“Microsoft’s Last Day” (1/14) was an excellent article. The writing’s on the wall for Microsoft. Two things though: Those of us who have used alternatives to Microsoft’s OS and applications have never had the perception that Microsoft’s brand name was ever synonymous with “best of breed.” Also, there seems to be a few typos in the last paragraph of your article. Let me correct: “In the last years of its existence, having never innovated, Microsoft concentrated its energies at what it had always done best—trying through tactical brilliance and brute force to make consumers endure, rather than enjoy, Windows.”
James Culbertson
via e-mail
Microvision
Great article! (See “Microsoft’s Last Day,” 1/14.) Funny thing is, it’s a very clever look “from the future.” Many of the things outlined could very well happen.
Sure would like to see something similar for Amazon.com, “the company that robbed a youthful generation of their retirement.” The idea of investing in a company showing no profits and potentially not showing any profits defies logic. Go figure.
Francis stanisci
via e-mail
Dyspeptic reader
I didn’t realize the Weekly accepted reviews from interns at the local high school rag. Kathryn Robinson’s review of Osteria La Spiga (“Simply . . . simple,” 1/7) has convinced me otherwise. Ms. Robinson’s misappreciation of fine food is equaled only by her own pretension and her delight in sophomoric imagery. Her presumption that the table bread, fashioned from an ancient Romagnan tradition is ” . . . more Scandinavian in spirit” is appalling. Phrases like “piadina . . . flatter than a pizza crust but chewier than a cracker,” “Even the coolest-sounding crescione . . . quickly grew tedious,” and ” . . . a dryish-like biscotti [referring to the ciambella]” remind me more of a bouncy cheerleader spiffing up her speech debate than a reasoned critique of a cuisine or the establishment that serves it.
“Simple is the word I see scrawled again and again in my notes,” Robinson cites and refers to again several times in the article as well she should. At a time when American dining is finally coming around from such indulgent forays as “fusion,” restaurants where personality took the dais over performance and a self-imposed inaccessibility from the average diner, “simplicity” should be heartily embraced and celebrated. Let the food, the pure ingredients, tell the story. Winemakers, American and worldwide, have long known that they can only control certain elements of their milieu. The rest is left for the earth to decide and so it should be with food and with dining.
At La Spiga I have always experienced the warm embrace of a tradition founded on such principles. Fresh ingredients, as few as necessary to evoke the dish’s theme and executed with grace and love . . . a combination I will never find tedious.
Thomas J. Foster
via e-mail
Sickening
Thanks, Geov Parrish, for your insightful, thoughtful column (At Large, “Local Leaders Get Sick,” 1/21)! Maybe next time you can list “101 Things to Do with a Dead John Stanford.” Or how about exposing Kathi Goertzen’s “brain tumor” for the shameless ratings ploy that it is? Best of all—why don’t you pick up some painful affliction yourself and go crawl under a rock for a while?
David Short
via e-mail
Don’t be cruel
Beyond a candidate’s presumed background in journalism what other qualities does the free, new and improved Seattle Weekly seek in its prospective writers? After reading Geov Parrish’s ugly column in the 1/21 issue of the Weekly (At Large), regarding the late John Stanford, “Local Leaders Get Sick,” it has become abundantly clear Seattle Weekly seeks talent (and I use the term “talent” loosely) well outside the mainstream. Parrish, in an infantile attempt at satire, displays a streak of cruelty that a reasonable reader can only assume comes from a lifetime spent torturing small animals and setting fire to sleeping drunks. In what passes for humor amongst an alarming breed of Seattle Weekly contributor, a long, painful bout with leukemia ending in the death of a devoted public servant is found to be extremely comical. What a riot. Jaded, cynical, and far, far too hip, Seattle Weekly is rapidly losing whatever credibility it once enjoyed. Your readers deserve better.
Richard Thurston
Seattle
Riposte to SHA
In a 1/7 Letter to the Editor, Seattle Housing Authority director Harry Thomas responds to the Weekly‘s coverage of charges of discrimination made by East African residents at the Holly Park Housing Project. Because he has chosen to imply that somehow I personally had a hand in trumping up these charges, I feel compelled to respond.
While our organization, the Seattle Displacement Coalition, and several other groups offered assistance, it was the East Africans themselves who held a press conference and filed charges of discrimination with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Yes, Efrem Seyoum did show up later at the grand opening of “NewHolly,” but not to accept a home at “NewHolly.” He and other East Africans were there to circulate fliers and make sure attendees were aware of their concerns.
Mr. Thomas claims that 40 percent of all job placements and at least half of all training positions have gone to East African and African Americans while they make up only 17 percent of the Holly Park community. In point of fact, however, about 30 percent of all households at Holly Park are East African and African-American. Furthermore, a closer look shows that when the East Africans get assistance at all, they are given access to training and jobs for low-paying positions, not the higher-paying positions or to assist them in starting their own businesses. Mr. Thomas also fails to mention that only a small percentage of all residents at Holly Park are receiving jobs or the training as originally promised by SHA when grants were first awarded for the Holly Park redevelopment.
While the East Africans’ complaint was aimed primarily at the Holly Park Community Council and its president, Doris Morgan, it also charged SHA with failure to intervene even though it has had full knowledge of the East Africans’ concerns for nearly a year. Mr. Thomas says SHA doesn’t have authority to intervene, but as the monitor of community council activities, he knows full well that a simple call to HUD would take away Ms. Morgan and the community council’s control over office space, jobs, training, and other programs at Holly Park. It is HUD who holds the purse strings, and the community council itself is a creature of HUD, governed by explicit non-discrimination requirements. Perhaps Mr. Thomas is reluctant to intervene for fear that it might jeopardize future HUD funding needed to complete the Holly Park project. Given conditions faced by the East Africans, Mr. Thomas’ willful avoidance of responsibility for whatever reason is not only disingenuous, it amounts to a callous abrogation of responsibility.
John Fox
Seattle Displacement Coalition
Bloody numbers
Eric Scigliano is entitled to his chosen method of number crunching—intent as he seems to be on crunching the numbers in such a way as to get the beaches of Washington state running red with the blood of whales (Quick & Dirty, “Whale Tales,” 1/14). His eagerness to assert any possible arithmetic by which the Makahs’ whale-hunter wannabes can kill their full quota is duly noted; the fact remains, as we stated, that the five whales the Makahs failed to hunt last year despite all their chest thumping, harpoon rattling, and target practice, “cannot be added to the 1999 quota.”
We also stand by our statement that our gray whale protection campaign was a success for that reason. Scigliano may feel that “it’s an open question to what degree the protest armada and resultant three-ring controversy dissuaded them from even trying.” The theory of evolution and the connection of cigarette smoking to lung cancer may also be open questions, but not to most impartial observers.
Scigliano proffers the fact that “the migratory whales they’d promised to confine themselves to didn’t show” as a factor that “might have kibboshed [sic] the hunt anyway”—neatly forgetting that the National Marine Fisheries Service decreed that any resident gray whale still in the vicinity of Neah Bay after November 1 instantly became a de facto migratory whale in order to accommodate the Makahs.
We look forward to Mr. Scigliano’s participation in next spring’s three-ring controversy. He did his bit last year, and we’re more than willing to share with him the credit for stopping an unjustifiable wildlife
slaughter by throwing the spotlight of unwanted media attention on it—though we surmise he will be reluctant to accept it.
Andrew Christie Director of Information
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society
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