HERE’S A SITE promoting a real-life in-person museum attraction, Tennessee’s Museum of Beverage Containers and Advertising. Makes one thirsty just lookin’ at it….

…to officially licensed Spice Girls lollipops and Canadian Ritz crackers shaped like the National Hockey League’s logo, a world of colorful snack-packaging’s yours at the Museum of Foreign Groceries. (Found by Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

…and I’m sure you’ll also go for the smart but not too-slick poster art of Jeff Kleinsmith.

SEVERAL OTHERS have had the same idea we expressed here a few weeks back, calling for men to valiantly employ their manhood in the service of peace. F’rinstance, a couple dozen Floridians have joined a “Men for Peace” contingent, organized (natch) by two women, and posed in a nude tableau for pro-peace photos.

MONIKER MADNESS DEPT.: Reader Terry Hickman has a suggestion for our recent rename-the-USA query: Corporatia.

…Punk: Pistols to Present, a 25-year retrospective that actually includes some of the pioneer acts often forgotten in such retrospectives (Damned, Runaways, Buzzcocks). The VJ’s background set and the show’s “bumper” logos (what you see before and after the commercial breaks), however, look creepily like the work of a corporate ad agency trying to ape a punk look (PoMo-ironic drawings of safety pins, “graffiti” typefaces). The “…to Present” side of the show’s equation is heavy on the MTV-friendly side of ’90s alternarock. Green Day is playing as I write this; I fully expect to see the Offspring and Stone Temple Pilots by the show’s end. I also expect to not see Fugazi. SO: Decide for yourself. Tribute? Exploitation? All of the above?

(Update: Further on in the show, there’s a No Doubt video and a documentary segment about a display of oldtime punk DIY posters—at a Levi’s-sponsored summer package tour!)

(Further Update: The show concludes with the predictable pairing of “God Save the Queen” and the newly-released Nirvana outtake song.)

This holiday season, you can give the special lady in your life a genuine Hello Kitty “shoulder massage” stick, which, the page linked herein notes, can also be used “for other purposes.”

“The left needs a marketing director.”

It’s been about a month and a half since we last had a new photo essay on the site. So let’s get caught up, starting with the ever-fiscally-important day after Thanksgiving. This particular day started in downtown Seattle the way most days start, with men waiting for the temporary main library to open. Some of these men are homeless, seeking a place to sit indoors while the shelters are closed. Others are simply retired or unemployed, seeking a morning’s worth of free entertainment and/or learning.

The “Buy Nothing Day” kids were out in force, denouncing squaresville commercialism without positing any positive alternatives. The sign depicted above was made, and then defaced, by a fan of Adbusters magazine pretending to be a conservative.

(Left-wing parodies of right-wing attitudes almost always get it wrong—nobody on the right ever speaks specifically for such lefty-insult terms as “commodification ” or “patriarchy.” Right-wing parodists are, natch, just as errant about lefty attitudes, wrongly imagining that anybody would speak in favor of such righty-insult terms as “special rights” or “takings.”)

Outside the Bon Marche, a busy crew was handing out free samples of Krispy Kreme donuts (I refuse to use the more formal “doughnut” for such an informal snack food). The chain, which in recent years has generated media hype far beyond its size (still fewer than 150 branches nationally, concentrated in the south) has been ringing Seattle’s far suburbs and will open its first in-town branch next year.

No snack product could live up to Krispy Kreme’s hype. But it is an impressive product. Its lightness, fresh aroma, and melt-in-your-mouth texture all belie the massive sugar rush that hits you after six bites.

One lady did offer a proactive alternative to the bigtime shopping mania, and didn’t need Photoshop to make it.

Among those who didn’t heed, or didn’t see, that lady’s message: The nearly 100 who camped out in anticipation of the Adidas Store’s moonlight sale.

THE NIGHT OF DEC. 7 featured hundreds of holiday parties around town. The one I went to was the opening of 13 Fridas, 13 Years, 13 Days, at muralist James Crespinel’s studio-gallery in Belltown.

Crespinel has been painting his own impressions of Frida Klaho over the years, and displayed some of them as a tie-in to the movie and the Seattle Art Museum’s current Mexican-impressionism exhibit.

The opening was a stupendous gala with authentic Mexi-snacks, singers (including our ol’ pal Yva Las Vegas, above), and dancers (below).

Later that same night, a somewhat different tribute to strength and beauty was offered at the nearby Rendezvous by the Burning Hearts burlesque troupe. This is one of the seven ladies who paraded around in whimsical mini-attire for a surly drunken Santa.

Other St. Nicks of all assorted sizes, shapes, and demeanors cavorted about the greater downtown area as part of the annual NIght of 1,000 Santas spectacle, enacted in cities across North America.

