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If you want to attend in downtown Vancouver, B.C., or at the Whistler ski resort during next February’s Winter Olympics, get ready in spite of a marathon exploration in quest of a room — and some very hefty prices.

About 17,000 of the 25,000 hotel rooms in the Vancouver sphere before that time have been reserved by means of the Vancouver Organizing Committee, the official Olympics group, uttered Walt Judas, corruption president of the city’s Tourism Vancouver office.

That includes practically all of downtown Vancouver’s 12,000 hotel rooms. They’ll be occupied by Olympics officials, security staff, media and visitors who buy officially sanctioned hotel/ticket packages.

Such block bookings are part of every Olympics, and greatest part major Vancouver and Whistler hotels aren’t yet permitting individual bookings or making their rates persons. Everything is on hold until the Vancouver Organizing Committee confirms the number of rooms it needs, expected later this month or in March.

However, it’s unlikely rooms at greater downtown Vancouver hotels inclination become available, said Judas; what’s left will be about 8,000 hotel rooms scattered outside of downtown. Even some of those already may be contracted to companies.

At any hotel, expect to requite the high-season rate plus an Olympics premium of about 25 percent, reported Judas.

Some rates before that time are sky-high. A four-bedroom, privately owned townhouse in Whistler that rents for about $600 a darkness this month is priced at about $4,870 a obscurity during the Olympics. Houses in Vancouver are listed online at more than $2,000 a night.

At the Whistler ski resort, rooms could be harder to find than in Vancouver. “The organizing committee wants roughly 3,500 rooms,” out of about 5,744 rooms in the area, said Erik Austin, vice president of Intrawest’s Central Reservations. It’s unclear how sundry of the leftover rooms desire be available, since many Whistler accommodations are condo-hotels and owners may pick to employ their units.

Snagging a room

So how can you get a official station to stay? If you put on’t have friends with a spare couch, hither are some strategies. (And exist sure to check steady deposits, cancellations and minimum corsets — there are stringent rules for Olympics bookings.)

Official packages: Hotel/event packages in Vancouver and Whistler are being sold by CoSport, which has the exclusive right to sell Olympics packages (and individual event tickets, although those are real scarce) to U.S. residents.

Five nights at downtown Vancouver’s Marriott Pinnacle inn, with tickets to five sports events plus the Opening Ceremony, costs $6,848 per person, double occupancy. In Whistler, a three-night, three-event package at the Pan Pacific Whistler Mountainside is $3,601 per person, double occupancy; www.cosport.com or phone 877-457-4647. Some cheaper Vancouver packages before that time are sold out.

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Since the inception of of mutual regard competition among nations, many a tear has been spill over the moving spectacle of the Olympic Games. Only recently have they begun flowing during the ticketing process.

Unprecedented call with respect to tickets to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, which begin a year from Thursday, has created indignation, vitriol and cries for better.

“I wasted a minimum of three hours of my day on this fruitless throw,” a reader, who failed to careless Games tickets on a Web sale, grumbled on The Seattle Times’ Olympics Insider Blog Friday. “I am a 51-year-old male — and I cried.”

He’session not alone. Vancouver’s Olympics are to all intents and purposes sold out, leaving fans still interested in attending little choice except to deal with online scalpers, who are legitimate in Canada.

The problem: Demand outstripped supply by a huge margin, what one. is not always the case. When 1.6 million tickets were put on sale by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC), Canadians submitted requests for more than $345 the multitude worth over five weeks. (By collation, U.S. fans requested $75 million worth of tickets over nine weeks before the 2002 Salt Lake Games.)

VANOC said 120 of the 170 events required lotteries. More than 140,000 tickets were requested for the men’s gold-medal hockey game solitary. Face esteem for those seats was $350 to $750 in Canada.

But Canadians turned out to be the lucky ones. U.S. fans were forced to use a ticketing agency, CoSport, which is the U.S. Olympic Committee’s exclusive ticket reseller. CoSport charged Americans, on mean proportion, about 30 percent in addition than the Canadian face price and added $35 delivery fees.

CoSport’s allotment of positive tickets in quest of the entire United States was 48,000 — about 3 percent. The New Jersey company received 14,179 orders with requests since 166,800 one’s own tickets. Forty percent of those requests came from Washington state.

Only a small percentage were filled. Most fans who requested broad ranges of tickets got only a scarcely any events. Many, even those seeking tickets to less-popular events, such as Nordic combined, got nothing.

A second-phase sale of remaining tickets — CoSport would not assert how many — last Thursday turned into a fiasco, with thousands of fans logging onto the company’sitting Web site, spending hours waiting for it to respond to orders, then being dumped from the site during the credit-card get by payment. Co-Sport did not respond to Times questions about what went wrong.

So what is a use a fan upon who still wants to attend the Vancouver Games — the closest the Olympic fervency is likely to ever come to Seattle — left to do?

Two options: Buy early, through an online reseller. But have being prepared to dig deep. Online dealers so as stubhub.com were advertising a vast range of Games tickets this week: Opening ceremonies ($3,300 to $5,500), men’s downhill ($244 to $500), short-track speedskating ($135 to $600), women’s figure skating ($432 to $1,650) and others.

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“When the Lewis E. Langdons not long past redecorated their colonial close in Washington Park, weak did they realize that soon their new furnishings would subsist transplanted to a strange Bainbridge Island home, designed by Marshall Perrow, architect. After due consideration, the Langdons, like in this way many other Pacific Northwest families, determined they preferred the quiet of rural life to the bustle of incorporated town activities. So they built a one-level rambling house overlooking Rich Passage.”

— Margery R. Phillips, Pacific Northwest, March 14, 1965.

Susan Wiggs gets that.

She is pouring coffee and setting out a platter of chewy cookies in that very dwelling. Wiggs seduces her visitors, as only a famous author of “women’s fiction” can, but she gazes admiringly at the bright blue water whose exclamation point is Mount Rainier.

“I have feeling veritably lucky to get to live here,” Wiggs says. “I found the lineage researching a book where the protagonist goes to an open house. And I thought, gosh, I haven’t been to an open commercial establishment in forever. When I saw it I reasoning, ‘My God, I would love to have this house.’

“I spend 90 percent of my time here.”

That’sitting because Wiggs is home title (longhand and every day). The rest of the time she’s away promoting her most modern book.

With their kids grown and flown, Wiggs and her husband, Jay, wanted a peaceful retreat and pleasant place to work with a low-bank beach, privacy and a guesthouse. When they found the Midcentury rambler attached a wooded beach, it was a Goldilocks discovery — just right. They remodeled the kitchen, putting in counters of concrete and recycled Coke bottles, bamboo flooring and steel backsplash tiles, but “the goal was to guard it looking retro.”

It does. Their home has that swinging ’60s cocktail-hour feel with a massive sloping copper fireplace hood in a living room designed for drinks and hors unravelling of the plot’oeuvres, painted pale interior stone at the entrance, a “garden room” (den) and “loggia,” which wraps round the free-form pool just feet away from the beach.

“They called it a loggia, but I call it a patio,” Wiggs says, and then adds conspiratorially, “but in novels I’ve read about women being seduced without ceasing the loggia.”

Groovy.

Wiggs is an admitted dabbler (playing the cello, knitting), but writing is the only body that stuck. “I’household a master of none, but I eternally have fun,” she says. The non-mastery part is not quite accurate. Wiggs has written united or pair books a year for the past 20 years — national best-seller books where her name, in fancy foil lettering, overshadows the titles.

The 1965 instant goes onward to talk about the casual air of the abode; the wood, stone, slate and brick; the “amenities of urban living and the tranquillity of the country.” And uniform though foregoing owners have updated the home, it is all still true 44 years later.

