ward sutton

‘Tis election day. The most infuriatingly nervous day of the year, or in this case of the quadrennium. (I believe that’s a word.)

The polls, even the progressive leaning polls, predict a tighter race than I want. I want Obama across the board over Mr. Lying One-Percenter Tax Cheat Hypocrite in previously “red” states, and all victorious long before the Pacific Time Zone results show up. If I can’t get that, I at least want an Obama victory big enough that even the partisan-hack dirty tricks in Ohio and Florida (and even here) can’t threaten it.

Back to randomosity:

• Lynn Stuart Parramore at AlterNet insists that liberals need to expand their potential base, to reach out to the whole of America. Yes, even to stop stereotyping white male Southerners.
• Postcard collector Lisa Hix has some lovely examples of cartoony “attack ads” from the women’s suffragist era.
• Bob Quinn, who started a one-man needle exchange program in the U District in the 1990s, has apparently died. I have no further information on this, however. (UPDATE: Here’s more.)
• Microsoft staged a real-life fake “invasion” theater piece to launch the newest version of its Halo video-game series. The mock battle essentially involved all of the European micro-state of Lichtenstein. Cue references to the Bloom County version of Bill Gates trying to get a date by boasting about owning Norway.
• UPDATE: The Cobain-Love stage musical, threatened last month, is now an official no-go.
• The state Dept. of Transportation is holding a naming contest about the big machine that will dig the tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. All entry names must be female, presumably to avoid the obvious phallic jokes.
• Boeing’s next jetliner model might have folding wings, to fit in better at crowded airports.
• Thirty-six percent of the cigarettes sold in Wash. state may be “contraband” (i.e., sold without state taxes). These will, of course, kill you just as dead.
• John Naughton at UK weekly The Observer says the big book publishers have played into Amazon’s hands in the past decade or so. Actually, they’ve played into the hands of their own conglomerate owners who cared only about the short-term Almighty Stock Price, to the long-term detriment of the business itself.
• If Disney buys Hasbro, as has been rumored, they’d not only get the rights to Battleship remakes, but also to the role-playing game franchise Dungeons & Dragons. You’ll recall Hasbro bought Renton game company Wizards of the Coast, which had bought D&D during its peak years.
• R.I.P. Mac Ahlberg. The famed Hollywood cinematographer had directed a few of his own films while still in his native Sweden. One of these was the erotic classic I, A Woman and its two sequels.
• Occupy Wall Street protesters had rigged together some bicycle-powered generators during their marathon protest. These devices proved handy for neighbors during the Hurricane Sandy blackout.
• Today’s lesson in the folly of marketing products “For Women” is brought to you by Honda.

aaron tung, via digitalbookworld.com

There are many differences between the book world and the music world.

For one thing, music-world people have long held a healthy disrespect for the weasels, hucksters, and corporate wolves running their industry.

Book-world people, in contrast, are often willfully supplicant toward their industry, its masters, and its most crippling business-as-usual tactics.

Until, perhaps, now.

Germany’s Bertelsmann and Britain’s Pearson Group announced they’re merging their respective English-language book publishing units, Random House and Penguin. Those firms, two of the Big Six in the U.S. book biz, have each absorbed other imprints over the years—Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Doubleday, Knopf, Pantheon, and many others.

Bertelsmann will control the merged entity, once the Feds approve (perhaps one year from now).

The official excuse, this time, is that big publishers need to become even bigger so they can “stand up to Amazon.”

But we know the real reason. Monopolistic greed and dreams of global conquest, as always.

Now, the publishing biz is too consolidated for its own good already. It has been since at least the mid-1990s.

But “people of the book” (authors, reviewers, editors, etc.) said or did little to challenge the takeovers.

They’d often complain about book selling falling into fewer hands, especially in the heyday of the Borders/Barnes & Noble duopoly. But these folks didn’t complain as much about publishers becoming ever fewer and ever bigger.

