MISC., THE COLUMN that likes to be dressed in tall, skinny type out here in the shade, welcomes the arrival of TicketMaster master Paul Allen to the Seahawks’ helm, tho’ it could mean a Kingdog might soon cost $2.75 plus a $10 convenience charge.

CORREC: Katrina Hellbusch, whose published first-person rape story was mentioned here last month, works in music promotion but isn’t in a band herself.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Grand Salami is a 12-page, slick-paper sports zine put out every Mariners homestand by Jon Wells and Mark Linn. Each ish features updated stats about the Ms and their upcoming home opponents. The next ish will have a cartoon of the editors’ choice for a new stadium–they want one built on top of the present Kingdome, with a AAA team playing in the old dome for quick player transfer. $1 at Bulldog News or outside the Dome before games, or $15/year at 328-1238. Speaking of running for home…

ON THE ROAD: Was amused by the minor brouhaha when a Seattle urban-advocacy group issued a report a few weeks back claiming you’re physically safer living in town than in suburbs, ’cause we might have a few more violent crimes but they’ve got a lot more car wrecks. The suburb-lovin’ Seattle Times found a UW traffic-engineering prof to call the study flawed. He claimed the report’s methodology was insufficiently documented, and questioned its choice of neighborhoods to compare–the gentrifying upper Queen Anne vs. the sprawling, insufficiently-roaded outskirts of Issaquah. While I can buy the validity of the prof’s hesitations, I also think the report’s premise is definitely worth further study ‘n’ thought. For too long, we’ve allowed “personal safety” to be defined by interests with a decided bias against cities and walking, for suburbs and driving. I know I personally feel more secure in almost any part of Seattle than in almost any part of Bellevue. Speaking of symbols of comfort…

THE GOLDEN BOWL: You already know I think cereal, that all-time “comfort food,” is one of America’s eight or nine greatest inventions. On those rare occasions when I neglect to eat prior to leaving home in the a.m., I always look for a place with cereal on the breakfast menu. (I’m allergic to eggs, so I have few other breakfast-out options.) I was pleased when the Gee Whiz espresso palace opened near the Weathered Wall on 5th, with a modest yet tasty selection of flakes, mini-wheats and Crunch Berries. Now I’m even more pleased ’cause the Red Light Lounge is now open at 47th & U Way (at the front of the New Store’s newest annex). In a setting of classic (and increasingly expensive) diner furnishings, it offers heaping helpings (not tiny single-serve boxes) of your choice from over 50 great cereals, in beautiful oversize bowls with beautiful oversize spoons. No cartoons to watch, but you do get to look at the latest fashion magazines while you enjoy a sugar-frosted treat those emaciated models must deny themselves. Speaking of fast food and gender roles…

WHAT’S YOUR BEEF?: At a time when Burger King and McDonald’s have simultaneous Disney promos, some burger chains are indeed trying to reach adult eaters (or at least arrested-post-adolescent eaters). An Advertising Age story reports how the Rally’s chain has a TV spot (running in about 30 percent of the country but nowhere near here) that opens with a shot of a pickup truck waiting at a traffic light. As the article relates, “A convertible pulls up with a guy driving and two beautiful babes aboard. `What’s he got that I ain’t got?’ the pickup driver says to his friend, who responds matter-of-factly, `he’s probably got a Big Buford.’ The driver stares downward in astonishment: `Look at the size of that thing!’ `We see the women in the car suggestively eating their giant Big Buford hamburgers. `You like ’em big, huh?’ the driver says to one of the women. `It’s not the size,’ she says coyly. `It’s the taste, stupid.'”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, ponder this from the late great Erma Bombeck: “Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.”

Welcome back to Misc., the local pop-culture column that tried to follow its bliss, until its bliss filed a restraining order against it.

WHERE THEY ARE NOW: Ross Shafer was poised to make it big in 1988 when he quit as the original host of KING’s Almost Live to star in the final post-Joan Rivers version of the Fox Late Show. His career since then has been one pathetic comeback try after another. Now he’s shamelessly ripping off the “Guy” comedy of Tim Allen, Jeff Foxworthy, and Red Green. He’s showing up on celebrity talk shows in overalls and no shirt to promote a “humor” book, Cook Like a Stud. You can imagine the routine, wreaking creaky gags out of the use of shot glasses as measuring spoons, claw hammers as meat tenderizers, and hubcaps as baking sheets.

WHERE THEY WERE THEN: Some of you may recall Marni Nixon as the singing hostess of KOMO’s late-’70s puppet showBoomerang. A few of you might also know the Seattle-native Nixon had a studio-singing career in the ’50s and ’60s before she returned home. She was perhaps the most famous “unknown” in Hollywood, the real soundtrack singer in such musical hits as Gigi, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and My Fair Lady. But few know her connection to that more-popular-now-than-ever master of space age pop, Juan Garcia Esquivel. In the liner notes to the recent CD compilation Music From a Sparkling Planet, vocal director Randy Van Horne credits Nixon as a session singer on Esquivel’s first U.S.-made LP, Other Worlds, Other Sounds (1958). Somehow, the vision of the perky, homey Nixon of Boomerang shrieking “Pow!” and “Zu-Zu-Zu!” seems oddly satisfying.

ANOTHER KIND OF PAY TV: The Seattle area’s getting an all-new TV station for the first time in 12 years, but don’t look for it to have any shows between its commercials. A Minneapolis company called ValueVision, partly owned by Montgomery Ward, is planning to launch an all-new UHF TV station in Tacoma (tentative call letters: KBGE). Actually, the broadcast transmitter’s just a loss-leader (at a reported cost of $4.6 million); they’re going on the air in order to force their home-shopping informercials onto local cable systems, thanks to an FCC rule requiring cable systems to carry all local over-the-air channels.

WHAT’S IN STORE: Vintage clothing was considered the latest “hot” thing in some circles, even before KING-TV heard of Cocktail Nation. And where there’s hype, money invariably follows. So it should come as no surprise that corporate-backed vintage chain stores are moving in big on what had been the territory of indie merchants and (usually) nonprofit thrift stores. You already know the Bufallo Exchange circuit; similar outfits rumored to be Seattle-bound include Crossroads (no relation to the Bellevue mall) and Wasteland. The Urban Outfitters chain has recently offered shelves of reconditioned garments alongside its new inventory. One indie vintage operator, the New Store, has started trying to defend its market share with flyers touting itself as the local, homespun alternative to “big corporate resale chains.”

GOOD NEWS: Centralized globalist culture may have peaked! An NY Times story, “Local Programming Cuts Into MTV,” notes with thinly-disguised alarm how broadcast and cable producers in assorted European and Asian countries are capturing viewers by offering local videos, in local languages–something MTV’s continent-wide satellite feeds just can’t offer. Seems audiences in assorted countries have increasingly had it with passive-aggressive acceptance of prepackaged superstar acts.

Since some global MTV acts in recent years have emanated from Seattle, some of you might see this as another sign of the long-hoped-for end of Seattle’s musical influence. I don’t. Most of our best bands and promoters weren’t trying to become global superstars; they were trying to smash the concept of global superstars. They were trying to promote a different attitude toward making and listening to “pop” music, as a creative force speaking directly to audiences rather than a brand-name entity to be manufactured and marketed. The more people there are around the world who make their own sounds, the more the Seattle scene’s real message to the world will have taken hold.

