Longtime corporate-privilege apologist and recent Seattleite George Gilder starts out his latest Wired essay by mentioning the big “server farms” Google and Microsoft are putting up in the hydroelectrified rural Northwest. It’s nice to see some of the NW’s tech-boom giving employment to parts of Wash. and Ore. that had previously been left out of it, even if those jobs are largely confined to construction and hardware maintenance.

But buried in the story’s midsection, Gilder notes the resource cost of all these data centers that supply our online applications, search-engine results, YouTube videos, blogs, podcasts, massively-multiplayer online games, and junk emails. Gilder estimates that the combined electricity consumption of all U.S. server complexes equals the electricity needed to supply Las Vegas on a really hot day.

As more and more networked apps and media files and other Internet “stuff” gets put up and transmitted about, where’s the energy going to come from to do it all? Gilder suggests nukes. I disagree, but don’t have a more feasible alternative other than newer, less-power-hoggin’ processors and routers, which will only slow down these plants’ thirst for juice.

Maybe we could take the content from some of the more salacious conservative blogs and attach them to wind-power generators.

The venerable national music chain has been sold to a liquidation company, and will promptly begin its going-out-of-biz sales.

Both of Tower’s Seattle stores, on east Queen Anne and in the University District, moved to new buildings in recent years; the separate Queen Anne Tower Books outlet shut several years ago. But through these changes, and the onslought of music downloads (paid-for and other), Tower remained the most “indie” of the big chains. While Musicland/Sam Goody (now also disappeared from Seattle) would hype the latest already-overhyped N’Sync or Jessica Simpson product, Tower would give big display space to the likes of Beck and the Donnas. Its staff over the years probably included more future rock stars and future rock critics than any other U.S. company. I had a once-comfy gig feeding local music-scene briefs to its venerable in-store magazine Pulse!.

Now, the leading music retailers in Seattle (besides Amazon, of course) are the locally-owned Easy Street and Sonic Boom, the locally-founded, now Portland-owned Cellophane Square, and the CD shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble. B&N’s about to start building a new book palace at Northgate; just why book sales attract more corporate investment than music sales is a topic for another time.

…about tough fiscal times for “the Aging Independent Filmmaker.” (That’s the makers of real indie films, not the contrivers of formula crime thrillers for the Hollywood majors’ pseudo-indie divisions.)

…from a company that’s been brimming with dumb ideas of late: “GM Hires Fox News Mouthpiece Sean Hannity As Spokesman.”

…speculates on potential reasons why the next version of Windows is late. His chief suspect: Dilbertian office politics.

7-Eleven stores are dropping Citgo gasoline, a former 7-Eleven subsidiary now owned by the Venezuelan state oil company. Last year, there was a “netroots” drive to encourage folks to buy Citgo gas to support Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, then as now under attack for saying nasty but lucid things about Bush.

…there’s only one part of private-sector employment in the U.S. that’s been gaining jobs this decade. It’s the health care biz, including drugs and biotech. The whole rest of non-governmental employment: stagnant or dropping. Including info-tech.

In other words, our only source of job growth is a corrupt system rigged to maintain high stock prices for the drug and insurance companies, at the expense of U.S. citizens’ physical and fiscal well-being (and, due to the built-in inefficiencies of the employer-paid insurance system, at the expense of the entire rest of U.S. business).

Any attempt at health care reform in a future post-conservative government will need to take this into account. Its proponents will have to argue their plan will increase more well-paying jobs than it cuts, by cutting costs for employers.

…Boeing exec still based in Seattle has now been picked to try to keep Ford Motor solvent. Expect few ringing endorsements from this corner.

So many Seattle institutions vanish all the time, one can’t keep up. Here are just a few of the more recent disappearances:

• The Jade Pagoda closes Thursday. Broadway’s last true dive bar, open since Repeal, makes way for the usual exciting new retail mixed use project blah-blah-blah. You were loved, you are still loved, you will always be loved.
• 
  Larry’s Markets disbanded. The six-unit supermarket chain, under Chapter 11 in recent months, is being sold off asset by asset. Two will become GI Joe’s sporting-goods stores. Three will go to other grocery operators, possibly Asian specialty chains. The lower Queen Anne store will be taken over by Metropolitan market (née Queen Anne Thriftway), but will keep the Larry’s name for perhaps a year, until the upper Queen Anne Metropolitan’s kicked out for a QFC-and-condo project.Larry’s didn’t pioneer the idea of a higher-price, gourmet-ized supermarket. But its huge stores took the concept to a new level. But then Whole Foods took the concept to still another level. Larry’s countered by emphasizing its everyday, regular-ol’-supermarket stuff as well as its 17 different kinds of cilantro. But it didn’t work, alas.
• 
  Rainier Hardware to be evicted from the Pike Place Market. The owners of downtown’s last hardware store wanted to keep going. But the Market’s jokingly-titled “Preservation and Development Authority” only saw the potential for big bucks from shucking a piece of the Market’s working-class heritage in favor of some high-rent upscale knick-knack boutique.
• 
  Pike Place Politics shuts down. It was one of the few truly comprehensive, truly independent, truly local political blogs. But Will, who ran it, apparently simply got tired of the legwork. As soon as he relinquished the subdomain name at blogspot.com, it was grabbed by someone offering video clips of animals fighting one another. Ah, gotta get those click-through ad links exposed somehow….

