Hosted by the Mukai Farm & Garden, the Mukai Haiku Festival 2024 received over a hundred haiku from 12 countries around the world. We are delighted to present the prize winners and their haiku, below. Category, Heritage First place:On Vashon Islandwhere our ancestors made home—the strawberries’ scent!~ Geoffrey Philp (Jamaica) Second place:Spring at Mukai FarmCherry…
Entertainment, May 2024
The Observant Frog’s Log
By Alex Soriano The Observant Frog’s Log – by Alex Soriano
Entertainment, Llaughing Llamas, May 2024
Llaughing Llamas Chronicles – May
By Daniel Hooker From Steven at the Vashon Library: By mistake, I swallowed some disappearing ink and had to go to the hospital. I had to wait to be seen. ~ Q: Why do cows have bells? A: Because their horns don’t work. ~ From Thalia at Granny’s Attic: Q: Where do they milk camels…
April 2024, Editorial Page
Coyote Control Faces New Challenge
The American Dream has always been imbued with some wildness. Not surprisingly, people can have widely differing opinions and definitions of its benefits and boundaries. Amidst reports of increasing coyote activity, Vashon social media groups have recently hosted lively debates that hint at a deepening divide between those who advocate for coyotes as a protection-worthy…
April 2024, Island Resilience
The AI Bubble and its Needles
By Marc J. Elzenbeck Hot as the Dot-Com bubble may have been, the AI bubble is blazing. There are strong connections between now and then. At its height in 1999, a smallish company named Sun Microsystems made computers key to powering the graphical internet, and its stock was bid to a staggering 10x price to…
Announcements, April 2024
Honorary Deputy Sets Out to Slow Speeders
Due to staffing shortages in unincorporated areas, the King County Sheriff’s Office has updated its General Orders Manual to certify residents for recording and reporting speeders. A volunteer is pictured on Cemetery Road deploying a county-issued radar gun and camera recorder. According to the Deputy, “One little red Honda is going to get a very…
April 2024, Letters to the Editor
Letter to the Editor
Dear Editorial Team, The headline of your March 7 editorial is a good description of its reasoning – “Feckless.” You argue that public funds now “serve irregular immigration, people with addictions and/or mental illness,” unlike 20 years ago when “the concern was for members of our community with modest means – they held down jobs,…
April 2024, Health Matters
Myocarditis By the Numbers – Part 2
By Caitlin Rothermel Last month’s article looked at the increase in myocarditis in the United States since the COVID-19 pandemic. Among young men in particular, vaccine-induced myocarditis seems to have at least doubled. This month, I looked at some new research that used national vaccine databases to study patients who developed myocarditis after COVID-19 vaccination. A…
April 2024, Island Voices
Solar Eclipse – April 8, 2024
By Melanie Farmer Eclipses are pure astronomical phenomena; those who experience its shadow share this with the world. The events, live-streamed globally, have no political attachment, no violent content, no war., no race, no gender … nothing. The eclipse is separate from all expectation or meaning, from new-age interpretation, from history. Here’s our chance to…
April 2024, Island Voices
The Power of the Pen
By Deborah H. Anderson The original draft of this was written in hunter green. I used to write words that came from my interior place, personal experience words, in mahogany. It’s a shade that looks deep red, like blood poured on the page. Life has gotten a little lighter, and those feeling words are like…