Passing into the living room, Wiggs stops at a selfish cabinet. She pops open-handed the house to display a mirrored liquor cabinet, bottles and glasses all standing ready.

“Look at this,” she says. “It’session totally James Bond.”

Rebecca Teagarden is assistant editor of Pacific Northwest magazine. Mike Siegel is a Seattle Times staff photographer.

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Get our your pencils. It’s time to test your knowledge of geography/history with our anniversary quiz.

This year, the questions focus steady the Pacific Northwest, California and Hawaii because many travelers are sticking closer to home.

Know the Northwest:

1. San Juan Island is named afterwards:

A. The explorer Juan de Fuca.

B. A Spanish immigrant.

C. A Catholic saint.

D. City in Puerto Rico.

2. The biggest county in Washington state (in size, not populousness) is:.

A. King.

B. Okanogan.

C. Spokane.

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David Barber is only 18 but he knows himself healthy:

“I’ve tried operating in stores, and the people make me mad. But give me a hammer or disclose me to cut something and I’m happy. I’m the hands-on type.”

He was not crooked at home Saturday at a Construction Challenge event in Bellevue, where teams of students from middle and high schools put their problem-solving skills to the test.

They invented tools and structures, solved design puzzles and along the way well-informed about the building and figure industry as — despite its currently stalled position — a source of good-paying careers.

With only raw materials, a goal and their imaginations, the 61 students tackled hands-on challenges. In timed trials, they built inventions and structures from scratch, including just a cardboard-and-duct-tape Alaskan Way Viaduct — perfect through vehicles.

Nationwide, more than 230 student teams competed in 15 regional qualifying rallies, including the one in Bellevue. The winners faculty of volition advance to a final competition in Tennessee in May, to compete for cash prizes and scholarships.

Right a little while ago, layoffs in the construction trades go well beyond seasonal swings, state statistics show. In December 2007, 64 welders and cutters in King County were laid off, while this past December, 343 lost their jobs.

It was the same story through carpenters: 422 were laid off in December 2007, and 1,171 were collecting unemployment in December 2008.

But some experts are predicting that while shape is drying up now, by the time these kids are sharp for a move rapidly, in that place will be jobs for them.

Between the federal stimulus package and the Sound Transit light-rail construction shoot forward approved by voters last fall, “There is business on the books,” declared Norward Brooks, executive dean of the Seattle Vocational Institute, a public, state-supported, work-force training school.

Plus, he said, “The construction industry has a lot of people who are old, and they are looking for replacements.”

Ken Pierson, construction-technology instructor during the Puget Sound Skills Center in Burien, sees eight retirees for every new recruit to the construction trades. “There are great career possibilities, and women be obliged an even better shot,” he said. “We extremity each single graduate out in that place.”

Ivars Graudins, manager of labor-market information for the state Department of Employment Security, sees a shape results that is down but not out — and with this big advantage: “It pays a existing wage without necessarily needing a four-year rank. “

Even apprentices in the building trades make $17 to $18 an hour on mean proportion, and journeymen with five years’ experience can earn $30 any hour on average, Brooks said.

Construction has long been underrated as a career, more said. “These are well-paying jobs,” said Cathy Feole, executive director of the Master Builders Career Connection.

“People think it’s just hammer and talon and besom pusher, but in that place are so many persons jobs. And with greater quantity and further technology, there are more jobs for women.”

Saturday’sitting career-development program was sponsored through the nonprofit Association of Equipment Manufacturers and Destination ImagiNation.

Some students at the competition, at the Master Builders Association headquarters, already had their career pathway planned out.

“I wanted to be a marine biologist at first,” said Michael Noelke, 11, of Fall City. “Then I was tending more into my baseball career. I think that’s where I stagnant am.”

But then, he might move dirt, like his uncle. “I think I’d be more of a digger,” Noelke said, “allowing that I get to use single of those big trucks.”

