early 'new yorker' writer janet flanner photographed by bernice abbott; tacoma art museum

• Tacoma’s getting what was too hot for the Smithsonian, a photo exhibit of 150 years of gays in America.
• There’s an art vending machine in Ballard now! But, despite what this story says, it’s not the first in town. There’s already one at the Hideout bar on Boren and Madison.
• Local animator Drew Christie asks your sympathy for the poor, put-upon Nutria.
• The Voice of America (yes, they’re still around) reports about beloved local artist Ginny Ruffner and her courageous comeback from a horrific car crash.
• The UW men’s basketball team has won “the championship of the West” and is still in the running for U.S. sports’ most famous consolation prize.
• Folks are still trying to bring Dennis Kucinich to run for Congress in Wash. State.
• Auto racing in King County has apparently been saved.
• Who’s profiting from America’s health care system and its runaway costs? Not Swedish Hospital. They’re losing a quarter million a day.
• Microsoft’s giving police departments a software tool to create “digital fingerprints” for any online image. They say it can be useful in tracking down the sharers of child porn. But as we’ve learned, “cracking down on child porn” can be invoked as an excuse for every creepy Big Brother tactic.
• Will the Florida teen shot for apparently no other reason than walking while black ever get real justice?
• This Raw Story piece about an FCC decision, setting aside hundreds of new low-power radio frequencies for actual local stations instead of mere repeater transmitters, exaggerates when it says the move represents “a critical blow to right wing radio dominance.” After all, these new local stations could host their own homegrown right-wingers.
• A Bloomberg Businessweek reporter who wrote about what he calls “the real Foxconn” insists the massive Chinese high-tech subcontractor is actually a pretty good employer, considering.
• Dyske Suematsu asks rhetorically why more Americans don’t like jazz. Suematsu’s rhetorical answer is just standard square-bashing elitist yawn city. Look: Advanced, specialty versions of ANYTHING are going to mainly appeal to niche audiences. Light aircraft. Eighteenth-century history. Foreign film. French wrought-iron sconces from the 1930s. And so on.
• UK author China Mieville wants you to frustrate and “unsatisfy” him. Preferably now.

The cherry blossoms agree with the calendar that spring has arrived. Why does the weather argue?

• Today (Tuesday 3/20) is half price Amazon gift card day.
• Seattle’s apparently on the cutting edge of privacy-free office interiors.
• Who wouldn’t love a local art exhibit of classic electric mixers, model cars, and miniature Space Needles? Nobody, that’s who.
• Who still supports Mike Daisey’s not-entirely-true “exposé” of Apple’s subcontracted Chinese gadget factories? Would you believe Steve Wozniak?
• More bad news for everybody who thinks web ads could eventually support professional online news. Turns out that 68 percent of all online ad spending goes to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. Only the latter two employ any journalists (Microsoft through its half interest in MSNBC.com; AOL through HuffPost, Patch, and other sites).
• Meanwhile in Maine, one of the most aggressively hyped “digital first/print last,” “hyperlocal,” “new media business model” companies has crashed, taking some almost 200-year-old weekly papers with it.
• Jonathan Chait at New York mag insists that Obama’s aborted budget compromise with John Boehner’s House Republicans last year was an attempt “to sell out liberalism,” which only failed because Boehner was “too crazy” to go along. I have a different interpretation. I believe Obama made a show of offering Boehner almost everything the latter wanted, knowing full well the latter would reject it anyway, as a part of the grand strategy of rendering the GOP utterly irrelevant on the national level and turning the Democrats into the new “party of business.” (Which could still be seen as “selling out liberalism,” if you want to see it that way.)
• Meanwhile, said House Republicans are desperate to keep the 1 percent’s loyalty by proposing a near total re-deregulation of Wall St. funny-money practices.
• To end on a fun note, here’s some animated “3D .gifs” by local artist Dain Fagerholm.

