The Nooze-day for Tooze-day includes a victory for bike-share lovers; genuine Nancy Pearl ice cream; more fallout from the Legislature’s school-funding punt; a creepy Cobain art show (that doesn’t even show him); and someone who likes Amazon’s physical bookstore.

As the Obama Era’s final year begins, we discuss gated lots for people who live in vehicles; plans to legalize extant pot-delivery services; big expansion plans for the Victoria Clipper; and the UW’s plans to raze more of its brutalist old dorms.

In your midweek missive: Seattle is now Dick-less; environmental activist group or classic punk band?; how not to cover U.S. firms in India; an anti-concussion football helmet; and are law firms doomed?

Would you believe, this is the thirtieth MISCmedia In/Out List? Well, it is.

As we prepare to begin the pearl-anniversary year of this adventure in punditry, we present yet another edition of the most trusted (and only accurate) list of its kind in this and all other known media.

As always, this list compiles what will become sizzling and soggy in the coming year, not necessarily what’s sizzling and soggy now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some Sears stock to sell you.

1. Don’t pour cooking oil down a storm drain.
2. Having your city’s biggest bridge collapse can hurt civic self-esteem.
3. Sounders fans are heartbroken today.
4. HÃ¥agen-Dazs still exists.

There will still be four Elysian brewpubs in Seattle.

There will still be various Elysian beers on tap and in bottles at bars, restaurants, and stores in the region and beyond.

There will still (probably) be an Elysian Brewery on Airport Way South, not far from the old Rainier Brewery.

But they’ll all be owned now by AB InBev (doing business in this country as Anheuser-Busch).

The Belgian beer conglomerate that bought Budweiser (and commands 47 percent of the nation’s total beer sales) is now buying up craft brewers around the country. Just weeks ago, it snapped up Oregon’s 10 Barrel. It already owns 32 percent of the now-merged Redhook and Widmer Brothers.

And now, Elysian has joined the empire.

The craft brewers’ national trade group, the Brewers Association, automatically expels any member company that sells out to AB or MillerCoors. (However, the group altered its rules a few years back to allow Boston Beer (Sam Adams) to remain in the group.)

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For almost 19 years now, starting with a single (albeit spacious) brewpub in the Pike/Pine Corridor, Elysian has steadily become a big fish in the no-longer-so-small pond of regional craft brewers. Its product line has included over 350 different brews over the years, many of them short-term and seasonal (like its annual pumpkin ales). Its products are distributed in 11 states and two Canadian provinces.

One of those products is Loser Ale, originally introduced as a promotional tie-in with Sub Pop’s 20th anniversary in 2008. Its slogan (based on Kurt Cobain’s hand scrawled T shirt on a Rolling Stone cover, which in turn was based on SST Records’ old slogan): “Corporate Beer Still Sucks.”

Many “craft beer” drinkers see their choice of drink as meaning a lot more than just a matter of quality product. They think of indie beer (just as many think of indie music) as a crusade of the Regular Folk fighting back against a bland, monolithic corporate culture.

But should they?

As Kendall Jones writes at the Washington Beer Blog:

The sky is not falling. This is not a sign that the end is near. There are still over 3,400 breweries in America that Anheuser-Busch does not own…. As craft beer lovers, we’ve been taught that Anheuser-Busch and the other big beer companies are our enemies. So what gives? Is Elysian now evil? Not in my mind, but that’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself.

Another view on the Elysian sale comes from Jeff Alworth at the Canadian blog Beervana, who ties Elysian’s past success to its savvy local management:

It’s long been my favorite Washington brewery, and it’s always my first stop when I hit Seattle. It has always seemed the most Seattle of the Seattle breweries—an extemporaneous brewery that could be equal parts gritty and urbane and credibly support local sports teams or indie bands. Elysian always seemed to be right where Seattle was at the time….

Just because a brewery is local doesn’t mean it can channel the local mores, culture, and zeitgeist. Elysian could and did—which is a big part of why they were so good. Can they still do that as a division of AB? In the short term, almost certainly. But I fear we’ve lost a little bit of what made Seattle Seattle.

