Britain’s behemoth Tesco chain may start a circuit of 5,000-square-foot “express” supermarkets in the U.S. western states next year.

This is what neighborhoods such as Fremont, Belltown, Georgetown, Alki, and First Hill have needed. Something neighborhood-sized, but with broad selections (including fresh produce) at major-chain prices. I’ve wanted to see something like this for years.

…the pioneer of big-box exurban furniture retailing, is bankrupt and might go the way of Doces, United Furniture Warehouse, and the Oak Barn.

…offers a new (or rather under-reported) bogeyman in Wash. state politics: The construction industry, whom he derides as a cabal of “orca killers” for its opposition to the whales’ endangered-species classification.

Warner Bros. and the divorced-from-Viacom CBS are merging their second-tier broadcast networks. Instead of UPN and The WB, this September will see the “CW” network, which I’m sure some cynical critics will rename “WC” (Brit slang for a toilet, or “water closet”).

Locally, the merged programming slate will appear on KSTW, owned by CBS’s UPN Stations Group. That leaves KTWB, nee KTZZ, as a true indie again, scrambling for old movies or talk shows or judge shows to fill its evening hours.

I’m sure the expensive switch to HDTV played a factor in the merger decision. Perhaps now we’ll get an HD feed of KSTW, the only major commercial broadcast station in this region that doesn’t yet have one.

The Northwest’s official strangest book publisher, and one of the strangest in the world, is finally calling it quits after some three decades. Loompanics Unlimited (named for its first title, an unofficial index to National Lampoon back issues) spent most of its existence pursuing a very specific niche. It commissioned genre-specific nonfiction and how-to titles “with a ‘beat the system’ slant,” as mentioned in its authors’ guidelines (which are still up on the firm’s web site). Its outlaw lifestyle guides covered such useful topics as Dumpster diving, fake ID, weapons, drugs, living “off the grid,” and fighting the IRS. Its target audiences included “mountain man” militia members, Libertarians, old and neo hippies, and young adults just out to laugh at the weirdness. In Loompanics’ ’80s heyday, when most of Wash. state’s small presses hewed tightly to a square-baby-boomer aesthetic of nature poetry and self-congratulatory smugness, Loompanics particularly stood out as a brand, shouting crass commercialism and rock n’ roll rebellion as two notes of the same chord. It’ll be missed.

Now comes the imminent closure of the Green Lake Albertsons, that neighborhood’s only full-service grocery. Something’s gotta be done to turn the food biz around so the stuff most folks eat and drink can be sold at competitive prices at walkable locations.

…in the state officially go smokeless.

Some bar owners have predicted a fiscal disaster, as smoking customers would find fewer reasons to linger in their favorite watering holes.

Alcohol service is one of Seattle’s biggest employers and most prominent industries. It’s an industry that’s continued to thrive while the rest of the regional economy’s sputtered and faltered.

One reason it’s continued to thrive has been its steady, piecemeal deregulation. A few oldtimers remember when hard liquor by the drink (a.k.a. cocktails) could only be served in Washington state at private clubs, such as the Elks. Later, from the 1950s on, the strong stuff could only be served in full-service restaurants. These restaurants had to offer full meals, devote more seating area to dining than to drinking, and earn a certain percentage of their revenues from food as opposed to liquor. In these places, as well as in beer-and-wine-only taverns, the taps officially shut down at 1 a.m. Monday through Friday, and at midnight on Saturday. Sundays were dry all day.

Even the number of drinking places in a neighborhood was restricted, by regulations designed to limit “destination” nightlife areas. The idea was to limit drunk driving by making people drink closer to their homes, but it never really worked in that regard; particularly in the suburbs, where everybody drove anyway.

Over the years, the Washington State Liquor Control Board relaxed these restrictions a little at a time. Perhaps the two most important steps came in the mid-1990s.

The neighborhood bar limits were eased, leading to robust nightlife zones in Pike-Pine, Belltown, South Lake Union, and most recently in Fremont.

Cocktail lounges still had to offer something vaguely resembling food, but no longer had to be adjuncts to restaurants–the “bar menu” could be as simple as microwaved frozen entrees. This move, which coincided with the outbreak of the “cocktail nation” fad, gave previously beer-and-wine-only outlets access to higher profit-margin items, making the whole business less of a gamble.

But while public drinking became more convenient, public smoking was the new target of restriction. With the passage of a state initiative last month, Washington’s now got the nation’s toughest anti-smoking laws.

As a result, a local hospitality industry that had seen nothing but growth for a decade now sees a threat to its livelihood.

Cigar bars, and that new downtown fad of hookah bars, will have to sue the state in court to continue existing.

Bars will no longer get big promotional incentives and advertising support from tobacco companies. (Bars will still be allowed to sell smokes for off-premises consumption.)

