(via Steve Mandich):

“Hey Clark -Steve here. Longtime reader, first time emailer.

So I’m flipping through the channels late Saturday night and at 1 a.m. this super-low budget, ‘Wayne’s World’-looking call-in show comes on channel 11 with two dudes talking about Rainier Beer. So I watch for a few minutes and then they flash this URL on the screen:

http://www.rememberrainier.com/

So I dial it up and it’s just a corporate website touting Rainier in Gen-X language with Seattle-based overtones – obviously the show is just an infomercial masquerading as a public-access quality show.

Rainier left Seattle for Olympia a few years ago, and then left Olympia for California not too long after that. So, for over a year now, ‘Rainier Beer’ is only brewed in Irwindale, CA (an LA suburb), and is just a subsidiary label of Miller or Stroh’s or some shit. [Ed. Note: It’s Pabst.] ‘Mountain Fresh’ my ass.

Just thought you’d be interested.”

Actually, I am interested. Pabst’s collection of brand names and wholesale contracts is currently up for sale. I’d love to see, or even help, some local consortium buy the Rainier and Oly brands, contract their production out to an underutilized microbrew facility in Wash. state, and thus bring our local heritage brews back home. Any takers?

…to Linda Dershang and the hard-workin’ gang at Linda’s Tavern on Pine. Hipster hangouts have notorious attrition rates, so the continued thriving of Linda’s is particularly praiseworthy.

My favorite personally-viewed events at Linda’s:

• The night the place was taken over by just laid-off Amazon.com workers, who cheerled the whole room into rousing chants of “FUCK AMAZON!”
• The cinema night on the back patio with Bette Davis’s evil-twin scenery-chompin’ performance in Dead Ringer.
• The election-night party for the sponsors of the first Monorail Initiative. For one brief shining moment, it looked as if the likes of Dick Falkenbury and Grant Cogswell really could change the world. And who knows, they still might.

Linda’s is also one of the last places where Cobain appeared in public, as you’re bound to hear next month as the media get ready to hype that, less happy ten-year anniversary.

MORE KUDOS are due-dos to Seattle Weekly, for Rick Anderson’s just-plain-lovely ode to that dying institution, the dive tavern.

BOWLING, BOOZE, and free WiFi–the three great tastes that taste great together! And they can all be found, perhaps exclusively in the world, at the lovely Leilani Lanes in north Greenwood.

That’s where I and over two dozen others were on Wednesday night, for a webloggers’ bowling party.

Pictured above, none other than our Confounded Books pal Brad Beshaw. He wasn’t in our group, but just happened to be at the alley the same night.

Besides knockin’ the ol’ pins down, many of us played the Dance Dance Revolution game. Pictured above, “TYD” and Anita Rowland.

FOR MEN, the “Boobie Flask” (a real invention, soon to be for sale online) combines two (or should that be three?) of the all-time great objects of desire. For women, the liquid-fillable bra’s an opportunity to sneak some of the strong stuff into football games (or movie theaters, or business meetings). Its female inventor probably wouldn’t mind if you made up your own “nip” puns.

…in an essay about today’s global/corporate elite, suggests British Prime Minister John Major would likely feel more comfortable in a Seattle wine bar than among the everyday citizens of his own country.

Back in ’98, the Redmond-based Orca Beverage started bottling cream soda and cherry cola under the brand name Moxie, originally the name of a “nerve food” elixir dating back to turn-of-the-century New England.

But now Orca’s added original Moxie to the lineup, as sold at Larry’s Markets and through the Seattle Beverage website.

I sipped it at Seattle Center on a 90-degree afternoon, and easily imagined myself back with the elegant ladies and gents seen strolling along old amusement-park midways in old Moxie ads. The stuff turns out to be a root beer-like concoction with a noticable twang and a modest but definite energy drink-like herbal kick. And like all Orca-bottled sodas, it’s made with real sugar and filled in real glass bottles. Astounding.

…The official beverage of summer romances.

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

NEAL POLLACK sez it’s way past time Americans started fighting for their right to party:

“These are tense times. People want to loosen the steam valve a little bit. They want to participate in culture outside of the jurisdiction of federal ‘morality’ educators. We don’t want the government telling us how to spend our free time, sussing out and prosecuting casual drug users and harassing nightclub owners. And for heaven’s sake, give the kids some condoms.

“Sex and drugs and live music make life great. These are the kinds of things that were outlawed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. If they can’t be legal and easy in America, then I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live in a place where drugs and sex are tolerated, where the government provides a sane level of social services, where religion isn’t always threatening to take over the state.”

