(NOTE: Due to time constraints of an employment-related variety, these might not appear as frequently during the next few weeks.)

• Seattle’s not the only city with no NBA basketball these days, as the lockout cancels the first preseason games.
• Just as we’d figured, the Illinois company calling itself Boeing has been out to bust its unions by dumping its Washington heritage.
• Seattle ranks #7 in a list of the top transit-using metro areas.
• Novelist Anne Marie Ruff has a theory why there’s no cure for AIDS yet—because a cure wouldn’t be as profitable for the drug companies as expensive lifetime treatments are.
• Canada’s hard-right federal government is imposing harsh minimum sentencing laws on pot growers caught with as few as six plants. B.C. provincial officials fear it could swamp its already overcrowded prison system.
• A guy in Montana was attacked by a bear. The guy’s friend fired a gun at the bear. Missed the bear. Hit the guy.

There’s one thing I sure don’t want you to miss. It’s at 5 p.m. today at the new Elliott Bay Book Co., on 10th Avenue between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill. Be there or be trapezoidal.

defunct connecticut strip mall, from backsideofamerica.com

• Mark Hinshaw at Crosscut says Seattle’s wrong to demand street level retail in so many mixed-use developments. He says there just aren’t enough viable businesses to put in them. It’s actually a national situation. Even before the ’08 slump, analysts claimed the country had become “overstored,” with too many malls, strip malls, big box outlets, etc. for the available business.
• One successful local retailer, kitchenware king Sur La Table, was bought by the same financiers who also own big chunks of Gucci and Tiffany.
• The big Nevermind 20th anniversary concert opened with the reunited (for now) Fastbacks nailing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Perfect in so many ways.
• “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is done for. There was a big coming out party for GLBT military personnel at Lewis-McChord.
• For once, a local art work made for display at Burning Man will actually be shown here!
• Tacoma’s life size Boy Scout statue is missing. Scouting officials fear the thieves could just melt it down.
• Thankfully, there will be no Oklahoma or Texas teams in the Pac-12 (previously Pac-10, previously Pac-8) conference. Some sporting traditions should remain sacred.
• U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt (R-Spokane) thinks schools spend too much time and resources on “nonessential curriculum” such as gay history and the environment.
• The big Netflix shakeup is explained by that prime explainer of everything, The Oatmeal.
• BBC Ulster commentator William Crawley explains how to be a Christian anarchist. Hint: It ain’t easy.
• Is the “Occupy Wall Street” protest a bigger thing online than it is as a real-world event? And what are the protesters for, anyway?
• Has Facebook really created 180,000 jobs, as the company claims? Or is this just a new version of dot-com hype?
• Current TV’s next lib-talk franchise: The heretofore Internet-based gabfest The Young Turks, featuring ex-MSNBC dude Cenk Uygur. Still can’t get the channel on my cable system.
• The feds claim the gaming site Full Tilt Poker has degenerated into “a global Ponzi scheme,” funding operations out of money owed to its winning players.
• Soon you’ll be able to preserve the remains of your deceased loved ones in handy liquid form.
• The annual Coffee Fest trade show is at the Convention Center this weekend. It’s intended for people in the business of importing, roasting, selling, and serving the stuff, though many parts of it are also open (for a fee) to those who simply love the java a lot. Of course, there’s also something else this weekend to pump up your pulse.

• Where the state bugged out, private promoters are pitching in to promote Wash. state tourism.
• The final public appearance by J.P. Patches was a heart rendering occasion, even for those of us who weren’t there.
• As Frank Sinatra once sang, “Oops there goes a million kilowatt dam.”
• Word from Spokane is the feds still hate the medical marijuana movement.
• The best part of the Emmys was what didn’t happen.
• Today’s instance of a right-winger “joking” about how fun it would be to murder all the liberals: Andrew Breitbart.
• Netflix’s grand strategy is now revealed. The online streaming-video service and the DVD-by-mail service will be split into two separate brands, requiring separate memberships. The DVD service will be rebranded “Qwikster.” About as insipid a name as I’ve heard, at least since the first dot-com crash of a decade ago. (You know, those bygone days of Beenz, Kozmo, Flooz, MyLackey, HotBot, Go, Go2, Go2Net, et al.)