Book fans cold have used some of the music fans’ cynicism about the companies who claim to have their interests at heart.

And now, they might finally be developing some of that wise-assery.

Publishers don’t, and never really have, acted in the best interests of either authors or readers. They, like other businesses, are in it for themselves.

And in this case, their actions may lead (as an LA Times business writer puts it) to “higher prices and less diversity of book titles.”

Yet that piece, and other commentaries summarized by UK trade blog TheBookseller, repeat the seldom questioned presumption of a “diminished interest in books.”

Even though total print and e-book sales are rising, even soaring in some categories.

And even though print book sales have held their own in this economy, better than a lot of other media sectors.

Instead of ever mega-er mega publishers saving the book biz, perhaps the biz is renewing itself in spite of them.

amidst-the-everyday.com

“Amidst the Everyday,” a project by photographers-artists Aaron Asis and Dan Hawkins, aims to reveal “elements of the unseen urban environment.” You go to places around town, scan QR codes (etched in wood!) at various buildings, and receive images of their hidden treasures. (Above, one of the unoccupied-for-decades upper floors of the Eitel Building at Second and Pike.)

• I’m not disillusioned by the news of a potential sitcom that would carry the title Smells Like Teen Spirit. (The show concept sounds more like a ripoff of Family Ties, which is also something we don’t need.) However, I am at least a little disillusioned by the news of a potential Kurt and Courtney stage musical, which would be licensed by Courtney Love via Britney Spears’ estranged ex-manager.
• Lester Smith, 1919-2012: The Mariners’ original principal owner had, in partnership with Hollywood star Danny Kaye, a number of business endeavors. They ranged from rock-concert promotion to direct-mail marketing. But Smith (or Kaye-Smith) will always be legendary for stewarding KJR-AM during its 1955-80 golden age as Seattle’s Top 40 (or “Fab 50”) powerhouse.
• The Seattle Times‘ free ads for Rob McKenna caught the LA Times‘ attention; not to mention a less-than-kind portrayal in the SeaTimes‘ own “Truth Needle” department.
• The next step up from bicycle lanes: physically separated “bike tracks.”
• Knute Berger reiterates what I’ve been saying about the waterfront development scheme. Let’s not let it be “sanitized by good intentions.”
• Dominic Holden would like you to know the biggest reason for legalizing pot. It isn’t for the stoners (and it sure ain’t to shut up the stoner evangelists, which had been my reason).
• Joe Copeland takes up the continuing legacy of Floyd Schmoe, one of the greatest people I ever met, leader of Seattle’s Quakers and hands-on advocate for peace and reconciliation.
• The next hurdle toward getting the NBA back in Seattle has been overcome. That hurdle is Commissioner David Stern, whose butt will be out of that particular chair by the end of next season.
• A major casual-games convention may be leaving Seattle.
• UK film blogger Petra Davis looks back admiringly at the still-underrated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, 20 years old this year…
• …and, with the winding down of the World’s Fair semi-centennial, our pal Jim Demetre has some kind words for the (mostly justifiably) forgotten It Happened at the World’s Fair.
• In other film news, the Columbia City Cinema is being reopened (yay!). The new owner has repaired all the previous owner’s not-up-to-code “renovations.”
• Note to Amazon Kindle users: Buy all your e-books while you’re physically in the same country, lest you be targeted as a Terms of Service violator.
• Today’s dire-threat-to-America’s-youth story comes to you from a California high school where boys and girls alike are invited to join a “fantasy slut league.”
• Penguin and Random House are in merger talks. This is bad news, since book publishing is one of those industries that’s too consolidated already.
• Today’s lesson in the folly of products marketed as “For Women” is brought to you by Fujitsu and its “Floral Kiss” brand laptop PC.
• Among all the slimy, sociopathic, and bigoted things Republicans are saying and doing these days, add this overt racism by Sarah Palin.
• Pseudonymous Daily Kos diarist “bayushisan” wishes gamer culture had fewer macho jerks in it. (The same, of course, can be said about athiests and “skeptics,” online comment threads, U.S. politics, and even atheists and “skeptics”.)
• Paul Karr loathes the dot-commers’ worship of “disruption” as a sacred concept, and the Ayn Randian me-first-ism behind it.
• The BBC notes that “creativity is often intertwined with mental illness“…
• …and Simon Reynolds disses the “modern dismissal of genius” in today’s “age of the remix.”
• Earthquakes can’t be predicted. That hasn’t stopped a court in Italy from convicting seven scientists who failed to do so.
• Community organizer “B Loewe” believes you should not get into lefty causes to feel good about yourself, and you shouldn’t try to be your own, or your only, emotional “caregiver.” Instead, you’re to practice prosocial interdependence as both ideology and a way of life.
• Someone says something nice about so-called “hipsters!” They’re credited with helping bring back Detroit (the place, not the car companies).