Both the Vanishing Seattle book and the September Belltown Messenger are outta here and on their way to your adoring eyes. So I can now resume this here corner of what used to be euphemistically called “Cyberspace.”

Among the things I haven’t gotten the time to write about these past almost two weeks:

• The 25th anniversary of the first IBM PC. Personal computers had already been around a half decade. IBM saw the character-generating on the wall and realized it had to be in that market, before its own sub-mainframe workstation computers were obsolete. An “Entry Level Systems Division” was set up in Florida, far from IBM’s mainframe designers in upstate New York. A workable and expandable machine was swiftly designed, mostly from off-the-shelf parts. Corporate schmoozing between IBM bigwigs and UW Regent Mary Gates got Mary’s son Bill the chance to bid on the operating system contract. He bought the existing QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a couple of Seattle nerds. His then-small staff made two variants, PC-DOS (for IBM) and MS-DOS (which, under the MS/IBM contract, Gates & co. could sell to anybody). From this one deal arose the Puget Sound country’s new #1 economic force, the driver of real-estate hyperinflation and the flow of money into local “alternative” culture.
• 
  The first sign of hope for saving the Sonics and Storm. The Okie owners say they’d be perfectly happy with staying in Seattle Center, as long as it’s not in KeyArena. They suggested the Memorial Stadium land, already set to be cleared under a blue-ribbon committee’s master plan for the Center grounds. That’d be perfect with me. The high school football games can go to Husky Stadium or even Qwest Field. KeyArena can be re-remodeled as a concert and convention facility. We can get an indoor arena big enough for a National Hockey League team, plus the food-court and amusement-arcade sections the Okies want. I may be the only one I know who believes this deal can indeed be worked out without excessively draining local tax coffers, but I do believe it.
• 
  Safeco Insurance plans to leave the U District; the UW plans to buy the Safeco Tower. Let’s just make sure the U keeps the IHOP, next to the tower on Safeco-owned land.
• 
  A dog-days lull in the Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer soap opera. I’ve been talking with others who, like me, would like to be involved in starting a new local-news venture should the P-I call it a day. Should this project progress, and should I become a real part of it, I’ll wind up saying less and less about it due to the ol’ non-disclosure falderal.

…the end of the America Online business model? No more AOL discs flooding your mailbox? O, what will become of us all without them?

The Sonics and the Storm are being sold to an Oklahoma City group with the not-so-hidden agenda of taking the teams east. How quickly can this threat to a local institution be pushed back?

Remember, OKC did in a Seattle institution before. Seafirst Corp., aka Seattle-First National Bank, was our state’s oldest, largest, and most stable financial institution. But in the ’80s, Seafirst’s CEO thought it would be a good thing to go into cahoots with Penn Square Bank, a tiny OKC shopping-mall bank whose main business was financing shady oil deals. The resulting fiscal catastrophe pushed Seafirst into the outstretched paws of BankAmeriCrap.

From a decade ago, here’s one guy’s prediction of “why DVD would fail” in the home-entertainment marketplace.

Seattle Weekly editor Knute Berger’s announced his resignation, six months after the paper was bought by the Arizona-based New Times chain. Berger (nephew of former Guiding Light soap star Barbara Berjer) spent his current editorship functioning as an old-guard defender of the faith, maintaining a sense of the paper’s (and the city’s) heritage in spite of parent-company pressure to cheapen and “modernize” the product. In spite of the Stranger’s constant ribbing about Berger’s official residence in the ‘burbs (a relic of his previous helming of the Weekly‘s former EastsideWeek edition), he remained loyal to the end to a particularly “Seattle” way of looking at the world—sincere and serious, but with a healthy sprig of wryness.

…three-days-after-Canada-Day day, my apologies for not having written anything for this site in the past week. I could say I’ve been busy, but that would be a mere excuse. I’ve had spare moments away from the search for Vanishing Seattle pix. But I’ve wasted those odd hours and half-hours in such meaningless pursuits as settling old debts, figuring out how to get to the Renton Fry’s Electronics store by Metro bus (the solution: Route #110, a minivan commuter route from the Renton Transit Center), and watching odd YouTube.com contributions (such as “The Worst Looney Tunes Ever,” five pathetic shorts made in 2003 by Simpsons/Family Guy writers).

NOW THEN, TO THE DAY’S TOPIC: Yes, it’s possible to still love your country, even when it repeatedly does stupid, stupid, STUPID things.

Indeed, that’s the only real kind of love there is.

The shut-up-and-obey submission preached by today’s right wing isn’t love. It’s more like the misguided pseudo-love battered spouses sometimes express toward their abusers.

There was a time, within my lifetime if not yours, when conservative fringies were defiantly distrustful of authority figures, particularly if those authority figures represented “big government.” Would that were still the case. Those same fringies were often racist, sexist, and anti-intellectual as hell, but they at least refused to be anyone’s stooge. We could use a little more of that “don’t tread on me” attitude around these days.