WELCOME BACK to your Ides-O-March Misc., the pop-culture column that amusedly notes the first wedding of the age of media mergers, in which the widow of the publisher of the Spokane Spokesman-Review married the retired publisher of the NY Times. Who said you can’t get far in the journalism biz these days?

UPDATE #1: The state legislature’s regular session expired with hundreds of conservative-social-agenda bills allowed to die. Among these was the Senate bill to drive strip clubs out of business via over-regulation, discussed here two weeks back. House members apparently felt the bill wouldn’t survive club operators’ lawsuits. Also gone, for this year at least, are bills to ban gay marriages, require parental consent for high-school HIV education, etc. Most of these proposals (except the anti-stripping bill) were introduced by Religious Right-friendly House Republicans but blocked by Senate Democrats. The Repo men hope to capture both chambers this November. You oughta work to try and stop that.

UPDATE #2: I asked you a few weeks back to suggest Disneyland character mascots for what might become the Anaheim Ex-Seahawks. Choices included Scrooge McDuck (natch), Jafar, and Cruella DeVil. My favorite was from the reader who, commenting on recent Seahawk seasons, recommended Sleepy.

COINCIDENCE OR…?: The guy who played Henry Blake on the M*A*S*H TV show and the guy who played Blake in the movie died within days of one another. Talk about becoming one with your role!

AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK (seen in the Stranger for the Backstage, 3/6): “Maria McKee: A Punk Edith Piaf.” Don’t bait me here, guys. The real Piaf was punker than you, me, or McKee will ever be. Ever heard her version of Lieber & Stoller’s “Black Leather Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”? Didn’t think so.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The P!pe is a tabloid run by ex-International Examiner staffer Soyon Im, who sez he wants “to debunk the myth that anything cool with Asian Americans is happening down in San Francisco or L.A.” It also helps debunk the squaresville reputation of King County’s large Asian American community. Issue #1 packs eight pages with stuff about Indian dance music, Japanese power pop, Korean fashions, “Pan-Asian” restaurants, Chinese-American comix, Vietnamese travelogue photos, Taiwanese interracial relationships, and old Japanese erotic art. There’s even a sex-advice column (where’d they get that concept?) by “Soybean Milkchick,” assuring readers there’s nothing deficient about Asian-American manhood. (In other words, don’t feel bad if you don’t look like the guys in that old Japanese erotic art.) At Pistil Books and elsewhere.

ONE TOO MANY?: Cocktail Nation hype has hit overdrive, less than two years after the first Combustible Edison record (albeit 15 years after Throbbing Gristle did its homage to Martin Denny). A glance at the “Cocktail Mania” display at Borders Music shows how nearly every record label with old middle-of-the-road instrumentals in its vaults is repackaging that material as something hip n’ ironic. And a local indie TV producer’s currently trying to launch a weekly entertainment-talk show called Atomic Lounge. Don’t be surprised if reproduction smoking jackets show up this fall in the Tiger Shop.

PAT-APHYSICS: Buchanan’s proving to be more than just another lifetime DC political/ media insider pretending to be an “outsider.” His (momentary?) campaign success signals the first significant crack in the GOP’s 16-year ruling coalition of fundamentalists and corporations (something I’ve been predicting or at least desiring for some time). About a quarter of the things he says (the parts about the plight of the downsized and the ripoff that is “free” trade) make more sense than what the other Republicans say. It’s just the other three quarters of the things he says are so freakish (the tirades against gays, feminists, immigrants, pro-choice advocates, and other humans guilty only of not belonging to his target demographic). If there’s hope, it’s that Buchanan’s polls rose after he started downplaying the hatefest talk and emphasizing the anti-corporate talk. Why’s the only candidate to challenge the sanctity of big money also the biggest bigot and bully? Why don’t any national-level Democrats speak against the corporate power-grab like Pat does?

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-culture column that still gets slightly disoriented when given a “Welcome to Fred Meyer” bag upon leaving the store.

SITE LINES: Adobe Systems is looking for new area digs for the Seattle software operation formerly known as Aldus, and possibly also for some of its currently Calif.-based divisions. I got just one piece-O-advice to the desktop publishing giant: keep it in town. You’re being tempted by developers to move to some soulless office park on some Eastside flood plain. But part of what made Aldus great was that it was in Pio. Square. The firm attracted people who liked walking to Ivar’s or to Mariner games. I believe this helped grow a corporate culture of creative, energetic people who could listen to others, including the people who used your warez; as opposed to the cult-like groupthink seen within certain office-park outfits.

ON A LONELY SATELLITE: Some of you can get 30 channels of DBX satellite music on your cable TV system. But what I want are the 60 extra channels the DBX company offers retailers and other clients via satellite dish. Instead of just mainstreamed selections like “Top Hits” and “R&B Oldies,” I could choose from polka, mariachi, Hawaiian, Danish, Greek, Brazilian, Indian, “Euro Pop,” “Canto Pop” (that’s Cantonese), “Traditional South African,” and that all-time fave “German Schlagers!”

AD VERBS #1: Denny’s sponsored the Harlem Globetrotters 70th Anniversary tour, which stopped in Seattle during African-American History Month. Let’s see, twelve Globetrotter players plus the sham-opposition team, trainers, and roadies… The restaurant chain instantly doubles its black employment!

AD VERBS #2: You may have been bemused by the Nike commercial with snippets of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (as remade by KRS-One) alongside images of street basketball players; defining “the revolution” as mere recreation and fashion. Now the hypocrisy deepens. Nike and its ad agency Weiden & Kennedy have hired Scott-Heron as a consultant for a planned Nike-owned cable channel. The channel has no name or launch date; but you can expect it to rival MTV in associating “rebel” youth culture with the purchase and use of apparel and other consumer products. You can also safely bet it’ll never promote any “revolutionary” thinking which might question companies that export all their manufacturing jobs to pennies-a-day Asian sweatshops and spend all the “saved” expenses on dorky ads.

SPACE CASES: The pitifully thin ranks of Seattle all-ages concert spaces briefly increased by one before shrinking again. The venerable Showbox got special dispensation from the Liquor Board to run all-ages shows under strict conditions. Ever-zealous authorities spotted a relatively minor violation of one of those conditions one night, and promptly decreed the joint 21-and-over for all further events. This was two days before the Throwing Muses gig; promoters had to refund 200 tickets from under-21ers. The onetime punk palace has since changed management (again), so don’t blame that fiasco on the guys there now. Instead, keep questioning why our Powers That Be keep making all-ages music so hard to get put on and so easy to get shut down.

MIKE TAKES A HIKE: It’s a rise-n’-fall tale almost Shakespearean if it weren’t so mundane: A politician who used his out-of-step appearance and social sense to symbolize his devotion to unfashionable policies; who did more things for more people (or tried to) than any Washingtonian since the Scoop-Maggie gravy train; whose downfall came not from opponents but from a trusted aide who’d had enough of his social manners or lack thereof, as expressed thru unwanted “bear hugs.”

