Straws suck.
They seem to come with every drink, whether you want one or not, only to end up in the trash soon afterward. From there, it’s all too easy for them to end up as more pieces of plastic pollution in our oceans.
But in one particular city, that might not be a problem anymore.
For the month of September, the Lonely Whale Foundation is running a campaign to encourage Seattleites to ditch their sucky plastic straws.
The campaign, Strawless in Seattle, is part of the foundations’s Strawless Ocean initiative, whose overall goal is to keep 500 million plastic straws out of American mouths and garbage cans this year.
"My mother taught me at a very young age to take care of my own environment, to clean my room,” says actor and Lonely Whale co-founder Adrian Grenier. “Now that I'm an adult, I recognize that my room has expanded, not just to my house, but also to my neighborhood and the world at large.”
Grenier (center), Daryn Mayer (left), and Brian Maynard pose for a quick selfie at a benefit for PFLAG in 2017. Photo by Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images for PFLAG.
So far, over 200 Seattle restaurants and venues have joined in, including the Space Needle, Sea-Tac airport, and CenturyLink Field, home of the Seattle Seahawks football team. Instead of plastic straws, businesses will either ask their patrons to go without or offer biodegradable paper straws instead.
The campaign even comes with its own hashtag, which encourages people to #stopsucking.
One individual plastic straw might seem harmless, but when we zoom out to look at what we’re doing to the planet, we’re not talking about individual straws.
There are people who might need a straw, such as someone who has mobility challenges, but for many of us, it's a luxury — one we're really fond of.
Americans alone use half a billion of the little suckers every single day, and once we’re done with them, they don’t stay in our drinks. Many of them find their way into our oceans. Plastic straws are actually one of the most common forms of plastic pollution in the ocean.
According to one study, the oceans might actually contain more plastic than fish by 2050. Photo from iStock.
Plastics can be harmful in other ways too. In a particularly distressing video from 2015, researchers spent nearly 10 minutes trying to pull a discarded plastic straw out of a sea turtle’s nose. Even when these plastics break down, they never totally disappear. Instead, they turn into tinier and tinier microplastics, which can poison animals — and even find their way into our food and drinking water.
In many ways, Seattle is a natural place for The Lonely Whale to start a string of city-wide campaigns.
The Seattle waterfront. Photo from iStock.
Sitting on the Puget Sound, the city’s already taken several steps to protect the ocean from pollution, including a 2010 ban on plastic bags. The city council is also considering expanding an ordinance to ban plastic straws and utensils from all of the city’s restaurants in 2018.
Grenier and The Lonely Whale Foundation are hoping that the early success and buy-in from Seattle businesses will not only raise attention and sway people’s hearts and minds, but also show legislators and other cities what is possible. They’re already starting to plan for future campaigns in cities both in the United States and internationally.
"We've only just begun,” said Grenier. “Hopefully the world is watching."
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Resurfaced video of French skier's groin incident has people giving the announcer a gold medal
"The boys took a beating on that one."
Downhill skiing is a sport rife with injuries, but not usually this kind.
A good commentator can make all the difference when watching sports, even when an event goes smoothly. But it's when something goes wrong that great announcers rise to the top. There's no better example of a great announcer in a surprise moment than when French skier Yannick Bertrand took a gate to the groin in a 2007 super-G race.
Competitive skiers fly down runs at incredible speeds, often exceeding 60 mph. Hitting something hard at that speed would definitely hurt, but hitting something hard with a particularly sensitive part of your body would be excruciating. So when Bertrand slammed right into a gate family-jewels-first, his high-pitched scream was unsurprising. What was surprising was the perfect commentary that immediately followed.
This is a clip you really just have to see and hear to fully appreciate:
- YouTube youtu.be
It's unclear who the announcer is, even after multiple Google inquiries, which is unfortunate because that gentleman deserves a medal. The commentary gets better with each repeated viewing, with highlights like:
"The gate the groin for Yannick Bertrand, and you could hear it. And if you're a man, you could feel it."
"Oh, the Frenchman. Oh-ho, monsieurrrrrr."
"The boys took a beating on that one."
"That guy needs a hug."
"Those are the moments that change your life if you're a man, I tell you what."
"When you crash through a gate, when you do it at high rate of speed, it's gonna hurt and it's going to leave a mark in most cases. And in this particular case, not the area where you want to leave a mark."
Imagine watching a man take a hit to the privates at 60 mph and having to make impromptu commentary straddling the line between professionalism and acknowledging the universal reality of what just happened. There are certain things you can't say on network television that you might feel compelled to say. There's a visceral element to this scenario that could easily be taken too far in the commentary, and the inherent humor element could be seen as insensitive and offensive if not handled just right.
The announcer nailed it. 10/10. No notes.
The clip frequently resurfaces during the Winter Olympic Games, though the incident didn't happen during an Olympic event. Yannick Bertrand was competing at the FIS World Cup super-G race in Kvitfjell, Norway in 2007, when the unfortunate accident occurred. Bertrand had competed at the Turin Olympics the year before, however, coming in 24th in the downhill and super-G events.
As painful as the gate to the groin clearly as, Bertrand did not appear to suffer any damage that kept him from the sport. In fact, he continued competing in international downhill and super-G races until 2014.
According to a 2018 study, Alpine skiing is a notoriously dangerous sport with a reported injury rate of 36.7 per 100 World Cup athletes per season. Of course, it's the knees and not the coin purse that are the most common casualty of ski racing, which we saw clearly in U.S. skier Lindsey Vonn's harrowing experiences at the 2026 Olympics. Vonn was competing with a torn ACL and ended up being helicoptered off of the mountain after an ugly crash that did additional damage to her legs, requiring multiple surgeries (though what caused the crash was reportedly unrelated to her ACL tear). Still, she says she has no regrets.
As Bertrand's return to the slopes shows, the risk of injury doesn't stop those who live for the thrill of victory, even when the agony of defeat hits them right in the rocks.