…of complainin’ and protestin’ all the time about that dumbheaded Prop 8 down in Californ-i-yay, you all could do something to support improved domestic-partner rights in our very own state. Like right here.

Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.

“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.

I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.

Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.

Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.

Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.

The nonexistent (outside Africa) hetero AIDS scare that was supposed to hit us any year now has cost governments and health groups about a billion bucks. Bucks that could’ve been spent on treatments and possible preventions for those who really did have it, or who really were at risk.

Another TV season has come and gone. Ratings across the channel spectrum continued to plummet, even on shows/channels that weren’t hit by the writers’ strike.

And with the explosion in programming across broadcast and cable channels, telecasters are constantly on the lookout for entertainment forms that haven’t yet been adapted to the screen.

Saturday Night Live, as you’ll recall, was born from trends in stage sketch comedy that hadn’t yet been brought to TV on a regular basis.

Later years brought us televised karaoke, poker, ballroom dancing, shows based on video blogs and webcams, travelogue shows at pubilc-drunkenness events, and even prime-time bingo.

So: What else is out there, to feed programmers’ ravenous appetites for stealable concepts?

Here are a few ideas. (If any readers successfully package a series based on one of these, you may pay me a modest royalty.)

• Poetry slams
• Jam bands
• The entire worlds of classical music, opera, ballet
• Modern dance
• “Legitimate” theater
• Conceptual performance art
• Easter egg hunts
• Neo-burlesque
• Alternative circus acts, such as Circus Contraption
• Drag cabarets/pageants
• Mr./Ms. Leather contests
• Drum circles
• Sewing circles
• Storytelling competitions
• “Cuddle parties”
• Role-playing games (not cartoons based on the characters in the games, but actual sit-down game playing)

Please feel free to suggest your own.

…we don’t have to do everything the way it’s been done in California? Well, here’s one exception.

(My apologies if that word-wraps weirdly in your browser.) As we await the potential end of at least one party race, knowing we’ve got our own state caucuses this Saturday, here’s some other nooze:

• Bush’s budget has good news for Sound Transit, bad news for education and health care.
• The Legislature’s working on relief for tenants of condo-converted apartments, just as that trend seems to be reversing.
• Oregon had gay marriages, then it didn’t. Now it’s got “domestic partnerships.”
• Georgetown: Potential haven for live theater groups displaced by gentrification elsewhere.
• Tully’s Coffee, which has turned a profit in exactly one of its 16 years, might be for sale.

…discover the shocking fact that skiers like snow in the mountains. In other nooze:

• The UW’s latest big fundraising campaign hit its goal five months early. No word whether they’ll just keep going to fund that new stadium remodel.
• Capitol Hill activists hope to prevent another spate of gay-bashing crimes this next summer.
• Driving in snowy mountain passes is tough. Attacking a snowplow driver sure doesn’t help.

…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.

• The LGBT Community Center, which just got its own Capitol Hill building a couple years back, is now in fiscal trouble. It may close by month’s end. Does cultural acceptance of other sexual preferences necessarily lead to assimilation, and in turn to the death of niche-subculture institutions?
• Is Paul Allen getting a “sweetheart deal” from the City in regards to his South Lake Union development projects? Many have rumored such allegations, and now City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is vocalizing ’em.
• No, Snohomish cops, UW profs taking industrial-art photographs are not terrotists.
• Microsoft’s shut down a holiday greetings Web page that featured a sometimes foul-mouthed Santa.
• In decades past, private, for-profit lending libraries offered books for rent, sometimes in genres or to audience niches public libraries wouldn’t or couldn’t fully serve. Now, some web entrepreneurs want to bring back the concept, in the form of “a Netflix for books.”
• And, yep, there’s still lotsa flood damage and closed roads and highways throughout Western Washington.

• PCC groceries ban all products containing high fructose corn syrup. Remember: When mainstream soda pop is outlawed, only outlaws will Do the Dew.
• The biggest class action lawsuit in Wash. state history’s underway. The class of plaintiffs: Every Washingtonian who’s ever worked for Wal-Mart.
• Those Kansas “Christians” harassing the families of dead gay soldiers at funerals showed up in Port Orchard, along with the expected counter-protesters.
• The state Dept. of Ecology claims stormwater drainage from parking lots, driveways, and roads sends more than six million gallons of petroleum into Puget Sound every year. That’s about half the output of the Exxon Valdez disaster, a drop at a time.
• Today’s dentist-caught-abusing-sedated-female-patients story comes to you from Shoreline.
• Beware of “sham recyclers,” outfits that charge you to take your stuff away and then just dump it in landfills.

• The end of the ride may finally be in sight for the delightfully seedy/carny Seattle Center Fun Forest. The amusement park’s lessee/operators never recovered from losing a big chunk of their space to the Experience Music Project. They’re way behind on their rent to the City. Everybody in city and county officialdom wants the arcades and rides outta there. They’d like to replace it all with something more befitting of New Seattle world-class-osity, such as a big lawn peppered with public art, or a miniature “real” forest. Will nobody step forward in defense of this business-for-pleasure, this bastion of pre-Space Mountain carnivality?
• Glammie-gate’s repercussions continue. Gay Bingo’s new boss told its beloved host, the foul-mouthed drag performer Glamazonia, to clean up her act or be gone. As you might expect, she didn’t go away quietly.And again this year, the Sheraton’s got a huge display of gingerbread structures to benefit, of all causes, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

…some less than flattering words about the church that’s moving into Belltown’s Tabella nightclub space. Essentially, Lanham accuses the church and its leader of preaching hatred, homophobia, and misogyny under the guise of a youth-understanding hipster.

Gay, piercing fan, cock ring wearer.

…sets in, the remaining loyal Bushbots get more transparent about their real beliefs and goals. Today’s lesson: A Wall St. Journal oped proposing that the Constitution actually allows Presidents to assume dictatorial powers, and that Presidents should assume such powers when they see fit to do so.

The author of this particular piece is no mere talk-radio goon. Harvard prof Harvey Mansfield, as profiled by Glenn Greenwald, is one of Leo Strauss’s U. of Chicago ideologues, an outspoken misogynist and homophobe, and a fawning admirer of Machiavelli. He articulately wraps his arguments in the fanciest of rhetorical flourishes. He creates structured arguments that follow from their initial premises, with all the skill of a great debater.

He is also full of shit.

Greenwald claims Mansfield’s particular slickly-packaged shit accurately expresses what the Bush machine really believes. I’m not so sure. To ascribe Mansfield’s forensic cleverness to the likes of Cheney and Rove, let alone the Chimp himself, is to imply that they (or their inner circle) are capable of logical processing at a sufficient level.

More likely, the central Bushbots have simply acted on lizard-brain tyrannical pasison. This leaves it to the peripheral Bushbots such as Mansfield to invent a reasoning behind the power-madness; just as the Soviets’ old “ministers of ideology” invented reasoning behind the Stalinists’ power-madness.

…with a high-profile rally at Seattle Center and a downtown parade, has now officially bankrupted its organizers. But another group has already stepped forward to stage at least something for this year, at the festival’s old Capitol Hill stomping grounds.