…or reverse boycott. He wants y’all to “buy your gas at Citgo,” ’cause that company happens to be owned by the state-controlled oil company of Venezuela. You might have read about that Latin American country, and how its democratically-elected president Hugo Chavez has survived at least one US-backed coup attempt, and how he’s held steadfast to his platform of channelling his country’s oil wealth toward eradicating his country’s poverty.

Citgo was originally a Northeast regional chain, originally called “Cities Service.” Many of us grew up knowing the Citgo logo only from its hypnotic huge neon sign seen in Boston Red Sox baseball telecasts. The only reason you can get Citgo-branded gas out here’s because it was briefly owned in the late ’80s by 7-Eleven, and still has a contract to supply gas to 7-Eleven locations, including 11 stores in Seattle.

…of that heartbreakingly corrupt racket known as poetry contests.

…about the meaning of the word “revolution.” A real revolution wouldn’t be about making things easier, cooler, or more efficient for big business. The exact opposite would occur.

…what would happen if Boeing got really serious about outsourcing. (What’s even funnier is that the Google Ad-bot sticks pro-outsourcing ad links on this anti-outsourcing page.)

…to use a quaint phrase quipped in the Seattle Times, even made the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid The Sun, despite the lack of any readily available photographs of her appearing in that paper’s preferred manner.

Harry Stonecipher, who’s helped Boeing become an also-ran in its own industry, has resigned in disgrace after the 70-year-old CEO got caught in a sex scandal. Maybe now we can get somebody who’ll set the company right, somebody who won’t confuse the stock price with the bottom line. If this new person drops the luxury of that Chicago head office and moves it back to Seattle, all the better.

…and I haven’t posted a remembrance of that potenially silliest of all silly dot-com-era hustle concepts, MarchFirst.com.

It was a merger of two web-design and online-services companies, which themselves were the results of several prior mergers. It was named after the date in 2000 in which the merger documents were signed.

The combined company boasted more than 5,000 employees, doing many different things on behalf of other companies. But MarchFirst’s preeminent claim was that it would help corporate clients build their Internet presences from scratch. Just one call to the Chicago-based MarchFirst, and your firm would instantly turn from an old-economy dinosaur into a new-economy powerhouse, right up there with such rising behemoths as Pets.com and Flooz.com.

None of this, however, was mentioned in the company’s costly TV ads. Most infamously, it bought naming rights for NBA halftime shows on NBC. “Coming up next: MarchFirst At the Half! Presented by MarchFIrst, where it’s all about ‘The Importance of Being First,’ at www-dot-MarchFirst-dot-com!” The commercials that aired within these halftimes were sentimental things, with gauze-filtered cameras and soft-rock music, in which a syrupy narrator talked about such feats as the first manned space flight and the first four-minute mile, and then simply reiterated the “Importance of Being First” slogan. Nary a word was given to what the heck MarchFirst was or what the heck it did.

For a company whose principal premise was helping other companies market themselves, it sure did a lousy job of marketing itself.

Within 14 months of its formation, it declared bankruptcy. Now, the URL points only to a claims site for ex-employees who were bilked out of their health benefits.

THIS IS how it used to be, and how it still ought to be.

This is an outrage. An abomination. Something so totally beyond WRONG that the mind reels to find a similie. Worse than Led Zeppelin for Cadillac. Worse than Adam Ant on a Motown Records anniversary special. Worse than auditioning a new singer for INXS on a reality series. (Make up your own “worse than” here.)

The National Hockey League’s team owners have canceled the whole season, having failed to make the players’ association give in on salary caps and other issues. Puck-and-stick fans will now have to find new pursuits, such as knitting, drinking, and watching Degrassi High reruns.

Mike’s Hard Lemonade is moving its (small) head office to Seattle; specifically to Pioneer Square’s Washington Shoe Building, that onetime party central for the Seattle indie art world. The company’s Canadian-born founder-CEO (whose real first name, natch, is Anthony) will hire 30 people here to handle development and marketing for the Mike’s brands, which are manufactured and distributed by subcontractors.

Imagine the implications: Boeing, Muzak, and UPS may have moved their corporate HQs to other states, but by golly we can still become the capital of flavored clear-malt coolers!

Our ol’ pal and fellow Stranger refugee Matt Richter just got fired from his own organization, the multi-arts center Consolidated Works. It’s a darn shame. Richter intended to create something big and sprawling, teeming with ambition and cross-pollination. And he did it. Now, he’s been shoved out by a board of directors who apparently believe in turning the place from a home of big ideas to one of stable management. Conworks will survive, and it may produce some great things. But it won’t be the same.

…photo yellow pages seem to have a glitch. The first page of its Seattle restaurant listings includes a dentist’s office.

…(not seen in print locally) The Straight Dope claims, “Somehow I doubt coming generations are going to get nostalgic about the great video rental stores of their youth.” I dunno ’bout you, but I sure as heck miss both incarnations of Video Vertigo, the pioneering Backtrack Records and Video, and the “Hypno Video” section of Confounded Books.

AS THE GANG at Anthropologie take down the Xmas window displays, we mark the end of a damn-depressin’ year, both here at MISC Towers and out in the world at large.

But there have been some not-altogether-unpleasant events during it, particularly this past week or so.

On Christmas Eve Eve, the Wall of Sound folk put up a holiday fete starring the improvised vocal stylings of Les Voix Vulgaires (from left, King Leah, Detonator Beth Lawrence, and Amy Denio).

Then this past Tuesday, K Records held an intimate li’l CD release party at the Green Room bar in the Showbox building. It promoted reissue compilations by two early-’80s local “art-damage” bands, the Beakers and the Blackouts.

Ex-Beaker (and fellow Stranger refugee) Jim Anderson is shown above, introducing longtime local musician/producer Steve Fisk, who performed for the packed room on a vintage ARP synthesizer. Also in attendance: Ex-Blackout Bill Rieflin and ex-Beaker Francesca Sundsten, who’ve been a lovey-dovey couple for perhaps more years than they care to remember.

I have more memories of the Blackouts than of the Beakers (I saw more of the formers’ gigs, including several at the Showbox). In Loser, I marked the birth date of the “Seattle scene” as the date, in 1976, of the premier gig by the Blackouts’ previous incarnation, the Telepaths. The Beakers, meanwhile, were among the earliest incarnations of the Olympia scene’s indie-ideology purity shtick.

In the blurry mists of hindsight, both bands now seem to belong outside of their time and place. The bands they borrowed from (Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, the Pop Group) didn’t become VH1 nostalgia faves. Their sounds remain as brittly dissonant, yet strongly compelling, as ever.

But some retail institutions did not survive the holiday season. One was the second incarnation of Video Vertigo, East Pike Street’s own friendly neighborhood horror-and-porn video store.

Another was the Sam Goody music store at Third and Pine. It’s been there, under one chain-name or another, since the late ’70s. The building owners now want to carve the space into several smaller retail spots, possibly including (you guessed it) a Starbucks.

Microsoft’s selling Slate, its online political/cultural magazine, to the Washington Post Co. You might recall it was another WashPost subsidiary, Newsweek, which gave a “Seattle-mania” cover story to original Slate editor Michael Kinsley. Now, the site (the last vestige of the Microsoft Networks’ original “shows” content plan) will be outta here. Current editor Jacob Weisberg promises only that “for the time being, several Slate employees will continue to work from Seattle.”