Um…
Anyone looking for Central Park can walk Seattle’s numerous other parks — Seward, Lincoln and Discovery parks.
Jesus… could the Seattle Times editorial board get any more condescending? Or stupid?
I mean, I’m not particularly advocating that Seattle Center should or even could be the Seattle equivalent of New York’s Central Park, but as far as parks go, it is Seattle’s most central, whereas Seward, Lincoln and Discovery… not so much. And Central Park’s centrality, well, that’s kinda its point.
So perhaps the Times’ editors should leave the snark to the professionals. Either that, or they should fuck off.
They should most definitely fuck off.
Funny. The Times says ” The crusade for a greensward never made much sense”, yet the Seattle Commons south of Lake Union for which property was acquired by Paul Allen to present to the city until we voted it down (error!), this idea was launched in the pages of the Times by one of their best writers, John Hinterberger. Here’s a followup to his original column: http://community.seattletimes......ug=1283352
I can’t wait until they locate out of town and become the suburban rag they aspire to be.
The immortal Walt Crowley wrote about the history of south Lake qunion with a brief on the Commons, a nod to the Center and the roots of Allentown in his own gift to NW culture, historylink-
http://www.historylink.org/ind.....le_id=4250
Oops, now where did that handle come from? Must be naptime.
The city sees dollar signs. This will allow them to buy more umbrellas for pedestrians.
Well, in all fairness they can’t really be expected to grok the lay out of Manhattan when none of them have ever left Kemper Freeman’s living room.
Central Park is not centered in the middle of New York City. Far from it. It’s at the western edge of the city. It’s only centered in one of the buroughs.
So the Times is correct. Their comparison is technically correct.
Also curious they made no mention of Volunteer Park, which, while smaller than the others, is much more ‘central’.
Perhaps it’s all those…icky Capital Hill people that’s the problem.
********
The sentiment of the editorial reminds me of a clueless grandparent-y figure trying to foist off on a youngster something much less cool than the youngster expects – “Here sonny, this duct-tape ball and 2×2 is just as good at that Official Rawlings ball and Louisville Slugger that Timmy down the street got for Christmas. When I was your age, all we had to play with was dirt!”
Or when a friend told me a story of when the Space Needle opened – his father wouldn’t fork over the cash to go up there, so they went to the Smith Tower instead, because “it was just as high, but cheaper.”
Gee, who needs parks, when we have all these lovely private golf courses withing a half-hour’s driving distance from our homes in Magnolia/Mt. Baker neighborhood/Medina, etc.?????
Goldy, we are still waiting. Please explain how Central Park is in the center of New York City.
Tick Tock.
Troll-
Goldy is struggling with how to respond and not make himself look even more geographically retarded than he already has.
He’ll probably now look at the map and contrive it as the Center of some random boundary..watch.
@2 – can’t really blame paul allen. i mean, why would he build his own park when he can ask the city to build it for him? and when the city turns him down, he can just wait until the next voting cycle when everybody votes out the “park hating assholes”
Goldy–
Lots of folks are afraid to walk in these parks at night. We need more guys like this guy–
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010.....z18P3uoU00
Perhaps we should require all park visitors be armed at night?
@10, 11 — Aren’t you being presumptuous by assuming Goldy has time to read your drivel? He has more important things to do.
@13 Uh, Cynical, that incident didn’t happen in a park. The jewelry store owner’s wife was taken HOSTAGE by the robbers who were robbing his STORE and he shot them in SELF DEFENSE. We don’t really need the self-appointed Charles Bronson-style vigilante patrols you envision for our public parks. That’s the police department’s function, ya know? You’d better leave the thinking to people who have brains and go back to fucking your goats.
Rog you bonehead–
Of course it took place in his store. That’s what the article said. But something similiar could take place in a public park…and has.
I just encourage folks to consider getting a concealed weapons permit and arming themselves if they want to go into dangerous places.
What’s wrong with that?
Private Health Care a la Carte
A DNA swab usually costs $100 but a private bone marrow registry that hired sexy young models to recruit donors in shopping malls charged the donors’ insurance companies over $4,000 per swab, according to AOL News.
http://www.aolnews.com/2010/12.....ecruiters/
Roger Rabbit Commentary: This is capitalism’s finest hour. Until this bright shining moment, privately run, no-government-interference, for-profit health care’s greatest accomplishment was five-dollar hospital aspirins. Me, I’ll take government regulation of the health care industry any day, to keep my health insurance premiums under $1 million a year.
