Tacoma, WA – police-seek-man-wearing-flowery-dress who robbed bank

Via: Nothing to do with Arbroath

Police in Tacoma are looking for a man who robbed a bank last week wearing a flowery dress. They have released a surveillance photo, hoping somebody might recognize him.

The hold-up happened at about 4pm on Wednesday. The man walked into a Key Bank branch and handed a teller a note demanding cash. He then left the bank with an undisclosed amount of money.

No one was injured. The robber is a white man in his 40s, 6-foot-3 and 190 pounds.

He was wearing a light brown wig, tan makeup, large sunglasses, a white long-sleeved shirt and a long dark blue sleeveless flowery dress. (heels? don’t know)

Anyone with tips is asked to call Tacoma-Pierce County Crime Stoppers. There is a $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest.

http://arbroath.blogspot.com/2013/08/police-seek-man-wearing-flowery-dress.html

***
Pope Francis, “Who am I to judge?”

Well, okay I guess, but . . .

.

Gene Daniels – Image Gallery

Via: First Time User

Children play in yard of Ruston, Louisiana Washington home, while Tacoma Smelter stack showers area with arsenic and lead residue.

– August 1972

~~~

See more photos, HERE:

http://firsttimeuser.tumblr.com/tagged/Gene-Daniels

****

Via: HistoryLin.org

The smokestack dated to 1917. Considered at the time an engineering gem, it was constructed of 2.5 million bricks, approximately 5,000 tons of mortar and stood 571 feet tall, making it then the largest smokestack in the world.  Earthquake damage in 1937 necessitated repairs and the stack was reduced to 562 feet in height.  Once a sign of prosperity, the stack had over the years become a symbol of environmental pollution.  Structurally it had become unsafe; many of its bricks were loose and in danger of falling. The smokestack had even attracted daredevils, from local youths to Greenpeace protestors.

The 67-acre ASARCO smelter site was listed as one of the country’s most polluted sites, primary contaminants being arsenic and lead. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called for an eight-stage cleanup that included demolishing structures, excavating soil and slag from the most contaminated locations, disposing of the contaminates, plugging or removing surface water drainage, capping the project area, protecting the site from erosion, continuing monitoring impacts on groundwater and marine sediments and integrating cleanup with future land use plans.    

Read more, HERE:

http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=8744

.

bastards!

.

Former NFL QB JON KITNA finds ‘gold mine’ at a school where other teachers only saw problems

Via: Yahoo

TACOMA, Wash. – Before he left the Dallas Cowboys to come home again, Jon Kitna had one request of the two principals who run Lincoln High School:

Give me your worst students.

The other teachers told him to stop. This was last February and it was going to be hard enough to teach three algebra classes in the middle of a semester. He was two months gone from an NFL career that went for 16 years, after all. Yes, this was his old high school, the one where he was a star quarterback in the early 1990s, but didn’t the new football coach understand what he was getting into?

Didn’t he see the numbers? Didn’t he know that four of every five of the students were on free or reduced lunches? That finding a meal was more important than understanding negative integers? Inspiring the best students was going to be difficult enough. Save himself, they advised. Start slow. Make it easy.

Kitna shook his head. Easy wasn’t the point. At 6-foot-4 with a buzz cut and a body built for football, he fills the classroom doorways. He would not be intimidated. And how could they understand this was the only job he ever wanted – that his time in the NFL was a daily preparation for this moment? No, coming home was supposed to be as hard.

~~~
Please take a few minutes, and read the rest, HERE:

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nfl–former-nfl-qb-jon-kitna-finds-‘gold-mine’-at-a-school-where-other-teachers-only-saw-problems-194739063.html

***

footnotes:

1. My Mom graduated from Lincoln High, Class of ’33.

2, I’ve been a die-hard Seahawk fan since Game 1 (1976), and a Kitna fan even before that.

3. Jon Kitna is a very good ‘Dude’.

GO ABES!

.

Descent into SEATAC

It seems like whenever I go to Seattle, it’s at the tail end of a series of flights, often involving a redeye. I’m of course happy to get off the lousy plane, but I’m even ‘more happy’ to be home, to ‘my hometown’, Seattle.

I don’t even remember anymore which flight I was on, but I remember the pilot coming on, and saying, “Folks, we are beginning our descent into Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, blah, blah-blah-blah, and blah”.

Of course at +30,000 feet, the sky is an incredible, almost ‘take your breath away’ blue; and I know this is incredibly lame, but I couldn’t get this tune out of my head:

“The bluest sky you’ve ever seen, in Seattle.

And the hills the greenest green, in Seattle.

Like a beautiful child Growing up, free and wild.

Full of hopes and full of fears,

Full of laughter, full of tears,

Full of dreams to last a year in Seattle.”

~

BUT THEN, we began the descent into the clouds, and the ground finally became visible at about five-hundred feet, and the rain of course was streaking off the window like a ‘whacked-out 150-mile per hour car wash’!!

There were a few grumblings (grumble, grumble, grumble) from some of the passengers; but hey I didn’t care because this wasn’t an ordinary rain, this was ‘Seattle Rain’, and I was home, and if felt good, very very good.

.

Ranger’s widow expelled from Rumsfeld book signing

Via: The News Tribune

Two people were removed from a Donald Rumsfeld book signing Friday at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, including the Yelm widow of an Army Ranger who blames the military for her husband’s suicide.

Security officers for the former secretary of defense escorted Ashley Joppa-Hagemann out by the arm, she said Saturday. She and Jorge Gonzalez, the executive director of Coffee Strong, a Lakewood-based anti-war group, confronted Rumsfeld as he promoted his memoir, “Known and Unknown.”

According to an account posted on Coffee Strong’s website: “Mrs. Joppa-Hagemann introduced herself by handing a copy of her husband’s funeral program to Rumsfeld, and telling him that her husband had joined the military because he believed the lies told by Rumsfeld during his tenure with the Bush administration.”

Joppa-Hagemann complained about Rumsfeld’s response Friday to her account of Staff Sgt. Jared Hagemann’s multiple deployments (eight) to Iraq and Afghanistan and his death at age 25. Hagemann belonged to the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment.

The website said Rumsfeld’s “only response was to callously quip, ‘Oh yeah, I heard about that.’”

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/08/27/1798800/rangers-widow-expelled-from-rumsfeld.html

***

Via: KPIC.com

‘Widow: After 8 deployments, Army Ranger takes own life’ (August 29, 2011)

A spokesman for the base tells KOMO News that the nature of the death is still undetermined. But Staff Sgt. Hagemann’s widow says her husband took his own life – and it didn’t need to happen.

“It was just horrible. And he would just cry,” says Ashley Hagemann.

Ashley says her husband Jared tried to come to grips with what he’d seen and done on his eight deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“And there’s no way that any God would forgive him – that he was going to hell,” says Ashley. “He couldn’t live with that any more.”

Ashley says her Army Ranger husband wanted OUT of the military.

“He just wanted to know what it felt like to be normal again,” she says.

Staff Sgt. Hagemann had orders to return to Afghanistan this month for a NINTH TOUR of duty.

http://www.kpic.com/news/local/127759193.html

.