After you’ve had your Caesar salad to celebrate the Ides of March, join me in celebrating the ghosts of meals past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on crunchy Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• Good News Dept.: It looks like the Volunteer Park Conservatory is a lot closer to being fiscally preserved than was implied in previous reports.
• The Husky men’s basketball team had to settle for playing in the NIT, despite winning its conference’s regular season title. But that wasn’t as demeaning as the team’s ultra-lousy attendance at its first round NIT game.
• Whatever patina of respectability the megabanks had is peeling off in the late-winter rains. There’s the blistering breakup letter by the ex Goldman Sachs exec. And there’s Matt Taibbi’s even more blistering exposé of BankAmericrap as “a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time.” And yet Megan McArdle at the Atlantic insists what we really need is a “massive deregulation” of banking. What?
• Meanwhile, here’s another good-riddance letter by a techie who left Google for Microsoft, claiming the former had devolved from “an innovation factory” into just another “advertising company.”
• The copyright police have convinced U.K. authorities to ship a Brit college kid to the U.S. for prosecution, all for the supposedly heinous crime of running a TV-episodes linking site.
• Some Catholic bishops in Missouri have decided the best way to respond to continued exposés of child-abusing priests is to mount vicious legal attacks against the exposers.
• To end this batch on an upbeat note, here are four illustration books and a comic-strip collection based on classic literature.

stephen crowe via brainpickings.org

Learn how we and our immediate forebearers ate!

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks) at Broadway and E. Roy on curvaceous Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

Be there or be yesterday’s “fresh sheet.”

• The World Trade Organization (remember them?) sez Boeing gets unfair subsidies from the U.S. gov’t.
• Are an ad agency’s “homeless hotspots” at the SXSW music festival really more demeaning than the Seattle company that  still calls itself “Bumvertising“?
• No, Michael Medved. We’re not secretly jealous of Rush Limbaugh and his awesome power. We’re disgusted by his puerile stupidity, bullying, and bigotry (and yours too).
• The Oregonian won’t run the Doonesbury comics about the GOP’s war against women. A local cartoonist responds by depicting the paper’s readers choosing to “abort” their subscriptions.
• Is there really something particular about the training of soldiers at Lewis-McChord that’s led to these dreadful stories about abuses of power in the Afghan field? Or is it just a coincidence, based on the fact that the base has grown so big, with so many troops transferring in and out of it?
• One of the 1980 American hostages in Iran would rather not see history repeat itself thank you.
• Blogger/editor Maria Popova believes websites should formally adopt a “curator’s code” identifying direct and indirect links via special unicode symbols.

esquire.com

Welcome to daylight savings time. Welcome to the “light” half of the year. Welcome to the little piece of manmade trickery that tells us the worst of the cold, dark time is over. Even though it sure didn’t look or feel like it today.

• Esquire’s “Eat Like a Man” department ran a survey asking readers’ “most life changing burger joint.” The winner: our own Dick’s, by a mile. (Also note the beautiful Dennis Hopper-esque photo topping the story.)
• Danny Westneat notes that the Republican state senate coup-mongers’ state budget cuts essential services even more brutally than the competing Democratic house budget. Westneat concludes that this totally destroys the longstanding Republican meme that all you need for a balanced budget is to get rid of some vaguely defined “waste.”
• KOMO headline: “Car slams into dentist office, driver extricated.” It may take you a second to realize that’s not “extracted.”
• The Huskies, despite their regular season prowess, are not in the NCAA men’s basketball tourney. The only NW team in it is Gonzaga.
• More and more advertisers desert right-wing hate radio. Not just Limbaugh but the whole bigoted, bullying gaggle. Will the whole genre collapse under the weight of its own need for continued extremeness? (And remember, this is the only audience today’s Republican Party gives a damn about.)
• The next time some techno-pundit tells you that every organization (from the news media to local government) must become more like whatever’s the social media darling of the week, just remember the example of Twitter. A very famous name. A very popular site. A very pathetic business.
• Jean “Mobius” Giraud R.I.P.: The king of “clear line” Euro comix art seamlessly blended slick, sophisticated senses of draftsmanship and composition with classic fanboy adventure genre subjects (Sergio Leone-esque cowboys, space opera, sword and sorcery, erotica, even proto-steampunk). He also cofounded Metal Hurlant, the way-influential magazine known here as Heavy Metal. Too bad most U.S. media obits of Giraud only wanted to discuss the Hollywood movies he’d consulted on or which were “inspired” by his work (typical myopia).