We may not have seen the last of Gov. Lowry, but neither may we see anyone like him again soon. And that’s a shame. He lived both in the world of three-martini politicians and that of six-fingered sawmill workers. He used the means of mainstream politics to help those outside the mainstream, at a time when politicians prefer to work chiefly for the overprivileged. (He even dared oppose tax rollbacks for Sacred Business!) And at a time when even many coffeehouse “leftists” ignore class issues or even sneer at working-class people, we need Lowry’s progressive populism more than ever.

MISC. DOESN’T BELIEVE everything’s cyclical, but still finds it cute when something that goes around comes around again. F’rinstance, local mainstream retailers seem again interested in exploiting the popularity of the local music scene. Why just last week, the E. Madison Shop-Rite had its neon sign altered, either deliberately or by accident, to read 1ST HILL FOO CENTER.

INDECISION ’96: Drat. Now I won’t get to recycle old druggie jokes about “a really bad Gramm.”

LEGISLATURE WANTS TO BAN STRIP CLUBS: When lap dancing is outlawed, only outlaws will wear buttfloss. But seriously, our elected guardians of hypocrisy are out to kill, via punitive over-regulation, one of the state’s growth industries, employing as many as 500 performing artists in King County alone, many of whom support other artistic endeavors with their earnings. (Old joke once told to me: “What does a stripper do with her asshole before she goes to work? Drops him off at band practice.”)

Yes, these can be sleazy joints, drawing big bucks by preying on human loneliness. Yes, in a more perfect world these clubs’ workforce would have more fulfilling employment and their clientele would have more fulfilling sex lives instead of costly fantasies. Yes, no organized political faction is willing to defend them (‘cept maybe some sanctity-of-the-entrepreneur Liberterians). But if we let the state’s sultans of sanctimony outlaw something just ’cause they think it’s icky, there’s a lot of gay, lesbian, S/M and other stuff they’d love to ban next.

REELING: You’ve heard about the Oscar nominations representing a surprising triumph for “independent” cinema. I’m not so sure. Just as the global entertainment giants have created and/ or bought pseudo-indie record labels, so have they taken charge of “independent” cinema. The Independents magazine given out at 7 Gables theaters lists the following participating sponsor/ distributors: Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight Films, Fine Line Features (owned by Turner Broadcasting, along with New Line and Castle Rock; all soon to be folded into Time Warner), Miramax (Disney), and Gramercy (PolyGram).

Seven Gables’ parent firm, the Samuel Goldwyn Co., just became a sister company to Orion, which at its peak was considered a “mini-major” but is indie enough for my purposes here. And there are a few other real indies still out there, including Jodie Foster’s Egg Films. But between buying up the domestic little guys and crowding out foreign producers, the Hollywood majors (half now non-US owned) are on their way to monopolizing everything on big screens everywhere in the world. Speaking of silenced voices…

THE OTHER SIDE: This paper’s reported how ethnic-rights and environmental activists in Nigeria have faced arrest, torture, and execution. The Nigerian govt. defended itself in a slick eight-page ad supplement running only in African-American papers (includingThe Skanner here). In the same quaintly stilted 3rd World PR prose style seen in the USA Today ad section Our World, the supplement extols the west African nation as a land of “Investment Opportunities” and “Investment Incentives,” whose rulers are “Truly Peace Makers and Peace Keepers.” The center spread insists the country’s military junta’s still on “The Road to Democracy” (“Only those detractors who deliberately persist in a negative view of Nigerians and their efforts fail to take account of all that Nigerians have achieved in a short time”).

The junta’s execution of opposition leader Ken Saro-Wiwa is discussed on the back page, in a “Letter to the Editor” by Af-Am conservative Rev. Maurice Dawkins: “The Nigerians are learning the hard way that the majority media and the international liberal left network is a dangerous foe.” Dawkins denounces Saro-Wiwa as “a terrorist determined to overthrow the government” and his anti-junta movement as “a group of bandits;” justifies the crackdown against his movement under “the right of a soverign nation to conduct business and maintain law and order within its borders,” and accuses the junta’s western critics of holding “a racist double standard, depicted by misinformation and disinformation.” In short, the persecutors are re-imaged as the persecuted–a classic Limbaughan doublespeak technique.

PASSAGE (British-Israeli-American social critic Eli Khamarov in Surviving on Planet Reebok): ” People are inherently good. Bad people are created by other bad people; their survival is guaranteed because of their safety in numbers.”

As we’ve done since 1988, this list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not what’s big now. If you believe everything big now will keep getting bigger, we’ve got Power Rangers movie videos to sell you.

INSVILLE..................OUTSKI

Mac clones.................Windows 95

Sun/Netscape...............Intel/Microsoft

Gentlemen..................Guys

Pete & Pete................Friends

Pinky & the Brain..........X-Men

Bravo......................HBO

Flagship Ale...............Muenchener

Community syndicalism......Global capitalism

Many-to-many...............One-to-many

Freedom....................Censorship

The City...................Melrose Place

Bizarro....................Dilbert

Sophia Loren...............Marilyn Monroe

Curling....................Snowboarding

Condo-izing office towers..Exurbs and "edge cities"

Albuquerque................New Orleans

Rotterdam..................Prague

Avant-Pop fiction..........Cyberpunk

Steak houses...............Coffee houses

Puppetry...................Computer animation

Electric cars (finally)....Luxury 4 x 4s

Kitty Wells................Patsy Cline

Fedoras....................Baseball caps

African food...............Thai food

Rosicrucianism.............Neopaganism

Opium tea..................Herbal ecstasy

Citizens Utilities.........Green Day

Sherman Alexie.............bell hooks

Padded butts...............Silicone

DVD........................CD-ROM

ADSL.......................ISDN

Dr. Laura Sleshinger.......Limbaugh and his wannabes

Coal.......................Alanis Morissette

Leonardo DiCaprio..........Jim Carrey

Lounge.....................Techno

Zog Logs...................Pog

H.L. Mencken...............Hunter Thompson

Raconteurs.................Stand-up comics

Virgin Megastore...........Sam Goody

Shoe Pavilion..............Payless ShoeSource

Crossroads.................Bellevue Square

Indian musicals............Special-effects thrillers

Women's basketball.........Beach volleyball

Poker......................Magic: The Gathering

Boa constrictors...........Pot-bellied pigs

Union jackets..............Gas-station jackets

Co-ed strip clubs..........Cybersex

"Return to civility"......."Return to elegance"

Mandalas...................Fractals

The power of love..........The love of power

Skepticism.................Cynicism

Braided pubic hair.........Genital piercings

Garcia sightings...........Elvis sightings

Black Jack.................Bubble Yum

Free Quebec................NAFTA

Percogesic.................Melatonin

Ang Lee....................Paul Verhoven

Lili Taylor................Sharon Stone

ESPN2......................Sonics pay-per-view

Infobahn...................Wired

Phrenology.................Astrology

Aldous Huxley..............Terence McKenna

Hypertexts (finally).......In/Out lists

THANKS TO ALL who went to my two most recent reading/ signing gigs. I’m not sure, tho’, what to make of the Elliott Bay Book Co. blurb calling me “an ardent supporter of books and reading.” That sorta language usually describes either terminally mellow NPR-heads or closed-minded videophobes who hate all non-book media formats. Mind you, I love books in general, though there are many, many specific books I’m either nonplussed about or absolutely abhor. And they’re not always the books someone in my position’s expected to hate. F’rinstance, I have nothing against formula romance novels. The early Harlequins, originally imported from Britain, can be read as object lessons in how pre-feminist young women could move ahead in the British class system, by marrying money and calling it love.

