wikimedia commons, via komo-tv

• Drugs? Guns? Codeine pain pills? Forget it. What U.S. Customs is really cracking down against on the Canadian border is a bigger threat to America than all those combined. Beware the dreaded candy Kinder Eggs.
• Starbucks apparently has an image problem in NYC.
• How to get shoppers away from dot-coms and back to the malls? How ’bout wine bars, yoga classes, craft-making groups, and jeans stores with special butt-view mirrors?
• Outside estimates put the cost of a spiffed-up Seattle waterfront near a cool billon. That’s a heckuva lot for what’s essentially just another group of “world class” windswept plazas (and we’ve already got more than we need of those). I still say: scrap most of that, bring back the Waterfront Streetcar, and put an amusement park at Pier 62-63.
• The big winner in the demise of Washington’s state liquor stores? Oregon’s state liquor stores.
• Deja Vu’s Dreamgirls really doesn’t want to leave SoDo, not even for a big buyout by the arena developers.
• In the immortal words of Mr. Costello, I don’t wanna go to Chelsea.
• Link Light Rail is three years old and more popular than ever.
• Macklemore’s new pro-gay-marriage hiphop track is getting quite the national attention.
• Boeing wants more engineers and more training for future engineers. Oh, and it also wants more Federal money.

Happy 7/11 everyone! And we’ve got a new place to get our free regular Slurpee® on this only-comes-but-once-a-year day. This brand new 7-Eleven franchise is on Virginia Street between 8th and 9th, in the cusp between Belltown, the retail core, South Lake Union, and the Cascade district. It’s got all your favorites—burritos, Big Bite® hot dogs, $1 pizza slices, bizarre potato-chip varieties, coffee lids with sliding plastic openings. It closes nightly at midnight, though (sorry, hungry Re-bar barflies at closing time).

• I can tell you that hate-filled, hyper-aggressive online “comment trolls” existed back in the 1980s days of bulletin board systems (BBSs) and 300-baud acoustic modems. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times sees their antecedents back even further. A lot further.
• There’s only one million-selling music album so far this year. It actually came out last year.
• Jon Talton explains how tax cuts are “the god that failed.”
• ACT Theatre will have the U.S. premiere of a play by Brit mega-playwright Alan Ayckbourn next year. And he’s personally coming over to direct it. This is just about the most establishment-prestige you can get in the play world.

An Eastside developer has bought the whole half block that contains Bauhaus Coffee, Spine and Crown Books, Wall of Sound Records, and five other merchants who help define the soul of the Pike/Pine Corridor.

All except the facades will be demolished, for yet another mixed-use behemoth.

The businesses themselves will be gone, either this June or next June (sources are contradictory about this).

And they probably can’t afford the new spaces when they finally open, at least a year and a half later.

vintage postcard via allposters.com (prints just $14.99)

• After the success of its Redbox DVD machines, Bellevue-based Coinstar’s Next Big Thing could be—(ready for it?)—coffee vending machines. But, supposedly, really good coffee vending machines.
• Queen Anne Books is for sale. Prospective buyers: Don’t think of this as your chance to stage a valiant crusade to save Book Culture. Think of it as a bona fide actual for-real business opportunity. One that, depending on your skills and dumb luck, stands a good chance of panning out.
• How fiscally desperate is the state? One legislator suggests selling off the state’s art collection.
• Community Transit in Snohomish County slashed service a couple years back, and is slashing it again this week. Like other transit agencies around here, it’s over-dependent on local sales tax revenue.
• Then there’s the story of an unemployed local tech writer, who’s now making at least some money picking lice out of schoolkids’ hair.
• Seattle’s would-be NBA owner, an admitted hedge fund manager, is also described as having been a small time bully at Blanchet High. (Seattle’s would-be NHL owner, as described here previously, is in a business almost as lowly regarded as hedge funds—tobacco.)
• City-owned KeyArena will do just fine even with a newer, bigger Sodo arena, or so the City insists.
• The scary mega-earthquake dystopian fantasy known around here as “The Big One:” Could still happen. Could be even more fearsome than previously feared.
• And we must say goodbye, after eight-plus years, to Inner Space, the private indoor skateboard park in Wallingford. But fret not: it might reopen under new management later this year.

