…(really) has today’s vulvic-imagery-in-a-consumer-product image. It’s for margarine. Bearing the name of Lee Iacocca. You know the puns you’ll see in the item’s comment thread.

…by people with far too much time on their hands: A comprehensive guide to fictional breakfast cereals.

Kress IGA, that is, as of 7 a.m. this morning. I’m happy.

The Kress IGA Supermarket should finally open sometime this week. The pre-opening VIP gala occurred Monday evening.
(Yes, you may ask why I photographed this event, but didn’t try to get into many SIFF-related parties and didn’t photograph the one I was at. I won’t answer, but you can ask.)
At the gala, the store’s many local suppliers (particularly in the deli and to-go-meals section) showed off their products. Reps from the city and the Downtown Seattle Association were on hand to wish the store and its Whidbey Island-based owners well.
I think it’ll succeed, even though it’s opening at a time when retailers in general are facing rough seas, and even though it’s in a basement, and even though it has no dedicated parking, and even though independently-owned groceries have taken a dive in this state (concurrent with the decline and fall of the Associated Grocers co-op).

The place just feels right. It’s not gargantuan (without the prepared-meals section, it’s about the size of an old ’60s-era supermarket), yet it’s got a complete selection. Prices are at least competitive with those at the big chains. (IGA is a member-owned franchise operation, whose presence in Washington has ebbed and flowed over the decades.)

Even the deli part, which is obviously intended as the store’s main profit center, serves up a lot of honest grub at honest prices. (Though I don’t understand why there’s a whole olive bar. But perhaps I’m not hep to the whole olive revival thang.)

This week we must say goodbye to the KFC restaurant at 1001 East Pine.

For decades, it was a welcome sight to nightclubbers seeking a pre-drinking meal, regular working folk seeking an affordable treat, and defiant carnivores who loved its wafting aromas signifying a Hill holdout for un-PC eating.

It was built in the mid-1950s as Gil’s Drive-In, part of a small regional chain started by Gill and Alma Centioli. When Kentucky Fried Chicken first rolled out as a franchise brand, Gil’s three locations offered it as a sideline to their burger-based menus.

By the mid-1960s, the Centolis remodeled Gil’s to conform to KFC’s chainwide branding. (They eventually owned more than 60 KFCs in the metro area.) But the Capitol Hill location remained listed as “Gil’s Drive-In” in industry directories. Restaurant-directory Web sites picked up this oddity, and continued to direct users toward this phantom burger stand.

(The Centiolis’ daughters were involved in the founding of Pagliacci’s Pizza and Merlino Fine Foods; their son owns the regional rights to Krispy Kreme.)

Jack in the Box, recently displaced from its own Broadway site, is said to be taking over the location. It’ll be a few months before the place is remodeled and reopened.

(Update: However, there’s a curious Craigslist posting claiming the site’s currently available, implying another chain doesn’t have it yet.)

…to the memory of J.R. Simplot, the only American to be a tycoon in both potato chips and computer chips. (He also dominated Boise’s economy, particularly in recent years, as Albertson’s and Boise Cascade got swallowed up by out-of-staters.)

Once again, we’re hearing about one of my pet topics, the lack of decent grocery shopping in many Seattle neighborhoods; particularly in neighborhoods far from any full-size supermarket.

The dilemma, as per current industry practice, is that low-margin, short-shelf-life items such as fresh produce don’t fit in with the typical convenience store business model. So the makings of “real” meals can only be found at huge marts that need a big population radius; while local “food” stores offer little besides beer, wine, soft drinks, cigarettes, candy, and potato chips.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Specialty produce stands, such as MacPherson’s on Beacon Hill or Rising Sun Farms on NE 65th, profitably fit into former gas-station buildings, with the same square footage as your basic C-store. With a little bigger restocking budget and a couple more cooler compartments, they could fit in a meat-deli counter and some basic staple groceries (rice, pasta, etc.).

Stick in a few higher-margin C-store items and you’ve got the return of the traditional corner grocery.

All it takes is a storefront (or a plot of land where one can be built), a competent operator, and a supportive investor (note: the latter two traits are not always found in the same person).

Communities can organize to start up such a store in their ‘hoods. A nonprofit could be formed to start a string of such stores, more compact and less hoity-toity-foodie than PCC.

It’s no megaproject. Really.

…know, there used to be a segment in this endeavor called “Junk Food of the Week/Month.” I phased that out two or three diets ago. But that doesn’t mean the food-tech geniuses have stopped devising new and wondrous things. Why, just this wek, the ol’ Blog-O-Sphere has caught on to the latest thing from a German hiker’s-supply company: A cheeseburger in a can! Just drop the unopened can in boiling water for a minute, take it out, open it up, and enjoy, sesame-seed bun and everything. (Apparently, it’s only sold in Europe at this time.)

…And in the nooze:

• The local biz world would be a less poppin’ place if out-of-staters take over WaMu.
• Affordable-health-care advocates have picked their current local target business—not some big-box retailer but the venerable 13 Coins restaurants.
• The Wash. State Legislature— America’s second gayest.
• Metro’s got more riders than ever. Don’t worry; the Eymans and Reicherts will keep insisting on car-only transportation solutions, no matter what.
• Coyotes are so 2007. The new feral menace in Seattle: Exotic cats.

