Elton John is walking down the longest yellow brick road in history. This tours been touring since 2018.
Elton John is walking down the longest yellow brick road in history. This nine-legged ultimate tour's been touring since 2018. PHOTO BY ERIKA GOLDRING/GETTY IMAGES

I think it's time to take a hike? I'm not the REI type, so you tell me, but Seattle Times says check out Marmot Pass, Big Huckleberry Mountain, Yellow Aster Butte, Green Mountain, and the Ira Spring Trail to Mason Lake if you wanna huff Washington wildflowers. Are they right? I do not know. For more flowers, consult Matt's list.

"I will not run for a second term," confirmed Washington State Representative Kirsten Harris-Talley (KHT) in a piece for the South Seattle Emerald this morning. KHT serves the 37th legislative district, covering Seattle neighborhoods from Beacon Hill to Rainier Beach and Renton. In the Emerald, she described feeling othered in the Legislature ("...you are cautioned that 'we don’t do it that way here'") and experiencing a lack of integrity in Olympia ("While there are many individual representatives and senators who are some of the most principled people I know, what was forming was a question of whether the institution and the leadership were as well"). Read the whole thing here.



An aerial view of the past: This morning, Matt highlighted this lecture on historic theater buildings in Seattle. If you're into that, you might be into this: Newly released bird’s eye photos reveal how England has changed over 100 years.

Lynching is now a federal hate crime: It wasn't before today. "The absence of a statute allowed the vast majority of perpetrators to go unpunished in cases of nearly documented 6,500 racial terror lynchings between 1865 and 1950," reports Axios. The act was named after Emmett Till.

Russia says it will "de-escalate" in Ukraine.

The White House says “no one should be fooled" by the de-escalation talk.

Trump says Putin should drop info on Hunter Biden.

It's the Seattle Center Monorail's birthday: The young Boomer turns 60 years old. Mike Lindblom has a nice piece on it in the Times. All I have is a confession: The only monorail I've ever hopped on is at Disney World. I almost exclusively use public transpo to get around Seattle, but I don't have a use for our monorail. I hope to ride a few whenever I'm allowed to visit Japan, but America's are so sad. Good for Kraken fans, though. ("The monorail carries an average 3,000 hockey fans to Seattle Kraken games," Megan Ching, the monorail’s general manager, told Lindblom.)

This country is so stupid: "Twenty-one states with Republican attorneys general sued Tuesday to halt the federal government’s requirement that people wear masks on planes, trains, ferries and other public transportation amid the coronavirus pandemic."

New streamer dropped today: Meet CNN+, which aims to be the biggest news-based streaming service in the game. It boasts on-demand content, original shows, and "a Reddit-like interactive tool for asking reporters and guests questions about the day’s biggest news," reports the Verge. Some hit CNN shows previously streaming elsewhere, like Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, will now stream exclusively on CNN+. It costs $6 a month but there's a limited promotion until April 26 to get it for $3 a month.

The latest slap-talk: Jim Carrey Says Chris Rock Should Sue Will Smith for $200 Million Over Oscars Slap, reported The Daily Beast. There Are No Heroes in This Story, said a New York Times roundtable. Fox News fed their audience the story with a side of racism. And the Washington Post declared this The Climax of Will Smith's Radical-Vulnerability Era.

And while we're still talking about the Oscars: This bad Ross Douthat take belatedly came to my attention today: We Aren’t Just Watching the Decline of the Oscars. We’re Watching the End of the Movies. His pitch:

My favored theory is that the Oscars are declining because the movies they were made to showcase have been slowly disappearing. The ideal Oscar nominee is a high-middlebrow movie, aspiring to real artistry and sometimes achieving it, that’s made to be watched on the big screen, with famous stars, vivid cinematography and a memorable score. It’s neither a difficult film for the art-house crowd nor a comic-book blockbuster but a film for the largest possible audience of serious adults — the kind of movie that was commonplace in the not-so-distant days when Oscar races regularly threw up conflicts in which every moviegoer had a stake: “Titanic” against “L.A. Confidential,” “Saving Private Ryan” against “Shakespeare in Love,” “Braveheart” against “Sense and Sensibility” against “Apollo 13.”

It's a soft-brained take: But I'm glad Douthat got the opportunity to write over 3,000 words on the rise and fall of suburban movies. I will prepare my 4,000-word rebuttal when I don't have work to do.

In any case: Word is SIFF 2022's line-up drops tomorrow.

The yellow brick road leads to Tacoma: Elton John announced new stops on his 2022 tour schedule today, including two shows at the Tacoma Dome in October. Elton previously canceled some shows after getting COVID in the South. This is expected to be his final tour—it kicked off in 2018 and he's playing over 300 shows worldwide. You and 22,999 people can buy your tickets starting very soon, says the Tacoma Dome.

This resurgence of T-Pain: The last year has seen an overdue critical reexamination of the auto-tune master T-Pain (watch the Netflix docu-series This Is Pop), and he appears on a good track off Denzel Curry's latest album, Melt My Eyez See Your Future, which is getting all-around praise. Curry swings by Showbox SoDo next Monday. His song "Walkin" is always playing in my head.