the kalakala in 2007, from wikipedia

During my long “blog silence” last year there were many things I could have written about, for sure. Some of them I mentioned in my little space in the little paper City Living Seattle (I’ll repost those soon here). Others I didn’t get to there either.

Among them:

• The smallest Seattle Times in my lifetime, a mere 18 pages, was published on December 2. Many regular parts (editorials, comics, stocks, weather, sports stats) were missing; the content that was there contained many typographical oddities. The skimpier-than-usual edition was due to still unexplained “severe technical difficulties” that also apparently prevented new posts to the paper’s web site the previous night. This trip-up was never fully explained by the Times; nor, as far as I could find, was it even mentioned by other local media outlets.
• I’d heard about, but didn’t write about, the sad final days of the art deco ferry Kalakala. After Seattle metal artist Peter Bevis, who’d gotten it back to Seattle from Alaska (where it’d become a gronded fish-processing factory) ran out of money, the Kalakala got evicted from its Seattle moorage, and got sold and moved to the Port of Tacoma. There it sat for several years, forgotten—except by the Coast Guard, who repeatedly cited the decrepit former floating palace as unseaworthy and as a potential menace to navigation. Just after New Year’s, the boat’s final owner said he’ll scrap it.
• I mentioned in City Living Seattle about the impending end of the Hurricane Cafe, which occurred on New Year’s Day evening, ending 20 years of unpretentious grub at Seventh and Bell (where the even more legendary Dog House had stood for decades before that). But I didn’t mention the ends (all due directly or indirectly to redevelopment mania) of Kidd Valley Burgers on lower Queen Anne, the Ballard exile location of the former Capitol Hill landmark B&O Espresso, and the original Mercer Street location of the Streamline Tavern. The latter was one of the city’s last un-upscaled storefront beer halls, which once numbered in the hundreds. By the end of January, however, the Streamline will have reopened (bar, fixtures, and sign intact) at the former Jabu’s Pub site on East Roy Street.
• Also now shuttered: the legendary Harvard Exit and Varsity movie theaters. The Varsity on University Way, once the only non-drive-in property of the former United Theaters chain, later became the last home of the the repertory-calendar format made famous at the nearby Neptune (itself saved as a live-performance venue). And the Harvard Exit near Broadway, with its spacious, chess-board-festooned lobby and its import-heavy programming, was one of the places where “art film” going in this town had begun. The buyer of the Exit’s building has gone on social media saying he’d consider ideas to incorporate the theater auditorium in his planned office-restaurant project.
• And due to be razed any month now: the First and Seneca retail strip. It includes the old Myers Music storefront (where, legend has it, the young James M. Hendrix got his first guitar) and the former Check Mart space (which was the last remnant of the “underworld” settings depicted in the classic Seattle-filmed movie House of Games). The historic Diller Building, on the University Street end of the block, will survive.
• In the realm of institutions coming instead of going, I got into the flamboyant new ultra-deluxe Starbucks Reserve Roastery and Tasting Room on East Pike Street on its first day of business, without even having to wait in line outside. As for what I found, I’ll quote what USA Today‘s puff piece called it: “…A gathering spot for the well-to-do, where industrial age aesthetic meets information age reality.… The smell of the roasting coffee permeates the air like invisible java junkie insulin.”
• I finally got around to watching the first season of the AMC series The Killing. The drama was clearly meant to be a single-minded barrage of unrelenting grimness. Except that it’s often unintentionally funny. Those welcome monotony-breaking moments are often, though not always, due to its many hilarious “set in Seattle, filmed in Vancouver” goof-ups. No, a King County Metro bus doesn’t look like a Vancouver Transit bus with a new label slapped on. No, Discovery Park doesn’t look like the hill above Wreck Beach. And so on.
• This next bit has nothing to do with local affairs, but I found myself at a pizza place on Christmas Eve-eve. They started by playing holiday songs performed by American Idol style diva singers. Then they switched to holiday songs interpreted by hair metal bands. I realized that modern diva emoting is the true feminine counterpart to old hard-rock macho grunting.
• Then there was time in October at an art gallery when I apparently talked to comedy legend Eric Idle but didn’t know it.

theryanrvexpress.blogspot.com

Here is a story about the world’s largest “shop from home” company, and the time it started an experimental business operation in Seattle that grew and grew.