And fewer regular customers, some bar owners predict, will show up. When they do show up, they’ll linger for shorter amounts of time, hence buying fewer drinks, because their nicotine urges will force them outside.

I have my doubts about the latter concern. There are more and more nonsmokers out there these days, though you wouldn’t know it if you hung out at some bars. I know several people who no longer go to bars or nightclubs, even when their favorite musical act’s playing, out of an aversion to second-hand smoke. The absence of such smoke from drinking establishments can increase, not deacrease, their potential customer base.

IN OTHER BOOZE NOOZE, Seattle City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen has introduced a bill that would offficially designate all of central Seattle, including Capitol Hill, as an “alcohol impact area.”

The anti-smoking law impacts on-premises drinking spots; Rasmussen’s bill would impact retail stores. These businesses would no longer be allowed to sell fortified wines or malt liquors. They couldn’t sell single cans or bottles of beer or single-serving bottles of wine. They couldn’t sell any alcohol prior to 9 a.m. daily (up from the current 6 a.m.).

Such restrictions have already been “voluntarily” imposed on retailers in the Central Area and Pioneer Square; but that’s just sent these products’ customers elsewhere. Now Rasmussen wants to impose it upon a wide swath of the city.

This bill is unabashedly class-biased. It would make it harder for poor people to get cheap booze. It wouldn’t help poor alcoholics get treatment. It wouldn’t stop people with money from making drunken fools of themselves in public. It would only affect the surface image of Seattle as a “clean city” inhabited only by “nice people.”

…the media industry is, or perhaps ought to be, “laying the newspaper gently down to die.”

Rosen cites long-term circulation declines (especially among the younger demographic slices) and conglomerates beholden to The Almighty Stock Price at the expense of all other principles of careful management. He sees an industry heading steadily into a “death spiral” of cost-cutting and shrinkage, an industry still able but not yet willing to fully invest in transitioning itself to the Internet age.

So why am I still trying to make a go of the newsprint racket?

Perhaps because I believe there’s still value in the ol’ beast. It’s a tactile experience, a verbal/visual showbiz of information and juxtaposition. Sure, the old monopoly-daily business model, in which every household every morning gets a big package of supermarket and department-store ads interspersed with moderate-conservative editorials and celebrity gossip items, is an antiquated relic. But the newspaper itself isn’t just a business, and it isn’t just a news medium either. It’s an art form. A form capable of endless variation and renewal.

My particular current newsprint product, the Belltown Messenger, isn’t yet my ideal expression of this art form. But I hope to get closer to that with every issue.

…the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web’s original creation, by a Brit working in Switzerland. James Boyle would like us to remember how worse it would be if the “info hi-way” had been dominated by a few Big Corps and their lawyers, as some (such as AOL) had wanted it to be.

…has fingered the real culprit in the music industry’s steady downturn—DVDs. The arrival of film as a home-library product, Norman Lebrecht claims, means “it has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms…. The DVD won’t replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture.”

THE NOVEMBER BELLTOWN MESSENGER is out at last, and may be our best yet. Read it online or seek it at more than 100 dropoff spots.

RAIN HAS ARRIVED SERIOUSLY in greater Puget Sound this morning, meaning the fourth category of autumnal transition has also arrived. (The prior three stages of fall: Labor Day weekend, the equinox, and the “fall back” to Standard Time.)

The grey has settled in. The washed-out watercolor look will be with us, with occasional sunbreaks, for the next three and a half months or so. This is what breaks the spirits of Californians and proves the mettle of real Nor’Westers. Can you take it?

…is here, and, like we predicted, it’s a fiasco that has more in common with the dorkier industry-friendly gossip rags than with the great video bible of yore.

Ex-staffer Jeff Jarvis, noting that the mag’s also slashing its circulation “base rate” (the rate guaranteed to advertisers) from 9 million to 3 million (it peaked at 19 million in 1974), calls the relaunch “the incredible shrinking magazine.” He also calls it “the official end of the mass market,” with the print media’s one everything-for-everybody holdout reinventing itself as a niche product.

OK, I can deal with that. But if so, then the new TV Guide ought to be a niche product targeting people who really like watching TV, and want more info about what they’re watching than they can get in a standard gossip mag or a daily paper’s entertainment section. A TV Guide that’s scrapped its local listings had better make up for it by adding reviews, analysis, and background info.

The new TV Guide doesn’t do that, at least not yet. It presumes its typical reader to be a celebrity-obsessed, attention-span-challenged “vidiot.” It offers this mythical reader nearly 60 pages of breezy, show-bizzy material for which “fluff” would be too good a term, coupled with 18 pages of listing grids so nationalized and generalized as to be near-worthless. (There are no weekend daytime listings; weekday daytime and late-night grids are full of “various programming” and “local programming” disclaimers.)