supervillain.wordpress.com

american institute of architects—seattle

• If we must get rid of High School Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, it ought to be replaced by a municipal “back yard,” not yet another municipal “front lawn.” Consider this while perusing some architects’ proposal to turn the site into a “Seattle Jelly Bean.”
• Back from the dead like a James Bond villain, it’s the Wash. state film tax-break program! Resurrected by the Legislature, just before the end of the regular session. Will this mean at least a few “set in Seattle” movies might actually, you know, be made here?
• We’ve said that one possible fiscal end game for the Seattle Times could involve it becoming subsidized by local business bigwigs, either directly or via vanity ads. Here’s an example of the latter: Boeing’s in-house magazine Frontiers, which will now be a monthly ad insert in the Times.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #1: Mr. Bellevue Square just lost another anti-public-transit crusade.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #2: Professional faux-populist power monger Tim Eyman just lost another anti-common-sense crusade.
• “Tukwila now has the most diverse school district in the nation.”
• Here’s another tribute to art director extraordinaire Dale Yarger, by my fellow Fantagraphics refugee Robert Boyd.
• Elaine Blair at the NY Review of Books compares single-male characters in novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women) to the male authors of these novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women readers).
• Arts activist Scott Walters takes aim at the so-called “progressive” nonprofit arts community, in which a few big institutions grab most of the funding and expect the rest of us to wait for the wealth to “trickle down.”
• Here’s a wake-up call to all the defeatist lefties I know who still believe, as one friend once wrote, that “Fox News is the most popular TV channel.” In reality, “Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News in the 2011 Ratings.” (Yet still, this aging, shrinking audience is the only audience today’s Republican Party bothers with!)
• A long, cute infographic compares Apples® to apples.

stranger cover, 8/30/95, art direction by dale yarger, illo by neilwaukee

I haven’t gotten all the details yet, but it appears Dale Yarger, a mammoth force in Seattle publication design, passed away over the weekend.

He’d been living in California for at least the past four years. But his local work is still a huge influence around here.

Yarger was one of the Rocket’s several rotating art directors in the 1980s. He created many memorable covers there and also made an early iteration of the Sub Pop logo, back when that was the title of Bruce Pavitt’s indie-music review column.

During that time he also co-founded a gay paper called Lights, art-directed The Oregon Horse magazine, and collaborated with artist Carl Smool on a memorable anti-Reagan bus sign.

Yarger became one of Fantagraphics Books’ first Seattle hires after the comix publisher came here from L.A. He redesigned the company’s Comics Journal magazine (where I first knew him), and essentially did every visual thing on its comics and books that wasn’t done by the artists themselves. He instilled the appreciation for top-notch design, typography, and production that now marks the company’s admired graphic novels and comic-strip collections.

By 1995 he transferred over to that other hip bastion, The Stranger. In his three-year stint there, Yarger took the alt-weekly from the look of “a zine on steroids” into the slick product it’s been ever since.

He also had a hand in the visuals of Seattle Weekly, the University Book Store, and Dana Countryman’s Cool and Strange Music magazine.

I will always remember him as a cool head even when surrounded by hot heads, a perfectionist who still understood schedules and budgets, a man with a knack for making even the most mundane assignment sparkle.

UPDATE: Now I’m told Yarger had stomach cancer, for which he’d had surgery some time last year.

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

filmfanatic.org

• Forget the movie and the two bios, all full of fiction. In reality, Frances Farmer was not lobotomized. Her story’s still mighty tragic, though.
• Architect Matt Roewe suggests a new, novel public transportation solution—a passenger gondola from the waterfront to Capitol Hill, ending atop a 16- to 40-story tower above Broadway.
• Even some longtime Seattle citizens don’t realize the Army has held on to pieces of Fort Lawton, now surrounded by former fort land that’s now Discovery Park. That ends Saturday.
• The last iPhone-incompatible cell service operator, Bellevue-based T-Mobile, won’t be such anymore. They’re not going to sell the iPhone any time soon, but their data plans will at least work on it once the upgrades are done.
• Yep, looks like another stupid all-cuts budget in the Legislature, kicking the can of our regressive revenue system down the road again. However, at least Basic Health (or what’s left of it) is preserved in one of the competing budget proposals.
• The memorial totem pole to slain carver John T. Williams will be unveiled this weekend at Seattle Center.
• The Seattle Times wants to sell its now ex-headquarters buildings for $80 million, twice their appraised value. That would help the company to meet its pension obligations, and perhaps even help subsidize the paper.
• Artists’ rights outrage of the week: “…A Florida judge ruled last month that iconic funk king George Clinton doesn’t own the rights to any music he created from 1976 to 1983.” That pretty much includes anything you remember from the P-Funk heyday.
• Sponsor tie-ins and product placement, those savior/banes of modern bigtime movies, just get more ridiculous every year. Now The Lorax, that story-sermon against runaway consumerism and “stuff”-ism, is being used to sell SUVs.
• Google’s latest potential new hardware product is something out of a modern dystopian novel. It’s “augmented reality” eyeglasses that display informative texts, social media updates, and, yes, ads.

