WELCOME, POST-BUMBERSHOOTERS (and post-Ellensburg Rodeoers) to the fabulous fall preview edition of Misc., the column that knows satire is useless in a world where the Seattle Times discovers straight edge punk almost a decade after the genre’s heyday, a woman can get banned from Disneyland for excessive wheelchair speed, poultry processors can legally call frozen chickens “hard chilled” (sounds more like an ad slogan aimed at mall-rat homeboy wannabes), and jazz-vocal grande dame Nina Simone turns out to be a piece-packin’ threat to any young punk who gets in her way! (About a year ago I predicted rap would one day become as tame as jazz. I may have been wrong.)
A HEARTY GET-WELL WISH goes to art-music promoter Larry Reid. He and sometime partner Tracey Rowland were sideswiped by a car on 8/25 while driving their classic Italian scooters near Eastlake (Reid and Rowland helped run Seattle’s first scooter club in ’84). Reid hit the pavement head-first and was rushed to the hospital, where he was originally diagnosed with broken neck vertebrae. The next day an MRI scan showed just a few compressed discs. He’s home now but will have to take things easy for a while.
AD VERBS: Washington Mutual’s “Free Checking” billboard shows a checkbook with human female legs jogging at dawn. That’s not freedom, that’s rigorous discipline (which itself could be a positive metaphor for a bank, but that’s a whole other issue).
CATHODE CORNER: Harry Anderson, a member of the growing Hollywood colony out on the Puget Sound islands, wants to move production of his sitcom Dave’s World to Seattle after this upcoming season. It would be the first three-camera filmed sitcom shot outside LA since the ’50s. You can guess I don’t love the show, since I find nothing particularly amusing about the real-life Dave Barry (at least the show’s dropped the Billy Joel theme song). But after years of Florida trying to take away the Mariners (presumably over, now that it looks like Tampa’s getting an expansion team), it’d be fun to have a show set in Miami but made here.
WEBSITE OF THE WEEK: Dallas kid Scott Glazer’s Page of Evil, <<http://rampages.onramp.net/~scottgl/index.htm>>, contains an almost Shavian lambaste of fantasy-novel hack Piers Anthony: “Some (fantasy) authors start with the germ of a good idea in the first book of a series and grind it down to pure crap as the books wear on…. (Anthony) has the courage and wisdom to eliminate the hard work that comes along with coming up with that good idea, instead skipping to unmitigated smegma from book one, page one…. The number of books in the Xanth series has been proven to be equinumerous with aleph-zero; in other words, infinite. This is possible because it actually takes a negative amount of time to produce a Xanth novel.”
ALL YOU’LL EVER HEAR ME SAY ABOUT WINDOWS 95: Leno really was the perfect choice to emcee the Windows hypefest in Darkest Redmond (the talk-show host who’s almost as good as Letterman but not really, shilling for the operating software that’s almost as good as the Mac OS but not really). Still, I understand why Windows 95 could be considered a significant introduction in some quarters. So many people have been suckered into using Windows, and have been so frustrated by it over the past five years or so, that the promise of a Windows version that sucks even a little less is cause for celebration among ’em…. In other MS news, the company denies its talks about pouring money into Turner Broadcasting have anything to do with Turner’s desire to raise cash for a raid on CBS. Some observers called MS’s statement a retraction worded so it could itself be retracted later.
GROCERY UPDATE: You’ve got another week to send your recommendations for Seattle’s best food stores, in the convenience, small-supermarket (under 10,000 sq. ft.), regular-supermarket, superstore (over 20,000 sq. ft.) and ethnic categories. More info is at the Misc. World HQ website. Organizers of the mass letter-writing campaign on behalf of a certain gourmet boutique in Madrona may stop now.