The company was Sears, Roebuck and Co. (“Cheapest Supply House on Earth”, “Our Trade Reaches Around the World”).

The time was 1925.

The experiment was to expand from its famous “Big Book” mail order catalogs into what are now called “brick and mortar” retail stores. Urbanization and automobiles (two trends that now seem contradictory) had come to threaten Sears’ biggest market—rural families who wanted prices and selections they couldn’t get in small-town stores.

Because this was a new direction for a company that had grown huge on its existing business model, Sears management chose to save money by placing its first two retail stores in buildings it already owned—its catalog warehouses in Chicago (the company’s headquarters) and Seattle. (The Chicago flagship store closed a few decades back, leaving the Seattle store as the company’s oldest.)

The Sears Seattle warehouse building had been built a little over a decade before, in 1912. The Industrial District (later christened “Sodo” by local boosters) had just been created a few years before, from tide flats filled in with dirt from the city’s massive regrading projects. It was built for the company by the Union Pacific Railroad, whose freight tracks hugged its back side. It was built from solid old growth local timber, with handsome brick cladding and a clock tower (still the neighborhood’s tallest structure, other than container-dock cranes) on top.

It also happened to be two miles south of the city’s traditional retail core. This meant the store would rely less on foot traffic and more on folks driving expressly to go there. That meant it was a forbearer of suburban malls and big-box stores, trends Sears would ride on nationally in the post-WWII decades.

The store housed a subset of the catalog’s almost-everything selection (but not cars, or entire houses in kit form, or non-perishable groceries, three of the catalog’s once-popular sections). It had “soft goods” (clothes and linens). It had “hard goods” (appliances, hardware, auto parts, furniture). For a while, there was even a farm supply department.

In 1951, the new Alaskan Way Viaduct meant Sears was just off of the main highway through the city. A little over a decade later, I-5 would pass nearby.

Generations grew up with our own local version of the store advertised as “Where America Shops,” a chunk of middle class materialistic heaven surrounded by warehouse and small factories.

Perhaps the escalators were narrow and rickety, and the ceilings shorter, compared to newer stores in the malls; but Seattle’s Sears had its own charms. The popcorn machine and the candy counter. The cool pastel colored walls in the women’s department. The Saturday morning cartoons or Sunday afternoon sports games on the wall of TVs.

Meanwhile, the warehouse part of the building grew over the years to 2.2 million square feet, making it Seattle’s largest building by volume.

But the Sears catalogs were phased out in the mid 1980s. The building was put up for sale in 1990. It was first retitled SoDo Center, then Starbucks Center when the coffee giant moved its head offices into it.

The Sears retail store remained but shrank. Part of its space was taken up by by an Office Max. Home Depot opened a huge store across South Lander Street, competing with many of Sears’ “hard goods” departments.

The company wasn’t doing too well nationally by this time either. Walmart had overtaken both Sears and Kmart to become the nation’s top retailer. The 2004 merger of Sears and Kmart failed to revive either chain’s fortunes.

Thus, the end of the Sodo Sears store became inevitable.

Only 79 employees remained with the store when its closure was announced in February, 13 of them in the “Auto Center” department.

The store had become forgotten before it was gone.

