Tacoma’s own Ventures, kings of instro surf-pop lo all these years, have got their totally deserved berth in the Rock n’ Roll Hall O’ Fame.

• Also from T-Town, somebody wants to replace part of the historic ex-Heidelberg brewery with a hotel. Yep, preservationists don’t like the idea.
• Columbia Winery will move its winemaking and bottling operation from Woodinville to eastern Washington. Its retail and “hospitality” operations, which employ more people than its wine production does, will stay on this side of the mountains.
• And the old Olympia brewery might be “sold on the courthouse steps” if a bankruptcy trustee, representing the bottled-water venture that tried to buy it, can’t negotiate a sale.
• In allegedly healthier drinkies, a big Colorado agribiz operation has been selling “organic” milk in several states. Health-food advocates call foul, claiming the big agribiz operation’s breaking or bending the rules on what can be called organic.
• Mayor Nickels’s son Jacob was sentenced for his role in a casino scam operation. Insert your own “Nickels slots” joke here.
• As you might have already heard, twelve ex-Mariners are on the Mitchell Report list of baseballers who’ve allegedly used or trafficked in steroids. Meanwhile, P-I columnist Art Thiel compares the whole scandal to “a look through the keyhole at a ballroom full of elderly, naked dancers. Something exotic is going on, but exactly what isn’t clear, and few are in any trouble aside from embarrassment. At least the line for the keyhole is short.”
• A GOP state legislator from the Eastside decides he’d rather be a Democrat.
• Another urban church is thinking of selling its historic building. University Baptist, a local leader in diversity and social-justice causes for more than two decades, hasn’t decided what to do yet, but has decided to offer up the building and see what offers show up.
• Gov. Gregoire’s latest plan to end the worn-out-ferry-boat crisis: Build three new boats ASAP (insert newsreel footage of the Kaiser shipyards in WWII here), lease one boat from Pierce County immediately, and run special foot boats from Seattle to Pt. Townsend. (I’m holding a group excursion on one of these boats in the next week or two; keep watching this space for details.)
• Sound Transit showed off its plans for an elaborate University transit station. In keeping with the current UW pecking order, the light-rail stop would be close to the football stadium and the medical center, farther from the upper-campus liberal arts buildings.

• Seattle’s first snow scare of the season was, as I’d expected, a bust, but here comes another.
• What the P-I calls “affordable-housing developers” (what, you didn’t know there were any of those?) rant that the City of Seattle doesn’t provide enough zoning and other incentives to let ’em profitably build more units for folks closer to “median” income levels. Of course, with the few megarich driving “median” income levels ever higher, the definition of for-profit “affordable” housing inches further away from what working families can afford.
• Meanwhile, Bellevue officials ponder regulations to deal with suburban “megahomes” that flaunt their materialistic corpulence over their neighbors.
• The last of the four Pine-and-Belmont bars has closed prior to condos taking over the half-block. Manray’s demise ends a tradition that goes back nearly 20 years, when Squid Row took over what had been a dive-bar space called Glynn’s Cove. Squid Row begat Tugs Belmont, which begat Kincora. Then came Bimbo’s/Cha Cha, Manray, and the Bus Stop (which begat Pony). The strip’s demise got the expected long mega-coverage in The Stranger; the Cha Cha had been the longtime favorite watering hole of several Stranger staffers.
• The P-I catches on to a story first iterated a year or more, I believe, by the Weekly, that Costco treats its workers nicer than the Wall St. investment community thinks it should, resulting in greater sales and profits. Why, if word of this leaks out, the whole economic excuse for screwing the masses could collapse!
• You don’t have to go to Wash. DC to see Democrats cowering in submission. They’re right here, ramrodding an emergency session of the State Legislature to appease Tim Eyman.

Drew Carey was at the George & Dragon pub in Fremont on Monday afternoon.

During a typically packed UK soccer day (there was a satellite TV match showing between Arsenal and Reading), Carey showed up in a chauffeured minivan with a small entourage. He plugged his recent status as a goodwill ambassador for U.S. pro soccer (you know, that game where nothing’s made up and the points do matter). Specifically, Paul Allen and partners have recruited Carey as a minority investor in their Major League Soccer expansion team, to launch at Qwest Field in 2009. (Rumor has it that somebody else sought the franchise, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

Carey’s big promo point during the speech (which he repeated that night as a Monday Night Football booth guest): The team will offer “club memberships.” For a projected $100/year, hardcore fans will (1) get an exclusive package of merch, and (2) get to vote every few years or so about the team’s future, even getting to fire the general manager.