shewalkssoftly.com

• Is there anything more ritualistically ridiculous than the standard commercial “sexy” Halloween costume? Speaking of which….
• Nancy Cohen at Playboy.com warns all aficionados of porn, erotic books, birth control, and non-procreative sex in general that the extreme right wing wants to shut all that down.
• And the neo-Riot Grrrl graffiti gang has mega-tagged one of the Aurora Ave. motels that was shut down as an alleged hooking site. Their message: Respect sex work and sex workers.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s management would really, really like you to continue (or resume) reading and even buying the paper, despite its owners’ giving away free ad space to GOP Gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna. (The Times has run “issue” advertising for gay marriage and against the estate tax, but this is the first time they’ve donated to a candidate.)
• The under-new-management (sorta) Seattle Weekly did something the Stranger might have done. It commented on the Times bosses’ McKenna ad by running their own “independent expenditure” ad praising Google as “the most totally fucking awesome company in the history of mankind.” Let’s see if that gets the Weekly listed any higher in the ol’ search rankings.
• Art Thiel believes the best chance of an NBA team in Seattle might not be moving an existing one, but getting a new expansion team.
• I know you can’t get enough of those extra-unique Mormon church doctrines.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic notes how only white people get to make “jokes” about wanting to “take a swing” at a dark skinned President.
• The BBC watches the supposedly alarming trend of “passive-aggressive Wi-Fi names.” Particularly network names aimed at other residents of the same apartment/condo complex, such as “Your Music Is Annoying” or “We Can Hear You Having Sex.”

first newsweek cover, 1933, via taylormarsh.com

So after 80 years, umpteen awards, hundreds of little insights and major scoops, and (particularly lately) a lot of dross, Newsweek magazine will fold in December. The name will live on as a section within the DailyBeast.com website; but we all know this is an ending, not a “transition.”

It’s a shame. But it’s been a while in coming.

The Washington Post Co. unloaded Newsweek a few years back, just to have one fewer money-losing journalistic enterprise on its books. It was propped up for a little while by audio-equipment tycoon Sidney Harman; but he died last year, and his family stopped subsidizing the mag.

That left Newsweek at the mercy of DailyBeast, the punditry and gossip site run by media mogul Barry Diller and serial failed magazine editor Tina Brown.

Circulation, at 3 million a decade ago, dropped by more than half. Brown imposed several sleaze cover stories this summer and autumn; these only led some former fans to wish it put out of its misery.

No one, except laid off employees and their kin, will mourn what Newsweek had become.

But many of us will mourn what it had been.

When News-Week: The Magazine of News Significance began in 1933, Henry Luce’s Time had been publishing for a decade. Many readers, particularly at the dawn of FDR’s New Deal era, had grown weary of Luce’s unabashed conservative slant. News-Week gave these readers a similar formula of digests and analysis, but with a nonpartisan, sometimes even pro-Dem POV.

