I KNOW IT’S PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE, but here’s my fantasy: We move the now-surplused Kingdome to the Interbay landfill, then turn it into a community of tomorrow. In the stands: moderately priced housing, artists’ studios, offices, and light-industrial work spaces. In the corridors: tasty brewpubs and burger stands, charter schools, and convenient shops. On the playing field: a combo park, playfield, bazaar, and art/ performance space. At least let’s dismantle and rebuild the Dome’s prefab pavilion annex for a year-round street fair, complete with food and merchandise booths, exhibits, and an all-ages music club. The gracefully-curved pavilion looks too neat (like an inner hallway in some giant space station) to just trash.

UPDATE: The bike-messenger zine Iron Lung, mentioned here in May, has a new address: c/o Stephanie Ehlinger, 1719 E. Spring St. #104, Seattle 98122.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: PMS Crunch, from a Scarsdale, NY outfit called “Time of the Month Inc.,” claims in food-trade magazine ads to be “the perfect combination of salty and sweet–the taste and the gift that’s always in season.” The can promises “Chocolate, Nuts, and More Chocolate.” Its primary slogan: “The Best Snack… Period!” (Wholesale orders can be obtained at 1-800-PMS-44ME.)

NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: I got some decidedly mixed messages from those huge newspaper ads for the Fox News Channel. I couldn’t tell whether the ads’ incessant insistance on fair, unbiased reporting on the channel is meant to trash CNN (which Fox proprietor Rupert Murdoch has previously, and falsely, accused of liberal bias) or to appease viewers apprehensive about the conservative bias of other Murdoch properties (most infamously, the New York Post and London Sun).

In any event, I’m intrigued by the notion of a news source with more nuts-‘n’-bolts info and less mealy-mouthed “analysis.” Of course, that’s not what Fox News gives you. That’d require more people and money than a startup cable channel’s gonna have (even one with Murdoch’s dough). Instead, you get hour upon hour of talking-head interviews and pontification, officially “unbiased” ‘cuz the opinionating’s done by the guests, not the hosts. This is augmented during daytime hours by functional but unremarkable top-of-the-hour news briefs.

FRAG-MENTATION: The other day I was talking with a musician who said her all-time favorite childhood memories included Fraggle Rock, Jim Henson’s Canadian-produced ’80s puppet series. The more she triggered my own memories, the more the show seemed a metaphor for the precarious existence of the would-be “alternative” artist or intellectual in our day and age. If you stay where you are, you can be safe and happy, working and playing and having funny misadventures with your own kind, but at the cost of ireversibly depleting the one resource that sustains you (the rock/ the safety of your subculture). Leave in one direction, and you end up in a smotheringly bourgeois purgatory (the handyman’s shop/ middle-class satiety). Leave in another direction, and you risk more directly hostile forces (the Fraggle-eating monster boy/ censorious conservatives). In the show’s final episode, the Fraggles found a solution to their dilemma by tunnelling to a new home. Perhaps we all need to (at least metaphorically) find our way toward a new premise for our lives and work.

THE INSANITY CONTINUES: I don’t care how the Camlin Hotel’s new owners redevelop the rest of the hotel’s block (now just parking and a motor-hotel annex). And if they must upscalize the hotel rooms, the rest of us will just have to find another site for our wedding receptions and/or just-divorced parties. But the plan to replace the venerable Cloud Room with luxury penthouse suites simply must be stopped. I don’t know how, but it must.

At a time when prefab retro-cocktail hangouts and stinky “cigar bars” are sprouting all over, we mustn’t lose one of the last real, un-“restored” martini emporia. I’m sure the Camlin-block development will still be plenty profitable with an intact Cloud Room. I suggest you go there at every opportunity in the coming weeks, and let it be known (both in the lounge and at the front desk) you love the joint and seek the chance to keep going there in the future.