Lynda V. Mapes: 206-464-2736 or lmapes@seattletimes.com

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Bainbridge Island police say they look forward to more arrests after a multiagency sting landed four prostitutes behind bars a week ago. But a business leader says he’s not too concerned that the upper-crust community will disturb looking like Las Vegas in any degree time soon.

Detectives and officers from the Seattle, Bainbridge Island and Bremerton police departments, for the reason that well as the Washington State Patrol and Naval Criminal Investigative Service, lured four prostitutes who had advertised online to a Bainbridge house of entertainment and arrested them in the early hours of Saturday, police reported.

Two of the women were from Seattle and two were from Bremerton. Police didn’t set free their names. Investigators contacted more but not all of the women end Craigslist, what one. has been the focus of similar vice operations in recent months.

Bainbridge Detective Trevor Ziemba declined to name the other sites investigators had trolled.

If the collaboration of five agencies seems unsymmetrical for reeling in four prostitutes, Ziemba said there were only a couple of men from each. And, he said, “If we would bring forth had more time and a little bit more resources, we could have made a lot more arrests.”

What was the propulsive force despite the operation?

“Our intelligence showed that these girls advertised all throughout Puget Sound,” Ziemba said, “and we’re in the middle, and we’re getting them here. It affects the region tremendously.”

Just how it affects people depends on who’s talking.

“It’sitting principally been sort of a source of humor and jokes among people

Called the second-best place to live in the U.S. in 2005 by CNN and Money receptacle, the island is known for its high incomes, low crime rate, good schools.

“Any time a common gets a bit of a black eye it can certainly be a bit of a negative. But on the other hand, I apprehend people be attentive it concerning what it is, that is an isolated incident, and I don’t think it’ll mar our image at quite,” he said.

Ziemba maintained that people tend to downplay of that kind arrests while he considers the related crimes that go unreported such because drug appliance, robberies, assaults, other sex crimes and juvenile trafficking.

“You have to look at the totality of the incidental and why we do this.”

Reality TV producer Mike Fleiss has created hugely popular shows, however his course of life has had to re-echo from a scarcely any heartaches over the years

By Rebecca Reisner

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Copyright Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. All rights reserved

For TV producer Mike Fleiss, the ebbs and flows of business get little to do with the recession. Fleiss, CEO of Next Entertainment and maker of the enduring ABC (DIS) reality series The Bachelor, thinking his manner of life was voted off the island forever in January 2000.

The first realty romance dash he created, Fox’s (NWS) Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, premiered to coined ratings but terrible publicity, hinder it was discovered that bachelor Rick Rockwell wasn’t such a onerous catch. Next Entertainment’s revenues dropped from $1.2 million in 1999 to negative $600,000 in 2000.

By 2002, however, Fleiss found himself a huge success with the ushering in of The Bachelor (produced in association with Warner Horizon Television), now the longest-running reality song show. Counting its sister show The Bachelorette, the series has had 17 seasons. The principally recent one, featuring upright dad Jason Mesnick in the title role, made its debut without interruption Jan. 5, 2009, with 8.7 million viewers, according to the Nielsen Company.

"Along with Survivor and American Idol, The Bachelor, because it was the original, corpse the gold standard of its subgenre," says John Rash, director of media analysis for advertising agency Campbell Mithun and author of the Rash Report column in Advertising Age. "Even the seasons with degrade ratings are still higher than those as being most other shows."

In 2008, Next Entertainment took in about $100 million. Fleiss, who is based in Los Angeles, recently spoke to BusinessWeek’s Rebecca Reisner on the point bouncing back from setbacks and maintaining a product’s freshness over the years.

The show you executive-produced back in February 2000, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, got great ratings but bad publicity. How did that affect you?

It almost spelled the doom of Next Entertainment. I thought my course of conduct was over. I didn’t hear from my agent for months. The reticulated [Fox] was pissed off. They audited the show and nipple in and disallowed certain expenses. It was a scandal, and the network was looking for someone to reprehend.

