Welcome to the new-look Stranger. Hope you didn’t have too hard a time looking a few pages further into the paper for Misc., the pop-culture column that actually likes to be printed in smaller type (a more intimate reading experience, ya know). For newbies, this is a column of public phenomena from cult- to mass-level, along the whole personal-cultural-political-corporate continuum, in Seattle and beyond. We don’t do gossip, we don’t do gonzo, we don’t settle wagers.

COUNT YR. BLESSINGS DEPT.: Even if you’re uncomfortable with the new-look Stranger, just remember it could be worse. It could be like KIRO-TV’s old “News Outside the Box.” Worse, it could be like the new-look Sassy, a second-rate imitation of the early-’90s teen mag of the same name, now run by a different company with an all-different staff. The old Sassy was an interesting attempted compromise between real communication and the same old consumerist hype. The new Sassy is just the hype, delivered in a lame impersonation of the old mag’s breezy copy style. What’s more, the old Sassy acknowledged that teenage girls had a wide range of motivations for doing (or buying) things. In the new Sassy, everything in a girl’s life’s supposed to revolve around boys–getting them, bending them to your will, dumping them, getting new ones. (It even encourages its readers to become online-service users because “for one thing, it’s a great place to meet guys.”)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Perfect Universe is an anonymous four-page zine of altered comic strips, available at Linda’s Tavern and other places. It’s an old trick to make familiar characters start talking about VD, condoms, beastiality and alcoholism. But it takes a certain snazz to make it work, and whoever redrew these strips has it. My favorite segment: the cut-up image of Andy Capp sitting silently at his barstool, in the exact same pose for seven consecutive frames.

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF: Imagine my surprise when I found, in a second-hand store, a paperback of a sci-fi novel called The War With the Newts! Imagine my glee when I read the back-cover copy, calling it a “prophetic and stirring novel about man’s fatal propensity to pervert the best things of the world.” Turns out to have been the final work of Karel Capek, the brilliant Czech satirist whose play R.U.R. gave the world the term “robot.” Capek wrote Newts in 1936, two years before the Nazis asked the Western powers for the right to take over his country in exchange for a promise not to invade anywhere else.

The book’s a satire of colonialism, racism, and global trade, among many other things. The Newts of the book are four-foot-long salamanders found on a remote South Seas island. They’re at least semi-intelligent; they can be trained to speak and to use knives, explosives and construction tools. And when given enough food and protection from predators, they breed like mad. In the story, which spans about 50 years with no true central characters, the major nations take to breeding Newts as all-purpose slave laborers for everything from manufacturing (in special shallow-water factories) to dredging and building new islands. They become an obsession for socialists, missionaries, and angered labor unions. “Exotic” songs, dances, and films are created to exploit their novelty. They’re described as perfect workers, always hard-striving and never complaining–until a billion-Newt army asserts control of the world’s seaports and announces plans to dismantle the continents, so the world can become one big Newt habitat. (R.U.R. also ends with the robots conquering the humans.)

The Newts paperback’s introduction quotes Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika writing to Capek praising “Your story of those sly, clever creatures which were first trained by man for all sorts of uses, and which finally, turning into a mob without soul or morals but with dangerous technical skill, plunge the world into ruin.” Any similarity between Capek’s disciplined, emotionless army of destruction and any similarly-named contemporary force is purely coincidental, of course.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MRS. FREELAND: My big Seattle punk-history book goes to press this month. I could still use your memorabilia. How do I reach you?