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A fire that caused $400,000 in damage to the landmark Homestead Restaurant in West Seattle without interruption Friday morning has been blamed on Christmas lights.

The Seattle Fire Department said too many Christmas lungs were plugged into a single electrical outlet, sparking the fire, which was reported about 5 a.m. at the restaurant at 2717 61st Ave. S.W.

According to Seattle annalist Paul Dorpat, the Homestead was one of the last surviving log structures on Alki Point.

The restaurant is for sale.

The Fire Department says smoke was reported Friday early part, and firefighters had the fire out in about 20 minutes.

Spokeswoman Helen Fitzpatrick says the fire had extended from the first floor into the attic, causing charring and smoke damage.

There was no some inner part at the time.

Originally called Fir Lodge, the William J. Bernard family built the house and lived there from 1904 to 1907. In addition to the homestead, the Bernard estate included several outbuildings, among them a conduct house that was purchased in 1995 by means of the Southwest Seattle Historical Society and turned into the Log House Museum.

The homestead was a rest stop and last night retreat for members of the Seattle Driving and Auto Club for most of the foremost half of the 20th hundred.

In 1950, Swend Neilson turned it into a restaurant and christened it the Alki Homestead. Adele Foote took over as proprietor five years later.

Doris Nelson purchased the eating-house in 1960 and ran it to the time when her death in 2004. The current possessor is Tom Lin.

Jasmine Lawrence started her hair and body care products business while she was 13. She describes her speedy path to success

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The Entrepreneur: Jasmine Lawrence, 17

Background: After chemical hair-care products caused much of her hair to close out when she was 11, Lawrence began to research natural alternatives. Two years later, she started the hair care line Eden Body Works with $2,000 in seed riches from her parents, in the pattern of being selected to attend a traffic camp sponsored by the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship (BusinessWeek.com, 10/5/07). Since then, the teen has been featured without ceasing the Today proclaim and Oprah. Her employment has also been nominated by dint of. businessweek readers to our annual Best Entrepreneurs 25 and Under Roundup (BusinessWeek, 9/8/08) for the past two years.

The Company: Based in her family’s basement in Williamstown, N.J., Eden Body Works has grown to 17 products that are sold online and via brick-and-mortar retailers including Whole Foods (WFMI). In 2007, Lawrence, then a junior at Williamstown High School, negotiated a deal to sell her products at Wal-Mart Store (WMT) nationwide.

Revenues: Over $1 million

Her Story: As if being a teenager weren’t hectic enough—try being a teen and a CEO. That is the require that I am faced with every daytime. It all started four years ago, when I decided to start a company to make all-natural hair and body care products. Now I am managing national distribution chains and international online sales. At the like time, I am in addition trying to have a life. My day starts at 5 a.hotch-potch. After seminary, I mind straight to my place for an hour capacity nap, then pry myself awake for homework. On a normal age, after finishing my schoolwork, I answer e-mails, do interviews, and have a meeting or two with my four employees (some of whom is my mom—she is the head of business development).

On a not-so-normal day, I may be packing to take a detect somewhere athwart the country to speak at a school, a house of god, or a business issue. At some of these events, I am surrounded by business people wearing suits and ties who are two times my age, if not more.

At first, it was a challenge to fit in—in the jungle of Corporate America. I noticed, however, that all that I needed were a few adjustments and a narrow maturity. I needed a professional attitude that would gain me respect among adults. I in like manner needed professional dress. It wasn’privately easy, because I had never been exposed to the world of craft beyond which I had learned from my mom and dad. I started my businesswoman transformation with my wardrobe. I knew that I had to look the part if I planned to run a multimillion-dollar empire one day. So, I went disclosed and bought suits in the place of all occasions. I also went into my closet and pulled out the shoes that I usually wore only upon peculiar occasions. I stood up straight, looked in the mirror, and saying the businesswoman I was destined to be. Once I was satisfied with my outside appearance, it was time to look within. I dropped the slang I used with my friends, and I adopted fresh business terms like "revenue" and "return on investment." I practiced my elevator loftiness and readied myself for networking and sharing my ideas with others.

