It’s the madcap return of the MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got a great house for sale at its 2007 price.

Hooters just opened in South Park, the first national chain restaurant in that defiantly unchained pocket neighborhood.

(Update 10/11/09: I got there today. It’s really in Boulevard Park, a tiny commercial strip separated from the South Park neighborhood by a lonely highway overpass. A McDonald’s already exists along this strip.)

I don’t particularly care for Hooters.

I really don’t care for essays that attack Hooters from the standpoint of simplistic gender-ideology, such as Lindy West’s piece in the Stranger.

On the other hand, I love the comment thread following West’s piece.

The commenters hit upon some important points West had elided past:

• Is Hooters’ food really any good? (Some say yes; others insist on the superiority of locally-owned hot wing emporia such as Wing Dome.)
• Is the “Hooters Girl” image demeaning to all women? (Some say yes; some say no; I say there’s no such thing as “all women.”)
• Is it wrong to use sex to sell stuff? (If so, many commenters note, the Stranger would be at least as guilty.)
• Are West and the Stranger contradicting their “sex positive” stance? (I say no, they’re simply overriding it with a stance that’s even more vital to “alt” culture—the stance of sneering at anything to do with “the wrong kind of white people”.)

West, most of the commenters, and I agree on one point—the Hooters Girl look (apparently inspired by the sorority-slut uniforms in the 1979 sexploitation film H.O.T.S.) is, to all of us, decidedly unsexy.

And the whole Hooters aesthetic/experience conjures association with/nostalgia for fraternity-sorority bonding, but is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-education. The apparent ideal Hooters customer is an adult who went to college but didn’t learn anything.

The Wall St. Journal now has a slick “style” magazine supplement called WSJ. (Yes, the period is part of the name.)

Its fall cover depicts a gold-painted apple and the headline “Forbidden Fruit: Selling Luxury in the Age of Abstinence.”

Which is precisely what the section’s articles and advertisements proceed to do.

Page after page (88 in all) lauds the charms of gaudy wristwatches, private jets, Lincolns with “eco” features, fashions (including fur items), jewelry, wines, boots, hotels, purses, and accessories for rich white people of all adult ages and genders.

The cover, though, really says it all.

How do you sell things/services/experiences of little to no practical value, at a time when even CEOs pretend to be regular folks trudging through thes times like the rest of us?

By re-imaging them as icons of daring rebellion.

Be un-PC! Thrift, practicality—BORING! Show the petty little people of this world you don’t give a damn about them. Look as unashamedly silly as any “white gangsta” teen hanging in the malls.

I’M THINKING OF TURNING the print version of MISCmedia into something closer to a slick magazine, with prettier paper and a real cover and everything.

Three things are keeping me from making the jump:

1. The startup costs.

2. The time commitment involved (which is really an excuse for the emotional commitment involved).

3. The iffy current state of the magazine biz.

Specifically, there’s a glut of newsstand magazines out there. Publishers have tried to seek out every potentially lucrative demographic niche market, and have accordingly shipped hundreds of new titles in recent years.

We’ve previously mentioned such hi-profile attempts as Talk, George, Brill’s Content, O: The Oprah Magazine, those British-inspired “bloke” magazines such as Maxim, those corporate-warrior business magazines such as Fast Company, and those Helvetica-typefaced home-design magazines such as Wallpaper.

But that all’s just the proverbial flower of the weed.

The shelves of Steve’s Broadway News and the big-box bookstores are verily flooded with unauthorized Pokemon collector mags, kids’ versions of Sports Illustrated and Cosmopolitan, Internet magazines forever searching for excuses to put movie stars on the cover (“This celebrity has never actually used a computer, but somebody’s put up an unofficial fan site about her”), superstar-based music magazines, genre-based music magazines, fashion-lifestyle magazines, ethnic-lifestyle magazines, and “ground level” magazines a step or two up from zinehood (Rockrgrl, No Depression).

(Then there are all the ever-more-specialized sex mags, from Barely Legal to Over 50.)

In all, there are now over 5,200 newsstand-distributed titles big enough to be tracked by trade associations. (That figure doesn’t include many ground-level titles. It also doesn’t include most comic-book titles, which these days are sold in specialty stores with their own distribution networks. It does include many regional and city magazines that don’t try to be sold everywhere.)

The good news about this is that it proves folks are indeed reading these days, no matter what the elitist pundits rant about our supposed post-literate society. Or, at least, that the media conglomerates are willing to place big investment bets that folks are still reading.

And it means a lot of writers and editors (even mediocre ones) have gotten work.

