…offers great deals on those two great tastes that taste great together–candy bars and diabetes test machines.

JUST SOME RANDOM shots today. Have a nice weekend.

I’m kinda-sorta intrigued by the Scion, Toyota’s new unabashedly-boxy compact wagon, just starting to be sold in the U.S. But the website blows. All demographic-target-marketed, it’s an over-the-top laff riot in trying to identify the vehicle with hot young photo models. (One page even proudly uses the gag-phrase “Generation Y!”) Let’s hope, when Scions do become widely available, that the car’s better than the ads.

One can only wish they’d change the name to Finko’s. But then again, those corporate types never listen to me. When Phillips 66 bought Union 76, they refused my suggestion to change the name to 142.

Who’d’ve thunk it? Noam Chomsky, academic-left theoretician and author of obscure incendiary anti-Bush tracts, has become a famous enough name, at least in this town, to become an ad slogan for a regional chain of seven bookstores.

You know you’re a word-usage freak when this sign makes you stop and think not about its message, but about whether it should say “1 in 7 is” or “1 in 7 are.”

Above and below, anonymous sidewalk chalk art found downtown.

AS OF TODAY, we’ve replaced some of the banner ads on this site with text ads serviced thru Google.

The previous ad supplier paid very little, offered few ads for things our readers would want to buy, had a lot of quesitonable ad content (pop overs, pop unders, strobe animations), and represented some questionable ad categories (Net casinos, mass-email address harvesters, military recruiters). The revenue I received for all this was less than the minimum-wage equivalent of the time I spent once or twice a month deleting ads I didn’t want on this site.

Google ads operate on a keyword system, based on topics found on the site. Since this site discusses so many different topics, it might be be fun to see what ads show up in the ad box over the next few weeks.

I’m going to take that as a challenge to discuss as many different things here as I can. Expect to read fervent, lucid discussions concerning the following and more:

• How the new Everett hockey team may fare this season against the perennial Western Hockey League powerhouses (including Moose Jaw, Medicine Hat, and my favorite, the Brandon Wheat Kings).
• Those new fangled cell phone vibrators, and all the potential puns to be generated therefrom.
• The coming closure of the Seattle Independent Media Center’s downtown storefront after four years, and whether an organization dedicated to opposing big business needed to have been situated in a building with big-business rents.
• Why Duck Dodgers is the best animated show of the year and the best revival of a classic Warner character since ’64.
• Proper ways to celebrate Friday’s seventieth anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. (Perhaps the Lushy gig at the Intl. District’s new Vesper Lounge).
• How many licks really are needed to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

MORE THAN A HUNDRED grocery, drug, and hardware store staples of the near and far past can be seen again at The American Package Museum.

…conduct a Google search for “male names,” the following is the first resulting link:

“1. Save money when purchasing ‘male’ on eBay!.
Find male and related items on eBay!. Discover for yourself why millions of people purchase items on eBay..”

SINCE IT’S BEEN A FEW DAYS since we added to this site, here’s a few images that speak for themselves.

When drug companies figured out how to market it as one.

…who passed away earlier this month at age 76, was one of the perennial fringe figures on the Seattle entertainment/journalism scenes. The former editor of the freebie tabloid Fun Weekly, Goldman established and kept his name on movie publicists’ lists. He kept getting onto studios’ press junkets to NY and LA even in his latter years, when Goldman’s only outlet for his always-positive reviews was a cable access show.

Goldman was like the fictional reviewer in the old Spy magazine, billed as “the publicist’s best friend,” who could be counted upon to call any piece of Hollywood tripe the next surefire Oscar hit. It can now be told that Goldman particularly loved junkets if they involved an opportunity to interview a hot young male starlet.

But at his center he knew he was on the periphery of a multi-billion-buck industry, and he knew his self-appointed place was to say and do what the studios wanted him to. It was his unbridled enthusiasm-for-sale that made him the colorful character he was.

FOR THE FIRST TIME in thirty-five years, there’s a major-party Presidential candidate with one of my names. I am, as you might expect, gonna collect all the “Clark in 2004” merch I can latch onto; even though I’d probably not vote for that other Clark. (Behind the empty slogans about “vision” and “leadership,” he appears at this early point to be just another of Clinton’s lite-right corporate wusses. If any of you disagree, I’d love hear from you.)

I’m also collecting any and all “Win With Clark”-type online logos, graphics, and headlines. If you know of a good source for these, pass ’em along.

Now comes the real question–should I take the metaphoric leap and announce my own candidacy?

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, you’ll all be treated to the sights of the most recent Western Washington Fair (aka “The Puyallup”)

In its 102nd year (not counting the WWII years when its site was used as a Japanese-American internment camp), the fair was its ever-lovin’ boot-stompin’ best, an entertainment and people-watchin’ spectacle at least equal to anything staged at Seattle Center.

(I suspect it’d even be a superior fun-time to that certain tres-overhyped googah in the desert Southwest if said googah didn’t have any nekkid people.)

My date for the afternoon was a devout vegan who, for some reason, didn’t know beforehand that the cows on display at the fair were likely to become next month’s filet mignon–until she ran into a Beef Marketing Board counter in the beef-cattle barn, offering free samples from some of the same breeds lolling about in the stalls.

On a more immediately practical level, my companion found nothing that met her strict dietary standards at the fair’s dozens of fast-food stands (all non-chain; many run by third-generation families that have become cozy insiders with fair management). If just a few of these ol’ standbys were asked to give up some of their multiple stands around the fairgrounds, other folk could join ’em with a wider variety of meal/snack offerings.

One could easily imagine an allegedly “healthy” food concessionaire who could hype their wares as part of the fair’s original mission of promoting agriculture in Washington. They could promote their entrees, salads, desserts, energy drinks, etc. as products from higher-profit-margin crops that could fiscally save some family farms.

Why heck, such a food stand could even cross-promote its wheatgrass shakes and veggie platters with the guys who hawk blenders and choppers in the Modern Living barns.

I’M STILL FEELING ERRATIC ACHES and dizzy spells at varying times of the day following my recent panic-type episode. (I’m still waiting for at least one reader to email their sympathies.)

But I did get to spend most of Friday at Bumbershoot.

Firstly, I spotted this loving pair on the way to what band’s set? (C’mon, it’s an E-Z guess.) (OK, the answer’s at the bottom of this post.)

Prior to that, however, I got to see plenty-O-rockin’-action at the Exhibition Hall, starting with the wonderful Visqueen.

Later, during The Divorce’s set in the same space, I finally got my very own Charles Peterson moment.

Beer gardens are everywhere on the B-shoot grounds, in keeping with the festival’s ongoing capitulation to the national mania for revenue enhancement. The Ex Hall’s beer garden is festooned with lovely Lava Lites and similar products.

Jessica Lurie performed a typical mind-blastin’ set with her ensemble at the Northwest Court stage.

The Bumbrella Stage’s banners include plugs for two sponsors I’d never expected to see on the same piece of screen-printed fabric.

One big change this year: The Small Press Book Fair was turned into the Ink Spot. Its aesthetic premise was also changed, from circa 1973 (Port Townsend-esque nature poetry) to circa 1983 (punk zines). Above, local zine vet Gregory Hischack (Farm Pulp).

(Answer: Modest Mouse, of course.)

…I’d even do what this guy’s doing.

ONE OF THE TEMPORARILY-REVEALED old advertising signs on the north face of the Commodore Hotel on Second Avenue, during the construction of the condo tower where Bethel Temple had been.

SOMETIME NEXT MONTH, Belltown’s first worthy cyber-cafe successor to the burnt-down Speakeasy Cafe will come in the form of the new Zeitgeist/Top Pot branch on Fifth Avenue. Coffee, donuts, free Wi-Fi, art, and a large meeting space.