…during the alleged recovery? Big corporate bottom-lines, particularly those of Big Oil.

…the US economy’s bleeding jobs out of obsessive submission to The Almighty Stock Price.

…but Jim Henson’s heirs finally agreed on one of Henson’s last wishes, to sell the Muppets to Disney.

…to buy the team before. But Patrick Sheehan has a particularly impassioned plea for Gates to buy the team and out-deal Steinbrenner.

Dean’s done. Apparenly, the Internet Presidential campaign is as not-ready-for-prime-time as the Internet economy.

BAD NEWS #2: The Redmond-based AT&T Wireless (nee McCaw Cellular) is selling out to Cingular, the SBC/BellSouth joint venture based in Atlanta. Yet another corporate headquarters is leaving the Seattle area. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of middle- and upper-middle-class jobs could vanish like a cell-phone connection in a tunnel.

…the Damned Yankees just add more superstars. As I’ve said before, rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Microsoft.

…to Linda Dershang and the hard-workin’ gang at Linda’s Tavern on Pine. Hipster hangouts have notorious attrition rates, so the continued thriving of Linda’s is particularly praiseworthy.

My favorite personally-viewed events at Linda’s:

• The night the place was taken over by just laid-off Amazon.com workers, who cheerled the whole room into rousing chants of “FUCK AMAZON!”
• The cinema night on the back patio with Bette Davis’s evil-twin scenery-chompin’ performance in Dead Ringer.
• The election-night party for the sponsors of the first Monorail Initiative. For one brief shining moment, it looked as if the likes of Dick Falkenbury and Grant Cogswell really could change the world. And who knows, they still might.

Linda’s is also one of the last places where Cobain appeared in public, as you’re bound to hear next month as the media get ready to hype that, less happy ten-year anniversary.

The world of alterna-comix is filled with endearing characters on the page and intriguing characters off the page. One of the trade’s oddest tales is that of Dave Sim. In 1977 he started Cerebus the Aardvark, a funny-animal parody of Conan the Barbarian. A year or two into the title, and supposedly after an acid trip that sent him to a hospital, he proclaimed he’d put out 300 issues and then kill off the title character.

A quarter century later, he’s done it. Along the way, he’s turned into a recluse, an outspoken misogynist, and one of the industry’s top advocates for creators’ rights. His comic book has veered from social satire to epic adventure to meandering ideological rants. By the end, its circulation had dropped from 35,000 to 7,000.

The Canadian newspaper supplement Saturday Night ran a fascinating piece about Sim’s triumphs and struggles, suggesting the stress of his self-imposed task pushed him to the edge of insanity. The comics weblog Sequential has posted image files of the five-page article (one, two, three, four, five).

Here’s Sim’s own “Hail and Farewell” essay from a wholesaler’s catalog.

I was never into Conan, or parodies of Conan, so Sim’s early work made no impact on me. The later, longer stories became so slowly-paced, you pretty much had to read them in the paperback reprint collections for them to make sense. But Sim’s brave and/or silly perserverence as a writer/artist/self-publisher may never be repeated.

Should it?

Sim employed several strategies to survive as a self-publisher. He started at the beginning of the specialty comic-book-store circuit, and maintained his place within it, even as he alienated most of his now-former friends and industry allies. He kept his famous-among-a-cult-audience title and lead character, long after he’d outgrown talking-animal stories. He wrote, drew, inked, and lettered 12 issues a year, usually with 20 pages of art plus a cover, collaborating only with background artist Gerhard; thus pushing as much quantity of product out at his audience as he physically could produce. He maintained his creative freedom and achieved a solid middle-class income; at the expense of potentially greater works he might have done if he’d had longer lead times and didn’t have to stay in the Cerebus universe.

…the media ganged up on Howard Dean precisely because an Internet-based campaign threatened the media’s role as “the gatekeepers, who for obvious financial reasons, have a lot at stake in the money continuing to flow through their bank accounts…. To accept his candidacy would be to accept the end of television-dominated politics. They aren’t going to let this happen, any more than the record and movie companies are going to roll over for P2P distribution.”

A city-sponsored report claims the Seattle “music industry” generates $650 million annually and 8,700 jobs.

Granted, this includes music teachers, office workers at piped-in-music companies (Muzak was headquartered here for a few years), symphony members, etc. But still, there’s real careers out in what many people still think of as a marginal starving-artist activity. It’s just that “rock star” isn’t the most stable of those careers.