If, as Elysian’s owners publicly insist, joining the big boys was the only way to support the company’s continued growth and to fund further expansion, maybe there’s a natural business limit to how big a microbrewer can be and still remain independent (if no longer truly “micro”).

neonsign.com

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In other news:

• Chop Suey, the venerable live-music club located not far from the original Elysian brewpub, may remain open (or rather, reopen) after all.
• Here’s how out-of-it (locally) I’ve been: Richard Hugo House, the city’s premier writing and literary-arts center, is getting demolished and rebuilt at the same site. Didn’t even know.
• The Seattle City Council and City Attorney Pete Holmes apparently believe sex workers will be less abused by pimps and traffickers if we just create harsher penalties for sex-work customers. Uh, no; it doesn’t work that way. Try again. This time, try to work on the pimps and traffickers themselves (and on support services for the workers).
• There’s still no real replacement for the still-mourned Fun Forest amusement area at Seattle Center. But we may be getting a 1,000-foot water slide this summer.
• Our pal Lindy West remembers the cool stuff found in the now-bankrupt SkyMall catalog, and also ponders whether its fate is that of all that is fun and quirky.
• Hershey, which owns all U.S. rights to Cadbury products, is moving to stop the grey-market imports of the British-made chocolate goodies.
• Print books are bouncing back, according to recent sales figures. The “literature is doomed” crowd will, I’m sure, simply ignore these figures and continue its wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth.

fix.com

To date, I have turned down all requests to allow paid “advertorial” content on this site. (You’re welcome.)

However, I am accepting (unpaid) the following request to link to a commercial site:

Hi there, as you may or may not know, July 23rd is National Hot Dog Day! To celebrate, we have designed this commemorative graphic that I thought you might enjoy: http://www.fix.com/blog/national-hot-dog-day/

I saw you had linked to HotDog.org in the past and wanted to suggest this for your readers. If you decide to share, all I ask is that you credit the source and I can send visitors to your site as a thank-you if you are interested.

Thanks,

Kelsey Phillips

(The title of this post continues with the Sinatra-esque title treatment of the previous post.)

The Seahawks are off to the Super Bowl for the second time in team history. Just like the last time, you can expect all the national media to be against us. It’s going to be all “THE GREAT LEGENDARY PEYTON MANNING and some other team.”

Or that’s how it was going to be, until certain online commentators found a hate object.

Yeah, Richard Sherman is loud.

Yeah, he talked like a trash-talking wrestler during his impromptu sideline interview just after the game.

No, he was not, and is not, a “goon” or a “thug.” (He’s really a thoughtful young man who gives generously to charity.)

And no, his remarks do not justify idiotic racist bigotry.

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The game’s striking ending, in which Sherman’s tip-away of a touchdown pass preserved the Seahawks’ lead with less than half a minute to go, was the climax of a huge day that capped a huge season.

It had been a day of high hopes and high fears.

The 2013-14 Seahawks had united this region in ways I didn’t think possible. Even some sports-hating hippies got into the fever.

The pregame festivities outside the stadium were a glorious cacophony of enthusiasm, pride, joy, and (yes) love.

And, yeah, maybe a little bit of bragging. Like when a lot of us noticed that one of the two Pioneer Square bars taken over by 49er fans was the New Orleans—namesake of the Seahawks’ previous playoff conquest.

(The “pegging” in the above photo was only with small water balloons, and was a school fundraiser, though they never said for which school.)

A nice lady gave me this cupcake decorated with Skittles (a product of Mars, originally founded in Tacoma), and a plastic kid-size Seahawks helmet ring.

Eventually, though, it came time to gather inside the stadium, to private parties, or to bars (such as Safeco Field’s “The ‘Pen”; yes, the Mariners learned to make a few bucks from a neighbor team’s success). I dutifully found myself back in Belltown, cheering on the team with about 40 other rabid fans.

And, as you undoubtedly know by now, it was a knuckle biter of an experience.

Our boys were down (but not by much) the entire first half, broken by a short-lived tie in the third quarter. They only took the lead early in the fourth quarter, and held precariously to that lead until Sherman’s final pass deflection.

The whole bar I was at became noisy as hell after that, and remained that way for a good half hour afterward.

Then the party spilled into the streets, with revelers driving and marching up First Avenue from the stadium. Revelry continued well into the night.

Something tells me the Super Bowl itself (which will occur in East Rutherford NJ, despite what the promo ads may say), even when we win it, might feel anticlimactic in comparison.

