‘Monkeypox’?
well, just SEE if I get
a Vax for that shit ‘cause
it’s all about FREEDOM – to
get Sick or Inflict as I SEE Fit
it’s EVERY man for himself & let
the Womenfolk keep havin’ them Babies

we’re
gonna
Need ‘em.

“… [polling] data says they [survivors of violent crime] overwhelmingly prefer solutions that prioritize addressing the root causes of criminal behavior over policies focused on punishment.“

well that’s just as stupid
and Tiresome as blaming
Billionaires for Homelessness and
saying if they only Paid their Fair Share
we could even Afford fucking Healthcare
for all like the rest of the Industrialized World
and half a Million Taxpayers wouldn’lt gotta go
Bankrupt just ‘cause a Family Member happened to get Sick and wipe out their Savings so maybe Go Fund Yourself on the Facebook? Sorry – MAGAtverse?

what are these Victims
Even Thinking? Where’s
the damn Retribution and
therefore Satisfaction, anyways?

what About my EMOTIONS?

1980 I was 11, living ~300 miles due west of MSH. Was going to go fishing with my dad, but by noon the thick ash cloud was overhead, and by 1:00 it was raining ash. We got around 1.5" in those first two days. Closed everything, had to wear masks for weeks (!!!!!!)

Crazy times.

east
Due east...

I was in SoCal. We got ash.

"Will the True Crime Industrial Complex ever end?"

If you're linking to a paywall you should give us a better hint of what the story is

"...eating a Big Mac every single day, a streak he started on May 17, 1972. In half a century, he's missed eating the McDonald's signature sandwich only eight times."

Sooooooo, not every day then? I mean, even if he'd actually accomplished this dumb "feat," it'd be far more disgusting than impressive, though I'm gonna say he's only managed to check the box for the former in this case. On a semi-related note, I've been sober every day for the past 20 years! Except for the days I got drunk, which is most of them.

Also, I was only seven years old and back on the east coast when MSH erupted, and have only super vague recollections of news broadcasts about it. But my dad was a longtime subscriber to National Geographic and they did a wonderful and exhaustively well researched and reported write-up on it. The cover photo of that issue is gorgeous and I've read the feature article many times. It's super easy to find too and I've owned several copies over the years, as they're frequently found at thrift stores with magazine collections. Recommended.

I was working in an after high school afternoon gig funded via the federal CETA program at KOMO TV News in a sort of a photography internship (different KOMO back then). Actually that was the day after, the eruption was on a Sunday. I was there in the newsroom when Dave Crockett came in still wearing hospital slippers. Incredible footage, in the audio you can hear him talking to Marlon, the then Director of Photography, cursing him because he'd always said he'd turn the camera off in a situation like this but here he is talking to his camera.

@8,

The guy who lived at the cabin was named Harry Truman, which I always thought was funny, in that it's not a common name by any stretch, and he's not related to his more famous namesake. Also, I just looked him up and he's got a Wikipedia page! He was born in 1896 and 83 years old when buried in ash and debris. I don't know that I'd call him an idiot, as that's a pretty badass way to go out and he's now something of a folk hero who'll likely be more fondly remembered than any of us.

"Today Don Gorske celebrates 50 YEARS of eating a Big Mac every single day, a streak he started on May 17, 1972. In half a century, he's missed eating the McDonald's signature sandwich only eight times. “All through life here, a lot of people said, ‘You’ll be dead before you reach 50 years of eating Big Macs,'" Gorske told KCRG. "I guess I proved them wrong.”

These lines from the late, great Hunter S. Thompson come to mind:

“There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

I was 9 and living in Tacoma. In my memory I saw a massive plume of smoke on the horizon, the sky was an angry, hellish deep red, and all us neighborhood kids stood transfixed at the spectacle. But the reality is we just listened on the radio and/or grainy TV, and it wasn’t all that much beyond a dusting of ash.

Meanwhile, I’m all for closing Alki at night, because the chuckleheads love that place and there are residents very near the beach. But I feel like Golden Gardens gets unfairly lumped in with that scene. Feels to me like more of a chill party scene and the impact on residential seems a lot less. I’m guessing the authority types just don’t like how hard it is to keep track of all the nighttime summer shenanigans that go down in the north section of the park. But that’s mostly just stoners and sexers enjoying the darkness as young people have since time eternal.

