• The first rule of casinos has been “The house always wins.” Turns out it ain’t necessarily so.
• Flood victims don’t give a damn for FEMA’s non-responses.
• Did a Kirkland 12-year-old get a digi-cam image of the Virgin Mary?
• Windstorm 2008 is here, and it’s nasty.
• New-agey sounding day spas: Fronts for more traditional forms of “touch”? And even if it’s so, why all the law-enforcement hassling of them, when the police have more important matters such as catching (insert your favorite nemesis here)?
• If fewer people are trying to rob banks, does it mean they know where the money isn’t?

• Letterman, and his writers, staged a gala comeback Wednesday night. Could this be the turning point in the election?
• Seattle’s Landmarks Preservation Board agrees with us that the Ballard Denny’s building is potentially worth keeping. Meanwhile, Robert Jamieson quotes the manager of Seattle’s last extant Denny’s as being mad as hell about Saturday night ruffians. And he’s not even on upper First Avenue.
• What with shrinking ice caps and endangered polar bears, what do the Bushies want for Alaska? More offshore oil drilling!
• Child Protective Services could use a lot more social workers. Gov. Gregoire wants to help, at least a little.
• Could Wash. state voters really have a pivotal role in the Presidential nominating process this time ’round?
• A coyote was seen in the general vicinity of Magnolia Bluff. Insert your own joke here.
• Tim Eyman hates transit, loves roads.

• Despite off-and-on cleanup efforts over the years, Seattle’s five biggest “urban streams” (formerly known as “creeks”) are in sorry shape, eco-wise.
• The lowly Sonics played three periods of valiant basketball against the mighty Celtics, before the NBA’s best team finally switched into high gear in the fourth.
• Atlas Clothing, Broadway’s biggest vintage store (and, very briefly last year, an all-ages music venue), is reportedly moving to a Fremont antique mall.
• Wash. state’s minimum wage goes up on the first. Don’t spend those extra 14 cents in one place.
• Can suburban sprawl be eco-friendly? A Spokane developer of “enviro-townhomes” claims it can.

…I hope, this evening (Friday), 6:30-8:30 p.m., for the fantabulous next book event starring yr. loyal web-author. It’s at Not A Number, an artistic and subversive gift and card shop on N. 45th in wondrous Wallingford.

IN OTHER, LESSER FRIDAY NOOZE:

• A shop after my own head, Bernie Utz Hats (sometimes inexplicably spelled “Byrnie” Utz), may or may not move next year. Seattle’s last downtown specialty hat store has been at Third and Union for 68 years.
• The next big thing, NW music-wise: That’s the current hype for Kimya Dawson, she of the K Records singer-songwriter stable, now featured on the Juno soundtrack.
• The bus tunnel is still shut.
• The Port of Seattle just got some worse news, in the form of a state audit questioning its spending and construction-project oversight.
• In the “DUH!” department, experts report that more commuters means worse traffic jams, drunk driving is a bad thing, the Bushies are stonewalling tougher fuel-economy standards, and the Okies want a pro basketball team.
• Willie Nelson’s giving $40,000 to charities in Vancouver USA, where he worked as an itinerant DJ back in the 1950s.
• Dumb criminal of the week: A guy who not only allegedly has sex with minors, but videotapes it, sometimes on public property.
• Feds are investigating whether Washington Mutual Bank deliberately used inflated property appraisals in selling mortgages.
• No Crocodile news, except for a benefit show for ex-employees on Sunday the 30th.
• The Neah Bay/Makah region along the Washington coast doesn’t just have rogue whalers. It’s also got ocean waves, which some believe can be used to make electricity.

• What to do with the historic, shuttered Seattle INS building? How ’bout selling it at an online auction?
• Would a fence deter potential Aurora bridge suicides? And if so, why hasn’t it been proposed ’til now?
• Gov. Gregoire’s budget proposal would keep more than $1 billion stashed away in the state’s “rainy day fund.” Gee, didn’t we have a few really rainy days this past month?
• A double-hulled fuel barge ran aground near the central waterfront. No spills have been reported as of yet.
• Onetime gym-equipment king Nautilus Inc. is now losing wads of cash, and is the target of a takeover attempt. The company’s fate was to have been decided this week, but now won’t be.