…GOP presidential frontrunners as of this morning, and none of them are Fred Thompson. In other news:

• Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner may face still more delays. How smart does globally-outsourced component construction sound now?
• Raw milk— its proponents claim it’s really good for you. Except when it isn’t.
• An appeals court ordered the Belltown-based Mars Hill Graduate School (not connected with Mars Hill Church) to pay $300,000 to its first female faculty member, in a long-standing discrimination suit.
• REI’s building an eco-friendly store in Texas. Now the weekend warriors who drive 75 miles or more to their wide-open spaces can feel a little less guilty.
• A state legislator would like to ban plastic grocery bags. Yeah, but then how will our children learn the pleasures of self-asphyxiation?
• There was a cable TV outage in Kent Tuesday, due to pranksters shooting at utility lines.
• Richard McIver’s charges were dropped, one day before his domestic-abuse trial was to have started.
• Tully’s Coffee underwent another executive purge. Make your own “grounds for concern” joke here.

• First the bus tunnel, now the Space Needle fireworks show suffers from a software glitch.
• Music industry wants UW students to pay big bucks for alleged file sharing. UW administration runs interference.
• While the Sea. Times has added the NYT crossword, the P-I, thankfully, hasn’t had to drop it. Thank heavens for non-exclusive contracts.
• A McDonald’s customer in Vancouver, USA suddenly felt strange and had to sit down. No, it wasn’t from the food. Turns out she was giving premature birth without heretofore knowing she was preggers. The boy’s first words will probably not be “Supersize me.”

• Downtown Bellevue’s getting a bowling alley again! The last one, Belle Lanes, closed 15 years ago; Barnes & Noble’s in the elegant arc-roofed building now. In a separate deal nearby, an 11-screen cinema megaplex is being turned into offices.
• To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Amazon.com announced it’s moving its HQ to south Lake Union. The dot-com may occupy parts of as many as 11 buildings sprawling over six blocks.
• A sports blogger insists KeyArena’s not so bad a joint, as long as you’re not a greedy team owner.
• The grocery biz is more efficient than ever. That means, among other things, fewer surplus products going to food banks.

• Seattle to White Center: “Maybe I don’t want to hook up with you after all.”
• All those new jobs that were gonna result from Wash. state giving Boeing huge tax breaks? Not so much.
• I’ve only eaten at five of the Public Health Dept.’s 10 most-cited local restaurants.
• A new home for Opus: Woodland Park Zoo’s thinking of building a big new penguin habitat.
• You know those inflatable indoor playground thingies? Two adult males fell out of one, landed on a three-year-old, and accidentally crushed the lad’s skull.
• More nasty rumors about the Crocodile Cafe: Could they be closing up for good?

…so I guess we can talk about it now: Downtown Seattle just might, might mind you, be about to face a luxury-condo glut. Of the umpteen projects currently announced, some may not get built. Developers, natch, say all’s still well n’ fine, not to worry, bubble-what-bubble?.

IT’S NOT JUST A FEW BAD APPLES, it’s dozens of bad apples and alleged bad apples: Over the past five years, 125 schoolteachers in our state have been “punished for sexual misconduct,” including unwanted groping and rude remarks toward students. The usual question: Are teachers getting ruder to students, or are students/parents/administrators getting more nerve to press charges?

IN OTHER SCHOOLHOUSE RUDENESS, vandals over the weekend disabled the Snoqualmie School District’s entire fleet of school buses.

JOHN S. MURRAY, 1925-2007: The former state legislator owned the Queen Anne News and Magnolia News from 1953 until sometime in the 1980s. (They’re now the prime properties of Pacific Publishing, which also owns the Capitol Hill Times and has a sales contract with the Belltown Messenger.) Murray also acquired, and ran into the ground, the downtown-insiders’ tabloid Argus and the pioneering local slick monthly View Northwest. In all these, he ran editorials advocating a square, pre-extreme Republicanism, and in which his prose repeatedly revealed he was a businessman and not a scribe. Murray also owned the old News Publishing printing plant on Third Avenue north of Bell Street, recently demolished for the Moda condo project.

AND REMEMBER, tread lightly in the woods if you’re scavanging for wild mushrooms. Of course, with some of those fungi among-I, you can just float out of the wilderness…

I first visited the Pike Place Market in 1975. More than three years after city residents voted to “Save the Market,” the big renovation/restoration was still underway. Much of the South Arcade was boarded up, with “artistic” grafitti and murals painted on the plywood barriers. One board bore the simple message: DON’T FIX IT UP TOO MUCH–SAVE THE MARKET.

The Market voters had “saved” was a homey, funky, rundown warren of stands and shops, a place of proletarian dreams and honest hard work. The fixed-up Market maintained this look, even as the surrounding First Avenue sleaze district shrank.

As the years passed, it became a mecca for civic self-congratulation. More merchants geared themselves to tourists, using such gimmicks as the infamous fish throwers. Luxury car dealerships shot magazine ads along Pike Place (“No Ordinary Supermarket, No Ordinary Car”).

New York financiers, supposedly “silent” investors in the Market’s real estate, suddenly claimed ownership. The city fought ’em and won. The city argued the financiers intended to “fix it up too much,” destroying the Market’s soul for the sake of upscale retail revenues.
Now, it seems the city bureaucrats running the Market might just be “fixing it up too much” on their own. Some of the powers-that-be want to promote the place as the ultimate high-end retail destination for the condo crowd.

I say the Market’s role as “the soul of Seattle” is more vital than competing against Whole Foods.

Sure, sell fancy stuff. But still sell the basics. Make the place a refuge for products downtown people need but high-end retail doesn’t offer.

And Keep It Funky, God.