A tequila toast Jeff Hess of Have Coffee Will Write! His site was named Best Local Weblog by CleveScene.com. Here’s what they had to say:

CoolCleveland.com may get more press, but Jeff Hess’ Havecoffeewillwrite.com is terabytes above the local competition. His daily posts remind the public of Cleveland controversies long after the local media gets bored and moves on. His continuing series on grassroots efforts to keep Wal-Mart from swallowing every Ohio town is fascinating and more in-depth than anything in the dailies. While this East Side educator’s left-wing philosophy comes off as heavy-handed at times, he does his best not to take himself too seriously - he’ll often post haiku or bumper stickers for a quick laugh, or links to weird news from around the world. If you’re wondering what’s happening behind the scenes in Cleveland or how our town is connected to national news stories, this site is a must-surf.

He’s too modest to post the news himself, but be sure to drop by HCWW and offer him your good wishes in comments. Congrats, Jeff, on the well-deserved honor!

Pretending to be a guard dog.

Reports are slipping out that some US military personnel have been trading gruesome shots of dead and dismembered Iraqis for access to a porn site. The Independent, a UK publication, reports:

The website owner, Chris Wilson, has been quite open about what he is doing. He said his site, which normally features photographs of the wives and girlfriends of his customers in pornographic poses, has proved very popular with the military. About a year ago, in response to complaints that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were having trouble getting their credit cards processed and gaining access to the site, he agreed to offer free subscriptions in return for the graphic images. Those images, unlike the porn, are openly accessible to anyone.

Mr Wilson’s site is registered in the Netherlands, putting it outside the purview of the US legal system. He has pointed out that he is not a member of the military and so is not subject to their rules.

Many of the photos were labeled with racist captions such as “What every Iraqi should look like,” and “Cooked Iraqi.” Other photos on the site invite viewers to identify dismembered body parts.

The photos have drawn a flurry of protests from Arab and Muslim advocacy groups in the US, saying that the images may be a violation of the Geneva Convention.

The US military said yesterday it is opening an investigation.

Mallards at sunset.

I shot this on a wonderful, peaceful evening at Manito Park, as the ducks glided silently across the water beneath the trailing branches of a weeping willow. They’re so used to human intrusion that my presence was not worthy of notice; their world had no need of me. Such dignity and grace humbles me.

I haven’t been deputized by the grammar police (I need to petition Meredith to get that assignment), but this new slogan really bugs me. The “Near nature” part I get. A couple of years ago my neighbor found a porcupine in his cherry tree, this spring I saw a baby moose wandering a couple of blocks from the grocery store and an extended family of quail make their home in my juniper bushes. One could say nature is up close and personal here. No problems there.

But the “Near Perfect” just drive me nuts. Jingle-ism has trumped basic English skills, delivering a sound bite that is probably far more accurate than those who coined it intended. It sounds provincial and uneducated, which some would say is appropriate for a congressional district that tossed out Speaker of the House Tom Foley in 1994 in favor of an unknown Republican, George Nethercutt, who ran on a promise to resign at the end of 6 years. (He didn’t.) It sounds like a city which struggles to pass school bonds, and which closed its main library on Saturdays to save money, whose branch libraries are only open a couple of days a week. It sounds like a city which considers water floridation to be a dangerous conspiracy. It sounds like a town that promised HUD money to the company owning the only major newspaper in the area for the construction of an overpriced, unneeded parking garage, then believed that the paper was delivering objective reporting on the issue.

It sounds like a place that thinks if it just toots its own horn loud enough, people will believe the publicity instead of the evidence of their own eyes.

If they’re trying to buck up their notoriously poor self-image, they could at least do it correctly. Add an LY, for goodness sakes. Two letters don’t take up that much room on the masthead.

Unless that “Near perfect” is geographical. Perhaps the campaign was paid for by Idaho, just 10 miles away ….

Tiger at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium

The Matrix battle scene — starring a cow.

This is the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. You may remember it from the infamous 1940 video footage of the bridge twisting and bucking, then collapsing into Puget Sound. I saw it first in 6th grade, and never looked at bridges the same way again.

I got to see it up close. Taking Highway 16 to the zoo, I missed the Jackson Street exit and ended up in my nightmares. I have a deathly fear of heights and the bridge hangs high above the Sound, seeming to stretch on forever. It’s 2 lanes each direction with a rumble strip between the lanes and only a low thin guard rail between the traffic and a horrible end. Of course, I ended up in the outside lane. Traffic was moving along faster than I was comfortable driving, leaving me feeling terrified and out of control. I rode the rumble strip, drawing honks from the other drivers, rather than get anywhere near that edge. After what felt like hours, I got to the other side. Granted, there are a lot of worse places to be lost than Gig Harbor, an enclave of multi-million dollar homes and marinas, but it’s on the wrong side of the Sound.

That meant I had to drive back across.

I seriously considered 2 ferry rides at a cost of $30 and 3 hours to avoid it.

But in the end I was practical and turned around, again in the outside lane so that I could hit the first exit on the Tacoma side. Traffic was jammed up because of road construction (the reason I missed the exit going the other way) so we crawled across the expanse, with Meredith exclaiming over the view and urging me to look. No way. I just wanted to live long enough to collapse on the other side. I think that was the longest 10 minutes of my life.

It’s a shame the snack bar at Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium doesn’t serve tequila.

But in the end, sharing Meredith’s unabashed joy in the animals was worth the terror. We spent 3 hours at the zoo, with her snapping pictures the entire time, before adjourning to Applebee’s for dinner where I finally got my margarita.

I really don’t want to do that again.

Beluga whales at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium in Tacoma, WA.

Photo by Meredith

I’m off to visit Meredith for the weekend, but I wanted to leave you with the deceptively calm image of Edgar posing in the rock garden. Just after I clicked he jumped on me, thinking the camera was a toy I would throw into the air for a game of Catch. He’s a tricky one.