via archive.org

• The collected entries of a New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest entrant who always enters the same caption: “Christ, what an asshole.”
• Seahawks fans still love their team after that last-minute win that turned into a last-half-minute loss, and rightfully so.
• First United Methodist Church, which sold its landmark downtown building to speculators, was and is a “welcoming congregation” (i.e. they like the gays). City Church, which just moved into the Methodists’ ex-building: not so much.
• Can any old buildings in South Lake Union be saved from high-rises?
• What would/will rising sea levels due to Seattle? Let’s just say you can make that down payment on waterfront property in High Point.
• Booze at the movies: because theater audiences just aren’t noisy enough.
• The American software mogul who was (and still is) wanted by police in connection to a Belize murder investigation has surfaced in Portland.
• It turns out Lance Armstrong’s cancer charity was less about research and more about raising money to raise money, and to promote Armstrong’s own celebrity. (I.e., just like “Komen for the Cure.”)
• Speaking of which, Texas Monthly magazine gave Armstrong a “Bum Steer Award.” This is an annual “honor” bestowed by the mag since 2001, and is not a snarky comment on Armstrong’s anatomical condition.
• More U.S. troops kill themselves than are being killed in combat.
• A top legislative priority in states with Republican-monopoly governments: making those states’ tax systems as unfair as they can.
• And in case you missed (trucked-in) “Snow Day” at Seattle Center, here come the pix.

seattlerex.com

via jim linderman on tumblr

• Dear Bellevue Police: People have sex. Sometimes the people who have sex are co-workers. Deal with it.
• You missed the suddenly announced closing night at Cafe Venus and the Mars Bar. It’s been around at least 16 years (the space, in a lovely old Eastlake Ave. apartment building, was the Storeroom Tavern previously). It hosted countless bands. It was cooler than all get out. Its status has been in doubt, like the statuses of so many cool spaces, for several years now.
• C.B. Hall at Crosscut reminds us that real “bus rapid transit” isn’t like Metro’s “RapidRide.” The real thing has its own lanes, for one thing.
• The Seattle Times couldn’t possibly be buying Seattle Weekly. That makes about as much sense as HP buying Compaq (oh wait, that actually happened).
• Shelby Scates, 1932-2013: It’s not just that we’re losing some of the great local journalists of our time, but that there’s no means to develop worthy successors.
• A 2007 anti-Iraq-war protest at the Port of Tacoma led to six arrests. Now the case is finally going to court.
• As the Legislative session nears, Brendan Williams at Publicola pleads for state Democrats to stop talking like diluted Republicans.
• We’re Number Five! (In terms of lousy traffic.)
• How did Vancouver’s economy do during the soon-to-end Hockey Lockout II? Not that badly.
• Newsweek refugee Andrew Sullivan’s new site won’t have ads. P-I refugee Monika Guzman agrees with the strategy. Guzman claims online ads earn too little money these days, and many sites that try too hard to attract ad revenue turn into useless “click whores.” But the problem then becomes attracting enough readers who like you enough to support your site by other means (pledge drives, merch/book sales, etc.).
• Hamilton Nolan at Gawker insists that real journalism means writing about someone(s) other than your own narcissistic self.
• “Intercity bus and rail ridership up, as car and air travel remain flat.”
• Folks luuuvvv those big online college courses. As long as they don’t have to pay for ’em.
• Frank Schaeffer isn’t the first pundit to note the geographical coincidence between today’s “red states” and yesteryear’s “slave states.” Nor will be be the last.
• In Iceland, like in France at one time, kids can only be named from names on an approved list. One 15-year-old girl is trying to fight that.
• The college football post-season was mostly a dud. But here’s one “highlight.” It’s the weird one-point safety Kansas State committed after blocking an Oregon point-after-touchdown.

via nutshell movies

For the 27th consecutive year (really!), we proudly present the MISCmedia In/Out List, the most venerable and only accurate list of its kind in the known English-speaking world.

