BACK IN THE EARLY ’90S, a porn mag ran a fictional spoof pictorial depicting topless baristas at what the mag billed as “The Big Cups Coffee House in Seattle.” Apparently, some guy in Maine wants to really create such an establishment.

…play nice with your free Wi-Fi.

…to that tireless provider of warmth and light, the coffeehouse.

…at 7:45 to see if that miracle of miracles, Snow Day in Seattle, had occurred. It hadn’t. But out my window this hour I have seen a few scattered moments of white flakes drifting slowly down, followed by the return of quickly-descending ordinary ol’ rain.

Will true snowfall, or even further furtive teases of this type, occur today, or during the remainder of the calendar year? Gawd I hope so.

I’ve always been in a minority of Seattleites about this, I’m oh-so-well aware. At a coffeehouse last night, I told the barista dude (in a K2 ski T-shirt) I was praying for snow. He mumbled, “But just in the moutains, right?” He couldn’t believe me when I said I wanted snow right here. He mumbled about icy roads and school closures and all that. I said that’s part of what I love about Seattle’s rare snow days–the bright, friendly anarchy everywhere.

Print MISC contributor Michael Thomas thinks this week’s defeat of the proposed Seattle “latte tax” was a bad thing:

Apparently our fair city’s reputation as a socially progressive, education oriented community of leaders isn’t worth a thin dime.This most egalitarian of taxes was defeated through a massively well funded “no” campaign under the premise that it would hurt small business.

Feh.

If you are an independent, this would mean one thin dime in a pot per shot. Take it to the bank and make your drop along with your deposit. No accounting hassle whatsoever.

More likely this effort was financed by the major coffee corporations who would have to hire one more person (!) to manage the accounting on this tax from hundreds of retail stores throughout the city. Tens of thousands of dollars involved here monthly. These folks spent tens of thousands to defeat funding of infant, toddler and pre-school programs for kids of families who are financially strapped. Baristas, for example.

Who would benefit had this passed?

Early childhood education programs not covered by the Families and Education Levy. These programs help young parents be better parents through workshops and classes designed to help them develop better parenting skills. Child services that help working families who are stretched to make rent, food, utilities, and other bills. Families where both parents must work to meet the above commitments while straining to pay child care expenses equal to rent (!).

The folks who would be affected by this proposal? Including the above folks who buy their espresso over-the-counter, and a lot of other working people, these voters were:

• Mostly professional. Probably able to afford an espresso drink a day, sometimes two.
• Likely driving a vehicle worth over $30,000, and who probably voted for $30 motor vehicle tabs (saving themselves hundreds per year at the expense of roadways, ferries, schools and other publicly funded issues).
• Probably voted for $1 billion in baseball and football stadium bonds in the last 6 years.
• Would see their daily espresso drink go from $2.70 to $2.80, an annual increase of $36 on one shot per day.
• Apparently haven’t a clue that buying a grinder and an espresso machine will save them nearly 1000 of their precious dollars per year.

I wonder if my “progressive” Seattle neighbors will (as they allude) throw their full support behind the Families and Education Levy renewal next year and insist that the levy be expanded to cover the Early Childhood programs left in the cold, or if they’ll use the same logic to defeat the continuation of that property bond.

I wonder if my Seattle neighbors who criticize our self anointed Dissembler-in-Chief for his “Leave No Child Behind” doubletalk can look honestly look at themselves in the mirror after voting ‘no’ on this measure.

I’ve been going to Zoka for several years. We’ve been buying their beans for about a year now. I was very disappointed to see Zoka leading this tax-revolt. I’m sorry, folks, but I’ll never ever take my child to Zoka again, which means that I won’t be going there either.

So, go ahead and celebrate if you will. In my opinion, this is a dark day for Seattle, a city whose whose promise and values are apparently not worth a dime.

…I’d even do what this guy’s doing.

ONE OF THE TEMPORARILY-REVEALED old advertising signs on the north face of the Commodore Hotel on Second Avenue, during the construction of the condo tower where Bethel Temple had been.

SOMETIME NEXT MONTH, Belltown’s first worthy cyber-cafe successor to the burnt-down Speakeasy Cafe will come in the form of the new Zeitgeist/Top Pot branch on Fifth Avenue. Coffee, donuts, free Wi-Fi, art, and a large meeting space.

