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.

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.

…a little further on the addictive quest for what my previous post referred to as “abstract power,” the destructive madness that’s fueling our governmental elite during its current drive toward doom.

Some of you who lived through the Watergate era remember the “Blind Ambition,” as Nixon aide John Dean described the White House mindset of the time.

Look at the number of un-reconstructed Nixonians back in the White House now, imagine three decades’ worth of stewing grudges and revenge fantasies.

Next, consider the “Reality Distortion Field.”

That’s the late-’80s-coined phrase with which Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs was accused of being selectively unaware of business conditions that didn’t fit what he chose to believe. The lieutenants and yes-men who surrounded Jobs, according to this theory, held such personal loyalty to their boss that they came to share his delusions?and to feed them back to him, by giving him highly edited market data and highly weighted interpretations of that data.

Finally, we have the example of Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal.

This documentary, currently airing on the Game Show Network, tells the tragic life story of Michael Larson, an unemployed ice-cream truck driver from Ohio with three kids by three different mothers, a man obsessed with finding the perfect get-rich-quick scheme that would set him up for life. He spent his jobless days watching the four or five TV sets he’d stacked in his tiny apartment. He watched the now-classic Press Your Luck until he realized the show’s big game board wasn’t really random, that he could predict the order of its blinking lights and stop it on any prize square he wanted. He got to LA, somehow got through the contestant-casting process, and legally took the network for over $100,000. He then promptly lost it all between a shady real-estate deal and a burglary at his home (yes, he’d kept thousands in small bills lying around the apartment!).

Anyhoo, during the documentary a staff member on the old show recalls seeing a steely, emotionless stare in Larson’s eyes. The staffer says he saw the same look years later, when his teenage son started getting hooked on video games. It’s the “in the zone” stare one gets when one has become one with the game. Total zen-like concentration on making the right moves in the right sequence, and on the power-rush rewards for success. Total obliviousness to everything that is neither the screen nor the control console.

This country, my loyal readers, is being run by people who try to run government, and war, as one big video game. The chickenhawks don’t want to fight. They never wanted to fight. They just want to manipulate the joysticks of power by all means available, including by the means of making other people fight for them, whilst they remain in their posh office suites and luxurious homes bossing everybody around.

I could give a fourth metaphor here, but you already know about the hubris and comeuppance of those ol’ dot-com bosses.

WIRED PONDERS whether PCs are from Mars and Macs are from Venus.

SURE ENOUGH, as soon as I’m no longer writing Obits a major passing occurs in the Northwest scene. Miller Brewing is closing the 106-year-old former Olympia Brewery, the region’s last mass-market beer factory and Thurston County’s biggest industrial employer.

It comes four years after Seattle’s Rainier Brewery came to a similar end. Both shutdowns (along with those of Blitz-Weinhard in Portland, Carling/Heidelberg in Tacoma, and the Lucky Lager plant in Vancouver WA) were directly caused by the industry’s massive consolidation. Miller’s contract-brewing arrangement with Pabst meant the Oly plant made the brand names formerly produced at all five big Northwest breweries (though Pabst has been phasing out what was left of the Olympia and Rainier brands this past year).

The Oly site was once the west’s second biggest brewery after Coors, but is now the smallest of Miller’s seven facilities. Management apparently decided to surplus it rather than add a recently required wastewater-treatment facility. So, just maybe, It really was The Water.

(The 125-year tradition of sudsy manufacturing in the PacNW, of course, at dozens of microbreweries and brewpubs, whose business plans aren’t as brutally reliant on mass production and mass marketing.)

Like you, we have many dreams and hopes for Ought-Three. We’d like to think no year could be more awful than Ought-Two, but the pro-war politicians keep promising otherwise.

Still, we must hope. Our first hope, natch, is that the purveyors of Armageddon Lite (in this and other countries) be thwarted from their dark dream. We’ve other dreams as well. In our ideal Ought-Three:

• The architects who design ugly, inhospitable office buildings would have to move their own offices into them, instead of hogging all the remaining funky old buildings for themselves.
• Some bigshot economist will realize you can’t maintain a national economy that depends on consumer spending if you systematically decimate the spending power of all non-zillionaires.
• Corporate de-consolidation will begin naturally, without the need for legislation, as unweildy conglomerates (particularly in the media) continue their steady march toward fiscal collapse.
• Indie films will cover topics other than the supposedly wacky lives of indie filmmakers.
• Kazaa and QuarkXPress finally come out for Mac OS X.
• Looney Tunes finally come out on DVD.
• Somebody figures out that if “freedom” is what makes this country distinguishable from the alleged bad guys, then our people should have more freedoms, not fewer.
• City Hall figures out that the answer to every problem is not necessarily a subsidized construction project.
• G.W. Bush finally doesn’t get something he wants. Like a war, for instance.