KITSCH N’ KABOODDLE: Longtime Misc. readers know we don’t go in for camp-for-camp’s-sake, so we shuddered as fearfully as you may have when we heard about a new TV talk show to start next month, co-starring Tammy Faye Baker and washed-up sitcom actor JM J. Bullock (Ted Knight’s bumbling son-in-law on Too Close for Comfort). No further comment is necessary.

ONLY ANOTHER NORTHERN SONG: The Beatles Anthology has left TV and we’re thankfully in the eye of the associated PR storm, before the hype campaign for longer home-video version of the miniseries starts up next month. During “A-Beatles-C” week, the hype (culminating in the release of two old Lennon demo tapes with schlocky new backing tracks tacked on) got so hot, even Monday Night Football got in by unearthing a 1974 halftime chat between Lennon and Howard Cosell. The corporate media’s completely manufactured re-Beatlemania was a nostalgia for a time when the corporate media’s power was at its height. Despite what the boomer-biased media have proclaimed, there have been many, many joyous, intricate pop, post-pop and power-pop bands since. Bands like the Jam, Pere Ubu, the Posies, and Shonen Knife. It’s just none of those folks had the full-on marketing assault the Beatles enjoyed (or suffered from).

And none of those folks, luckily, found themselves profitable commodities for the truly pathetic hyper-spectacle that is the boomer nostalgia industry. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d fantasize about the Powers That Be working to prevent any rebellion among current or future young generations by smothering them with a disinformation campaign “celebrating” The Sixties while mentioning nothing but the wild-oat-sowing of upper-middle-class college kids–leaving out any mention of the environment, the Cold War, or the Black Struggle, and thus turning off any kids who might have silly notions of wanting to change the outside world. Speaking of retooled boomer fads…

THE-GRASS-IS-GREENER DEPT.: After reading last week’s Stranger piece about the bloated save-the-world claims made by the hemp movement, I finally understand the motivations of the wheeler-dealers in the Oakland Hills who thought up the whole hemp-mania in 1990-91. The hemp movement revises the pot aesthetic to seem less pathetically complacent, more in tune with the brash go-for-it dynamism of the ’90s. It does this by deliberately never mentioning pot smoking (except as a potential prescription painkiller), even though pot smoking is what it really wants to legalize. Eschewing the popular association of long-term cannabis use with sleepwalking fogheadedness, it instead markets the drug as an investment commodity, as the best potential friend capitalism didn’t know it had. More sky-high claims are being made for hemp today than were made in the early ’60s for the schmoo (a little bowling-pin-shaped animal that threatened to solve the world’s food problems and thus upset the global economy) in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner.

AD VERBS I (ad headlines in the 12/95 Wired): “At this mall, you can even shop naked” (MarketplaceMCI)… “Shop for CDs without the inconvenience of getting dressed” (MusicNet)… “If you’ve never been shopping while eating Mu Shu pork in your underwear, then you’ve never really been shopping” (éShop Plaza)… “Put our jeans on” (The Gap).

AD VERBS II (electronics-store slogan found in The Irish Times): “Harry Moore–Bringing you the future for more years than we care to remember.”

All Hail the Tube of Gloom:

Toyland Roundup

Essay for the Stranger, 11/23/95

Again this year, I’ve canvassed over 30 stores (all within the Seattle city limits) to find the most fantastically cool new toys of the season. With no powerhouse licensed-property product expected this year (the Power Rangers fad peaked early), retailers hope customers will explore a wider range of gift ideas. But that’s what I’ve been advising you for years.

My biggest disappointment was not finding I Love It/I Hate It, a board game being promoted by Daryl Hannah. You’re supposed to guess whether your opponent really loves or hates the thing they’re talking about. I’d be great at it, since people already think I really love things I really hate, no matter how hard I tell them I really hate them.

Inga Muscio’s already told you about one of 1995’s greatest, Sky Dancer ($8.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Basically, it’s a flying plastic helicopter in the form of a beautiful ballerina with gossamer wings on her arms. It’s graceful, it’s serene, and it flies like a dream.

Somewhat less sublime is the Monique Hair Styling Set ($2.99, Pike Place Oriental Food Market). Inside a blister-pak with the quaintest mod lettering is perhaps the closest thing yet to a punk rock fashion doll. It’s a pouty, thin-waisted girl in black tights with assorted-color wigs–orange, black, silver, and pink.

If you must send out-of-town relatives something that says “Seattle” on it, the Oriental Food Market (across Pike Place from that fish stand the tourists love) also has Filipino-made Seattle Slugs ($2.50). They’re sorta like Slinky Dogs only made of folded-paper bodies and wooden heads. Or you can send Seattle’s Strongest Coffee ($11.99, Pike Place Magic Shop), a new label on your basic battery-powered vibrating can novelty.

Archie McPhee’s houses wondrous fun stuff year-round. Among its current goodies is the Tube of Gloom ($1.50), a duck-call-like device inside a grey plastic cylinder. Turn the tube upside down or move it back and forth, and it makes a variety of sobbing, weeping, laughing, psychedelic, and orgasmic sounds.

More aural fun can be had with the Echo Mike ($2.99, Bon Marché), a plastic acoustic echo chamber shaped like a microphone. Talk or sing into it and you make a natural echo while you’re pretending to make an electronically-synthesized echo.

The Bon’s ToyTropolis department’s also got a complete line of Playmobil people (figures $2.99-$4.99, play sets $5.99-$89.99), so you can make your own wood-people tableaux just like on the first Sunny Day Real Estate album.

But ToyTropolis lacks one of the hot toy lines, like the Nickelodeon/ Mattel plastic goops. Fortunately you need go no further than the Broadway Fred Meyer to find Floam, Smud, and the new food-scented versions of Gak ($3.99 each). You’ll have to go to the Greenwood or Lake City Fred Meyer, or to FAO Schwarz, to get the newest Nicksubstance, Zog Logs construction sets ($12.99-$19.99). They use a soft yet sturdy item that looks like candy-colored insulation foam to make nearly any 2- or 3-D artwork you can imagine. Expect hip gallery artists to start making Zog Logs installation pieces by this time next year.

Ex-Catholics and devout agnostics will love the parody prayer candles by local outfit Three Tacky Texans ($10.50, FireWorks at Westlake Center). The entertainingly drawn styles include Prayerful Protection from Alien Abduction, Our Lady of Artistic Inspiration, and Protection from Bad Hairdressers.

