Mr. Zizyakutakek wants crime-fighting bike chariots on Capitol Hill
City council candidate Egan Orion (formerly known as Egan River Zigzyakutakek Orion) wants crime-fighting bike chariots on Capitol Hill. Lester Black

Kshama Sawant is scared of cats: Brandi Kruse dove into the city council elections for this week's episode of her Sunday Q13 Fox show, The Divide, and predictably focused on the contentious District 3 race between incumbent Seattle City Council Member Kshama Sawant and Amazon-approved candidate Egan Orion. Orion hammered on the centerpiece of his campaign platform: that he’s “almost completely aligned” with Sawant’s values but not “her own special brand of politics of derision, division, and demonization.”

Sawant's response? She said Orion’s "divisive" attack, which is repeated by his Super PAC overlords (Tim Burgess & Amazon) who have spent over $170,000 trying to get Orion elected, is disingenuous because her style of politics is only a reflection of the economic inequality that corporate Democrats like Burgess and Amazon are fighting to maintain. “It’s important that those of us who want a city based on social justice and not endless corporate greed... that we are not apologetic for creating that city,” Sawant told Kruse.

As for the thing about cats? Sawant told Kruse that she has two dogs but is afraid of cats. “I am phobic and if you ask my mom she will say, ‘She’s always been phobic and I don’t know how that happened.’” So there’s that.

As for Egan River Zigzyakutakek Orion—yes, that was his legal name. Once. Twitter user @Jim_Brunner shared an interesting tidbit about Amazon-approved District 3 candidate: His birth name was Adam Colter Papritz, but he then changed his name in 1996 and 2014.

All your Alex Pedersen news in one place: District 4 NIMBY Alex Pedersen found his name on Slog a lot this week. Nathalie’s counted off all the ways Pedersen hates on transit in this piece (he voted against the Move Seattle Levy in 2015 and campaigned against Sound Transit 3 in 2016) and then she went on a bike ride with the bike-hater on the infamous 35th Avenue NE. Pedersen popped up again in a story I wrote about how both Pedersen and his opponent Shaun Scott want to stop upzones on The Ave in the University District.

As for that bike ride Nathalie took with him: I was following along taking photos, and toward the end I asked Pedersen if he would ever make a policy decision that makes it less comfortable to drive in Seattle. He tried to sidestep the question by saying he only wants to make transit easier to use, not driving harder. He could not commit to ever advocating for any policy that hurts the convenience of driving in Seattle. This gets to the core of Pedersen and his supporters’ ideology: The dominance of the climate-destroying single occupancy car needs to be preserved at all costs, they believe. Non-car transit can only be pursued if those options can be delivered without hurting the dominance of the automobile.

In other words... Cyclists should forever be as uncomfortable as Nathalie and Alex look in this photo:

This shit is scary.
This shit is scary. That's Pedersen in light blue, Nathalie in white, and Eli Sanders in dark blue. Lester Black

Egan Orion wants more bike chariots: Rich went to Tuesday’s LGBTQ-focused candidate forum put on by the Greater Seattle Business Association so you didn't have to, and he heard Egan Orion make one of the odder claims this election season. He thinks bike chariots can fight hate crimes on Capitol Hill. If that sentence doesn’t make sense read Rich’s full post to further understand... that Orion’s plan makes no sense.

Someone’s getting ready to red bait: It looks like someone (probably Tim Burgess and his Super PAC) paid for a poll asking voters in District 3 (Capitol Hill area) and District 4 (University District/Northeast Seattle) how they would react to hearing that one of the candidates in their respective races, Kshama Sawant in D3 or Shaun Scott in D4, are socialists. The C Is For Crank reported that a phone poll was sent to D3 asking how they felt about “noisy, grandstanding” and “socialist” Sawant. Scott tweeted out a text message poll that asked voters how their support would change if they learned Scott was a socialist.

Former mayor and current shadow council member Tim Burgess didn’t respond to a request for comment but the language in this poll has all the trappings of his name-calling style of politics.

The house from Up just won’t die: It turns out the walls of Edith Macefield's house can talk and instead of yelling about developers they are endorsing District 6 candidate Heidi Wills. How does a house endorse a candidate? I'm not sure but this isn’t the first time Macefield’s house has found its way into this year's election. The boarded-up old home was featured in an odd television ad supporting District 7 candidate Andrew Lewis, the largest ad buy in city council election history. Even Lewis said the ad, which was paid for by an out-of-state union through their Super PAC, didn’t make any sense.

Anderson Cooper might be making his own "Seattle is Dying": MyBallard.com is reporting that Anderson Cooper was spotted in Ballard appearing to film a new 60 Minutes special about Seattle's homelessness problem. Cooper was spotted talking to a man in front of St. Luke's Episcopal Church. Here's to hoping Anderson doesn't spotlight our city's housing crisis by calling for more demonization and criminalization of the poor.

Today in Seattle History: Nirvana got kicked out of their own album (Nevermind) release party at Re-Bar in 1991 (FYI Re-Bar might get kicked out of South Lake Union via demolition); in 1934, an electric guitar was played for the first time in Seattle, eight years before Jimi Hendrix was born in Georgetown; in 1909, SPD officers in Ballard had to place their station's cats in solitary confinement after the felines went insane. Perhaps there is some sense to Sawant's cat phobia.