…of the Seattle Wonder Bread neon, which for decades drew people toward Seattle’s least-whitebread neighborhood?

…a long New Yorker review of yet another Playboy photo-retrospective book, critic Joan Acocella stumbles upon what I’ve long said is the secret behind the current centerfold “look”: Today’s Playmate spread is an advertisement for an unavailable “product,” presented with all the slick manipulation and “reverence” given, on other pages, to images of cars and whiskey bottles.

…I can fully endorse: “Save the 76 Ball!”

…you saw all those ads and billboards announcing that AT&T Wireless was now part of Cingular? Strike that; reverse it.

David Lynch is now evangelizing for Transcendental Meditation.

…to Charles Herring, Seattle’s and the Northwest’s first TV newscaster (at KING from 1951 to 1967), who passed away this Monday.

Herring’s solid, if square, demeanor helped give the new medium of local TV news a brand of credibility, back in those pre-sound-bite, pre-helicopter days. He’s best known today for his live coverage of the 1962 World’s Fair, preserved on kinescope films and excerpted in many subsequent documentaries.

His final newscast was immediately followed by his appearance in a filmed commercial for White Front, a discount-store chain expanding into the area from California. Herring’s straight-shooting reputation didn’t do much to boost White Front, which folded within six years. (A small subsidiary chain, Toys “R” Us, survived.)

Around the time White Front disappeared, Herring’s son Chuck briefly ran a bookstore on Capitol Hill and self-pubilshed his own essay book, If I Don’t Do This, I’ll Never Do Anything. The “this” the younger Herring was struggling to do? Pubilsh that very book.

The elder Herring ran a mom-and-pop radio station in Port Angeles, then returned to Seattle and worked in Boeing’s industrial-video unit until 1987.

Even many jaded Seattle bohemians, the kind of guys who snootily disdain all pro team sports in America (especially football), are tonight expressing joyous anticipation over the Seahawks’ potential Super Bowl-qualifying game Sunday afternoon. Bars that never show sports are bringing in TVs to show this game.

In the larger scheme of things, a pro sports championship doesn’t mean much. The Hawks’ success thus far has meant an upturn in ratings for KCPQ and KIRO-AM, and an upturn in revenue for many of the local bars that had been facing uncertain post-smoking futures.

But there’s something less tangible at work here.

Amid a miserably wet winter, in a city that’s been battered by economic stagnation, in a nation still withering under the iron thumb of a frat-bully junta, the Hawks’ spectacular game play and (with a few exceptions) great sportsmanship have brought at least symbolic hope to thousands. Yes: We can succeed, even triumph, against all odds and despite all the naysayers. With talent and teamwork and attitude, we can get it done.

…(a name we’re gonna have to give up once CRT televisions finally die off): You may have seen a Comcast cable commercial that looks amazingly like an old episode of that game-show favorite, The $20,000 Pyramid. How’d they do it? They dubbed the audio, and digitally altered the video, from a real episode!

Tablet, a monthly freebie newsprint mag of local fashion, music, and whatnot, is calling it quits after five years.

I was a peripheral participant in the team that launched Tablet, and can now tell how it came to be. Everything in the beginning was by consensus vote, including an hour-long debate over what to call the publishing company (not the publication itself; that came later). Two early collective decisions would eventually lead to my leaving the mag. It was decided that (1) the mag would shamelessly suck up to every potential advertiser with uncritical reviews and hype-profile pieces, and (2) no writers would ever get paid. While I’m at least partly thankful this business plan proved ultimately insufficient to create a profitable publication, I’m still sad to see the mag go. We need all the voices we can get, ya know.

RANDOM PHOTO PHRIDAY returns after an absence of way too many months.

To begin, this recently-opened used car lot on Aurora takes its sign letters from a prior business further up the street, Sure-Fit Seat Covers. You can’t tell in this shot, but the “A” is an upside-down “U.”

I know I read somewhere what company this airship is advertising. But the article ran in a daily paper several days ago, and I’ve already forgotten it.

YES, EVEN upscale megamalls can experience the occasional identity crisis.

The new narrower P-I arrived at my doorstep this morning. The new narrower Seattle Times is in the vending box outside my building.

As promimsed/threatened over the previous week, the papers are an inch narrower than they were before, as are many other papers around the country these days. (The narrower size has become the de facto standard for national full-page newspaper ads.)

I still don’t see how the narrower page saves paper. In order to fit the same amount of square-inchage of editorial and ad space, a paper would have to add pages. The smaller page size means the ratio of ink area to trim area is smaller, so more paper is unprinted-upon, not less.

No, the only way this scheme can save paper is if (1) advertisers are charged the same amount of money for less space, and (2) the news hole is similarly cramped. But those measures could be accomplished on the old page size. So the expensive retooling of massive printing presses is all for show, for telling fickle stockholders that we’re really doing something to keep those unreasonable promises of 20 percent profit margins.

And as for the excising of approximately one-eighth of the papers’ news holes, I’ve always been a brevity fan. There’s no need for any paper that’s not the NY Times to try to write like the NY Times. Heck, even the Times of London writes short-n’-sweet.

NOW LISTENING TO Music Out of Century 21, a Seattle World’s Fair tie-in LP that even I hadn’t known about until last week, when it was offered online at the out-of-print music site The Collector. (It’s since “scrolled off” from that site, alas; scroll down this link to read about the disc).

It turns out to have been the product of Atello Mineo, creator of the even more wacked-out World’s Fair disc Man in Space With Sounds, and his wife Toni. (The credited “artist” on Music Out of Century 21 is big-band conductor Vincent Lopez.) This one’s not as far-out as Man in Space (pun intended, as always). But it’s still a smash, a dozen tracks of lushy lounge sounds that snap in a beat from syrupy strings to badass brass to swooning choristers. The listening experience is only enhanced by the fact that I’m watching the Space Needle out my window whilst listening to the tuneage, in the century that evoked such high hopes way back then.

…in ad-industry lingo, as “a promise which cannot be legally substantiated.”

…of cultural contradiction I live for–using an anti-coal-mining folk song to promote more coal mining!

…to Thurl Ravenscroft, whose deep resonant voice was heard in Disneyland singing-robot-animal shows, old time radio, religious albums, Elvis records, the animated film The Brave Little Toaster (as Kirby the vacuum cleaner), the original How the Grinch Stole Christmas (singing “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch”), and in commercials for over half a century as Tony the Tiger.