My full time (with overtime some weeks) contract position with Amazon.com is now ended. A gig that was originally set to have lasted 7.5 weeks instead got stretched to 13, so I’m more than grateful.

I was not stationed at the massive new Amazon campus at south Lake Union. Rather, I was in the company’s highly obscure back office in back of the Rainier Valley Lowe’s.

(For local old timers or baseball nerds, my desk was where the left field bleachers had been at the old Sick’s Seattle Stadium, home of the old Rainiers and Pilots.)

I was in an office area previously occupied by Amazon’s accounts payable department, for which we occasionally got phone calls, to which we had no forwarding info.

The building also houses:

• the company’s central mailroom,
• its photo studio (where tall blonde models would occasionally assemble),
• a large conference room (sometimes rented out to the guys from the Pepsi plant across the street),
• office-equipment storage, and
• the workshop where they custom-make the legendary Amazon “door desks.”

I got to eat lunch at the fine fast-food outlets of the Rainier Valley; as well as two local indie treasures, The Original Philly’s and Remo Borracchini’s bakery-deli.

I worked as part of a team that varied between 12 and 32 people; at least two-thirds female. Some were otherwise stay-home moms. Some were recent college grads. Some were middle-age cranks like myself. All were damn smart and able to think their way through sometimes obtuse situations.

•

What we did all this time is a bit harder to explain.

On the Wednesday of our first week at the task, Amazon announced a line of new Kindle e-book machines.

At the same time, it announced a new, exclusive feature in its e-book files, “Xray.”

Reviewers have called Xray “an index on steroids.” It’s a hyperlinked list of a book’s references to people (real and fictional), places, ideas, topics, etc. It gives Amazon something other sellers of the same e-book titles don’t have.

The company’s crack coders created a software algorithm to generate the Xray files. But it had trouble parsing the infinite possibilities of what is and isn’t a person’s name (it regularly believed “Jesus H. Christ” and “Jack Daniel’s” to be characters in a story), and what is and isn’t a relevant phrase (publishers’ addresses don’t really belong in an index).

So every Xray file needed human tweaking.

That’s what we did, on the “Xray Quality Assurance Team.”

We used specially-programmed data tools to delete and add names and phrases in the Xray files. (To explain the process any further would risk violating my non-disclosure agreement.)

Our goal was to have 6,500 titles ready by the time the new Kindle models came out or shortly thereafter. By this past midweek, we’d exceeded 8,000. I worked, in whole or in part, on almost 1,500 of those.

•

Since “books” are a widely diverse lot, each Xray editing job was different.

Some titles (self-help guides or tech instructionals) contained lots of phrases but few to no names. Others (short stories sold as stand-alone products) had names but no significant phrases.

Some had compact casts of characters and limited place names. Others, such as epic historical tomes, contained literal “casts of thousands.”

The absolute toughest e-books to figure out were the umpteen-volume fantasy sagas, such as The Wheel of Time and the Game of Thrones sequels. They’ve got hundreds of made-up people names, plus hundreds of equally made-up names for places, tribes, deities, swords, etc.

But no matter how tricky any particular job was, our goal was accuracy above speed.

We picked the titles to work on from a database of Amazon’s most popular e-books, both “paid” and “free.” The latter include sample chapters of forthcoming books as well as public-domain classics. (I helped edit the Xray for The Idiot, and sure felt like one afterwards.)

•

I’ve long ranted in this space and elsewhere that, despite four decades’ worth of pseudo-intellectual hype about “The Death of The Book,” the written word remains a vital medium, commercially as well as in other aspects.

My thirteen weeks with Xray helped to confirm this belief.

The job also gave me an insight into what’s selling in the e-book sphere.

You’ve got all your regular NY Times and USA Today bestsellers, present and past.

You’ve got your expected genre items:

• Thrillers.
• Whodunits.
• Regency romances.
• Sword n’ sorcery.
• Space operas.
• Twilight knockoffs.
• Bridge to Terabithia knockoffs. (In the knockoffs, the fantasy worlds the kids travel to are real.)
• Inspirational lessons.
• Celebrity tell-alls.
• Cookbooks and diet guides.
• Political sermons of all stripes. (Yes, my fellow lefties, right-wingnuts do read books. They read wingnut books.)
• And, oh yeah, “serious literature,” or whatever that’s called these days.

