• Despite what Republican politicians would have you believe, Washington state actually leads the nation in new business creation these days.
• One of these new businesses will be a downtown JC Penney store, in the old Kress five-and-dime store building at Third and Pike. That’s just a block from the old (1930-82) Penney store (Target’s going in on that site later this year). It’s great news, but what will become of the loveable, and vitally needed, Kress IGA supermarket in the building’s lower level? Its operators insist they’ve got a long term lease and are staying no matter what.
• It’s not just the state civil payroll that’s ethnically un-diverse. The state legislature is only 6.8 percent nonwhite.
• Local theater blogger Jose Aguerra asks whether local troupes are being too coy and inoffensive, even in their depiction of female orgasms. (In my day, Seattle’s live theaters prided themselves on presenting edgy, daring material, even if the promise was grander than the product.)
• A UW Medical Center administrator got caught embezzling a quarter mil from the hospital. You’re only hearing about it now because the state auditor made a statement publicly praising the U for how it investigated and prosecuted the inside thief. A potential huge scandal was thus turned into a low-key moment of triumph for the administration. At least if you read the Seattle Times version of the story. KOMO offers a far more critical spin on the affair.
• Grist.org’s David Roberts ponders what the heck Friends of the Earth is doing getting involved with right-wing lobby groups in proposing a “green” federal budget slashing scheme.
• The link we ran last week about the electric-guitar company? The company that got raided by federal agents, who were supposedly looking for endangered imported wood? The company flatly denies all allegations. And the Murdoch Wall St. Journal, ever eager to bash anything environmentalist, claims the feds could next go after folks who own old vintage instruments that contain now-restricted components.
• Should any of us care about speculation about the new Apple CEO’s private life? Ars Technica says no.
• Birth rates are dropping in many countries, especially those where female fetuses are sometimes selectively aborted. The Economist calculates some countries, at their current rates of decline, could totally run out of people in 600-700 years. Of course, if you’re not a dystopian scifi fan you know trends don’t stay the same, at the same rate, forever.
• Sasha Brown-Worsham believes “we should parent more like they did in 1978.” More Boo Berry and daytime TV; less overprotectiveness and constant fear.

• Those of us who were looking forward to that separatist, elitist Burning Man institution’s imminent demise are outta luck. A nonprofit is being formed to take over future annual festivals. Among other effects, it means those who go there this year for the first time will get to annoy everybody back in their hometowns in subsequent years, with sermons about how much more “pure” the festival used to be.
• Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a book signing in Tacoma. Antiwar activists, including the widow of a Ft. Lewis soldier who committed suicide, tried to disrupt the proceedings and got roughed up.
• Can something really be done to stop drug selling in Belltown? I say, it’s not likely as long as the First Avenue glamour-bar scene keeps attracting so many affluent drug buyers.
• Ain’t them Sounders something? Well, yes they are.
• Despite the elimination of state tax breaks for filmmakers, one production is underway on the Eastside—a horrific true-life drama.
• As Wash. state’s government payroll gets smaller, it’s also getting whiter. Gov. Gregoire’s response: more “staff reviews” and talk about the importance of diversity.
• Gay marriage—here next year?
• For reasons I won’t get into, I witnessed the closure of the (high level) West Seattle Bridge late Saturday night. Sadly, it wasn’t due to road work, but to a jumper, who eventually “succeeded.”
• Gawker’s unsupported rant that Seattle was “a very annoying place” has made Seattlest’s “Seattle stereotyping hall of shame.”
• Qaddafi, Gadaffi, Gadhafi, however you transliterate the name—he lived the typical dictator’s opulence amid public squalor. And his son and daughter-in-law were grotesquely brutal to the household staff, in ways unimaginable outside of a Japanese gore movie.
• Megabucks campaign financing just continues to get bigger and more corrupt. But you knew that.
• And Republicans increasingly bind themselves around an anti-science, anti-thinking ideology. But you already knew that.
• Ad Age lists some lessons from past recessions, for those businesses that still need to sell tangible products to U.S. consumers.
• I keep getting asked about this, so for the record: The L.A.-based chain In-N-Out Burger is not, repeat NOT, opening in Bellevue. Not this year, not next year. It was just an Eastside food blog’s April Fool’s gag. Need proof? Just look at the link in the story for “View renderings of the new restaurant here.”

The Puget Sound Business Journal has been running a reader poll to name “Seattle’s most respected brand.”

The finalists are Windermere Real Estate and Chateau Ste. Michelle.