The Washington Post Co. bought Newsweek in the 1950s, and beefed up its original reporting. It never overtook Time in circulation or revenue, but frequently outshone its rival in getting the biggest stories and the most insightful angles on the same stories.

These days, there are any dozens of websites and blogs and aggregator algorithms serving up customized, bubble-ized, non-threatening headlines and punditry and spin about the national political/economic sphere.

But there’s less and less original reporting for these sites to slice, dice, and interpret.

And there are fewer big places that serve a variety of points of view, challenging readers to think outside of their respective ideological boxes.

We need more of what Newsweek, at its peak, served up every seven days.

It’s 10/11/12! The sort of date-progression that only happens 11 times in a century and is utterly, completely meaningless!

Elsewhere in randomness:

• Tully’s coffee shops try another fiscal maneuver to stay afloat, having been profitable only twice in 20 years.
• One of the three Pussy Riot martyrs is out of prison.
• Convicted serial child-rapist Jerry Sandusky blames his victims. And the media. How typical.
• Charles Mudede agrees with me that ending Metro’s Ride Free Area is a bad idea.
• That silly Korean dance-music video may have some social commentary nested within it.
• Turns out there’s a term for Romney’s debate tactic. It’s the “Gish Gallop.” It’s the spewing of so many fibs in so short a time that one’s opponent is left tongue-tied.
• Robert Reich debunks seven lies about the economy in two and a half minutes.
• And as a touch of visual spice on the first real week of autumn in the Charmed Land, here are some classic pin-up illustrations retouched with the face of Robert Downey Jr.

kurzweilai.net

• Did the U.S. Air Force really think up plans for a supersonic flying saucer in the 1950s? And would it have been practical (i.e., would it fly)?
• What does it mean to be “indie rock royalty” these days? It means you can play Radio City Music Hall and still have to share a studio apartment. Speaking of which….
• KEXP’s pledge-drive playlist of the most important records of the past 40 years is essentially a canon of “indie” music classics, plus a few “mainstream” mentors. Nevermind predictably tops the listener survey. The list is top-heavy with the Pixies, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., New Order, Arcade Fire, etc. etc. The list’s only surprise is its paucity of female artists. The top woman-fronted act, the Pretenders, appears at spot #51.
• A HuffPost blogger disparages Vancouver as “No Fun City,” a place where nightlife is essentially nonexistent. I can recall ages ago when I looked up to Van as having the bars and live-music venues Seattle could only dream of having. Since then, Seattle has vastly changed while Van has, if anything, become more moribund.
• The Olympic Peninsula’s northwest tip has no teen vampires, but it is an ideal spot to measure climate change with solid empirical data.
• Even “underground food market” dining operations (one-night-only food courts) have to have health permits.
• Nintendo’s next game machine will be a tablet. It will also stream video content to TVs. It could be big.
• Amazon’s paying a cool billion to buy the Paul Allen-owned buildings it occupies in South Lake Union.
• Stalking and harassing apartment residents is no way to sell cable TV.
• Seattle’s next would-be mega-developers? The Bill Pierre car-selling family.
• Can the waterfront tunnel be built without massive city subsidies (that the city really doesn’t want to pay)?
• Stranger staffer Kelly O tells a San Francisco website “12 Things You Should Know About Seattle.” These things include (too much) pot, (endangered) graffiti murals, and (yummy) street hot dogs.
• White cops shooting at nonwhite civilians with little or no true justification: it’s not just happening here.
• I had a boring and/or miserable time in the Boy Scouts. But, as we’re all learning, it could have been worse. Much, much worse.
• CNN contributor Simon Hooper asks if we can finally get over Beatles (and James Bond) nostalgia now.
• A self-described “middle aged punk” gives forth a back-in-my-day-sonny lament, nostalgizing about getting beaten up by jocks.
• Don’t look now, but Walmart workers are trying to organize.
• Having solved all of the world’s other problems, 60 Minutes sics its fangs on the designer-eyeglass-frame monopoly.
• Today in right-wing sleaze, two GOP senators are asking defense contractors to fire thousands of people just to make Obama look bad; while Arizona is suppressing the votes of up to 200,000 Latino-descent citizens in the name of “cracking down on illegals.” Also, a Legislative candidate in Arkansas says parents should be allowed to put “rebellious children” to death.
• The University of Idaho’s getting the world’s biggest collection of historic opium pipes. Hey, you gotta have something to do out there.
• Forbes contributor Steve Cooper believes content-based websites could make more money by directly selling stuff on their sites, instead of running low-profit ads for other companies selling stuff. That biz model might work for sites focused on entertainment or lifestyle topics (music, food, bridal, travel, etc.). For local newspapers’ sites, it’d be a tougher fit.
• Don’t look now, but rain (remember that?) might finally appear locally later this week.

