LEARN INSTANTLY HOW TO GET to any address in the contiguous states, and how many McDonald’s meals you can eat along the way!

I honestly have no idea why Google Ads thinks my readers would go to Wal-Mart for punk rock discs.

LOCAL LABEL BlueDisguise Records has a long site chronicling record covers imitating previous record covers. It’s seven pages, filled with tiny images. And they haven’t even gotten into the 1994 fake-Blue-Note cover fad!

…can be found at the most unlikely of places–a stock-music website. You can also listen to extensive samples of its industrial tuneage.)

…formerly the Rhodes of Seattle department store, began to come down during the same week that M. Lamont Bean, who closed Rhodes and turned its suburban branches into the Lamonts apparel chain, passed away.

Bean’s story was one of your classic rise-and-fall (or should I say rise n’ fall?) tales. He started as a protege to his dad Monte Bean, who’d bought the Tradewell grocery chain and opened the first Pay n’ Save pharmacy at Fourth and Pike. Bean fils built Pay n’ Save into 300 stores in 10 states. He further built his “Family of Stores” empire by buying Ernst Hardware, Malmo Nurseries, Rhodes (which begat Lamonts), and Seattle Sporting Goods (which begat SportsWest). By the ’70s, it seemed like every other strip mall in Washington was anchored either by Pay n’ Save/Ernst or Pay n’ Save/Tradewell.

But a takeover bid for Schuck’s Auto Supply left him in debt and vulnerable to a 1984 takeover by New York financiers Julius and Eddie Trump (no relation to Donald). They sold off the Bean chains, piece by piece.

Pay n’ Save, including the Fourth and Pike flagship, is now absorbed into Rite Aid. What’s left of Lamonts is now part of Gottschalk’s. Ernst and SportsWest have disappeared altogether. Only Schuck’s, the buy that broke Bean, remains under its original name (though now merged with two other regional chains under parent company CSK Auto).

BRAVE SIGN INSTALLERS at the Kenneth Cole store (where Lamont Bean’s Ernst used to have its flagship outlet) unwittingly turn themselves into image props for giant-woman fetishists everywhere.

TELL ME AGAIN why I’m supposed to want to live someplace else?

JUST IN TIME for the tenth anniversary of his leaving us, fresh Cobain shirt designs are in the tourist shops.

ANYONE REMEMBER Professor Egghead?

THE MIDWAY DRIVE-IN on Highway 99 north of Tacoma, more recently just used as a Swap & Shop site, is gonna be razed for a Lowe’s and a strip mall. Where’s Joe Bob Briggs when we need him? Oh yeah–he’s got religion now.

IN HONOR of the passing of the darkest 13 weeks of the pagan year, some random rain pix for Photo Phriday.

I’M HAVING FUN seeing the text ads Google’s bots choose to put upon this page. The day after I posted some particularly anti-Bush stuff here, the ad box started offering T-Shirts to help you “show support for President Bush.” But then again, perhaps the ad bots are reacting the way some of you readers have reacted to my stuff over the years, and just assume I’m kidding when I’m really not.

…so of course I’m gonna love Signs of Life, a site devoted to ’em.

OH WELL, guess I’m gonna hafta grab all the “Clark for President” buttons and bumper stickers while I still can.

Someone at Slashdot, in a comment that seems to have scrolled off the site, wrote:

“In a country where it’s okay to fry mentally ill people to death, let any eejit carry a gun, consume a huge proportion of the world’s resources and invade a country for dubious reasons, exposing a bit of human flesh is greeted with the sort of outrage that you’d think would be reserved for the end of the world.”

Of course, that’s the whole point. The right-wing sleaze machine loves violence (physical, verbal, emotional, etc.) and loathes sex (especially pleasurable, loving, or otherwise “girly” sex).

And the youth-marketing industry, which devised the Super Bowl halftime and most of the Super Bowl commercials, loves everything hard and “edgy” and hates anything soft and subtle. Faced with record-low TV viewership levels among the corporately-prized young male demographic, marketers are trying to outdo one another in vulgarity and desperation. It’s not that their audiences want this; it’s what they, the marketers, want their would-be audiences to want.

So, in the commercials, we got “jokes” about the following: A farting horse, little children saying a bleeped-out cussword, a wheelchair crash, a dog biting a man’s testicles, a talking monkey hitting on a woman, an old man beating an old woman, a football referee refusing to talk to a nagging wife, a man getting an unexpected bikini wax, and the very idea that a skinny man could love a heavy woman. All of these were just fine-‘n’-dandy with CBS and the NFL. (As were the two erectile-dysfunction-drug commercials, one of which included explicit language.)