I hereby promise to post more of these in the near future.

• Update: Looks like B&O Espresso will stay open, perhaps through the bulk of next year.
• The City Council’s trying, again, to ban plastic grocery bags. I say it’s none too soon, particularly for those awkward, flimsy Safeway bags that routinely break or spill their contents. It’s impossible to take them home on a bus and expect to get home with all one’s purchases intact.
• SeattlePI.com’s most famous employee, political cartoonist David Horsey, is going to work for the LA Times. He’ll draw and write commentaries about the 2012 election cycle. PI.com will most likely still get to run Horsey’s work on its site. Since the demise of the print Post-Intelligencer, Horsey has seldom addressed local issues anyway, preferring to cover national topics for syndication. The upside of this move is that, just maybe, the Hearst bosses who’ve kept a tight rein on PI.com’s purse strings might reassign Horsey’s salary to beef up the site’s news staff. The site desperately needs more staff-created content to be a first-stop local news destination.
• AT&T to T-Mobile: Let’s call the whole thing off.
• Scientific American claims there’s evidence for the long standing portrayal of creative people as eccentric. I can assure you, however, that eccentric people are not necessarily creative.
• Simon Mainwaring at Forbes.com claims anti-corporate fervor actually provides an opportunity for corporations to enhance their brand images, by hyping themselves as socially responsible.
• Katha Pollitt has her own take on the late Christopher Hitchens. Among other things, she found him way short of acceptability on women’s-rights issues; even though he invoked those among his excuses for supporting Bush’s wars.

If you tried to access this site on Tuesday, you would have found an ugly, undesigned mess.

That’s because my site (and email) server company disconnected me for nonpayment, without previously bothering to tell me in any way, shape, or form that a payment was due.

The texts on the site remained up, but the WordPress-based formatting and most of the images were locked away. It took about three hours to get everything back and properly configured again.

In other news, my current contract job might finally end Friday. More regular postings should follow.

But for now, a few random linx:

• Seattle’s about to honor the now really-really retired J.P. Patches by naming a city dump transfer station after the beloved TV clown.
• The on-again, off-again plan to save Capitol Hill’s beloved B&O Espresso is off again, and the joint will close for good by New Year’s. It had been open during the entire time I’ve lived in Seattle.
• The latest alleged threat to the spoken word? “Vocal fry.”
• Conspiracy theory of the minute: Could former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens have been one of the supposedly, mysteriously ill fated BP whistleblowers?
• Joseph Stiglitz sees bigger long-term trends at work behind the economic blech. It’s a shift away from industry as the basis of commerce, not just in the U.S. but globally.
• Studies show that users of tablet computers and ebook machines are using them quite a bit for long-form texts, causing The Economist to proclaim “the rebirth of reading.” I’ll have more to say (tangentally) about this next week.

denny hall, the uw campus's oldest building

• We’ve always known the Univ. of Washington has one of America’s most beautiful campuses. Now it’s finally getting national recognition in that regard.
• Meanwhile, the UW is participating in a research study into drunk Facebook photos.
• Mayor McGinn says he admires the spirit behind the Occupy Seattle folks, but still orders them to remove their tents from Westlake Plaza or risk getting arrested. Protesters say they’ll take the risk.
• The American Planning Association calls Tacoma’s Point Defiance Park one of America’s “great public spaces.” As the old bumper sticker says, “Admit It, Tacoma. You’re Beautiful.”
• NYTimes.com’s automated ad placement bots placed an ad for Starbucks’ Italian Roast above an article about you-know-who.
• Starbucks boss Howard Schultz’s next idea to save the economy: donation boxes in the stores, where customers can contribute to community development groups. They’d use the cash to help small businesses create jobs. Of course, if Schultz really wanted to help jump-start the economy at the personal level, he could pay his own baristas a living wage….
• The message from the Gates Foundation, the City of Seattle, and others: Don’t be no fool, stay in school.
• The Zune, Microsoft’s would-be iPod killer, is dead.
• Layoffs hit another supposedly recession-proof industry, nuclear-waste cleanup.
• A cause of death I, for one, hadn’t heard of—”detergent suicide.”
• Lee Fang believes the Occupy Wall Street protests “embody the values of the real Boston Tea Party.”
• Paul Krugman analyzes big bankers’ testimony in a Congressional hearing about the financial crisis. He sees the bankers claiming to be clueless, as an alternative to admitting to be evil.
• Obama’s finally speaking out against GOP state legislatures’ spate of anti-voting laws.
• The Fox broadcast network is threatening to cancel The Simpsons unless its voice actors accept a 45 percent pay cut.
• And now for fun, here are some fun Mexican movie-theater lobby cards.

