uw archives via businessinsider.com

All of you who are going to be outside in Seattle tomorrow (Sat. 3/3) should attend my nice little chat about Vanishing Seattle. It starts at 2 p.m. at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. Be there or be fool’s gold.

• Here’s a lovely interview with my fellow Stranger refugee S.P. Miskowski. Her play Emerald City, about (among other things) Seattle’s love/hate relationship with itself, opens next Friday (3/9) at the West of Lenin space in Fremont. In the interview, she mentions that the Stranger was, indeed, a totally commercial operation from the start:

The owners were business smart. Very smart. You will never go broke in Seattle making people think they’re in a special, exclusive club that is cooler than everyone else. That is money in the bank. The fear of being provincial and dull is so powerful, there.

• Republican legislative dirty tricks: they’re not just for other states anymore.
• Norm Dicks, a stalwart of Wash. state’s Congressional delegation, is retiring.
• It’s one thing for Amazon to coax favorable pricing terms from the mega corporate publishers. But when it got into an ebook pricing impasse with a small indie distributor, it attracted the ire of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, an outfit with which one shouldn’t mess if one knows what’s good for one.
• Who else is refusing links to Amazon ebook sales pages? Apple iBooks, that’s who.
• Meanwhile, is Amazon ridiculously inflating the “before” prices of on-sale food products?
• As we’ve mentioned before, Shepard Fairey steals from street-level artists as well as corporate art. Here’s one artist who sued Fairey and won.
• Matt Taibbi notes that the late right-wing sleazeblogger Andrew Breitbart used to post private info about his ideological opponents online and threaten violence against them. In response for mentioning this, Breitbart fans posted private info about Taibbi online and threatened violence against him.
• Meanwhile, Jen Doll proclaims, “If Rush Limbaugh slut-shames you, you’re doing something right.”
• Truthout pundit Henry A. Giroux and Nation writer Dana Goldstein claim the “religious” right is against public education because it’s against people thinking for themselves.
• Robert Reich would like to remind you that increased “productivity,” per se, doesn’t necessarily add jobs. It often means cutting jobs.
• “More U.S. soldiers killed themselves than died in combat in 2010.”
• I just found out last year that there are serious grownup My Little Pony fans. I’m not sure if the Amazon customer-reviewers of this spinoff DVD are among them.