The Broadway Farmer's Market will help you dress up your pumpkin this Sunday. Kid-friendly and provided freely are a few pumpkins and a crafty space with sparkly supplies galore. Is there a drag pumpkin in your future? From the market newsletter:

Grab a pumpkin and go to town with all manner of ghoulish deco and artistic accoutrement; paints, glitter, glue, pipe cleaners, googley-eyes, yarn, leaves, corn silk, etc. The decorating choices are endless and the results are always original. Decoration materials are provided by the farmers market, and some pumpkins will be provided by local farmers (shoppers are also welcome to purchase a pumpkin of their choice from market farmers).

Also in season: Kiwis!  I always forget this fruit can be grown locally; they just seem way too exotic for our temperate climate. (Like puffins. I am not making this up. Puffins are local, I swear. I saw one once.) 

Besides pumpkins and kiwis, other in-season goods include squash, carrots, lettuce, onions, pears.

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As part of my protest to only support meaningful environmentalism at the expense of feel-good environmentalism, I have found that you can grab an extra couple of bags from Trader Joes and "re-use" them at Madison Market. Madison Market has decent produce - TJ's does not.

Also: commenters advise you to keep your eyes out for the extra bags they provide for reuse at the front.

Also, has any post ever received a net "-1" score before?

Every time I go to Madison Market, I check out with a bad taste in my mouth. The checker is there, watching me to see if I take a bag so they can punish me with a surcharge. It's annoying. It doesn't make me bring my own bag - it just makes me annoyed with Madison Market and the holier-than-thou crowd. 

This is from a guy who drives a car that gets 35+ miles to the gallon. I bring bags to the store - when I haven't used them all for garbage bags. I am seriously concerned about global warming. But I am thoroughly annoyed by grocery bag fees.

I will be protesting the Block Party Crashers in spirit this weekend. This tax is a bad idea. It won't impact the amount of garbage Seattle hauls in any significant way (i.e. changing weight or volume by more than 1%), and it gives people who are on the fence about environmentalism a really bad feeling about it - by giving them an annoying reminder of the "nanny state" every time they check out. 

Ways we could *actually* make the city greener:

• tax gasoline<...

No, it's not a new neighborhood "shop local" initiative. The Drug Market Initiative is a pilot program aimed at reducing chronic street-level drug dealing that was rolled out by the East Precinct last week at a joint meeting with the African American Advisory Council at the Langston Hughes Cultural Center.  After an 1,800 household survey and multiple public comment meetings, the East Precinct is going forward with what they're calling an innovative new approach to eliminating drug activity in our neighborhoods.

The concept comes pre-tested since the SPD borrowed the idea from a similar program in High Point, Carolina. The idea: infiltrate neighborhood drug markets (as identified by neighborhood calls and complaints), gather information, call in low-risk dealers and give them a chance to turn their life around (and prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law if they don't), prosecute high-risk dealers on a number of counts in a coordinated effort between all...

With fifteen vendors and the nice, cool basement venue of All Pilgrim's Church, the Steampunk Swapmeet was a lovely way to spend a hot summer afternoon.  The goods were what you'd expect from a Sci-Fi Victoriana craft market - corsets, parasols, jewelry and accouterments with extra gears attached, and lots and lots of goggles.  Prices ran from a few dollars for brightly colored old computer parts (score!) to several hundred for scratchbuilt model steampunk guns (so pretty...).

After I got my fill browsing the appropriately anachronistic merchandise, I sat down to talk with Diana Vick, the Swapmeet's founder.

How did you come up with the idea of having a Steampunk Swapmeet?
A bunch of us were at Steamvents at the Wayward Cafe on a Monday night and someone said they had a bunch of stuff they weren't going to use. So, why don't we have a swap?  The problem is that it's hard to find someone that's an exact size match, so why don't we have a sale instead? And nothing came of it until I decided to do...

Her shirt says: "We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic as we are about who grows our food." ~Michael Pollan.