Last year’s mad-scientist simulator, the Dr. Dreadful Food Lab, is joined this year by the Juice Lab, Drink Lab, Living Lab, Brain Juice Lab and Squeem Lab ($7.99-$19.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Each makes a different kind of oozing, glowing food product. If you’re giving one, include at least two refill kits ($3.99-$5.99) so your recipient will still have something to do on Dec. 26.

Not all toys are just fun. Some are also useful. The Sputty Ball ($5, FAO Schwarz) is so firm yet moldable, computer users can keep one by their keyboards to help prevent repetitive-stress injuries.

The slogan on the blister-pak says it all: “From the Prehistoric Past, Time Warped Into Our Cosmic Future, Come Insecto-Bots” (the Dollar Store, you-know-what-price). Simultaneously the cutest and most menacing-looking of the transforming-robot figures, they come colorful in Bee, Woolbear, Beetle, Mantis, Mosquito, and Butterfly models.

If David Byrne ever has kids, I’m sure they’ll get the whole Barbie Dolls of the World Collection ($19.99 each, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). As the catalog sez, “Redheaded Irish Barbie wears a vivid green dress. Dutch Barbie looks as if she just stepped out of a tulip garden. Kenyan Barbie wears an authentic African costume.” But no matter what their hair and skin color, they’re all taken from the same mold. It’s a small world (beat) after all.

There’s nothing particularly novel about the kids’ trivia board game Brain Quest ($16.99, PayLess) except for the slogan on the box, proclaiming the unfashionable-in-some-circles notion that “It’s OK To Be Smart!”

There are plenty of DIY drinking games involving various TV shows, but here’s a commercial product to enhance your viewing–the Channel Surfing Game ($15.99, Kmart). Players pick a card and switch channels trying to find something on TV that matches the card’s instructions (“Something Hot,” a car, somebody eating) before a timer runs out. No TV is needed to play The Talk Show Game ($29.95, The Game Place in the U District), in which players play talk-show hosts and guests and opposing players must guess what the “guests” will say next.

But we mustn’t leave out a suggestion for the hard-to-buy-for in your family, the young cynic of a niece who can’t wait ’til she can replace her rub-on tattoos with real ones. What can you get her that her parents won’t confiscate? In separate boxes, send her aSecret Wish Horse ($19.99, Bon Marché and elsewhere) and a Superman action figure ($9.50, Zanadu Comics). She’ll have untold hours of sick, sick fun in the privacy of her room.

HERE AT MISC. we adore the new Seattle Center fountain–it squirts higher and more voraciously than the old one, and new recessed nozzles inside a steeper center bulge mean folks are less likely to try climbing it, slip, and get their crotches ripped into (it happenned to someone I knew and it wasn’t fun). We also like (save for the name and sign) the KeyArena, a.k.a. Coliseum II–plenty of comfy seats to watch the T-Birds play the Brandon Wheat Kings. But in other ways, Seattle Center remains a relic of a long-ago futurism, bypassed by brasher monuments like Las Vegas’s fake Space Needle (the Stratosphere Tower, topped off last week). At 1,149 ft., twice the Needle’s height, it’s now the west’s tallest structure (displacing, I believe, a TV tower in the Dakotas).

THE SAME WEEKEND Coliseum II opened, thousands other Seattleites were at the first NW Book Fair. Loved the fair; loved most of the booths; loved the speakers I was able to get to (if Sherman Alexie or his publishers read this, I’d love to hear more sometime about his remarks on shoddy Indian-reservation public housing.) The lack of an empty parking space within five blocks of the event oughta be enough proof that smug elitist rants about a “post-literate society” are at least somewhat exaggerated. Folks are indeed reading these days. It’s what they’re reading that can sometimes be disturbing.

FOR PROOF THAT “The Book” is not the universally progressive-n’-prosocial force the elitists crack it up to be, look no further thanThe Seattle Joke Book III by Elliot Maxx (the comedian formerly known as the other Gary Larson). Not just another round of bland latte gags, it may just be the single worst book ever published here, even worse than those endless whale-poetry chapbooks put out by the Heron Presses (you know: Pink Heron, Chartreuse Heron, Polka Dot Heron). Maxx’s slim volume is crammed with the vilest racist “jokes” disguised as “neighborhood humor;” along with homophobia, sexism, and Keister bald jokes. All it lacks is Wayne Cody fat jokes.

THE NTH POWER: In recent months, even before Annex Theater’s Betty In Bondage, I’ve had trouble with the mainstreaming of S/M culture. Then at the Halloween parties I was at along the downtown/ CapHill arty circuit, seemed like half the attendees wore some variation on fetish garb. There were four hetero couples where one partner dragged the other around on a leash (three of the leashees were guys). I finally figured it out. Today’s S/M isn’t “transgressive.” It’s sure not “rebellious,” save in the minds of those who get off on imagining themselves hated by a stereotyped “Mainstream America.” These days, S/M IS mainstream America, a distillation of the modern American zeitgeist. The newly commodified S/M celebrates power, domination, victimization, ruthlessness–your basic hypercapitalist values. As for politics, I’ve already written comparisons between “pro-business Democrats” and the consensual bottom position.

JUST SAY `NON’?: You realize if Quebec ever does leave Canada, it’d mean no more bilingualism in the rest of Canada? What would we do without bilingual Canadian food packaging, such as Diet Coke with “NutraSuc”? Without CBUF-FM and the great way its announcers pronounce words like Chilliwack and Okanagon? Maybe Vancouver could go bilingual English/ Mandarin, but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, a Christian Science Monitor commentary by Washington, D.C. corporate lawyer Mark Schwartz called the Parti Quebecois one of the world’s last “hard-line leftist” movements. Schwartz’s piece trembled with fear that an independent Quebec might attempt “a new social order” that’d neglect the proper coddling of foreign investors and instead pursue “full employment, a more equitable society for all citizens, and a lessened role for the marketplace in people’s lives.” He was agog that the separatists’ “64-page vision of an independent Quebec fails to mention a single word about the private sector’s role in creating jobs.” A place where 49.4% of voters declared humanitarian and cultural values more important than business? Alors!

I’m speaking and signing books this Friday at 3 p.m. at the renowned University Book Store. Be there or lose your chance to collect NW music history while earning a Patronage Refund.

CORREC: Sorry for misstating the first name of syndicated talk-radio goon Bob Grant a few weeks back. Incidentally, an out-of-town reader of the Misc. World HQ website emailed to say he’d followed Grant’s local NYC show for years, and he believed Grant’s racially-charged demagoguery wasn’t based on organized white-supremacist ideology but on simple obnoxiousness–as if that makes it any better.

DUDS: The new downtown Ross Dress for Less is all done up inside like a mall store, with all the old Woolworth magic gutted out of the building. And they don’t have my favorite Woolworth apparel section, the $17 fedoras. But the new store’s something downtown’s needed since the demise of the Bon Budget Floor in the late ’80s. It’s a place where non-yups can actually buy useful products. And I do like the Giant Wall Of Sox downstairs. As Seattle’s business establishment and the politicians it owns keep striving to turn this into a city By The Upscale, Of The Upscale and For The Upscale, I invite all of you to regularly visit the Wall Of Sox and meditate on its deeper meaning, representing what residents really need from a city. (Now if we could only get a store that brought back some of the key Woolworth features: the fedoras, the bins of bridge-mix candy, the shelf of easy-crossword and confessions magazines.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Squeeze Cone, made by the Amurol unit of Wrigley’s, is a chocolate-flavored corn syrup concoction in a toothpaste-like tube. The experience is akin to gorging on the gooey insides of off-price assorted box chocolates without the milk-chocolate outsides.