•

And there’s one genre that I, and the rest of the Xray Quality team, were surprised to find so prevalent among the top selling e-books.

Sometimes, it’s euphemistically billed as “erotic romance.”

What is is, is women’s smut.

You might already know that your regular formula romance novels, the Harlequins and the Silhouettes and such, include explicit sex scenes these days. (Only “Christian” romances don’t.)

But lately—and specifically in the e-book realm, where no one else can see what you’re reading—stories primarily or totally about sex, written for and by women (or at least under women’s pseudonyms), have become a major cottage industry.

I’d say they made up a good 5 percent of the database of Kindle bestsellers, at least.

They range in length from full size novels to short-short stories.

Some are self-published. Others come under the logos of established romance imprints, or their subsidiary lines. Still others are issued by professional, e-book-only companies. The latter have authors’ guidelines as strictly detailed as those of print romance publishers.

And formulaic they are.

For one thing, the traditional romance happy ending is a must. No matter how wild the sexual adventures, the heroines have to end up in committed relationships by the end.

The prose styling is also strictly regulated. No Anias Nin poetic flourishes; just simple declarative sentences and an established vocabulary of descriptions. Breasts are never fondled or groped but always “cupped.”

The plots are equally formulaic.

Several of them star mousy, modern-day women who travel back in time and into the arms of shirtless Scottish Highlanders.

In other formula plots, the male lust objects are equally studly—young corporate tycoons, Navy SEALs, cowboys, police detectives, firefighters, zombie hunters.

Or they’re vampires. Or shape-shifters of assorted types. There are werewolves, were-leopards, were-foxes, were-rats, and were-ravens.

And, quite often, the heroine has simultaneous sex with two, three, or four men. Sometimes these men are brothers. Other times they have sex with one another as well as with the heroine. But they always end up in permanent polyandrous households.

The self-published smut stories often have more traditionally “smutty” formulae. Amazon won’t deal in sex stories involving underage characters or blood relatives (except for the aforementioned groups of brothers sharing the same woman). But there are plenty of just-over-18 tarts seducing stepdads and stepbrothers.

E-books don’t really have covers, only promotional images on their respective Web pages. For many low-budget e-book-only smut titles, these images are amateurishly Photoshopped from licensed stock photos, or from unlicensed “found” online pictures. The effect is, of course, extra cheesy goodness!

An anonymous member of our team (not me, I swear) collected some of these images, along with blurbs and excerpts from the cheesiest of these smut stories, and put them on a blog called Wet & Wilde.

This, my friends, is what massive technological investments by companies here and overseas have led up to.

And even if most of it doesn’t arouse me, I’m glad it’s out there.

I hereby promise to post more of these in the near future.

• Update: Looks like B&O Espresso will stay open, perhaps through the bulk of next year.
• The City Council’s trying, again, to ban plastic grocery bags. I say it’s none too soon, particularly for those awkward, flimsy Safeway bags that routinely break or spill their contents. It’s impossible to take them home on a bus and expect to get home with all one’s purchases intact.
• SeattlePI.com’s most famous employee, political cartoonist David Horsey, is going to work for the LA Times. He’ll draw and write commentaries about the 2012 election cycle. PI.com will most likely still get to run Horsey’s work on its site. Since the demise of the print Post-Intelligencer, Horsey has seldom addressed local issues anyway, preferring to cover national topics for syndication. The upside of this move is that, just maybe, the Hearst bosses who’ve kept a tight rein on PI.com’s purse strings might reassign Horsey’s salary to beef up the site’s news staff. The site desperately needs more staff-created content to be a first-stop local news destination.
• AT&T to T-Mobile: Let’s call the whole thing off.
• Scientific American claims there’s evidence for the long standing portrayal of creative people as eccentric. I can assure you, however, that eccentric people are not necessarily creative.
• Simon Mainwaring at Forbes.com claims anti-corporate fervor actually provides an opportunity for corporations to enhance their brand images, by hyping themselves as socially responsible.
• Katha Pollitt has her own take on the late Christopher Hitchens. Among other things, she found him way short of acceptability on women’s-rights issues; even though he invoked those among his excuses for supporting Bush’s wars.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times)

Starting in June, liquor sales in this state move to private retailers.

