KOMO, rolling its eyes: "Be ready to get turned away from driving into Pike Place Market." Have pedestrians finally won this long and stupid war? Have those in power at last seen the light? Hardly. The Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA) bills this ban as nothing bigger than a pilot program. Meaning, it may or may not last. And, by the way, the program doesn't run the full length of the street. Only half of it. And, by the way, a considerable part of Pike Street is under construction. (Seattle Public Utilities is tearing up sections of the street and sidewalk for repairs and improvements.) This work will end on July 18, at which time, I suspect, the ban will be lifted. In truth, cars really couldn't go down Pike Street during construction anyway, so little to no enlightenment played a role in the ban.

I visited Pike Street on the day it was kind of liberated, April 23, and soon found the calm that never fails to settle in a place with little or no rumblings or roars from the world's most wasteful mode of transportation. You can even hear other humans better. "Bruce, what the hell is wrong with you?" A young woman said this to a boy who tried to kick a pigeon that was doing nothing but minding its own business.  

A Pike Place business owner claims that the closing of Pike Street has already cost them business? On day one? That's all it took for the sky to start falling? Are we to believe the business owner exists in a world that has never heard of the expression: "give it a chance"? Or does KIRO Newsradio not want to give the pilot program a chance? It is, I believe, the latter. You see, what the business owner actually said (“Whenever the street is closed, the people stop coming into the building as much and my line disappears”) is different from what the story's headline says: "Pike Place Market business owner says street closure stalls sales." Expect to see this kind of manipulation in the days to come. Our culture is built to see anything that poses even the slightest challenge to cars as an extinction-level threat to the greatest freedom America has ever known.   

We could reach and even pass 70 today, which is, of course, as hot as any day should ever be. Beyond 70, misery. Beyond 75, the sun becomes nothing but a bully in the sky. The German philosopher Hegel once wrote that "history is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history." I feel the same way about sunny days. They are blank. There's not much to say about them.

Alaska Airlines was stung by the first quarter. It lost $166 million, though it made $3.1 billion. And this bad news arrived just as Trump's tariffs and economic confusion made it difficult for the airline to see a return to profitability in the near future. The company, however, plans to hold its chin up and move forward. In the famous words of Conan the Barbarian: What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. That's the spirit.

Skye at Belltown, a modernist tower designed in 1955 by Earl Morrison, the same architect behind the Olive Tower, was sold for $102.7 million, Puget Sound Business Journal reports. The Belltown building, first named Grosvenor House, then Wall Street Tower, has it all: 371-units, great views of the Space Needle, and a rich local history.  The sale's broker told PSBJ that the deal marked the return of institutional investors "from the sidelines."

Will the people of Washington State find something better to do than pointing lasers at passing airplanes? KING 5 reports that there's been 438 such strikes since March. (There were just 23 in 2023, and 383 in 2024.) Pointing a laser at a plane is, if you don't know, a federal offense that could cost you $250,000 or 5 years. The FBI is now asking the public to name names. The Federal Aviation Administration is rightly frustrated. Unlike so many other puerile practices, the exact pleasure in this one is impossible to find. 

Trump ignited a trade war, crashed the markets, and now China is in no mood to end it. They didn't start the fire. New York Times: "Stocks Waver as China Calls Reports of U.S. Tariff Talks ‘Baseless’" So, Trump's administration is not even really talking to China. It's talking to (manipulate) the market. It must not be forgotten that none of this had to happen. Behind this chaos, you won't find a meaningful cause. This is why those who think there's some kind of deep scheming going on (like: he is destroying the market so that bond rates fall) are mistaken. Trump just doesn't know what the fuck he is doing. All he knows is he must look like he is doing something.

For example, Trump is now trying to turn down the tariff hot air because the CEOs Walmart, Target, and Home Depot told him, behind closed doors, that his trade war with China would "disrupt supply chains and lead to empty shelves in the coming weeks." The amazing thing about this story is someone had to spell it out for him. Someone had to tell him how the American economy actually works. The understanding among these CEOs is he knows jack. And they are right about that.

Let's end Slog AM with this chill tune by Waikiki Sweet Heart: