…to so skillfully manipulate his wand that a beautiful girl ends up on her back, smiling angelically and floating beyond the bounds of earthly reality. (Found at the Pioneer Square Magic Shop.)

WHEN MCDONALD’S REOPENED its Third and Pine branch earlier this year (it was shut while the upstairs was remodeled into moderate-income housing units), they didn’t bring back the loud country music they’d formerly blasted out onto the sidewalk in a futile attempt to repel street loiterers. Instead, they had Ronald himself give a proxy warning.

(BTW: A fan site called McBurgers offers recipes it claims resemble the chain’s original formulae, and insists McD’s current market-share troubles would be solved if the company went back to the way it used to make things, before the efficiency experts and cost-cutters started messing everything up.)

A SURE SIGN OF SUMMER in the city: An elegant barefooted lady relaxing with her PowerBook.

Posting from a Net-cafe again today. My re-un-fixed laptop went back to the shop (actually to some central repair facility in Houston) today.

FUN QUOTE #1 (Snoop Doggy Dogg in the SeaTimes on women who’ve complained about his fully-clothed MC jobs on Girls Gone Wild videos–specifically, women who’ve complained about the lack of Af-Am breast-barers in the videos): “They’ve been complaining to me like crazy… They think I like the white girls because I’m on there with them, and I don’t, I just did that for money.”

FUN QUOTE #2 (Vendetta Red singer Zach Davidson in the same SeaTimes issue, on having become the client of an LA-based voice teacher): “He’s very good at that, how to preserve your voice. … When your voice goes, it’s like losing your penis.”

…here’s something to remind you of the joys of winter, sort of.

THE LINE TO GET IN to the new Apple Store in Bellevue Square on its opening day this past Saturday was pleasant and intelligent. Macheads from all over the greater Puget Sound country lingered for as long as two hours to get the chance to buy their hardware and software factory-direct, to temporarily enter the source of theie beloved computing platform.

It was a gathering of the tribe, sharing lively conversation augmented by opened iBooks and PowerBooks. (The store has a free-access WiFi transmitter, also receivable from the nearby Nordstrom espresso stand.)

Inside the brightly lit, cleanly appointed store: Your basic hardware selection of laptops, desktops, monitors, MP3 players, printers, digital still and video cameras, etc.; two big wall displays of software boxes; a customer-service desk pop-pretentiously christened “The Genius Bar;” and big billboards promoting Apple’s new paid music-download service.

The Apple Store doesn’t have anything, with the possible exception of a few third-party software titles, you can’t get for the same price or less at The Computer Store, CompUSA, or other outlets, or online. No, the appeal of the Apple Store is the opportunity to immerse oneself in the brand, to experience Apple Computer as a tangible real-world thang and not just a presence inside the screen.

GOT BACK TO SEATTLE in time to see the last of the Maritime Festival and tugboat races on the waterfront.

JOSEPH P. KAHN TRIES TO EXPLAIN the rash of movie and product names starting with the letter “X.” No, it’s not so they’ll be listed first in reverse alphabetical order.

AS IF YOU HAVEN’T GUESSED IT, there’ve apparently been no big mass-destrux weapons caches in Iraq. Saddam really was only a threat to his own people.

THE MAJOR RECORD LABELS are rumored to be commissioning virus-type software programs that’d be posted within, or under the titles of, online music files, in order to instill fear into the hearts of MP3 traders. I’m old enough to vaguely remember when the record co.’s claimed to be rebels, or at least friendly vendors of rebellious attitudes. Today’s music monoliths might market one-dimensional celeb images of bad boys and naughty girls, but that’s no more “rebellious” than the sight of Republican politicians on Harleys.

TODAY WE BEGIN a new occasional photo series, Space Available, depicting some of the once-productive retail and office real estate currently made redundant by today’s economic collapse.

…the recently-ubiquitous “No Iraq War” posters is dead. Morgan Griffin, 66, was a retired Seattle Symphony bassoonist who’d survived several obscure illnesses and had learned to live his life to the fullest. His was a life from which we all could learn a thing or three.

…to “Value Added Marketing” and “The Fake Little Laugh That Means ‘Bad Acting,'” Phil Agre’s compiled a long, thoughtful, personal list of “Minor Annoyances and What They Teach Us.”

IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).

THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:

• SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE got sold out from under itself by its Atlanta conglomerate owner. SBC and its Torrefazione Italia sub-chain will be absorbed into Starbucks’ operations, with only the brand names continuing to exist. Thus ends what had been one of Seattle’s hottest retail rivalries since the demise of the Frederick & Nelson department store. (SBC is technically a year older than Starbucks, tracing its roots to a 1970-vintage Seattle Center House ice-cream stand called the Wet Whisker.) The hipster crowd has already publicly eschewed both chains in favor of mom-‘n’-pop indie cafes. Last winter, the Stranger essentially chided local indie Cafe Ladro as being too chainlike to be truly cool, despite having a mere eight stores.
• APPLE COMPUTER said it would open one of its own retail stores in Bellevue Square, invading not only the home turf of Microsoft but also that of Computer Stores Northwest, one of the country’s top independent Apple-only retailers.
• THE SONICS’ SEASON ended quietly with a decisive, meaningless victory over the Phoenix Suns. The team’s ought-two/ought-three campaign really ended weeks ago with the Gary Payton trade; it’s been in rebuilding and reloading mode ever since.
• ACT THEATER said it had raised enough emergency donations to would survive for the time being, albeit with major cutbacks. Let’s hope it gets back to the funky, audience-friendly aesthetic of its heritage, after a half-decade of dot-com-era largesse and pretentions.
• KCTS KICKED its longtime president Burnill Clark into early retirement and fired 35 employees. Yeah, it’s a recessionary cutback, but it also marks the end, at least for now, of the Seattle PBS affiliate’s years-long drive to become a major player in supplying national network programming. The ambitious venture generated some great shows (particularly Greg Palmer’s Vaudeville and Death: The Trip of a Lifetime). The loss of KCTS’s network-production unit is another setback for the local film/video production community, already struggling under the dual blows of the overall economic ickiness and cheap Canadian filming.
• THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT announced it would replace its “Artist’s Journey” attraction, the least museum-like and most theme-park-esque of its offerings, with a separate museum of science fiction memorabilia. It only makes sense for an institution founded upon computer-nerd largesse to partially rededicate itself to the nerds’ most favoritist art form of them all. You might beg the question: Will it be tacky? I damn hope so.

…you’re promoting as a simple, reliable machine? How about with a two-minute, one-continuous-take TV commercial that reuses the car’s parts as a Rube Goldberg invention?

…things to say about this current mess, I’ve gone back to a couple of the past century’s most famous social thinkers. So have some other present-day commentators.

I’m about a third of the way through a dog-eared used paperback copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. The pop-critic’s best known “serious” book popularized the catch phrases “the medium is the message” and “global village.” But it also presented a detailed, reasonably coherent worldview, built around the human senses and how various generations of media effect/extend/attack/desensitize/alter them. He claimed it was the phonetic alphabet, more than roads or weapons or force of will, that brought about the Roman Empire, and by extension the later western powers’ conquests around the world. My the mid-20th century (the book came out in ’64; he was working on it as early as ’59), the “cool medium” of TV (as defined by the degree of the audience’s attention and involvement) was overtaking such “hot media” as radio and movies. This, McLuhan claimed, was starting to change North American society’s whole perceptions and attitudes.

A recent symposium in NYC discussed how these and other McLuhan theories could be used to try to make sense of the current nonsense.

Certainly, the war is the ultimate example of what later PoMo media theorists called “The Spectacle.” It’s both a real war with real death and a media event made with an eye toward home-front PR. TV has become a “hotter” medium since McLuhan’s time (more detailed, less aloof), and live war coverage is “hotter” still. Sleaze-talk radio, the Bushies’ favorite medium, is ultra “hot” by McLuhan’s definition: It not only gives a dumbed-down, one-sided worldview, it orders its listeners precisely how to respond—with anti-intellectual, passive-aggressive obedience.

I’ve previously referred to demagogue radio as a 24-hour version of the “Two-Minutes Hate” scene in George Orwell’s 1984. Lots of folk have noticed the increasing parallels between Orwell’s world and ours. Among them: A new satirical student group, Students for an Orwellian Society. (Slogan: “Because 2003 is 19 years too late.”)

Certainly we’ve got a milieu of economic catastrophe for all but the members of the “inner party,” a regime that loves war, loathes sex, vilifies rational thought, and thrives on fear. The regime wants total knowledge and control of every citizen’s thoughts, words, and deeds. It preaches eternal self-sacrifice for the masses but reserves untold priviliges for itself. Its media minions disseminate nonstop war “coverage,” deliberate detailed lies, exhortations toward “patriotic” fervor, and demonizations against all perceived opponents.

