Our green cone is a thing of beauty this year with all the heat, provided a bad acid trip is your idea of beauty. I’m not sure what these things turn into when they grow up, but I know I’m not doing an Internet image search to find out:

And that’s just for a vegetarian green cone. Maybe in a carcassatarian green cone the maggots would have sharp little incisors and vertical eye slits?

If you want an ecosystem of your own, you can get green cones here (you need at least two):

http://www.seattle.gov/parks/scc/binsandbarrels.htm

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We’ve been busy crushing bugs on the redesigned Web site. Please let us know if you see more problems or have wishes for the site. The old template was craptastic so we were afraid to change things, but now we are liberated.

Here’s a list of semi-recent fixes:

Fonts and spacing everywhere should be correct- previously some fonts were squinty The smartphone view is now updated as well, complete with a new banner The sidebar widgets for comments and forums should work well The search box now searches forums, comments, and articles with in-place results that can be sorted by…

Seattle Public Utilities has a grand master plan to solve sewage overflow problems for Lake Union, and it’s a tunnel of course. This has been in planning for several years, and in general you shouldn’t care, but it’s worth noting because this particular poo tube will clock in at close to a half billion dollars so it’s a “mega project”.

Mega projects have tons of money sitting around, plus they have highly compensated consultants standing at the ready, just waiting to listen to your complaints and bright ideas. There’s 1% for art money, there’s environmental impact study mitigation efforts, there’s …

Hopefully you enjoyed the novelty of cold rain yesterday. Today summer sort of returns, which is fortunate for the “summer splash” at Green Lake today. From 9 to 4 there will be crew races, food vendors, children’s activities, and a chance to experience rowing, canoeing, kayaking, and paddle boarding for free. For more info, click here.

Beyond that, if you have room for a giant conifer then the city would like to give you one. Go here to claim your evergreen.

There’s no redwoods available, but Wallingford has at least two giant ones already. There’s one at the Bittman Estate …

Disc Golf is the best sport there is. If you play another sport instead, you have been making a mistake. Disc golf wins for so very many reasons:

It’s generally free to play and you can bring your dog You can play whether it’s hot or cold, wet or dry, winter or summer You can play at most any age or ability level, it doesn’t matter if you have a trick knee or whatever (give younger kids like 2 throws for every throw you take) It has all the good stuff in common with ball golf- soaring drives, tense putts,…

Have you noticed the fresh coat of paint on the sculptures at Meridian Playground? You can thank the kids at Meridian School, who did the work as part of the City of Seattle’s 1% for Art program. From Erin Ruddock with Meridian School:

Students had the opportunity to power wash the sculptures and prepare them for painting, to select the new color scheme, and of course…paint! The students demonstrated perseverance, incredible attention to detail and amazing focus! To date, 5 out of the 10 existing sculptures have been revitalized. The remaining sculptures will be completed in the fall of 2015 …

After a big push by the police department, most camper vans have been pushed off of Northlake Way. There are still a few near Gasworks and the problem has ebbed and flowed through the years, but for now the situation seems to be semi-resolved.

It’s not clear to me why the police took action now after many months of complaints. Maybe they finally relented to pressure from the Northlake Safety and Security Team. Or, if you’re more cynical, you could say they took action because it’s election season so some politician decided to respond to a citizen complaint for once.…