Paul Allen’s gonna spend $100 mill to fund a research study utilizing mice to explore the genetic development of brains. By this time next year, the lab space in Fremont just might become HQ of assorted plots to take over the world.

…but yr. web-editor just might (repeat, might) have had either a panic attack or a “silent” heart attack late Monday night.

It was at the long-belated end of an extremely long and extremely stressful day, in which I’d found myself gasping for breath to the point of giggling. By the time I finally got home around 11:30, I felt intense pain in my lower abdomen and left shoulder (but not further down either arm). I tried to relax enough to sleep, but only kept getting more tense. At the episode’s nadir, I had to fight to breathe and felt searing pain when I did.

But then I finally did relax enough to sleep, which I did until 2 p.m. Tuesday. Since then, I’ve continued to maintain my regular activities (applying for jobs, writing, schmoozing, shopping). But some shoulder pain has remained, and intense headaches have come and gone.

At no point in any of this has my heartbeat felt too slow, too fast, or erratic.

I still don’t know what happenned. I might not until sometime next week. But for now, I’m trying to take things easy. So I might not see y’all at Bumbershoot ’03. But please rest assured I’m alive and more-or-less well now.

SO AT THE AGE OF approximately 46 and a half, I’ve finally had an intimation of mortality. Until this week, I’d been holding onto the pseudo-invulnerability of youth all this time. Long-term friends have gone bald, had kids, undergone nasty divorces, won Emmys or Pulitzers, or moved to Germany. A few have passed on, due to everything from suicide and drugs to cancer and HIV. Others have valiantly fought back in the face of doom and become stronger, wiser people.

I never wanted to become middle aged. I’d always associated it with those annoying guys whose lives had essentially ended at the end of The Sixties, and who ever since wouldn’t stop alleging that Their Generation was some sort of superior species. I’d planned to stay sprightly and open to new ideas. Either that or become an unabashed crochety old geezer. (My short-lived Tablet column was even titled Back In My Day, Sonny.)

Nowadays, there are at least some role models out there for ’80s-generation fellas growing older, if not gracefully, at least forcefully. Elvis Costello, and to a lesser extent Joe Jackson, are making some of the most provocative music of their careers. Locally, so are Kim Warnick (in Visqueen) and Scott McCaughey (in the Minus Five). Peter Bagge’s comics and Charles Peterson’s photographs keep getting better.

This time has not come for me to, as Charles Aznavour sang, “pay for yesterday when I was young.” It is time for me to start seriously considering what I wanna really, really do with what I fully expect to be the many, many more years I’ve got.

DAVID KOENIG WONDERS whether we’re seeing the slow demise of traditional Disney animation.

ENDING OUR RECENT VISIT to the formerly-scenic Kent Valley, we come across one recent attempt to create a public space in this heavily privatized stretch of suburbia, the Interurban and Green River trails.

These hiking-biking paths wander along disused railway corridors. One of them crosses the still-scenic Green River at a restored wooden bridge. Go far enough southward on the 15-mile Interurban Trail and you’ll eventually get to where it’s still the countryside.

The Great Wall Mall, south of Ikea in the greater Tukwila-Kent-Renton sprawl, is an undoubted godsend to the thousands of Asian-American families who’ve moved there in search of slightly-less-obscene housing prices. For a casual shopper from the city, however, it has little that you can’t find in greater variety/lower prices in Seattle’s International District.

An arrangement in black and white, courtesy of a black fridge on display at Albert Lee’s in the big-box superstore desertscape surrounding Southcenter.

Tukwila’s Family Fun Center, whilst not as expansive as the Wild Waves/Enchanted Village complex in Federal Way, is still prominent enough to get its own road signs. (As well as having go-karts, mini-golf, a climbing rock, a wooden-fence maze, water-cart racing, a video arcade, and the ever-familiar sights of screeching tots, sullen teens, and nerve-wracked parents.)

Question: What’s out of place in this picture of the franchised Bullwinkle’s restaurant at the Fun Center?

Answer: The Underdog Show wasn’t made by Rocky and Bullwinkle creators Jay Ward and Bill Scott. It simply had some of the same financial backers and merchandising contracts as the Ward shows.

IF YOU SAW the movie Ghost World, you’ll remember a shot of the astoundingly racist logo for an old restaurant, the Coon Chicken Inn. A few of you might not know that was a real chain, which until the ’50s had a large outlet on Lake City Way, just beyond the old Seattle city limits–and just a half mile north of the offices of Fantagraphics Books, which published the original Ghost World comic. (Ying’s Drive-In now stands on the ex-Coon Chicken site.)

What’s more bizarre than the old Coon Chicken logo is the fact that modern-day folks are making counterfeit logo souvenirs!

…with some of “those” words from the comics.

…to the economic wreck.

You already read about the impending demise, sometime later this year or early next, of the historic and sumptuous Cloud Room in the quaint but affordable Camlin Hotel. It’s been one of Seattle’s oldest surviving piano bars, along with (but a lot more cozy n’ elegant than) the also-closing Sorry Charlie’s on lower Queen Anne.