Other contenders included Nordstrom, Canlis, Columbia Bank, the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Starbucks, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Northwest Harvest.

But where were Dick’s Drive-Ins, Pyramid Ales, Fantagraphics, Big John’s PFI, Sub Pop, or Tim’s Cascade Chips?

Oh right. They’re not freakin’ upscale enough.

Then forget it.

from thepoisonforest.com

• Gov. Gregoire wants the feds to consider declaring all of Wash. state a farm disaster area, due to this year’s long, cold, wet weather.
• The Seattle waterfront tunnel referendum, in which a “no” vote meant disapproval of the deeply boring tunnel scheme, got a seemingly unassailable 60-percent “yes” vote.
• In the City Council primaries, Jean Godden got under 50 percent of the vote; her general election challenger will likely be Bobby Forch. All other incumbents are sailing through into the general election.
• Earlier Tuesday, the City Council put a $60 car tab surcharge on the November ballot. It would fund assorted “transportation improvements,” i.e. transit and roads. (This is different from the $20 car tab surcharge approved by King County in order to save Metro Transit from the massive sales-tax collapse.)
• Today (Wednesday) marks the 25th anniversary of Rachel, the fundraising pig statue at the Pike Place Market. Yes, there will be a public event at noon. Yes, it will involve fundraising, for the Market Foundation.
• The Twin Teepees, Chubby & Tubby, the Playland Amusement Park—they all live again on the new Aurora Avenue commemorative mural. It’s at the east side of Aurora at N. 105th St.
• We’ve just one more month until Ballard’s legendary Totem House fish n’ chips shop reopens as a branch of Red Mill Burgers. The signature totem pole has been refurbished and re-installed.
• Could our region have another “La Nina” winter? Who the heck knows?
• The state Liquor Board will let sidewalk cafes serving booze go up in more places.
• So where are all the “green jobs” promised when the city got a big federal grant to help weatherize homes and businesses? The city says they’re coming, maybe later this year.
• Author Larry Sabato believes we’re in an age of “junkyard journalism” and have been since approx. 1979—well before Fox, even before Limbaugh.
• Verizon’s got big profits, but still wants workers to take big pay and benefit cuts. The response: 45,000 of said workers have walked out.
• Where do people think the economy these days is actually doing fine? In Washington DC, of course.
• You can’t even get into the same room with some Republican candidates unless you pay them.
• Psychiatry prof Nassir Ghaemi thinks when it comes to our leaders, sanity is way-overrated.
• The Mariners no longer have the baseball player named Milton Bradley, but the Seahawks just signed a football player named Atari Bigby. His highlight tapes should be accompanied by the “Pole Position” song, with hits denoted by the spaceship-explosion sound from “Berzerk.” The team’s defensive formations should look like the attack formations from “Space Invaders.”

nalley's display at the puyallup fair (1948); from the tacoma public library

It’s the end of the (canning) line in Nalley Valley.

The 93-year-old south Tacoma food processing giant became a regional (and in some product lines, international) hit in potato chips and dips, pickles, pancake syrup, chili, mayonnaise, salad dressings, and countless other packaged-food products.

But the company was sold back in the ’60s, and resold several times since. Various managements sold or closed Nalley’s product lines over the years.

Finally, the New York equity group that now owns the brand has shut the last part of the plant, which made chili and canned soups.

The equity group, and its trademark licensees, promise to keep the Nalley’s brand alive, in the same way that there’s still a beer called Rainier (made at the Miller plant in L.A.).

But that’s not the same thing as actually being here, employing local workers, sourcing from local farmers.

(In the comments that follow the hereby-linked Seattle Times story, one commenter notes the current owner of the Nalley’s pickle line touts it as “The Taste of the Northwest,” even though the stuff’s now made in Iowa from cukes grown in India.)

It was a corn-doggy sunny Sunday afternoon when I went to the Seafair hydro races.

Took the light rail to the Othello station, then a free shuttle bus to the southern end of Genessee Park. That got me to a lot of people milling about at fast food and military-recruiting booths.

Inside the admission gates, initially, were more of the same. Then approaching the lakefront you got the bigger sideshow attractions, such as the Seafair Pirates.

One of these attractions was a daylong demonstration of something called “Hyperlite,” a water skiing experience using ropes and pulleys instead of a tow boat. (Yes, that was my excuse to ask you to say “tow boat” five times fast.)

Oh yeah, there was that highly publicized intermission act, which newbies increasingly mistake for the star attraction. It’s loud. It’s fast. It’s shiny. It’s simple to “get.”