As always, this is a prediction of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming year, not necessarily what’s hot and not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some Hostess Brands stock to sell you.

There was a spot on lower Fourth Avenue downtown on Sunday afternoon where the cheers from the gay marriage celebrants at City Hall and the cheers from the Seahawks fans in CenturyLink field were equally loud. And, with the Seahawks game a total rout, the cheers from both sources were about as frequent.

The City Hall scene was a big, one-time-only, spectacle of civic self-congratulation (the sort of thing Seattle does as often and as chest-thumpingly as possible).

But at the heart of this circus were the 137 couples who were legally wed, at five different chapels set up in the building, by a corps of judges working off the clock for free (including the aptly named Judge Mary Yu). Only the couples and their immediate guests were let inside the building.

Then the couples all got to descend the big exterior stairs and be congratulated with cheers, signs, and music.

Where there are mass weddings, there will be mass receptions. One was held at the Q bar on Broadway. Another was at the Paramount. The latter had its main floor all in flat seatless mode, with tables and tablecloths, and complimentary cupcakes and candies and wine and cider, all donated by local merchants.

Then the celebrity well wishers came on stage. Singer Mary Lambert, then Mayor McGinn, then State Sen. Ed Murray and fiancee (left).

A singer named Chocolate came on to sing a dutifully soulful rendition of “At Last,” leading the ceremonial “first dance” for all the couples.

At this time of year, when superficial wishes of love and joy are repeated to the point of meaninglessness, let us all heed the example of these couples, all all their gay and straight supporters who worked to make this happen, and to all before them who strove to have their love officially recognized in this way, and all who will marry (or simply know they can) in the days and years to come.

steven h. robinson, shorelineareanews.com

• After 82 years, Parker’s Ballroom on Aurora in Shoreline was demolished this month. Also known over the years as the Aquarius Tavern and Parker’s Casino, it originally opened as a naughty out-of-town “roadhouse” on the then-new highway from Seattle to Everett. The 20,000 square foot room (with no supporting posts inside) was a rollicking big-band venue during the swing years, then a major rock club hosting everyone from the Fabulous Wailers and the Sonics to Heart. It was a cardroom and sports bar most recently, closing earlier this year. If any attempt was made to save it, I haven’t heard of it. The site’s rumored next use: a car lot.
• KPTK-AM, aka “Seattle’s Progressive Talk AM 1090,” goes off the air the day after New Year’s. The station’s owned by the CBS Radio Stations Group. CBS has its own sports talk network in the works, and is “flipping” many of its AM outlets to make room for it. There’s already a “Save Progressive Talk” page on Facebook.
• SeattlePI.com Shrinkage Watch: Amy Rolph, most recent curator of the site’s “Big Blog,” is quitting to take an editorial post at MSN.com. PI.com still hasn’t replaced the last five people who left.
• The Lava Lounge, Belltown’s hip hangout bar since ’95, might or might not be sold within the next month or so, and might or might not be closing shortly after that.
• A homeless camp isn’t the place you want to be even when it’s not flooding.
• Hostess Update: Labor arbitration might save the venerable cake and bread maker as a going concern. Of course, that would leave the company’s “vulture capitalism” bosses in charge to keep increasing their own wages while cutting everyone else’s (and crippling the company’s ability to compete or even operate). However, a rival capital/buyout firm says it wants to take over Hostess, and keep its union workers.
• So let’s get this straight: Hope Solo, Olympic soccer star whose late dad often lived on the streets downtown, marries Jerramy Stevens, ex-UW and Seahawks football player with a history of sexual and other assault allegations—including a charge of domestic violence involving Solo herself. I’m not the only one hoping there’s no more drama in this story.
• The tiny town of Gold Bar, Snohomish County, may “disincorporate.”
• We now have the first vague idea what a new Sonics Arena might look like. It’ll look like a modern arena.
• Christy Wampole submitted an NY Times essay about “How to Live Without Irony.” Only she seems to completely misunderstand what irony even is. I could call that ironic but won’t.
• Sure enough, as soon as I plug one Kickstarter fundraiser on this site, I get folks asking me to plug their Kickstarter fundraisers also. This time, it’s a solo CD by venerable Red Dress singer Gary Minkler. He describes it as “contorted, gospel-rooted Americana (the broad definition), lyrically akin to American Modernist poetry sensibilities, shaped like cartoons but deadly serious.”
• Local web-comix legend The Oatmeal explains what “being a content creator” is like (well, other than the part where everyone wants you to do everything for free).