The summer print MISC, which was supposed to be out next week, has been delayed; basically because certain freelance contributions have been slow or nonexistent. Think of this as YOUR opportunity. We need your essays, op-eds, and fun facts (800 words or shorter), particularly about the issue’s previously advertised theme: “More Sex, Less Gender.” E-mail for particulars.

TO OUR READERS #2: We get a lot of e-mails from folx who’d like this site to plug their new Net-based audiovisual technology doohickeys. For them, I have a simple six-word response: Wake me when it’s Mac-compatible.

…to one of the true greats at the still-new art of web writing, Rodney O. Lain, who passed away over the weekend.

Lain, who at various times wrote for nearly every Macintosh-centric website, quickly established himself as an outspoken, well-written, detector of pomposity and dissecter of corporate hype. In perhaps his most memorable piece, he audaciously compared his status as a black man in a white world to his status as a Mac man in a Windows world.

AS WE APPROACH the 10th anniversary of the filmed-in-Seattle semiclassic Singles, Forbes magazine has placed Seattle right in the smack-dab mediocre middle of its listing of “America’s Best Cities for Singles.”

As you might expect from the magazine’s other priorities, its index included “cost of living” and “economic growth” among its criteria–areas in which the Nor’West is admittedly doing piss-poor these days. But SeaTown also ranked less than stellarly in the more subjectively-defined areas of “culture” and “nightlife,” areas in which I firmly believe we’re more than fully competitive with other cities in our population “weight class.”

But then we come to the most potentially damning part of the piece: “Seattle ‘solo artists’ say the town is still a bit tougher than other places when it comes to dating, as denizens tend to be more reserved than folks in sunnier spots…” As one who’s proud to call himself one of those reserved denizens, I think it a badge of honor that I don’t stoop to screaming dorky pickup lines at women; and I enjoy that my taste in the single ladies tends more toward smarties and less toward silicone.

Yes, Nor’Westers might be a little harder to get to know. But, like so many other advanced disciplines of life, we’re darned well worth it.

OPPONENTS OF MODERN ART have a new pet accusation. Instead of calling it obscene, at least one critic is now saying it’s bad for your mental health.

Mementos of my own formerly-fair city were everywhere in Stamford and NYC. Starbux stands and Microsoft ads were ubiquitous, of course; but there were also Seattle’s Best Coffee-serving restaurants and Eddie Bauer boutiques. (There’s supposedly a Nordstrom in some suburban mall outside NYC, but I didn’t see it.) The Virgin Megastore in the infamously Disneyfied Times Square stocked plenty of Seattle bands, even the semi-obscure ones. (F’rinstance, a Fartz CD was on prominent display!) One quasi-Seattle-related person, Fantagraphics cartoonist Chris Ware, had a huge display of his (fantastic) original art in the Whitney Museum’s 2002 Biennial exhibition. And the Tuesday edition of everyone’s favorite rabid-right tabloid included a positive review of the new CD by our ol’ pal Christy McWilson.

TRIP ASIDE #2: My flights both ways, as previously mentioned in this space, were on the airline soon to be formerly known as TWA. Thanks to the overcast conditions also previously mentioned in this space, both flights offered the comforting illusion of sailing on a sea of cotton fluff. Only the eastward flight offered a movie (K-PAX, displayed on LED video monitors).

Both flights included stops at the ol’ TWA hub in St. Louis. Right out the window, you could clearly see the old McDonnell-Douglas HQ complex at the other side of the main runways. The building now bears a big Boeing logo, even though it’s becoming increasingly clear that MD has staged a palace coup and essentially taken over Boeing.

TRIP ASIDE #3: I’ll try to scan some snapshot-camera pix I took of NYC, including Ground-0 (still an extremely quiet and solemn quarter-square-mile surrounded by the famous NYC bustle).

THE FOLLOWING is not necessarily aimed at our regular readers, but at people trolling the search engines in need of a particular piece of help:

When you’re trying to play a DVD movie in MacOS 9, and the Apple DVD Player software only gives you a blank screen and occasional split-seconds of sound, your computer might be mistaking the disc for one of a different format.

To solve this, try the following sequence:

• Launch Apple DVD Player before inserting the disc.
• Simultaneously press the logistically difficult but possible combination of the Command, Option, and I keys with one hand.
• Re-insert the disc with the other hand.

This will make MacOS read the disc in the “ISO” rather than the “UDF” format, and should make many previously Mac-unfriendly DVDs play without any further hitch.

If that doesn’t work, open your Extensions folder to make sure it contains only one system extension with “Volume Access” in its name. And make sure you have the current version of DVD Player (2.7 for OS 9, 3.1 for OSX).

MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…

UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.

UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.

Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.

An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…

FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:

• Real goths don’t collect assault weapons. They might get into fantasies about vampires and post-nuclear zombies, but their real-life personas tend to be far more pacified. (South Park, set in a Littleton-like Colorado town, employed Cure singer Robert Smith for a guest voice as an action hero precisely because the role was so out-of-sync with Smith’s non-action image.)
• As noted in the Weekly, the Euro metal-punk band KMFDM (whose headman Sascha moved to Seattle as the band’s career was winding down) played aggressive music but was always opposed to real-life violence. In its biggest U.S. hit, the band referred to itself as “The Drug Against War.”
• The Trench Coat Mafia boys had their own tribal thang going on. They took bits and pieces from various subcultures and stitched them together to form their own particular monster. Besides industrial and heavy-metal music, they took notions and concepts from neo-Nazis and militia cults. The racist aspect of their ideology is something you just don’t find in more orthodox nerd or goth cliques (which tend to be pasty-face white but to profess solidarity with other outcast groups, including minorities).
• The conservative commentators, as might be expected, went all over themselves to get nearly everything wrong (“Guns don’t kill people, video games and Internet chat rooms and liberal moral relativism and do”).
• The middle-of-the-road commentators (particularly the likes of Dateline NBC) got almost as much wrong. By stereotyping goths, punks, nerds, geeks, smarties, role-playing-game players, video-game players, and just about anyone else who’s not a jock or cheerleader as walking time bombs, the media know-nothings are only encouraging the school officials and the “popular” kids to dehumanize and persecute the unpopular kids even more harshly.
• The liberal and quasi-left commentators liked to compare the Littleton massacre to what they see as America’s “real” culture of violence–the one that presently gives us bombers over Serbia and Iraq. I wouldn’t quite take it that directly. Kids have been cruel to one another in times of relative military peace (like most of the Clinton years), and in times of military conflict (like the Vietnam and Desert Storm eras). Besides, our supposed objective in the Balkans is to stop the kind of ethnic-purity crusade our homegrown neo-Nazis like to dream about.
• Violent media don’t kill people; violent people do. (Note Japan’s relative lack of youth violence and its abundance of youth-oriented-media violence.) Right-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Spawn and Doom. Left-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Schwarzenegger and the World Wrestling Federation. Corporate media defenders might love to blame Littleton on cultural phenomenon outside of corporate control (especially on that bad-ol’ Internet). All these blowhards have done is exploit 15 senseless deaths to promote their own agendas. Some of these agendas are as potentially divisive as that of the Trench Coat Mafia.
• If anything can be learned from the horror, it’s that kids can be, and are, cruel. Especially Caucasian American kids (perhaps a legacy of Britain’s even crueller boarding-school culture). As seen in very mild form in the current crop of teen movies, the typical high school caste system rewards the conceited, the athletic, and the “beautiful,” and disdains anybody with more than half a brain or more than half a conscience.

  Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.

• Perhaps we could use a new kind of PR campaign. One that celebrates the brainy ones, the nonconformists, what that Apple commercial called “the crazy ones.” I wouldn’t go the way of Times columnist Jerry Large, who once called for papers to promote community-volunteer kids as sexy role models. Instead, I’d honor the girls and boys who neither followed role models nor tried to be them. After all, it’s the geeks and the brains these days who (given at least a modicum of adult or peer encouragement) grow up with a chance at creative lives and/or hi-tech careers. It’s the girls who stop worrying about becoming popular who’re more likely to get to 18 childless. It’s the boys who face the taunts and the name-calling who’re more likely to successfully weather the slings and arrows of grownup office politics. It’s the kids who think learning’s too square who end up clerking at Kmart. But it’s the brainy outcasts who are constantly harassed and put down who can end up with the lifelong scars.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”

IT’S A COOL, DAMP, MISTY PRE-WINTERTIME MISC., the pop-culture report that always knows the launch of arrival of high shopping season when the regular downtown freaks are pushed aside by the seasonal-specific freaks. (For our own special gift to you, read on.)

HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN OUR TIME: Despite what it seems, not every old, lo-rise building in greater downtown Seattle’s being razed for cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. At least a dozen have been meticulously saved from the wrecking ball, so they can house the offices of the architects designing the cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. I’m reminded of a slide lecture I once saw by Form Follows Fiasco author Peter Blake. Among his examples of bad modern architecture was a mid-size city in central Europe with narrow, winding streets faced by quaint, homey, romantically worn-down buildings. When the socialists came into power, they hated the place. They had a new city built across the river, designed on all the efficient, rational, no-frills principles of Soviet-inspired central planning. The only government workers permitted to still live and work in the old city? You guessed it–the architects who designed the new city.

SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION IN OUR TIME: Ever notice how the 1-800-CALL-ATT long-distance logo, with a light-blue circular shape gently rising from within a dark-blue square, looks, at first glance, a heck of a lot like a condom wrapper?

AD OF THE WEEK: Future Shop, which publicly stopped selling Macintosh computers back during Apple’s pre-iMac sales doldrums two years ago, now prominently uses the Mac screen-window design in its current CD sale flyer.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 11/29): “Drunk Driving Made Easier.” The story was really about a new state law that’ll make drunk driving arrests and prosecutions easier.

MEN AT WORK: The old truism that men will pay for sex but women will pay only to “look sexy” may be changing, at least among certain affluent women in remote locations. A loyal reader recently told of her recent trip to Jamaica, where she and her adult daughter were regularly propositioned by male locals on the streets and public beaches. But she says the solicitations weren’t expressions of harassment but of commerce. Hetero-male hooking’s apparently become such a big tourist draw on the island in recent years, the Jamaica Rough Guide travel book even lists the best spots for European and American women to rent what the book gingerly calls “Jamaican steel.” Some of the gated seaside resorts are discreetly offering bus tours for the ladies to go partake of a tall, dark toy-boy, then return to the hotel in time for scuba lessons.

This is a different phenomenon from the also-booming business of “swingers’ resorts” across the Caribbean and Mexico, where the sex is just as casual but is restricted to one’s fellow paying tourists. It’s also a phenomenon of potential interest to North America’s own remote, economically depressed regions, regions which tend to have ample supplies of rugged if less-than-gentlemanly men. You’d have to get some anything-for-a-buck politicians to change a few laws, then put the recruited men through some Full Monty-esque makeovers and charm lessons; but from there, the only limit would be one’s ambition and one’s marketing budget. I can easily imagine big layouts in the continental fashion mags, inviting the pampered ladies of Italy and France to really experience the rugged, robust America they’ve only known through movies and ads, by enjoying a real Akron factory worker or a real Detroit homeboy or even a real Aberdeen lumberjack!

SLICKSVILLE: Earlier this year, business analysts were talking about the mergers of the seven Baby Bells into four as presaging a potential reassembly of the Bell System. Now, with Exxon and Mobil combining and BP taking over Amoco, we might be seeing the reassembly of the old Standard Oil! (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and BP’s current U.S. division are all descended from pieces of John D. Rockefeller’s old monopoly.) The headline in last Friday’s Times claims the merger would “benefit consumers” somehow–even though it would result in further station closures across the country (neither company has much of a presence left around here) and mass layoffs, and even though today’s low oil prices are the result of the collapse in OPEC’s ability to set prices for its member oil-exporting nations.

The first hints of a possible merger made the news the same day as the fatal explosion at the Anacortes refinery built in the ’50s by Texaco, but now operated by Texaco and Shell under the joint-venture pseudonym “Equilon.” All these spinoffs, mergers, joint ventures, and consolidations in the business have scrambled what had been clear vertically-integrated brand identities. (Could the Anacortes plant’s management change have influenced conditions that led to the freak accident? In all probability, no. The coking tower that blew up was designed and built when Texaco still fully owned the installation.)

Still, doesn’t anyone remember back in the ’70s when TV oilman J.R. Ewing became the world’s image of a slimy businessmen? When oil companies were popularly thought to be the bad guys, and the bigger they got the badder they were presumed to be? The oil giants turned out to have profited then from circumstances beyond their control; they’re now struggling from circumstances equally beyond their control. But these are still global collossi whose only true loyalties are still to (1) the stock price, (2) executive salaries and perks, (3) promoting government policies favorable to the first two priorities, and (4) their public images. Everything else (environmental protection, resource conservation, fair labor practices, preserving neighborhood service stations) the companies either pays attention to when doing so fits priorities 1-4 or when they’re forced to. And as we’ve seen in places like Kuwait (where women still have virtually no civil rights) and Nigeria (where opponents to the Shell-supported dictator are harrassed and shot), these companies are still perfectly willing to associate with less-than-admirable elements as long as it’s lucrative.

SCARY COINCIDENCE #1: In this space last week, I promised this week I’d list things I was thankful for. Little did I know I’d be grateful to the fates for some relatively lucky timing. I was on the southbound Metro #359 bus at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, heading back from the ol’ family dinner–exactly 24 hours prior to the incident in which a presumably deranged passenger shot the driver on a southbound #359 on the northern reaches of the Aurora Bridge, just above the Fremont Troll. (The bus crashed through the guard rail and plunged to the ground below. The driver fell out and died.)

