Author: Jeff

Fillipi’s Old Books and Records, Seattle’s oldest bookstore, is closing. There are wide gaps in the shelves and the posted store hours have diminished to ten a week.

This family owned shop opened in 1935 and moved to the building at Melrose Avenue and Olive Way in the ’50s. It expanded until it’s collection of books, records, sheet music, and vintage snapshots and movie stills filled the building’s three storefronts.

In the last ten years, I’ve spent a dozen afternoons browsing there. On my first visit, I bought a hundred year old anthology of short stories by Scottish writers for $3.50. It had the self-contradicting title, Stories by English Authors: Scotland. I went to a park and started reading it, which soon became difficult as the book still had some uncut pages. At the time that Stories by English Authors: Scotland was published, books were bound with some facing pages bundled together. Readers had to use a knife to seperate pages — to get from page to page. At the time, I assumed that it was a binding error.

Earlier, I saw a young fashionably dressed couple walking up Broadway. The girl was chatting away, when the guy just stopped short and planted his feet in the middle of the sidewalk. The girl went on for a couple of steps before noticing that he’d fallen behind. She turned and walked back to him, and he nodded at a spot on the sidewalk, calling her attention to a scarf that she’d just dropped. She bent down and picked it up and then they continued walking up the street. He probably would have just slowed down to pick it up, and then rushed to catch up with her, except to do that he would have had to put down the live duck that he was carrying with him.

One thing is that I redesigned this site in my head months ago. The site feels incomplete and broken, which is a bit discouraging.

I’m not sure why, but the light on the cap of the Space Needle isn’t on tonight.

It’s in right under the wire: The February Beans for Breakfast Print Calendar. Download it, print it out, and spend your month with it.

76 kb PDFs:
Letter Size
A4 Format

There are 88 Starbucks locations within five miles of my home. (via Phil)

I didn’t specifically set out to avoid caffeine today. But I spent the whole day without a sip of tea or a drop of cola. It’s possible that this was my first caffeine free day in ten years; or maybe my body has started producing its own caffeine.

I finally put most of my used book inventory up on Amazon, and aside from a quick trip to the weblog meetup, I’ve spent most of the day tweaking the inventory database and scrambling to get books shipped. The first book ordered was Color Me Beautiful, the ’80s guide to choosing the right colors for your wardrobe.

What do you think it means?

People sitting behind me at the movie theater:

“Is that Cherry Coke?”

“It’s regular Coke. I decided not to get something that would make you vomit. Actually, they were out of Cherry Coke.”

“I remember the first time I had Cherry Coke was when we went to see the original Batman.”

“Oh. That was the one with Bruce Wayne.”

“And it was directed by Tim Eyman.”

Three girls with three distinct hairstyle archetypes sit at a sidewalk table outside a cafe. Each girl has a to-go cup of coffee and a cigarette. The cups are turned with the cafe logo in the same direction. A fourth girl sits in a chair ten feet away, and ten feet from her, a photographer shoots picture after picture of the four of them with a camera that’s the size of a lunchbox. The girl in the foreground sits in profile to the camera and looks distracted at the other side of the street. The girls at the table are background. They make listening faces and laugh at imaginary jokes. They re-point their cigarettes after every second shutter click, never aiming them in the same direction twice. After ten minutes of pictures and repositioning, the girl in the foreground gets up and takes a cigarette from the pack of Parliaments on the table. She takes takes a few deep drags and then puts it out. She returns to her chair and the shooting resumes. The girls in the background take occasional puffs on their cigarettes to keep them lit.