IT’S A THANKSGIVING MISC., the pop-cult column that asks the musical question, “Why doesn’t the columnist like sweet potatoes?” (Answer next week.)

THE MAILBAG: Ex-Almost Live! cast member John Garibaldi writes, “Credit my friend now in New Hampshire, Geordie Wilson. One visit back to Seattle this fall and he instantly renames the new REI store Hiketown.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Matt Asher’s Seattle Scroll has arrived to take the place of the now-suspended Perv as Seattle’s biggest one-piece-of-paper publication (it measures an odd 11″ x 40″). Its first issue was highlighted by associate editor Chris Walker’s essay on the real meaning of Chief Seattle and a haunting photo by George Vernon of Georgetown’s abandoned but still gorgeous Hat n’ Boots gas station. Biweekly at the usual dropoff sites, or from P.O. Box 3234, Seattle 98114.

BLOBOSITY: The second Seattle Scroll has a beautiful shot of the lower Queen Anne restaurant building unofficially known as The Blob. While that space still sits empty (but no longer awaiting demolition), its playful spirit lives in the hearts of local developers. The chapel now under construction at Seattle U., designed by Steven Holl, includes a sequence of oddly-shaped roof structures and baffles. As previewed in the local architecture mag Arcade, they represent elements of iconography, light, and mystery in Catholic tradition.

On a less meditative note, initial designs for the Experience Music Project at Seattle Center (still popularly known by its former working title, the Hendrix Museum) show a series of connected buildings, in shapes and colors that, looking down from the Space Needle, would vaguely resemble a smashed guitar. It attempts a “fun” rendition of Blobosity, but ultimately succumbs under the heavy thumb of Boomer-nostalgia pretensions. Speaking of spaces made for fun…

MALLED DOWN: By now there’s something pleasantly weather-beaten about Northgate, “The Mall That Started It All” (in 1950 it was the first complex of its kind anywhere), making it an almost human experience compared to newer, more hyperreal retail theaters. That hasn’t stopped mall management from vying to “upgrade” the joint with ever more yuppified chain boutiques.

But when the now-disappearing Ernst chain abandoned its N-gate hardware outlet, the mall took a rare populist turn and lured the first in-Seattle Toys “R” Us. If you’ve never been to one, it’s essentially an overgrown version of a discount-store toy department (it grew out of the long-defunct White Front discount chain). Tall shelves, narrow aisles, bright boxes, and more echoey sounds of screaming kids than in a suburban YMCA pool. The opening-day festivities included costume-character versions of favorite kiddie stars, including a woman dressed up as Barbie. (No, pervs, I didn’t ask her how she goes to the bathroom.) It’s nice to know the store’s there in case of a really good advertised special, but for day-to-day plaything accumulation I still prefer Archie McPhee’s.

IT AIN’T ME: By the time this comes out, we’ll have seen if the local media that got all aghast over Annie Dillard’s throwaway remarks about the Northwest’s intellectuals (or lack of them) will be equally incensed over the more deliberately nasty regional barbs of Nanci Donnellen, KJR-AM’s former Fabulous Sports Babe. In her new blather book, out this week and predictably titled The Babe in Boyland, the now nationally-syndicated radio sports gabber calls her ex-stomping ground “a hopeless zero” and “a fucked-up backwater town… filled with the dumbest people in the world.” Her KJR colleagues? “Small-time nobodies who thought that because they lived in Seattle they were some big deal and that the rest of the world should come kiss their asses.” To further prompt cheap over-reactions, she writes how when she moved here from Tampa she pledged to work to get the Mariners moved there. Her introduction even thanks Jeff Smulyan, the ex-Ms owner who tried to facilitate such a move, whom she calls one of her “true friends.” Yawn.

IT’S NEARLY TIME for our annual In/Out List. Your suggestions are now being accepted at Misc. World HQ. ‘Til then,ponder these improbably risque remarks attributed to Phyllis Schafly: “Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.”