If you have Real Audio click the link to hear the Seattle Police Live

Seattle Police live scanner

-- Rainman (rainman@uh-oh.com), November 30, 1999

Answers

Oh, too cool Rainman!

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), November 30, 1999.

Yikes..annonymous man threatening to go shoot protesters....Heaven help us all.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), November 30, 1999.

Man thats awesome. Wonder how long before its banned.

-- a (a@a.a), November 30, 1999.

It's a new incident every 2 minutes! It's hard to believe. I try to read up on possibilites to prepare my niaive mind for the way stuff like this goes down, but if this scanner was reporting these events in MY neighborhood then I would be under my bed wetting myself.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), November 30, 1999.

Still crowds running, "1/2 wearing masks." Scanner has long periods of silence for us (maybe Mac related) but what does come through -- whoa!

And friends this is with no hunger, electricity up, water flowing, phones & TV functioning fine -- everything working perfectly.

Ain't nobody gonna convince us that January is gonna be peachy keen, no way Jose.

Hudlums, mayhem, chaos, citizens calling in about guys with baseball bats doing vandalism ...

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), November 30, 1999.

Just cannot believe how busy the police are in Seattle! Did the WTO spark insanity or is it like this normally? They are spread thin.

The site only covers a few cities ... too bad, would like to listen to the police scanner in the city nearest us ...

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), November 30, 1999.

I have a cable modem. Only natural pauses on the scanner, maybe 15 sec max. Any visual on whether guards are there?

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 01, 1999.

4:00am here in AZ. Haunted by the scanner link. Listening to the blue boys, playing cool but nerves showing all the same- outnumbered, in the dark, surrounded by who-knows who, the Glock on the next block, the fires, the looting, the tragic mistake waiting in the alley: I think I'm listening to an abysmal little hair-of-the-dog-which-will- shortly-be-biting-you training manual for y2k.

The noble cause went home early. Packed up its conscience and its bright wings and left the streets to the raw appetites on two legs. The blue boys and girls are alone there, with the Big Id let out to play. Would you like to be there too? You'd have some bright lights and some firepower and your job and your friends: but the subconscious elements whooping it up all around you have something you haven't got. They've got freedom from that foolish veneer, that tiresome inconvenient restraint of basic sanity.

How hopeful, how beautiful the concept: human beings gathering together bodily to protest the subversion and wholesale enslavement of the human race by the multinational corporate Thing. By all means, let us collectively Just Say No as we boldly we make Thing an offer it cannot refuse. Yes, of course, we must overthrow entire interlocking stranglehold- the hanky-panky gangsters in power on this planet. But as T.S.Eliot said: "Between the Idea and the Reality falls the Shadow.

Tonight, transfixed by a scanner, something changed. The fear skulking around with me, that bogeyman who has been carrying my bugout bag and whispering sour nothings in my ear over the last year...is gone now. It disappeared into the sound of the blue boys hiding their own fear for the sake of...holding safe common ground. Do you have to be on a side to hear what is in their voices? Someday, or tomorrow, they might be shooting at me. They have bosses, who have bosses, and well, it gets awfully ugly. Still, I feel love and pity these voices in the dark, tonight. Tomorrow....will they still be human?

I'm not afraid anymore. But I'm sadder than I ever knew I could be. Because I heard- didn't I?- a minute preview of the pent-up let-loose now's-our-chance warcry devil-dance of the repressed contents of the human race. And look how easily it fastened itself to a reasonable active hope, right there in the broad daylight of civilization. You don't need a particularly flexible imagination to contemplate the sheer magnitude of wretchedness ahead, if human darkness gets loose in any kind of bigger and better, comprehensive dark.

Many people have understood this in their own way, but I'll leave you with my own heartfelt version: the supreme, the penultimate y2k preparation is...us. Are we really ready for Big Dark, if Big Dark comes stalking, walking wild, and talking crazy?

Find out what we're made of, maybe: be willing to live and maybe even to die for what is better than our pelts, toys, appetites, fears, ideologies. We will decide what this is, and we will call it by a name, but it will still be just us. Our real names, so to speak: the ones that we can ever tell, but never cease demonstrating all the same.

Merak

-- merak (merak@kachina.net), December 01, 1999.

Yes, the humanimals were unleashed. Our biggest Y2K fear. What we've been saying all along and shuddered at listening to the police scanner. Very eloquently put, Merak. We're still afraid.

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), December 01, 1999.

nothing like listening to it live

-- flash forward (Y2K@Dec 1.1999), December 01, 1999.