The downtown Seattle Borders Books closed earlier this week after 17 years. (The Redmond store closes Sunday, among the busted chain’s final outlets to close.)

designsbuzz.com

• The Seattlest gang’s putting out, in installments, a revised and updated “guide to Seattle stereotypes.”
• Neighborhood activists are starting a tiny but intelligently stocked mini-grocery in the Lost Valley of Delridge, an area bereft of places selling anything more nutritious than Budweiser.
• What’s the biggest fear of people buying into a 33-story condo tower? That somebody will block their view with a 40-story condo tower a block away.
• Let’s try to get this straight. A candidate for King County Council has a brother who administers an arts program for at-risk youth. Said arts program puts out, for the first time in its history, a “student made” newspaper. Said paper includes several mentions praising the administrator’s sis and several other mentions disparaging her election opponent. Oh, and the thing was partly made with City funds.
• Microsoft’s immensely profitable. Its stock price has essentially been “flat” for some time. One more reason for America’s socio-economic nabobs to stop believing in the Almighty Stock Price as the all-determining value of everything.
• Progressive economist Remy Trupin looks at Wash. state’s no-end-in-sight budget hole and insists that from this point on, “further cuts are not an option.”
• A hundred years ago, eight destitute young women were killed in an accident at a Chehalis explosives factory. Their joint grave has finally been rediscovered.
• The Illinois company now calling itself Boeing has friends among the House Republicans. That body just approved, in a symbolic gesture certain to sink in the Senate, a bill to strip Federal protection for workers whose jobs were outsourced as punishment for union organizing.
• If we must say goodbye to Cyndy’s House of Pancakes on Aurora (closed as of July after 53 years), at least we can be consoled that housing for the formerly-homeless will go up on the site.
• There was a hearing about a plan for a homeless shelter in Lake City. The senior-housing developer SHAG bused in residents to speak against the plan. One of these speakers called the homeless “garbage.” Brutal insensitivity: It’s not just for Republican campaign events any more.
• Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy: There’s an FBI corruption probe of figures surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and cronies.
• The 3-D movie craze? Dead already. Again.
• How will the record labels survive? Some are diversifying into other businesses. Such as, according to a Federal indictment, international cocaine smuggling. (I know what you’re thinking. Drugs in the music industry? Never!)
• We go out on a snarky note with some books Borders can’t even give away.

• Lake City’s legendary, recently-closed Rimrock Steak House is saved! Well, maybe.

• Starbucks gave away download codes for a “free” ebook. The document turned out to exclude the novel’s ending, telling readers they had to get the paid version to learn what happens.

• Get ready for Sleepless in Seattle, the Musical. In preparation for years, it’s set to open in L.A. next summer.

• The Longview longshoremen’s strike might be ending.

• J.P. Patches, who announced his retirement from public appearances earlier this summer, will make his last one this Saturday at Fishermen’s Terminal.

• Darn. Just when we were getting used to Dennis Kucinich, turns out he’s probably not coming to stay.

• The Republicans have a master plan for winning the White House. It has little to do with actually fielding a mass-appeal candidate (or even a sane candidate), and everything to do with voter suppression and making the Electoral College even more unfair.

• Earlier this week, we discussed an LA Times essay asking where today’s great recession documentarians were. Well, here are two more places to find them—Facing Change and In Our Own Backyard.

seattle times announces the new team's name (1975), from historylink.org

• The always-alert local sports historian David Eskenazi looks back to the first regular-season Seahawks game, held 35 years ago this week.
• There’s more sports-related nonsense from Oklahoma. Both of that state’s big college sports programs are thinking of dumping the Big 12 practice and hooking up with the Pac 12. Comment one: Only if they return a certain non-college basketball team to its rightful home. Comment two: How “Pacific” would that be? Not much. Isn’t the whole idea of college conferences supposed to be regional rivalries?
• If we do get our rightfully deserved men’s pro basketball team back, they could always play in the Tacoma Dome.
• Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 was put on display at a developers’ conference in L.A. It sure looks different.
• State Republicans are drawing up Congressional-district redistricting maps that would create a “majority minority” district, and incidentally decrease Seattle’s voting power.
• U.S. News & World Report doesn’t exist as a print periodical anymore, but it’s still putting out its annual college rankings. The UW ranked #10 among public universities, #42 overall. At least before the next round of state budget cuts.
• Mark your calendars: There’s a “Rally for Good Jobs Now,” 11:30 a.m. Thursday (Sept. 15) in front of the Seattle Westin Hotel. It’s organized by the union-affiliated group Working Washington, protesting the Port of Seattle’s current practices, and coinciding with a convention of port administrators.
• We recently ran a link to an essay on the rise of recession literature. Now, Jaime O’Neill at the L.A. Times wants similar realism and advocacy in the visual arts by asking, “Where’s Today’s Dorothea Lange?” Apparently O’Neill doesn’t know the work of local photog Rex Hohlbein and his ongoing “Homeless in Seattle” series.
• Beware the killer cantaloupes.
• Has the online daily coupon craze passed its peak?
• Poverty in the U.S.: highest since 1933, says the Census Bureau.
• Apparently, the corporate-libertarian attitude toward health insurance extends even to their own staffs. At least that appears to be the case with a Ron Paul campaign aide, who died from pneumonia, was uninsured, and left his family with $400,000 in bills.
• As the rich get richer, so do their “toys,” such as 220- to 500-foot long “gigayachts.”
• Dave Niose at Psychology Today believes some people are simply hardwired to be disbelievers.
• Michael C. Jones debunks the anti-SpongeBob story, in which the cartoon supposedly harmed young kids’ mental development. Jones notes the researchers covered only 60 upscale, white, four-year-old tots:

