Ex-Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio just got sentenced to six years’ imprisonment over sleazy corporate accounting tricks. Now if we could only get our old, public-service-minded Pacific Northwest Bell back….

…”reading is going to “go completely online.” I can imagine that fate for ephemeral and time-sensitive matter, for research and reference, and for community info sharing (aka “social networking”). But more artistic, entertainment-oriented, long-form, or “experience” reading (yeah, that includes porn) may always be more popular in nonvolatile formats that don’t require separate playback hardware, i.e. books.

The longtime “member owned” grocery wholesale co-op has sold itself to a California firm, having already sold the land under its massive Georgetown plant to developer David Sabey.

AG, born of a Depression-era cost squeeze among mom-n’-pop grocers, was Washington’s #2 supermarket “chain” at its peak. It owned the Thriftway franchise brand, from which QFC, Larry’s Markets, and Metropolitan Market were all spun off. For years it ran a full service operation; it not only stocked stores, but designed and built stores and ran advertising and data-processing for its members. (Here in Seattle, one of the last AG-designed stores was the now-shuttered Fremont Red Apple.)

AG’s beginning-O-the-end came when Cincinnati’s Kroger bought Fred Meyer, which had previously bought QFC. QFC pulled out of AG, setting up its own in-house distro operation. QFC also bought out many of the key AG-member indies; other single-store and small-chain operators, such as Larry’s, collapsed as the industry kept consolidating. Left to protect the investment of its remaining members, AG sold out. Chalk up another “vanished” Seattle institution.

…this is the week when a major Seattle aesthetic institution marks a new opening, in a much larger, fancier space.

I speak, of course, of the Queen Anne QFC.

This 45,000-square-foot palace of sensual pleasure is twice the size of the chain’s prior unit six blocks west (a site acquired in 1974 from the once-mighty A&P). The new gallery of edibles is at the ground floor of a behemoth condo development, on land vacated by another once-mighty retailer, Tower Records.

The “store,” if you must call it that, contains all the departments you’d expect and more–a fish market, deli, “bistro,” sandwich bar, walk-in wine cooler, walk-in flower cooler, pharmacy, and, natch, a Starbucks stand.

As for product selection, it includes almost all the sometimes obscure brands I sought. It’s got HP and Pickapeppa steak sauces, Fisher scone mix, Session Lager, Hungry-Man frozen dinners, Millstone coffee, whole-wheat spaghetti, and liquid smoke. It didn’t have Moxie pop, but a manager promised it would show up next week. As for two other products it lacks, Campbell’s pepper pot soup and Arizona diet green tea, the folks in charge said they’d look into getting ’em.

This ongoing tribute to the wonders of human taste is open 24 hours a day, with no admission charge (though it’s hoped you’ll purchase some merchandise while you’re there).

As for that other local aesthetic institution opening an expanded space, the Seattle Art Museum’s grand new digs at First and Union are open free for a 35-hour marathon today and Sunday, for art lovers and Cinco de Mayo amateur drunks alike.

Daniel Eran writes today about the long-in-the-works failings of Microsoft. But he could also be writing about the national political scene:

“The weakness of power not only cultivates poor strategic direction, but also tends to focus attention on covering up mistakes in the media rather than solving the actual problems. This just makes things worse, particularly when that subterfuge is later exposed.Interestingly, part of the downfall of monopolies comes from the delayed discipline of reality checks offered by the media, which tends to cheer on the gratuitous sloth of former glories long after any celebration is deserved.

Counter-intuitively, the media is just not very good at pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; once enough children point it out for them however, the embarrassment becomes a great story and the press begins beating up the same celebrated darlings they once revered as untouchable.”

…has resigned in the wake of a secret gay romance becoming public. Insert your own jokes about hoses, pumpers, nozzles, octane ratings, pipelines, etc.

…in town, sort of: Skybus will take you where you want to go, as long as you want to go from Bellingham to Columbus, OH, for as little as $50 one-way. Some of its other routes out of its Columbus hub cost as little as $10, plus the usual taxes and security fees. Everything that’s nonessential costs more, from food and blankets to checked baggage. With a connecting flight, Skybus will take you to such noncongested airports as Portsmouth (NH), Ft. Lauderdale, Richmond, Greensboro (SC), Kansas City, and (if you don’t mind a really indirect itinerary) Oakland and Burbank.