…to so skillfully manipulate his wand that a beautiful girl ends up on her back, smiling angelically and floating beyond the bounds of earthly reality. (Found at the Pioneer Square Magic Shop.)

WHEN MCDONALD’S REOPENED its Third and Pine branch earlier this year (it was shut while the upstairs was remodeled into moderate-income housing units), they didn’t bring back the loud country music they’d formerly blasted out onto the sidewalk in a futile attempt to repel street loiterers. Instead, they had Ronald himself give a proxy warning.

(BTW: A fan site called McBurgers offers recipes it claims resemble the chain’s original formulae, and insists McD’s current market-share troubles would be solved if the company went back to the way it used to make things, before the efficiency experts and cost-cutters started messing everything up.)

A SURE SIGN OF SUMMER in the city: An elegant barefooted lady relaxing with her PowerBook.

…that free wireless Internet access was poised to spread out from a few indie espresso joints and into other kinds of venues. Now Seattle’s got an Irish bar-restaurant with free Wi-Fi. Just don’t spill any black n’ tans on the keys.

Among the seminar speeches and dry-research releases put forth at the recent newspaper-biz convention in Seattle was one study that claimed the elusive youth market started reading daily papers more often during the Iraq war, but didn’t stick with the habit. The trade mag Editor & Publisher quoted the survey company’s boss John Lavine as saying:

“Coffee in a can is a dead ringer for where newspapers were: It was a mature product, it was dying, everybody said its time was over — and then Starbucks came along.”

We’ve already written that the current push by the Seattle Times to kill its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer, and by extension to kill the P-I itself, could instead be an opportunity to reinvigorate the P-I as a truly independent paper, and by extension to revive the newspaper biz.

I’m convinced it can be done. Yes, a JOA-less P-I would need to get its own ad sellers and delivery vans, and either buy or hire printing presses. Getting the financing for such a venture just might be easier if it were for a new paper for a new era, something this country hasn’t really seen since USA Today first targeted the everywhere/nowhere of shopping malls and airports 21 years ago.

A post-JOA P-I, or an all-new paper that could be launched in the wake of the current JOA mess, could be a paper devised from scratch to meet the ink-on-paper needs of the Internet age. It could be neither old-American-journalism boredom nor Murdoch sleaze, but something lively and forward-looking and written to be read.

IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).

THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:

• SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE got sold out from under itself by its Atlanta conglomerate owner. SBC and its Torrefazione Italia sub-chain will be absorbed into Starbucks’ operations, with only the brand names continuing to exist. Thus ends what had been one of Seattle’s hottest retail rivalries since the demise of the Frederick & Nelson department store. (SBC is technically a year older than Starbucks, tracing its roots to a 1970-vintage Seattle Center House ice-cream stand called the Wet Whisker.) The hipster crowd has already publicly eschewed both chains in favor of mom-‘n’-pop indie cafes. Last winter, the Stranger essentially chided local indie Cafe Ladro as being too chainlike to be truly cool, despite having a mere eight stores.
• APPLE COMPUTER said it would open one of its own retail stores in Bellevue Square, invading not only the home turf of Microsoft but also that of Computer Stores Northwest, one of the country’s top independent Apple-only retailers.
• THE SONICS’ SEASON ended quietly with a decisive, meaningless victory over the Phoenix Suns. The team’s ought-two/ought-three campaign really ended weeks ago with the Gary Payton trade; it’s been in rebuilding and reloading mode ever since.
• ACT THEATER said it had raised enough emergency donations to would survive for the time being, albeit with major cutbacks. Let’s hope it gets back to the funky, audience-friendly aesthetic of its heritage, after a half-decade of dot-com-era largesse and pretentions.
• KCTS KICKED its longtime president Burnill Clark into early retirement and fired 35 employees. Yeah, it’s a recessionary cutback, but it also marks the end, at least for now, of the Seattle PBS affiliate’s years-long drive to become a major player in supplying national network programming. The ambitious venture generated some great shows (particularly Greg Palmer’s Vaudeville and Death: The Trip of a Lifetime). The loss of KCTS’s network-production unit is another setback for the local film/video production community, already struggling under the dual blows of the overall economic ickiness and cheap Canadian filming.
• THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT announced it would replace its “Artist’s Journey” attraction, the least museum-like and most theme-park-esque of its offerings, with a separate museum of science fiction memorabilia. It only makes sense for an institution founded upon computer-nerd largesse to partially rededicate itself to the nerds’ most favoritist art form of them all. You might beg the question: Will it be tacky? I damn hope so.