Mount St. Helens.

I was enlisted in the military, station far away. The 1980s vintage phone networks overloaded, and it took more than a day for me to confirm that my family wasn't buried under the rubble. Good times!

@ 8 & 11... yes, Harry Truman.
His rationale was that he lived most his entire life there, if MSH was gonna go, he was going with.
yeah, badass, gotta respect that.

My parents and maternal grandmother were visiting my grandmother's family ranch in Eastern Washington the weekend of May 17th and 18th. I was loading laundry into the washing machine when suddenly, at 8:32 a.m. Sunday morning there was a loud explosion (!!!!!) and the washing machine in our basement started shaking intensely. I thought there had been an earthquake. Coverage of the Mount St. Helens eruption was all over TV and radio news. All this before I went to my part-time weekend high schooler job (I was just shy of 16 then).
How my parents and grandmother made it safely home while navigating westbound on I-90 and US Route 2 through all that ash must have been a feat. I remember seeing TV footage of Yakima being pitch black by noon that day, and Toutle River near Castle Rock, not to mention I-5, was a real mess. Millions of trees surrounding Mount St. Helens had been uprooted, burnt by hot mud and volcanic ash, and stripped of branches and limbs from the blast, looking like scattered toothpicks.
"Where were you when the mountain blew?" became the catchphrase of 1980.

And yeah, 83 yo.
that's one helluva way to go out.
I could only hope for so much, to be on the same level as the other Harry Truman.
What a morning that must have been. You figure he would've been up, taking the dogs out, and WHAM!!!
Mountain collapse. Did the explosion shock wave kill him first? Or was it the 70 ft. of mud.
No one knows, he ain't been found, might end up fossilized at some point (which if I wasn't going the compost route, I'd love to be a fossil).

And @17, you live in Seattle, or surrounding areas, right? Anyone ever told you there are other volcanoes around?

When Mount St. Helen blew, Amtrak's westbound Empire Builder was in central Washington. In those days, it was routed over Stampede Pass, instead of using the Great Northern Tunnel.

Since the diesel locomotive weren't affected the way regular cars were, they kept heading to Seattle, and picking up stranded people along the way. By the time it reached King Street Station, every seat was full - including the dining car, lounge, and all of the empty bedrooms.

I don't think they stopped running the trains all through that. They were about the only way to get from the Puget Sound to Spokane for a few days.

A more appropriate metric to track and report on for COVID these days would be emergency room/hospital capacity. If we all remember back to 2020, wearing masks, social distancing, etc., was all to prevent the medical system from breaking down. So if the medical system in King County is anywhere near capacity due to COVID, then it would be advisable to begin those precautions again. Otherwise, learn to live with it/make the risk assessment for yourself. Getting sick is a fact of life. Get vaccinated, get boosted, stay current on your vaccines and you should be fine. If you don't think so, then take the precautions you think are appropriate for you.

if ppl learned to fuckin act right then you could be getting lit on the beach til 1am. but nah...

@23 Unfortunately not, as this does not capture the number of people who get sick but don't go to the hospital, who can still spread COVID. The number you propose would vastly underreport cases, perhaps fueling a cycle of even more optimism and less precuation, leading to more spread. Just because someone doesn't go to a hospital doesn't mean they can't spread it to dozens of people, some of whom may not be vaccinated or have low immune systems and would require hospitalization. Your proposal is similar to Drumpf's idea: "Hey, if we don't test, there won't be any positive tests."

MSH: I was in sixth grade, and had transferred a couple months earlier from a different school. We turned on the TV and watched it all day. We had ash on the cars for several days (weeks?), sometimes depending on which way the wind was blowing. And I remember almost immediately people were selling t-shirts, little vials of ash, etc (I remember vendors specficially at Seattle Center).