(Cross posted with City Living Seattle.)

seattleglobalist.com

• The thorough folks at Seattle Globalist traced UW-licensed apparel items back to the places where they were made, to the people who made them, and to how much more the people who made them would need to earn to meet the local cost of living.
• Speaking of apparel, BuzzFeed’s got some sorry evidence of pathetic attempts to turn punk rock nostalgia into mere fashion-fad fodder.
• Still speaking of apparel, Sesame Street really doesn’t like unauthorized “Sexy Big Bird” Halloween costumes. (You can still get the “Pho King Hot” waitress costume, though.)
• Why is Storyville Coffee, a single espresso and pastry boutique in the Pike Place Market, spending so much on lavish pre-opening marketing (including a month of free food and drinks for invited guests)? Because (1) it’s the first unit of a planned chain, and (2) it’s got the zillionaire behind a for-profit college backing it. (And as an aside, the owners also have ties to the “hip” but reactionary Mars Hill Church.) (And as another aside, do they even know they’ve named it after New Orleans’ old red-light district?)
• Can the scenic, low-density office “park” that is the ex-Battelle Research campus in Laurelhurst be saved? And should it?
• Eric Stevick at the Everett Herald has the sad life story of a woman who basically never got a break her entire life, and then died in the Snohomish County jail because they wouldn’t send for medical help.
• Bumper salmon runs! Yay! Just, you know, keep ’em away from the dogs.
• Pasta-and-pride dept.: Barilla’s CEO doesn’t care much for the gays, but Bertolli (hearts) the gays. Or something like that.
• Bono wants a more equitable tax system in Ireland, but will still keep his own millions stashed away in offshore trust accounts.
• Could Google’s latest search-ranking changes finally kill off that bane to humanity that is “Search Engine Optimization”?
• Ted Cruz apparently didn’t understand that Green Eggs and Ham is a liberal allegory about open mindedness. But he’s yesterday’s news. Today’s news is the conservatives’ next showdown target, the debt ceiling.
• Do they serve Hello Kitty beer on the Hello Kitty plane?
• Let’s leave you today with some visual inspiration, of sorts, in the form of “Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos.”

terriblerealestateagentphotos.com

via washingtonpost.com

• Our ol’ pal Lynda Barry reveals “The 20 Stages of Reading.”
• Knute Berger sez the real issue in recent local violent crimes isn’t political “leadership,” it’s the sorry state of mental-health care.
• We now know where Bauhaus Coffee is going, temporarily, while its building gets knocked down and replaced. It’s moving into the about-to-close Capitol Club’s space, just two blocks up East Pine.
• Chick-Fil-A, the fast food chain with the cow commercials and the homophobic CEO, is coming to Northgate.
• A micro-apartment developer wants Amazon to put up its short-stay employees, vendors, etc. at his buildings instead of hotels. So much for the argument that “we’re just trying to make affordable housing pencil out businesswise” etc.
• In case you care, Bill Gates is the richest guy in the country again.
• A Nation of Change essay comparing Libertarians’ ideological justifications for selfishness to “comic book writing” is an insult to comic book writers everywhere (yes, even at Marvel).
• Bob Woodward describes the GOP standard operating procedure these days as “extortion and blackmail.”
• My fellow Stranger refugee S.P. Miskowski now writes horror stories, and she’s looking for good examples of “bad woman” characters. Not daring rebel women who were really good but just called bad, mind you. She wants real (fictional) female baddies.
• Playboy’s latest, er, re-vamp in search of lost circulation and ad bucks: “natural” glamour, instead of bleach and silicone. Also, 1 percent-y lifestyle articles.

sprudge.com

• Coffee blogger Alex Bernson serves up some kind words, and a little design history, toward Capitol Hill’s soon-to-close Bauhaus Kaffee & Kunst:

It is the quintessential Northwest cafe—rustic industrial meets cozy 1950s Modern nostalgia in a beautiful, double-height corner space. It manages to feel warm, inviting, and communal all at once, even when the acres of windows are filled with oppressively gray Seattle skies.

