CLASS WARS: Amid the controversy regarding Ballard High’s students and staff being shunted from their reconstruction-impaired regular digs to the quite dilapidated Wallingford carcass of the closed-in-’81 Lincoln High, Showtime’s been running Class of 1999, a truly bad B-thriller filmed at Lincoln in 1989. Exec-produced by onetime SIFF co-boss Dan Ireland, this RoboCop ripoff starts with that #1 cliche of bad sci-fi, the present-day trend exaggerated into the future. Teen-gang violence gets so bad by ’99, the opening narration states, that high schools have become total-security compounds with armed robots disguised as teachers. Only some of the robots go schizo and start killing teens, causing the all-white gangstas to retaliate in a predictable orgy of blood and steel limbs. Anybody who saw it (or worked on the crew) could tell Lincoln was perfect as a fictional bombed-out shell of a school, hence a lousy site for a real school.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: A kind reader, visiting a local dollar store, found and sent in a package of Smack Ramen, an Asian-style meal in a packet (as made in Costa Mesa, CA). While the name obviously derives from a Japanglish attempt to invoke lip-smackin’ goodness, there is (as is oft the case with Japanglish) an unfortunate double meaning. Is this also the cheapo-meal of choice for those who’ve spent all their money on a certain poppy-derived non-nutritive substance (also Asian-derived)?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The second “more-or-less quarterly” issue of Platform, Morgain Cole and Bret Fetzer’s ambitious local theater zine, is now at Seattle theaters and other free drop-off spots. It’s got timely ideas about the organization and financing of local drama troupes, plus a 1983 Richard Nelson essay about the precarious state of “Nonprofit Theater in America.” He said the theater movement was “nearing disaster,” ‘cuz it was “without an adequate sense of tradition or a sense of social responsibility.” The fact that most of Nelson’s arguments could be made today (and are being made today, as in a recent NEA staff report) proves (1) the theater movement’s done a good job of not dying, and (2) how little further than that it’s gotten. (No subscriptions, but info can be had from 313 10th Ave. E, #1, Seattle 98102.)

WORKIN’ IT: The Discover U catalog offered a course two weeks ago on the “Secrets for Making Love Work.” For those of you who couldn’t attend that day or didn’t have the $29 class fee, we hereby offer a few of our own secrets:

• Cut off love’s phone and cable TV.
• Threaten to cancel love’s MasterCard and/or bar tab.
• Offer love a management-track position with three weeks’ vacation, stock options, and full dental.
• Show up at love’s door in a Ride-Share commuters’ minivan. Keep a-honkin’ the horn ’til love comes out.
• Enroll love in an employees’ softball league.
• Change the locks on love’s room and throw all love’s stuff onto the sidewalk.
• Get love a really cool metal lunchbox, pre-filled with a pastrami sandwich and a pack of Hostess Sno-Balls.
• Enroll love in an SCCC career-training program.

I WANNA KNOW: Last month, we asked who you thought had more powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It wasn’t one of our most popular surveys, but all four respondents agreed: Sabrina. Our next survey: What will ’90s nostalgia look like? Which sights, looks, sounds, and consumer goods will future movies and collectors deem as evoking those silly days of now as A Simpler Time? Submit your suggestions at our new email address, clark@speakeasy.org.

PASSAGE (from Topper author Thorne Smith): “Like life itself, my stories have no point and get absolutly nowhere. And, like life, they are a little mad and purposeless. They resemble those people who watch with placid concentration a steam shovel digging a large hole in the ground. They are almost as purposeless as a dignified commuter shaking an impotent fist after a train he has just missed. They are like the man who dashes madly through traffic only to linger aimlessly on the opposite corner watching a fountain pen being demonatrated in a shop window.”