In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula relocates from Tran­syl­va­nia to London. Asking themselves, what would Dracula have done in London before he was killed by Van Helsing, 18 authors wrote un­con­nect­ed short stories. Dracula meets the Prince of Wales, he is observed by the servants, he terrorizes Aleister Crowley and Charles Fort and Ellen Terry, he even takes the lead in the Pirates of Penzance.

The stories are uneven. None is out­stand­ing.

On the First Thursday of every month, there’s an Art Walk around Seattle’s Pioneer Square. All the art galleries stay open late and thousands of people wander around looking at the art.

It’s a shame then that in the four years that I’ve worked in Pioneer Square, I’ve only Art Walked a handful of times. Maura and Joseph joined us on Thursday and we spent a pleasant couple of hours talking and wandering around, mostly through the Tashiro-Kaplan building. Muhsin was supposed to come too, but couldn’t find parking as the Seahawks played a pre-season game.

There are other First Thursday events: many of the museums are free after 5pm. The Seattle Art Museum, the Science …continue.

Chuckanut Drive is one of Washington State’s best yet least-known scenic drives. Take I-5 north from Seattle for 70 miles. Just past Burlington, exit on to state route 11. The highway heads northwest towards the coast across the fertile floodplain of the Skagit valley. For nine miles, you drive past farms and fields. Then the road rises at the coast, changing character instantly.

Now you’re driving along the rocky, forested shoulder of the Chuckanut mountains. One hundred feet below as you drive along the twisty, shady road, you can catch glimpses of the waters of Samish Bay through the trees. If you look closely, you may see the train tracks, prac­ti­cal­ly at water’s …continue.

Kevin Kerney, deputy chief of the New Mexico State Police, has just inherited a high-country ranch, where he finds a dis­mem­bered skeleton.

An old-school police procedural (by a real cop) with believable characters and a not im­plau­si­ble plot. The prose is a little clumsy, but the story pulled me along.

This afternoon, I invited 200 friends, family, and ac­quain­tances to the Reilly & Bartholomew Family Journal. The Journal is the feature that we’ve been working on at Cozi for several months. It’s a light­weight blog that’s really easy to set up and post to, with straight­for­ward privacy controls.

More im­por­tant­ly, though, I invited those people to use Cozi for themselves.

I’m inviting you to read the Family Journal that Emma and I set up at Cozi. It’s a way of letting our friends and relatives keep up with us. If you see a story you like, add a smile. We hope you enjoy it!

I’m also inviting you to start using Cozi for yourselves.

Cozi …continue.

Inspector Henri Castang of the Police Judiciare in­ves­ti­gates the apparent kidnapping of a politician’s mistress and discovers a far-right conspiracy.

Written in Freeling’s char­ac­ter­is­tic idio­syn­crat­ic style, this is as much a meditation on corruption and compromise as it is a police procedural.

This year is the 23rd an­niver­sary of the Seattle AIDS Walk. A whole generation has passed since the Northwest AIDS Walk began. AIDS used to be the un­stop­pable disease that killed much of a generation of gay men.

AIDS is still a serious problem, but the de­vel­op­ment of an­ti­retro­vi­ral drugs in the Nineties means that people with HIV are living longer, healthier lives than before. More than 1.5 million Americans are now living with HIV/AIDS: 9,000 of them in King County. 40,000 people are infected every year, and most new infections are among African-Americans. The U.S. is getting off relatively lightly: about one-quarter of the adults in southern Africa have HIV!

The Lifelong AIDS Alliance …continue.

Approve Referendum 71. If you’re eligible to vote in Washington state in November, remember this: Approve Referendum 71.

On May 18, 2009, Governor Gregoire signed Senate Bill 5688, aka the “ev­ery­thing but marriage bill” or the Domestic Part­ner­ship Law, a law ensuring that all Washington families are treated the same, with the same pro­tec­tions, the same rights, and the same oblig­a­tions as their neighbors. Under this law, registered domestic partners (same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples with at least one partner over age 62), and married couples, are treated equally under the law in all parts of the state.

Key rights and oblig­a­tions in the law include:

• Death benefits for the partners of police and fire­fight­ers killed …continue.

I had about 60 apparently corrupted photos on a Com­pact­Flash card this evening. It might have been due to Lightroom going berserk, but it was more likely from my pulling the card reader out of the computer without ejecting it first.

The photos wouldn’t show up under Mac, Linux, or Windows. I tried to chkdsk the card under Windows, which complained about a “raw” disk. That led me to ZAR, the Zero Assumption Recovery toolkit. The evaluation copy retrieved the photos very nicely. Whew!

Das Barbecü is Wagner’s Ring Cycle trans­plant­ed to Texas for comic effect. We saw it at Seattle’s ACT Theatre tonight. The Ring Cycle is currently playing at the Seattle Opera, who com­mis­sioned Das Barbecü in 1991.

I’m no opera buff and certainly no Wagnerian. After sitting through four hours of Tristan und Isolde years ago—Ach du lieber Gott! Mein Arsch! Meinen Ohren!—I told Emma that my limit for opera was two-and-a-half hours. I have never seen any part of the Ring Cycle and had only cursory knowledge of the story, and it detracted not one whit from my enjoyment of Das Barbecü.

Wagner might have …continue.