…why I haven’t put her picture up on this site.

…to Troy Hackett, co-owner of Philly’s Best cheesesteak shop on 23rd Avenue, easily the best indie fast-food place in Seattle today. I’d met Hackett a few times, both at and away from the restaurant, and always found him to be a gentle, well-humored gent with a mind set on building his business and his heart set on having fun. (This image depicts Philly’s Best’s mobile kitchen, which had already been installed at Seattle Center on Feb. 15 for a black community festival when an antiwar rally was booked for the same date.)

…has come and gone. I was only there for two hours or so. I really don’t mind crowds; but crowds + excessive heat = unneeded discomfort.

Still, it’s a great people-watchin’ spectacle, and the most populist (yet also the most consumerist) of Seattle Center’s three big summer whindigs.

The all-new lower Queen Anne Safeway just opened today on the site of what had been one of the chain’s smallest surviving Seattle outlets. That building, a classic ’60s box structure, had been razed for a big half-block condo complex with the unfortunate name of “Tribeca”–a moniker intended to conjure images of old iron Manhattan warehouses redone into nouveau-riche loft dwellings, not brand-new stick structures.

(BTW: Safeway, while once the world’s biggest food chain, has never had a store within 300 miles of NYC.)

The store, while twice the size of its precursor, is still a compact and urbane work of “retail theater.” It has narrow carts and aisles, tall shelves, and a slightly darker color scheme. Its internal layout’s also different from the standard grocery cube we’ve known all our lives. The single entrance is toward the building’s narrow south side. The checkouts are placed diagonally along the south side, leaving space near the entrance for special promotions. The produce coolers are in the middle, not along a wall, freeing more wall space for higher-profit-margin operations (pharmacy, deli, video rentals).

It’s a pleasant, even quasi-happy place. My only gripe: Just as with Safeway’s late-’90s rebuild on 15th Avenue East, the new lower Queen Anne store abuts the sidwalk instead of hiding behind a moat of parking–but doesn’t have an entrance at its peak foot-traffic spot (in this case, Mercer Street).

IF YOU SAW the movie Ghost World, you’ll remember a shot of the astoundingly racist logo for an old restaurant, the Coon Chicken Inn. A few of you might not know that was a real chain, which until the ’50s had a large outlet on Lake City Way, just beyond the old Seattle city limits–and just a half mile north of the offices of Fantagraphics Books, which published the original Ghost World comic. (Ying’s Drive-In now stands on the ex-Coon Chicken site.)

What’s more bizarre than the old Coon Chicken logo is the fact that modern-day folks are making counterfeit logo souvenirs!

…over spilled ranch dip.

…during my enforced absence from Broadband Nation (not in chronological order):

Attended the informal outdoor wedding of print MISC contributor Michael Thomas and Sherry Wooten, with their precocious li’l one expressing approval of the whole proceeding.

Attended the Edmonds Waterfront Festival, a simple and unpretentious small-town fair with all the standard carny rides, craft booths, fast-food fads, beer gardens, and generic “blooze” bands.

Witnessed some of the commotion at the Convention Center on the day of Oprah WInfrey’s big $180-a-seat self-help seminar. The few other males on the scene included the crew of long-running cable access show Music Inner City, complete with “Oprah for President” stickers.

It just so happened that the big rally starting off Saturday’s peace march took place outside Fisher Pavilion (where the Flag Plaza used to be). Inside the pavilion was Festival Sundiata, an annual African American crafts and culture fair. That was the reason Philly’s Best, the black-owned cheesesteak house at 23rd & Union, brought its mobile van there that day.

Its delectable sandwiches happened to be the perfect peace-march meal—hearty, flavorful, made with person-to-person care by an independent business, and named for the birthplace of modern democracy.

The march attracted at least 30,000 people and possibly many more. The police kept to themselves. The marchers were remarkably upbeat. There was such a vibe of togetherness and optimism, one wishes the march had led to a closing rally-party in a park rather than merely to a dispersal point in front of the INS jailhouse.

The question remains: Did anybody in power pay attention to the thousands marching here, and the millions marching worldwide?

We can be reasonably certain the Bush goon squad has privately pooh-poohed all the protests as the impotent work of a few scattered ’60s relics who refuse to get with the proverbial program. The professional bigots on hate-talk radio and the Fox Fiction Channel are assuredly poring over their theasauri this afternoon, devising newer and meaner epithets to hurl against anybody who dares to question instead of obey.

