Sunset Magazine has listed Bellingham among its 2011 “Best Towns” in an article headlined “Places to make you happy” in the February issue.
“So depending on what makes you smile, here are the ten best places to live (and find happiness) in the wondrous amusement park of the American West,” the article says in an introductory passage…
Each town makes the list for a different reason. Bellingham is characterized as “a seaside haven 90 miles north of Seattle” with 65 miles of multi-use trails within city limits, plus nearby access to mountains and sea.
Whatcom County residents have a reputation for supporting local, independent businesses. Now it is being noticed nationally.
A new report about the vitality of independent retailers ranks the Bellingham metro area – which includes all of Whatcom County – second highest out of 363 metro areas studied. The top spot went to Ocean City, N.J.; followed by Bellingham, Medford, Ore.; Carson City, Nev.; and San Jose, Calif.
Company researchers have added a growth hormone gene from the Chinook salmon as well as an on-switch gene from the ocean pout, a distant relative of the salmon, to a normal Atlantic salmon’s roughly 40,000 genes. Salmon normally feed only during the spring and summer, but when the on-switch from the pout’s gene is triggered, they eat year round.
Well, today the Herald reports that a depleted food supply for salmon is a very real problem, even without a fish with an eating disorder added to the equation.
With nearly 650 million adult Pacific salmon swimming in the ocean at any given time, the competition for food is increasing, and the already shrinking wild stocks could be crowded out…
Studies over the past several years suggest competition for food is affecting salmon runs up and down the West Coast, from Puget Sound chinook to Bristol Bay, Alaska, sockeye. In some instances, the fish are smaller when they return, making them more susceptible to predators. In others, runs are actually declining.
See, if these so-called experts would only listen to me!
I found the following photo, submitted to the Bellingham Herald, to be absolutely stunning.
Herald reader BJ Toews sent this photo of the sun rising behind Mount Baker, creating a shadow in the sky, at 7:39 a.m. Monday, Oct. 18, 2010. Toews took the photo from the family’s backyard in Everson.
The art of photography fascinates me. It exists as the result of a collaboration between technology and the human element, but not just any human. Heck, all you have to do is spend a little time looking at your friends’ photos on Facebook to see that some have an observant, creative eye and some are simply archivists, documenting moments in time with no regard to aesthetics.
Conversely, it was one thing for BJ Toews to notice this spectacular sunrise, but without the technology it might have remained a memory in his mind, or, at the most, a story to tell over breakfast.
Last week I mentioned the much publicized (locally, at least) missing Western Washington University student, Dwight Clark, and as of this morning Dwight is still missing and the police are baffled.
I have to say that I’m haunted by this incident. I can’t stop thinking about it. I check the Bellingham Herald website several times a day, even though I know that they don’t update it very often.
I’m haunted because I have a son, and while it may be that I feel this more acutely because my son is about to become a teenager, with all the gains in independence and risky behavior that accompany this coming of age, the truth is that scenarios like missing children, or children getting hit by cars…um, not scenarios…nightmares like this are always hiding out in some dark, scary corner of a parent’s consciousness.
It’s been enough, over the years, to make me occasionally wonder, semi-seriously, why the HELL we ever decide to bring children into the world. I know that’s terribly nihilistic, but I assure you that it’s not a common thought, that the thought never lingers long, and that I have no regrets whatsoever about having become a father. Yet the thought does come from time to time.
And yet nothing, it seems to me, comes close to the limbo state that Dwight’s parents, family, and friends find themselves in. They know something has happened, but they don’t know which of the many horrible possibilities has come to pass.
This is the dichotomy of parenthood — unrivaled joy at the miracle of birth on one hand, the terror of harm coming to your child on the other.
Since we humans make the decision to become parents with overwhelmingly more frequency than the alternative, I suppose that unrivaled joy married with our drive as a species to reproduce easily trumps terror.
My thoughts remain with Dwight’s family and friends.
