As boosters of local small business, Misc. is pleased as punch that Hale’s Ales is building a new facility on Leary Way, but slightly saddened that it’s going to take over the site now occupied by one of my all-time favorite Seattle building names, the House of Hose.
DISCLAIMER OF THE WEEK (seen before a body-piercing segment on the Lifetime cable fashion show Ooh La La): “Warning! The following piece contains images some viewers may find sorta gross.”
THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”
STUFF I GET IN THE MAIL: Each week I get PR directives that just don’t warrant a complete column item, yet are good for at least a moment’s reflection. F’r instance: Ex-KCMU manager Chris Knab now leads seminars on how to make it in the music-marketing biz. The four-week course costs $149… There’s something out for this summer called the Carol Woir Slimsuit (“The Swimsuit With A Personality”), a one-piece women’s swimsuit with a built-in corset-like thingie. Its ads say “Lose An Inch, Gain The Glamour”… C-Space, a biweekly forum/ support meeting for local S/M pursuers, is hanging up its spikes for the last time after five years. Speaking of postal submissions…
NO MILK, THANKS: I was amused when a reader sent in six pages clipped from a Cheri magazine pictorial about nude waitresses at one “Big Cups Coffeehouse.” The story claims the café’s been in business in Seattle for four years. It’s all fictional, of course (it probably wouldn’t even be legal here). Florida and Texas, though, have had a tradition of novelty nude businesses (car washes, laundromats, donut shops, pool halls); so the concept might seem plausible to some Cheri readers. Speaking of stapled Seattle sightings…
THE GOOD LOAF: Somewhat more factual than the Cheri pictorial was the May Esquire article about Seattle’s “baby boom slackers,” whitebread liberal-arts grads of the magazine’s target demographic who used to have time-consumin’ bigtime careers but now hang out at the Honey Bear Bakery, having chosen “voluntary simplicity” instead of the work-hard-spend-hard ideology long advocated by the magazine. I certainly hope the mag’s readers will realize the selectivity it used. The story notes that only 70 percent of U.S. adult males now work full-time year-round at one job; but from personal knowledge I can assure you a lot of those guys walking around in the daytime with self-DTP’d “consultant” business cards aren’t there fully by choice. Not to mention the millions who haven’t had the chance to quit a well-paying job. Speaking of the world of work…
ON THE MAKE: Was reminded three times this month of the good ol’ days of American business, the days when this country was interested in making things instead of just marketing them. The first was the Times obit for Weyerhaeuser exec Norton Clapp. The article’s lead labeled Clapp with the now-quaint rubric of “industrialist.” The second was Our World, the monthly USA Today ad supplement touting things like new concrete-fabrication plants in ex-Soviet republics. The third was when I got to play with a friend’s CD-ROM drive. Among his discs was The Time Almanac, with texts and pix from old Time magazines thru the decades. But it didn’t have the real joy of collecting old Time issues, the ads. Old Time ads from the ’40s and ’50s are wonderful evocations of a time when the Opinion Makers of most towns outside NYC were bourbon-swillin’, tweed-wearin’ managers of small and midsize manufacturing plants. The ads pushed roller bearings, conveyor belts, commercial air conditioning systems, semi rigs, axle greases, grinding wheels, and all that other cool stuff you never see around the house. I’d much rather see more ads of that type than the ads you see in today’s Time for import luxury cars and prescription hair-growth tonic. Speaking of CD-ROMS…
WINDOW PEEPING: The thing about those new X-rated videos on CD-ROM is that the images are so small and lo-res, the old adage about risking blindness via overuse might in this case actually be true.