via movieline.com

The queen of Euro-softcore was no sexual “swinger” in real life. Instead, she preferred other earthly pleasures, such as the pleasures of cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco. The first destroyed her finances; the latter contributed to her final physical decline.

She appeared in dozens of films (including The Concorde: Airport ’79, Private Lessons, Madame Claude, Mata Hari, the 1981 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and particulalry Claude Charbol’s underrated Alice or the Last Escapade).

But she’ll be forever known for Emmanuelle. It played in Paris for 13 years. It still “inspires” in-name-only sequels and ripoffs.

There’s a key scene nobody remembers toward that film’s start. It’s when Emmanuelle is left alone in an idling car on the streets of Bangkok. Screaming child panhandlers surround the car and pound on the windows. Kristel looks like she wants to implode.

In this wordless throwaway scene, Kristel communicates that Emmanuelle is a creature of delicate tastes, with no patience for the harsh realities of the romantic places she visits.

via interestingengineering.com

• Circa 1833, one W.D. Kellogg published a lithograph entitled A Map of the Open Country of Woman’s Heart. It goes, as the hereby-linked article states, “from the mole traps in the Province of Deception, to the city of Moi-meme in the Land of Selfishness, to the Plains of Susceptibility in the Region of Sentimentality.” There’s no Aorta of Righteous Disgust, though. Speaking of which….
• Yep, it’s the meme of the day: “Binders Full of Women.”
• You’ve heard of wanted criminals (and debtors) getting caught via phony contests and giveaways. But a chewing-gum survey?
• The debut of Microsoft’s “Surface” tablet computer mark’s the company’s biggest effort yet to take control of its own destiny, away from the desktop/laptop PC makers. However, it doesn’t mean they’re actually making the things themselves. Speaking of which….
• A Shanghai newspaper got a guy in to work as a Foxconn factory laborer. As it happened, he got onto the iPhone 5 assembly lines. Note: Most consumer electronics products today, no matter the brand, are made under similar conditions.
• Paul Buchheit at AlterNet lists “Five Ways Corporate Greed Is Bankrupting America.”
• The latest company to be bled to the point of death under Bain Capital (which Mitt Romney’s “officially” not part of anymore): Clear Channel, the owner of too many hundreds of radio stations and employer and/or syndicator of most of the worst right-wing talkers.
• A class action lawsuit accuses Morgan Stanley of deliberately targeting Af-Am households for junk mortgages, believing them to be less knowledgable or to have less access to legal recourse.
• An ex-American Apparel store clerk talks low pay, long hours, and being expected to laugh at non-skinny women.
• Today’s teenage scare story is brought to you by vodka-soaked tampons.
• The Arizona National Guard and its recruiters hunted homeless people in Phoenix with paint guns, and bribed/pressured some of them (and some of their own female members) to show their tits.
• A guy puts a song up on the digital music services. Some other guy “samples” the entire track, dubs a few bird-chirping sound effects onto it, puts it up on the same digital music services, and way outsells the original. The maker of the original gets perturbed.
• The ever-vigilant xkcd reminds you that every Presidential election has set one precedent or another (some more trivial than others).

via imdb

It’s 10/4, good buddy!