…playoffs begin with Seattle fans once again relegated to spectator status, Danny Westneat suggests a simple, elegant solution. If the Sonics/Storm owners put up as much money as they would have put up for a new suburban arena, let’s get the state and/or county to front the remainder of what it’d take to fix up KeyArena (hey–remember that joint?) with a bigger food court and a few more tiers of seating. The teams not only stay in Seattle, they stay in Seattle. Everybody’s happy except the sports-hating hippies (and the owners, if they were really only looking for an excuse to move the franchise).

Biz bigwigs were overheard at the Davos economic conference exchanging gleeful predictions about outsourcing up to 40 million U.S. professional jobs to low-wage countries.

…“Microsoft is Dead”: “No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they’re not dangerous.”

(Too bad Graham, a tech-startup guru, believes the answer to MS’s troubles is to buy a bunch of Web 2.0 companies and to run them from Silicon Valley. It reminds me of Wired’s old list of prescriptions for MS, that the company should “move all software operations to Silicon Valley” because “the Evergreen State is still the sticks.”)

Seattle’s own Little Internet Service Provider That Could, legendarily started out of a cafe in Belltown in 1995, has just been bought out by Best Buy. Spokespeople, natch, promise no changes on the customer-service level; though the hereby-linked press release emphasizes small businesses as the firm’s current target customer, not the home user.

It should be pointed out that, in the post-dot-com-crash hi-tech biz, unloading one’s whole company to a bigger fish is often considered the highest sign of success, rather than any sign of failure.

…the Ides-O-March this year my thanking the P-I’s Bill Virgin for a really nice Vanishing Seattle book plug in his column today. Virgin’s topic: The past and future, if there is one, of that once ubiquitous institution, the gas station.

According to some Web site that claims to be authoritative, Seattle ranks 7 on a list of “Top US Erotica Important Cities.” NY/LA/SF are up there, of course, as are Vegas, Miami, and Chicago (the latter in honor of what’s left of Playboy’s head office, much of whose operations have been shipped off to LA and NY). Our reason for getting on the list: “Adult Websites.” (Maybe they didn’t hear that IEG/ClubLove went pffft years ago.)

Other fun alleged-facts on the page: One out of three “visitors to adult websites” are women. Ninety percent of 8-16 year-olds have seen porn online. Twelve percent of all U.S. Web sites are devoted to porn. The U.S. accounts for only 14 percent of “Worldwide Pornography Revenues,” fourth in the world; China (!) and South Korea (!!) lead that category, with fetish-fanatical Japan third. Despite this, “US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.” (The latter stat I’m particularly not so sure of; most video and online porn companies are privately held, and reliable financial data about them are notoriously elusive and exaggerated.)

Today’s front page news is “Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades.”

This spells disaster for the grumpy-grownup set.

Ever since I was a teenager (the term “teen” having been temporarily out of style then), pompous adults have relished every chance to stereotype their youngers as a gaggle of illiterate nothings.

I like to imagine this was especially true in the ’80s, when haughty “’60s Generation” people were crowding the grumpy-grownup demographic, but no. This habit has been going on long since, and it was going on long before (cf. Steve Allen’s old snipes against that silly rock n’ roll music, or the scene at the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy where an aging George M. Cohan (James Cagney) cringes at some energetic teens singing “Jeepers Creepers”).

More recently, Seattle Weekly’s new management figured the way to capture a young-adult audience (which the paper’s previous managements had either ignored or overtly spurned) was to fire the news department, decimate serious political coverage, and add dumb imitation-Onion faked features.

But this time the grumps can’t get away with their putdowns, at least not without a bigger reality-distortion field.

We’re facing what, a couple years ago, I half-facetiously named the “Long Attention Span Generation.”

We’re talking about teens who spent their preteen years devouring Harry Potter novels, each one 150 pages longer than the one before. Teens who’ve fled the instant-gratification video arcades to immerse themselves in the nonlinear, massively-multiplayer worlds of The Sims and Second Life. Teens who actually understand vast technical parts of the computers, cell phones, and online networks they use.

So, yeah, long-form narrative is quite a familiar concept for ’em. So is the activity of reading itself. (The non-porn parts of the ol’ WWW are all about words; so is text messaging.)

What this might mean in the future: Yes, I can imagine whole chat rooms devoted to Proust and Pynchon. I can foresee neo-Shakespeare fashions in London’s boppingest nightclubs (complete with codpieces, of course).

But, sorry to say, I suspect there will always be stoner boys whose idea of great writing begins and ends with Hunter Thompson.

For five years, I lived across from the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, that huge concrete box propping up part of Freeway Park at the cusp between Capitol Hill and downtown.

More lately, I’ve occasionally temped there in between freelance gigs. I’ve gained a new appreciation for that city-within-a-city, that most earthbound segments of the floating world of business travel.