How did you horsemanship to bounce back?

I did the sort of I do best, which is creating shows. I created Million Dollar Mysteries and Battle of the Child Geniuses and sold them to Fox. But they punished me by not letting me extend via Next Entertainment. So I produced working toward Dick Clark Productions.

How did you retool the romance reality interpret in the form of The Bachelor?

I knew there was fearful energy in this universal, women competing for someone we certify as a distinguished catch, and I could see there was alarming audience appeal. I thought of ways to make it more respectable. With Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, the contestants didn’t see what the man looked like to the time whenever the close of the show. With The Bachelor, they meet the bachelor first and are empowered to leave if they want to.

Why has your show lasted which time so many other romance reality course came and went?

Some of the copycats were shot in singly two or three weeks. You’re just watching play-acting. There’s no sincerity, and the audience knows it. We shoot The Bachelor [season] into the bargain seven weeks, thus it gives the multitude a real chance to emptying in love. There are still women out in that place who are in love with Andy Baldwin [season 10], and wonder if he’s going to call them.

How does the show stay so popular when its objective—to end in a marriage—has failed to materialize in every season reject one (Trista Rehn in The Bachelorette, season 1)?

People like to see the emotional roller coaster of romance more than the completed romance.

The temper with Charlie O’Connell (period of the year 7) in the right role seemed like the nadir of the series. Its ratings were in the midst of the lowest, and the sets were plain compared with other seasons’. Some of the contestants seemed a little trashy. What happened?

We had gotten complacent concerning the show. I don’t blame my staff; I blame myself. The series was so successful we thought we could remain it without adjustments.

How did you reinvigorate the show?

We made it so it wasn’t so predictable. We started taking chances. In Brad Womack’s convenient time [season 11], it became clear he didn’t have strong feelings for either of the final brace women. The netting and some producers were freaked out once we knew Brad was going to reject two women on air. But we let it happen. And I think that unpredictable end revived interest in the show. It made it fresh. We besides started putting more effort into casting good contestants.

One way you’ve made the show fresh is to pellicle seasons abroad, one in Paris and one in Rome. Isn’t that a little extravagant?

It still costs much less to film than scripted shows. The writers, actors, and directors get paid a lot more [for nonreality shows]. We don’t have that stratum of cost. I could write the script instead of Chris Harrison [host of The Bachelor] in 15 minutes. An episode of ER would direct one’s course weeks to write.

Any plans for the future, aside from more reality TV?

Before I got into TV, I was a sportswriter. My next goal is to oddity together a arrange of investors to buy one of the NFL franchises.

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KENNEWICK — Mitch Fadden had four goals because Tri-City, after spotting Seattle a one-goal pass, buried the T-birds 7-1 in a Western Hockey League game Saturday death.

Seattle (24-27-1-3) took a 1-0 lead at 15:52 of the first period on a goal by Thomas Hickey.

Fadden scored three goals in the second period, sandwiched around a goal by Brett Plouffe.

Fadden, Kruise Reddick and Mason Wilgosh scored goals in the third period for the Americans.

Chet Pickard got the win by stopping 27 of 28 shots. His record is now 26-11-0-3.

The T-birds finish the weekend against the Vancouver Giants at 5:05 p.m. today at ShoWare Center in Kent. The game can be seen on FSN.

Lethbridge 5, at Everett 4

With a four-goal deficit to overcome, the Everett Silvertips made a strong effort to erase the Hurricanes’ lead, but constructer Silvertip Kyle Beach earned the prepossessing goal to hold off Everett.

Beach recorded three points upon the body a goal and two assists in his return to Everett though Carter Ashton took the ignorance’sitting pristine star with one goal and one assist.

The line of Tyler Maxwell (1G, 1A), Byron Froese (2A) and league-leading rookie scorer Kellan Tochkin (1G, 1A) had a combined six points.