The effect of the Nickelodeon series “SpongeBob SquarePants” on little kids’ attention spans was tested on, well, almost nobody.

• Let’s close with some stunning Kodachrome images of NYC in 1941-42.

1931 model bookmobile, from historylink.org

• If you believe the rumor sites, Amazon’s working on a for-profit, by-mail lending library program. For a monthly or annual fee, you’d get all the (physical and/or “e”) books you can handle; but you’ll have to return ’em before you can get more. The company’s already announced “Kindle Library Lending,” a scheme for borrowing Kindle-format e-books from libraries (which can already offer book files in other ebook formats). (UPDATE: Some rumor sources say Amazon’s lending-library program would only involve e-books.)
• Could, would, should ex-county exec Ron Sims run for Seattle mayor in ’13? And could he count on an endorsement from non-relative Dave Sims? Or the video game creatures The Sims?
• Update: Capitol Hill’s B&O Espresso will stay in business at its current location for at least another year.
• Another fiscal year in Washington state, another attempt to kill the Basic Health program.
• Bank of America announced at least 30,000 layoffs. But the business media doesn’t want to talk about the firings, just the Almighty Stock Price.
• Remember, freedom lovers: When SpongeBob is outlawed, only outlaws will eat Crabby Patties.
• Procter & Gamble and other companies respond to the collapsing middle class by repositioning their product lines into distinct “luxury” and “bargain” tiers.
• Daily Kos readers have submitted more than a hundred ideas for how Obama could boost U.S. jobs without the approval of congressional Republicans.
• Is today’s Republican party a doctrinaire religion (as Andrew Sullivan claims), or “sadism, pure and simple” (as Alan Grayson alleges)?
• There’s a big “Seattle Design Festival” coming next week. One of the guests is architect-writer August de los Reyes. His presentation is “A 21st Century Design Manifesto.” The festival’s site says, “Topics include vampires, werewolves, starfish, bamboo shoots, video games, and natural user interface.” Dunno ’bout you, but I’ve never heard vampires described as having a natural interface before.

from thestand.org

• The Longview longshoremen’s labor action has spread to the Port of Seattle, which is what it took to get the Seattle media to notice it. While few were looking, Wash. state became one of the few places where labor is directly striking back.
• Ready for another cold, rainy and/or snowy winter?
• So much for the great biotech job boom hope: Dendreon is laying off at least a quarter of its staff.
• Who’s replacing C.R. Douglas as a public affairs host at the Seattle Channel? The same guy Douglas replaced on KCPQ.
• Update: Here are some remembrances of the tragically gone-from-us Espresso Vivace favorite Brian Fairbrother.
• Seattle-based activists have filed suit to block the State Route 520 replacement project.
• I like the Tiger Bar in Georgetown. It’s sad to hear about one of its owners allegedly going off-hinge.
• Pete Jackson has vivid memories of Everett’s last pulp-and-paper mill.
• The combined offices and server farms of Google are responsible, in the company’s own estimates, for 1.5 million tons of CO2 sent into the atmosphere annually. But Google insists it’s still more energy-stingy than the average dot-com.
• I won’t link to very many 9/11 anniversary hype pieces, but here’s Janine Jackson wondering if we can ever get our civil liberties back.
• There have long been people who’ve whined about the imminent death of “the word” in a culture cluttered up with images. But now here’s a voice from the other side as it were. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Dave Marash proclaims that “for the first time in history, mankind is developing a universal language: video.” In particular, he cites the amazing news footage generated by world broadcasters and by amateurs in this year’s Mideast uprisings. But then Marash bashes U.S. TV news for not showing enough of these pictures, instead filling time with pontificatin’ pundits.

