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For our show this week, we wanted to talk to someone who hears lies all the time: Tow truck drivers. That’s what Sound Effect Executive Producer Erin Hennessey suggested. She sent 88.5’s Simone Alicea to a towing company in Bellevue to talk to someone who’s heard it all. But it turns out Erin wasn’t being totally forthcoming, herself, about the role she had cast for these drivers. She and Simone sat down to compare notes about their impound experiences. While Erin was in college, she drove a

This week on Sound Effect , stories of time and how it rules our daily lives. Every Hour Injures, The Last One Kills For centuries, sundials have inspired artists and scientists alike as a way to display the passing of time. Retired UW astrobiology professor Woody Sullivan shares how his 25-year love affair with sundials began and how he invented the first working sundial tattoo. A Brewing War In 2015, 28-year-old Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali wanted to bring the unique flavor and high

Retired University of Washington astrobiology professor Woody Sullivan is obsessed with the concept of time. It's apparent the instant you walk into what he call’s his “man lodge," the little study behind his North Seattle home. It’s full of shelves of books with titles like “Empires of Time,” and “Time, The Familiar Stranger.” Plus, there are shelves of small, ornate sundials, some that can fit into the palm of your hand. Finally, across his ceiling is Woody’s real masterpiece: a reflection

28-year old Yemeni-American Mokhtar Alkhanshali loves coffee. In fact, h e is the first Arab certified Q-grader, the coffee equivalent of a sommelier for wine. Mokhtar grew up between the United States and Yemen. In his grandparents’ garden in Yemen, Mokhtar picked red coffee berries off the trees and laid them out on drying beds. His grandmother taught him when to harvest the berries, and later, how to brew coffee with spices like cardamom and cinnamon. This early affinity with coffee stuck.

In the spring of 2014, Marilyn Roberts' son, Kevin, was 27 years old and struggling with bipolar disorder. One day, he called his mom to tell her that he was taking a bus to go to downtown Olympia, Wash., not too far from where he lived. "He was to a point where wasn't cognizant of what was going on, on a day to day basis," Roberts remembers. Kevin smokes cigarettes. At a bus stop in Olympia, he lit up in a non-smoking area. Kevin exchanged a few words with transit workers who asked him to put

All of our lives are ruled by time, but some of us are more aware of it than others. At the Northwest Kidney Centers in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood, dialysis patients are very aware of the passing hours. They're hooked up to machines that display the elapsing time prominently on a screen. These machines filter and clean their blood, a job normally handled by healthy kidneys. Seattle native Vonita McGee is a patient at the center. She goes in for dialysis three days a week for four and a

When I think back on it now, when I was growing up there’s two things that were really hard for me to tell my parents. The first was: ‘Hey Mum and Dad, so we’re getting sex education at school.’ And the second was, ‘I love you.’

This week on Sound Effect , we share stories of people, places and things that are right in front of us, that we may never notice.

According to a recent Pew Research Center study , there are more than 200,000 undocumented people living in Washington State. Seattle-based immigration attorney Carol Edward says these men, women and children come from all walks of life. Over the course of her career, Edward has had undocumented engineers and nurses as clients. One undocumented man who hired her was a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard. Removing undocumented people from the U.S. was a campaign promise made by President Donald

Edwin Martinez runs Onyx Coffee in Bellingham, Washington. The shop is a bit unusual. Martinez calls it "a mad scientist lab" for studying human behavior with coffee. He sells just coffee and nothing else, not even cream. The coffee comes straight from his family’s farm in the mountains of northwest Guatemala. "So if you love coffee, you are just in seventh heaven." said Martinez. "But if you aren't here for the coffee, this is the most disappointing coffee house in America." In his "mad