• The new Frontier Room: Travesty or abomination?
• I tried to follow my bliss, until it filed a restraining order.
• It’s hard to believe sometimes, but people have been having sex since before you were born.
• Philip Morris sells Miller Beer to South African Breweries Ltd.: Since Miller owns Olympia Brewing (the Northwest’s last mass-market brewery), how will the radicaler-than-thou Olympia downtown scenesters react to their town’s biggest non-governmental institution becoming part of what used to be apartheid’s biggest profiteers? (I know they cared little about Philip Morris owning Oly; except for the straight-edgers, those Olympia scenesters smoke like factories.)
• Who doesn’t love the ever-evolving typography of movie title graphics? And who doesn’t think they were a lot cooler in the olden days of real showmanship?

DROPPING THE NEEDLE: Even before Barry Ackerley’s radio stations become part of the Clear Channel evil empire, they’re changing for the worse. One of them, which had briefly run a nice nonthreatening ’80s nostalgia format, has suddenly become “Quick 96,” playing only six- to ten-second sound bites from oldies songs, which are given credit only on the station’s web site. (The snippets are separated by an automated voice announcing three-digit numbers, which you must look up on the site.) My initial reaction: I’m reminded of the countdown-roundup snippets on MTV’s TRL, without the pictures of course. My second reaction: Is anybody actually expected to like this enough to listen even past one commercial break? My suspicion: This is likely intended as a short-term filler concept, until the sale to Clear Channel goes final, at which time it’ll adopt one of the chain’s satellite-fed network formats. When an earlier sale doomed an earlier operation on the same frequency, KYYX, the station ended with a week of nothing but an electronic voice counting down the seconds to sign-off–for an entire week.

UPDATE TO THE ABOVE: Sure enough, “Quick 96” turned out to be a publicity stunt. Forty-eight hours after the “innovative new station” debuted, back came the ’60s-’70s oldies library of The Beat’s immediate predecessor format, KJR-FM, played as full-length tunes; this format (conveniently using music tapes already on the station’s premises and requiring no additional new recordings) will presumably stick around until Clear Channel moves in.