via imdb

It’s 10/4, good buddy!

• T-Mobile merges with Metro PCS, avoids local layoffs, remains out of AT&T’s and Sprint’s clutches (for now).
• George Lakey explains how left-O-center folks have to get back on the offensive, and in the process get over “class tunnel vision.”
• The memoir of a former undercover teen booze buyer for the Liquor Board.
• The MTV website still discusses pop music, even though the MTV cable channels have abandoned it. And the site now proclaims that “Seattle Is the New Seattle.”
• The compact disc officially turns 30 this month. The first discs and players appeared in Japan in October 1982, but didn’t show up here until the next year. From that start, it took the CD only seven years to completely eradicate vinyl from mass-market music sales. Now the CD itself, and the whole industry of selling music recorded onto physical objects, is threatened with extinction. There’s a strong underground of vinyl-record advocates these days, but who will rise to defend the CD?
• We don’t have to cringe at the Mariners for another six months (not counting spring training games).

via fastcompany.com

• Dean of indie animators Bill Plympton offers a handy “Guide to Telling Animated Stories.” Lesson #1: “Having a great idea is more important than being a great artist.”
• The New York Post doesn’t like Dina Martina. Of course, they’ve been so wrong about so much so often….
• One reason the Republicans are running so scared this election: it could be the last election cycle to be dominated by TV ads, and hence by the megabucks they cost. Local news ratings around the country are teetering, especially among young adults. (And don’t expect 3D TV to save the business.)
• Buried in this story about Fender Guitars’ fiscal trouble in the techno era is the info that Fender’s biggest wholesale customer, Guitar Center (the 500 lb. gorilla of music-store chains) is controlled by Mitt Romney’s ol’ pals at Bain Capital.
• George W. Bush was kept far away from the GOP convention but is front n’ center at an “alternative investment summit” in the Cayman Islands.
• Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster looks back at his creation, now under semi-new ownership again. Brewster still seems not to understand why the Weekly had become vulnerable to the Stranger’s early-1990s rise. For 15 years, the Weekly had operated under the unbending assumption that its original target audience, the (formerly) young urban professionals of the Sixties Generation, were the absolute only people who mattered in this town or ever would matter. By ignoring the wants (or even the existence) of people born after 1952, Brewster left a huge hole for some underfunded entrepreneurs from the Midwest to fill.
• Jeremy M. Barker would like to remind you that, even when its performers appear nude on stage, “Contemporary Dance Is Not Stripping.” I agree. It’s infinitely sexier.

Sound Transit has a bus from downtown Seattle to downtown Puyallup (via Federal Way, Auburn, and Sumner). It ends at the Puyallup Sounder commuter-rail station, right by a classic small-town downtown garnished with street-corner public art works.

Civic authorities have restored this brick-wall painted sign advertising the company that created both the Puyallup fair scone and KOMO-TV.

A brisk ten-block walk took me to the fairgrounds entrance, guarded over as always by the noble cow heads.

While marketed since 1978 as “The Puyallup Fair,” the event’s official title has always been the Western Washington Fair. A new name, “Washington State Fair,” was phased in starting this year. This will surely lead to confusion with the smaller Evergreen State Fair in Monroe.