With just a little effort, this could be improved. The articles could be at least as intelligent as they were in the magazine’s golden age under founder (and Nixon crony) Walter Annenberg. The listings could be brought back up to a useable level of completeness, and could be put out in Central and Mountain time-zone versions instead of just Eastern and Pacific. The local listings could be brought back in vestigial form, as an eight- to twelve-page newsprint insert stapled into the middle.

In short, it could be much more like TV Guide Ultimate Cable, a short-lived test-marketed revamp of the mag from the mid-’90s.

Or, let someone else do the job. The new TV Guide, in dumping its costly programming-database costs, has lowered the bar toward potential competition. Let’s get another TV mag out there, one that gives a damn about viewers/readers who give a damn.

As some of you know, I’m in the midst of writing a book to be sold exclusively online, Take Control of Digital TV. It’s intended for readers who know about computers but don’t know about television, particularly the new hi-def generation of TV gear. As part of the research, I’m currently watching the DVD Digital Video Essentials, a way-comprehensive guide to installing and adjusting medium- to high-end video gear. The HDTV and home-theater subculture is audiophile geekiness cubed (at least).

TV has become high-attention, long-attention-span material. A print mag that wants to keep calling itself the authority on the field ought to be becoming smarter, not dumber.

…the NY Times is now charging for online access to its op-ed columnists.

So instead, let’s link to other qualified, distinguished Bush-beraters; such as Robert Perry’s comparison of the White House press corps to “the enabling family of a drug addict insisting nothing is wrong.”

Or ex-Clinton aide Robert Reich’s claim that the Bush gang’s success at running a perrmanent-offense political machine is the very reason for its utter failure at running a government.

…the Fremont Red Apple Market is holding a going-out-of-biz sale, along the lines of the now-also-shuttered Alki Market in West Seattle and Rogers Foods on MLK Way.

All of these proud indie supermarkets had been under the TLC of Associated Grocers, the venerable merchant cooperative based south of Boeing Field. For decades, AG has provided wholesale buying, warehousing, ad design/placement, and other services for mom-and-pops and regional chains in Washington and Alaska, helping them compete against the likes of Safeway.

AG’s most important service, though, may have been as a startup helper. It had a program to build, equip, and stock a full supermarket for anyone willing to put up the money. When Lucky Stores pulled out of the Seattle region in the mid-1980s, AG bought its remaining locations and resold them to individual operators; the Ballard Market on NW 15th St. is one of these.

But the ’90s brought the Kroger takeover of QFC, which had been one of AG’s most dominant members. QFC pulled out of AG, and also either bought out or drove out several of AG’s top indies (Art’s Family Center on Holman Road, Food Giant in Wallingford, Mathews Market in Wedgwood).

A weakened AG had to discontinue its startup program and cut back services to its remaining members. These moves hit hardest on the one-store operators such as Rogers, Alki, and now Fremont.

This disturbing trend hits hard on the neighborhoods that relied on these stores. And it hurts the dreams of those of us who’d like to see full grocery selections available in neighborhoods that don’t how have ’em (Belltown, Georgetown).

For weeks and weeks, depressing developments have dominated the scene. Now, at last, I’ve got something positive to report, at least for my local readers.

Thanks to a federal district judge’s ruling on Monday, new strip clubs in Seattle can finally open again.

I’ve long asserted that a healthy sex-entertainment industry’s a vital part of an urban milieu. It attracts tourist dollars. It employs many creative types, giving them money to support their painting, costume design, rock bands, novel writing, etc. It entrances and pacifies its patrons, instead of turning them into drunken boors. And, at least sometimes, it inspires its clients to go home and satisfy their wives and girlfriends.

For too long, the Seattle cultural establishment’s idea of the perfect strip club has been a peep show parlor, where the genders are permanently separated by a glass curtain. Nothing else could more vividly depict the so-called “Seattle freeze,” a regional sociological phenomenon in which isolation and even loneliness are mistaken for positive human traits.

No, we need better. We need a place where women and men are in the same room, perhaps even talking to one another.

And not just another clone of the Deja Vu formula either, but a club where the costumes and performances are inspired by the neo-burlesque revolution instead of by the bleach-and-silicone porn-star stereotype. A place where the women who show and the men who look are both made to feel good about their sexualities. A place that could even attract a coed clientele.

I’ve known people who’ve wanted to start such a club over the years, but who’ve been stymied by the city’s 17-year “temporary moratorium” on adult entertainment licenses. I hope they can now get up and running, and soon.

Heck, while we’re at it let’s also have strip clubs for women (again), and for gay men (for the first time).

…by yrs. truly in the SeaTimes today. It’s about The Great American Jobs Scam, a sprightly little collection of anecdotes about corporate welfare gone wild.