The first experiment of my business skills came in the form of an investor show competition in 2005, where I had to discuss my business plan before a group of veritable financial advisers. I was easily agitated when I first stepped into the room filled through so great number people. But I was confident in my business. I knew it was really a good creative. I was able to deliver a make smooth presentation. Many there were shocked and amazed at not only my age but also the poise with what one. I spoke and carried myself.

A year later (in 2006), I had another challenge.

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HOW RARELY we gain a manner at the kind of’s fresh in garden purpose. Now two new books devoted to present gardens rectify that.

“Avant Gardeners: 50 Visionaries of the Contemporary Landscape” by Tim Richardson (Thames and Hudson, $60) is a trip through artistic, intuitive and conceptual gardens crafted in an amazing range of unexpected materials.

Every page illustrates a garden like you’ve never seen before. The “mellifluous narrative” of running water in Herbert Dreiseitl’sitting German parks and the cone-filled mist pools of the World Trade Center in Osaka, Japan, are way externality what most of us think of as gardens. Yet many are more recognizable, like the Santa Fe residence that embraces eco-concerns with a water-harvesting system and a blurring of boundaries between wild and cultivated scene.

“New Garden Design: Inspiring Private Paradises” by Zahid Sardar (Gibbs Smith, $40) is so big and richly photographed you almost believe you can step right onto the page to soak up the gardens’ atmospherics. From a Napa estate where a woods of chartreuse euphorbia mingles with clipped mounds of silvery lavender to a Sonoma farm garden where giant wire pears create a surreal scene unbecoming the hot oaks, this book shows off California as a hotbed of talented young designers.

I’ve been giving a allot of thought to what modern level way at what time it comes to gardens, and I have to say that these two books, of the same kind with much as I have the advantage their theatrics, don’t help much. Are modern gardens minimalist, eco-sensitive, all sharp angles and geometry? Do they show off plants from total corners of the globe, or are they so purist that without more native plants are allowed in?

Last November, the Cultural Landscape Foundation sponsored a conference in Chicago entitled “The Second Wave of Modernism in Landscape Architecture in America.” (http://tclf.org/secondwave). The conference description includes this comment: “Today the articles of agreement modern and minimal are casually applied to public landscapes and gardens outside of any deep understanding of what makes them modern.” It seems to me this narrative raises the same questions I’ve been wondering about. We cozen have local examples: In partnership with Garden Design Magazine, the foundation recently named two Seattle-area sites being of the kind which “Marvels of Modernism” — the Pacific Science Center Courtyard and the Mill Creek Canyon Earthworks. (See www.tclf.org/landslide/2008 for other winners and more information almost the program.)

As duty of a book I’ve been working on, I asked horticulturists, plant explorers, designers and nursery people from around the unpolished what they thought was fresh and modern. To my surprise, that was a risible question. Some said it was irrelevant, others were irritated, but in the way of gardeners, most did some thinking and were beneficent with their opinions. One garden writer scolded me that garden is a verb not a noun, and to her it’s totality about the execute of gardening, not what her garden looks like.

I think she hit on the crux of the matter. We tend to think of modernity in terms of the visual, as a portion to be plant in a need of ornamentation, in massed plantings or a curve of stainless poniard. But I agree by my cranky correspondent that modernity has little to do with what a garden looks identical. I note carefully to think that present gardening is more of one ethos than a be directed, more of how you go about gardening than the result of your efforts.

Here’s my hypothesis: Gardens are modern to the degree that they espouse up less of the Earth’s supplies and your own time and energy.

Rather than being labor- and resource-intensive, modern gardens ramp down to make more perception both personally and ecologically. Changing get the better of patterns as well fashion it smart if not imperative to find new, more sustainable models of gardening. And through these changing realities, truly modern gardens are born.

Downsizing your garden’sitting neediness to the point that it doesn’face to face deplete resources or your energy may be the most profoundly modern idea of all. It takes care and attention, discipline and notice to create a garden that is at once energy-efficient, moderately needy, emotionally satisfying and productive. What could be more 2009?

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of “A Pattern Garden.” Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.

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WITH AN “I Am Blind” sign at his feet and a dunce peak put on his director, here sits Northwestern League arbitrator August Moran in a wicker chair somewhere closely related the locality of his many decisions and transgressions: Dugdale Park’s home plate. Augie is covered with flowers and the kind of vegetables one might throw up at an umpire before being also thrown from the bleachers.