But I, along with almost every local old-timer, will always think of the fair as “The Puyallup,” thanks to a TV/radio jingle that has been embedded in our minds for more than three decades.

Along with the revised name, fair officials showed off a plan for a revised fairgrounds. The master plan would rein in the commercial exhibits that have sprawled over more of the grounds, and install outdoor agricultural demonstration areas. The idea is to re-emphasize the fair’s roots as a showcase for people of “the land.”

Other exhibits included a mini “factory tour” honoring the 100th anniversary of a Tacoma legend, the Brown & Haley candy company. Booth ladies outside were selling special commemorative Almond Roca tins. I asked if any of them contained Bjork’s life savings. They didn’t get my reference to the film Dancer in the Dark, alas.

In the fair’s Hobby Building, someone installed a private collection of memorabilia relating to another Tacoma institution, Nalley’s Fine Foods. The diversified processed-foods giant had made everything from pickles to potato chips; it closed last year, after decades of mismanagement by various out-of-state owners.

As a pop-culture compulsive, you know I always adore the collection showcases at the Hobby Building. This year folks showed off their stuff relating to the Girl Scouts (above), Lego, Dr Pepper, Sailor Moon, the Seattle World’s Fair’s 50th anniversary, Starbucks gift cards, and the Happy Face symbol.

I’ll have some more of this lovely stuff in a future post; so stay tuned.

via yowpyowp.blogspot.com

Having finally gotten the Boomerang cable channel, I’ve become re-acquainted with the early Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows (Huck, Yogi, Quick Draw, ‘Stones, Top Cat, Jetsons, Jonny Quest). They didn’t have fluid movement but they had great visual composition. They had pleasing character designs and cool semi-abstract backgrounds. They had funny dialogue. Then the company got too big and everything went downhill. This B.C.-based blogger explains it all thoroughly, including the links between the Jetsons look and the Space Needle (hint: ours came first).

• Chris Ballew’s jaunty li’l song from the J.P. Patches memorial celebration is now a video.
• Seattle’s Capitol Hill was rated America’s eighth “hippest” neighborhood in one of those questionable magazine surveys.
• Good (media) news, for once: the Village Voice Media chain of papers, including Seattle Weekly, was “taken private” in a management-led buyout. This might mean actual newspaper people in charge again. And Backpage.com, VVM’s oft-criticized sex ad website, will not be part of the new Voice Media Group.
• We’ve long snarked at TV shows that were set in Seattle but made in L.A. or Vancouver. Now, though, it turns out it’s the L.A. production community that’s worried about “runaway” shows. Of all the new hour-long dramas on the five broadcast networks, all but two are being shot somewhere else. Even one show about young actors trying to make it in Hollywood is filmed in Toronto.
• Take out the highly GOP-biased Rasmussen poll, and Obama’s currently ahead (at least slightly) in every so-called swing state.
• The Obama campaign released a fun little online commercial showing how campaigns take opponents’ statements out of context—using real sliced-and-diced Romney quites.
• Romney’s son admits his dad cheats and laughs about it, then says “that’s what we need in the White House.”
• What happens when a Koch Bros.-funded super PAC tries to stage a pro-Wall St. rally? It gets infiltrated by “satirical” anti-Wall St. activists in suits and dresses.

