What should we make of the Lusty Lady? Adult FriendFinder dude Andrew Conru bought the old peep show theater for $3 million, and now he's asking the people of Seattle for renovation ideas, according to the Seattle Times. Your choices include: Restaurant, hotel, museum, strip club, retail store, or other. Not to be a buzzkill, but how about some housing for poor people up top with some retail space for sex worker advocacy groups on the ground floor? A bathhouse would be fine, too. Or maybe we could bring it all back with a peep show / gay bar concept called Shelly's Lusty Leg Lady. 

Speaking of sticky wickets: Everybody welcome the Seattle Orcas, one of five new teams to join Major League Cricket for its first season this summer. Unfortunately, the league will hold all the games in Texas, but the team is "working with King County and the city of Bellevue to build a cricket community park that could seat 6,000 people" in Redmond, KOMO reports. Not as fun as the Lusty Lady, but kinda fun. 

A new idea enters the CID light rail station discourse: This week Hannah will drop a piece explaining everything you need to know about the big fight between urbanists and Chinatown preservationists and urbanists who want to preserve Chinatown about whether to put a transit hub in the area, but, in the meantime, Martin Pagel over at Seattle Transit Blog offers this olive branch: "Let’s just improve our existing tunnel and use the savings to make up for lost time on other projects." I'm intrigued. 

"Detective Cookie" files $10 million claim against the Seattle Police Department: Detective Denise Bouldin seeks millions in damages for enduring discrimination over the course of her 40-year career as a cop in the South Precinct. Among other incidents, she claims some officers wouldn't back her up on calls, and someone put dog shit in front of her locker, KIRO 7 reports. Looks like the only thing we can do here is give the department more money to train the cops not to discriminate or put dog poop near lockers. 

False alarm: Port police shut down part of the airport for three hours on Sunday over some unattended luggage, causing "backups and delays," according to KING 5. The cops set off a little bomb to destroy what turned out to be "scuba and fishing gear." 

Sprucing up the light rail stations: An in-depth feature from Mike Lindblom at the Seattle Times runs through Sound Transit's long to-do list, which includes replacing a lot of the broken and worn-out escalators and elevators, hiring more maintenance teams, and employing more security guards. The agency recently ramped up the latter two efforts, but it'll take about ten years starting next year to replace all that hardware. 

Spring sprung a leak: 

Ban Wyoming: Over the weekend, Governor Mark Gordon banned abortion and abortion pills, reports Politico, signaling his desire to see a 25% increase in preventable maternal deaths among women in general and a 39% increase in maternal deaths among Black women in particular. Courts tied up the state's earlier abortion ban, and this one will likely meet the same fate at least for a while, so abortion remains legal in the state for now. 

Trump fears arrest: In an all-caps social media post published on Saturday morning, the leading 2024 GOP presidential candidate falsely claimed that Feds planned to arrest him on Tuesday. He then tried to start a lil Jan 6 action by asking his followers to protest the injustice. The potential arrest relates to allegations about Trump breaking campaign finance laws when he paid hush money to Stormy Daniels, but the grand jury on that case still has more work to do, so Tuesday probably isn't the day, according to the New York Times. Plus, Trump lackeys say he'll probably just turn himself in once the scythe draws near anyway. 

The GOP establishment continues to stand by its man: In partial fulfillment of his blood oath, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rallied his troops in the House Republican caucus and framed the New York prosecutor's investigation of Trump as a political witch hunt, according to Politico. They're not wrong to sound shocked. Like many houses of prosecution, the Manhattan DA's office is known for nailing the poor while letting the rich off with wrist slaps—if that. 

A "muted" reaction from core supporters: One young Republican demonstration and a few social media posts aside, Trump's base didn't really respond to its leader's encouragement, "with even some of his most ardent loyalists dismissing the idea as a waste of time or a law enforcement trap," reports the Associated Press.

On the 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, we read Michael Brenes. "No war is inevitable, but I remember thinking the Iraq War would be the first," he writes. 

DeSantis backed force-feeding at Guantanamo Bay: The Washington Post looked into the Floridian meatball's record as a JAG officer in Gitmo, where one detainee says DeSantis smiled as he watched soldiers tie the detainee to a chair, stick a rubber hose up his nostril, and pump "two cans of a protein drink" into him. The UN and the Red Cross both call that torture. DeSantis does not. As we mark the 20th anniversary of the Iraq war, that prison remains open. 

Oh, forgive me, I meant that Pennsylvanian-Ohioan meatball: In his memoir, DeSantis, a governor who harnesses the power of the state to oppress people that identify as a gender they weren't assigned at birth, says he was raised in Florida but identifies as one of two crucial swing states in the upcoming presidential elections: 

Cyclone kills more than 500 in eastern Africa: People living in Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar endured the "longest-lasting tropical cyclone" in recorded history, according to Al Jazeera. Most of the damage and death has fallen on Malawi, where the storm made "tens of thousands" homeless and produced floods that hit hundreds of thousands more. The cyclone started in late February, and it only began to let up last Wednesday.  

Related: The newly released report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that we'll miss our goal of slowing warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius "within a decade," according to the Washington Post. If we don't take more aggressive action soon, then we damn ourselves to increased numbers of deaths from "heat waves, famines and infectious diseases." We have the tools to stop this now, but we do not have the political will. 

I spent part of the weekend a little stoned in my reading chair trying to determine who sang the best cover of Blaze Foley's "Clay Pigeons." The answer turned out to be John Prine:Â