But only at establishments of at least 10,000 square feet, as per terms of the Costco-written and -sponsored initiative.

This means most of the new liquor outlets will be run by big retail chains, not by independent merchants.

Washingtonians will continue to be spared the garish storefronts and signage associated with commercial liquor stores in other states.

But, for the most part, we also won’t get the careful selection and knowledgeable advice an independent merchant can provide.

In and near the Capitol Hill Times‘ distribution area, three independently owned food-beverage outlets have enough square footage to qualify as liquor sellers. They’re the Montlake Deli Market, the Madison Market Co-op, and the Jackson Street Red Apple Market.

The Madison Park Red Apple and Pete’s Wines on Fairview aren’t big enough. To get booze, they’d have to convince the state that their respective neighborhoods qualify as “trade areas.” You see, there’s a provision in the new law that says the state can license smaller stores to sell the hard stuff if there aren’t other liquor sellers in their respective “trade areas.” The initiative’s text doesn’t define those areas.

However, Area 51 Furniture on East Pine and City People’s Garden in Madison Valley ARE big enough to sell liquor. And the new law doesn’t say a store has to make most of its income from food/beverage sales, since Costco doesn’t.

Most of the new places for the hard stuff on the Hill will be the chains. Two Safeways, two Walgreens, one Trader Joe’s, and three QFCs (but not the too-small Broadway and Madison Rite Aid stores). All of these companies, including QFC’s parent Kroger, sell liquor at their stores in other states.

The Washington-only Bartell Drug chain (with large stores on Madison and in the Harvard Market complex) hasn’t said if it will add liquor. Bartell just added beer and wine to its stores last year.

•

The state’s budding “microdistillery” movement, including Capitol Hill’s Sun Liquor, will also be affected by I-1138. How it will be affected isn’t certain yet.

Hard liquor had not been commercially made in Washington since Prohibition, until a few years ago. That’s when a few entrepreneurs, with some regulatory easings from the state, started producing and releasing artisanal vodkas and gins. Whiskey, with its longer lead time, took longer to show up.

With the State Liquor Board as their only retail/wholesale customer, these fledgling producers could make one sales pitch and have their product in every liquor store in Washington, and available to every cocktail lounge in Washington.

The new system will be more complex.

Restaurants and bars will have multiple, competing distributors from which to get their spirits.

The big chains (mostly based out of state) that will dominate retail liquor sales will get to buy direct from producers, with no wholesale middlemen. And their offerings may be much more limited than the variety in today’s state stores. (They might even take shelf space away from local wine brands, and give it to national spirits brands.)

Will a Kroger corporate booze buyer in Cincinatti, or a Trader Joe’s booze buyer in suburban L.A., bother to even receive a proposal from a small Seattle distillery (or a small Yakima winery)?

Already, the Liquor Board has stopped adding new products to its inventory, as it prepares to shut down its stores. That’s put a crimp in local distillers’ new-product launches.

•

The changes to the booze biz in Washington are vast and complex. And various business interests will immediately ask the Legislature to make changes to the changes.

It will take a sober head to figure it all out.

Remember the big plan to revive All My Children and One Life to Live as online-only soap operas? Ain’t gonna happen. The economics just weren’t there.

washingtonstatewire.com

So the voters of the state finally up and did it.

They took liquor retailing away from themselves (the people of the state) and gave it to the likes of Costco and Safeway.

I for one will miss the state liquor stores, which will be closed or auctioned off to private operators some time next year.

In a modern marketing world where everything was loud and flashy and out to sell-sell-sell, this was one major retail chain out not to promote its wares, but to control their sale.

The stores were mostly no-frills operations, with modest signage and minimalist interior decor.

The employed unionized clerks, whose job was to facilitate sales, not to increase them.