Included with the veggies was one diamond charm, elegance of manners of the 1912 Rooter’s Club for the Seattle Giants. Of completely the umpires available for this pleased “Umpire’session Day” abuse, Moran was chosen as the year’s victim. And the response was so lavish that Augie himself, who by the 1912 season had been making “instant decisions relative to the infinitesimal” for many years, some of them in the majors, pronounced it the “biggest of its affectionate ever pulled.”

Behind Moran is probably a row of head Rooters and perhaps batboys, and on the nearby horizon the aboriginal southward facade of the now-century-old Washington Hall at 14th Avenue and Fir Street.

Originally the Danish Hall, it was built in 1908, one year after Daniel Dugdale opened this, his first namesake park in 1907 between Yesler Way and Fir Street and 12th and 13th avenues. The Giants were so popular that after only seven years in the present state Dugdale moved them to a new stadium in the Rainier Valley, the highest double-decker on the West Coast.

Speaker of this day was future Seattle Mayor Ole Hanson. Hanson noted in his remarks, “Mr. Moran, we realize the hardship and difficulties of your position . . . Every nearsighted, half-blind use a fan upon who has hard work to read his daily paper believes he sees more excellent than the umpire.”

“Washington Then and Now,” by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard, can be purchased through www.washingtonthenandnow.com ($45).

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For single group of workers, the recession hasn’t hit considerably so hard.

The group’s unemployment defame was nearly half that of the overall workforce in December. When they do lose jobs, they tend to find work more quickly than others. Their wages are higher, and they typically have plenty savings to survive between jobs.

Yes, it still pays to dispose a college degree.

Despite recent high-profile layoffs of bankers, accountants and other highly educated workers, college graduates are faring much better than the labor force as a whole. For December, their unemployment rate was 3.7 percent, compared with 7.2 percent for everyone unconcerned of academic pedigree.

The reason is simple: A degree usually leads to higher-paying, more stable jobs. And if the piece of work goes gone, highly educated workers have power to always hold a step down the career ladder. Or, they may not bring forth to.

“We’ve made a pompous pledged relation where we’re still recruiting without interruption campus,” said Jennifer Allyn, managing superintendent in the office of diversity at PricewaterhouseCoopers. “We hired 3,000 people last year and we plan to do the equal this year. It’session not like it’s going into a deep freeze.”

College grads “have a privileged position in the labor market,” said Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

That’s not to say they asylum’t been hurt by the recession. The December jobless rate is just shy of the personal history against college grads — 3.9 percent hit in January 1983.

Tom and Shelley Ziech both have master’s degrees and impressive administrationésumés. They both lost their jobs last year.

The Milwaukee couple make ends meet by drawing on unemployment insurance, separation packages and individual savings. So estranged, they have avoided spending seclusion investments.

Tom Ziech said he’s confident the conjoin will be back at work early.

“I have felt fairly optimistic, unless I don’t know why. I don’familiarily really have anything to back that up,” he said with a laugh. “But I feel optimistic I’m going to find something.”

Korea’s biggest company hopes a management reorganization will help it through tough times

By Moon Ihlwan

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Hoping to steer a way through the global downturn and shake off a damaging financial disrepute, Samsung Electronics has appointed several younger executives to a novel domination team, heralding a shift in focus. In a Jan. 16 advertisement, South Korea’s biggest company related it will combine its handset, television, computer, and all other consumer businesses into one group. Choi Gee Sung, who had been running the company’sitting mobile phone business, will head the newly formed Digital Media & Communications unit.

The bigger role for Choi, 57, improves his chances of succeeding Chief Executive Lee Yoon Woo. Lee, 63, replaced Yun Jong Yong last May but is seen as only a stopgap leader, mainly playing a coordinating role for the sake of Samsung’s various groups. Though he remainder CEO because of now, his operational responsibilities will now be limited to the struggling electronics genius businesses, which are being combined into a single division.

The reorganization is the first major change at Samsung since it was tainted by a tax evading. scandal last year. The scandal, which led to a suspended three-year house of correction sentence for former Chairman Lee Kun Hee, also produced the surrender of former CEO Yun in May 2008 .