There’s an analogy there for word people such as I, somewhere, I’m sure.

MIKE PENNER BELIEVES the National Football League has become a greying institution that “thinks old and tries to act young, never a flattering combination.”

MEANWHILE, following the big to-do at the downtown Sheraton, the announcement came that Seattle’s first Sheraton franchise, known in recent years as the University Plaza, will be sold, closed, and turned into apartments.

The ol’ motor inn, on the NE 45th Street exit off I-5, was a familiar sight for commuters and tourists since it opened in 1966 (just a few years after the freeway itself). Even before I lived in town, I remembered spotting it out the car window every time the family went through Seattle on the way to Tacoma.

Then one year the big sign stopped saying SHERATON and started saying SHERWOOD. I didn’t have to be told what happened: The place had obviously been sold; the new owners had obviously lost, or chose not to renew, the Sheraton franchise; and they had chosen a new name that required them to change only three letters on the big sign.

When I finally got to look inside the place in ’76, it turned out they’d spent the money they saved from the sign on a “Sherwood” interior. They’d added fake Olde English interior walls and lights for a pseudo-Robin Hood effect. That loving seventies tackiness remained with all the subsequent owners, as it became a Nendel’s Inn, a Quality Inn, and finally the University Plaza.

But that prefab quaintness couldn’t hide the hotel’s business problems. As a freeway motel, it was relatively small and inconspicuous, even when it had a franchise operation behind it. As a dining/drinking/meeting spot for locals, it was inconveniently located and not particularly inviting-looking from the outside.

But I’ll miss it just the same.

FAO Schwarz’s Seattle store closed last week after eight and a half years as the city’s premier emporium for all things play-like.

Seeing a once-proud institution collapse like this was sad, but perhaps not preventable. Yeah, management claims Wal-Mart did ’em in; but the FAO stores were in downtowns and major malls, far from the Wal’s exurban big boxes. I smell mismanagement, perhaps on a big scale. But it makes little difference now.

For mass-market toy merchandise (the Barbie-level stuff, as opposed to the Beanie Baby-type stuff sold more exclusively at indie stores), in-town Seattle shoppers are largely stuck with Fred Meyer, the Bon, and the Northgate Toys “R” Us.

Sub Pop and PopLlama are officially not part of the evil RIAA.

IF TOMORROW, “Super Sunday,” is America’s biggest day for macho horseplay, last Friday night was Seattle’s night to celebrate beauty.

First, there was the lavish opening party for Spa Noir, a new posh pampering palace in the former Confounded Books space at Second and Bell. Above, owner Jessica Norton receives a bouquet of flowers and a socket wrench to celebrate having finally gotten the space ready.

Spa Noir offers all the favorite day spa services (facials, massages, manicures, etc.), but offers them until 10 p.m. Appointments can be made for even later at night, so bar and nightclub workers will have something to go to after closing time besides the suburban casinos.

Just a block away, the Rendezvous hosted the Nerd Rock Fashion Show A Go-Go, a sprightly little fashion show featuring local designers and benefitting the fledgling DIY arts orgalization Hometown Gravy.

Then, down by Terry and Mercer at Consolidated Works,, came the lavisher-than-lavish opening night gala for the second Seattle Erotic Arts Festival. You’ve got to get there this weekend. It fills Conworks’ cavernous exhibition space with hundreds upon hundreds of paintings, drawings, sculptures, Etch-A-Sketches, installation pieces, and more. They mostly are figure studies of lone females and males in provocative poses. There are also many fetish action scenes, some gay action and lesbian action scenes, and even three or four images of heterosexual coitus (the one category noticeably missing at last year’s festival in Town Hall).

It was often hard to see the beautiful art because of all the beautiful people in the way. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of flirty gals and dashing guys swarmed the joint, reveling in their fabulosity.

The festival organizers didn’t let me take pictures last night. (Hey, some of ’em are BDSM people, so you have to expect they’ll love to make rules.) I did, however, persuade a finely-coiffed party attendee named Alisha to pose outside the building. (Her outfit was designed by print MISC contributor Jen Velasco.)

As Seattle’s winter overcasts continue their reign of darkness, something like Beauty Night should be an annual ritual.