lpcoverlover.com

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Sylvia Robinson, the singer-producer-entrepreneur whose journey went from ’50s pop R&B to disco to (literally) the invention of hiphop.
• A little-noticed legislative loophole gives Safeco Field a parking-tax deal that could cost the city $300,000 a year. If the Mariners’ management only been that clever in running its baseball team…
• In honor of National Dwarfism Awareness Month. Caffe Ladro made its “tall man” logo shorter.
• A long-stalled Paul Allen Belltown condo tower project will now be built as apartments.
• More dirty business by the big banks: fees for debit card use.
• The allegedly latest thing among the ultra ultra rich: luxury camping, or “glamping.”
• Glenn Greenwald believes corporate-owned media have an agenda in ignoring or scorning anti-corporate activism.
• Toure waxes nostalgic for the good old days of centralized mass-media culture.
• Clean up your dog poop and keep it out of Puget Sound.

defunct connecticut strip mall, from backsideofamerica.com

• Mark Hinshaw at Crosscut says Seattle’s wrong to demand street level retail in so many mixed-use developments. He says there just aren’t enough viable businesses to put in them. It’s actually a national situation. Even before the ’08 slump, analysts claimed the country had become “overstored,” with too many malls, strip malls, big box outlets, etc. for the available business.
• One successful local retailer, kitchenware king Sur La Table, was bought by the same financiers who also own big chunks of Gucci and Tiffany.
• The big Nevermind 20th anniversary concert opened with the reunited (for now) Fastbacks nailing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Perfect in so many ways.
• “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is done for. There was a big coming out party for GLBT military personnel at Lewis-McChord.
• For once, a local art work made for display at Burning Man will actually be shown here!
• Tacoma’s life size Boy Scout statue is missing. Scouting officials fear the thieves could just melt it down.
• Thankfully, there will be no Oklahoma or Texas teams in the Pac-12 (previously Pac-10, previously Pac-8) conference. Some sporting traditions should remain sacred.
• U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt (R-Spokane) thinks schools spend too much time and resources on “nonessential curriculum” such as gay history and the environment.
• The big Netflix shakeup is explained by that prime explainer of everything, The Oatmeal.
• BBC Ulster commentator William Crawley explains how to be a Christian anarchist. Hint: It ain’t easy.
• Is the “Occupy Wall Street” protest a bigger thing online than it is as a real-world event? And what are the protesters for, anyway?
• Has Facebook really created 180,000 jobs, as the company claims? Or is this just a new version of dot-com hype?
• Current TV’s next lib-talk franchise: The heretofore Internet-based gabfest The Young Turks, featuring ex-MSNBC dude Cenk Uygur. Still can’t get the channel on my cable system.
• The feds claim the gaming site Full Tilt Poker has degenerated into “a global Ponzi scheme,” funding operations out of money owed to its winning players.
• Soon you’ll be able to preserve the remains of your deceased loved ones in handy liquid form.
• The annual Coffee Fest trade show is at the Convention Center this weekend. It’s intended for people in the business of importing, roasting, selling, and serving the stuff, though many parts of it are also open (for a fee) to those who simply love the java a lot. Of course, there’s also something else this weekend to pump up your pulse.