Mementos of my own formerly-fair city were everywhere in Stamford and NYC. Starbux stands and Microsoft ads were ubiquitous, of course; but there were also Seattle’s Best Coffee-serving restaurants and Eddie Bauer boutiques. (There’s supposedly a Nordstrom in some suburban mall outside NYC, but I didn’t see it.) The Virgin Megastore in the infamously Disneyfied Times Square stocked plenty of Seattle bands, even the semi-obscure ones. (F’rinstance, a Fartz CD was on prominent display!) One quasi-Seattle-related person, Fantagraphics cartoonist Chris Ware, had a huge display of his (fantastic) original art in the Whitney Museum’s 2002 Biennial exhibition. And the Tuesday edition of everyone’s favorite rabid-right tabloid included a positive review of the new CD by our ol’ pal Christy McWilson.

TRIP ASIDE #2: My flights both ways, as previously mentioned in this space, were on the airline soon to be formerly known as TWA. Thanks to the overcast conditions also previously mentioned in this space, both flights offered the comforting illusion of sailing on a sea of cotton fluff. Only the eastward flight offered a movie (K-PAX, displayed on LED video monitors).

Both flights included stops at the ol’ TWA hub in St. Louis. Right out the window, you could clearly see the old McDonnell-Douglas HQ complex at the other side of the main runways. The building now bears a big Boeing logo, even though it’s becoming increasingly clear that MD has staged a palace coup and essentially taken over Boeing.

TRIP ASIDE #3: I’ll try to scan some snapshot-camera pix I took of NYC, including Ground-0 (still an extremely quiet and solemn quarter-square-mile surrounded by the famous NYC bustle).

Scott Kennedy, a software engineer who started the (lovely) BitStar Internet Cafe on Capitol Hill, launched his independent mayoral campaign Sunday evening with a short rally outside the former Denny Way car-rental office where he’s installed his campaign HQ. The 50 or so supporters did little to fill the huge parking lot in front of the office.

The advertised highlight was a gig by a Beatles cover band, the Nowhere Men, playing on the building’s roof. (The real Beatles, as you assuredly know, played on a London rooftop as their final joint public performance–not the right symbolism when you want to be starting something, such as a political career.) The arrangement of the band on the roof and the audience down below kept the audience from getting within 30 feet of the campaign building, except for one dancing fool of a four-year-old boy.

Kennedy’s speech at the event, also performed on the roof, showed inadequate preparation and the lack of seasoned campaign handlers on his team to coach him. He interrupted himself twice, to take some gum out of his mouth and to take an earpiece out of his ear. He didn’t have anyone introduce him (you know, someone who could give endearing personal remarks about a candidate which the candidate himself would pseudo-modestly then demure from).

I personally like many of Kennedy’s stated platforms and ideas, which you can read about on his own site. I just want him to become more effective at stating them, and at the basic nuts-‘n’-bolts of campaigning. After all, voters have always, at least partly, judged a candidate’s potential adeptness as an office-holder by his/her adeptness as an office-seeker.

Some local activists had a great idea, to hold a “Reclaim the Streets” party Saturday afternoon, along the lines of similar events in England and across the U.S.

The premise: A party, a celebration, an outdoor rave of sorts (albeit without a DJ booth) in a big public place, unauthorized and unofficial.

The justification: The streets, and the city, belong to the citizens, not to politicians or cops or retail chains.

The organizers wanted the event to be a celebration, not a protest. Instead of complaining about society, attendees were asked to make positive statements about creating a new world without cars or malls or dumb laws.

But that was enough of a premise to draw the usual protest infiltrators from the Revolutionary Communist Party and other bands; plus individual marchers who believed in taking any opportunity to call attention to fervently believed-in causes (Mumia Abu-Jamal, police brutality).

And, natch, it was enough to draw great phalanxes of cops (who, at one point near the event’s end, may have outnumbered the participants).

There were cops in riot gear, cops on bicycles, cops on horses, cops in cars, and cops in a big van. There were lines of cops guarding the Convention Center, a Starbucks, the new Hyatt Hotel, and Pacific Place.