Despite the glamourous image of the ’50s-’60s “jet set,” business travel’s really what put the airline biz, hence Boeing and hence Seattle, into the big money. (In 1968, American Airlines advertised itself as a company “built for the professional traveler.”) While some people travel on business year-round as dealmakers or sales reps, most folks who travel on business do so only a few times a year; a goodly portion of these do so to gather en masse with their professional counterparts from around the country. They go to get out of the office for a few days, to see a strange city at company expense, to sit in group ennui during PowerPoint presentations, and to receive numerous sales pitches from vendors at exhibit booths.

Many people from many employers work the conventions, or benefit from the work done there.

There are the officers and year-round employees of the convention’s sponsoring entity (usually a business or professional association). There are the employees of professional convention-services companies—nomads who roam North America’s convention halls running registration desks, “lead retrieval” systems (see below), client-satisfaction surveys, etc.

There’s the Convention Center’s regular staff, cleaning rooms, operating video projectors, forklifting display-booth parts between the loading dock and the etc.

There are the various contractors and suppliers—caterers, catalog printers, sign printers, and such.

There are the restaurants, bars, hotels, cab drivers, and merchants in and around the Convention Center. There are the bus drivers who ferry groups of visitors to their hotels, to ancillary meeting venues, and to tourist attractions. There are the workers at the tourist attractions. (And, yeah, there are the strip clubs and escort services.)

There are the car-rental companies. There are the beneficiaries of car-rental taxes, includng the Seahawks and the Qwest Field staff.

There are the concierges and ushers, employed by the Seattle-King County Convention and Visitors Bureau (the fine folks who once bestowed us with the moniker “Emerald City,” and who now want our burg to be known as “Metronatural”).

And, under the concierge crew’s supervision, as many as 25 of us in the temp squad earn our pay by being dependable, being efficient, and being able to endure boring hours of either repetitive tasks or just sitting around looking authoritative.

With all this cash to be collected from out-of-town pockets, it’s no wonder states and municipalities kept outdoing one another in the 1980s and ’90s to build these taxpayer-supported shrines to business and the Business Class.

The convention biz has slumped since 9-11 and the resulting headaches of air travel, not to mention teleconferencing and online chats and other hi-tech alternatives. Yet, every year, thousands of people in hundreds of work-related “tribes” still feel a need to meet F2F and IRL. (That’s “face to face” and “in real life,” in ’90s chat-room lingo.)

My most recent gig there was a convention of surgical radiologists. Before that, I worked on the American Library Association’s confab. (From Willa Cather to catheters, all in one building.)

Most Convention Center events aren’t as exciting as that of the World Trade Organization in 1999. And most convention work is routine stuff, particularly the tasks assigned to the temps.

We stuff thousands of logo-encrusted backpacks full of promotional pens, CD-ROMs, T-shirts, umbrellas, ad flyers, convention catalogs, schedules, and last-minute addenda to the schedules.

We sit outside the center’s many big and small meeting rooms as “room monitors.” There, we pass out evaluation forms before sessions and collect them afterwards. In between, we regularly count the attendance, lest the fire marshals bust the whole convention over one overpopulated room. We answer questions and complaints from belligerent convention goers about intricacies of the convention’s schedule—or, as often the case, respond with a smiling “I’m sorry, I don’t know. The big booth on level 4 probably has someone who’ll know.”

We work for convention-service companies, disbursing “lead retrieval” machines to exhibit booths. (These are credit-card type readers that collect the demographic data of each attendee who swipes his/her registration card at an exhibitor’s booth.)

We stand behind the registration booths, assembling attendees’ badges and ticket packets while quickly explaining why they mustn’t misplace them; all while long sign-in lines are held up by one or two people whose pre-registration confirmations had been eaten by a computer somewhere.

My favorite moment in that regard was at a convention for ethnic-minority students from private high schools. While many convention goers are jaded and jet-lagged adults, these teens acted truly excited to be in a strange city with thousands of their peers. And, unlike some of the librarians and radiologists, they were visibly excited to receive their free backpacks.

I’ve learned to admire the vastness of even a middle-sized convention as a logistical operation, from signage to people-moving to the setup and teardown of exhibit booths.

And our Convention Center, even after the 2001 expansion, is but an average-sized facility of its type, at 200,000 square feet of exhibit space (not counting meeting rooms). The Las Vegas Convention Center, the world’s largest, holds 15 times that much floor space.

That’s an awful lot of lead retrieval machines to be handed out by a lot of temps.