But for Seafair’s steadfast true believers, it’s not the big thing.

This is.

The combination of subtlety and power, of quiet water and loud machinery, of stillness and speed, of steamlined curves and pure aggression, of hand craftsmanship and industrial might.

Here’s the Graham Real Ventures boat. It’s one of the “Unlimited Lights,” the smaller class of boats that raced on Seafair Weekend. Yes, I know “Unlimited Lights” is an oxymoron derived from a misnomer. (The bigger boats have long been under various size and horsepower restrictions for safety’s sake.)

But they’re still fast and exciting. And because they use piston engines, they generate the kind of noise that old timers like me find comforting, not annoying.

Above is the boat of Kayleigh Perkins, the only female driver in this past weekend’s lineup.

And this is her boat after it flipped over in the air during the lights’ championship heat, the only accident of the day. (She got out of the boat safely and was apparently fine.)

With Budweiser’s departure from the circuit, the Oberto beef jerky-sponsored team has been the team to beat in recent years.

But it wasn’t the only boat out there.

I happened to be positioned near a group of loyal Oberto fans. Would they find themselves satisfied at the end of the championship round?

Why yes, they would.

As for me, I sunburned through my shirt and had to have a long nap once I got hope. And it was completely worth it.

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.

• Those newfangled “3-D printers” can even be used to make motor-powered small airplanes.
• A judge knocked down the feds’ long-term plans for Columbia River salmon restoration, calling them vague and insufficient.
• The Belltown P-Patch cottages, the neighborhood’s last remaining “single family home” structures, are getting their old lead paint stripped off and replaced.
• Thanks to federal funding cuts and other snafus, 400 otherwise homeless people could get kicked out of local shelters soon.
• Dominick Holden has a handy primer on why you should reject the deep bore tunnel.
• You don’t have to go to the “whole paycheck” store to know “healthy” food can be costly.
• What’s really wrong with American discourse? Tabitha Justice believes it’s the “argument culture.”
• Ending on a lighter note, here’s some hilarious-in-retrospect images of completely ineffectual “disguising” by the East German secret police.

I’ve spent the day lost in the past.

I’ve done that before. But never quite like this.

I’ve been buried this afternoon in old Seattle Times articles, ads, and entertainment listings. They’ve been scanned from old library microfiche reels and posted online by ClassifiedHumanity.com.

The site’s anonymous curators scour back SeaTimes issues from 1900 to 1984.

The site’s priorities in picking old newspaper items include, but are not limited to:

• Strange crimes.
• Local historical figures.
• Drug scare items.
• Early home computers and video games.
• The anti-commie “red scare.”
• Ads for old local stores.
• Movies that have remained popular among the “geekerati,” such as the original Star Wars.
• Individual out-of-context panels from old comic strips, especially Nancy.
• Casual racism.
• Reactionary editorials.

Go to Classified Humanity yourself. But don’t be surprised if hours pass before you walk away from the computer.

bachmann family values?

• No, Michele Bachmann, slaves did not have stable marriages and families. Not when spouses could be re-sold to separate masters or be used as involuntary sex toys.
• Today’s anti-deep-bore-tunnel sermon comes to you in the form of cute CGI cartoon characters with synthesized voices.
• As for the tunnel project we like, the Capitol Hill light-rail tunnel is being dug by a 21-foot-wide boring machine nicknamed “Brenda.” Make your own 90210 jokes here.
• Painting murals on street surfaces—do they reduce traffic speeds, or encourage dangerous games of pedestrian hopscotch?
• The Midwestern union buster wannabes who now run Boeing are being very secretive in their “southern strategy.”
• Admitting your addiction to Facebook is the first step toward regaining control of your life. Yes, I found this link from Facebook.
• Woke up, it was a Chelsea mornin’ and the first thing that I heard was the historic hipster hotel’s been sold to speculators who want to turn it into rich folks’ residences.
• Post-made-up-“crisis” updates: Joe Biden allegedly called Congressional Republicans “terrorists.” Less famous commenters say the GOPpers are waging a “war on America” and claim they “fit the profile of the classic abuser.” Another e-pundit wonders whether the Bushies deliberately left the nation incurably “bankrupt, corrupt, ungovernable.”
• On a lighter note, here’s some fun stuff found at Grocery Outlet.