The bad news is it can’t last. Literally, there’s no place to put them all. Not even in the big-box stores.

Even the ones that make it into enough outlets can’t all attract attention through the clutter. Some big wholesalers now find only 33 to 36 percent of the copies they ship out actually sell through to consumers. The rest are shipped back to warehouses, stripped of their covers (which go back to the publishers for accounting purposes), and either recycled or incinerated.

One industry analyst estimates more than half the newsstand mags out there now will be gone within a year.

Granted, there are still enough startups in the pipeline that the net reduction will likely be smaller than that.

And many, many of these threatened titles won’t be missed much, maybe not even by those who work on them. (Though I could be wrong; perhaps in 2002 there will be eBay auctions for scarce old copies of Joe or Women’s Sports & Fitness).

So where will all the thousands of potentially soon-to-be-jobless word and image manipulators go?

Barring a sudden revival of commercial “content” websites (now intensely disliked by investors), a lot of them might end up trolling the streets of New York and other cities, trying to round up nickel-and-dime investments from pals to start up their own publishing ventures.

Just like me.

TOMORROW: Men’s designer fashions become just as silly as women’s.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About”….
• Can the lowly banner ad be raised to the status of an art form? Should it?…

…rolls along, even into primary states. Elsewhere:

• Ron Sims would really like all King County agencies to solve socio-economic inequality. (Hey you: Stop scoffing. What if they could really do it?)
• A Seattle swimwear designer’s creations are featured in the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue; as are the (fully costumed) Seafair Pirates.
• Please: If you must steal porn, use BitTorrent, not armed robbery.
• Jones Soda becomes the official fizzy drink of Alaska Airlines.
• Old nudist magazines used to sport such wholesome titles as Sunshine & Health. Now, some doctors claim a lack of Vitamin D-bearing rays really could weaken us.
• Gay-bashing attacks on Capitol Hill—on the rise.
• State GOP boss Luke Esser: Playing favorites or just incompetent?
• More fun news from my ol’ hometown: America’s first tribal TV station, streaming online.
• And the TV/movie-biz writers’ strike is over. Now Leno can go back to having other people to blame for his lameness.

…could possibly resist the clarion call of Obamamania? Douglas County, that’s who.

In other nooze:

• As you probably don’t recall, the reason WashState has both caucuses and primaries is because Bush pere‘s people cried foul after Pat Robertson’s people swamped our ’88 GOP caucuses. This time, it’s Huckabee’s people crying foul.
• Your Museum of Flight: Singlehandedly bringing back the stewardess fetish.
• Note to KEXP main man John Richards: You can host a local Seattle show, or you can move to NYC. Choose one.
• Developers’ plans for the part of First United Methodist that won’t be saved: One of them angular, reflective glass towers you see in 60 Minutes segments about emerging Far Eastern capitals.
• Doesn’t anybody wanna buy Getty Images?
• Actual headline (for the print version of this story): “How far will Microsoft go to overcome Yahoo’s rejection?” Some handy tips: Chocolate, self-esteem classes, regular gym workouts, a ‘pity party’ with friends, a nice cry, then get on with your own life.

• The easy half of the equation has been solved, as Clay Bennett agrees to sell the Storm to owners who’ll keep the WNBA team here. The hard part, wresting the Sonics from his reverse-Midas-touch hands, now begins in earnest.
• Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess in the first place by selling the teams to Bennett is making new moves at his day job. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz has fired his CEO, retaking the reins himself. Can he return the coffee chain to its former fast-growin’ ways, in spite of all the obstacles? (Among the latter: espresso drinks coming to McDonald’s.)
• Some folks got pretty snow this morning; the heart of Seattle, again, didn’t. Damn.
• The Port of Seattle’s fiscal shenanigans will be investigated by the Feds.
• House prices finally begin to go down in the area. (Insert your own “going down” joke here.) Still, local biz leaders insist it’s not that drastic really. Meanwhile, developers who’d planned to condo-convert Seattle’s historic Smith Tower are scaling back their plans; now only the top 12 stories will be converted.
• My second-ever adult job (such as it was), the student newspaper Polaris at North Seattle Community College, is a goner.
• Blacks are more likely than whites to get busted for having or smoking pot, even though that’s now the city’s official lowest law enforcement priority.
• In more positive law-related news, “serious crime” (as the FBI defines it) is way down in western Washington’s cities these days. That, alone, won’t stop the media from exploiting the occasional random shooting, or stop the talk-radio nebbishes from preaching the city=danger, suburbs=serenity meme.
• An election year’s underway. You can tell because a politician, in this case Gov. Gregoire, is trying to generate headlines on the get-tougher-on-drunk-drivers line, the encroaching-surveillance-state issue on which no one dares to disagree.
• Woodland Park Zoo tries again to make its own cute li’l baby elephant.
• The men’s fashion headline of the year is “Return to Elegance.” Just as it’s been every year since at least 1978.
• 12,000 people in Idaho lost electricity due to a stray cat wandering through a substation. Brian Setzer remains at large.
• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their cablecasts, just in time to give writerless jokes about the New Hampshire primary.