BELLINGHAM – IHOP’s mascot Suzie Pancake was assaulted by a bystander at about 3 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 3, outside of the restaurant at 3619 Byron St., according to Bellingham police.
A 19-year-old woman dressed in the pancake suit was outside the IHOP, waving at passers-by, when 22-year-old James Manas approached her and began yelling at her and hitting the suit with his hand, Bellingham Police spokesman Mark Young said.
A passer-by stopped Manas as he tried to hit her again; Manas then walked to a nearby bus stop, said Young.
Disturbing. I know. It’s the kind of thing you never think will happen in your town. It’s so A Clockwork Orange!
It’s funny, right after I read this story in the Bellingham Herald this morning, I started to take off on my bicycle for work and found that our car, which we park on the street in front of the house, had had both front windows wide open all night. Truth is, this is a common occurrence, arguably foolish complacence for sure, but crime is, fortunately, incredibly rare in our neighborhood.
Question is: Now that Suzie Pancake has been assaulted here in Bellingham, will all that change? I mean, what’s next? Will Ronald McDonald go on a crazed vigilante binge seeking revenge on Suzie’s behalf?
I’ve been thinking about what I posted this morning about candy and flour and the Washington State Department of Revenue, and I realize that I just didn’t say enough about how wacky the whole thing seems to me.
One initial reaction I had to this idea that candy without flour will be taxed and candy with flour will not, was how ridiculously arbitrary it seems. I mean, why make that distinction?
My first theory was that, perhaps, this has to do with the very definition of candy. Maybe, I thought, candy with flour, by definition, is not real candy, and I could just envision this scene at a conference table somewhere in the offices of the Department of Revenue, around which sat the director, her staff, and a team of lawyers, and one of the lawyers said something like, “You know, we better not risk calling something candy that isn’t candy, because we could be vulnerable to a lawsuit.”
Well, Merriam-Webster doesn’t say anything about flour at all…
can·dy
Pronunciation: \ˈkan-dē\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural candies
Etymology: Middle English sugre candy, part translation of Middle French sucre candi, from Old French sucre sugar + Arabic qandī candied, from qand crystallized sugar
Date: 15th century 1 : crystallized sugar formed by boiling down sugar syrup 2 a : a confection made with sugar and often flavoring and filling b : a piece of such confection 3 : something that is pleasant or appealing in a light or frivolous way
It can’t be on nutritional grounds, could it? Cuz, suggesting that something is healthier because it contains flour…
Any product that lists flour as an ingredient on the nutritional facts label is not taxable as candy, the agency points out. Flour is “made from grain such as wheat, rice, corn, rye, oats, and barley.”
And then I remembered that the Bellingham Herald article on the candy tax stated (my emphasis in bold):
Candy subject to the tax can be made with “sugar, honey, or other natural or artificial sweeteners combined with chocolate, fruits, nuts, or other ingredients or flavorings and formed into bars, drops, or pieces,” according to information from the Department of Revenue.
So, the nutrition reason myth is busted. Candy has fruits and nuts, so it must be healthy!
Reminds me of…
Footnote: Just a little more digging and I did actually figure out the origin of the ‘flour or no flour’ distinction. Thanks to an article in the Chicago Tribune from August 2009, back when Illinois was preparing to implement their candy tax, it seems that my theory about lawyers was closer to the truth:
Illinois is hardly the first state to take on the “if it’s got flour, it’s not candy” conundrum. The language was copied straight from a model law drafted by a multi-state organization called the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board, which aims to makes sales-tax rules more uniform across the nation.
Scott Peterson, executive director of the Nashville-based group, said the organization struggled over how to define candy for tax purposes because many products that some states saw as cookies, other states saw as candy bars. “It finally came to us throwing up our hands and saying, ‘What in the world can we use as a definition that would be relatively straightforward and easy for a retailer to discern?’” Peterson said.
Quite a day to be a Bellinghamster!
