Saturday just happened to be the first warm day of the year; a perfect setting for the already much-documented Dalai Lama show in the pro football stadium, where he talked about compassion and coexistence for all people.

(No, I see absolutely no cynical irony in that. American football is a game of confrontation, but it’s also a game of cooperation.)

His message, and the other messages at the Seeds of Compassion confab, have been both simple and deep. I’ll probably have more to say about them later this week.

Later that evening, I found myself at the Georgetown Art Attack gallery crawl. Saw some lovely informal paintings at Georgetown Tile curated by my ol’ pal Anne Grgich; then caught some great buys at the Fantagraphics bookstore’s scratch-and-dent sale.

Sunday brought us the last day of the last bowling alley north of the Ship Canal, Ballard’s totally beloved Sunset Lanes.

It was also the day of what just might have been the last pro basketball game in Seattle. Maybe. If we don’t do something about it.

Even after a deliberately thrown season, the finale was sold out. Fans booed the home team’s owner Clay Bennett, and cheered the opposing team’s owner (Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, who opposes Bennett’s desired team move to Oklahoma City). You saw little to none of this on Fox Sports Net; under terms of its contract with the team, FSN’s announcers said almost nothing about Bennett’s threats or the real importance of Sunday’s game.

Also Sunday evening, and this takes the whole entry full circle, CNN held what it called a “Compassion Forum,” in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (appearing separately) discussed their religious and/or spiritual foundations. Of course, because they are rival applicants for a really big job, some pundits just had to compare and contrast who’s really the most faith-based.