@16 Let’s see, where to begin. First of all, because this thread is about the Seattle Times editorial board’s commentary about our local public parks, your cut-and-paste from Fox News about a jewelry store heist in Houston is eligible for deletion under the HA comment policy on at least two grounds, (1) it’s off topic, and (2) it’s a cut-and-paste of copyrighted material (with no thought added by the cut and paster), which I understand is against HA policy on, you know, plagiarism and copyright grounds and so the blog host doesn’t get sued by the news organization whose copyrighted material was stolen by you. And that’s even before we get into the question of what relevance a jewelry store heist in Houston has to Seattle Center’s function as a public park. And you call me a “bonehead”?
But we’re not done here yet. You claim “something similar” to a jewelry store robbery in Houston could happen in a Seattle public park. That’s quite an extrapolation, and I’m tempted to nominate it for an award as the most original thought that has ever radiated from your syphilis-addled brain. I guess I could see it happening if some enterprising enterpreneur set up a card table in Volunteer Park and sold $10,000 diamond engagement rings from his coat pocket. Yeah, he might get robbed. But that seems kinda unlikely because most park patrons around here have more sense than that.
If we take your ingenious extrapolation a bit farther, we should give kindergartners guns so they can fight back if three armed thugs try to kidnap them from a locked school building.
As a firearms expert and former U.S. Army weapons trainer, I want to say that most people should not pack guns in public parks, their cars, their homes, or anywhere else, because they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. It takes quite a bit of knowledge, training, practice, and experience to do more good than harm with a gun. A lot of things can go wrong. Not to belabor this point too much, but the things that can go wrong include:
1) You forgot to chamber a round and it doesn’t go off when you point it at the armed attacker and pull the trigger, in which case you are dead a split second later;
2) You didn’t forget to chamber a round but you’re so scared by the armed attacker that you grab the gun from your waistband by the trigger and it goes off in your pants, shooting your sexual equipment off, in which case if you’re real lucky the armed attacker finished you off with a shot to your head a split second later;
3) You’re so scared by the armed attacker that, even if the gun doesn’t go off while you’re jerking it out of your waistband* (*next time, buy a $50 belt holster, you fucking cheapskate, if you value your balls at all), when you fire you miss him by six feet and the bullet goes out the door and kills a 6-month-old infant in a baby stroller outside on the sidewalk, in which case the best thing that can happen to you is the armed attacker kills you before either the cops or the tort lawyer show up;
4) You’re walking alone at night in a park and you hear a noise behind you and, reactively, you turn and fire, and the dead body on the sidewalk behind you turns out to be a Seattle cop, in which case the best thing that can happen to you is that you have enough presence of mind to put your gun to your temple and fire a second shot through your own head before the rest of the Seattle PD shows up; …
I could go on, but you should be getting the drift by now. Most people are not qualified to use guns, either in self-defense or any other mode. However, this fine point, like all fine points, escapes our friend Cynical, who has been watching too many Charles Bronson movies.
Now let’s do a quick analysis of the Houston jewelry store shootout. Fox News is holding this up as a shining example of self-defense because it turned out okay: The bad guys are dead, the good guy only got shot in the gut, and the hostage escaped unharmed. It’s hard to determine from these bare facts whether the jewelry store owner was incredibly lucky, the robbers were incredibly inept, or this is a case of Divine Intervention. The one thing that’s clear is this guy was incredibly stupid.
Or maybe he’s not so stupid. Maybe he had a big life insurance policy on his wife, whose father holds the note on the jewelry store, and a girlfriend on the side. In which case, pulling a gun on three armed robbers who have the drop on him and have taken his wife hostage might not be as bad a plan as it appears to be on paper, although it still could go awry if he gets killed along with his wife.
But in a more rational world, I think most of us would just give the robbers the money. After all, that’s what they’re after. They probably didn’t intend to take his wife with them. What would they want her for? She’s not worth anything to them; they can’t fence her. All she’s good for is getting them out of the store with the money in their possession. So just give them the fucking money and you’ll get your wife back and you won’t get shot in the gut. If you were smart enough to have insurance you’ll get your money back, too. Or move the moving store to a neighborhood where robberies are less prevalent. Or something. But trying to win a gunfight against three-to-one odds when the bad guys start out with a gun to your wife’s head just doesn’t seem like a real good tactical plan to me. This guy may look like some sort of hero because of how it turned out, but he has the brains of a gnat and is luckier than shit (or is on real good terms with God). I don’t think Fox News would be holding this up as an example if the robbers had gotten away and left the jewelry store owner and his wife lying dead in pools of blood.