• Timothy Harris of Real Change has some icononoclastic, and caustic, words about the eviction of the “Nicklesville” homeless encampment.
• Seattle’s Cinerama’s getting the snazziest, brightest digital cinema projecter ever.
• Texas Gov. Rick Parry might finally face prosecution for alleged abuse of power.
• A “banker-turned-writer” who predicted the financial floposity of ’08 now says the U.S. is at the verge of a “new economic boom.”
• A new smartphone app encourages bicyclists on group rides to break away and race against the clock on their own. A bike blog calls this an invitation to antisocial behavior.
• Computer chips could stop getting ever-smaller and more powerful every year, not due to physical limitations but to economic ones.
• In modern (or postmodern or neomodern) fiction, is there such a thing as “The New Weird”? Or has this particular brand of weird always been with us?
• A lesser-talked-about aspect of Miley Cyrus’s “twerking” performance: It was another in the centuries-old tradition of white performers paying “tribute” to black culture by stereotyping blacks as sexy savages.
• (By the way, there’s apparently a Twitter meme called “solidarity is for white women,” dissing white feminists who imagine affluent white women’s issues as comprising the sum total of all women’s issues.)
• (By the by-the-way, I’m still not sure what “twerking” is, but I’m not completely against it.)
• (By the by-the-by-the-way, some guy wrote an advice essay on “How to Talk With Your Sons About Robin Thicke.” Unfortunately, the advice had only to do with the “Blurred Lines” video and its depictions of women. It’s also vital to address common stereotypes of men as dumb, dick-obsessed dorks.)

via capitolhillseattle.com

• Bauhaus Kunst & Koffee, one of the many businesses being “disrupted” by Pike/Pine’s mega-development boom, has its official gallows-humor “wrecking ball” T shirt.
• As we may have mentioned here before, our supposed “progressive” town has a worse gender pay gap than the nation as a whole.
• Did Microsoft really waste nearly $1 billion on the Surface RT tablet, or should at least part of that be considered R&D/marketing expense to be carried over into future models?
• Microsoft has also quietly shut down the product/service once known as WebTV.
• Meanwhile, the end of Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color tablet shouldn’t be seen as foreboding the end of B&N as a whole.
• A Calif. tax-planning firm put Seattle as the #2 city for startup companies.
• And a Forbes.com “contributor” placed Seattle on a list of world cities with the most patent applications per population.
• Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy, quoting an anonymous publishing-biz source, insists Amazon is “going to kill” the traditional book industry. Lacy places the blame on book-biz malpractices, such as putting big bucks into celebrity titles instead of the sacred literary midlist that “book people” always whine about. Sorry but no. Snooki’s “memoir” will not kill publishing. Just as previous decades’ celebrity books didn’t. And neither will Amazon. It needs a variety of suppliers, just as all “media channels” do.
• Seattle’s first dedicated bike lanes are now operational.
• Are Seattleites “snobbish” when they talk about not wanting to have, or be around, children?
• Our own Bill Nye made #16 on a list of the 22 “All Time Hottest Hunks of PBS.” Bob (Magic of Oil Painting) Ross didn’t even make the list.
• Meanwhile, a PBS YouTube “channel” is home to a serious discussion on the supposedly radical “gender bending” aspects of BMO (pronounced “Beemo”), a character on Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time. Here comes the “but-duh” part: BMO is an anthropomorphic talking computer, a machine. Machines don’t usually have genders.
• Is Sears being driven into the ground by a CEO who likes Ayn Rand’s theories too much?

theatlantic.com

Derek Thompson at the Atlantic has assembled a U.S. map containing what he claims to be “the most famous brands born in each state.”

Only he doesn’t consistently play this game by his own rules.

Some of Thompson’s picks are obvious: Nike for Oregon, Coca-Cola for Georgia, Hasbro for Rhode Island, DuPont for Delaware, L.L. Bean for Maine, Budweiser for Missouri, Tabasco for Louisiana.

Other choices are debatable but defensible: Apple for California, Hawaiian Airlines for Hawaii, Starbucks for Washington state.

But in some cases, Thompson lists parent companies rather than “brands.” (GM is a bigger company, but Ford is a bigger product name.)

In others, he places brands where corporate takeovers have placed them, not where they began. (Does anyone really associate Saks department stores with Alabama?)

