T-town’s next mayor needs a nickname – Tahoma and Salish are already taken
THE NEWS TRIBUNE
Marilyn Strickland’s rise to the mayor’s office can mean only one thing: It’s time for us to come up with a catchy nickname. (M.S., M-Strick and Tricky Strick won’t stick. How about a little help, folks?)
It’s also time for her allies to call in political favors. For departing Mayor Bill Baarsma, that could mean exacting a pledge to carry forward his most critical piece of unfinished civic business.
Getting Mount Rainier renamed Mount Tahoma.
Double B has to be encouraged, now that the state has adopted a tribal word for another Northwest landmark. By a vote of 5-1, the Washington Board of Geographic Names recently agreed the inland waters of Western Washington and southern British Columbia should henceforth be called the Salish Sea.
OK by us. It’ll spare tourists the embarrassment of mispronouncing the Strait of Juan de Fuca. But try saying this five times really fast: “She sells Salish Sea shells by the Salish Sea shore.”
The loser in the mayor’s race, meantime, refuses to say “uncle” despite his opponent’s insurmountable lead.
“I don’t understand conceding or not conceding,” Jim Merritt told the Trib.
His never-say-die spirit is just what Tacoma needs. With Merritt in City Hall, let’s get out there and save the Luzon.
Move over, Federal Way. Sure, you’re the third-largest city in King County and eighth-largest in the state. But with an easily passing annexation on the Nov. 3 ballot, Kent is leaving you behind like a broken-down Caprice near Exit 143.
Kent will get about 24,000 new residents in one shot, which should make tired ol’ Tacoma worry some day it’ll be known as Kent’s suburb.
For now, a question: Does every new Kentite get an honorary trucker cap and case of Pabst Blue Ribbon?
Tacoma has museums, glass art, a glass art museum and a tavern shaped like a coffee pot. In short, as the Germans say: haute culture.
So, of all the things that could put us on the FM dials of America’s merlot-sipping, Celtic-music-listening National Public Radio elite, we never guessed it would be an old porn theater and dirty-book store.
The Mecca, as we learned in court recently, was the place frequented by a chicken-soup-loving, soon-to-be-former county judge before it closed in 2006.
But the NPR wise-guys smeared the city by suggesting that the naughty establishment where Judge Michael Hecht bought his broth is still in business!
All things considered, we’re shocked and mortified.
It happened last week on NPR’s live-audience news quiz show, “Wait, Wait … Don’t Tell Me!” The hosts were yukking it up about our judge and how he often visited the Mecca to buy soup from a vending machine.
One host said: “We called the owner of this Triple-X book store in Tacoma, Wash., and we asked what made the soup so good, and he said, ‘Well, it has delicious herbs and spices and a secret recipe. But mostly what makes it good is that it’s surrounded by boobs!’” (Audience laughs.)
“So it’s in the middle of Congress?” said the other host. (Audience laughs again.)
Just when you think NPR has gone blue, they spoil it by throwing in a token highbrow political joke.
And speaking of classy humor: There’s something flattering about a Seattle-Tacoma zinger delivered by the cranky old lion of American nightclub comedy.
Don Rickles lobbed this chestnut when he opened his show at Snoqualmie Casino last week: “If I bomb in Seattle, I can always go to Tacoma.” Or something like that.
If the Rat Pack were alive, they’d have keeled over with laughter.
We’d be hypocrites to fault Rickles for a cliché one-liner, and we’ll cut him slack for poor geography. “If I bomb in Snoqualmie, I can always go to Cle Elum” just doesn’t produce the same ha-has.
Rickles proceeded to rattle off jokes that, if we tried them in this column, would send us on a short walk to the HR department.
By the end of his set, he’d insulted Italians, Irish, Polish, American Indians, blacks, whites, Catholics, women, gays and disabled people.
So don’t despair, Tacoma: We’re in good company, pack of small-town hockey pucks that we are.
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