Hiatus, self-imposed

We are going on a temporary hiatus. Having taken on far too many projects (each of which deserve our undivided attention at this time) it's only right to stop with the stringing on and just call it off for a bit.

If you would like to recieve an email when Legwarmers is back up and at 'em, please send an email to shesajar dot withaheavylid [at] gmail dot com -- and make sure the subject line is "legwarmers", or that shit will get filtered into the junk pile faster than you can say...

Well, you get where I'm going with this.

Be good. We'll talk soon.

Wheeling and dealing the Big Guy

This guy made a deal with God -- and kept it, repeatedly. (It's really an incredible video -- though you may want to save it for home unless shrieks of agony are acceptable in your workplace, in which case watch away, and I don't want to know what you do for a living.)

While my deals with the good Lord are significantly less painful (If you get me through this hangover, Lord, I promise not to swear/eat chocolate/binge drink for a whole week), I have to say I've also been significantly less faithful to them.

I'm going straight to church this Sunday morning.

...Most likely.

The future is now, and I'm pissed about it.

I went to opening day at Safeco yesterday and watched the Mariners win their first (and likely last) game of the season. The stands were packed with 40 thousand some odd fans all swilling beer and cramming hot dogs and peanuts in their faces. My seats were good - 16th row on the first baseline. It was sunny. Sunglasses were on. Laughs were had. All around a great time.

Halfway through the game, the retractable roof went on. In minutes, tens of thousands of people suddenly had a roof over their head. Which really struck me as funny: we've got the technology to put a retractable roof over a stadium in less than 20 minutes, but it still takes my hot water that long to get from the laundry room to my shower -- a whopping 1-story climb.

What the hell? It's 2007 and I'm still waiting for decent non-static-y in-shower radios to come out and spending hours driving 15 minutes across a bridge in rush hour traffic while listening to CDs -- antiquated, skipping, scratched up CDs! (Which, by the way, are the worst-executed invention ever. Why couldn't we put them in
protective cases like the old floppy disks so they wouldn't scratch after three listens? I mean, doesn't that seem like a pretty obvious solution to you?)

Where is the future everybody was talking about in, like 1979? By now weren't we supposed to be zipping around in spacecars wearing tinfoil suits and telepathically communicating? Where's my damn Jetson's wardrobe? And what about the spacefood? And teleporting? I'm SUPER pissed that we're not teleporting yet.

But oh no, instead of investing in stuff we really want, like the technology necessary to use something other than liquid gold to fuel my car, which I drive to work so I can afford to pay money to watch roofs magically appear on top of sports stadiums, we're spending millions of dollars a minute to stomp around the planet in our Army boots policing the rest of the world, who by the way are getting pretty good and sick of our whole elementary school bully posturing thing and are calling us out as the one trick ponies we are.

Can somebody please explain this to me? And if not, I understand, but in that case, can you just please come over to my house with two to three bottles of wine and some Cheese fish crackers so we can at least get drunk and tell bad dirty jokes and play Scrabble and watch Family Feud reruns and pretend everything's totally cool?

...


Thank you.

Hometown heroism

(Thanks, Ryan, for the image!)

So now I'm starting to sound like a real hometown hero with all this puffing up of Seattle, but did you see Prevention Magazine's list of the top 100 "Most Walkable Cities"?

According to the story, which I saw on CNN,

Factors contributing to the ranking were air quality, the percentage of people who walk to work, access to parks, number of athletic shoes sold, and (believe it or not) weather.

While I'm here singing its praises, I might as well also mention that the city falls on the top ten list of "greenest cities", according to Green Magazine, which takes into consideration not the scenery, but the environmental policy, air and water quality and long-term sustainability strategy of a city.

All this "top ten" stuff got me thinking, though. What lists wouldn't we see Seattle on? I'll open the floor, but will throw a few out there to get the ball rolling:

"Best places to live if you hate hippies"
"Top 10 best cities in which to drive a stick-shift"
"Best places to open up a coffee shop"
"Most dendrophobic and technophobic-friendly cities"