In most years, they generated at least enough revenue to pay for the state’s alcohol treatment and anti-drunk-driving programs.

But their main function was service, not sales.

(Booze For People, Not For Profit.)

They showed by example that consumer goods can be distributed without excess hype, and without the secular religion of excess consumption.

'off the mark' by mark parisi

• R.I.P. Bil Keane, 1912-2011. The Family Circus cartoonist plied the same realm of family homilies and deceptively simple line work for a half century. If Keane’s characters never generated the licensing income of Garfield or Dennis the Menace, they did provide a consistent note of light amusement. By staying within their own fantasy realm, with only the slightest whiff of contemporary pop-culture references. Even more notable was Keane’s good-natured willingness to let other cartoonists spoof the Circus’s delicately insular universe.
• Local singer-songwriter Heather Duby was in a horrid accident in New Jersey. She lost part of one finger, and almost lost both her hands. She’ll need a lot of rehab. There is, as you might expect, a benefit concert 11/26 at the Crocodile.
• Just what the hell is Microsoft doing as a prime sponsor of the Koch brothers’ (funders of all things wingnutted and anti-planet and anti-democracy) big Tea Party conference?
• Brendan Coffey at Forbes lists our own Russell Investments as one of the four companies that essentially control the financial world, for good or ill.
• Reuters notes Seattle’s explosion as a high tech hub. Now let’s work on getting more jobs here for non-programmers.
• The long-lost deleted scenes from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet have been found in a Seattle warehouse, and will be a bonus feature on the film’s DVD reissue.
• Punk rock history is becoming an academic specialty. Maybe I should apply for that teaching certificate.
• Amanda Hess at Good magazine depicts the late Andy Rooney as a reactionary crank who hated minorities, uppity women, and pretty much anything newer than the electric typewriter. She also describes Rooney as a man “who saw the world from his seat in a darkened library of hardcover books.” The combo of book collecting and reactionary crankiness, alas, exists far more frequently in this world than “book people” will admit.
• Paul Krugman proclaims solar energy as now being widely cost effective in many applications.
• Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” PR campaign wasn’t enough to save one horrendously bullied gay teen from suicide. In response, CBC comedy-show host Rick Mercer issued a call for more immediate action:

It’s no longer good enough for us to tell kids who are different that it’s going to get better. We have to make it better now, that’s every single one of us. Every teacher, every student, every adult has to step up to the plate.

jiyoung-s.blogspot.com/

• The Bruce Lee family is talking about establishing a museum in Seattle honoring the late martial arts star, who lived here for much of his youth. A shame this wasn’t in the works while half the town was trying to put something at the old Fun Forest site that wouldn’t be a friggin’ glass art gallery.
• What happens when a big Wall St. bank CEO (specifically, the CEO of the big bank that devoured our own once-beloved Wash. Mutual) comes to town to give a speech during the height of the Occupy ____ protests? Citizen blockades and pepper spray, that’s what.
• Forget about caffeinated meat. That was yesterday’s novelty product. Today’s big news in pick-me-ups is caffeinated inhalers!
• The Tacoma City Council passed what was essentially an anti-Walmart zoning law. But, faced with potential unaffordable lawsuits, the council’s backed down and allowed Walmart’s application to proceed through the bureaucracy.
• Darcy Burner, one of our favorite folks, is running for Congress again. This time it will be in the redrawn version of Jay Inslee’s old district.
• R.I.P. Thomas Patrick Haley, who bought two neighborhood-newspaper groups and combined them into Pacific Publishing Co. Haley took a ragtag batch of properties (including a job printing operation) and put them on a firm footing (well, as firm a footing as could be attained in that subset of publishing). The Belltown Messenger had a co-publishing agreement with Pacific for the five years I was involved with it. I appear once a month in Pacific’s Capitol Hill Times.

SeaTimes average paid circulation has shrunk again, to 242,814.

This is according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation report, covering the six months ending Sept. 30. This decline is comparable to that of other big-city dailies.

(One exception to this trend: The NY Times, which actually has more Sunday print readers nowadays. That’s because it’s offering “weekender” print subscribers full access to the NYT’s online content, at less than half the price of a web-only subscription.)