Here are my alternate choices:

• California: Chevron or Disney.
• Illinois: John Deere, Kraft, McDonald’s, Sears, or Playboy.
• Kentucky: KFC or Jim Beam.
• Minnesota: Target or Betty Crocker.
• Nebraska: Union Pacific, ConAgra Foods, Mutual of Omaha, or Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffet’s holding company).
• Nevada: Caesar’s Palace.
• New York: AT&T, CBS, Citibank, Colgate, IBM, Kodak, Macy’s, NBC, or Xerox.
• North Carolina: Camel.
• Ohio: Goodyear or Tide.
• Texas: Texaco (still a well known, albeit mostly dormant, brand) or Dell.
• Virginia: M&M’s.
• Wisconsin: Miller.
• Wyoming: JCPenney (long since moved away; currently HQ’d in Texas).

And for good ol’ Wash. state, arguments can be made for Amazon, Microsoft, and even Sub Pop, or such moved-away corporate HQs as Boeing and UPS.

• Welcome Valentine’s season with Mitch O’Connell’s array of 100 unintentionally “unerotic vintage pin-up modeling photos.” (Note: The hereby linked page is, as the kids say, “NSFW.”) Speaking of the un-erotic….
• Emily Nussbaum at the New Yorker likes how HBO’s series Girls reinvents the late-night-cable sex scene, that most hackneyed of video tropes, into farcical pathos.
• The John Keister/Pat Cashman “comeback” show The [206] disappeared after two episodes (which had been shot in one taping, as a pilot). But it will return in April.
• Would you buy your coffee wherever “The Bitter Barista” works next? (He was fired after his employers found out about his blog.)
• The Seattle Transit Blog explains when the new Car2Go company is a better value than Zipcar and vice versa.
• It’s harder to sneak past the NY Times website’s paywall these days, but may are still trying.
• Things people feel nostalgic for these days include VHS tapes and the manual paste-up of newspaper pages.
• Sam Tanenhaus at the New Republic explains just how the Party of Lincoln became “the party of white people.”
• Esquire‘s cover story about “The Man Who Shot Osama Bin Laden” didn’t mention that “the shooter” (the only name the article gives him) does have health care for the next five years, and would have had more benefits if he’d just retired a year and a half after he did.
• On the 50th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Ashley Fetters at the Atlantic unearth’s bell hooks’s argument that the book treated the problems of white “leisure class” housewives as if they were the problems all women faced. Fetters then adds Daniel Horowitz’s 1998 snipe that Friedan, under her birth name Betty Goldstein, had been a prolific NYC radical essayist, and hence knew she was deliberately ignoring the plight of non-affluent women.
• The Museum of Vancouver is opening an exhibit all about that city’s cultural history of sex. Yes, it includes the black-cat silhouette that signified adults-only movies in B.C.

comics buyer's guide in 1983; via bleedingcool.com

When I worked at The Comics Journal (foundation of the entire Fantagraphics graphic-novel empire), publisher Gary Groth’s official line was that we were the smart, progressive alternative to the comic-book industry’s”mainstream” trade mag, Comics Buyer’s Guide.

Now, CBG is being shut down after 42 years, without even an ongoing website to remain.

CBG‘s parent company is transferring all CBG subscriptions to an antiques-collecting mag (really). Fantagraphics, however, is offering book discounts to ex-CBG subscribers.

(CBG’s publishers are also firing the editorial staff of another of their mags, Print; that title will continue with HOW magazine’s editors pulling double duty.)

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• In other collectibles news, there won’t be a trillion-dollar coin after all.
• Patrick Dempsey can buy the remaining Tully’s Coffee locations after all.
• Real “bus rapid transit” services have their own lanes. Seattle’s proposing giving such a lane to Metro’s “RapidRide.” The lane would run for two blocks on Broad Street.
• “Reality” TV may be less than completely unscripted, but the dangers crew members face are all too real.
• Andy Warhol, as you might imagine, was a wrestling fan.
• Yes, I’m still looking for actual paid employment. (No, not “writing work;” just PAYING work. I’ve learned I have to say that.) Joining me in scrounging for dishwashing and warehouse gigs: all the PhDs on Food Stamps.