…so you know we love this stie full of 20th-century Russian circus posters! You don’t need to know the Cyrillic alphabet to understand the classic spirit of rah-rah showmanship, bursting through Czarist/Soviet official grayness.

…have a fish head and derive his powers from Kikkoman soy sauce? Watch this flash movie and see for yourself. (Found by Memepool.)

…Dead Souls, the protagonist tours the feudal countryside, buying the title deeds to big landowners’ dead serfs, so he could amass enough “property” to force his way into the privileged classes.

Now, instead of buying dead people, the relentless arm of Marketing wants to sell things to them. P-I columnist Joel Connelly has written about the commercial junk mail that still comes addressed to his recently-deceased ladylove. That piece generated many responses from bereaved citizens with similar tackiness to report. In the story linked here, these include an old UW Daily colleague of mine, Joel VanEtta, who lost a brother but can’t convince mailing-list compilers of this.

THE WASHINGTON STATE LOTTERY’S been running TV spots fantasizing about a big winner buying the Space Needle and moving it from Seattle to the remote Eastern Washington town of Moses Lake. Some viewers might see the ads’ computer-animated imagery of wide-load trucks transporting the Needle across Snoqualmie Pass and imagine it represents just another outmoded tribute to individual greed.

But the ads’ clever creators are also tapping into another fantasy—that of transferring wealth and prestige away from Seattle (where the economy’s been horrid lately) to rural Washington (where the economy’s been even worse, and has been for a much longer period of time). It’s a blatant exploitation of what lotteries, and gambling in general, have always exploited—the dream of the futureless underclass citizen finally Making It.

True, the Needle’s fictional purchaser in the commercials isn’t depicted as a country cracker or a world-beaten working stiff, but the implication’s all there: Buy a lottery ticket and, just maybe, you can transcend your dead-town life.

…you know I love old magazine ads. Here’s a UK art-school site with scores of them, each representing a concept that’s hard to visualize. Painters, illustrators and cartoonists should pay particular attention to the lessons herein.

FIRST, A HEARTY THANX AND A HAT TIP to those who attended and/or participated in our nice midsummer soiree last Friday. We’ll have to do it even bigger and better soon.

SECOND, MANY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS for all who’ve offered ideas re: our plans to redesign and revamp the print MISC. We should have something to announce by the end of this month.

A NEWSPAPER BOX DOWNTOWN was adorned with a less-than-totally-adoring statement from one “STRWBRY GIRL.”

A BELLTOWN CONVENIENCE STORE bears a poster hawking a Korean budget-price cigarette with the slogans “Placing into the Escrow Fund” and “Try Our Full Line of Flavors and Watch Your Income Grow.” What’s more likely to actually grow if you smoke ’em, of course, is a malignant tumor.

Y’ALL BE SURE TO ATTEND our glorious MISCosity Breakdown live event, this Friday evening (7-9:30) at the spiffy Rendezvous, Second Avenue north of Bell Street. At least five writers from the print MISC will appear; there’s also some odd video and music plus some other unannounced surprises.

TWO OF THE TENTPOLES of Seattle’s anti-youth culture have suddenly collapsed after almost two decades’ worth of litigation. Ex-City Attorney Mark Sidran’s anti-postering law was thrown out by a judge; band flyers started reappearing on light poles the very next day (though the 50 “Fuck Mark Sidran” posters someone put up were systematically removed by someone else).

And the nefarious Teen Dance Ordinance, which essentially shut down all-ages music shows in Seattle in 1985, was finally replaced by a far less restrictive law. Just don’t look for any immediate explosion of open-to-under-21s gigs. Some bars have already been hosting no-booze, all-ages matinee and early-evening shows (under recently relaxed state Liquor Board regulations). Despite the daily papers’ renewed teen-bashing editorials, the clubs aren’t making significant profits on these shows. Nonprofit all-ages promoters (the Paradox Theater, the Vera Project) rely heavily on volunteer help and monetary donations (the latter of which are darned hard to come by in the current economy).

HERE’S SOME MORE CAPITOL HILL BLOCK PARTY images from a few weeks back, that of several baseball-backstop climbers and one clever stilt walker viewing Sleater-Kinney for free.

A FEW WEEKENDS LATER, the Bite of Seattle hosted one of the most bizarre cover bands I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot of bizarre cover bands). The members of “Grunge: A Tribute to the Seattle Sound” seemed to know the ridiculousness of their premise, going as far as to introduce Alice in Chains’s “Man in a Box” with a rousing cheer: “This next one’s for all the kids to dance to!” The group appears regularly at Doc Maynard’s in Pioneer Square, where the audiences might or might not get the irony.

AT AUGUST’S FIRST THURSDAY ART WALK, painter Jessica McCourt found out her exhibit at Bud’s Jazz Records didn’t make the newspaper listings. So she did her own leafleting, dressed up as one of the characters from her show “Saints, Sinners, and Monkeys.”