• It’s your first day to ride the SLUT, though city fathers hope it won’t be your last.
• Corporate consolidation hits the “alt” music world, as LA-based megapromoters have bought the Showbox and Showbox Sodo nightclubs. Ex-Showbox owner Jeff Steichen will still run the clubs for AEG Live/Anschutz Entertainment Group. That company’s owned by Philip Anschutz, the Denver financier and promoter of various right-wing social and political causes. Outfits he owns, in whole or in big pieces, include Qwest, Regal Cinemas, a string of free daily tabloids in DC, SF, and Baltimore, and the film company that made The Chronicles of Narnia and Atlas Shrugged. Organizations he’s supported include Seattle’s own Darwin-deniers at the Discovery Institute, as well as the astroturf lobby that’s been generating almost every “indecency” complaint sent to the FCC. It’d generally be safe to say he’s not the kind of chap indie-rock folks might want to give money to.
• Someone who’s likely one of Anschutz’s least fave politicians, Sen. Obama, made a quick campaign stop at the Showbox Sodo Tuesday.
• If you thought Rainstorm 2007 was dreadful, which it was, just be glad it didn’t wash away part of 405.
• My old hometown has become a leading source of weird crime stories lately. The latest: A father charged with drugging his own baby.
• Seattle’s rep as Eco-City USA? T’weren’t always thus.
• Should the City condemn land owned by the the Central Area Motivation Program and replace its food-bank building with a fire station? As you might guess, many say no.

• In the absence of even an unorganized “save the Fun Forest” campaign, the beloved old fashioned amusement park in Seattle Center will close in 2009.
• Washington Mutual Bank, whose national fortunes have risen and fell with the housing bubble, is laying off over 3,000 workers.
• Some 380 gallons of diesel fuel spilled from a factory-trawler boat at the Port of Tacoma.
• The current ETA on fully restoring car-ferry service to Pt. Townsend? Perhaps a year.
• Barack Obama’s coming to Seattle tonight (Tuesday). The campaign event, at the Showbox Sodo (formerly Premiere, formerly Fenix) costs $100.
• UW athletic director Scott Turner is this year’s sacrificial lamb for football mediocrity.

• You won’t love it at Levitz anymore. The discount furniture chain, which has teetered in and out of insolvency for several years, is finally throwing in the seat cushion.
• Safeco Insurance has fulfilled its duty to propping up the downtown real-estate biz by moving into two existing downtown Seattle office towers.
• I-5 in southwest Washington is slowly reopening in stages. Meanwhile, receding floodwaters leave what P-I headline writers call a “Deluge of sewage.” Say that five times fast.
• A Federal Way sixth grader has invented a device using kitchen gloves and semi-porous plastic bubbles, which can inject medicines into the body without needles. Just the thing for squeamish junkies everywhere.
• Yep, King County’s fully, officially, joined the housing-price bubble “pop.”
• And there’s a fun story about professional horse’s ass Tim Eyman getting into a hissyfit at a Yakima city council meeting and getting forcibly removed.

• The LGBT Community Center, which just got its own Capitol Hill building a couple years back, is now in fiscal trouble. It may close by month’s end. Does cultural acceptance of other sexual preferences necessarily lead to assimilation, and in turn to the death of niche-subculture institutions?
• Is Paul Allen getting a “sweetheart deal” from the City in regards to his South Lake Union development projects? Many have rumored such allegations, and now City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is vocalizing ’em.
• No, Snohomish cops, UW profs taking industrial-art photographs are not terrotists.
• Microsoft’s shut down a holiday greetings Web page that featured a sometimes foul-mouthed Santa.
• In decades past, private, for-profit lending libraries offered books for rent, sometimes in genres or to audience niches public libraries wouldn’t or couldn’t fully serve. Now, some web entrepreneurs want to bring back the concept, in the form of “a Netflix for books.”
• And, yep, there’s still lotsa flood damage and closed roads and highways throughout Western Washington.

• As the floodwaters from Rainstorm 2007 still linger, the blame game commences. Was the state laggardly in building Chehalis River flood control systems after allocating money to do so? Does Seattle have an insufficient drainage infrastructure? And, of course, does climate change/global warming have anything to do with all this unseasonably warm rain coming here via the “pineapple express?”
• Jones Soda’s CEO, whose surname (naturally) is Van Stolk, will leave the company at the end of the month. Jones’s massive growth in recent years has come with allegations of financial irregularities at the Seattle-based “boutique soda” marketer.
• Seattle was named #6 on a Brookings Institution list of America’s “most walkable cities.” Portland was #5. Washington DC (Brookings’ home town) made the top spot.
• Seattle Center’s future fate is still undecided, but one legacy building has a new, at least temporary, use. Seattle Opera will stick some staff members and scene storage into Mercer Arena, the former Seattle Ice Arena (home of the 1917 Stanley Cup champions!). The structure, which has also housed rock concerts, the old Seattle Reign women’s basketball team, and many other events, has been idle the past four years.
• The Lake Union streetcar finally has an official opening day. It opens for pubilc rides on Wednesday, Dec. 12. Yes, the clever folks who promoted the unofficial nickname of South Lake Union Trolley, or “SLUT,” promise to be on hand, proudly sporting “Ride the SLUT” T-shirts.
• Amateur film-based photography’s rapid decline hits home. PhotoWorks, formerly Seattle FilmWorks, is selling itself to American Greetings Corp. Seattle FilmWorks was originally a piece of American Passage Marketing, which posted gazillions of ad posters on college campus bulletin boards hawking everything from magazine subscriptions to term paper “research guides.” It originally bought Kodak 35mm movie film, repackaged it for still cameras, and sold it by mail in film-and-processing joint deals.