'he-man and she-ra: a christmas special,' part of the festivities at siff film center on xmas eve

And a dreadful sorry for not posting in the last 12 days.

What I’ve been up to: Not much. Just wallowing in the ol’ clinical depression again over my first mom-less Xmas, trying to figure out how the heck I’m gonna pay January’s rent.

(For those of you who came in late, I’m not independently wealthy despite the old rumors; a few little local photo books don’t earn anything near a decent living; and my eternal search for a little ol’ paying day job has gone nowhere slowly.)

But I have vowed to stay at it. And there will be new MISCmedia products in the new year.

And, as always, it’s the time of year for MISCmedia’s annual In/Out List, the only accurate guide to what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming 12 months. Send in your suggestions now.

On with the accumulated random links:

• To be a fan of a Seattle team is often like being a Who (Horton Hears a Who! version), constantly needing to scream “We Are Here! We Are Here!” to the NYC/Bristol CT sports media. Finally, they’ve heard about the Seahawks, who just might be “the NFL’s best team” right now.
• Get ready for big labor strife at the Northwest’s grain export terminals.
• Gray’s Anatomy costar Patrick Dempsey says he wants to buy the remaining Tully’s Coffee stores, and says he may make Seattle his “home away from home.” What, someone associated with Gray’s Anatomy actually plans to be in Seattle? How will that affect the Gray’s drinking game, where you take a swig whenever someone says something hopelessly inaccurate about this town?
• Today’s example of trying to make the homeless “invisible” is brought to you by the City of Olympia.
• Are Safeway stores deliberately overcharging? And is Staples.com charging different people different prices for the same stuff based on where they live?
• One pundit’s predictions for the e-book biz in ’13: Free e-book reader machines.
• Al Sharpton looks back at 2012 as “the year the rich couldn’t buy.”
• The Paris Review reviews porn novels. Yes, really. Specifically, contributor Avi Steinberg discusses five recent porn novels with librarian characters, and wishes (among other things) that they had more sex scenes that actually took place in libraries.
• It’s been a week of losses for fans of fun TV and movies, with the departures of Jack Klugman and Charles Durning. Now we must also add Gerry Anderson, creator-producer (with then-wife Sylvia) of Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and Space 1999. His “Supermarionation” shows were nothing less than “F.A.B.”

capitolhillseattle.com

• After years of redevelopment-related doom staring it in the face, Capitol Hill’s beloved B&O Espresso and Bistro finally closed last week. B&O will live on, however, in a soon-to-open Ballard location, and might return within the new mixed use structure to be built on the old site. Word is another Hill coffee institution, the Bauhaus, might also resurface in Ballard.
• The pairing of Paul McCartney with the remnants of Nirvana turned out to be an original composition, which was not all that bad. Overall, though, that all-star (and mostly old-star) benefit for Hurricane Sandy victims could have had a little more variety on stage, such as even one woman.
• Some dude at Buzzfeed put up a supposedly shocking exposé of local web comix king Matthew (The Oatmeal) Inman. Once you take out the stuff that’s either exaggerated or based on a fake online profile made by somebody else, you’re left with the hardly reputation-killing facts that Inman is thinner and more athletic than the alter-ego character in his strip, and that he once had a day job in “search engine optimization” (the pseudo-science of gaming Google’s page rankings).
• A few select Seattle neighborhoods are getting ultra-speed home Internet service some time next year.
• Stupid Republican Tricks, WaState style: Another state Senate “coup” is in the works with two turncoat Democrats’ collusion.
• Are sales of e-book machines really falling victim to tablet-mania, or is this just another overhyped “trend”?
• You know you want to read every fake newspaper headline that appeared in the first 16 seasons of The Simpsons.
• Gawker lists 22 “terrible things that must end in 2013.” Among them: “twee framed sayings,” “fake Twitter accounts,” and “the word ‘swag.'”
• Feminist pranksters in Baltimore made a clever send-up of a Victoria’s Secret panty ad, complete with “No Means No” slogans.
• Urban Outfitters “buys yard sale clothes in bulk and resells them to hipsters as ‘vintage.'”
• Dan Mascai at Fast Company really hates silly media stereotypes about his own “millennial generation.”
• Another venerable mag leaving print behind for an online-only future: The Sporting News, the “bible of baseball.” While it expanded its coverage into the other big U.S. team sports, its prime asset is its record of every major and minor league baseball game ever played in the U.S. and Canada. That alone is an ongoing endeavor worth keeping alive somehow.