A GREAT GIFT IDEA: Out-of-town readers in search of more non-mall maniacal media now have another option. The WFMU Catalog of Curiosities, put out by a college radio station that somehow survived the mid-’80s demise of the college that owned it, has gone national. It comes from the same North Jersey suburbs where Nickelodeon films The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and displays a similarly Petean attitude toward defining what others would call “weirdness” as the stuff of everyday reality. You know you’re reading the right catalog when the first page offers an import CD of William Shatner’s infamous spoken-word LP The Transformed Man, followed on the very next page by a Sun Ra retrospective. But there’s more: Music from legendary amateurs theShaggs and the late Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner! The Mondo Cane and Forbidden Planet soundtracks! Tapes of Mexican border-radio announcers hawking scrotum implants made from goat glands as a supposed cure for impotence! Books of “outsider art” and conspiracy theories. I could tell immediately WFMU’s my kinda people; and I’ve never even heard their station. The catalog’s free from P.O. Box 1568, Montclair, NJ 07042, or online at <<http://www.wfmu.org>>.

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, BUT: LOVE that salad-in-a-bag. Green leafy vegetables as a convenience food, who’da thunk it?… Overheard at Tower Records: “I normally don’t care for alternative music, but I like Candlebox…” It’s just so dang fun to re-use America Online’s freebie floppy discs to store files downloaded from the Internet… If you seek the next stage in the lounge-music revival, check out the Sazerac Sextet. They carefully straddle that delicate cusp between that safe tongue-in-cheek lounge sensation so popular these days and the naked despair of Edith Piaf/ Billie Holiday territory… Great to see The Baffler back after an interminable absence for another carefully thought-out treatise on the survival of human values in the Age of Marketing. This one takes particular aim at the Gingrich/ Toffler “promise” that in the CyberFuture everybody will live in the suburbs, as if we all wanted to… I normally have little nice to say about media mega-mergers, but the possible Time Warner-Turner deal will mean Warner Bros. will finally regain control of all the Warner cartoons, allowing for more complete home-video collections (but also more latter-day censorship of classic violent gag scenes)…

(Those who missed my prior promos for Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story can attend a free talking/ signing event next Friday afternoon, Nov. 10, 3-4 p.m., at the University Book Store.)

TRY TO IMAGINE playing Wheel of Fortune in pre-Mao Chinese. The puzzle only has one letter, but it takes thousands of turns to guess it. That’s the only way to imagine a game longer and more frustrating than Mariner baseball. Natch, the team’s first-ever division-title drive dragged out as frustratingly long as it could, until the letter finally got turned and turned out to be a “W.” Can’t tell at this writing how farther they’ll go, but even this level of victory erases what had been a comfortable, familiar “hapless” status. Just like the stadium scheme, in which the tax proponents snatched a narrow defeat from the jaws of a wide defeat, only to come back for an extra Legislative playoff.

IN OTHER ELECTION-FALLOUT STUFF, I’d like to think our anti-Commons rants had something to do with the defeat of that dubious plan to fund amenities for condo developers. But the defeat came not too long after the library and transit plans I liked also died. This town used to be a lot more generous about spending money when it didn’t have as many rich people in it.

ELSEWHERE IN POLITICSLAND: When I first glanced through George magazine, I figured it was a misguided corporate-media attempt to use gossip to make politics relevant to a new generation. On second reading, I concluded it was an attempt to use politics to make gossip relevant to a new generation. To young adults increasingly apathetic toward the doings of movie stars, corporate rockers and other media inventions (according to industry demographic surveys I’ve seen), the publishers of Elle and John Kennedy Jr. offer an attempt to connect that floating world to issues of actual importance, exemplified in a celebrity-party photo page headlined “We the People.” It’s a “We Are The World” with stinky perfume samples and bare-chested fashion ads. For a less-slick look at how a political magazine might be created for the millennium’s-end era, pick up a free copy of the Portland-created Modern America at Borders or access its website, <<http://www.modernamerica.com>>. Many of its contributors are conservative, but they’re the kind of conservative I could hold a reasoned argument with. I can even almost forgive it for using that most-overused article-title cliché, “The Rise and Rise of….”

HIP HOPS: Anheuser-Busch held a PR fete and tasting party for its new fake microbrews at The Fifth Avenue Place (a Belltown rental hall), all done up with sawdust floors and displays of beer memorabilia. The brands display the names (and allegedly the formulae) of brands A-B marketed in the 1890s. The copper-colored Muenchener is a hearty quaff that might almost substitute for a micro if you’re someplace where nothing better’s around. Black & Tan tastes a little like the stout-and-ale cocktail of the same name, but not really. Faust is the least of the bunch (like a watered-down Full Sail) but it’s got the coolest label, depicting a theatrical devil (I can just see teams of Faust Girls touring Pioneer Square in red jumpsuits with flannel devil tails).

`XTREME’ PREJUDICE: Matt Groening’s Life in Hell used to run an annual list of “Forbidden Words” for the new year. If he were still doing it, I’d nominate “extreme” and its recent variation “Xtreme.” Marketers everywhere are out to exploit that “extreme sports” fad. Afri-Cola’s consumer-hype number is 800-GO-XTREME. And Pacific Northwest Bank offers an “Xtreme CD.” Easy why companies want to identify with snowboarding, Rollerblading, bungee and even the socially-maligned skateboarding. They bear a vener of “alternative” or even “punk” street-cred, but can be interpreted to celebrate today’s “lean and mean” corporate aesthetic–especially the way ads downplay the camaraderie of group noncompetitive adventure and emphasizing the solitary white-boy athlete triumphing over gravity and other squares’ laws. One can imagine your Benzo-drivin,’ cell-phone-yappin’ New Right hustler imagining himself as a sailboarder of business, riding waves of Power and Money while conquering the turbulence of do-gooder environmentalists and regulators.

ELSEWHERE IN HYPELAND: Radio Inside, an MGM/UA direct-to-video movie, stars erstwhile local actress Sheryl Lee; but the biggest headline on the video box is for its “HIP ALTERNATIVE SOUNDTRACK With Today’s Hottest Artists.”

Welcome, good buddy, to the high-rollin’ 10/4 Misc., in which we attempt to figure out the rationale behind the recent rash of beers with dog names. There’s already Red Wolf and Red Dog (one’s owned by Coors, the other by Busch, but I can’t remember which is which). Now, Seagram’s trying to get into the beer biz with something entering local test markets this week called Coyote. Dunno ’bout you, but as one who grew up in a dog-owning household, the association of yellowish-colored liquids with dogs is not an appetizing one.