Scary coincidence #2: A KIRO-TV reporter, mentioning cops scouring the wreckage site for evidence, noted how investigators spent months combing the seas off Long Island, NY after the TWA Flight 800 crash several years ago. A friend of mine had been on that plane from Paris to NYC that day; the fatal flight was to have been the plane’s return trip.

Scary coincidence #3: As part of the part-time duties I’m still handling for The Stranger, I’d scheduled to turn in a website review this week about www.busplunge.org, a site collecting every English-language news story containing the words “bus plunge.”

Scary coincidence #4: The driver, Mark McLaughlin, was shot in the arm. Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s real surname: McLaughlin.

Back in the late ’80s, Metro Transit’s ads tried to discourage citizens from thinking of bus riders as underclass losers and winos, with images of well-scrubbed, pale-skinned models and the slogan, “Metro. Who rides it? People just like you.” Then in the ’90s, as headlines blared of “road rage” and roads became clogged with “out-of-my-way-asshole” SUVs, bus riders got plastered with the PR image of “civil society” do-gooders who did their part to reduce traffic congestion and encourage social mingling, people whose efforts deserved to be furthered by the regional light-rail referendum. Will this tragedy re-ignite the old stereotype of bus people, or be perceived as the wheeled equivalent of a drive-by?

NOW FOR YOUR GIFT: I also promised last week I’d start adding exciting new features to your beloved Misc. World site. With the assistance of the speakeasy.org programming staff, I’m proud to pre-announce the forthcoming, one-‘n’-only Misc.Talk discussion board. In a sense it’s a return to my roots, having first discovered online communication via bulletin board systems back in 1983. Your first question: What’s the ickiest, most inappropriate, or most embarrassing Xmas gift you ever got (or gave)? Have fun, and talk nice.

> iMPRESSIONS: The Stranger office just got a couple of them new iMac computers. They’re gorgeous; they’re screamingly fast; they’re just plain fun. The iMac’s the first “home” computer designed as a piece of home decor, like old “cathedral” radios used to be (one old radio name, Motorola, makes the CPU chip in the iMac). Just as importantly, it expresses the MacOS’s superior visual aesthetic into tangible, physical form. This has the practical effect of reducing the dissonance, the trance effect a computer user may have while really concentrating on the “mindspace” of working or running software. On plain beige-box computers, an advanced user can become almost unaware of his/her physical presence (unless, of course, something goes wrong with the hardware). The iMac’s more noticable, yet pleasant, presence might help hardcore gamers and Net-skimmers keep at least partly aware of the tangible world surrounding them. That, in turn, might help relieve or prevent the loneliness and depression cited among hardcore computer jockeys by some Carnegie Mellon U. sociologists.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Usually for weird potato-chip flavors you’ve gotta go to Canada. But Benson’s T-Bone Steak Crisps are imported directly from England to local spots like the Old Pequliar tav in Ballard. They don’t taste like steak, but have an oddly smoky flavor without being overly spicy. The slow frieght, tho’, can leave ’em a little less fresh-tasting than domestic chips.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Swaank (no relation to the porn mag Swank) is a rip-rollickin’, stylish-as-all-get-out chronicle of local swing-revival happennings. Besides musician and dancer interviews, it’s got a valuable jazz-history lesson and retro-fashion tips that thankfully go beyond the semiannual “Return to Elegance” nonsense in larger publications. There’s even a cartoon demonstrating how a neo-bopper can revise an outdated death-rock tattoo! (Free at clubs with swing nights, or $12 for four issues from 12437 110th Lane NE, #P101, Kirkland 98034.)

ANOTHER YEAR OLDER: Who’da thunk The Stranger (originally a li’l 12-page sheet of coupon ads, movie listings, sex advice, and cartoons) would become such a robust force in alterna-media, reaching some 150,000 readers and revered nationwide? The growth of the paper has parallelled the growth of its “virtual community” of readers and advertisers. While a lot of beloved stores, bands, clubs, eateries, performance troupes, galleries, etc. have left us since late Sept. ’91, a lot of others have joined us. And while the corporate-rock biz has largely left Seattle alone lately (local bands no longer even feel they have to insist on how “not grunge” they are), there are more pro musicians doing more different kinds of things here now than maybe ever. (How many of them are really good at it is another question.)

But what’s in store? Wasn’t too long ago when the stock market was supposedly on a never-to-end rise, when Wired magazine predicted a “long boom,” when the only question anybody asked about the economy was how to keep up with (or survive) the megagrowth. Nowadays, things seem a bit more uncertain, particularly among anyone with direct or indirect dependencies upon Canada, Mexico, Russia, east Asia, or the U.S. stock market (as you might guess, that’s a lot of dependents). Can’t say what’ll happen next, but it might not be all on the upswing.