chris lehman, npr via kplu

• In my onetime stompin’ grounds of Corvallis OR, an Asian American businessman sponsored a downtown mural depicting tranquil nature scenes in Taiwan contrasted with police brutalizing protesters in Tibet. China’s government would like the mural gone.
• On the 20th anniversary of the film Singles, Spin imagines the film with a modern-day soundtrack (available as a Spotify playlist). No current Seattle acts are on it (though ex-local Mark Lanegan is).
• Most of the hereby-linked article is behind a paywall, but the gist is this: ESPN blogger Craig Custance believes Seattle’s got a great shot at a National Hockey League team, but as an expansion rather than a moved franchise. Custance agrees with similar remarks earlier this year by CBC hockey commentator Elliotte Friedman. (Nobody might have NHL hockey for perhaps a whole year, if the league continues to lock out its players.)
• My ol’ pal James Winchell has a neat piece in the Jewish mag Tablet (no relation to the defunct local hipster rag of the same name), philosophizing on the Hebrew roots and symbolism in the works of Franz Kafka.
• How artificial intelligence is turning out: expect more stuff like Siri, but no human-esque robots any time soon.
• As big chain retailers abandon more and more sites around the country, some of those sites are being taken over by big chain restaurants.
• Danny Westneat asks if Romney’s so down on those who don’t pay taxes, when’s he gonna go after the likes of Boeing? (Or, for that matter, Microsoft?)
• Poll-analyst extraordinaire Nate Silver sees Obama doing better in polls that include real-live pollsters (instead of robocalls) and that include cell-phone-only households.
• Today’s scathinger-than-scathing Romney rants come to you courtesy of Nicholas Kristof and Lawrence O’Donnell…
• …while Jon Stewart tears yet another righteous hole in the blatantly hypocritical Faux News partisans.
• As for me, for now, I’ll just say Romney’s appearance on Univision should have been accompanied by one of that channel’s biggest personalities. I speak, of course, of “El Chacal de la Trompeta,” the masked trumpeter from the Gong Show-like talent segment of Sabado Gigante.

watch el chacal de la trompeta, via youtube

andraste.com via the smoking gun

• A Seattle fetish photographer puts up some shots taken inside a cemetery. Legal rancor ensues. Trust me on this: The dead people don’t give a darn.
• Heather Artena Hughes, 1967-2012: The longtime local actress/singer/dancer/comedienne did everything from torch songs and burlesque bits to parody wrestling matches. She was a regular in the Match Game Belltown shows. Everyone who knew and/or worked with her called her a near-goddess of skill and verve.
• Nordstrom is expanding into Canada. (No “designer toque” jokes from this corner.)
• Why do the Mariners brass still oppose the Sonics arena scheme? Could it be because the M’s could conceivably want their own cable channel, and any neo-Sonics team could conceivably compete with that?
• The city of Auburn has a “wall of shame,” decrying banks that hold on to foreclosed homes and leave them to decay.
• A JPMorganChase analyst claims the iPhone 5 (just announced this week) “could prop up the entire U.S. economy.” Douglas Rushkoff at CNN is more than a little skeptical about this claim.
• AT&T wants the legal right to abandon the landline-phone biz, and with it all demands for “network neutrality” that keep it from manipulating what websites its customers get to see.
• The broadcast/cable/satellite TV industries, and their attorneys, continue to make the online streaming of “free” TV a near-impossibility.
• It’s a little too late for the chain’s Washington locations (the regional franchisee went under a year or two back), but Hooters is trying to be more female-friendly.
• It’s not much of a comic (just dialogue scenes), but there’s still novelty value to a lawyer making a five-page strip as a legal brief in the Apple/Amazon ebook pricing suit.
• USA Today just brought out a massive print/online redesign. Nice to see a print paper fighting for continued relevance, instead of just fading away.
• Amanda Palmer raised over a million bucks on Kickstarter for a new album. Not getting a slice of that: local pickup musicians on her tour stops.
• The Pussy Riot protesters might get out of jail next month. Just might.
• “Did the Republicans deliberately crash the U.S. economy?” Or was that merely collateral damage in the game of supplying as many favors as possible to its billionaire campaign donors?
• How do you get and keep more women in the tech industries? One way is to not require programming experience in filling non-programming jobs (such as middle management).
• What will it take to get more black ballet dancers?