I met Truman several times over the course of a number of summer weekend spent up at MSH in the mid-to-late 1970's; he was a friend of my grandfather's from his many years cutting timber on and around the mountain, and we never failed to stop by the lodge when we were up there. He was an ornery-as-sin old cuss who you never saw without a drink in his hand or heard without a veritable torrent of swear words spilling out of his mouth, but who ironically, had a soft spot for kids: he always kept a big glass jar of hard candy next to his cash register, but woe until the greedy little hellion to attempted to grab more than one piece; that was a guaranteed hand-slapping accompanied by a few of his more colorful curse words. One thing he was NOT was "anti-science". He knew full well what the mountain was capable of, having experienced numerous - and some quite violent - earthquakes, as the seismic activity increased over the years. But he respected the mountain, and he had no doubt it was going to blow at some time, but he was stubborn and simply refused to leave his home. "I'm scared, scared to admit it - I'm shaking, shaking like a leaf now," he observed in a 1980 interview with Portland television station KATU recorded a few weeks before the eruption (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neZQdGDPKkI), "but, it's going to have to come and get me, and no authority can take me out of here, no authority dare." And sure enough, despite many people urging him to change his mind, it did. But, it wasn't because he was ignorant of what it could do or thought he knew better than the scientists who'd been studying the mountain - he was just a stubborn, ornery old coot who died as he lived - on his own terms.

Mt. S-H; I was a 22 year old lad working the breakfast shift at a restaurant in Yakima. Took a break on a beautiful Sunday morning to smoke a joint behind the dumpster and noticed what appeared to be a large thunderstorm rolling in. 5 minutes later it was raining ash. Dark as midnight by noon. News media was clueless. On one TV station they were telling us to avoid handling the ash as it might be slightly radioactive (!), on another channel the talking head was sifting the ash through his fingers and describing it as a "fine, silicate powder".

Had to mask up to go outside; ironically (in hindsight), nobody complained about the masks, but when the city lowered the speed limits on the roads to 10 mph due to limited visibility caused by blowing ash, people went ape shit. Took many weeks to get everything tidied up.

My homie was near Camp Muir on Rainier when St Helen's blew. He had a front row seat for the show.

COMTE's summation of Harry Truman is spot on. He was an old man who decided he'd rather die in his home than leave. I can relate.

I was heading out for a hike up in the pass (it was a really nice day). I heard St. Helens go bang, but thought it was that crazy kid trying again to dynamite the pylons for the (then unfinished) I-90 bridge across the East Channel between Mercer Island and Bellevue.

On a personal note, a better bet than Cannes is to go to the Venice Film Festival in Venice, Italy. You can buy inexpensive tickets and sit in the primo seats, and it's crawling with fun people to hobnob with.

If you really want to do Cannes, most of the fun parties aren't in Cannes, they're just west of there on the point at Antibes.

Toe Tag, isn't it funny how much crazy stuff used to go down here? The "Seattle is dying" crowd would have a stroke if they went back to Seattle in the 70's

and a hey-day they'dda
had at the Seattle Fire & also
with Grandpappy Dtrumpf selling
Womenfolk out the back a' his Wagon?

sad -- they missed Out on
Seattle's Real Glory Days
but how'd they have got-
ten Word out? was tS
covering the News
way back then?

I can just picture our own
dewdrop as Town
Crier

Would not have met my wife if Mount Saint Helens didn't destroy her house on the Toutle River. To this day, high waters freak her out.

@29 COMTE: WOW--that's so cool that you and your grandfather both knew Harry Truman!

@19, drew12, @29 COMTE, & @30 Euonymous: That is how I saw Harry Truman. I never met him, but had the feeling that Truman refused to evacuate Mount St. Helens because it was his home---"Je suis, je reste"; therefore, it was where he planned to live until he died. And, as COMTE aptly pointed out and Truman himself predicted, the mountain took him and on his terms.
I am the only member of my immediate family who never met Harry Truman. My parents and much older siblings took a road trip to Mount St. Helens and rented canoes from him back in the early 60s when my sibs were little and before I was born. My Dad kept saying we'd go back there one day, but none of us predicted that Mount St. Helens would ever blow up.

@31 ToeTag and @33 Catalina Vel-DuRay: There really was indeed, some pretty crazy shit going down in Seattle back in the '70s.

Wasn't there a sex church in Belltown and Redmond (No, not the Monastery) ?