If there really is a recession later this year or early next, how will it affect our community? Seattle ain’t the same place it was when we lived on the trickle-down from Boeing and its subcontractors. But now the $$ coming into Seattle isn’t merely trickling down from overall national business conditions. It’s coming from whole consumer-economy sectors (software, chain coffeeshops) centered here, shipping cash into head offices that directly employ many art-worlders and art-biz customers. Of course, an overall slowdown will slow down these companies as well; just perhaps more moderately and slowly than Boeing slumps used to be. For whatever it’s worth, the nothing-ever-happens pre-Stranger Seattle ain’t coming back.

The High-Tech Boys’ Club:

Now For Women Too

Book review by Clark Humphrey, 11/10/97

Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson (Broadway Books)

The Interactive Book by Celia Pearce (Macmillan Technical Publishing trade paperback)

Signal to Noise by Carla Sinclair (HarperCollins)

Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders by Jim Carlton (Times Books)

Interface Culture by Steven Johnson (HarperCollins)

Sometimes it seems a lot of people want to tell us about the future of computer-aided communications. Other times, it seems like it’s just the same few people putting out the same book. That’s because these screeds promising a decentralized, all-empowering cyberfuture are dominated by a small elitist cadre of ideologues who all hang out at the Global Business Network and other right-wing think tanks. These “digerati” all say pretty much the same things; none question their Gates-given right to not only predict but to dictate the direction of computers, the Net, etc. The first three authors in this review are women, but they’re still in the PC-biz “boys’ club.”

Esther Dyson’s a “digerati” insider of the first rank (daughter of celeb scientist Freeman Dyson, publisher of her own industry-insider newsletter). Her book’s essentially a general-audience reiteration of the digerati party line–the computerization of business is subverting all sorts of “paradigms,” you’ve gotta stay on your toes to keep up with market conditions that change overnight, don’t let pesky governments get in the way of all-kind-and-knowing companies, your kids’ll end up homeless tomorrow if their classrooms are computerless today. If you’ve already read Gates or George Gilder or Alvin Toffler or Nicholas Negroponte or any issue of Wired, you really don’t need another volume of the same.

Celia Pearce, who had almost as privileged an upbringing as Dyson (her industrial-designer dad’s worked on everything from Vegas light shows to Biosphere 2), could’ve used an editor. The Interactive Book, Pearce’s 580-page collection of essays, rambles on through her career designing group computer games for shopping malls, her love of the Internet visual-programming language VRML (whose co-designer wrote her introduction), her misadventures with the “new media” divisions of Hollywood movie studios (whom she believes will never “get it” regarding interactive media and its inherent differences from TV and movies), and how the Net and interactive media are supposedly on the verge of exploding all the old hierarchies of media, entertainment, and society in general.

Of course, behind most crusades against an old hierarchy there’s somebody who wants to build a new hierarchy with her/himself at its center. Carla Sinclair’s novel Signal to Noise doesn’t document this trait as much as help propagate it. Sinclair treats her friends and acquaintances in the Digerati as being important enough to have a roman a clef written about them. If you don’t personally knowDouglas Coupland or the Wired editors, there’s really no point in reading this long paean to their alleged hotness.

If the Digerati are the New Rock Stars folks like Sinclair claim them to be, then it’s natural to expect them to be subjected to scurrilous gossip. In Apple, Wall St. Journal writer Jim Carlton does the kind of hatchet job the digerati are always complaining about mainstream-media people for. Carlton blames office politics and executive infighting/ incompetence for Apple Computer’s fall from big profit margins in the late ’80s to multimillion-dollar losses the past year and a half. The eral story’s a lot simpler than Carlton’s account claims: When Microsoft wrested control of the PC platform away from IBM (with help from indie chipmakers who copied the IBM PC’s ROM chips for the first PC clones), MS turned PCs into low-margin commodities (similar to the old Kodak strategy of giving away the camera to sell the film). By then, Apple was already locked into an opposite business model, using the Mac’s superior operating software to sell its costlier hardware. MS’s Windows wasn’t (and still isn’t) as good as the Mac OS, but it got close enough for corporate computer buyers, threatening Apple’s market niches and decimating the high markups it had become dependent upon. None of the boardroom-soap-opera battles Carlton relishes in detailing had much effect on this corporate trajectory, and none probably could have. Apple put out a lot of superior products, but built a big organization that couldn’t change as fast as it needed to. An important story, but not the tabloidy tale Carlton’s trying to sell.

Amid all the hustle-hustle of uniform paradigm-subverting, it’s refreshing to read the occasional voice of common sense. Steven Johnson, who runs the pioneering webzine Feed, is out not to make websites hotter, just better. While Johnson’s Interface Culture isn’t flashily designed itself (not a single illustration), Johnson’s screed about the principles of online design makes compelling reading. He’s out to improve online communication on a structural level, applying oft-forgotten common-sense principles to the creation and organization of text and graphics. While other cyber-pundits blather about their mover-‘n’-shaker pals, Johnson quietly shows the rest of us how to start subverting their paradigms by making our own online statements more effective.