Troll and Cynical can’t grok Manhattan geography because they have never left their mothers’ basement. Fot those who might, through ignorance, think that those two fascist fucktards have some kind of tenuous grasp on reality: When people (even New Yorkers) refer to New York City, they are referring to the bourough of Manhattan. (No one says ” I’m going to the city” if in fact they are going to Queens, Brooklyn or The Bronx.) Central Park is located roughly in the center of Manhattan, from 59th St on the South to 110th st on the north, and from 5th Ave on the east to Central Park West on the west. It’s central location helps define the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side, as it seperates the two. It is roughly equidistant from the south and north ends of the island. It is surrounded by densely populated neighborhoods, attractions, subway lines, museums, etc. It is in fact the heart of New York. Anyone who maintains otherwise is a brain dead piece of ignorant shit.
Now, back to your regular programming.
Rog–
You seem to think that most folks are too stupid or reckless to carry a firearm safely & responsibly. I have found that to be true.
Lots of friends have concealed weapons permits…and have never had an incident.
Ever. But if they do, they won’t have to wait for the cops to hopefully show up…they can defend themselves.
Rog–
Here is a 2002 study about ACCIDENTAL DEATHS in America.
http://www.the-eggman.com/writ.....stats.html
Only 776 or .8% were from Accidental Discharge of Firearms.
18 times more deaths were because of falling.
Maybe we should ban falling?
About 5 times more were from drowning. Perhaps we should ban swimming?
The worst of course is Motor Vehicle Accidents.
At the very least, we must ban driving.
The Match @ 20–
Goldy called it New York’s Central Park bonehead.
Had he called it Manhattan’s Central Park…different story.
Sheesh.
You must be one of Goldy’s relatives…one of the only besides his mom who will speak to him.
@20:
@23:
I think the latter is an example of what is termed, as a clinical descriptor (and sometimes pejorative) “concrete thinking.”
This is a cognitive dysfunction characterized by inflexible, unsubtle, non-nuanced thinking, typical of personality and thought disorders like Conservatism and schizophrenia.
@10 & 11
Manhattan is the only borough that matters. It is the center of the known universe. Just ask anyone who lives there.
czech–
I refer to it as “The Anal Canal of the Universe”
Lots of arrogant snobs like Liberal Scientist dorking around picking flysh*t outta pepper.
Why are you so preoccupied with goats and anal canals?
Perhaps it’s because of arrogant, elitist A$$holes like you??
I’m not sure LS…something like that.
There you go – going on and on about assholes again – this time with dollar signs. Money and goat-sex – is this what really motivates you?
heh- I didn’t tag him “Klynical” for nothing. The name has caught on and stuck with him for good reason. My goodness, he’s really living up to it in this thread.
Steve and LS,
We’ve all tried to help Cynny, Klynical, whatever we might want to call him. The reality is that he is Teabag Crazy. That is who, and how, he is. Ain’t no point in engaging with insanity. Just bash the shit out of it.
’14. Roger Rabbit farts:
@10, 11 — Aren’t you being presumptuous by assuming Goldy has time to read your drivel? He has more important things to do.’
Huh? Are you talking about David Goldstein? Better things to do? Like what? The loser hasn’t had a job in how many years now? Begging for handouts under the ruse of a “fund drive” does consume a lot of time however. And his house is a dump, so you know he dosen’t spend time on it there. Thanks old timer, your ever increasing comedial senility is always so entertaining. Have another toke on that oxygen tank of yours asshole and quit your feeble attempts to defend the undefendable.
@26
I thought that was the Tri-Cities. As in, “If they gave the Earth an enema, the tube would go in Pasco.”
Certainties are such fleeting things.
“Central Park is not centered in the middle of New York City. Far from it. It’s at the western edge of the city. It’s only centered in one of the buroughs.”
Well, to be fair, to bloggers here, it’s the center of ‘white’ New York. THat’s where the confusion lies for Seattleites.