• T-Mobile merges with Metro PCS, avoids local layoffs, remains out of AT&T’s and Sprint’s clutches (for now).
• George Lakey explains how left-O-center folks have to get back on the offensive, and in the process get over “class tunnel vision.”
• The memoir of a former undercover teen booze buyer for the Liquor Board.
• The MTV website still discusses pop music, even though the MTV cable channels have abandoned it. And the site now proclaims that “Seattle Is the New Seattle.”
• The compact disc officially turns 30 this month. The first discs and players appeared in Japan in October 1982, but didn’t show up here until the next year. From that start, it took the CD only seven years to completely eradicate vinyl from mass-market music sales. Now the CD itself, and the whole industry of selling music recorded onto physical objects, is threatened with extinction. There’s a strong underground of vinyl-record advocates these days, but who will rise to defend the CD?
• We don’t have to cringe at the Mariners for another six months (not counting spring training games).

• The first Boeing 747, the plane that saved both its maker and the state’s economy from complete ruin, sits out in the outside elements, desperately needing restoration.
• One possible cause of the “West Seattle hum”: fish mating calls in the Stillaguamish.
• Hunger in Washington increased more during the recession than it did in most every other state.
• How’s private liquor sales turning out? Higher prices, smaller selections, more “moms” buying the hard stuff.
• Teamsters may strike against a wholesaler of organic produce.
• Washington’s most ethnically diverse place: Tukwila.
• Eric Scigliano claims local leaders push for “trophy rail” projects, even when plain ol’ buses would be more cost effective.
• Appropriately enough for what was founded as a railroad town, a “crazy person” and self-promoter named George Francis Train has a big role in Tacoma’s history.
• Professional right-wing initiative maestro Tim Eyman might have broken the rules by moving money around between two of his concurrent campaigns.
• Rachel Maddow believes Mitt Romney’s currently slim chances could be doomed by a far-right third-party candidate, who’s on the ballot only in Virginia.
• A 71-year-old man asked Romney about Social Security. Romney’s security squad forced him to the ground. Romney joked about hoping the man had taken his blood pressure meds.
• Laurence Lewis at Daily Kos warns that as the Republican base gets ever smaller and more X-treme, they’ll get ever more ugly and desperate:

Their last and only hope is that they can buy a last election or two, and encode into law, and legislate from the bench into the Constitution, an end to democracy itself.

• King Crimson legend (and a man sometimes billed as the “smartest person in music”) Robert Fripp says he’s retiring from the music biz.

• Clint Eastwood’s invisible-Obama-in-a-chair stunt took place during the 60th anniversary week of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s allegorical novel about the black struggle in the face of social “invisibility.”
• Robert Reich’s message for an election-year Labor Day: “It’s the inequality, stupid.”
• Romney’s “533 lies in 30 weeks:” Now THAT’s an achievement!
• One of our favorite watering holes and DJ clubs, Olive Way’s The Living Room, is no longer living.
• There’s a “Seattle” restaurant (really on Bainbridge) with a most un-NorWestern strict reservations policy.
• The anti-gay-marriage campaign is engaging in potentially illegal fundraising solicitations toward area churches.
• An abandoned Ballard church that became an art gallery briefly in 2009 is now set to be razed for townhomes.
• The author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull almost got his own wings when his small plane crashed in the San Juans.
• An outfit that ran some of those big motivational seminars (that were really fronts for selling questionable investment schemes) has collapsed.
• Faye Anderson, 1950-2012: The owner of the New Orleans restaurant/bar in Pioneer Square hosted, and supported, jazz and other musics for more than a quarter century. Whether the club will survive is for her heirs to announce, and they haven’t yet.
• Hal David, 1921-2012: The acclaimed lyricist was already pushing 40 when he first teamed up with composer Burt Bacharach. For 14 years they (with singer Dionne Warwick as their mouthpiece) were an unstoppable team, with David’s deceptively simple wordplay leading listeners through Bacharach’s often complicated melodies, until the musical version of Lost Horizon blew up in their faces. What the world needs now is more expressive minds like him (and love, of course).
• As all good NorWesterners know, it doesn’t really rain here more than other parts of the U.S. Especially not in the past 42 days (and 42 nights).