• PCC groceries ban all products containing high fructose corn syrup. Remember: When mainstream soda pop is outlawed, only outlaws will Do the Dew.
• The biggest class action lawsuit in Wash. state history’s underway. The class of plaintiffs: Every Washingtonian who’s ever worked for Wal-Mart.
• Those Kansas “Christians” harassing the families of dead gay soldiers at funerals showed up in Port Orchard, along with the expected counter-protesters.
• The state Dept. of Ecology claims stormwater drainage from parking lots, driveways, and roads sends more than six million gallons of petroleum into Puget Sound every year. That’s about half the output of the Exxon Valdez disaster, a drop at a time.
• Today’s dentist-caught-abusing-sedated-female-patients story comes to you from Shoreline.
• Beware of “sham recyclers,” outfits that charge you to take your stuff away and then just dump it in landfills.

• The giant bowling-pin sign from Leilani Lanes will be saved and put on display, out in rural Snohomish County.
• MS Windows Vista made Cnet.co.uk’s list of the worst tech products ever. Number one on the list: The Sinclair C5, a three-wheeled electric scooter from the creator of the SInclair computer. (I think it looks rather charming myself.)
• The feds won’t demand the names of thousands of Amazon.com book customers after all.
• Mayor Nickels’s office has declared a temporary lull on harassing the homeless.
• How long will it take to get full ferry service to Pt. Townsend again? Maybe a year.
• Seattle no longer has America’s fastest-inflating home prices, losing that dubious spot to Charlotte, NC.
• Keeping one person in prison in Wash. State costs $30,000 to $50,000 a year.

• It’s the end of the line, sad to say, for onetime Northwest timber giant Pope & Talbot. A court has approved a plan to auction off all of P&T’s remaining assets.
• A Bremerton area woman was arrested for gambling with counterfeit money at the Clearwater Casino. Authorities say she had meth in her purse at the time. Trust me: When you’re sober, those Hell Bank Notes from Chinatown gift shops don’t look a thing like U.S. currency.
• Some of Dino Rossi’s major donors in the 2004 gubernatorial election are backing incumbent Christine Gregoire this time around.
• The Everett Elks Club, the old Mill Town’s predominant social club and nightlife institution for pretty much ever, is being demolished for condos. Once boasting 5,000 members (about a third of the town’s adult male population), it peaked in the ’30s and ’40s, when private clubs in Washington were allowed to have slot machines and were the only places allowed to serve liquor by the drink. I was only in the current Everett Elks building (built in 1962) once, on a father-and-son night. I remember it as a vast, labyrinthine place, with a huge meeting room on the top floor, a male-only “Stag Room” bar and a showroom on the ground floor, and athletic facilities in a series of basements and sub-basements (swimming pool, gym, handball courts). Everything exuded an air of genteel masculunity, albeit toned town to fit the more prole tates of the local community. By that time, though, the Elks had begun their national decline; younger adults were far less interested in joining a group with an official pro-war stance and a white-males-only membership policy.
• And, oh yeah, the Cougs won the 2007 Apple Cup against the Huskies, with a spectacular last-minute touchdown run by the highly appropriately named Alex Brink.

With a high “five” from John Curley to the big ‘KING Mike’ balloon/float, the downtown holiday shopping season is among us.

I know I’m not the only one who saw something subliminally S/M-like about the real woman locked up inside a giant snow globe.

Then, at the Black Friday parade’s conclusion, always comes the fake snow shot out from TSFKATBM (that’s “the store formerly known as The Bon Marche”).

• How not to fly: A 31-year-old doctor from Nashville missed his flight from Sea-Tac. His clever solution (as he’s admitted to authorities): He phoned in a phony bomb threat to get the plane back to the airport.
• Forget bears: The newest critters to fear are “hybrid wolves,” on the prowl for our delicious house pets.
• Comedian Stan Freberg once made a scathing comedy record, “Green Christma$,” attacking the holiday’s rampant commercialization. This year, the phrase takes on a new meaning as merchants hawk allegedly eco-friendly gifts.
• Downbeat news for all local popcult fans: Larry Nelson, KOMO Radio’s morning host for some 30 years, has stage four lung cancer. You can send him your well-wishes at larrybnelson.com, a Web site created by Nelson’s longtime colleague Stan Orchard.