•

The SeaTimes still plans to vacate its 81-year-old landmark HQ on Fairview Ave. The company now plans to hold on to the site, while offering a “ground lease” deal to developers. If one reads between the lines of the paper’s spokesperson Jill Mackie in the linked story, one can conclude the company hopes to help subsidize the paper’s losses via real-estate profits.

•

Before those profits, if any, kick in, there are areas where the already-thin paper could keep shrinking.

The biggest of these is the space given to wire-service stories, particularly on Sunday.

Some local-reporting beats could be turned into blog-like columns, to which assigned reporters would fill a predictable quota of  column-inches every week, whether there’s a big story in that subject area or not.

The SeaTimes could also give up on home delivery for the nearly ad-free Mon.-Wed. papers. (The potential snag to this idea: its recent deal to take over the Everett Herald’s delivery operations.)

(Told you I wouldn’t necessarily be providing these headlines every day.)

• Wednesday was drum n’ bass dance nite at Occupy Seattle!
• Gavin Polone is a film/TV producer in L.A. who believes film and TV should mostly be made in L.A., not spread out across North America. Still, he makes a lucid point when he alleges state and provincial tax breaks for film producers (like the ones Wash. state just got rid of) benefit only the producers, not the states and provinces.
• The real woman behind the book and TV movie Sibyl didn’t really have multiple personalities. But (and this is buried in the linked story) she really did have serious psychological/emotional issues, and believed she could only get the attention and help she desperately needed by exaggerating her condition.
• Ex-Seattleite Emma Harris pleads for her fellow environmentalists to care about more places besides “pristine wilderness”—which she says doesn’t even exist.
• Could the recently concluded CityArts Fest grow into the big regional music festival various entities have tried to launch from time to time but without really catching on?
• Now it can be told: Steve Jobs called Fox News a “destructive force in our society” to Rupert Murdoch’s face, while he was negotiating to get Murdoch-owned entertainment content for iTunes.
• Does the boss of BankAmeriCrap really believe all he has is an “image problem“? If so, he’s even more out of touch with reality than the average big-bank CEO. If not, he’s just another cynical spinmeister.
• Even Forbes scorns the Oakland, CA police’s violent over-reaction to peaceful Occupy protesters.
• Danny Westneat notices something we’ve known all along—Tim Eyman hates transit. So do right-wingers in general. They want people stuck in traffic, as captive audiences for the talk-radio goons.

gadgetsin.com

As power in the book biz moves increasingly from Manhattan to here, the Manhattan news media treat it as a crisis, or at least as a matter of controversy.

Hence, the Sunday NY Times op-ed package posing the musical question, “Will Amazon Kill Off Book Publishers?”

What rot.

Worse, it’s predictable rot.

I’ve ranted on and on here, since years before the e-book became a marketable commodity, about the traditional book industry’s stodginess, parochialism, and criminal inefficiency.

I’ve also ranted about the particular cultural conservatism (bordering on the reactionary) that’s long held sway within the big-L Literary subculture. (That scene is not the same thing as the book industry, even though it thinks it ought to be).

Current example: Dennis Johnson (a respected publisher of, and advocate for, big-L Literary product), claiming in the NYT debate-in-print that

…publishing isn’t, right now, and hasn’t been, for 500 years, about developing [sales] algorithms. It’s been about art-making and culture-making and speaking truth to power.

The corner of publishing Johnson occupies might be about art n’ culture making.

But the whole of publishing is, and always has been, about the bottom line.

And in societies such as this one where there’s no royal family or state church to prop up (and censor) publishing, that bottom line means sales.

And, I will argue, that’s mostly been a good thing.

Not in spite of the ephemeral commercial dross that’s been the bulk of most commercial publishers’ product, but because of it.

The romances. The mysteries. The space operas. The treacle-y 19th century “ladies’ stories.” The pulp adventures. The lurid ’60s paperbacks. The advice and how-to guides. The travelogues. The comics. The fads. The tracts (spiritual, political, dietary). The bodice-rippers. The porn. The celebrity memoirs. And, yeah, today’s teen vampires and werewolves. They’re all where the passions of their particular times and places are preserved.