• Radical activists associated with Adbusters magazine want to organize a long-term “occupation” of Wall Street, with the aim to force an end to the “politics of greed.” Paul B. Farrell isn’t so sure it’ll work.
• Bad news of the day: Espresso Vivace general manager Brian Fairbrother was badly injured in a cycling accident. (Yes, he wore a helmet.) On Wednesday, loved ones decided, in accordance with his previously stated wishes, to remove life support.
• Good news of the day: The INSCAPE arts center in the former immigration building got a $10 million grant for needed structural upgrades and interior refits.
• Eh? news of the day: Wash. state’s slashing of higher-ed support was only tied for worst in the nation, with three other states.
• Update #1: The Belltown substance-abuse center boss accused of trying to rape a boy? He wasn’t the psychologist he’d claimed to be.
• Update #2: That Snohomish County stink mentioned here yesterday? It’s chicken byproduct.
• The long-delayed development at Ballard’s former Sunset Bowl site is finally underway.
• Turns out that creepy plastic faced “king” mascot wasn’t the only scary thing about Burger King.
• Tacoma: The city that knows when to say no.
• The City’s got this “Only in Seattle” program, promoting local businesses in various neighborhoods. The program’s Belltown edition was unveiled Wednesday. The four honored outfits were two upscale restaurant-bars, one upscale furniture emporium, and Federal Army & Navy Surplus.
• Coming to a 7-Eleven near you (depending on where you are): A locker where you can pick up your Amazon purchases. 7-Eleven in Japan has had this for years. It’s great for people who work during the day and live alone (or with other people who also work during the day).
• The Wall St. Journal discovers grunge nostalgia.
• The Seattle Weekly/Village Voice Media/Backpage.com sex ad mess just gets messier, as politicians of more stripes use it for cheap grandstanding.
• Cartoonist Ruben Bolling seems to wish George Lucas could digitally alter the past 10 years.
• The St. Petersburg Times fact checked Wednesday’s GOP Presidential debate and came up with at least two statements deserving the ultimate “Pants On Fire” rating.
• Our ol’ pal Tim Harris appeared with C.R. Douglas in a great segment on KCPQ on the topic of “Homeless in Seattle.” If you’re wondering how something this insightful got on a program entitled Q13 Fox News, let me repeat (for what seems like the umpteenth time): KCPQ has no connection to the Fox News Channel (except for airing the latter’s Fox News Sunday “spinterview” show). KCPQ is an affiliate of the Fox Broadcast network. KCPQ is really owned by the (Chicago) Tribune Co. I wish the station itself would make this clearer.

The summer doldrums in news-type postings seem to have ended. Enjoy.

• The hugely hyped fiscal crisis at the U.S. Postal Service might simply be the result of a Bush-era manufactured scheme to bust the postal unions and sell off the whole operation to privateers; a scheme that can be reversed. We need a delivery system that literally works for us, not for hedge funds. And we need first class mail (you know, letters) and second class mail (magazines). Those services, traditionally, have been marginally profitable at best. FedEx can’t do these. It’s simply not built to do them.
• CoCA commissioned a whole outdoor art group exhibit for Carkeek Park. A parks employee decided on his own that one of the pieces, hung up by wires, might hurt a tree. On his own volution, the parks employee cut down the wires. The delicate art piece fell and was “heavily damaged.”
• If you weren’t sure about Howard Schultz’s political crusade, we now know he’s in league with NoLabels.org. That’s NY mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “bipartisan” (read: near-right) PR drive to sell a national political agenda. Said agenda is heavy on deficit slashing and “entitlement” abandoning and corporate tax cutting, and way-light on directly assisting the jobless and the non-zillionaires.
• The “transit improvement” component in the Viaduct replacement tunnel plan? It’ll run out of money even before the tunnel opens.
• The Brightwater sewage treatment plant near the King-Snohomish county line isn’t even running yet, but SnoCo residents are already complaining about the stink. Officials insist the plant’s not to blame.
• The Seattle Public Library’s third annual budget-cutting closure week made the NY Times.
• Today’s on-the-one-hand story: While the city’s trying to squeeze every potential nickel out of every metered street parking space, it continues to subsidize under-market-rate parking at Pacific Place.
• What happens when a multimedia art program in NYC devoted to confronting “notions of individual and collective comfort and the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility” is fully funded by a global automaker? You get some devout anti-corporate pontification against the whole concept, natch.
• Amnesty International’s got a handy, if incomplete, checklist of lies in Dick Cheney’s memoir.…
• …while here’s the oft-linked-to “Goodbye to All That,” ex-GOP operative Mike Lofgren’s indictment of today’s Republican party as an unholy alliance of corporatists, fundamentalists, and war-machinists.
• Not specifically political, at least overtly, is business consultant Ron Ashkenas’s guidance on how to deal with irrational people:

Don’t try to fight irrationality with rationality. It will only make you more frustrated and the other person more defensive. No matter how many well-constructed arguments you offer, you won’t make headway until you understand the underlying motivation that is driving the other person.

