Everything is a part of nature.
Everything is a part of nature. Emmoth/shutterstock.com

Mount Rainier National Park Should Provide Cellular Service in the Park: Why? Because we need to stop seeing nature as a place outside of the city. Authenticity is a fiction. The city is not not nature. You can connect with the wild on a downtown street in much the same way you connect with it in the middle of a forest. And besides, forests do have a form of internet. They use root fungi; we use cellphone towers. What's always missed by the lovers of the wild is the nonsense that the common and old binary of urban inauthentic/nature authentic generates. For example, those who do not want cellphone coverage on Mount Rainier fear it will ruin the experience of hiking or climbing in the great outdoors. But you are already hiking and climbing and visiting the park for recreation. What, according to this tired binary, is natural about recreation? Those 41 elk that died in the reservoir in Oregon never hiked in their lives. (More about the unfortunate elk in a moment.) Hiking and mountain climbing and being one with the hills are as authentic as cellphone towers. See things in the proper way and you will say: Let Verizon Wireless or T-Mobile "install telecommunications equipment at the visitor center on Paradise." It is natural to hike, it is natural to fall into a freezing river, it is natural to post on Facebook, Instagram, and what have you while climbing a volcano.

41 Elk Fall Through Ice And Die In Oregon Reservoir: At around 9 a.m. yesterday, a herd of elk crossed a frozen reservoir near Richmond, Oregon. There was something on the south side of the reservoir that they wanted. This something was, we can assume, not on the north side. Elk do not hike. When 300 yards from land, the ice beneath them snapped, crackled, and sank. 41 elk went down and died in the freezing water. Humans could not retrieve their meat.

The Ugly KOMO Plaza Sold For Nearly $276 million: Completed in 2003, KOMO Plaza has the appearance of a suburban office development, which is why it looks so out of place in the heart of our big city. The seasick-green glass, the boldly bland futurism, the effort at exoticism in the court's plantings—this is the kind of thing you expect to find in Issaquah. A very pretty penny was recently paid for this vapid property.

Portland Has the Best Architecture in the Three Big Cities of the Pacific Northwest: Seattle has the worst architecture, but the best cafes. Vancouver has the best public transportation, but the worst cafes of the big three.

Which Will Be the First Trillion-Dollar Tech Company? Microsoft or Amazon? Some analysts think it will be Amazon, which has a market capitalization of $364 billion. Others think it will be Microsoft, which has a market capitalization of $490 billion. What about Facebook, Google, or even Apple? They are not in this picture because they are not in the clouds.

Car Crashes Into Salon, and Misses Two Elderly Women By Less Than Two Minutes: After a hair appointment, an elderly stylist and her elderly client, who walked with two canes, left the salon. A minute later, the stylist reentered the salon and stepped into a bathroom. The stylist was in the bathroom when a whole car crashed into the salon. Though the business, The Hair Joint, is on Pacific Highway South, it is separated from its traffic by a sidewalk and a section of a parking lot. In the distance between the building and highway, you will find lots of room for a fast car to stop in. But for a reason that is not yet known clearly, this particular driver managed to jump the sidewalk, dash across the parking lot, crack a utility pole, and crash into the core of the business. The driver only suffered minor injuries.

55,000 Migrants Left Germany Voluntarily in 2016: That record number was double the number of those deported from Germany...


Obama Hands Trump a Strong Economy: A Republican handed a Democrat a collapsing economy, and the Democrat is to hand a Republican a growing economy. That's how the US goes around and around. The venerable Financial Times has the story.