I've been talking the talk about public transit, and I do prefer it, but the bus by my house only comes twice an hour, and it goes nowhere I want to go. There are more frequent buses a ten-minute walk from home, and with a twenty-minute walk there's a fast, frequent bus that I rely on.

But c'mon, if you know me, you know that I don't want to walk for ten or twenty minutes. When I take those buses, I drive to the bus stop and park at the side of the road.

Not this weekend, though. My car won't start. Hope it's a cheap problem to fix. A new battery would be nice.

Anyway, now I'm actually walking the transit walk. I walked twenty minutes this morning to take a bus to breakfast, walked twenty minutes back from breakfast, then walked ten minutes to catch a bus to the library. So far my legs, knees, and ankles are holding up OK, and I'll bet I fall asleep quicker than usual tonight.

It's further impetus to hurry up and move, though. I want to live someplace where I don't have to commute to the bus stop.

Walking with my empty bags from the bus stop to the bodega, a dead rat blocked my way on the sidewalk, alongside the Ling's Produce building, and just twenty feet from the bodega's entrance.

Rats are more interesting dead than alive, so I paused and gave it a good look. It was freshly dead, as no bugs were eating it, only a few flies crawling on its fur.

Nice fur, too. It looked warm and soft, but I didn't touch it. Anyway, you'd need a hundred or so dead rats to make a rat's fur jacket, and a sewing machine and the willingness to dissect rats, and none of that's me.

I was alone, of course. Nobody in my life would be in that neighborhood, four whole blocks from civilization, if you define civilization as a nationally-known chain store.

Being alone, there was no-one to have a conversation with about the rat, so I chatted at the rat itself. "Hello, rat," I said. "Is it a bad sign that you're lying there dead, directly outside the bodega where I'm about to buy celery and carrots and maybe some Japanese candy?"

Pondering my question, I noticed that the rat had no visible injuries. It had probably been poisoned, which answered my question, I think.

Ling's is in a building that's at least 50 years old, and it's probably been a produce store all that time. How could they not have rats? What's pertinent, seems to me, is that they apparently use rat poison to keep the problem under control. A dead rat on the sidewalk outside the store means that rat's not alive inside the store, so it's actually proof of sanitary conditions inside.

"I'm glad we had this conversation, Doug," the dead rat said to me in my imagination. And inside the bodega, Ling's had excellent baby cucumbers at a very good price. I bought two pounds, along with the celery and carrots and Japanese candy.

Bartell Drugs has several locations around Seattle, and it's been here for a long, long time. Wikipedia says it was founded in 1890, by George H. Bartell Sr.

I've always liked Bartell. They earned my loyalty when I was a little kid, because they had a soda fountain, just like you see in old movies, and my oh my, they made marvelous root beer floats. Long after the soda fountains were gone, Bartell was where I got my prescriptions filled, where I drug-store-shopped until leaving Seattle in the 1990s. It was family-owned, with fair prices and friendly staff. "Washington's own drugstores," brags the sign in front of every Bartell.

Having recently moved back to Seattle, I walked into a Bartell Drugs for the first time in many years a few weeks ago, and it seemed very un-Bartell. The shelves were half-empty, the store felt dirty, the employees were grumpy, there was a huge line-up of people waiting for service at the pharmacy — and all this was at a Bartell in an upscale neighborhood.

When I later visited a Bartell closer to home, in a loud, lousy neighborhood, it was almost as bad. Worse than Walgreens, definitely.

On a third visit to a different but just as disastrous Bartell, I knew it wasn't Bartell any longer.

And sure enough, it's not. According to Wikipedia again, Bartell hired its first non-family CEO in 2015, and by 2020 the company had been sold to Rite Aid. That's why Bartell Drugs now sucks. The signs in front of every store still say "Washington's own drugstores," but since they're now owned by Rite-Aid, it strikes me as false advertising.

On a whim and because the state Attorney General's office made it easy online, I've filed a formal complaint regarding this matter, which might be fun.

I never gave it any real thought, but I assumed that when I went to a library and certain books were prominently displayed — on a tabletop, or cover-out on a shelf instead of spine-out — it meant that a staffer had read the book, and was recommending it.

My internet access is at several different branches of the public library, and I've noticed that the same books are prominently displayed at every branch. Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino, for example, has a distinctive mirror-image cover, and without looking for it I've seen that cover at five different branches in the past two weeks. I don't think there's a branch where I haven't seen that book.

Now I'm wondering if there's a kickback involved. Just more corruption from Big Library. Perhaps I should file another complaint with the Attorney General's office.

And now, the news you need, whether you know it or not…

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This heavily-trafficked south Seattle bridge can't be repaired, without a company's permission

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Juneteenth ice cream, and watermelon salad:

Companies keep getting holiday wrong

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US activists stay in treehouses to block $90m "Cop City"

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Number of Americans who believe in God is at its lowest since at least 1944

So don't tell me there's never good news among the news here!

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Mass frog burial baffles experts at iron age site near Cambridge

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Uvalde Police try to prevent the release of "embarrassing" records

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A Green Bay Packers-style approach to rescue Colorado newspaper

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CNN's new boss tells staff not to say "Big Lie" when referring to Trump's Big Lie

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One-word newscast, because it's the same news every time...

• climate • climate

• cops • cops • cops • cops • cops • cops

• Republicans • Republicans • Republicans

♦ ♦ ♦

The End

• Philip Baker Hall

• Duncan Hannah

• Dorothy E Smith

6/19/2022
Tip 'o the hat to Linden Arden, ye olde AVA, BoingBoing, Breakfast at Ralf's, Captain Hampockets, CaptCreate's Log, John the Basket, LiarTownUSA, Meme City, National Zero, Ran Prieur, Voenix Rising, and anyone else whose work I've stolen without saying thanks.
Extra special thanks to Becky Jo, Name Withheld, Dave S, Wynn Bruce, and always Stephanie...