• Clint Eastwood’s invisible-Obama-in-a-chair stunt took place during the 60th anniversary week of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s allegorical novel about the black struggle in the face of social “invisibility.”
• Robert Reich’s message for an election-year Labor Day: “It’s the inequality, stupid.”
• Romney’s “533 lies in 30 weeks:” Now THAT’s an achievement!
• One of our favorite watering holes and DJ clubs, Olive Way’s The Living Room, is no longer living.
• There’s a “Seattle” restaurant (really on Bainbridge) with a most un-NorWestern strict reservations policy.
• The anti-gay-marriage campaign is engaging in potentially illegal fundraising solicitations toward area churches.
• An abandoned Ballard church that became an art gallery briefly in 2009 is now set to be razed for townhomes.
• The author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull almost got his own wings when his small plane crashed in the San Juans.
• An outfit that ran some of those big motivational seminars (that were really fronts for selling questionable investment schemes) has collapsed.
• Faye Anderson, 1950-2012: The owner of the New Orleans restaurant/bar in Pioneer Square hosted, and supported, jazz and other musics for more than a quarter century. Whether the club will survive is for her heirs to announce, and they haven’t yet.
• Hal David, 1921-2012: The acclaimed lyricist was already pushing 40 when he first teamed up with composer Burt Bacharach. For 14 years they (with singer Dionne Warwick as their mouthpiece) were an unstoppable team, with David’s deceptively simple wordplay leading listeners through Bacharach’s often complicated melodies, until the musical version of Lost Horizon blew up in their faces. What the world needs now is more expressive minds like him (and love, of course).
• As all good NorWesterners know, it doesn’t really rain here more than other parts of the U.S. Especially not in the past 42 days (and 42 nights).

zoo atlanta via king-tv

• Ivan, 1962-2012: In the postwar years, the biggest public attractions in both Seattle and Tacoma were caged gorillas. Seattle’s gorilla, Bobo, was kept at the Woodland Park Zoo. Tacoma’s Ivan was in the indie B&I discount store, which later evolved into a low-rent mall. There, he was kept in a cage with a back concrete wall painted to resemble a jungle. After years of public pressure, the mall’s owners finally donated Ivan to Woodland Park, which in turn sent him to Zoo Atlanta.
• Just when folks are getting used to the Space Needle in its retro original “Galaxy Gold” color scheme, its owners want to change it again.
• Thanks to the state’s “top two” election law and a Stranger-fueled write in campaign, the speaker of the State House of Representatives will be challenged this November by a socialist.
• Former City Councilmember Cheryl Chow (daughter of powerful local restaurateur Ruby Chow) has proclaimed that she is a lesbian; and also, as an aside, that she’s dying of cancer.
• The best thing left at Seattle Weekly, longform-essay reporter Rick Anderson, was just laid off and placed on freelance status. Will someone local please buy the paper back from the Arizonans and make it something to be proud of again?
• A tech news site visits the Bellevue company (run by ex-Microsoft top execs) that’s become infamous for buying up patents by the thousands for the purpose of suing other companies that didn’t know these patents existed.
• PopCap Games, the Seattle-based darling of the “social gaming” realm, is firing 50 people.
• Bookstore sales rose 3.8 percent in June compared to the previous year. Sorry, book snobs—you’re still not nearly as solitary as you believe/wish you were.
• Big national corporations have turned the art of finagling sweetheart deals from local governments into a precise science. Today’s examples: sporting-goods superstores.
• ABC’s Nightline, in its 34th year, is the #1 network show in its time slot, regularly outdrawing both Leno and Letterman. Right after the elections, it’ll be pushed up to 12:35 a.m. so Jimmy Kimmel can get the 11:35 slot. And you ask why total TV viewership is down these days, what with these total geniuses running the joints.
• Charles Kenny at Bloomberg Businessweek claims to know “the real reason America’s schools stink.” According to Kenny, it’s know-nothing, do-nothing parents.
• Let’s all “Do the Felix!“

seattle mariners via mynorthwest.com