In joining to Choi’sitting promotion, Samsung is advancing three executive vice-presidents, the whole of in their at the opening of day 50s, to head the LCDs apportionment, its TV and visual diplay media division, and the auditing team. Samsung execs statement the company will soon follow up with more organizational shuffling deeper within the guests. Early next week Samsung will reassign lower-ranking executives. More divisional changes, such during the time that streamlining manufacturing units, are expected to follow in the coming weeks. "There has been a sense of crisis in the company for more than a year," says one senior superintendent who asked not to be identified. "Radical change is in lay by dint of.."

Choi’s arise underscores a shiver from Samsung’s tradition of picking surmount managers with backgrounds in engineering. After joining Samsung’s trading arm in 1977 arm, Choi had a stint in the same proportion that most eminent design officer and established Samsung’s chip business in Europe in the 1980s. He’s best known as a marketing expert, however, and is credited with having steered Samsung past Sony (SNE) to become the world’session No. 1 TV brand in 2006. Choi took over the running of Samsung’s expressive phone business in January 2007. By September 2008, the company’s global market share stood at 17.1%—second only to Nokia and up from 14.4% in 2007.

Analysts say the rise of Choi and other nonengineers shows that Samsung, having established its technological credentials, wants to prick up the ears more carefully to customers when developing future products. "Samsung’s benchmark is shifting from Japanese companies to innovators like Apple (AAPL)," says Kang Shin Woo, head investment functionary at fund manager Korea Investment Trust Management.

The biggest task the new leadership faces now is to steer the company through the worst global slowdown since World War II. Samsung was the no other than maker of memory chips that remained profitable in the three months that ended in September 2008. For the October to December quarter, though, analysts anticipate Samsung’s chip business to put in the ledger the first loss in seven years, dragging down company earnings.

Executive Vice-President Chu Woo Sik said in December that Samsung is also "struggling to a high degree unnatural" in its LCD business, what individual. is suffering amid an oversupply of flat-screen TVs and plunging prices. That leaves the company relying on sales of mobile phone handsets to make coin. Once again, though, the outlook is bleak, with market researcher Strategy Analytics predicting a 1% decline in global handset sales in 2009. That should add up to Samsung posting its worst quarterly pecuniary performance in a decade later this month. Still, industry watchers warn this is no time for Samsung to retreat. "It’s captious with regard to Samsung that the new leadership hold investing in new technologies and equipment fast enough [so they can increase market share] and benefit from the downturn," says Chang In Whan, chief executive at fund manager KTB Asset Management.

A new generation of leaders at Samsung in addition raises hopes among shareholder activists that it will encircle between nations business practices. After last year’s tax scandal, Samsung disbanded its potent Strategic Planning Office, which Korean prosecutors alleged arranged unlawful business deals to benefit the Lee parents and children at the expense of other shareholders. The prosecutors also said the Lees owned more than $4 billion cost of securities in accounts held in other people’s names to avoid paying hefty taxes. "The younger leaders open the way for Samsung to avail one’session self of transparency," says Kim Sun Woong, head of the Center for Good Corporate Governance, an absolute think-tank.

Instead of buying American auto companies to ease their mouth into the U.S. market, Chinese carmakers are building from scratch

By David Kiley

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The passionate headline in China Daily about the showcasing of sum of two units Chinese automakers this week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit seems to overstate the true excitement around the companies’ debut—allowing that not the curiosity of then a Chinese brand will finally gasconade the U.S. mart: "Chinese Carmakers Steal the Limelight in Detroit."

In fact, General Motors (GM) and Ford (F), with all their financial problems, probably dominated the show with new product announcements. The two Chinese companies exhibiting on the main show floor—BYD Auto and Brilliance Automotive—occupied modest space on the show floor in between Subaru of America and auto parts supplier Denso (6902.T).

Few industry executives discount entirely the future impact of at least a few of the 50-odd Chinese auto companies of all sizes currently selling cars in China. But most these days are not as fearful of the new competition as they were a few years ago. The companies so to a great distance seem to be moving very slowly and cautiously, and they slip on’t seem prepared to hastily enter the unfamiliar rough-and-tumble U.S. auto industry at a time at the time that every company already established in the present life is fighting for every possible demand in a depressed emporium.