But Saturday’s events prove more and more of us refuse to be cowed by the fearmongers.

We can stand up and resist. We can answer deliberate fear with compassionate love.

Even if the near-right Democrats are afraid to come along, we can let them know it’s in their best electoral interest to listen to us.

We can encourage individual Republican politicians to break off from the hate machine if they’re ever going to win another “swing district” election.

We close today with a line from the ineptly directed, but politically prescient, Attack of the Clones:

“The day we stop believing democracy can work is the day we lose it.”

Carbo-loaders on the go may soon have a new alternative to Cup Noodle. Very Italiano is a line of frozen pasta lunches in single-serving microwaveable cups; intended, according to the Rome-based company’s press kit, for “young hedonistic people between 18 and 34 years of age, in search of little daily pleasures and little food gratifications, showing a predilection for savoury snacks and a greater responsiveness to new products.” They also claim the nine varieties need no stirring or mixing, due to new technology that keeps the sauce from separating. US distribution is just getting underway, but prospective retail outlets will be offered vending machines that dispense the cups, hot or cold, complete with a napkin and plastic fork. Info: VeryItaliano.It.

…have a fish head and derive his powers from Kikkoman soy sauce? Watch this flash movie and see for yourself. (Found by Memepool.)

THE NEXT PRINT MISC finally reached the printer today. It should be out to subscribers by the end of the week. One of its features will be a short history of softcore sex-comedy movies.

But movies about a certain other life-fulfilling passion have been much less thoroughly documented over the years. Here’s a link to an effort to rectify this discrepancy, listing “118 Movies About or Featuring Food.”

As part of the increasing, much-vilified Kroger-ization of QFC, the formerly Washington-owned supermarket circuit has replaced is store-brand milk label with the “Carnation” logo. The Cincinnati “Distributed By” address on the label gives this away as being a case of the Cin-city-based Kroger having licensed the name from the eco-elite’s favorite love-to-hate company, Nestle, which umpteen years back acquired the formerly Washington-owned original Carnation Co., which had its local fresh-milk plant in a building east of the University Village mall, a building now housing a branch of, you guessed it, a certain supermarket chain. (Confused? Good.)

• The new Frontier Room: Travesty or abomination?
• I tried to follow my bliss, until it filed a restraining order.
• It’s hard to believe sometimes, but people have been having sex since before you were born.
• Philip Morris sells Miller Beer to South African Breweries Ltd.: Since Miller owns Olympia Brewing (the Northwest’s last mass-market brewery), how will the radicaler-than-thou Olympia downtown scenesters react to their town’s biggest non-governmental institution becoming part of what used to be apartheid’s biggest profiteers? (I know they cared little about Philip Morris owning Oly; except for the straight-edgers, those Olympia scenesters smoke like factories.)
• Who doesn’t love the ever-evolving typography of movie title graphics? And who doesn’t think they were a lot cooler in the olden days of real showmanship?

DROPPING THE NEEDLE: Even before Barry Ackerley’s radio stations become part of the Clear Channel evil empire, they’re changing for the worse. One of them, which had briefly run a nice nonthreatening ’80s nostalgia format, has suddenly become “Quick 96,” playing only six- to ten-second sound bites from oldies songs, which are given credit only on the station’s web site. (The snippets are separated by an automated voice announcing three-digit numbers, which you must look up on the site.) My initial reaction: I’m reminded of the countdown-roundup snippets on MTV’s TRL, without the pictures of course. My second reaction: Is anybody actually expected to like this enough to listen even past one commercial break? My suspicion: This is likely intended as a short-term filler concept, until the sale to Clear Channel goes final, at which time it’ll adopt one of the chain’s satellite-fed network formats. When an earlier sale doomed an earlier operation on the same frequency, KYYX, the station ended with a week of nothing but an electronic voice counting down the seconds to sign-off–for an entire week.

UPDATE TO THE ABOVE: Sure enough, “Quick 96” turned out to be a publicity stunt. Forty-eight hours after the “innovative new station” debuted, back came the ’60s-’70s oldies library of The Beat’s immediate predecessor format, KJR-FM, played as full-length tunes; this format (conveniently using music tapes already on the station’s premises and requiring no additional new recordings) will presumably stick around until Clear Channel moves in.

TODAY, some non-caption-requiring people shots from the Forklift Festival.