Slightly less publicized is the folding of Orpheum Records on Broadway, one of the town’s finest indie-rock and techno CD stores. It was a great supporter of local bands for over a decade and a half, and hosted innumerable memorable in-store gigs by local and national faves.

The Capitol Hill Times recently ran a checklist-type piece about the comings and goings of the Hill’s CD stands. A partial list:

Coming: Sonic Boom, Wall of Sound (moved from Belltown), Music Werks, Down Low Music, Half Price Books and Music.

Going: Wherehouse Music, Fallout, Beats International, and now Orpheum.

Morphing: Cellophane Square into Everyday Music (the budget chain of Cellophane’s Portland-based parent company, Django).

Staying put: Fred Meyer Music Market.

MEANWHILE…: My former bosses at Fantagraphics Books have publicly pleaded for customers to buy more of its graphic albums and comics, to help the company survive the current econo-turmoil (which in this company’s case included the bankruptcy of a big wholesaler). Fantagraphics has gone thru plenty of ups n’ downs in its past 27 years, and I’m sure it will survive this setback as well. But it’s still a great opportunity for you to grab some of the best visual storytelling this and several other nations have ever produced.

…toward the most grandiosely stupid single action taken by a first-world nation in my lifetime. I feel like getting smashed, so I’ll probably send myself instead to a no-booze recreation joint (perhaps the go-kart place in Georgetown or the Family Fun Center in Tukwila).

Or I might peruse some of my favorite antiwar websites, such as Boondocks Net (not officially connected to the Boondocks comic strip). It’s got many intriguing essays and features about past wars (particularly the Phillipine-American War), early political cartoons, and peace and justice movements past and present. My favorite pieces on the site include one about Mark Twain’s scathing satirical story The War Prayer and William Dean Howells’s more somber 1905 home-front tale Editha.

There’ll natch be another antiwar rally today, at the Federal Building at 5. Details are at NotInOurNameSeattle.net.

Other antiwar sites with vital stuff on them include:

• the Nowar Collective (whose cofounder Robert Jensen has written candidly about his current personal fears over the situation)
• the Independent Media Center
• Information Clearing House (slightly conspiracy-theory-friendly, so feel free to be skeptical about the more outrageous of its claims)
• Guardian Unlimited (the UK national newspaper that’s become a godsend for US readers seeking unspun news about Bush)
• Bush Watch
• TomPaine.com (easily the best-written and best-edited lefty website)
• Common Dreams (some of the sharpest punditry anywhere)

In punditry you might not have seen on the bigger news sites, the former “most trusted man in America” Walter Cronkite sez a war would not only permanently endanger international relations but could put the U.S. economy into chaos.

And our ol’ fave Molly Ivins asks, “Have you ever seen such amazing arrogance wedded to such awesome incompetence?”

Those nude protests you might have read about can be viewed at Baring Witness, which also provides instructions on staging your own big PEACE bodyscape. Individual ladies n’ gents had been sending self-portraits with body-paint messages to an Australian site called Nude for Peace, but that site has apparently been blacklisted by its server provider.

I’ve been recruited into speaking this Thursday at the Tacoma Public Library’s main branch (1102 Tacoma Avenue South; 7 pm).

They’re running one of those “everybody in town reads the same book” promos, based this time on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The panel I’ll be at will discuss Bradbury’s premise of a future dystopia where audiovisual media are drugs and books are outlawed.

This nightmare image has been very popular among highbrow technophobes, particuarly by Neil Postman. In his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman essentially argued that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of TV-addicted idiots; that new info technologies were always inherently reactionary and anti-thought; and that The Word was good for you and The Image was bad for you.

I’ve written about Postman in the past: I disagreed with his premises then and still do.

The Simpsons and The Sopranos are, I argue, more intelligent than the books of Danielle Steel and John Grisham. Secondary and tertiary cable channels provide more highbrow arts and culture than PBS ever did. The Internet has helped to democratize the written word (and helped get the current peace movement jump-started).

And kids’ attention spans seem to be getting longer these days. I’ve written before how every Harry Potter book is at least 100 pages longer than the previous one; and about those PC adventure games where you have to methodically explore and experiment for weeks or months before discovering the solution.

Postman, and most of his leftist pop-culture-haters, apparently believe there had been a pre-TV golden age when everybody was a Serious Reader, every newspaper was a junior New York Times, and every magazine was a junior Atlantic Monthly.

Not so. Escapism has always been with us. We are a species that craves stories, pleasure, beauty, and diversion. Bradbury himself is an entertainer. (In the early ’50s he sold stories to EC Comics, whose Tales from the Crypt and other titles were denounced in the U.S. Congress as corrupters of innocent youth.)

And no, The Word isn’t in decline. We’re more dependent upon words than ever. Rather than dying, the book biz seems to be weathering the current fiscal storm better than the TV networks, and a lot better than the movie theater chains and the cable TV operators.

And those words aren’t always progressive or enlightening. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Jewish hoax that’s become recently popular among Islamic fundamentalists, is a book. The Bell Curve, a pile of pseudo-scientific gibberish intended as an excuse for anti-black racism, is a book.

