Great news if you have to get to and from the Seattle Center ever!
Great news if you ever have to get to and from the Seattle Center! 400tmax/Getty Images

To upzone the Ave or not to upzone the Ave? That is the question for the Seattle City Council, especially District 4 city council member Rob Johnson. The Ave, the well-known, well-loved, grubby stretch of sidewalk that runs parallel to the University of Washington, has a bunch of small and immigrant-owned businesses. Because of that, the Ave was omitted from the original U-District upzone plan in 2017. But city council members are currently reevaluating the upzone along with 27 other neighborhoods. There's talk of upzoning the Ave. Johnson said he's postponing including the Ave because the environmental impact statement done in 2017 didn't include it.

Finally! ORCA cards will be accepted on the monorail! Obviously you're all big monorail riders and this is an issue close to your heart. So you'll be happy to learn that finally, finally you can use your ORCA card to swipe onto the monorail. The cost will be $2.75. This won't start until September.

Special education in Washington is not good: In fact, Washington has the third-highest dropout rate for special education students in the country. The services for children with disabilities in our state are abysmally funded. The state senate is trying to fix that. Over the weekend, they unanimously passed two bills that would "improve funding, accountability, and programs for special-education services," reports the Seattle Times.

These people in Portland keep getting sent Amazon packages they didn't order: Hey! If you're sending these people foot massagers and juicers, they don't want anything to do with it! Take a hint! They called Amazon and complained about the mysterious mail that was addressed to them and listed one of their cell phone numbers on the labels and, duh, Amazon did nothing. So these gift-getters took this baby all the way to the top: local broadcast news. No one is sure of the culprit. In similar cases, it turned out to be sellers sending people their shit in order to get good reviews.

Look, they're tearing down the viaduct: Bite into that concrete, baby.


Seattle police "rescued" 26 sex workers from human trafficking: But were these women really being trafficked? None of the charges brought against the suspects are for human trafficking. Were these simply sex workers making a living?

The youth lead the climate fight in Seattle: There's a climate strike in Cal Anderson Park set for Friday, March 15. Student from Seattle schools are participating:


Traffic deaths were down in Seattle last year: Except the majority of the 14 people killed by traffic—8 of them—were pedestrians. Despite the downward trend in traffic deaths, there was still a high number of pedestrian deaths. But Seattle is one of the safest places in the country for pedestrians. One of the most dangerous streets for pedestrians in the city is Rainier Avenue South, which officials have called a "technically challenging process." Progress is expected to happen soon, reports the Seattle Times.

It's going to rain! Starting tomorrow, we're getting some rain. Then, after this storm, maybe it'll be spring.


Nancy Pelosi thinks impeaching Trump is a "waste of time": She thinks impeachment is too divisive for the country. She argues that Donald Trump being president is good for the country. Not because she thinks he should be president but because Democrats have been really organizing because he's president.

There's a database of women in China: A database of 1.8 million Chinese women was uncovered this past weekend. It lists age, sex, education, and marital status. And there's another category called, disturbingly, "BreedReady." China is experiencing a falling birth rate and a shortage of women because of China's old one-child policy.


An update on the Ethiopian plane crash: Investigators don't know what caused the Sunday crash that killed 157 people. They have retrieved the black boxes, but that data takes time to analyze. So. That's all we know. Meanwhile, countries around the world are grounding flights with the kind of planes involved in this crash and the one a couple of months ago in Indonesia—the Boeing 737 Max 8. The Federal Aviation Administration hasn't ordered any groundings.

Captain Marvel had the biggest opening for a female-led film ever: The first ever female Marvel superhero graced movie theater screens this weekend and scored $153 million in the United States and $455 million globally. That's a lot! I'm excited to see it. Whenever I get around to doing that.

Lester posted a rebuttal to my toilet lid issue: On Friday, I went off on how a lot of The Stranger staff keeps leaving the toilet seat up after they use the toilet. It was a minor gripe. My whole thing is that it is not the natural state of the toilet and you should return the toilet to its natural state. Lester Black, my colleague, took offense to that. He wrote a novel about his logic around the issue. The whole office is up in arms about it. I'm sorry to say that you'll probably be seeing more on this issue. I've opened a real can of worms.