Welcome back to a foolishness-free April Misc., the column that finds amusement anywhere it can, like in that brand new post-Broadway theater in Vancouver. Only a bunch of Canadians (or others with similar ignorance of basic U.S. history facts) would call a place the Ford Theatre. So when are they gonna mount a production of Our American Cousin?

PHILM PHUN: Toast With the Gods, the indie feature by Eric MaGun and Latino Pellegrini based loosely on The Odyssey and shot here gawd-was-it-really-almost-two-years-ago?, is finally finished and premiered late last month at the New York Underground Film Festival. When will we get to see it? No word yet. Speaking of undergrounds…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Blackstockings (“For Women In the Biz”) is a small, low-key, personal newsletter aiming to raise solidarity and class-consciousness among “sex industry workers” (strippers, peep-show dancers, phone-sex callees, video models, escorts, even streetwalkers). Similar zines in other towns are run by politically-minded committees. This one’s run by one woman, a freelance stripper using the name “Morgan;” she and her contributing writers present themselves neither as society’s lurid victims nor as daring counterculture adventurers, but simply as ordinary folks doing work that’s like any work–occasionally invigorating, more often dreary. While the first issue focuses on sex workers’ personal lives (“Who’s a good dentist that doesn’t discriminate against us?”), political and legal issues inevitably appear. One item alleges that in the days before the Kingdome Home Show, police staged a sweep of street people and prostitutes in Pioneer Square–“For the women who they could not legally arrest, they poked holes in the condoms the women were carrying.” Available at Toys in Babeland or by leaving a message at 609-8201. Speaking of realities behind “glamour” businesses…

THE BIG TURN-OFF: As predicted here, the Telecommunications “Reform” Act promptly fed a massive drive to consolidate broadcasting into fewer and fewer hands. Thanks to rules enacted in the name of “greater competition,” speculators are amassing up to eight radio stations in a town. The owners of KMPS bought the biggest rival country stations, KRPM and KCIN, so they could change the stations’ formats and reduce KMPS’s competition. (KMPS’s owners also bought Seattle’s other country station, KYCW.) Viacom sold KNDD to the Philly-based Entertainment Communications, which already owns KMTT (both are already situated in the Can of Spam Building on Howell St.). No word on whether another Viacom unit, MTV, will still help devise KNDD’s ads, graphics, and web site. If all the currently-planned local radio deals go through, the Seattle Times estimates six companies will control 77 percent of the region’s listening audience. Speaking of media choices…

LIST-LESS: The Times’ highly-promoted new Sunday TV section debuted March 17 with 19 previously unlisted cable channels. But one channel was dropped from the 35 in the paper’s previous lineup–Public Access. According to spokesbot Pat Foote, Timeseditors deemed the access channel too marginal and too Seattle-specific for inclusion, even though they included several tertiary movie channels seen only on scattered suburban systems. However, an unspecified number of complaining phone calls persuaded ’em to reconsider. Access listings are back in the Times (the only print outlet they’ve ever been in) this week. Speaking of mis(sed) prints…

POT-CALLING-THE-KETTLE-BLACK DEPT.: Kudos to my fave computer user group, Mac dBUG (Macintosh Downtown Business Users Group), on its 10th anniversary. Its current newsletter (available free at the U Book Store computer dept.) has a cute word-O-warning, “Speaking of Spell-Checking,” reminding desktop publishers that even the best computer spell-check programs can’t catch real words in the wrong places. As examples, it used fractured phrases made of real words, all just one letter off from the expected words: “Share thy sod aid spool she chill,” “I switch it tires sages nice,” and “Take ham whole she fun spines.” Too bad they didn’t catch a real headline elsewhere on the same page: “What Does the Term `Bandwidth’ Means?”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, welcome Bedazzled Discs away from Pio. Sq. and into the ex-911 space on E. Pine, and eat all your chocolate Easter bunnies ears-first (otherwise ya lose all the flavor).

MISC. CAN’T DECIDE what’s more pathetic: The Weekly believing the media “grunge” stereotype really exists, or the P-I believing it used to but doesn’t anymore.