There were pepper-sprayings; there were cop horses sticking their heads out at protesters. There were an estimated 18 arrests (almost 10 percent of the marchers).

“Rioting” on the protesters’ side, meanwhile, was limited to just a couple of hammered-at windows at the Gap and Banana Republic, which attracted the extended gazes of the TV news crews, which were apparently out to tell a violent-assault-and-righteous-retribution story no matter what the real situation was.

So why the heavy police over-reaction?

It’s been pretty obvious these past few weeks that Mayor Paul Schell, heavily trailing in the polls for his re-election bid, has been staging silly PR stunts to make him look better in the public eye. The amassing of all those cops (clearly instructed to protect private property above all other priorities, just as they were at Mardi Gras) may have been, at least partly, a show intended to make weekend downtown shoppers believe Schell’s finally got his act together.

And what of the event itself? How could it have more effectively communicated its message and attracted a larger, more diverse set of supporters?

The “Reclaim the Streets” ideology, borrowed whole from out-of-town and out-of-country events (the first was a protest against a British highway project), wasn’t specific to the particular situation of downtown Seattle (or even of U.S. big-city downtowns in general). There are already lotsa Northwesterners who like to live and play where there aren’t malls or cars; these people are sometimes called exurbanites or backpackers. People who’ve chosen to live in town have often done so because they enjoy the bustle and the excitement. A New-New Left celebration in Seattle ought to welcome those who actually like city life, inviting them to help try and take charge of how their city develops.

(Of course, that means it would also have to be inviting toward older people, nonwhite people, non-vegans, and people who don’t necessarily enjoy wearing face bandanas.)

How caffeine created the modern world.

The name says it all: “My Cat Hates You.com.”

Everything you could ever want to know about Godzilla.

Just when you’d forgotten about the Sonics’ former top star, a Houston-based site has a collection of (borderline distasteful) Shawn Kemp fat jokes.

THE POKEMON FAD might be fading fast, but it’s still a useful metaphor for much of human society. The Japanese-invented cartoon universe of 151 cute “Pocket Monsters” is, like many anime creations, much more complex and layered than U.S.-devised kiddie fare.

Thus, its characters can even be used to symbolize the U.S. Presidential election.

Herewith, our first-ever “Poke-President” guide:

AL GORE: The perfect Poke-world stand-in for Droning Al is Jigglypuff– the wide-eyed Pokemon who defeats its opponents by singing a lovely song that puts them all to sleep. Jigglypuff thinks its song is merely beautiful; when all other Pokes and humans go snoozin’ as a result, it takes out a felt-tip pen and draws scornful patterns on their faces. Sort of like a policy wonk chiding us for not fully appreciating his 151-point economic platforms.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Most perfectly represented by the cross-eyed Psyduck. This Poke-critter attempts to disable its fighting foes by sending out a psychic “confusion attack,” only to usually end up making itself too confused to even know which way it’s going. It’s even capable of staring itself down in a reflecting pond to the point of paralysis. Still, it’s cuddly and sympathetic in its usually pathetic attempts to hold its own in the arena of combat.

PAT BUCHANAN: There are several bad-guy Poke-critters who could symbolize our aging borderline-bigot, but the most appropriate is Koffing. This Pokemon floats through the air to launch a lethal “smokescreen attack”–subjecting the other Pokemon (and its own trainers) with an unbreathable cloud of thick black smoke. Thus, it’s a perfect match for Pat, who (heart symbols) big polluters and is always blowing a lot of hot air.

RALPH NADER: Fighting Ralph’s most apropos Poke-counterpart is the fire-breathing Charizard. One of the most powerful good-guy Pokemon, Charizard’s a never-say die competitor–when there’s a truly important cause at stake. But it can’t be bothered to take part in the commercialized nonsense of organized Pokemon cockfighting (the Poke-world’s counterpart to organized sports, and hence a great metaphor for the meaningless gamesmanship rites of organized politics). When asked to combat just for the sake of combatting, it will blow flames in the face of its would-be trainers and go back to sleep.

TOMORROW: On the Sound Transit commuter train.

ELSEWHERE:

• Still-classic graphic wonders, the posters from the Works Progress Administration….
• What Karl Marx sez about globalization (found by Arts and Letters Daily)…./UL>