• My book Walking Seattle (you do all have your own copy by now, right?) just happens to take readers past five historic Christian Science church buildings in different parts of town. All are now occupied by others; two as other churches and three re-purposed to new uses. The last of these, a townhome redevelopment on 15th Avenue East on Capitol Hill, is finally done. Lawrence Cheek explores both the architectural and usage ironies in turning a house of worship into homes for the upscale.
• (By the way, Walking Seattle has its own online companion now, as an add-on virtual tour guide within the iOS/Android app ViewRanger!)
• (By the other way, North Sound readers who want to learn more about traipsing through the Jet City can attend a Walking Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Sunday Feb. 26 at Village Books in Bellingham.)
• Damn: J.C. Penney won’t be coming back to downtown Seattle after all. So let’s get Kohl’s in the old Borders space, and a full branch of the University Book Store upstairs in the Kress building (where Penney’s was supposed to have gone).
• In today’s wacky city survey of the day, Seattle ranks last in average pay raises last year. (Note to bosses, particularly in the tech biz: People can’t eat break-room foosball tables. Wanna hold on to those people you insist are so vital to your continued growth n’ success n’ stuff? Treat ’em better.)
• In a related story, the labor union UNITE/HERE is fighting to get a better deal for workers at the Space Needle, who’ve been offered the usual raw deal of takebacks and job insecurity.
• Megan Seling asks the musical question, if Seattle does get NHL hockey, what local standard should be the team’s “goal song“? I’m more interested in the team name. If we do get the currently league-owned Phoenix Coyotes, we wouldn’t really need to change that moniker. After all, this state is the birthplace of the creator of Wile E. Coyote.
• Somebody who claims to have done his research has come up with an online, annotated Seattle gang map.
• How to end police brutality? Studies? Consultants? “Process”? No?
• Sadly, there are still some pathetic, deluded dudes who want to turn the inland Northwest into a white supremacist “homeland.”
• You want to know how completely unpopular the far right’s social agenda is? Consumer marketing and advertising have completely ignored/rejected it. (Yes, many of you reject marketing and advertising. But advertisers want to sell by appealing to common contemporary values. And those are not the values either held, or paid lip-service to, by today’s rabid right.)
• I didn’t notice this when it came out, but New York magazine noted a couple months ago that e-books have become “a whole new literary form.” Specifically, the mag cited the fact that e-books can be any length, thus creating a market for long “short nonfiction” and short “long nonfiction.”
• Rampant, pathetic homophobia can pop up anywhere, even among the people you’d think were least likely to absorb it. Such as female tennis stars.
• The LA Times thinks it’s tracked down the world’s most unromantic tourist destinations. I dunno. I can certainly imagine the erotic symbolism of Australia’s giant earthworm museum.
• Our ol’ pal Jim Romenesko’s got a growing list of “words journalists use that people never say.” My own favorites include pontiff, solon, stumping, embattled, succumb, cohort, loggerheads, cagers, and, of course, moniker.

shadow planet productions

• A Fremont video-game studio has won a national animation award for its Xbox game “Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.”
• Hoop-la dept.: Seattle Weekly believes the current hype over bringing men’s pro basketball back to town could potentially save Mayor McGinn’s political career.
• Central Cinema says it can’t survive sans booze.
• Intiman Theatre says it will rise again this summer.
• Facebook regularly deletes photos of nudity, even if they depict breastfeeding. Local moms went to the company’s Seattle programming branch-office with a “nurse-in.”
• Pioneer Seattle photographer Asahel Curtis (brother of the even more famous Edward Curtis) wasn’t just a great shutterbug. He was also a master at the art of hand-coloring his pictures.
• Sound Transit believes spending $24 million on blueprints for light rail to Federal Way could help grab Federal bucks to actually build the thing.
• In a new ad pitch, Microsoft says its online apps and tools are more privacy-friendly than Google’s.
• It’s worth saying again, those six words that usually define a bad movie: “Set in Seattle, Filmed in Vancouver.”
• Brock Howell has a simple catch phrase for the kind of communities we need to develop and support: “Coffee shop neighborhoods.”
• Keep on truckin’ strikin’. Local short-haul truck drivers are often immigrants, and are often treated as overworked, underpaid, benefits-deprived “contractors.” They’re taking action for a better deal.
• Univision and Disney are said to be planning a cable news channel for English-speaking Latinos. I presume that means no political analysis from Sabado Gigante‘s “Chacal de la Trompeta.”

crypt-orchid.blogspot.com

Today marks David Letterman’s 30th anniversary on late night TV.

