Weirdest Seattle News of 2022 – Seattle Met
Seattle Met
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By Benjamin Cassidy
Image: Buffy 1982 and krolya 25 / shutterstock.com, JWalsh / flickr CC, and Seattle Met Composite
For weeks Reddit ran wild with theories about a mysterious red goo clinging to sidewalks in Wallingford. Was it Tubifera ferruginosa, a raspberry mold? An homage to a wacky podcast sketch? Just melted candy? One brave soul appears to have confirmed the globs are Swedish Fish, the Wallingford Red Goo Instagram account reports. But its origins remain unknown.
After the Museum of Museums announced a call for art exclusively from Amazon and Microsoft workers, many social media commenters dragged a show designed “to recalibrate the narrative around what a big tech worker is,” citing the industry’s ties to the gentrification pushing artists out of the city. The exhibit, slated to debut this fall at the First Hill art space, was swiftly nixed.
A Nigerian Dwarf goat was stolen from the Grays Harbor County Fair. The suspects then took Penny to a Walmart in Lacey (naturally) before the local sheriff’s office recovered the three-month-old animal and returned it to its owners. The heist wasn’t the only local goat drama. A few days later, three runaways trotted alongside Highway 12 in Brady. A state trooper gave them a ride home.
Forget about those Dall-E Mini art memes. Artificial intelligence is also coming for the performing arts. A recent New York Times feature captured the oddity of watching a jazz fusion band perform on Maury Island with a machine, Desdemona, as its lead vocalist. The not-yet-sentient singer crooned about the day when engineers can no longer control their creations.
In late August, the third Seattle-area location of a “premier assisted stretching boutique” opened in Issaquah. StretchLab offers personal training sessions with Flexologists and touts a machine that, after just three squats, can assess one’s mobility, activation, posture, and symmetry. Memberships start at $179 per month.
Image: Seattle Met Composite, NeoLeo / shutterstock.com, Maraiakray / shutterstock.com, yulia glam / shutterstock.com, and COURTESY JULIANA ENOIM via Facebook
E-bike batteries. A stripped-down mobility scooter. An old love seat. Put it all together and you have the motorized couch Kass Hodorowski has jury-rigged to wheel around the City of Destiny. The three-mile-per-hour joy rides of Tacoma Couch Guy have both amused social media and highlighted the sorry state of local sidewalk accessibility.
Angelyn and Richard Burk, formerly of Tukwila, will spend their retirement years living exclusively on cruises. Angelyn, an accountant, says it’s more affordable to perpetually ship off for Sydney and other coastal locales than to stomach the bonkers cost of living on shore.
The Seattle Department of Transportation has removed a “guerrilla crosswalk” at Greenwood Avenue North and North 83rd Street, The Seattle Times reports. Thick white lines showed up one September day across a thoroughfare that’s overdue for a permanent crossing. It’s being called an act of tactical urbanism.
Neglected produce in warehouses and shipping containers will get wasted less now, thanks to a local startup recently featured by GeekWire. Strella Biotechnology uses sensors to monitor levels of ethylene, a gas that fruits exude, to track which Granny Smiths are ripe or rotten as they slog through the supply chain.
The wanderlust of an orange tabby cat has captured the imagination of a Seattle neighborhood. A rapidly growing Facebook group devoted to Lord Byron, a five-year-old feline named for the adventurous British Romantic, documents sightings everywhere from street corners to inside random people’s homes. Lord Byron’s owner told The Seattle Collegian the cat has even hopped into the cars of unsuspecting drivers.
Image: Gage Murrey, Art Em Po (Frown), Photoongraphy (Egg) / shutterstock.com, and Brandon Erlinger-Ford, Ruby Khoesial / unsplash.com
Police rescued an 80-year-old woman in Illinois from a hostage situation after her Seattle-based daughter noticed she hadn’t texted her daily Wordle score. Unanswered messages prompted her children to alert the authorities. No indication of how many five-letter words the former teacher thought of during the many hours a naked, scissors-wielding man locked her in a bathroom (she was uninjured), but some four-letter ones must have come to mind.
Broadcast news fixated on crime downtown early in 2022, and nobody was more obsessed than KOMO reporter Jonathan Choe. During one dispatch, he stood across from police on Third Avenue and queried a visiting couple, “You guys aren’t afraid to walk through all this?” The tourists, befuddled, kept walking. Choe was later fired after multiple incidents.
Pilots have experienced some unexpected air traffic in the vicinity of Jet City. The rollout of AT&T and Verizon’s 5G wireless services grounded all passenger flights at Paine Field earlier this year because it potentially interfered with vital safety equipment. And someone trained a green light on multiple planes approaching Sea-Tac in dangerous (and criminal) “laser strikes.”
A glitch in Mazdas of a certain age recently tested the limits of our public radio fandom. Drivers turning to the NPR station in cars made between 2014 and 2017 sent their infotainment systems into a new iteration of the Seattle Freeze. The problem remains something of a mystery, but local dealerships have begun installing replacement parts free of charge to appease the aggrieved tote-clutchers.
Jeff Bezos has offered to pay for the deconstruction of a historic bridge in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to accommodate the shipment of his $485 million superyacht. In protest, thousands of Facebook users have pledged to egg the 417-foot vessel as it makes its way through the Dutch port. In unrelated news, Bezos’s ex MacKenzie Scott has donated more to charity since their split than the Amazon founder.
Editor’s note: This list is updated quarterly with news items of questionable import but indubitable resonance in the Seattle zeitgeist. If you have any odd local anecdotes to share that haven’t made headlines yet, feel free to send them to [email protected]
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