But Johnson wants to know how big-L Literary work will fare in the brave new e-world.

I say it will thrive as never before.

For the e-book business model is not, as Johnson fears, a recipe for monopoly.

It’s about less consolidation, not more.

There are three major e-book sales sites, and hundreds of minor ones.

Anybody can sell just about anything in e-book form on their own, or via one of these sites.

And they are.

Cottage industries are springing up to provide editing and design services for e-book self publishers.

And new small presses are forming to more fully curate “quality” ebooks, and to more effectively promote them.

Big-L Literature was, at best, a prestige sideline for the old-line major publishers. Smaller specialty presses, like Johnson’s, had to play by the big presses’ business rules (including devastating return policies with bookstores); rules that made Johnson’s kind of books hellishly difficult to put out at even a break-even level.

That good, and sometimes great, books of highbrow or artistic fiction came out of that business model, and came out regularly, is a testament to the perseverance of impresarios such as Johnson, and to authors’ willingness to work for the equivalent of less than minimum wage.

The e-book business model doesn’t guarantee success.

But it gives specialty works, and their makers, a fighting chance.

• Jezebel and Gawker each snark away at the absurdist extremes of commercial “sexy” Halloween garb.
• The Olympian has some cogent reasons (as opposed to the TV ads’ scare-tactic reasons) why Washington state’s liquor business shouldn’t be turned over to Costco.
• Jerry Large is the first local mainstream reporter to note the connection between Occupy _______ and the Vancouver mag Adbusters.
• Buried within a statement of support for Occupy Seattle, city councilmember Nick Licata floats the idea of a municipal income tax.
• There’s a whole site of writers expressing support for Occupy ______. One of its best entries, as you might expect, is from Lemony Snicket.
• Matt Honan claims to speak on behalf of millions of grownup children of prior recessions when he proclaims, “Generation X is sick of your bullshit.”
• Is Target really better than Walmart? Allegedly, not when it comes to working conditions.
• Microsoft’s opened a retail outlet in U Village, right across a parking lot from the Apple Store.

seattle sounders fc, via seattleweekly.com

• ‘Twas a lovely low key event in glorious Greenwood Thursday evening, debuting our latest book Then & Now: Seattle. Thanks to all who attended and to the staff of Couth Buzzard Books.
• The greatest American-born soccer player in perhaps-ever has retired. There’s a monument to him in his hometown, Olympia.
• Besides the expected police over-reactions in various cities, right wing sleaze artists are trying to discredit the Occupy ______ movement by committing acts of vandalism and blaming it on the movement. There’s also a falsely credited photo circulating around right-wing blogs. It depicts a protest march with banners reading “Fuck the Troops” and “No Gods No Masters.” The right-wing blogs claim it to be a recent Occupy Wall Street scene. It’s really from Portland, and it’s from a 2007 antiwar protest.
• Danny Westneat is wrong. The Occupy ______ people don’t want to get “government handouts.” They want the people and companies who don’t need government handouts, but get them anyway, to get at least fewer of them.
• I guess there’s never an off-season for jokes based on “Seattle” stereotypes.
• Seattle Public Schools are way popular. This bodes well for the city’s survival as a place where ordinary, non-affluent folk can continue to reside.
• The guy being blamed around Facebook and Twitter for stiffing a Capitol Hill waitress and calling her fat? He’s not the guy that did it.
• With fewer undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. these days (despite what the lying right-wing media claims), there’s a shortage of farm workers. That shortage has hit the Washington apple orchards.
• One side effect of the proposed Swedish-Providence medical merger: The nuns who run Providence want nothing to do with abortion services, and will veto any continuation of elective abortions at Swedish. Swedish management’s trying to get out of the resulting PR brouhaha by helping to fund a new Planned Parenthood clinic.
• Dear animal activists: “Liberating” critters bred to be homebodies doesn’t always work. Especially if the critters aren’t native to the particular wilds you’re sending them into.

