You could be the one that kills that traffic jam on the I-5.

Breaking Up a Traffic Jam! – Click here for more home videos

Also see: trafficwaves.org, for more explanation of how it works.

Hat tip to Leo Laporte.

Seattle Times Photo

Imagine you’re tooling around the bottom of Elliot Bay in your private submarine, and you’ve got a hankering for some piping hot clam chowder. But where to go to get some? All of a sudden, out of the murk and surrounded by swimming sharks, you see a large sign for Ivar’s Acres of Clams, and their 75¢ bowl of chowder. Excellent! You change your heading for Pier 54 and start digging your pockets for change.

This apparently was a scene envisioned by Ivar Haglund as happening in the not-too-distant future, and so in his unremitting genius he actually set billboards for his seafood restaurant on the bottom of the bay. Ivar died in 1985, but in his papers he left a map showing where the beacons were located, and Paul Dorpat in his research came across this fantastically whimsical find. It seemed just crazy enough to be true, and so a dive team was sent down to the bottom to scout out one of the locations on the map. And what do you know, they actually found one!

This is like something out of a quirky movie, billboards at the bottom of the sea advertising restaurants to passing aquanauts. But then again, Ivar himself, from what I’ve heard of him, was like a character out of a quirky movie, a living cartoon who promoted himself and his businesses in every weird way he could think of. I’m not at all surprised that he had this idea, or that he actually went through with it. And it’s great that it’s been uncovered after all these years, one more little surprise nugget he left behind to delight future generations.

Hat tip to West Seattle Blog for this one.

Central District News has discovered evidence of Seattle’s streetcar past: an old rail sticking out of a pothole.

It seems so foolish now that all the streetcars were put out of business seventy years ago, when now we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to put rail back. Makes you wonder what things would have been like if the rails were there all along. CDN put together a map of all the streetcar routes that used to crisscross First Hill and Capitol Hill. A complete map, as of 1941, can be seen on Flickr.

Seattle Times Photo

Amnesia is something that we see in movies and TV so often that we start to forget that it’s a real thing. But it’s happened again, with a man who stumbled out of Discovery Park and flagged a bus, remembering very little about his life. Researchers on the internet were able to discover his name, Edward Lighthart, and piece together a few more tidbits from his life, but I’m sure that’s very little comfort to him. Imagine not being able to remember anything about your past, and then being told who you are but the name has no more familiarity to you than that of a stranger.

Maybe he’ll stick around for a while. There are worse places to wake up than Seattle, after all.

My boys would totally do this:

3-year-old found wandering alone late last night

According to his grandmother, the boy was put to bed earlier that evening and the grandparents went to watch a movie. The boy then crawled out of his bedroom window, on the ground floor, and wandered three blocks from home before anyone noticed him. Meanwhile, when the grandparents finished their movie they went to check on him, finding him gone and the window open.