Today’s historic-preservation outrage involves the Jefferson Park Golf Course clubhouse. It’s a magnificent structure, “homey” yet elegant, that’s served city residents for more than 75 years. The City wants to raze it to put up a new driving range. It’s rushing through a plan to deny landmark status to the building, in cahoots with the architects that are planning the redevelopment scheme.

• This week, the southeast corner of the United States has been hammered by a massive destructive force of nature, devastating the people and the land with its wind and fury. There’s also a tropical storm.
• A deaf woman in Tacoma was arrested for a crime she was really the victim of. She was tasered and held for 60 hours without access to an interpreter. She’s now got a global support network.
• The stretch road in front of the J.P. Patches statue in Fremont may get the honorary second name of “J.P. Patches Place.”
• Dan Froomkin doesn’t want more jobs. He wants more decent-paying jobs than today’s corporate sector seems willing to provide.
• As Seattle’s libraries and their patrons endure their fourth annual end-o’-summer closed week, the son of an ex-Seattle Public Library bigwig believes libraries need to reinvent themselves by ditching those dumb ol’ books, or at least stuffing them in some inaccessible-by-the-public storage facility. Uh, thanks but no thanks.
• Meanwhile, the volunteer-run “People’s Library” at 23rd and Yesler plans to remain open after the city libraries reopen, at least through the end of this month.
• Pierce Transit, already socked by over-dependence on local sales tax revenue, could face potential total shutdown (or something close to it) if a tax increase measure doesn’t pass.
• An extreme-right-wing militia cult wanted to bomb a Wash. state dam and poison the state’s apple crop.
• Higher prices, less selection. Isn’t liquor privatization wonderful?
• In the no-rules/new-rules world of self-e-publishing, you can get your book all the rave reviews it needs, and for a reasonable price.
• Bill Nye, who’s usually right about these things, proclaims that creationist fantasy is not healthy for children and other living things.

1931 soviet book jacket; new york public library via allmyeyes.blogspot.com

• Love old timey design elements in photography, fashion, furnishings, books, posters, ads, packaging, and everywhere else? Then you’ll love Linda Eckstein’s fastidiously curated site All My Eyes.
• Conversely, Angela Riechers at Print magazine’s site disdains all this obsessive old-schooling. Riechers claims the world of graphic design, and perhaps the world as a whole, is becoming infested with “toxic nostalgia.” Among the symptoms she sites is Churchkey, the Seattle microbrew beer that comes only in cans that require an opener.
• Amazon’s sales rose 29 percent over the same quarter last year. But the company reported almost no profits, thanks to big investments in robotic warehouse systems. (Remember what we always say when robots are in the news: “Nothing can possibly go wrong….”)
• David Brewster found someone to take over management of the local-punditry site Crosscut. He’s a longtime functionary at the Gates Foundation. Let’s see how well he can transition from a nonprofit that doesn’t have to raise money, to one that needs to do a lot of that and soon.
• At the end of a long rant, Paul Constant describes Mitt Romney as:

A cowering man in a suit on the screen, waving his hands in front of his face and begging Robocop not to kill him for profiting, for draining the United States dry and exploiting the pain and hard work of others, for doing what businessmen do.

• Meanwhile, Devin Faraci at something called Badass Digest describes The Dark Knight Rises as feeling “like it is composed entirely of knee-jerk conservative nonsense.”
• A (non-cable-dependent) TV network tells you how you, too, can cut the cable.

This is the UW’s Lander Hall dormitory, where thousands of students over the past four-plus decades have slept, drank, toked, screwed, and even studied. It’s being razed this summer so the U can build a new (though not necessarily less ugly) residence-hall complex. It was really time for the building to come down. So much so, that a big slab of a concrete wall cracked off during demolition last Saturday. It crashed down on the closed cab of the excavator machine. The operator is still in the hospital.

