Our newest book is at the presses, and will be out for the holidays.

Vanishing Seattle collects over 200 pictures of former local icons and landmarks. It’s a book every Seattleite of a certain age will crave.

Until I get a proper ordering page set up, here’s where you can pre-order it thru Barnes & Noble.

Spectacular promo events will be scheduled. Watch this space.

…is now 52 percent female, according to unnamed sources cited by In These Times. One more geek bastion breached.

Both the Vanishing Seattle book and the September Belltown Messenger are outta here and on their way to your adoring eyes. So I can now resume this here corner of what used to be euphemistically called “Cyberspace.”

Among the things I haven’t gotten the time to write about these past almost two weeks:

• The 25th anniversary of the first IBM PC. Personal computers had already been around a half decade. IBM saw the character-generating on the wall and realized it had to be in that market, before its own sub-mainframe workstation computers were obsolete. An “Entry Level Systems Division” was set up in Florida, far from IBM’s mainframe designers in upstate New York. A workable and expandable machine was swiftly designed, mostly from off-the-shelf parts. Corporate schmoozing between IBM bigwigs and UW Regent Mary Gates got Mary’s son Bill the chance to bid on the operating system contract. He bought the existing QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a couple of Seattle nerds. His then-small staff made two variants, PC-DOS (for IBM) and MS-DOS (which, under the MS/IBM contract, Gates & co. could sell to anybody). From this one deal arose the Puget Sound country’s new #1 economic force, the driver of real-estate hyperinflation and the flow of money into local “alternative” culture.
• 
  The first sign of hope for saving the Sonics and Storm. The Okie owners say they’d be perfectly happy with staying in Seattle Center, as long as it’s not in KeyArena. They suggested the Memorial Stadium land, already set to be cleared under a blue-ribbon committee’s master plan for the Center grounds. That’d be perfect with me. The high school football games can go to Husky Stadium or even Qwest Field. KeyArena can be re-remodeled as a concert and convention facility. We can get an indoor arena big enough for a National Hockey League team, plus the food-court and amusement-arcade sections the Okies want. I may be the only one I know who believes this deal can indeed be worked out without excessively draining local tax coffers, but I do believe it.
• 
  Safeco Insurance plans to leave the U District; the UW plans to buy the Safeco Tower. Let’s just make sure the U keeps the IHOP, next to the tower on Safeco-owned land.
• 
  A dog-days lull in the Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer soap opera. I’ve been talking with others who, like me, would like to be involved in starting a new local-news venture should the P-I call it a day. Should this project progress, and should I become a real part of it, I’ll wind up saying less and less about it due to the ol’ non-disclosure falderal.

…the last eight days, and what I’m doing at least the next six days: Finishing the huge Vanishing Seattle book project. That, and maybe a little bit of sleeping and eating.

But I can tell you there’s a new Belltown Messenger on the streets. And work on the Vanishing Seattle book continues apace. I still seek pix and mementos of several long-gone landmarks, including:

• The Last Exit on Brooklyn coffeehouse;
• Free Mars cafe/SCUD artists’ co-op (the “Jell-O mold” building);
• the original Herfy’s drive-in chain;
• punk and “grunge” era nightclubs;
• Jones Fantastic Museum; Seattle Center House;
• Orestes restaurant (“the Blob”);
• The Monastery disco;
• Trade Winds bar;
• the former downtown Nordstrom store;
• Osborn & Ulland sporting goods;
• the Vault and Penthouse jazz clubs.

Send any potential leads to this special email addy.

Our grandiose, bigger-and-badder-than-ever MISC@20 anniversary party has a home! It’ll be held Thursday, June 15 at the lasciviously delightful Grotto Room of the Rendezvous, Second north of Bell in Seattle. Further details TBA.

ANOTHER PLEA: Still lookin’ for Vanishing Seattle pix. So far, the Food Giant, Dag’s, and the old U District Herfy’s (yr. author’s first employer) remain the unfound holy grails of this search. The details are on the link at the upper-left corner of this page.

…the art of fiction in the U.S. is stagnating; particularly the short story, a “dead form” which has “exhausted the conditions for its existence.” Her Rx: “Write long novels, pointless novels. Do not be ashamed to grieve about personal things. Dear young writers, write with dignity, not in guilt.”

…about assembling a picture book about disappeared Seattle landmarks is the fact that more landmarks keep on a-dissapearin.’ Next: the Ballard Denny’s, which is both that chain’s next-to-last Seattle outlet (there’s still one on Fourth Avenue South) and the former last branch of the once-mighty Manning’s chain. O, when will the madness cease?

…I seek your help in assembling the ultimate Seattle memory book. Please add your own favorite long-gone landmarks to the ones on this big list.

Our ol’ pal, Loser designer and graphix genius Art Chantry has announced on this Net-radio show that he’s coming home from his six-year, self-imposed exile in the Midwest. He’s going to reside in his ol’ hometown of Tacoma, and commute to Seattle to the School of Visual Design. He taught there part-time for some 18 years. Now he’s gonna be a student, to finally learn the computer production skills he’s pooh-poohed since the crude early days of desktop publishing.

I’m working on another book.

The tentative title: Vanishing Seattle.

It’ll be a picture book all about fondly remembered local bygones–restaurants, stores, TV/radio personalities, buildings, landmarks, tourist attractions, and more.

Suggest your favorite such topics today at this handy email link.

…data confirm what I’ve always suspected/known–that TV viewers and thinkers are not mutually exclusive sets.

…the fake memoir schtick has indeed merged with the older fake Native American schtick.

The Northwest’s official strangest book publisher, and one of the strangest in the world, is finally calling it quits after some three decades. Loompanics Unlimited (named for its first title, an unofficial index to National Lampoon back issues) spent most of its existence pursuing a very specific niche. It commissioned genre-specific nonfiction and how-to titles “with a ‘beat the system’ slant,” as mentioned in its authors’ guidelines (which are still up on the firm’s web site). Its outlaw lifestyle guides covered such useful topics as Dumpster diving, fake ID, weapons, drugs, living “off the grid,” and fighting the IRS. Its target audiences included “mountain man” militia members, Libertarians, old and neo hippies, and young adults just out to laugh at the weirdness. In Loompanics’ ’80s heyday, when most of Wash. state’s small presses hewed tightly to a square-baby-boomer aesthetic of nature poetry and self-congratulatory smugness, Loompanics particularly stood out as a brand, shouting crass commercialism and rock n’ roll rebellion as two notes of the same chord. It’ll be missed.

Weaving Women’s Words: Seattle Stories isn’t about weavers.