He also got in a well-received dig about how such a fan-empowerment schtick might have helped with “that basketball team you used to have.”

…Tabella is selling its space to Ballard’s Mars Hill Church. So, instead of drunken gay-bashers on Saturday nights, Western Avenue will have sober gay-denouncers on Sunday mornings. Yes, that’s an improvement.

IF ANYONE WAS AT the big and costly Hillary Clinton to-do in town Monday night, I’d love to hear about it. I do know the rightist protest scene outside Benaroya Hall wasn’t so big as it had been at her prior visits.

PARKING-LOT CZAR Joe Diamond may be dead, but he’s still a stern taskmaster. Diamond company officials earlier this month said they’d forbid tailgating parties before Seahawks football games on Diamond-owned lots. Now comes a revised edict: Go ahead and party, but don’t be seen with any booze.

SEATTLE’S MOST FAMOUS “We Never Close” restaurant is closed today. A chimney fire has shut down 13 Coins since about 4:30 a.m. Tuesday; it may reopen for tonight’s dinner shift.

IN VANISHING SEATTLE NEWS, the famous Wonder Bread neon sign will rise again, on the apartment building that’s replacing the former Central Area bakery site. Once again, the mark of wholesome blandness will draw motorists to what has traditionally been Seattle’s least whitebread neighborhood.

KUDOS TO 13-year-old Aaron Furrer of Monroe and his Guernsey heifer Dot for winning a big juniors-division prize at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WI. Buried deep in the hereby-linked article: Furrer’s family can no longer turn a profit on their 46-acre dairy farm; his dad now works as an electrical contractor just to hold on to the land.

OVERHYPED TRAGEDY OF THE DAY: “A jury Monday convicted a former stripper turned Olympia, Wash. soccer mom in the decade-old murder of her fiance. Mechele Linehan, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder for conspiring with another fiance to kill Kent Leppink, who was shot three times in 1996 near Hope, AK. Prosecutors say Linehan wanted Leppink’s $1 million insurance policy.”

IF YOU BELIEVE what you read in the papers (or on the papers’ web sites), Shirley McLaine says Dennis Kucinich once saw a UFO outside Graham, WA. Make up your own comment here.

One of Capitol Hill’s last unreformed dive bars is still awaiting all the permits to reopen on Olive Way, but might finally be speeding up from stopped to slow.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer 73-year-old unreconstructed dive bar. The U District’s legendary Blue Moon Tavern is finally getting a hard-liquor license after two years of battling city authorities, who’d tried to stop the bar from expanding beyond beer and wine. The Moon’s owners claimed the city was harassing ’em on behalf of upscale demographic cleansing. The city said the Moon didn’t deserve the higher-margin beverages because many of the bar’s patrons had been caught holding or trading in non-liquid mood-alterants. The state’s sided with the owners, who might begin mixing cocktails as soon as this weekend.

The amazing thing about him wasn’t that he became a “colorful local celebrity” as a lowly beer vendor in the old Kingdome. It was that he successfully capitalized on that fleeting celebrity. As a disc jockey on the old KXA-AM, he proved eminently capable of holding an audience’s attention with little screaming and no visible body language.

A Pew Research study claims today’s 18-25-year-olds are more tolerant and more Democratic-leaning than their elders, have more casual sex and binge drinking, and are more eager to make tons of money.

The former UW football star and early NFL great was best known locally for the namesake diner-bar he ran on Broadway for some 50 years. Generations of hipsters fondly recall Steele’s lovable but gruff presence behind the bar, ready at a moment’s notice to snipe at any young whippersnapper who dared to rest an elbow on a table.

…since a post to this site. What can I say except (1) I’m sorry, (2) I’ll try to do better, and (3) I’ve got some great print work I’ve been workin’ on that’s comin’ at ya real soon?

Meanwhile, our Capitol Hill Times friends have a full list of all the beer and wine products you can’t buy downtown anymore. Yet that abominable California product sold under the once-respectable Pabst name still remains freely available.