…has a sincere, heartfelt, kitsch-free memorial to Anna Nicole Smith.

If you’re expecting a comment about how rich people with media-proclaimed perfect bodies can have tragic personal lives, you won’t get one here.

…officially begins tonight. Here’s some of the costumes I’m fully expecting to see along the party/club circuit these next five days:

• Curious George.
• Incurious George.
• Mark Foley and a Congressional page.
• A Brokeback Mountain couple with Bush and your least favorite Republican politician (yes, including Joe Lieberman and Tony Blair).
• A politicial “attack ad.”
• A Seattle Times vending box attacking a Seattle P-I vending box.
• A Super Bowl referee.
• Matt Hasselbeck on crutches.
• An Oklahoma Sonic.
• Howie Mandel and the Deal Or No Deal models, with metal briefcases.
• A celebrity baby.
• An adopted celebrity baby.
• Dr. House.
• Marie Antoinette.
• Samuel L. Jackson covered in rubber snakes.
• A dissected human body.
• A “cylon” from the new Batlestar Galactica.

UK soldiers will be equipped with “strap-on bat wings.”

…is upon us. Because a lot of people don’t want to party on the real night, a Monday, parties will go on all weekend. And, as usual, I need you to be my eyes-n’-ears. Give me your scene reports; upload your digital pix.

Here are some of the costumes I’m hoping to see this year:

• The Desperate Housewives.
• The Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
• Martha Stewart with ankle bracelet.
• CNN anchorman Anderson Cooper in his Hurricane Katrina galoshes.
• A bird with the flu.
• Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.
• A Mardi Gras “Girl Gone Wild” in her Hurricane Katrina galoshes.
• The Corpse Bride.
• Indicted vice-presidential aide Scooter Libby.
• An off-the-wagon George W. Bush.
• The avenged ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson.
• Ex-FEMA director Michael Brown and ex-Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers rewriting their resumes.

…of the first moi-edited issue of the Belltown Messenger, here are some pix I took last Thursday at the second annual Fashion 1st Boutique Fashion Show. Some 100 models showed off the wares of 16 area boutiques, most of them in Belltown.

Tom Douglas’s Palace Ballroom banquet facility was packed to the walls with an almost all-female audience. The event’s advertised hours were 6 to 9. The first two of those hours were devoted to drinking and schmoozing, before the runway saw any action.

Once the models started a-struttin’, they continued at a brisk, businesslike pace.

This model is selling Ottica eyewear. (What else?)

And here’s the organizer of this year’s event, Joan Kelly, with a spokesman from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which got a percentage of the $40 ticket price and the $120 “trash belts” being sold in the lobby. The event was dedicated to its first-year organizer, Jared Seegmiller, who’d died earlier this year after a brief bout with a rare form of heart cancer.

…since we’ve posted pix here. To atone, here are some acquaintances who held a li’l conceptual-art spectacle called The Brides of March last Saturday, in front of what you must still call “The Bon Marche,” or at least “The Store Formerly Known as the Bon Marche.”

Yes, I’m absolutely certain the Moore Theatre management knew what it was doing by this juxtaposition of posters in its box-office window.

This mullet obsession is annoying enough in places, such as Seattle, where it’s a retro-ironic fad. But in other places, such as this warehouse near the Everett commuter-train station, the metalhead hairstyle never went away.

Just a couple of guys in miniskirts and deliberately torn stockings, dancing to the Fame soundtrack on Broadway last week.

And to conclude for today, something we ran years ago, in a reader-submitted photo. Now we have our own visual document of the mighty MISC shipping line. This stoic cargo ship was seen docked at the Interbay grain terminal, wihch is now operated by the Louis-Dreyfus Corp., commodity merchants and traders since the 1850s. (You might have heard of a certain heiress to that family fortune.)

…faux leopard print vinyl jackets and your go-go boots, recharge your revolution-now attitude, and explore “The Women of 1970’s Punk.”