Appropriately enough, his principal guest last night was Bill Murray, the first guest on both his NBC (1982) and CBS (1993) premieres.

When the NBC Late Night with David Letterman began, it was a breath of fresh air. It was knowing, it was snide, it respected its audience’s intelligence and its love of the bizarre.

The premiere opened with Calvert DeForrest (descendent of radio pioneer Lee DeForrest) reciting a “be very afraid” spiel in front of the Rainbow Room peacock dancers (yes, female “peacocks,” an actual attraction at the rooftop lounge in the RCA (now GE) Building).

Then came the first mini monologue and the first studio comedy bit (a backstage tour). The Murray segment ended with him and the host suddenly leaving the stage, and the screen switching to old film of the 1973 World Series.

That first episode ended with a comedian reciting the opening scene from an obscure Bela Lugosi movie. By the time I saw that bit, I knew I’d be a fan for life.

•

Letterman, the self-spoofing, genre-busting insurgent, is now the establishment, and has been for some time.

A persona that was once hip-to-be-square is now the grand old curmuddgeon. In this respect, he has become more like his onetime occasional foil Harvey Pekar (as seen above).

A collection of shticks that playfully (or awkwardly) toyed with the established celebrity-talk format has become a well-tuned programming machine, that regularly disseminates well-scrubbed guests plugging their films/shows/CDs.

Little comedy bits that had been cute and playful are now trotted out with slick animated openings and pompous fanfares. More of them these days are pre-taped or assembled from news footage, instead of acted out on stage.

The biggest flaw in Letterman’s current formula is the 12:15 a.m. commercial break, following the first guest spot. It runs between five and eight minutes, stopping the whole proceedings. It essentially begs viewers to shut ‘er down and hit the hay.

Still, there are worse fates to befall a creative performer than to become the sort of bigtime mainstream institution he had once scoffed.

Letterman could have grown old much less gracefully.

Like Leno.

•

PS: Here are some Letterman guest spots that one entertainment site considers classics. At least one actually is an all-time moment—a totally laugh-free, in-character Andy Kaufman spot from Letterman’s 1980 morning show.

PPS: Letterman began his career on Indianapolis TV in the early 1970s. The ill-fated, Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer ended her career in the same place and time. If I ever meet him, I’ll ask if he’d ever met her.

freecabinporn.com

• This site of nothing but pictures of countryside cabins (rustic to postmodern) reminds me of my young adult years, when all writers were supposed to want to live in cabins. I never did. To me, the countryside was something to escape from.
• On a similar thread, some of the same “writerly lifestyle” folks who’d demanded that I be a mellow back-to-nature lover also kept laundry lists of everything they hated about the modern world. Meet today’s incarnation of that trope, Jonathan Franzen.
• NHL hockey in Seattle: even more likely?
• Here’s something novel for ya: Scenes of women in superhero comics that female readers actually like!
• When a Google attorney goes on a Time Warner site to advocate for less draconian copyright laws, something’s going on. I don’t know exactly what, but something.
• A young Brit couple Tweeted® about their upcoming trip to the States. They said they were gonna “destroy America” by, among other hard-partyin’ things, “digging up Marilyn Monroe’s grave.” Agents arrested ’em on their arrival at LAX, detained ’em, and shipped ’em back home. They insist they were just joking. Memo to Homeland Security: Anyone who actually wants to destroy America probably won’t Tweet® about it.
• If the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation wanted to keep selling itself as the voice of defiant courage, it shouldn’t have caved to the phony right wing smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.
• Don’t watch porn on your laptop in a public library where kids can see it. Make ’em find the really good sites on their own.
• Just why do restaurant websites so consistently suck?