Autumnal conditions gracefully settled into the greater Seattle area on Tuesday, Sept. 12. We’re cloudy and cool once again, and will probably stay this way, more or less, for the next six months. I like it. If you don’t like it, here’s the URL for Florida real estate.

How high are fans’ expectations for the Seahawks? Let’s just say they’re undefeated, but not undefeated by enough.

And the UW Husky footballers are doing better than expected, having won two squeakers.

Roq La Rue’s Tiki Art Now 3 exhibit is still up. If you go this week, you’ll probably have a more pleasant viewing experience than was had by we who attended the packed-to-overflowing opening night.

I’m sending off the page proofs of my next book, Vanishing Seattle, to the publisher today. There’s only a slight chance copies will be available prior to Xmas; but you’ll still be able to preorder. If you do so through MISCmedia.com, you’ll get a truly lovely gift card to let your lucky recipient know of the memorable reading experience awaiting when their copy does arrive.

Excuse us if we’re not yet really impressed by the newly corporate-approved legal movie download hype. Even if one (1) of the services is Mac-friendly. At this point in time, those physical artifacts known as DVDs still provide greater selection, higher image quality, (usually) lower consumer costs, and fewer pesky rights-management shackles.

It looks like Seattle First United Methoidist Church may move to Belltown after all, even as its previously announced deal with developer Martin Selig goes pffft. Under the new deal, rival developer Nitze-Stagen will take over the church’s historic sanctuary for commercial uses, put an office tower on the rest of the church’s existing land, and help the church buy the Third and Battery site Selig was going to give away to it.

Tomorrow’s primary day here in WashState. I beg of you to all get out and defeat the far right’s highly funded drive to pack the state Supreme Court with anti-environmentalists.

…fortified wine or malt liquor in Belltown as of today. Now if they’d only ban PBR, I’d be happy…

So many Seattle institutions vanish all the time, one can’t keep up. Here are just a few of the more recent disappearances:

• The Jade Pagoda closes Thursday. Broadway’s last true dive bar, open since Repeal, makes way for the usual exciting new retail mixed use project blah-blah-blah. You were loved, you are still loved, you will always be loved.
• 
  Larry’s Markets disbanded. The six-unit supermarket chain, under Chapter 11 in recent months, is being sold off asset by asset. Two will become GI Joe’s sporting-goods stores. Three will go to other grocery operators, possibly Asian specialty chains. The lower Queen Anne store will be taken over by Metropolitan market (née Queen Anne Thriftway), but will keep the Larry’s name for perhaps a year, until the upper Queen Anne Metropolitan’s kicked out for a QFC-and-condo project.Larry’s didn’t pioneer the idea of a higher-price, gourmet-ized supermarket. But its huge stores took the concept to a new level. But then Whole Foods took the concept to still another level. Larry’s countered by emphasizing its everyday, regular-ol’-supermarket stuff as well as its 17 different kinds of cilantro. But it didn’t work, alas.
• 
  Rainier Hardware to be evicted from the Pike Place Market. The owners of downtown’s last hardware store wanted to keep going. But the Market’s jokingly-titled “Preservation and Development Authority” only saw the potential for big bucks from shucking a piece of the Market’s working-class heritage in favor of some high-rent upscale knick-knack boutique.
• 
  Pike Place Politics shuts down. It was one of the few truly comprehensive, truly independent, truly local political blogs. But Will, who ran it, apparently simply got tired of the legwork. As soon as he relinquished the subdomain name at blogspot.com, it was grabbed by someone offering video clips of animals fighting one another. Ah, gotta get those click-through ad links exposed somehow….

…to Drinking Liberally for some time now. You should too, if you’re in Seattle and over 21. (Actually, the Montlake Ale House does let underagers in before 9, so even undergrads can sit in on part of the Tuesday-evening confab.)

I often find myself out of the proverbial league with some of the talkers there. The event’s weekly regulars include some serious politics nerds, guys (and a few brave gals) who talk politics with the same degree of knowledge and enthusiasm with which other guys talk about sports and cars. It’s an astounding thing to see and hear, truly it is.

And it’s what the progressive movement, and the country as a whole, have long needed.