I heartily concur.

Down with the Republican sex police AND the Democrat music censors!

Proponents of pot legalization should give up their pious guises, admit they’re really out to legalize recreational toking, and take pride in that.

We should allow and even endorse such wholesome frolics as the Fremont Parade nudists. Even set aside a clothing-optional public beach or two.

The Seattle City Council shouldn’t just approve bigger parking lots for strip clubs, it should dump its decade-long moratorium against licensing any new strip clubs.

Let’s fess up and admit our teens (and adults) are gonna be gettin’ it on w/one another, and prepare ’em for the potential physical (and psychological) consequences.

And consentin’ adults of whatever gender oughta be able to get it on w/other consentin’ adults of whatever gender, even for material gifts, as long as they don’t keep the neighbors awake at night.

Hedonistically-related activities that do impunge on the well-being of others, such as stinky meth labs that could explode and take out the whole block any day now, could still be prosecuted under those reasons.

Heck, I’d even lower the drinking age a year or two, under certain circumstances and with certain driving-related caveats.

There. Now I’ve gone and ruined any chance of ever getting elected to the U.S. Senate.

Unless a bunch of us go out and do what Pollack asks–form a “Party Party” built around the right to live our own lives our own way.

As I’ve written in the past, Seattle’s civic history has always involved the dichotomy between sober civic-building and boistrous partying-for-fun-and-profit. (Frenchie theorist Jean Baudrillard would call it “production” vs. “seduction.”) The past decade of the hi-tech boom saw great public and private investment in the “production” half of the equation, but all that remains standing from much of that are monuments to the bureaucrat-acceptable parts of the “seduction” industries–sports and recreation sites, big comfy homes, museums, and performing-arts palaces. The newest of these, McCaw Hall (the revamped Opera House), has its open house this Sunday. (Yes, it’s a theater named for a family whose fortune was made in that bane of theater operators everywhere, cell phones.)

Las Vegas is realizing the economic value of fun. It’s time our regional (and national) leaders did likewise, or got replaced with other leaders who do.

(PS: I know the cyber-Libertarians would insist to me that they fully support the right to party. Alas, some of these dudes also support the right to pollute, the right to discriminate, the right to pay shit wages, and the right to bust unions.)

(PPS: Ex-Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg discusses some of this in his new book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Goldberg makes the supposedly provocative, but actually common-sensical, point that the Demos can’t successfully court what used to be known as “the youth vote” if they’re sucking up to censors and wallowing in baby-boomer bias.)

…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.

The Bon Marche, which hasn’t really been locally owned since the previous Great Depression but is still thought of as a Northwest institution, is having the “Macy’s” brand stuck onto its name by the parent company. Some think it’s a first step into merging the whole Bon operation into the Macy’s bureaucracy; eliminating local buyers, local ad designers, etc. That would be a stupid business move, but it also wouldn’t be a surprising move in today’s consolidation-mania.

DUMBER NEWS: The current Great Depression II is taking its toll on another Seattle favorite. Sorry Charlie’s restaurant and piano bar on lower Queen Anne just might close next month. Truly great cities are not merely made of penne pollo and baba gnoush, but on slippery omelets and 6-9 a.m. happy hours and sad-faced crooners leading besotted adults in one more round of “Volare.”

WE DON’T KNOW WHO MADE IT, but here’s a hilariously intoxicating Gulf War 2 Drinking Game:

drink when:

• bush is called a crusader
  x2 if its by saddam
• saddam is called evil
  x2 if its by bush
• iraq troops surrender to the media
  x2 if to a unmanned vehicle or inanimate object
• a member of the media gets shot at
  a toast to the shooter if its ashleigh banfield (msnbc), geraldo riviera (fox) or arron brown (cnn)
• the united states terrorist threat level changes
• the united states government tries to link iraq to 9-11
• someone implies tony blair is bush’s bitch
• someone implies scott ritter is Saddam’s bitch
• anybody ‘warns’ anybody
• the word “escalation” is used
• the media compares the war to blackhawk down
  x2 if its because a blackhawk really goes down
• a puppet government is installed in iraq
  x2 if its by the puppet government installed in the US

…in the piece below, here’s a guy who wonders whether Bush, an admitted former “heavy drinker,” fits the personality profile known in AA groups as that of a “dry drunk.”

…one you can only play once a year. It involves the Oregon State-USC football game. There’s only one rule: Down your drink whenever an announcer says anything to the efffect of “the Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”