• Does David Horsey really believe Newt Gingrich stands a serious chance of becoming president (or rather, that America stands a serious chance of being saddled with such a corrupt egotist getting “the nuclear button”)? Or is he simply being provocative for its own sake?
• Ex-UW public affairs prof Hubert Locke, meanwhile, listens to Gingrich’s debate rants and hears plenty of “racial code words.”
• This is a fairly long and complex story, but the gist appears to be this: Current state GOP boss (and former KVI hate-talk host) Kirby Wilbur set up a Washington branch of the Koch Bros.’ astroturf lobbying group Americans for Prosperity. National AFP HQ helped Wilbur’s guys traipse through a loophole in state laws about partisan political committees, by claiming to instead be a “grassroots” lobbying group, a group that wasn’t really endorsing candidates or policy positions. Even though it ran cleverly-worded stealth attack ads against 13 Democratic legislators, just before the ’10 elections. By deftly skirting around state Public Disclosure Commission guidelines, Washington AFP didn’t have to reveal its money sources. What’s more, it might get to do so in the future, depending on how the state PDC decides to clarify its rules.
• State Attorney General (and GOP gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna tries to prove he’s hep with the digital generation by spearheading a crackdown against Facebook “clickjacking” scams.
• With private liquor sales coming to Washington (but only at large retail spaces), here come the out-of-state big-box liquor chains.
• Male and female co-CEOs of a world famous company battle in and out of the courts over full control, leading to a restraining order against one of them. It could be a plot for a potboiler novel or a made-for-TV movie, but probably not for an Archie Comic.
• RealNetworks, the local outfit that pioneered streaming online audio/video, just sold a bunch of patents to Intel for $120 million. In other news, RealNetworks still exists.

from three sheets northwest

• Well, whaddya know? Looks like gay marriage will pass the state Senate! (It’s always been expected to pass the state House.)
• Historic-preservation bad news #1: The Kalakala, currently docked in Tacoma, started listing to one side during Friday’s wind storm. The Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to prevent the legendary streamined ferry boat from sinking. Its current owner can’t afford to restore it, perhaps not even to fix it. The owner of the dock where it’s moored wants it out. It’s been offered for sale for as little as $1. If no repair plan, new owner, and/or new dock site emerge, the Corps of Engineers could seize and dismantle it.
• Historic-preservation bad news #2: Lawrence Kreisman from Historic Seattle blasts Sound Transit, because he agency plans to demolish the Standard Records storefront on NE 65th Street, as part of its Roosevelt light-rail station project. But few people seem to care that the same project would obliterate the original QFC store.
• Bellevue’s own Redbox is now the biggest video rental company in the nation (if you count physical discs, not streams or downloads).
• “Distressed homes.” That’s the term for sales of foreclosed homes, and for “short sales” of homes for less than what’s owed on them. They’re one-third of home sales in King County these days, and half of home sales in Pierce and Snohomish counties.
• State Rep. Reuven Carlyle is the latest to express his disgust at draconian all-cuts state budgets and the “tyranny of the minority” behind them.…
• …while Knute Berger ponders whether the reluctance to admit the need for public services, and for a reformed tax system to support them, is a sign that the social fabric of our city, state, and nation could be collapsing from within.
• The next bowling alley scheduled for demolition: Robin Hood Lanes in Edmonds, a fine place at which I have bowled (pathetically, as I always do).
• You know the sorry state of newspapers and big consumer magazines. But do you know what other print genre is “staggering along” on “geriatric legs”? Manga. For one thing, the biggest U.S. outlet for translated Japanese comic magazines and graphic novels (as much as one-third of total sales) was the now-imploded Borders Books. And the Japanese home-country market for the stuff is also shrinking and aging, partly due to Japan’s declining birth rate. (Thanx and a hat tip to Robert Boyd for the link.)
• Post-SOPA item #1: Could the Internet censorship dust-up drive a wedge between Democrats and one of the few big industries (entertainment) that mostly donates to Democratic campaigns?
• Post-SOPA item #2: Even in Denmark, the copyright industry loves to disguise its proposed Internet censorship laws as “crackdowns against child pornography.”
• Post-SOPA item #3: The MegaUpload bust has led several other file sharing sites to refuse access from U.S. users, or to restrict downloads of files to the same users who’d uploaded them. But would a complete end to noncommercial piracy really lead everybody into attaining all the same content commercially? Not bloody likely.
• Why are most computers, smartphones, HDTVs, etc. made in China and not here? It’s not really labor costs, not anymore. It’s China’s hyper-efficient supply chain, its masses of skilled engineers, and its sheer scale of industrial intrastructure. Oh, and perhaps the little fact that American workers “won’t be treated like zoo animals.” (The first-linked story is about Apple, but applies to most all consumer-electronics firms.)
• Attention, Coast to Coast A.M. listeners and techno-libertarians: Folks like me aren’t down on Ron Paul because we’re scared of his awesome disruptive super-goodness. We’re down on him because we despise his “small government” hypocrisy—the freedom to discriminate, the freedom to pollute, the freedom to pay slave wages, but no reproductive rights, no gay marriage, and no legal protections for “the little guy.” That, and the racist newsletters and his lame cop-out excuses for them.
• Two great tastes that absolutely don’t taste great together—Mickey Mouse and Joy Division. (Really.)