But today’s Republican INGSOC doesn’t yet have the total power its agenda ultimately requires. It might never attain that total power. In the Internet age, information and communication may be unstoppably diffuse, despite the monopolistic efforts of Fox and Clear Channel. Neotribalism, multiculturalism, and the media’s own push toward fractured demographics mean there’s no undifferentiated mass of “proles” to be easily controlled.

But a gang that can’t get total power can still inflict a lot of damage trying to get it.

CBC just ran a commercial for Zero brand liquid detergent, promising a goth-gal it would keep her clothes their blackest.

…is among the creators of copyright-free, print-out-yourself badge and banner designs at Another Poster for Peace.

TODAY, SOME IMAGES from the past five days of local protests. As in the 1991 war, these were centered at the Federal Building. And as in the 1991 war, they tactically differed from the prewar protests.

The prewar protests included broad coalitions of groups, including labor unions and churches. They were devised to bring as many people as possible to one place at one time.

Last week’s protests were largely coordinated by the Radical Women/Freedom Socialist Party. They were devised as long vigils with a couple of extra highlighted gathering times (particularly Thursday evening). This diffused the number of potential participants, and emphasized the role of those for whom protesting is a year-round way of life.

That meant the speakers’ podium was dominated by dudes (almost all of whom were bearded) and dudettes who wanted to tie in the Iraq war with darned near everything else they didn’t like, from McDonald’s and health-care budget cuts to the capitalist system in general.

Even if we’re not doing this primarily for how it will look in the media, it’d still be to our advantage if it didn’t look like only the lifestyle-leftists still wanted peace. We need the experienced dedicated protestors; but we need to keep the rest of the populace in this as well. And that means bigger coalitions creating bigger events, which also recruit people from all walks-O-life into ongoing works in the more boring parts of the task (organizing, letter-writing, etc.)

IN OTHER NEWS, J.C. Penney had a commercial during the Oscars with average suburban young-women’s clothes modeled on screen while an off-screen singer proclaimed “I’m a One-Girl Revolution.” What if we had a 200-million-girl-and-boy revolution that was about something other than wearing different clothes?

What would an actual revolution be like today? What would be replaced, and what would it be replaced with? Any ideas? Lemme know.

WIRED MAGAZINE put out its tenth-anniversary issue last month. Its contents will appear on its website once the issue disappears from the stands.

The issue contains a big section in which the mag, now run by the Conde Nast empire, relived its heritage as the most rah-rah, corporate-hip, cheerleader of the ’90s tech boom in all its manifestations. Particularly noticable are all the excerpts from pieces in which the magazine’s original regime emphatically insisted that “the old rules” of just about everything no longer applied. (With one exception: It once insisted the only way Microsoft could become a company it could approve of was to move to Silicon Valley, because “the Evergreen State is still the sticks.”)

In the world of the old Wired, everything was either Wired (hip) or Tired (square).

What was invariably deemed “Wired:” Giant corporations built up from nothing. Hyper-luxury lifestyles. CEO celebrity cults. Stratospheric stock prices for companies that had never earned a dime. Stock markets that would rise, rise, and keep rising into infinity. Unabashed greed and individual ambition. Power tripping. The relentless thumpa-thumpa of generic techno music. Sex redefined as individual pleasure (hence the “dildonics” fantasies for futuristic elaborate masturbation machines).

What was invariably deemed “Tired:” Thrift. Quiet dignity. Long-term relationships, other than with financial advisors. Labor unions. Health-care reform. Poor people. Caring about poor people. People in rural areas who didn’t move there from a city. Cities in North America that weren’t San Francisco. The “old media.” France. Environmental laws. Minimum-wage laws. Governments in general, except when subsidizing businesses. Literary genres other than science fiction. Movies without special effects.

True to past form, the magazine follows this nudge at its old arrogance with a big bit of new arrogance, in the form of a long cover story extolling hydrogen power, for cars and just about everything else. It’s a nice idea (a clean-burning fuel-O-the-future that emits only water vapor).

But you have to use some other generation system to make hydrogen. Windmills and solar panels could be used for that; but the corporate energy czars would rather promote “more fully developed” technologies—petroleum, coal, and especially nuclear power. The Wired piece goes on to suggest environmentalists should start loving nukes, as long as they’re being used to make hydrogen, and insists there are no safety or waste-disposal problems with today’s nuke-plant designs.

But then an article in the back of the same issue, about the eternally pesky issues regarding permanent radioactive-waste disposal, reminds us we’ve heard those no-problem promises before.