spoon-tamago.com via buzzfeed.com

• Newest fun invention from Japan: the “3D photo booth.” Stand very still for 15 minutes, and a few days later a figurine that looks like you shows up in the mail.
• Wash. state is Number One! As, er, a “net importer of out-of-state parolees.”
• Question: “Is Amazon.com Taking Over the World?” Answer: No. Only the world’s potential profit centers.
• The remaining Tully’s coffee houses may have a buyer.
• Did the Bellevue City Council not really know that light rail tracks have to have a rail yard (train car parking lot) with them?
• Gender-neutral marriage licenses are on the way. Will they show up in time for the first rush of gay nuptials?
• Walden Three, Greg Lundgren’s ambitious attempt to set up a multimedia arts center in the old Lusty Lady building (and to partly pay for it all as a years-long “documentary film shoot”), now has a blog. In it, Lundgren spins completely fictional stories about fabulous exhibits and shows that would be occurring there if it were operating now.
• The Illinois company calling itself Boeing is still stonewalling in talks with the engineers’ union.
• After 11 years, the final edition of KING-TV’s Up Front With Robert Mak airs this Sunday. It’s ending for no good reason. A studio interview show doesn’t cost that much to make, particularly if any good bits can be reused on your regular newscasts.
• Yes, the Florida Republicans really were trying to stop people in Dem-leaning districts from voting.
• Speaking of state-level GOPpers, they’re now in full control of 24 state houses. Expect more Wisconsin-like extremist legislation and dirty tricks, just on the other side of the holidays (if not sooner).
• I still meet left wingers who imagine that in some utopian pre-television age, all newspapers were local mini versions of the NY Times, noble progressive institutions exposing social ills. In real life, even the NY Times mostly wasn’t like that. A lot of them were pugnacious right-wing rags that supported, or even contributed to, climates of fear and hate. Case in point: The Hollywood Reporter. The venerable showbiz trade paper recently ran a big essay describing, and apologizing for, its role in promoting the 1950s “blacklist” against film people even suspected of “communist” beliefs.
• The “Black Friday boycott” at Walmart stores, thankfully, turned out to be more than just self-serving online rants by lefties who never go there anyway. There were actual pickets and other actions at the stores, in favor of fairer labor practices. And now, fast food workers in NYC are also demanding a living wage.
• Something lost in all the copyright-police suppression drives against “file sharing”: the “obscure music” blogs, which unearthed and shared long-out-of-print LPs, 45s, and 78s in all kinds of non-hit categories.
• Larry Hagman, 1931-2012: The Dallas/I Dream of Jeannie star was as kind hearted and generous off screen as he could be villainous on screen. I once got to know his daughter Kristina, a local painter who had a space in the old 619 Western building. She is also a kind and generous soul.

It’s 10/11/12! The sort of date-progression that only happens 11 times in a century and is utterly, completely meaningless!

