Making sense of the senseless: I can’t even try. But I try anyway. I also look at the paucity of women on local corporate boards; more trouble for Western State Hospital; a worker walkout at a strawberry farm; and an attack of “Diarrhetic Shellfish Poison.”

For our big pre-weekend missive we’ve got: A city growing even faster than Seattle (no, not THAT one); why drones should be kept away from orcas; the first thing associated with the “50 Shades” franchise to actually occur IN Seattle; the Pride Fest boss quits; and the Mariners bringing up a childhood TV memory.

Sheila E. won’t let personal tragedy interfere with work for Seattle’s young musicians. Also noteworthy today: Big tech fails in SR520 tolling; coal and oil export-terminal plans proceed despite industry upheavals; tacky, potentially racist Cinco de Mayo apparel; Seattle (er, Kent) is posed for a hockey championship; and Paul Allen’s new twist on “cross-marketing synergy.”

In the heat-O-the-night, we observe a West Seattle landmark restored; an important GLBTQ institution threatened; a Hanford waste tank leaking; car-share service in the south end lacking; and Nordstrom’s Seattle office staff shrinking.

Things we wonder about: Could Boeing sell 747s in quantity again, if more of them looked like the one Iron Maiden’s touring with? Should the City buy up privately held, “affordable” apartments? Have we seen the last of the would-be Bellingham coal terminal? Does Microsoft’s proclaimed “gender pay parity” even matter when it’s got so few women higher-ups?

Greenwood has been through disasters, natural and other, and will survive this one. We also mention what is and isn’t still alive in the Legislature; more LGBTQ folk gathering in smaller cities; Jeff Bezos’s vision of a future post-industrial planet; a beloved plant store’s potential end; and another loss to the NW music world.

Your pre-pre-weekend newsletter includes: A paid-membership library opens; more GOP hate-talk; a formerly top-rated radio station disappears; tech-biz sexism; “Planet X” may exist, but would now be “Planet IX.”

The work year begins and so does MISCmedia MAIL, with: white gunmen get not to be called “terrorists;” the region’s oldest gay bar quietly disappears; a Seahawks triumph; and what will Jim McDermott do?

Midway through another short work week, and we’ve got: A big hop crop (but not as big as planned); a WSDL might not get you on domestic plane trips; Seattle’s gay-rights record honored; we’re building homes for the homeless but the homeless population gets bigger anyway.

In the Toosday Nooze: Could Sparkling Ice turn Japanese?; could the “revenue neutral” carbon tax be anything but?; could Bellingham get its own version of Gas Works Park?; and remembering Lemmy.

Our midweek report includes: Paul Allen’s real-estate tentacles reaching into the Central District; the potential return of Ride the Ducks; the fate of Skyway’s mountain of concrete scrap; photos by homeless gay youth; and Boeing old-timers missing its old corporate culture.

The darkest two weeks of the year are underway, and we’re here to help you survive. On Monday, read about more weather woes; anti-Islamaphobia marchers; just how Microsoft and other companies shave their tax bills; and a real-estate developer who tried to improve views from his property by poisoning neighbors’ trees.

It’s a new month, and also World AIDS Day. MISCmedia MAIL remembers that, and also discusses Bill Gates’s clean-energy initiative and its discontents; a UW urban-planning initiative and its discontents; and the secret history of a major Capitol Hill building.

Another late June, another Pride Parade.

This time, it had the special, one-time-only, added attraction of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to celebrate. Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land from approximately coast to coast.

Mayor Murray spoke at a hastily-arranged rally Friday afternoon outside the Federal Courthouse, thanking the high court’s majority for coming down on the side of respect, dignity, and legal rights for all couples and families.

Thus, the weekend’s pride parades in Seattle and elsewhere took on an extra air of triumph.

But of what?

Will gay men and lesbians settle into mainstream corporate-American culture, no longer threatening to the established order?

Certainly some of the political figures and public officials who appeared in the parade are out for mainstream acceptance, for the gay/lesbian community and for their own careers.

One specific politician, of course, will have nothing to do with assimilation or “mainstreaming.”

And many at the parade, both in the crowds and marching/dancing/biking along the route, also displayed little interest in settling down into domestic boredom (or anything like it).

No matter how many images get issued of nice, wholesome, show-tunes-loving guy/guy couples in meticulously decorated homes, homosexuality and transsexuality are still about sexuality.

And even whole aspects of “typical” hetero sexuality are topics many Americans don’t like to discuss, or to be confronted with.

“Queerness,” therefore, will always have an element of “outlaw” status to it.

Even now that it’s protected (to an extent) by the law.

fastcoexist.com

• The Fast Company folks seem to love Northgate’s Thornton Creek mixed use megaproject.
• A Seattle architect has re-devoted his career toward aiding the homeless and the recently homeless.
• One-fourth of Amazon’s Kindle ebook sales in 2012 were for books by indie and self-publishers.
• Amazon’s warehouses, sometimes infamous for pushing workers hard, are getting robotized.
• Meanwhile, some guy at the Atlantic’s biz-news site Quartz claims that 3D printing and robotized manufacturing, and the one-of-a-kind manufacturing they can enable, could eventually mean “the end of Walmart and mass-market retail as you know it.”
• Students at Eastside Catholic High School will keep protesting the firing of a beloved, now gay-married, vice principal.
• Seattle author David Shields is acting in a movie directed by James Franco.
• City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, and the Stranger writers who relentlessly pushed her candidacy, were named to the Nation‘s “2013 Progressive Honor Roll.”
• The gang down at Three Imaginary Girls has a roundup of their favorite (mostly) local music of ’13.
• Ani DiFranco scheduled a women’s songwriting retreat at a former slave plantation. (The place is now a museum, offering a highly sanitized account of America’s slave-owning heritage.) Some Af-Am women protested online. A smart person would have used this hubbub as a positive “teaching moment.” DiFranco and her associates essentially failed at that.
• Where They Are Now Dept.: NY punk and underground-film bad girl Lydia Lunch now teaches women’s yoga and “empowerment” workshops in Calif.
• Right-wing front groups, pretending to be “journalists,” have tried to obstruct investigations into right-wing financial misdealings in Wisconsin.
• Prostitution is fully legal in Canada (including brothel-keeping and solicitation), sez their Supreme Court. It could be the start of a new (or upgraded) tourism shtick. But I’d like it to mean more respect and personal safety for sex workers, there and here.