WITH POPULARITY comes a wider audience not all in on the same cultural reference points. Some folks thought that recent Stranger Performance Issue cover was “kiddie porn.” (It was even banned by the Spokane post office!) It was really taken from an early-’60s lesbian-domination photo book, originally distributed in the pre-Stonewall gay underground. The brouhaha over it shows how folks “read” images based on their own suppositions. I was more shocked by a P-I front page the same week, with banner photos of glass-art renditions of what obviously were a diaphragm, a uterus and a dildo — with a headline about how the artists were “Showing Off Their Talent at Blowing.”

KNIT PICKING: I don’t think the discontinued Calvin Klein ads were “kiddie porn” either (more like deliberately antisexual sleaze, using old underground photography as another retro-pop-cult “inspiration”). However, there’s now a line of junior-size knit tops called Betty Blue. Do teenage girls wearing the tops know about the movie of the same name? Quite possibly. Do moms buying ’em for their daughters know about the movie? Maybe not.

TAB KEYS: For those of you still stuck in post-adolescent snickering, the Weekly World News is now on America Online. I doubt it’ll be a hit there. It removes the only thing I like about the paper, its typography. Besides, online distribution too effectively targets that made-to-be-laughed-at tabloid’s real target audience of fratboys and hipster wannabes, negating the effect of imagining you’re the only WWN reader who knows it’s a joke.

REBEL WITHOUT A LUNG: Hope you’re ready for New Left nostalgia, corporate-style; for here come Politix cigarettes, with a peace hand-sign and a rainbow on the pack. It’s one of several brands (along with Sedona, exploiting the Arizona new-age colony of the same name) from the pseudonymous Moonlight Tobacco Co. (really R.J. Reynolds). The NY Times business-section story about Reynolds’s latest gimmick came the same day as a front-page story about the megabux being shoveled from the cig industry into GOP campaign funds…. Elsewhere in the product world, Coca-Cola quietly dropped OK Soda from its remaining test-market regions, three months after it ceased to be sold here. Chalk it up as another failure from Portland ad whizzes Wieden & Kennedy (of Subaru “Lack of Pretense Days” and Black Star Beer infamy). W&K’s string of flops may revive the old-school ad theory that cleverness might get your agency famous within the ad biz but doesn’t move product.

E.T. STAY HOME: The AP reported “three self-styled mediums” in Sofia, Bulgaria led some 1,500 followers to an airstrip to await eight space ships. Among other things, the mediums promised the aliens would help the poor Balkan country pay its $12.9 billion foreign debt. No non-earthers showed up. Just as well; if the space people had acted like Bulgaria’s last patron state, the ol’ USSR, the financial aid would’ve been in inconvertible currency that could only be spent in its home country.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, recall the words recited by Tom Berenger as Brigham Young’s bodyguard in the cable movie Avenging Angel: “The problem with polygamy is when you have 27 wives and 56 children, one of them is just bound to turn out as dirt stupid and pig ugly as you.”

Mark your calendar to attend the book release party for my hefty tome, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, Sun., 10/15 at the Crocodile. It’s 21-plus, but an all-ages reading event’s in the works for later this month. More info at the Misc. World HQ website.

A NON-CYNICAL MISC. WELCOME goes to the Rocket’s new owners, the Frisco-based BAM Media. I’ve heard the rumors, how the new Rocket guys wanna go after this paper’s readers and advertisers. But we can be sports about it. F’rinstance, here’s some tips for the newcomers on what not to do to succeed in Seattle:

* Don’t arrive in town in suits, impose a dress code on the office, yet claim to be “one of you” with the staff because you love ’60s classic rock.

* Don’t expect us cowtown hicks to kneel in worship before your superior Cali essences. Don’t act aggressively and pompously among Seattle bands, club owners, and advertisers, boasting how you’re gonna do everything exactly the way it’s done in San Francisco.

* Don’t replace what’s left of the Rocket style with corporate-rock PR and bland shopper-tabloid design.

* Don’t replace familiar Rocket staffers with parent-company transfers who can’t even pronounce the “a” in “Ivar’s” right (it’s theschwa sound).

Avoid these temptations and the Rocket might get fun again. Heck, stronger competition would be good for both papers.

B’SHOOT NOTES: The upgrading of musical acts this year was great, though Sweet Water (perennial also-rans of the Silver Management stable) selling out the Arena surprised me. The cops went after TchKung! for the second straight year, ‘tho the band and its audience managed to keep the officers slightly better-behaved this time. The Stranger had a stage co-sponsorship this year with Biringer Farms, for whom I spent many a boring summer day picking strawberries as a kid. At least this year there was no Lamonts Blues Stage; ’twas bemusing in the past to see bands that considered themselves first-rate, beneath the name of a store popularly known as a perpetual clearance sale.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE UPSCALE: This column and this paper have talked more about the Commons than the other money issue on next Tuesday’s ballot, the new baseball stadium. The stadium, like similar stadium tax measures across North America, is a simple matter of asking taxpayers to subsidize businesses. That’s a story as old as railroads, agribusiness price supports, and unneeded weapons systems. (In Canada they use slogans like “Partners in Progress” to promote subsidies for worthless oil scams.) But the Commons represents a twist on public pay for private gain, a twist with implications for our future.

Around 1969-70 there was a revolution in City Hall: a slate of progressives ousted a machine of tired, inbred business interests. That new regime has calcified into a replica of the regime it replaced. Politics in Seattle is now essentially the same as in D.C.; i.e., money, power, privilege and to hell with anyone who can’t offer any of them. Seattle’s political machine doesn’t even claim anymore to speak for “The Little Guy.” Seattle, steadily over the past 20 years but now accelerating rapidly, is becoming a city by, of, and for only one class. The Upscale control the politicians, even the “progressive” politicians. The Upscale control the media (cf. KIRO’s hype-laden puff piece on the Nordstrom family, promoted as “The faces behind the brand name everyone loves!”).

The Upscale loathe real cultural diversity; they accept a culture of all races and nationalities who believe and behave exactly alike, like Disneyland’s “It’s A Small World” robots. Anybody who neither belongs to the Upscale nor can be dismissed by it as “quaint local color” is beyond the pale. (Belltown condo dwellers circulated petitions some months back demanding the Vogue’s closure.) Certain non-Upscale subcultures have returned this loathing, though by and large the Upscales don’t know they’re hated. (Corporate “designer grunge” fashion was such a joke because the “Seattle scene” aesthetic was anti-fashion, specifically anti-Nordstrom.)

The Commons is essentially a scheme to create an Upscale haven a la Vancouver’s West End, anchored by a mini-Stanley Park. It’s an Upscale wet dream; it removes blocks of non-Upscale businesses for Upscale condos, stores, and dineries. And it’d remove some of those disgusting punk clubs too! They insist on making Seattle a World Class City, even if it’s ruined as a place for the rest of us to live.

NOW AT THE MISC. WORLD HQ WEBSITE (<<http://www.miscmedia.com>>): Name your favorite Power Ranger.

THE ULTIMATE HUNNY TREE: By now you’ve probably heard a broadcast day’s worth of ABC/Disney merger jokes and fantasies. You know, the ones about the deal coming from secret bargaining sessions between Scrooge McDuck and Old Man Quartermaine from General Hospital, or Joel Siegel’s movie reviews getting even less critical, or merging McGyver with Bill Nye the Science Guy, or letting Urkel redesign the theme-park rides, or adding Flubber-enhanced events to Wide World of Sports, or animatronic figures of Jimmy Smits’s butt, etc.

