I don’t know if this site gathered any “regular” readers in its short life, but if you’re out there you’re probably thinking I must be dead. Well I’m not, and neither is the site, though it’s a long way from what I’d call “vibrant”.

The thing is, Seattlehound was meant to run in two phases. The second and most exciting phase hasn’t happened yet, and that’s when I move to Seattle and start using this site as my everyday blog about what’s going on in my life and around town. But the job hunt has not been going as well as expected, and I’m still in Nevada, so that phase of Seattlehound is still a ways out. If you have the patience, subscribe to my RSS and hold out for that day.

But the first phase of Seattlehound was supposed to be an experiment in long-distance placeblogging. I would try to write a vibrant and interesting blog about a city that’s far far away. And for a while it worked, I have 9 months of archives that show I was really in the groove for a while. But always Seattlehound was at the bottom of my list of priorities, and as time went on there were other things that were just more important. My kids, my work, my other websites. Seattlehound eventually became little more than a Twitter account and a languishing website. And that’s where we are today.

So I don’t think of Seattlehound as dead. Think of it as one of those frogs that can freeze solid and come back to life later. Seattlehound is just frozen, that’s all. Subscribe to the RSS, follow me on Twitter, and be patient. Things will warm up.

Here you can see the side-by-side comparison of the original with the remake.

My Ballard points to the city’s Surplus Warehouse, where they are selling used street signs from all over town. There is a PDF listing all the signs that are available, over 200 streets in all. Most of the signs sell for $5, for a “below average” condition sign, or you can shell out $10 for “average”.

So if you’ve ever wanted that street sign from the street where you grew up, or even where you live now, head over there and see if it’s on the list.

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.

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.

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.

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.