The owner of Salty’s on Alki (and former owner of Red Robin and a string of fern bars) is a big right wing political talker and fundraiser.

My ol’ pal and sometime colleague Doug Nufer looks back at a decade in which he got four books out somehow amid an ever more confused book industry and an ever more precarious alternative-literature subsegment within that industry. He offers no solutions, but I will:

• All of book publishing (heck, all of the traditional offline media) need new business models and more efficient, dynamic ways of doing what they do.
• Alterna-lit needs to build its audience. Yes, I believe even the genre’s geekier, tougher material can find more readers and more lovers. I’m sure of it.

or,

I Survived the Bush Junta and All I Got Was This Lousy iPod

WE’LL WONDER HOW WE EVER DID WITHOUT:

The whole WWW thang, social networking, smart phones, Netflix, Adobe Flash, Netroots organizing, Jon & Stephen, Keith & Rachel, HBO-style serial drama, digital video, Pixar, the gay-marriage movement.

WE’LL LOOK BACK AND LAUGH AT:

‘Sexting,’ Twitter, Auto Tune, tea parties, Jon & Kate Plus Eight, Glenn Beck, CGI-enhanced superhero movies, Sarah Palin, American Idol, Botox, the first dot-com frenzy, the second dot-com (“Web 2.0”) frenzy, the real-estate frenzy, the stock-market frenzy, the war frenzy.

ALTERNATE-HISTORY FANTASISTS WILL DREAM ABOUT WHAT IF:

Gore won, 9/11 was prevented, the print-media and music industries got their heads out of their asses, the New Orleans levees had been properly built.

ALREADY FORGOTTEN:

Y2K, Napster, $4 gas, Enron, Octomom, Balloon Boy.

ALREADY MISSED:

The P-I, the Sonics, Washington Mutual (pre-“WaMu”), “big book” catalogs, Tower Records, the Bon Marché (and all the other Macyfied stores), New Yorker Films, The Rocket, Sunset and Leilani Lanes, the Ballard Mannings/Denny’s, the International Channel, Olds/Pontiac/Saturn/Plymouth, Chubby & Tubby, the Twin Teepees, McLeod Residence, Northwest Afternoon, inauguration morning, Ted Kennedy, Pluto.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO:

Bush/Cheney, all the corrupt cronies of Bush/Cheney, all the graft-happy funders of Bush/Cheney, all the apologists and hucksters for Bush/Cheney (even the ones currently still on air and in print).

Carl Franzen at the Atlantic compiles other sites’ “Odd, Overreaching ‘Decade’ Lists.” Among them is Billboard’s list of “One Hit Wonders of the 2000s.” This one’s a particularly odd list, mainly because the pop charts have become so meaningless. Back when commercial music radio meant something, the Top 100 chart meant what you’d be allowed to listen to on the ol’ AM/FM. But now, the likes of Gnarles Barkley and Macy Gray can carve out decent careers for themselves without returning to the top of singles-sales.

Owner Marita Holdaway on Wednesday’s closing night party for the Benham Gallery on First Avenue. After 22 years of operating Seattle’s premier art-photography gallery (partly supporting it by taking custom portraits of downtown business bigwigs), she’s fleeing to the San Juans. Follow her continuing career at BenhamFineArt.com.

My ol’ pal Thomas Frank recalls the Oughts as a “Low, Dishonest Decade.” He’s specifically talking about the economy, more specifically about the assorted inter-related scams, bubbles, and funny-money charades of the speculator caste. Dot-coms, Enron, subprime mortgages, the massive re-concentration of wealth, you know the drill.

Reader’s Digest might have been the first “aggregation site.” Its original concept was to take existing articles from other magazines and rewrite them into a unified, compact package.

Then it became a near-right, squarer-than-square money machine.

Now, the NYTimes reports, both the magazine and the company that bears its name are hollowed-out shells of their former selves. A leveraged buyout led to millions in debts, massive layoffs, and the installation of new execs spouting acronym-heavy motivational schticks.

They’re even abandoning their mammoth quasi-colonial suburban offices. Which, despite the mag’s mailing address, are not in Pleasantville NY, but in another town a dozen miles away.

From the lesser Washington, the Wash. Post opinion section lists the “Worst Ideas of the Decade.” Among them: The battle of Bora Bora (you know, where Bin Laden escaped), TV dancing competitions, anti-vaccination conspiracy scares, Bush’s crony capitalism disguised as “compassionate conservatism,” and “world-is-flat movies” (Crash, Babel).

Our ol’ pal Tim Egan chortles at the New Yorkers who’ve just discovered Costco, now that the big Seattle-founded retailer finally set up shop in Manhattan. Then Egan wanders, like a shopper through oversized aisles, into a more generalized rant about ignorant East Coasters.

Whilst perusing SeattleTimes.com’s old stories about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, I discovered this headline from May 2007: “This is a composite guy’s dream.”

I can see it now:

COMPOSITE GUY! Assembled from spare parts! He’s got the heart of a nun, the brain of a rocket scientist, the hands of a surgeon, the legs of an Olympic distance runner, the arms of a warrior, and the guts of a CHAMPION!

Looks like the current lessee of the Elliott Bay Book Co.’s cafe space will follow the store to its new Capitol Hill location.

Publicola’s got this big rant about what’s really wrong with Elliott Bay Books. Being in Pioneer Square, the writer “Heidi” asserts, isn’t really among the store’s liabilities. To her, the store’s real failings are (1) its little-bit-of-everything generalism (which is one thing I happen to love about it), and (2) its failure to embrace the Internet age (which frustrates me, but which I understand as a part of the store’s whole boomer-Luddite aesthetic philosophy).

Now where will we get our industry-insider news about the shrinking print-media business?

It’s official. Elliott Bay Book Company is moving to Capitol Hill. Sometime in February or March, it’ll take over the lo-rise industrial building next to the Odd Fellows hall on 10th Avenue. What’ll happen to Elliott Bay’s original Pioneer Square space, or to the now independently operated Elliott Bay Cafe within? Still to be determined.

The newly independent AOL says it’s got a whiz-bang system to generate online content by determining just what material will attract certain users toward certain ads.