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RANDOM LINKS FOR 2/23/12
February 22nd, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

joe mabel, via wikimedia commons

  • How comprehensive can a list of the “10 Greatest Homes in Seattle History” be if it leaves out the Montlake spite house?
  • Something I never thought I’d see: young adults joining Elks lodges. Back in the middle of the last century, Elks clubs were huge. The one in Everett, where my father attended, had that town’s best bar, gym, and private pool, and its only live music lounge. But the national Elks were among the last American social institutions to confront their own racist/sexist policies, and hence got branded as reactionary fuddie duddies. The new Elks are promoting themselves with that so-courant “social” mantra, and cheap drinks.
  • Linda Thomas would like to remind you that Microsoft XBoxes and Amazon Kindles are also made at the same notorious Chinese factories used by Apple.
  • Thomas also performs the ever popular local-angle-on-big-story shtick, with “Local duo penned popular Whitney Houston hits.”
  • Not so fast, arena-hopers: Efforts are indeed being made to keep the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes right where they are. At worst, this would give the arena developers more time to acquire the rest of the land they’d need and to design the thing.
  • Meanwhile, Goldy dumps righteous scorn on the hippie sports-haters.
  • Mayor McGinn’s “State of the City” address mentioned the usual things (Amazon, arena, jobs, education, crime, etc.). But he also mentioned race discrimination in housing (still going on) and attempts to pull up African American school graduation rates. Unlike some ’60s-generation white people around here, McGinn actually knows there have been actual black people here other than Hendrix.
  • Knute Berger sees developers and Seattle’s civic establishment as preparing for a post-recession boom.
  • The state budget deal: done with mirrors.
  • Who’s not making money from the Facebook IPO? The $1-an-hour foreign laborers who censor your pictures on the site.
  • Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis thinks journalistic institutions should become more like Facebook. Whatever that means. Let me explain briefly why this is hokum: Professional journalism (no matter what contrived “social” or “search” elements are tacked onto it) is someone relaying/interpreting information, telling factual stories for collective audiences. It’s nothing even vaguely similar to the huge censored chat room that is Facebook.
  • Amanda Marcotte says the Girl Scouts, current topic of a trumped-up right wing smear campaign, really were progressive at the start, just by having girls do the same “scouting” things boys were doing.
  • D.L. MacKenzie boils down the whole Libertarian thang into a simple mantra, in which Business is supposed to be Always Good and Government is supposed to be Always Bad. (As you might expect from this summary, MacKenzie interprets this mantra as a gross oversimplification, at odds with the complications of the real world.)
  • Where not to go to get away from drugs: small towns.
  • My fave recent American author David Foster Wallace would have been 50 this week. He never even got to live to see The Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar (a shtick in his most famous work Infinite Jest).

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