Elsewhere in randomness:

• Tully’s coffee shops try another fiscal maneuver to stay afloat, having been profitable only twice in 20 years.
• One of the three Pussy Riot martyrs is out of prison.
• Convicted serial child-rapist Jerry Sandusky blames his victims. And the media. How typical.
• Charles Mudede agrees with me that ending Metro’s Ride Free Area is a bad idea.
• That silly Korean dance-music video may have some social commentary nested within it.
• Turns out there’s a term for Romney’s debate tactic. It’s the “Gish Gallop.” It’s the spewing of so many fibs in so short a time that one’s opponent is left tongue-tied.
• Robert Reich debunks seven lies about the economy in two and a half minutes.
• And as a touch of visual spice on the first real week of autumn in the Charmed Land, here are some classic pin-up illustrations retouched with the face of Robert Downey Jr.

seattle chapter, american institute of architects via kplu.org

• What to do with the soon-to-be former 520 floating bridge’s surplus pontoons? Several folks have ideas. One of them, above, is to build a walkway just below Lake Washington’s surface, for the ever-popular “walking on water” illusion.
• Seattle’s own alt-country rising star Brandi Carlile has officially come out.
• Fast Company seems to find it odd that Microsoft’s new hardware products have embraced a newly enriched design aesthetic without CEO Steve Ballmer being in hands-on charge of the initiative. A good boss knows when (and to whom) to delegate authority.
• Amazon’s proposed three new towers won’t just be big, they’ll also be bold.
• Earlier this year we mentioned how the Swedish Hospital system said it was losing loads of money. Similar news has now come from Group Health.
• Private housing developers are getting tax breaks for building “affordable” housing units, without enough proof that they’re actually building ’em.
• Meanwhile, City Councilmember Nick Licata wants you to know that more than of Seattle’s “renter” population, 20 percent spend more than half their income on rent.
• Starbucks now has its own branded home espresso machine.
• If there’s anybody with an apparent greater sense of L’etat, C’est Moi than Seattle police, it’s Bellevue police.
• More first-birthday greetings to the Occupy movement: Bainbridge Island-based Yes! magazine uses a tree graphic to show how the movement has “born fruit.”
• Who wants to keep simple majorities in the Legislature from deciding revenue bills? Big business, of course. Like duh.
• As of Wednesday evening, HuffPost’s Electoral College map lists only one tossup state, North Carolina. Obama has taken leads (at least small ones) in all the other previously “swing” states.
• Richard Eskow of the Campaign for America’s Future claims Romney’s “47 percent” speech reveals the combination of privilege, selfishness, and rage that defines “the radical rich.” (A certain megahome-building couple in Leschi might be considered among these.)
• Those print-on-demand book machines are coming to lots more locations. But will the new models allow color interior pages, or be even halfway decent with photographs?
• Jack Hitt at The New Yorker has a hi-larious “Conservative History of the United States,” based entirely on wingnut politicians’ and pundits’ actual untrue statements.

ichiro large bobblehead, available at halloffamememorabilia.com

• Well if that isn’t the just about worst thing that could happen, local-baseball-fan-wise. The M’s ship Ichiro to the Damn Yankees, for two triple-A pitching prospects. Please sell this team now.
• (Here’s a thorough overview of his illustrious career as compiled by SportsPress NW.)
• Frank Rich reminds us that if America is really “in decline,” its either the fifth or eighth such “decline” in the past six decades, depending on how you count ’em.
• A self described “conservative Republican” moves to Canada and realizes “I don’t see universal health care as an evil thing anymore.”
• Monica Guzman believes the phrase “I don’t know” is due to die off, as more of the world’s knowledge becomes a simple web search away. I’m not so sure. Seems to me there’s tons each of us doesn’t know about. At least there’s tons I don’t know about. (Though, when I answer a question with “I don’t know,” people still tend to respond by simply repeating the question in greater detail.)
• In-state tuition at Washington’s “public” universities could top $20,000 by decade’s end.
• Peet’s Coffee isn’t Seattle-owned anymore. (Did you know it had been Seattle-owned, specifically by the original Starbucks founders?)
• Alexander Cockburn, R.I.P.: The longtime Village Voice and Nation columnist and CounterPunch.org cofounder was, at his best, probably America’s most lucid leftist writer. At his worst, he defended climate-change deniers, wholesale Israel-bashers, and French neo-fascist Marine Le Pen.