April Fool: 22 Things About Seattle That We Wish Were a Joke

19. Election '09 is another sausage fest.
When it comes to Seattle's top dogs, there's nary a bitch to be found. Our only female mayor was the one-term Bertha Landes, who served from 1926 to 1928. King County hasn't had a female Executive since creating the post in 1968. There are currently three women on the nine-member city council, one of whom is leaving. And of the 15 people who have so far filed to run for a council seat, Jessie Israel and Sally Bagshaw are the only females. What the hell, ladies? Sally Clark, don't you want a promotion? Sally Jewell, you're running one of the last big Seattle business successes, REI—maybe it's time to parlay that know-how into the political sphere? Storm co-owner Anne Levinson, you're a "political dynamo" (according to The Seattle Times) and a former deputy mayor—no interest? Getting people to run for office around here is always a challenge, but the refusal of local women to step up seems especially disheartening. Hard to believe that while women dominate at the statewide level (Gregoire, Murray, and Cantwell), we can hardly get any to kick this nanny town's butt.

20.Sleepless in Seattle is still this city's defining movie.
When the obituaries of the principal participants in this film are written, will Sleepless be mentioned anywhere near the first paragraph? Not likely. (OK, Meg Ryan—maybe.) Yet 16 years after New York writer-director Nora Ephron put a lonely, widowed Tom Hanks on a houseboat on Portage Bay (or was it Union Bay?) we're still cursed with the association. It's the first pun that comes to mind, the first lame headline, the wacky slogan on the cheap T-shirts sold to tourists downtown, the first cinematic reference point for anyone you meet, on any airplane flight, in any corner of the world. Hard as it is to believe, our city has produced nothing else as memorable as this trifle, nothing with anything like its iconic impact. It's as if Home Alone 2: Lost in New York (which was a more popular movie, by the way) were still the touchstone whenever the popular imagination considered Manhattan. And it's only going to get worse: A musical version of the film, with a reported budget of $220 million, will open next year on Broadway (no doubt with a trial run at the 5th Avenue first). Why couldn't it have been Disclosure (which came out the year after Sleepless) that claimed the Seattle brand? There, you'll recall, corporate executive Demi Moore rapes poor, innocent Michael Douglas (who then sues for sexual harassment). That's a musical we'd pay to see.

Pat Moriarity

The state can’t distinguish between unreal phony wrestling and real phony wrestling.

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Slideshow: A look at Seattle's 22 unfortunate truths.

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21. D. Parvaz enjoys safe harbor at Harvard while her P-I colleagues are on the street.
An editorial and "pop culture" writer of Iranian descent, D. Parvaz (née Dorothy) earned a prestigious, year-long Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, where she's set about chronicling "the moral and social underpinnings that created the country's current political climate." But if Parvaz wants to get to the crux of her Cambridge thesis, she should look in the mirror. Formerly co-anchoring the P-I's insufferable "Saturday Spin" section with comedienne Cathy Sorbo, Parvaz epitomizes the sort of lazy pundit who simply riffs, in the most predictable ways, on everyone else's reportage—a sort of fifth-rate Frank Rich, an aggregator before aggregating became en vogue. But her interests aren't limited to politics; in her second-to-last column, Sassy D slammed the octuplet mom. This is the journalistic equivalent of bragging about nailing a date after slipping her a roofie. Sadly, such incidents were all too common during Parvaz's P-I tenure. Sadder still, she'll no doubt end up with another high-profile gig after her fellowship ends.

22. Duff McKagan has been forced to fill the void of credible financial pundits.
Somehow, over the last couple of years, the world's financial press managed to miss a little story we might call The Imminent Economic Catastrophe. In fact, as Jon Stewart recently observed, networks like CNBC and pundits like Jim Cramer did nothing but puff up the CEOs and talk up the stocks. Into this void of incompetence has stepped the unlikely voice of Duff McKagan, a regular columnist on our Web site who was recently invited by playboy.com to become a financial blogger. A graduate of the Albers School of Business at Seattle University, McKagan's experience isn't on Wall Street—it's in the studio with Velvet Revolver, collating receipts for Guns N' Roses, and running the business that is Loaded (his new album, in stores Tuesday). But as we've now learned, listening to the puffy "experts" doesn't exactly encourage responsible financial planning. Two things in life are certain, though: Duff McKagan's not going to steer you toward a Ponzi scheme, and nobody ever lost their shirt from looking at porn. OK, bad example.