Since before my time, too much of “left” politics has been a big exercise in demographic segmentation (under the guise of “identity politics”), in which an insular subculture got to proclaim its righteous superiority through confrontative protests and oversimplistic us-vs.-them ideologies. The DL folks aren’t like that; well at least not mostly. Instead, they parse, they research, they study. They enthusiastically follow the early returns on out-of-state primary races. They embrace politics as the world’s biggest “massively multi-user” computer game, albeit one with real winners/losers and real heroes/villains.

This particular kind of passion, a passion for the complex mechanics of politics instead of base-emotional posturing, means a lotta liberals are finally, FINALLY getting serious about long-term progress, about winning not just elections but also the hearts-‘n-minds of the populace.

It also means you’d better get ready for some serious fireworks this fall.

…that U District hangout for construction workers, filmmakers, and guys who can’t stop talking about how radical they used to be 40 years ago, is threatened again. Its owner Gustav Hellthaler has gotten tired of
municipal harassment and of the state’s refusal to let him add hard booze, a right that’s been granted to almost all former beer-and-wine-only bars in town.

So the joint, one of the few bars in town in continuous operation since the end of Prohibition, is for sale.

It could be bought by someone who’d turn it into an upscale gourmet restaurant.

It could be bought by someone who’d turn it into an unthreatening nostalgia theme bar.

Or it could be bought by one or more of the affluent boomers who frequent or used to frequent the place, and kept largely as-is.

Sleep. Take a staggering variety of cold/flu medications. Sleep. Refrain from eating, in whole or in part. Consume bag after bag of store-brand cough drops. Listen to people tell me everybody’s been getting this debilitating bug, whatever it is. Make bad puns about the bird flu (“Of course it did; it didn’t walk!”). Cough up substances you don’t want me to describe, in mass quantities. Skip out on about half a dozen meetups, parties, Belltown Messenger interviews, etc. Sleep. Briefly attend a Drinking Liberally meeting at which I hear King County Executive Ron Sims talk informally about tying in any KeyArena rebuild with a larger Seattle Center makeover (he gave no specific suggestions as to what he’d like to add or delete from the complex). Sleep.

While the world was passing me by, an odd li’l Stranger essay suggested we might as well go ahead and let the Seattle Post-Intelligencer die. I, of course, utterly disagree. Ideally, I’d like the P-I to come out of its joint operating agreement with the SeaTimes as a viable, fully-independent, full-size daily. If that can’t be achieved, there are other options for keeping Seattle a two-daily town:

• Keep the JOA more or less as it is. If this is even feasible now (the Times says it isn’t), it might not be in a few years, as the new electronic media continue to drain ad revenue away from ol’ newsprint.
• Turn the P-I into an online-only operation, as the Stranger piece suggested. Intriguing but ultimately insufficient. There’s still not enough money in Net ads to support a local, mass-market operation employing 100 or more full-time journalists. One day, the money might be there.
• Turn the P-I into a separately-run section within the Times, like the current three pages of P-I Focus within the Sunday Times. The Las Vegas JOA was renegotiated a few years back, turning the Las Vegas Sun into a six- to ten-page features section within each day’s Las Vegas Review-Journal. Such an insert section might include strictly local news, features, and opinion pieces; leaving the Times itself to run stock tables, weather, sports stats, TV listings, comics, puzzles, wire copy, and syndicated columns. Such a solution would keep the P-I‘s “voice” in the public eye, albeit as a “kept” dependent to the Times.
• Turn the P-I into a freebie tabloid, either within or outside of a JOA. Free mini-dailies began in Europe in the ’90s, and are now found in a handful of U.S. cities (NYC, Chicago, Frisco, DC, Philly). They tend to be scrawny li’l things, offering the same content as regular dailies but far less of each department.Still, they provide the best current hope for a rethinking of the whole newspaper concept. Today’s big-city dailies have the same content mix they had 50 years ago, only they’ve gotten duller. There’s no absolute reason why we still have to have full local, world, sports, business, and “living” sections in every paper. There’s no reason except tradition to still print stock prices, or for the comics page to be two dozen tiny, mostly unimaginative, gag strips.

As I’ve written a few times before, the prospect of a post-JOA P-I allows all of us news fans to imagine a new type of paper for a new century. Let’s keep the imagining going. If the P-I doesn’t morph into our brave new paper, let’s start it up ourselves.