The nightmare reality, of course, is this is a part of the growing consolidation of corporate media. So is the deal in which the rump remains of CBS (without the record, musical-instrument and magazine divisions) joins the rump remains of Westinghouse (itself greatly transformed since the days when Betty Furness opened Westinghouse refrigerators during ads on CBS’s Studio One). Despite Letterman’s jokes, today’s Westinghouse makes nothing you the consumer can buy, except home security systems. It owns TV and radio stations and makes heavy industrial, electrical, and military gear. The deal will also mean two of the traditional Big Three networks will be owned by nuclear-reactor builders.

Unless the rival bid for CBS from Ted Turner and Microsoft (which is denying its participation in the deal in deniable ways) goes through. You can imagine the Letterman jokes about which show they’ll bring back first (Designing Women or Northern Exposure), or about whether Gates’s geeks will demand Price Is Right models be added to the Evening News.

One potential nerd’s-companion show Gates won’t get to buy right away is Santa Monica Bike Patrol, due to air next year on USA. “It’s just police officers on their bikes, fighting crime through the beach community,” says a spokesperson for the producers. Before you say, “But Seattle’s had its own bike cops for years; they’re stealing the idea from us,” remember that even before Seattle’s bike cops, Harry Shearer did a routine on an early Letterman show showing stills from what he claimed was his own bike-cop-show pilot. “We’re always pulling out our guns,” Shearer said back then, “but of course we can’t fire them because we’d fall off the bikes with the recoil.”

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: By the time you read this, the first Miss Deaf Swimwear bikini contest will have been held in L.A. The swimwear-catalog company promoting the event claims it’s doing it “to involve the Deaf community in the modeling world. Many deaf women do not have the self condfidence to compete in this kind of competition, and we are hoping to change that.” It could also be seen as a statement that hearing-impaired women don’t all prefer to spend their free time at signed acoustic-folk concerts. Some like to make universal expressions of pride, vanity, and sneering at other women’s judgmental scorn.

JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Philly’s Best Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, on E. Union east of 24th Ave., is the real thang. Philadelphians I’ve sent there as spies agree. Their secret to a perfect meat-grease-bread concoction? They fly in foot-long rolls from Penna. direct, for that melt-in-your-mouth softness that still holds up under a half-pound or so of sliced, freshly grilled steak or chicken plus fixins. Have one for lunch; you won’t need dinner that day…. Sangria Senorial, imported from Mexico, just might be the first decent-tasting grape soda. Grape has traditionally been one of those minor flavors the US drink giants placed under their catch-all brands (Fanta, Nehi), originally because their sales didn’t warrant their own bottle designs. Senorial, while non-alcoholic, comes in a mini wine bottle. It doesn’t taste like wine, even non-alky wine. It does taste like real grapes with just the right amount of fizz.

YA MIGHT NOT WANNA HEAR THIS BUT: Prepaid phone-sex cards, now sold in the back pages of some alternative publications, are like buying a single bed. They’re both acts of admitting you’ll be alone and desperate for the foreseeable future… The aforementioned Disney co. is making an updated, live-action remake of 101 Dalmations. Expect more than 101 “cute” dog-poop gags… Everyone I know who went to the Johnny Cash/Mark Lanegan concert called it Lanegan’s show that Cash closed, not Cash’s show that Lanegan opened.

Welcome to the All-Star Break edition of Misc., the only column that openly wonders what those pseudo-intellectuals are doing when they worship the only major league sport (baseball) that doesn’t even pretend to give its players a college education.

PRE-COOKED FOR THIS TIME ZONE: A proposed Saturday Night Live theme restaurant in Vegas has been scuttled. Variety sez it was to have been part of “New York New York,” a $400 million hotel-casino being built by Kirk Kerkorian (the financier who dismembered MGM and tried to take over Chrysler). It was to have included a “cheeseburger cheeseburger” grill, a Bill Murray piano lounge, and shrines to the show’s old stock characters and iconography. But NBC (which, with SNL honcho Lorne Michaels, was going to get $11 million plus a share of the restaurant’s take for the rights) backed out. Some observers see this as a sign that the network’s finally getting hip to the utter unhipness of today’s SNL. Speaking of TV comedy once-legends…

THAT’S ALL!: Hee Haw reruns were quietly taken off the Nashville Network (owned, like the show, by Gaylord Entertainment). The show’s been off the Gaylord-owned KSTW since last winter. The real Hee Haw ended in ’92, when the Kornfield Kounty set, most of the “Hee Haw Honeys,” and all the running gags were dropped for an “updated” format set in a shopping-mall nightclub and retitled The Hee Haw Show. The producers had to do it because those “Young Country” singers were refusing to be guests on the old show, claiming its Midwestern hayloft iconography didn’t fit their modern suburban New South personas. The new format was a bust, and the show’s been in reruns of old-style episodes ever since. The closest thing to the show’s old humor in today’s country universe is Jeff Foxworthy, that comedian whose whole routine starts with “You know you’re a redneck if….” Speaking of the detrius of cultures past…

LEFT FIELD: The Wall St. Journal’s front page ran a wishful-thinking piece in mid-June about the death of the left, cleverly defining “the left” in the narrowest possible sense as groups descended from the Communist Party USA or the Socialist Workers Party–the least active side of US left-wing activity (including Seattle’s own Freedom Socialist Party). The piece sneakily ignored the entire environmental movement, the movements to reform organized labor, the various leftist third-party movements (the New Party, the Rainbow Coalition, et al.), all your single-issue groups, and the campus-intellectual left I’m always chastizing.

THE TRUTH ABOUT `CYBERPORN’: The totally ridiculous exploitation story in Time only proves the same lesson Time‘s Pearl Jam cover proved: When you know the media are lying about a topic you know about, how can you trust them about other topics like politics? Yes, there are pictures of female and male bodies on the web. Most are put up on amateur home pages, though a few such sites are commercially run (by such firms as adult-video distributors, magazines, phone sex purveyors, lingerie catalogs, and “glamor photographers”). The sites aren’t easy to find unless you use search programs to find them. Most have introductory screens that ask you to type in your age before they’ll let you in further. But really the whole gamut of sexculture appears on the Web: ads for “educational” CD-ROMs, exhibits of neoclassical nude paintings, bondage stories, rambling essays about broken relationships, personal ads, listings of lesbian and gay community resources, pirated Celebrity Skin photos, video clips of topless pillow fights, and clips from women’s-mag ads of supermodels selling clothes by not wearing them. Sexculture on the Web is (almost) as diverse as in life, which is what they advocates of a commercialized monoculture like Time Warner are probably really afraid of. Speaking of the glamor of nakedness…

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Body Doubles is a new brand of cosmetics and skin care products, sold thru an online multi-level marketing scheme. The promise implied in the company’s name (but not explicitly given in its advertising) is with this stuff, you can look better than the movie stars–you can look as good as the models who do the stars’ nude scenes for them!