designsbuzz.com

• The Seattlest gang’s putting out, in installments, a revised and updated “guide to Seattle stereotypes.”
• Neighborhood activists are starting a tiny but intelligently stocked mini-grocery in the Lost Valley of Delridge, an area bereft of places selling anything more nutritious than Budweiser.
• What’s the biggest fear of people buying into a 33-story condo tower? That somebody will block their view with a 40-story condo tower a block away.
• Let’s try to get this straight. A candidate for King County Council has a brother who administers an arts program for at-risk youth. Said arts program puts out, for the first time in its history, a “student made” newspaper. Said paper includes several mentions praising the administrator’s sis and several other mentions disparaging her election opponent. Oh, and the thing was partly made with City funds.
• Microsoft’s immensely profitable. Its stock price has essentially been “flat” for some time. One more reason for America’s socio-economic nabobs to stop believing in the Almighty Stock Price as the all-determining value of everything.
• Progressive economist Remy Trupin looks at Wash. state’s no-end-in-sight budget hole and insists that from this point on, “further cuts are not an option.”
• A hundred years ago, eight destitute young women were killed in an accident at a Chehalis explosives factory. Their joint grave has finally been rediscovered.
• The Illinois company now calling itself Boeing has friends among the House Republicans. That body just approved, in a symbolic gesture certain to sink in the Senate, a bill to strip Federal protection for workers whose jobs were outsourced as punishment for union organizing.
• If we must say goodbye to Cyndy’s House of Pancakes on Aurora (closed as of July after 53 years), at least we can be consoled that housing for the formerly-homeless will go up on the site.
• There was a hearing about a plan for a homeless shelter in Lake City. The senior-housing developer SHAG bused in residents to speak against the plan. One of these speakers called the homeless “garbage.” Brutal insensitivity: It’s not just for Republican campaign events any more.
• Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy: There’s an FBI corruption probe of figures surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and cronies.
• The 3-D movie craze? Dead already. Again.
• How will the record labels survive? Some are diversifying into other businesses. Such as, according to a Federal indictment, international cocaine smuggling. (I know what you’re thinking. Drugs in the music industry? Never!)
• We go out on a snarky note with some books Borders can’t even give away.

from thestand.org

• The Longview longshoremen’s labor action has spread to the Port of Seattle, which is what it took to get the Seattle media to notice it. While few were looking, Wash. state became one of the few places where labor is directly striking back.
• Ready for another cold, rainy and/or snowy winter?
• So much for the great biotech job boom hope: Dendreon is laying off at least a quarter of its staff.
• Who’s replacing C.R. Douglas as a public affairs host at the Seattle Channel? The same guy Douglas replaced on KCPQ.
• Update: Here are some remembrances of the tragically gone-from-us Espresso Vivace favorite Brian Fairbrother.
• Seattle-based activists have filed suit to block the State Route 520 replacement project.
• I like the Tiger Bar in Georgetown. It’s sad to hear about one of its owners allegedly going off-hinge.
• Pete Jackson has vivid memories of Everett’s last pulp-and-paper mill.
• The combined offices and server farms of Google are responsible, in the company’s own estimates, for 1.5 million tons of CO2 sent into the atmosphere annually. But Google insists it’s still more energy-stingy than the average dot-com.
• I won’t link to very many 9/11 anniversary hype pieces, but here’s Janine Jackson wondering if we can ever get our civil liberties back.
• There have long been people who’ve whined about the imminent death of “the word” in a culture cluttered up with images. But now here’s a voice from the other side as it were. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Dave Marash proclaims that “for the first time in history, mankind is developing a universal language: video.” In particular, he cites the amazing news footage generated by world broadcasters and by amateurs in this year’s Mideast uprisings. But then Marash bashes U.S. TV news for not showing enough of these pictures, instead filling time with pontificatin’ pundits.

• So, like is this Capitol Hill retail mainstay claiming it’s barren and lonesome enough to successfully hide out in?
• Forty years after its founding, and six years after developers first threatened to demolish it for a six-story apartment complex, Capitol Hill’s legendary B&O Espresso may finally be doomed, at least as we know it. The developers plan to have a restaurant/retail space in their new building at the corner of Belmont and Olive (hence the coffee house/bistro’s name). But that space will be half the size of today’s B&O.
• KIRO-TV is still stalling in talks with its unionized technical staff. The station doesn’t explicitly want to bust the union, just to take away most of the things union crews get to do, like complain about hours and working conditions.
• Masins Furniture is leaving Pioneer Square. The Seattle Times-approved reason: The neighborhood is beset by costly parking and, you know, those people. A more likely reason: Two and a half years without folks moving into new urban housing units, and without a lot of folks having the funds to refurnish the housing units they’ve got.
• Labor Day Weekend Thought #1: How long does it take to turn from unemployed to “effectively unemployable”?
• Labor Day Weekend Thought #2: Robert Reich wants a Labor Day with fewer picnics and more protests.
• Word (or rather phrase) of the day: Mighty Whitey. Refers to the long tradition of the fictional white hero who not only sympathize with other ethnicities’ struggles “but also becomes their greatest warrior/leader/representative.” Cf. Last of the Mohicans, Snow Falling On Cedars, Avatar, and most recently The Help. Also see every white blues/soul/rap musician, especially if British.