classickidstv.co.uk

• Greenwood. It’s truly a lovely neighborhood. A great place to spend an autumnal evening in the company of fellow Seattle social history fans. Specifically, fans of our latest product, Then & Now: Seattle. It all transpires starting at 7:30 p.m. today (Thursday) at the Couth Buzzard Books and Cafe, 8310 Greenwood Ave. N. Be there.
• The media’s parental scare story of the week: Teens are supposedly soaking gummy candies in alcohol and scarfin’ them down for a quick buzz.
• The state’s moved one step closer to allowing Seattle bars to stay open later.
• Gay marriage, now less unpopular than before.
• Occupy Seattle’s still going strong; but is it being taken over by folks protesting for protesting’s sake?
• Community colleges in Washington can now declare themselves in states of “financial emergency.” Unions representing the college’s (mostly already underpaid) teachers are worried it could lead to further and faster layoffs.
• After the construction slump and the shrinkage of print newspapers, what more could go wrong for the wood products industry? Well, China used to buy Northwest-made finished lumber, but now it just wants raw logs.
• The vast majority of non-governmental arts funding in this country goes to big establishment institutions with decidedly white, upscale audiences. This will come at no surprise to friends of mine who’ve tried to drum up corporate and foundation support for smaller but established performing-arts outfits, only to learn said corporations and foundations only give to the “SOB” (symphony, opera, ballet).

linda thomas, kiro-fm

• If only more real-world buildings could be more like the ones displayed at BrickCon, the gathering of Lego maniacs.
• If you still measure companies by the Almighty Stock Price (and you really shouldn’t), the once mighty IBM is bigger than Microsoft for the first time in 15 years.
• An Internet photo of a Sharpie-penned list of bookstore employee pet peeves, supposedly from a now-closed Borders branch, has been going around lately.
• So, apparently, has whooping cough.
• The next big idea for Seattle bike lanes—site them on side streets instead of major arterials.
• Open Circle Theater has produced what it called “fantastical theater for a daring audience” since 1992. In recent years, it moved into the old Aha! Theater space on Second Avenue, bring live theater back to Belltown. Now, it’s apparently defunct. No word yet about the other troupes that have been sharing OCT’s Belltown space.
• Danny Westneat claims that, despite the hype, Seattle Public Schools are actually pretty good these days.
• State schools superintendent Randy Dorn is refusing to offer Gov. Gregoire a list of programs that could be sacrificed in the next round of budget cuts. Dorn claims to do so would violate the state constitution’s requirement for basic education support.
• The “voter fraud epidemic” so loudly hyped by the right-wing media despite its complete nonexistence? KIRO-TV hyped it too. Even though the state gave the station the facts that negated the station’s claims.
• The Occupy Wall Street protests continue. And they’ve now got a Seattle branch operation, which also continues.
• Mark Sumner argues that the old Dutch tulip mania makes a better metaphor for the Wall Street speculation bubble than it did for the late-1990s dot-com bubble.
• Despite what the religious right and its right-wing-media hucksters claim, America’s actually becoming a more secular nation.
• Mike Dillon, who first got me doing the occasional essays I do for the Capitol Hill Times, has some nice things to say about my book Walking Seattle. Thanks.

costco store-brand whiskey, from rebelbartender.com

• The initiative to Costco-ize Washington’s liquor business? Less popular now than in previous polls.
• Good news, or as close to good news as we’re likely to get, i/r/t govt. budgets. The proposed city budget doesn’t cut human services, and the county budget doesn’t cut anything.
• MTV’s The Real World is coming back to Seattle. In other news, MTV still exists.
• Some people would apparently rather wear their vegetables than eat them.
• A Boeing 787 was finally turned over to an airline, three years late. How’s that whole outsourcing/union-busting thing workin’ out for ya?
• Nobody was hurt when Gov. Gregoire’s car was sideswiped by another car on I-5.
• You can always count on College Republicans to believe racist “jokes” are cool.
• The “Occupy Wall Street” protests finally get some media attention, thanks to brutally over-reactive cops.
• The potential price of eco-friendliness: “A car wreck that involves an electric vehicle or a hybrid can pose grave risks to emergency personnel.”
• Sean Penn, diplomatic superstar?