• So, like is this Capitol Hill retail mainstay claiming it’s barren and lonesome enough to successfully hide out in?
• Forty years after its founding, and six years after developers first threatened to demolish it for a six-story apartment complex, Capitol Hill’s legendary B&O Espresso may finally be doomed, at least as we know it. The developers plan to have a restaurant/retail space in their new building at the corner of Belmont and Olive (hence the coffee house/bistro’s name). But that space will be half the size of today’s B&O.
• KIRO-TV is still stalling in talks with its unionized technical staff. The station doesn’t explicitly want to bust the union, just to take away most of the things union crews get to do, like complain about hours and working conditions.
• Masins Furniture is leaving Pioneer Square. The Seattle Times-approved reason: The neighborhood is beset by costly parking and, you know, those people. A more likely reason: Two and a half years without folks moving into new urban housing units, and without a lot of folks having the funds to refurnish the housing units they’ve got.
• Labor Day Weekend Thought #1: How long does it take to turn from unemployed to “effectively unemployable”?
• Labor Day Weekend Thought #2: Robert Reich wants a Labor Day with fewer picnics and more protests.
• Word (or rather phrase) of the day: Mighty Whitey. Refers to the long tradition of the fictional white hero who not only sympathize with other ethnicities’ struggles “but also becomes their greatest warrior/leader/representative.” Cf. Last of the Mohicans, Snow Falling On Cedars, Avatar, and most recently The Help. Also see every white blues/soul/rap musician, especially if British.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

My book Walking Seattle, which I told you about here some months back, is finally out.

The big coming out party is Sunday, Sept. 24, 5 p.m., at the Elliott Bay Book Co. This event will include a 30-minute mini walk around the Pike-Pike neighborhood.

When I came up with the idea of a mini-walk, the store’s staff initially asked what the theme of my mini walk would be. Would it be about the gay scene, or the hipster bar scene, or the music scene, or classic apartment buildings, or houses of worship, or old buildings put to new uses?

The answer: Yes. It will be about all of the above. And more.

The reason: Part of what makes Capitol Hill so special (and such a great place to take a walk) is all the different subcultures that coexist here.

A tourist from the Northeast this summer told me he was initially confused to find so many different groups (racial, religious, and otherwise self-identified) in just about every neighborhood in this town.

Back where he came from, people who grew up in one district of a city (or even on one street) stayed there, out of loyalty and identity. But in Seattle you’ve got gays and artists and African immigrant families and Catholics and professors and cops and working stiffs and doctors all living all over the place. People and families go wherever they get the best real-estate deal at the time, no matter where it is.

On the Hill, this juxtaposition is only more magnified.

In terms of religion alone, Pike/Pine and its immediate surroundings feature Seattle’s premier Jewish congregation, its oldest traditionally African American congregation, the region’s top Catholic university, a “welcoming” (that means they like gays) Baptist church, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, and a new age spiritual center. Former classic Methodist and Christian Science buildings are now repurposed to offices and condos respectively. And yet, in the eyes of many, the Hill is today better known for what happens on Saturday night than on Sunday morning.

A lot of Igor Keller’s Greater Seattle CD is a quaint look back at when this city’s neighborhoods could be easily typed, as they famously were on KING-TV’s old Almost Live!

Perhaps you might find a few more franchised vitamin sellers in Fremont, or a few more halal butchers near MLK and Othello.

But for the sheer variety of different groups and subgroups and sub-subgroups, there’s no place like this place anywhere near this place.

•

Though a lot of the time, these different “tribes” don’t live in harmony as much as in they silently tolerate one another’s presence.

To explain this, let’s look at another book.