• Another local bicyclist was struck, and at this writing remains in critical condition, after getting struck by a hit-and-run driver (in, as if you hadn’t guessed, an SUV).
• Crooks in a local art heist had very specific tastes. They only took stuff by one guy, Hispanic-heritage painter Esteban Silva.
• The NY Observer claims Brooklyn’s becoming more like Portland, or rather like the Portlandia Portland.
• Could “Sonics Appreciation Night” at tonight’s Mariners game be one of the greatest single events in M’s history? It’ll certainly rank among this sorry year’s highlights.
• Besides the usual fringe-right-wing suspects, here’s someone else who seems to believe the Norway massacre wasn’t all that awful. It’s Morrissey. He apparently thinks the existence of fast food is a worse crime.
• James Warren, who knew Obama back when, insists the guy’s no Clinton “centrist” but a seeker of deals, a professional bargainer. But is he enough of a hard bargainer?
• Meanwhile, even John Boehner is apparently not looney-right enough for the looney-right…
• …While Robert Reich suggests another force pressuring the Democrats into caving to shock-treatment budget cuts—the Wall St. bond rating cartel.
• The traditionally cars-before-people Eastside is getting its very own light rail line. Sometime in the next decade. Unless Bellevue Square tycoon Kemper Freeman, who hates transit, has his way and stops it.
• Science Guy 1, Fox News 0.

happy bite of seattle consumers

• Food vendors, start your engines. The City Council likes you.
• A Vancouver news site describes last month’s Canuck riot as a desperate attempt by the city’s young males to momentarily escape “a state that could be described as a deficit of the real, which is dangerous and unstable place, full of unfocused outrage and an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement that constantly simmers just below the surface.”
• As past allegations of phone tapping, computer hacking, and other dirty dealings resurface against Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. businesses (which still aren’t directly implicated in the current U.K. phone hacking scandal), Peter Cohan at Forbes suggests News Corp. shareholders would have themselves a much more robust business if it weren’t for Murdoch, his kinfolk, and their insistence upon continuing to run newspapers.
• One anti-tunnel measure stays on local ballots; a second gets kicked off by a judge.

street food vendor, 1930s, singapore; from the-inncrowd.com

• More kinds of yummy street food could soon come to Seattle, as a deregulation proposal makes its way to the full city council.
• Also, the city’s asking the state Liquor Board for the authority to let some Seattle bars stay open after 2 a.m.
• Those toll-happy state bureaucrats are thinking about charging for the I-5 express lanes.
• Playboy has a natty profile of fast rising music/comedy/performance-art star Reggie Watts. Unlike New York mag’s Watts profile from last year, this piece gives full credit to his long formative years in the Seattle music scene.
• Lynnwood motorist sees ducks crossing the freeway, slows down. Semi driver behind said motorist doesn’t see ducks, doesn’t slow down.
• Hanford could become America’s newest, glow-in-the-darkiest national park.
• In nanny-state news, some doctor in Boston said obese children should be taken away from their parents.
• Clever Brit engineers have devised a $25 computer (basically a memory stick with a cheap little CPU attached; no screen or keyboard included) that schools could just give out to kids.
• Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell does turn out to have a larger agenda behind his offer to say “uncle” for now on the debt ceiling nonsense. He wants to bring back the “balanced budget amendment,” one of those recurring ideas that sounds hot on right-wing talk radio but doesn’t work in real life. The amendment McConnell wants would impose the same budgetary rules on the federal government that have already made California ungovernable.
• Those right-wing governors and state legislators around the country—how, you may wonder, do they simultaneously introduce the same brutal anti-labor, anti-women, anti-middle-class, anti-voter legislation? A lot of it comes from the same right wing think tank. And yep, the Koch brothers are in on it, big.
• American progressive pundits still seek a connection between the News of the World phone hacking scandal and Rupert Murdoch’s US media operations. Until they find one, let’s remember that the London-based NOTW aggressively spied on plenty of Hollywood movie stars. Its targets included actors working for Murdoch’s 20th Century-Fox—and even the Murdoch family’s celebrity friends.
• As he has a few times in the past, Jean-Luc Godard has again declared that “film is over.”

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?

• Somebody’s buying PopCap Games, the Seattle maker of utterly cute video games, for a cool billion. But who? If, as rumor has it, the buyer is gaming giant Electronic Arts, what will happen to the PopCap office and staff?
• Somebody at Huffington Post has compiled a list of 10 brands expected to die by 2012. American Apparel. Nokia. A&W restaurants (at least in the US). Even Sears. (No, not Sears!)
• Fareed Zakaria at Time looks back wistfully to a past when conservatives at least pretended to be pragmatic, even “reality based.”