Entertainment can give a context for ideas and propose a way of seeing the world. Few people knew this more fully than Francois Truffaut, who directed the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was a lifelong student and admirer of great films. He wrote elequently about how the perfect scene, or even the perfect single image, could immediately express whole ranges of thoughts and feelings.

The question should really be what contexts and worldviews emanate from the entertainments we’re being given. That’s what I hope to ask in Tacoma this Thursday. Hope you can attend.

This holiday season, you can give the special lady in your life a genuine Hello Kitty “shoulder massage” stick, which, the page linked herein notes, can also be used “for other purposes.”

…have a fish head and derive his powers from Kikkoman soy sauce? Watch this flash movie and see for yourself. (Found by Memepool.)

UNLIKE APPARENTLY MANY OF YOU, I still believe in reading local newspapers. Sure, the NY Times has lotsa pretty real-estate ads for fantasy palatial mansions, but there’s still tons to be said for reading up about your own place.

There’s also the fun tea-leaf-gazing ritual of discerning what gets into the paper and why. F’rinstance, the Sunday SeaTimes’s virulent anti-monorail editorial and the accompanying, heavily inane, editorial cartoon by the paper’s new staff art-hack Eric Devericks. Devericks, like his P-I counterpart David Horsey, can be sort-of amusing when attacking some targets, but astoundingly unfunny and uncreative when called upon to visualize an editorial stance dictated by the publisher, who in turn probably got his marching orders from the Downtown Seattle Association and/or Washington Alliance for Business.

In this case, Devericks’s drawing portrays a quartet (actual) nuts, spouting the anti-monorail campaign’s shameless distortions of the pro-monorail campaign’s arguments. Being mere nuts, they have no facial expressions or body language. There’s no personality, no artistry, not even any vitriol.

The Oregonian once had an even duller cartoonist, an old guy with the perfectly geezeroid name of Art Bimrose. His idea of illustrating an idea was invariably to depict a seersucker-suited guy pointing to a newspaper headline and either smiling or frowning.

But Bimrose was consistently dull, day after day. Horsey and Devericks are selectively mediocre. When they draw a dud, you can be fairly sure they’re following orders—even, just perhaps, attempting to sabotage their assigned opinions by depicting them as opinions with which only a witless geezer would agree.

Elsewhere in that same edition, human-interest columnist Jerry Large ran selected, edited letters responding to a prior piece of his, which pondered whether Seattle was a good place for African-Americans to move to.

Large cleverly didn’t ask whether the town was merely “tolerant of diversity,” a phrase which usually refers to upscale white people’s images of their own smug perfection. No, Large wanted to hear from actual black people about their own actual experiences across the whole spectrum of life’s needs (love, career, family, community, finding a decent BBQ place, etc.).

Either by his own drive to be fair-n’-balanced or by his editors’ wish to preserve the “tolerant” civic image, Large made sure to include several letters from people who liked it here. These letters tended to list safe, “tolerance”-type reasons. The negative letters were more passionate. Their arguments tended toward a few main areas:

• The “this town completely sucks, man” argument I often hear from white art-hacks, and which I’ve attempted to refute prevously;
• the “where’s the rest of me?” argument, bemoaning the relative paucity of Af-Am individuals and related community institutions in a town with more Asians than blacks; and
• the “what tolerance?” argument, referencing icy social receptions, public stares, and racist remarks. (Trigger-happy cops weren’t mentioned in the letters Large chose to print.)

In my prior refutation of white “this town sucks” whiners, I’d said Seattle indeed is a real city, with lots to offer. But it’d have even more to offer with more Af-Ams around, what with all their immeasurable-contributions-to-the-American-milieu etc. etc.

For those Af-Ams reading this (and I know at least a few are), please consider becoming part of our city. We’re northern but not freezingly so. We’ve only got two or three indirect-race-baiting politicians, none of whom currently hold elective office. We’re awfully white, but not in a Boondocks extreme. You can find hiphop recordings here (though it is easier to find stores selling obscure German techno CDs). We’ve got our gosh-durn own African Heritage festivals, breakdancing contests, and typo-abundant black newspapers. While our local economy’s become the nation’s worst, there’s a new source of minority venture capital in the form of families who sold their city houses to rich white people at the peak of the market.

And all my dorky white brethern & cistern can do more to be fully welcoming toward (not just “tolerant” of) these neighbors. A good place to start is to start realizing black people aren’t always like what white people think they’re like (so leave those stereotypes behind). If you’re an employer, start hiring some (and not just as janitors and receptionists). And don’t think you’ll automatically become their friend if you start acting like some dorky white person pretending to be black. Just be the most honest, life-loving, gracious dorky white person you can be.

…you know I love old magazine ads. Here’s a UK art-school site with scores of them, each representing a concept that’s hard to visualize. Painters, illustrators and cartoonists should pay particular attention to the lessons herein.

…has taken old WWII domestic-propaganda posters and added new texts to create some scathing anti-Bush satires. (Warning: The site is on one of those free servers with a daily hit quota, so you might have to access it early in the day.)