THE BIG WHITE-OUT: The news media love few things more than a huge, region-encompassing Act of God story. In the winter around here, that means either flooding (which tends to actually show up at the predicted times and places) or snow (which doesn’t). All the boomers I know hate snow (“How on earth will we get to that bed-and-breakfast we already made reservations for?”). All the squares I know fear snow (“How the hell do you expect me to commute to and from Woodinville in this goddamned weather?”). I, however, love snow. And I don’t mean but-only-in-the-mountains. Snow in Seattle is a rare and wonderful thing. It puts everyday life, and everyday reality, on hold for a day or two of diffused light, an eerie yet inviting silence, and the sharp contrast between grumbling grownups and ecstatic kids and kids-at-heart. It’s been a few years since we had a really good snow in town, so when the radio stations crank up their stern warnings of a Big White Peril today-or-maybe-tomorrow I can’t help but get excited. But invariably, like parents who keep promising that trip to the Grand Canyon but who take you to see the cousins in Topeka every summer instead, the snow-threatening announcers usually leave me with little but brief moments of joy and hopes for the next winter. So to me, for a few flurrying moments before and after the big football telecast, it really was Super Sunday.

BUBBLE TROUBLE: The Times sez “the blob,” the distinctive white Lower Queen Anne restaurant most recently known as 14 Roy, is slated for demolition by bankrupt owners. I say save it! It’s one of Seattle’s few works of individualistic PoMo architecture, as historically important as, well, as many other buildings that were also unfortunately torn down. Speaking of things that oughtn’t disappear…

DOES IT COMPUTE?: If all you know is what you read in the papers, you might believe the scare stories about Apple Computer, stories claiming the company’s into a “death spiral” on the basis of one unprofitable quarter (due largely to price wars in Japan). The Mac’s demise has, of course, been predicted almost every year since it came out. This time, the nay-sayers are citing everything from intensified price competition to over- or under-production to the hype machine over Windows 95 (Gates’s version of the old Ritz cracker recipe for “Mock Apple Pie”). Looking beyond Apple’s short-term numbers, however, shows a different story. The Mac’s selling better than ever (albeit at tighter profit margins). Its market share may be small in corporate back-office environs but it’s doing very well in homes, schools, and small businesses–the loci of most of that hot Internet action. More powerful operating software and a more easily cloneable hardware platform are coming this year, so the Mac’s presence should only increase.

Yet some want the Mac to die, and not just Gates loyalists. I think I know why. Umberto Eco once wrote that the Mac and MS-DOS worlds were like Catholics and Protestants–the former visual, sensory, and collectivistic; the latter verbal, coldly rational, and individualistic. (Windows, Eco wrote, is like Anglican spectacle atop a base of Calvinistic doctrine.) Others say the Mac’s intuitive approach and seamless hardware/software integration are more attuned to right-brain creative folks; Windows keeps users stuck in left-brain logic mode. Today’s centers of economic and political power, including the Wall St. analysts and the business press who quote them, are as left-brain-centric as any institutions in history. Many in these subcultures see Macs as artsy-fartsy playthings or as annoying symbols of Windham Hill/ NPR propriety, definitely not as accouterments for the Lean-n’-Mean mentality of Global Business. Yes, I’m a Mac loyalist. But more, I’m an advocate of creative thinking and of Stuff That Works. To millions like me, the Mac’s an extension of the mind, not just another overgrown calculator. It could be improved on, but there’s no real substitute in sight.

ONLINE EXTRA (More thots on Apple): Apple lost over $130 million in one quarter of fiscal 1993 and survived. It’s got about a billion in cash on hand, and theoretically could buy some of the companies rumored to be considering buying it. Even after losing 1,300 employees over the course of the next year, it’ll still have more employees than it had in Sept. ’94. The Mac platform’s relatively higher R&D costs should come down with the new Power PC Platform hardware setup and the new Copland operating system, which not only will make Macs cheaper to design and build but whose development costs have bloated Apple’s recent expenses and payrolls.

There are really only two software categories where the Mac lacks certain important products compared to Windows: Specialty business applications (i.e., accounting and inventory programs for specific industries), and Internet multimedia utilities (i.e., streaming video/audio, virtual-reality gaming, the Java programming language). To help solve the first discrepancy, Apple’s hired the distinguished third-party-development vet Heidi Roizen as its head of developer relations. The second discrepancy’s a bit tougher. The Net is a wild, anarchic place where all sorts of media developers are bringing out all sorts of new media and data formats; many of these developers, especially those working on Netscape helper applications and plug-ins, are rushing out Windows products and promising to get around to Mac versions one of these months. One of the reasons was Netscape’s slowness in bringing plug-in support and other features to its own Mac software. Netscape people have apologized for this on newsgroups, claiming they couldn’t find enough experienced programmers to properly staff their Mac development efforts until recently. I’ve corresponded with folks at other outfits who say similar things. Maybe Apple’s layoffs will help the overall Mac universe by sending some of the company’s best and brightest off to make not just Mac ports of all these media formats but to make newer and better Netstuff.