• It’s garbage strike time, right during the dog-days-O-summer! “Oh it’s the moooost/stinkiest tiiiime/of the year….”
• We now know what will (partly) fill the old Borders Book site downtown. It’s Yard House, a Calif.-based bar and grill chain with one of those 100-plus-beer-tap bars.
• The ferry Kalakala’s current owner is suing the state. He claims they’ve unnecessarily impeded his efforts to restore the historic bucket-O-bolts.
• In one of its rare unsigned editorials, the Stranger gives some darned lucid reasons for supporting the Sonics arena scheme.
• Defenders of Chick-Fil-A’s homo-hatin’ include ex-Sen. Rick Santorum and a fictional teenage girl, invented by the fast food chain’s PR reps.
• Wednesday was the fourth straight night of police brutality-inspired protests in Anaheim CA. It’s become a cycle. Every police over-reaction leads to protests, that become targeted with another wave of over-reaction.
• NPR talks to a guy who claims to know “how to manipulate people to say ‘yes.’” Yes, the story mentions how these techniques might show up on a future pledge drive.
• Google may be cracking down on sites that use “search engine optimization” tricks to manipulate their way to the top of the search rankings. That would be nice, since (as previously griped about here) so many of those sites turn out to be worthless arrays of bland, uninformative self-help texts.
• When Buckyballs are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally swallow tiny spherical magnets.

Cafe Racer was first opened by Kurt Geissel and then business partner Staci Dinehart in 2003, originally as the Lucky Dog Espresso.

First with Dinehart and then with longtime manager Ben Dean, Geissel built it into a place that was everything to many people—a coffeehouse, diner, bar, dual art-exhibition space (both permanent and rotating exhibits), eclectic live music venue, and gathering place for both Ravenna/Roosevelt area locals and for several citywide subcultures.

Geissel kept his outside day job all that time, pouring everything the cafe made back into it. It made the front page of the Sunday New York Times arts section for its Sunday all-ages improv-music shows, the “Racer Sessions.”

Some of the other people most responsible for Racer’s rise have included:

• Marlow Harris and Jo David (longtime arts-scene figures who curate the permanent exhibit of unfortunate amateur painting, the Official Bad Art Museum of Art),
• Jim Woodring (creator of the acclaimed graphic-novel series Frank; he led drawing classes at the cafe and cofounded its cartoonists’ peer group Friends of the Nib),
• Andrew Swanson (cofounder of the Racer Sessions),
• Leonard Meuse (the cafe’s chef, who kept a varied comfort food menu going in a too-small kitchen space), and
• Drew Keriakedes, aka Shmootzi the Clod (the round-earringed veteran of the local alt-circus and performance art scenes; he booked most of the musical acts at the cafe, and led its Thursday house band God’s Favorite Beefcake).

As you all know, Meuse and Keriakedes were at the cafe the morning of May 30, when a mentally unstable former customer came in and started shooting. He killed Keriakedes and three other people, and shot Meuse. He fled, shot and killed a woman outside Town Hall, took her car, and was finally found by police in West Seattle, where he fatally shot himself.

Geissel has said he was actually making more money with Racer closed, thanks to insurance. But friends and loyal customers pretty much demanded he reopen. After take a couple of weeks off to get his own head together, he and a crew of volunteers cleaned up and repainted the place and installed a new bar.

Reopening day was all hugs and smiles and closure. There seemed to be a collective sense, not of “normalcy” but of triumph. Meuse was working. Woodring was on hand.

So was Geissel, hauling in fresh supplies of hamburger buns and Tater Tots.

He’s said that not reopening would be letting “the bad” win. Bringing Cafe Racer back, he’s also said, was a process fed by “the tremendous love” expressed by everyone who’s frequented it.

(Cross-posted with City Living.)