Kent Simpson played highminded in relief of Thomas Heemskerk, make 21 saves on 22 shots despite picking up the ruin. Mike Alexander and Shane Harper rounded out the scoring for Everett.

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ST. GEORGE, Utah — Danielle Lawrie struck confused 12 and Lauren Greer belted a winning, three-run home run to surpass the Washington softball team to a 4-2, come-from-behind victory over Loyola Marymount on Saturday in the Red Desert Classic.

Earlier Saturday, the Huskies defeated Southern Utah 9-0 in a five-inning game. The Huskies are 4-0 for the first time inasmuch as 2003, when they opened the season 9-0.

In the first game, Washington used a seven-run fifth inning to clinch the victory. The large blasts were a run-scoring alone by Bailey Stenson, a two-run double through Felecia Harris — who also got the pitching victory — and a two-run home run by freshman Niki Williams, the first of her sweep.

Henderson leads SPU women

Daesha Henderson had 15 points for Seattle Pacific, which posted a 66-55 women’session basketball win over Northwest Nazarene in Brougham Pavilion.

Seattle Pacific (15-4, 8-2 Great Northwest Athletic Conference) was from a thin to a dense state 18-16 when a jumper by dint of. Lexi Schaar with 6:36 left in the first half kicked off a 12-0 run. A brace of free throws from Maddie Maloney gave the Falcons a 20-18 lead with 5:47 left before halftime, and they not at all trailed again.

Other women’session basketball

Saint Martin’s Jamey Gelhar pose an NCAA Division II record for consecutive free throws made, but Western Washington earned an 86-78 overtime victory in Bellingham.

Jessica Summers had 21 points and eight rebounds on the side of the Vikings (14-5, 6-2 GNAC), who’ve won five straight.

Gelhar made all four of her free-throw attempts to extend her streak to 58, breaking the previous mark of 55.

• Amanda Murdoch made all six of her three-point attempts and finished with a career-high 24 points in leading Central Washington to a 76-68 victory over Western Oregon in Monmouth, Ore.

The victory was the first GNAC win of the season on account of the Wildcats (4-15 overall), who snapped one eight-game skid.

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Winning the all-around competition in Saturday’session KingCo 4A athletics championships at Ballard High School left Hailey Wells speechless. Literally.

The Woodinville junior, who placed first on bars and beam while amassing an all-around total of 36.95 points, could barely utter a whisper at the meet’sitting conclusion, the aftermath of a weeklong curve with a head cold.

Asked how her condition impacted her performance, Wells gasped a barely audible “breathe.”

Teammate Rachel VanderWel interpreted for the diminutive Wells.

“It’s stiff for her to breathe,” she said, “and her head has really been hurting, so it’s been compact for her to balance in her events.”

Still, her beam score (9.625) was the highest in any adventure in the 12-team meet. Wells said events requiring prolonged endurance, in the same state as beam and floor (where she placed 22nd), were specifically challenging.

“She wanted to do it towards the team,” VanderWel declared.

Yet Wells, who placed fourth in all-around at the public meet last year, spoke for herself when asked on the supposition that this was among her more fully performances this taint, just shaking her first place no. Will she be in better hale condition at next week’s district meet at Sammamish? “Hope so,” she wheezed.

Woodinville (181.625 points), Bothell (177.025) and 4A newcomer Issaquah (172.7) modified as teams with respect to district. Three-time defending 3A champion Newport, now a 4A instruct, placed fifth (166.7) and will not be at the state fitting as a team despite the first time this decade.

Five of the past six 4A state champions have come from KingCo 4A. Yet only the winner of next week’s circuit meet will advance to state.

“It’s really sad,” said Woodinville coach Kimberly Fleming. “When I look out on the floor and see how many good athletes are fully in that place in this meet, it’s very frustrating.”

Ballard junior Taylor Stern placed second to Wells in all-around by a fraction (36.925), taking third on bars. Amy Sisk of Inglemoor, second on vault and third part part without ceasing beam, was third in all-around (36.85).