Leno got it all wrong. The line should be, “It’s MONDAY, time for NON-HEADLINES!” Monday morning newspapers’ “top” stories tend to be feature-y or analytical or, in the case of the Venus Velasquez DUI arrest, more than a week old.
Still, there are a few actual items of interest out there.
Turns out, for one thing, that the Coolest Adult any Seattleite of a certain age ever knew, J.P. Patches, has cancer, but still keeps up a rigorous schedule of personal appearances. The Times’s picture showed the legendary local TV funnyman looking more ilke one of Red Skelton’s sad-clown paintings. Alas.
Let’s figure this one out: The Bellinghamsters at Western Washington U. told a male ex-student he couldn’t sell Women of Western swimsuit calendars on campus, because they were allegedly “demeaning to women.” Four years before, the same administration allowed a student organization to screen erotic art movies under the series title Pornfest.
A good student of semiotics would parse her/his way to a consistent line straddling both decisions–we want to encourage students to do it, not just sit around and look in the manner of passive consumers; or, perhaps, a swimsuit calendar represents an awkward intersection of sexuality and fashion, while porn offers a more directly visceral experience and is therefore more subversive of the dominant paradigm.
We must bid a fond adieu this morning to Porter Wagoner, your quintessential Nashville pop star. Besides his own dozens of hits (my favorite: “The Rubber Room”), he had a modest little syndicated TV series for 21 years. The Porter Wagoner Show was a deceptively plain affair, designed to mimic Wagoner’s touring show. Some patter, a baggy-pants comedian, some solo songs, one instrumental number, and a couple numbers by the band’s current “girl singer.” The second woman to fill the latter role was Dolly Parton, with whom Wagoner co-wrote and co-recorded many tracks between 1967 and 1975, when she went solo.
Puget Sound Energy is being sold to Australian and Canadian investors, who will take the state’s largest private utility “private.” That is, no more stock trading; and therefore no pesky SEC reports to file about the company’s finances.
The Puget Sound Light, Traction and Power Company was Seattle’s original electric company, and also its first operator of electrified streetcars. Even after the formation of the municipally-owned Seattle City Light, Puget Power still ran its parallel, competitive electric lines until the 1950s. (The last vestige of Puget Power’s in-city operation is now the independent Seattle Steam, providing competitive electric service to a wide swath of downtown.)
Further public-power initiatives in Tacoma and Snohomish County left Puget Power with a diminished operating turf that happened to be in the path of suburban sprawl. That territory included Snoqualmie, where the company had already dammed Snoqualmie Falls and built what’s now the Salish Lodge.
In the 1990s Puget Power merged with Washington Energy, formerly Washington Natural Gas, formerly Washington Gas Company (or “GASCO”). That company had run a huge smoke-belching coal-fired gasification plant for almost half a century. The plant was rendered obsolete when natural gas pipelines reached here; it eventually became Gas Works Park. For decades after that, the gas company’s most famous landmark was the giant revolving neon sign on its office roof, the Blue Flame (or, in later street jargon, the “blue vagina”).
In recent years, Puget Sound Energy has become under fire for not getting the power back on after windstorms as quickly as Seattle City Light and Tacoma Public Utilities. It’s not all the company’s operating fault. Its service area includes a lot of rural and exurban territories, still serviced by overhead wiring. Still, the company promised last week that the new owners would pour cash in to help modernize its network. Weezell see.
And, oh yeah, the Boston Red Sox effortlessly swept the World Series.