British novelist China Mieville’s book The City and the City is a tale of two fictional eastern European city-states, “Bezsel” and “Ul Qoma.” These cities don’t merely border one another; they exist on the same real estate. The residents of each legally separate “city” are taught from birth to only interact with, or even recognize the existence of, the fellow citizens of their own “city.” If they, or ignorant tourists, try to cross over (even if it just means crossing a street), an efficient secret police force shows up and carts them away.

It’s easy to see that scenario as a metaphor for modern urban life in a lot of places, including the Hill. It’s not the oft talked about (and exaggerated) “Seattle freeze.” It’s people who consider themselves part of a “community” of shared interests more than a community of actual physical location.

The young immigrant learning a trade at Seattle Central Community College may feel little or no rapport with the aging rocker hanging out at a Pike/Pine bar. The high-tech commuter having a late dinner at a fashionable bistro may never talk to the single mom trying to hold on to her unit in an old apartment building.

Heck, even the gay men and the lesbians often live worlds apart.

It’s great to have all these different communities within the geographical community of the Hill.

But it would be greater to bring more of them together once in a while, to help form a tighter sense of us all belonging and working toward common goals.

from vintageadbrowser.com

• The Kleenex factory in my ol’ stompin’ grounds of Everett, one of that Mill Town’s last working mills, will likely close in December. I’ve not much time to get my picture taken in front of its big CLARK (as in “Kimberly-“) sign.
• However, Everett is getting something new as well. It’s getting a qualifying meet for international Olympic gymnasts.
• Tacoma’s famed Goddess of Commerce statue is back!
• Bank of America caved in to massive public outcry, and will modify Vera Johnson’s loan. This lets Johnson keep her beloved Village Green nursery in West Seattle, which had been threatened with foreclosure. Ray Davies was wrong: you are the Village Green Preservation Society.
• Video mashup of the day: The CGI animation of the Alaskan Way Viaduct detour route, combined with the video game Mario Kart.
• A Republican county committee in Arizona (in Gabrielle Giffords’ county) wanted to raffle off a gun. The same kind of gun Gabrielle Giffords was shot with. It took other Arizona GOP vets to tell ’em this wasn’t such a cool idea.
• Sex Inc. #1: Tampa’s world famous strip clubs are expanding and modernizing their facilities, in anticipation of extra business from next year’s Republican convention.
• Sex Inc. #2: The “.xxx” domain-name suffix is about to go online. Two groups are concerned about this: 1) Porn companies that don’t necessarily want to give up their current .com URLs, and 2) companies and celebrities in every other line of business, worried that smart-assed pranksters could buy up the names “mcdonalds.xxx,” “spongebob.xxx,” or even “rickperry.xxx”.
• And just for awesomeness, here are some amazing old Soviet movie posters.

619 western's exterior during the 'artgasm' festival, 2002

• We begin with the end of a 27-year tradition. The 619 Western Building artists will hold their actual, for-real-this-time, final First Thursday art show tonight. Like the previous one, it will actually occur in the south parking lot outside the building.
• The feds want to protect Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA from AT&T’s planned takeover.
• Port Townsend town leaders are getting a federal grant to start a privately run, tourist-oriented passenger ferry from Seattle. Rides are expected to go at $20-$25 a ticket.
• Tacoma doesn’t want any more big box chain stores for the time being.
• Employment in Puget Sound country? Rising up to mediocre. In the rest of the state? Still putrid.
• Those “tea party” scream-bots love to interrupt Democratic politicians’ town halls. But when they’re elected, they don’t like to hold any fully public meetings of their own.
• That “Latino gang problem” in south King County, mentioned in yesterday’s Random Links? Keegan Hamilton at Seattle Weekly says it’s way overblown.
• Howard Schultz’s crusade to get CEOs to stop giving to politicians seems to be working. If, by working, you mean cutting off money to Democrats, while the super-PACs giving to Republicans get ever super-er.
• The HP tablet device became so popular at really cheap close-out prices, that HP’s getting more made—to be sold at the same near-total-loss price. This is politely known as dot-com economics at work.
• Just when we got excited that JC Penney was coming back to downtown Seattle, the company has to pull one of the ultimate all-time product FAILs. Yep, we’re talking about the girls’ shirt bearing the slogan “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has do it for me.”
• Glenn Greenwald describes the “war on terror” as “the decade’s biggest scam.” Considering all the other scams competing for that title, that’s saying something.
• What sounds weirder—Al Jazeera’s claim that Dennis Kucinich tried to help Gaddafi stay in power, or the associated claim that Kucinich’s partner in the scheme was a top ex-Bush aide?
• We end with the end of a 42-year tradition. All My Children taped its last network episode Wednesday.