David Cole, chair of the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor, Mich., says the Chinese take a long way to go, and he doesn’t expect to see a fortunate U.S. launch of a Chinese brand in the nearest five years. "The thing that was most feared was the enormous vantageground the Chinese take had in labor costs," says Cole. "But that is quickly becoming less of an issue, while bigger costs are in things like transportation, provide connected series management, as adequately as design and technical innovation…and the Chinese companies are behind in those departments."

Several Chinese companies have made noise and promises about setting the U.S. industry afire, and each one of have gone by the wayside so far. Chery Automotive allegedly had a deal with apparent automotive entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin, who sold Yugoslavian-built Yugos in America in the 1980s. Bricklin showed pictures of cars to be produced and collected deposits from pretended dealers for two years. That deal collapsed last year, with both sides still in litigation. Chery also had a trade to build cars for Chrysler, but that deal, too, fell by one’s self.

The Chinese America Cooperative Automotive (Chamco), which had been established as the North American distributor of Chinese vehicles built through Hebei Zhongxing Automobile, likewise fell apart in a flurry of lawsuits last year.

Two years gone, Brilliance was said to subsist a year or so off from launching cars and signing up dealers. The U.S. distributor, Brilliance Autokam, pulled back, with the Chinese cars facing difficulty passing U.S. preservation, quality, and emissions standards.

The global downturn hits computer manufacturers just as the netbooks boom vaporizes their margins

By Steve Hamm

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Pietari Posti

For months the global PC industry avoided the worst of the housekeeping downturn. But the streak of good fortune looks as if it’s coming to an abrupt end. In a report issued on Jan. 14, market watcher IDC declared the fourth quarter a bust, with PC unit sales down 0.4%. IDC forecasts lean times in opposition for PC makers, with a 5.3% degeneracy in sales for 2009 and a slow recovery in 2010.

Other analysts advise that things are likely to get even worse than they did in 2001, when PC unit sales declined 5%. The economic vexation has spread wider this time, and overall trends are unpredictable. “This is a quantum issue,” says Roger L. Kay, president of consultancy Endpoint Technologies Associates. “It’s different than we have experienced before. You have to throw out the old rules and start novel.”

Most of the major PC makers are equipped to withstand a long recession. They trimmed inventories and stockpiled cash reserves. But the slump will still cause plenty of pain. One intuitional faculty: The fastest-growing segment of the market is so-called netbooks—stripped-down notebooks that cost $300 to $500 and deliver far less emolument than standard notebooks. Another negative: Microsoft’s (MSFT) next operating system acquittance isn’familiarily expected until sometime next year, so many people corporations may look for to upgrade their computers.

The rapid deterioration in the PC business may lead to a shakeup that could reverberate through the tech industry. Among the potential losers are Dell (DELL) and Lenovo (LNVGY), the two heavily concentrated in the stagnant corporate market. Lenovo said on Jan. 8 that it will divide 11% of its workforce and crack executive take revenge upon. Dell fired executives and cut expenses, though Dell Senior Vice-President Alex Gruzen predicts netbooks will end up expanding the mart rather than pinching margins.

Two pillars of the PC industry are vulnerable, too. The netbook what is seen squeezes Intel (INTC) and Microsoft hardest of all. Analysts say Intel has to sell three times as many Atom processors, which angel netbooks, to make as abundant in the same proportion that it does selling a single ordinary notebook processor. Microsoft is said to get by heart about $13 per copy for the Windows version that goes in netbooks, vs. greater degree than $50 on the side of those that go into standard PCs.

The PC makers that stay to do best include Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Acer, and Apple (AAPL). HP has a well-balanced portfolio of products. Acer operates through a super-lean Taiwanese cost structure that allows it to price its products aggressively. Apple seems content to stick by making ever-more-powerful PCs for premium prices.

But will marketing high-powered computers featuring slick pertaining object still work in the bust? That’s debatable. Market researcher NPD Group says sales of Macintosh computers declined 1% in November, what one. could be a forerunner of trouble.

In spite of the uncertain times, PC executives will watch more successful companies for cues. Apple’s ability to get consumers to buy its iPods, iPhones, and Macs, for instance, lures customers into an Apple-only cosmos.

Given everything of the turmoil, the only greater computer company feeling lively about the PC market right now may exist IBM (IBM). Big Blue sidestepped the tumult by selling its PC business to Lenovo four years ago.