MISC. DOESN’T KNOW how to start this week’s item collection, with a touch-O-bemusement (the Jack Daniel’s Faux Faulkner writing contest limiting entries to 500 words or less? Bill couldn’t write a want ad that short!) or a solemn pledge (Guaranteed: Absolutely nothing about the Baby Boomers turning 50!).

SPACE PROBES: I know this is Anna Woolverton’s department but I gotta mention the gorgeous new Sit & Spin band room. A more perfect homey-glitz look I’ve never seen, and how they made a concrete box sound so good I’ll never know. Seattle band spaces never get bigger (at least not until this year’s planned RKCNDY remodel) but they do get better. Meanwhile, Beatnix (ex-Tugs, ex-Squid Row, ex-Glynn’s Cove) suddenly went the way of 80 percent of new small businesses; it’ll be back with new owners and probably a new name after a remodel. And there was big fun a couple weeks back at the reopened Pioneer Square Theater; whenSuper Deluxe sang their Xmas song about asking Santa for a skateboard and only getting a stupid sweater, the teen punx drenched the band members with sweaters. With occasional all-ages shows continuing at the Velvet Elvis that means there’s real punk now at both former homes of Angry Housewives, the punk parody stage musical that delighted smug yuppie audiences from 1983 to 1989.

TYPO-GRAPHY: I’m developing a theory that certain grammatical errors come in and out of fashion. F’rinstance, people in many stations of life still use “it’s” (the contraction of “it is”) when they mean “its” (the possessive). A year or two back there was a similar fad of spelling “-ies” plurals as “y’s” (i.e., “fantasy’s”), but it didn’t catch on very far. The incorrect phrase “A Women” was seen about a year ago in a Wash. Free Press headline. Then earlier this month the phrase showed up in a Sylvia strip. Even in hand-drawn comics dialogue, people seem to be falling back on the computer-spell-checker excuse (“it’s a real word, just the wrong word”). Either that, or cartoonist Nicole Hollander’s succumbed to the notion of “Women” as a Borglike collective entity.

MATERIAL ISSUE: As a tangental allegation to her $750,000 LA wrongful-termination/ sex-discrimination lawsuit, ex-Maverick Records employee Sonji Shepherd charges the Madonna-owned label and its day-to-day boss Freddy DeMann with running a payola machine, bribing DJs and station managers to play Candlebox and Alanis Morrissette songs with cash, expense-paid trips to lap-dance clubs, and even flown-in visits from Heidi Fleiss’s call girls. Candlebox-haters shouldn’t go around high-fiving and shouting exhortations like “Knew it! They couldn’t have gotten big without extra help!” That’s the same line rock-haters offered during the ’50s payola scandals, when pay-for-airplay charges destroyed pioneer rock DJ Alan Freed. Also, Shepherd’s allegations are aimed at label staff; no band members are charged with committing or knowing about anything unlawful.

NAKED TRUTH DEPT.: Ongoing science exhibits don’t often get reviewed in papers like this, but the best can give as much fun and insight-into-reality as any performance-art piece. My current all-time fave: the naked mole-rats at the Pacific Science Center. These li’l four-inch-long, furless pink rodents from sub-Saharan Africa are the perfect straight-edge punk mascot animals, the ultimate combination of cuteness and ferocity. They live totally underground, in networks of burrows that can be as big as six football fields. They’ve got an organized cooperative, matriarchal social structure (some dig, some walk backwards to shove dirt around, and the biggest ones shove dirt up through surface holes). They don’t drink. They’ve got huge long teeth that can chew through concrete. Their lips close behind their teeth. Science Center PR calls them “saber-toothed sausages.”

At the exhibit they live in a plexiglass-enclosed environment with clear plastic plumbing tubes to scurry around in. It may be impractical to get your own naked mole-rat colony (you’d have to specially import a queen and two or three breeding males, as well as build their elaborate home). But there’s plenty of other fun things you can make and do with science; an invitation elsewhere in this paper should help give you an incentive.

(Next week: A vilification of all those `Apple Computer death spiral’ media stories, and an appeal to Save The Blob.)