In a further attempt to attract young nonviewers, CBS turned the halftime festivities over to sister company MTV. It staged a predictably rude and trite affair with mercifully short performances by has-beens Kid Rock, P. Diddy, Justin Timberlake, and Janet Jackson. Aside from Jackson’s reprise of the oldie “Rhythm Nation,” all the lyrics were about rude dudes boasting of their sexual-conquistadory prowess. Again, all that was OK’d in advance by all concerned.

Then, in the last dance move of the show, Timberlake (a mediocre dancer-singer known primarily for his write-ups in the gossip pages as the first boy to spear Britney) ripped open Jackson’s tear-away blouse and, officially “accidentally,” slipped her bra off as well.

This is far from the first “costume accident” on broadcast TV. (Remember Lucy Lawless’s rendition of the U.S. national anthem at a hockey game back in ’99?)

And CBS has been willing to show seminude women in recent years–as C.S.I. corpses, or as Chicago Hope hospital patients. And the network runs the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, but that’s all edgy and teasy, the way the Super Bowl was supposed to be.

But, like that other youth-marketing vehicle Maxim, rude-‘n’-crude’s OK, but pure physical beauty’s taboo beyond taboo.

Jeff Laurie at Sex News Daily claims the Jackson flash was newsworthy because “like most breasts, it’s scarce, and seeing it is getting a sneak peak at the forbidden fruit.” Uncovered breasts, of course, are far less scarce than they used to be. They’re in fashion magazines, in Oscar-winning movies, on Emmy-winning cable shows, and all over the Internet. But they’re not in “edgy” youth marketing, which is all about forever teasing and never pleasing.

And they’re not in the right-wing bombast culture, forever stuck in the sixth-grade notion that boys who like to blow stuff up are Real Men, but that boys who like girls are faggots.

So now we have, as a blatantly cynical election-year stunt, the Bush FCC promising a swift and thorough investigation into the incident; all while the Bushies keep stalling about 9/11, the Cheney energy plan, and the lack of real causes for invading Iraq.

What does it all prove? That in a supposedly sexed-up pop culture, one of the purest, simplest forms of sexual expression still threatens certain powerful interests–precisely because it threatens the premises of their power.

HERE ARE the two most important parts of the big football telecast:

• Janet Jackson’s attempt to prove, once and for all, she and Michael are different people.
• The anti-tobacco ad that wasn’t by a tobacco company, TheTruth.com’s “Shards O’ Glass.”

The game itself was a surprisingly tight, action-packed affair, ending with a last-second field goal. And it was won by the northern team (the New England Patriots), barely beating the southern team (the Carolina Panthers). Perhaps it’s an omen that someone from, say, Vermont or Massachusetts might whoop a certain adopted Texan later this year.

…to have a great main-title screen, but it helps. I’m talking about great typography, great composition, and even a little razzle-dazzle (“First National Pictures, Inc. Presents Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stupendous Story of Adventure and Romance–THE LOST WORLD”).

Also note the “busy-ness” of Golden Age main titles. The Thin Man‘s title screen includes not just the name of the movie but five of its stars, the director, the producer, the MGM name and logo, a copyright notice, and MGM’s old “Controlled by Loew’s Incorporated” bug. And in the background you can see a mockup cover of the original novel, with author Dashiell Hammett’s name clearly visible. And it’s elegant, not cluttered-looking at all. These days, a studio will commission graphic-design specialists to create snazzy logos for a film’s print advertising, and even give these designers screen credit in the film, but only use a plain, small-print typeface for the on-screen title itself.

When you see a beautiful title screen, you know the filmmakers have at least made an attempt at classic showmanship. If you just see the movie’s name in some common desktop-publishing font, why bother watching the rest?

…coming this weekend to Consolidated Works. But the video promo for the event, which asks the question “What Is Erotic?”, isn’t erotic. But, natch, the promo was meant to be non-erotic. It was made by a bigtime ad agency and aimed at the same target audience everything in Seattle seems to be aimed at (squarer-than-square baby boomers).

…to fashion photographer Helmut Newton, the king of opulant sleaze, and to Bob “Captain Kangaroo” Keeshan, the king of wholesome salesmanship.

During Keeshan’s heyday, some Seattle-area viewers occasinally wrote in to the daily papers complaining that KIRO-TV showed only the second half-hour of Kangaroo so it could run the more local, and more light-entertainment oriented, J.P. Patches (see the right-hand side of this page). I’m personally glad both hosts got to be seen, because each had his own set of messages and each cared about us young’uns in his different way.