So I haven’t written diddly squat about the Mariners this season. It’s been a very weird year for the club; they’re nowhere near as good, I think, as their record… but they’ve been winning just enough to be interesting.

The M’s are a frustrating bunch. They’re just good enough that they’re kind of in the hunt for a playoff spot, but I really don’t think they are THAT good. It’s frustrating because instead of focussing on what’s working and what isn’t, and planning on developing for the future, the attention is distracted and goes more towards what they can do in the immediate time frame and get into the playoffs.

The club has a lousy GM, in my opinion. They also have attitudes of playing guys well after it’s obvious that they shouldn’t. So, this season, we’re stuck with Richie Sexson, who’s been pretty lousy, playing more than guys who would be better.

And yet… they’re a lot of fun. And just down the street, too! So I walk down to the park (I skipped tonight, and now I wish I hadn’t, because it’s a good game) and watch them anyway.

Ahh, being a fan. You’re up, you’re down…

Today’s Seattle Times contains a veritable gold nugget, a piece of writing so fantabulously wonderous that it’s amazing it hasn’t revolutionized opinion writing worldwide already…

…or, maybe not. But I did get a letter to the editor published in the Times today, which is pretty cool.

I’ve had a couple of letters in the Times’ pages before. They don’t print everything they get, but if you keep plugging away and sending them letters sooner or later you’ll get one in the paper.

One I wrote was railing against cameras in public spaces, like something out of a George Orwell novel. I wrote another that both cheered and booed Washington State’s “initiative king”, Tim Eyman, for his taking a salary from contributions to his campaigns.

They unfortunately had to edit that one a bit, and it took out an important point where I scolded Eyman for not being open enough with contributors about the fact that he was paying himself, but that’s how it goes. I learned an important lesson with that one and another one, in the Seattle P-I (which I can’t find online for some reason) that was hacked up so poorly that a crucial point was removed, making my letter effectively mean the OPPOSITE of what I intended.

I got so mad about that one I’ve since tried to quit writing to the P-I, those jerks. Afterwards, the letters editor couldn’t understand what I was talking about or why I was so angry at first, which makes sense because he was the one who’d done the editing. Then the light came on, he realized he’d really screwed it up (I could hear it in his voice) but he refused to apologize, saying that’s just how it goes sometimes. And the media wonders why people don’t trust them.

I wrote one that I was particularly proud of several years ago, in the post-9/11 days. Now I’m not quite so sure it’s “pretty easy to tell who the good guys and who the bad guys are”, as I said in the letter.

Writing letters to the editor is a great exercise for anyone who wants to sit and pontificate on stuff. It forces better writing; you have to be more blunt, punch your points home harder and quicker, and generally write in a manner that doesn’t come naturally to people sometimes. (Including me; I love to ramble on WAY too long!)

I’d encourage anyone and everyone to take a crack at it sometime. Read something online you don’t like? Knock out a note to whoever wrote it, whether it’s a comment on a blog, or a letter to the editor, or whatever.

So today, at work, we’ve been doing metering with slight delays into Sea-Tac airport most of the afternoon.

It’s clear and visibility is essentially unlimited. There’s no runway closure. Why are we having to slow traffic a bit?

Because some moron missed his flight.

Now, ordinarily, this wouldn’t be an issue. People miss their flights all the time. But what they don’t do is what this guy did.

He got angry that they wouldn’t put him on the plane, you see. So he went to an airline worker and said that there was a bomb on the plane (which had already taken off and was heading to Memphis).

Well, he got his wish- the plane turned around and came back to Seattle and landed. Actually, he only got part of his wish, because once the plane arrived (and was emptied, and searched) and eventually sent back on its way, he wasn’t on it.

He was, of course, in police custody. I don’t think he’ll be welcome on Northwest Airlines anytime soon, either.

Don’t ever think you’ve realized just how stupid people can be, because they keep doing things like this that make you realize some are even dumber than you think.

This video takes a few minutes to watch, but I think it’s worth it. It exposes how the Bush Administration scrambled to cover their butts when their lies and mistakes caught up to them in the Iraq war.