The Puget Sound Business Journal has been running a reader poll to name “Seattle’s most respected brand.”

The finalists are Windermere Real Estate and Chateau Ste. Michelle.

Other contenders included Nordstrom, Canlis, Columbia Bank, the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Starbucks, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Northwest Harvest.

But where were Dick’s Drive-Ins, Pyramid Ales, Fantagraphics, Big John’s PFI, Sub Pop, or Tim’s Cascade Chips?

Oh right. They’re not freakin’ upscale enough.

Then forget it.

No matter what you think of big box retail chains, I always find it sad to see one go.

Especially when it’s in an industry for which I have particular fondness (and in which I’ve invested much of my life).

This is the case this week. Borders Books and Music, not too long ago one of the Big Two of bookselling, didn’t find a buyer and will probably shut down. Going out of business sales at the remaining 399 branches (down from 1,249 in 2003) may start Friday.

You can read exhaustive histories of the company elsewhere. If you do, you’ll learn how the Borders brothers of Ann Arbor, MI started a book superstore operation that was bought by Kmart, which merged it with the mall chains Waldenbooks and Brentano’s; then the whole “books group” was spun off into a separate company.

“My” Borders, the downtown Seattle location, opened circa 1994, during the Kmart ownership. At the time, it was considered a major vote of corporate confidence in a downtown that had lost the Frederick & Nelson department store  two years before.

It seemed a warm and friendly place despite its size. It had downtown’s best CD selection, including a healthy stock of local consignments. It had a children’s section that served as a play area for shoppers’ tots. It had in-store events nearly every weekend, ranging from readings to acoustic musical performances and chocolate tastings. Its charity gift wrap table helped many a bachelor such as myself every Christmas season.

But the local store, no matter how cool it was, could not escape the parent company’s troubles.

As local staff was cut back, the in-store events disappeared. The up-only escalator to the mezzanine level was removed. The music and DVD departments were severely shrunk. The various book genres were shuffled around, and a huge section of floor space was given over to long-shelf-life stationery items and even iPhone cases.

Now it will be a brief bargain store, then get gradually emptier, then go dark.

There will still be physical places to acquire physical books, including Barnes & Noble and Arundel Books downtown.

But what of the Borders downtown space?

It’s not like there are a lot of other big chain stores itching for a two story space like that. (Though if you’re listening, University Book Store? Powell’s? Even JC Penney?….)

•

A secondary loser in the Borders shutdown: Starbucks. Its Seattle’s Best Coffee subsidiary had dwindled in the past few years, mostly to a string of coffee stands inside Borders stores. Will the rest of SBC’s stores survive this?

Thanks to the kind Lori at Espresso To Go in Fremont, I recently got a look at the SeaTimes’ Washington Territorial Centennial supplement.

This was an eight-section addition to a Sunday paper in the summer of 1953. Each section ran twenty pages or more. (Remember, newspaper pages then were one-third wider than they are now.)

There’s little to no content about the state’s pre-Statehood past. Instead, what little “editorial” content there is consists of puff pieces for the advertisers.

Most of these advertisers aren’t companies selling consumer goods. They’re construction firms, timber giants, commercial truck dealerships, shipyards, cement plants, fishing-rig outfitters, metals processors, agribusinesses, restaurant-supply companies, etc. Their common, simple message: They’re proud to be part of the Evergreen State’s great industrial infrastructure.

OK, there is one huge ad for Fisher Flouring Mills and its about-to-launch subsidiary operation, KOMO-TV. The ad juxtaposes a drawing of the big Fisher plant on Harbor Island with a glamour image of that fresh, new television talent Betty White, who could be seen in her sprightly comedy series Life With Elizabeth once KOMO-TV started telecasting later that year.

Can you imagine today’s SeaTimes managing to sell even a fraction of all that ad space to local companies that have nothing to sell to a mass audience?