• It’s easy to really admire Jim Vallandingham’s project “Mapping Seattle Streets.” It’s harder to describe it. I’ll just say he’s using street grids and other map details to explain the city to itself.
• You know I love the Clark Bar, and am eternally grateful to the NECCO people for saving the historic candy brand. So yes, I’m amused by the brand’s current ad campaign, in which women of various ethnicities say inexplicable things in foreign languages followed by a brief product plug in English.
• Jonathan Franzen has become, alas, the very model of a modern get-off-my-lawn crank. Fortunately, Mallory Ortberg at The Toast has a lovely antidote, “The Rage of Jonathan Franzen”:

He is angry because Salman Rushdie uses Twitter, and nowadays people can buy books on the Internet, and the Home Depot, and he had to go to Germany one time, and also some women exist who have not had sex with him.

• I wish NYT contributor Tim Kreider’s “Slaves of the Internet, Unite!” was actually about organizing a crusade against dot-coms that expect artists and writers to work for them for free. Alas, all Kreider offers is a prepared statement you can use when you reject their “opportunities.”
• Is long-term unemployment a “good” thing? Perhaps to Wall St. speculators.
• The “Lofgren Corollary.” It’s a fancy term to describe how Republicans destroy government from inside, then proclaim how government isn’t working.
• Lou Scheimer, 1929-2013: The cofounder of the Filmation cartoon studio broke through to the bigtime with a Saturday morning Superman cartoon show in the ’60s. It led to dozens of series over the next two decades. All but a few were based on established character “properties,” and almost all were considered to be factory-produced schlock. But they were all made in the U.S. by unionized staffs, with no outsourced animation. Thus, a disproportionate number of today’s top animation figures got their start under Scheimer.
• My favorite “intellectual joke”: Rene Descartes goes into a bar, orders a drink, and drinks it. The bartender asks if he’ll have another. He says, “I think not,” and disappears.

via washingtonpost.com

• Our ol’ pal Lynda Barry reveals “The 20 Stages of Reading.”
• Knute Berger sez the real issue in recent local violent crimes isn’t political “leadership,” it’s the sorry state of mental-health care.
• We now know where Bauhaus Coffee is going, temporarily, while its building gets knocked down and replaced. It’s moving into the about-to-close Capitol Club’s space, just two blocks up East Pine.
• Chick-Fil-A, the fast food chain with the cow commercials and the homophobic CEO, is coming to Northgate.
• A micro-apartment developer wants Amazon to put up its short-stay employees, vendors, etc. at his buildings instead of hotels. So much for the argument that “we’re just trying to make affordable housing pencil out businesswise” etc.
• In case you care, Bill Gates is the richest guy in the country again.
• A Nation of Change essay comparing Libertarians’ ideological justifications for selfishness to “comic book writing” is an insult to comic book writers everywhere (yes, even at Marvel).
• Bob Woodward describes the GOP standard operating procedure these days as “extortion and blackmail.”
• My fellow Stranger refugee S.P. Miskowski now writes horror stories, and she’s looking for good examples of “bad woman” characters. Not daring rebel women who were really good but just called bad, mind you. She wants real (fictional) female baddies.
• Playboy’s latest, er, re-vamp in search of lost circulation and ad bucks: “natural” glamour, instead of bleach and silicone. Also, 1 percent-y lifestyle articles.

soundersfc.com

• Turns out there’s a word for these massive fan-made visual displays at soccer matches. The word is “tifo.”
• The NY Times notes that Amazon hasn’t asked for a dime in extra tax breaks for its big Seattle development schemes.
• Meanwhile, could Amazon start its own wireless cell-phone network?
• Even the rarified realm of Seattle sushi, there are problematic “bigot diners.”
• After almost 50 years, the Francine Seders Gallery in Phinney Ridge closes this December.
• After 22 years, the radio station known as “The Mountain” is leaving the air, sort of. An Internet feed and a digital sub-channel will continue the format (but will they have live DJs?).
• The UW experiment in “mind control” won’t immediately lead to anything useful, like helping disabled people regain control of their limbs or anything.
• “Celebrity architects” don’t always design monumental, scenery-dominating houses in the countryside for fat cat clients. Sometimes they do it for themselves.
• In keeping with my occasional claims that we’re entering a long attention span generation, the Guardian claims that big epic novels “are back.”
• It’s not just McDonald’s workers who are getting screwed over. Franchise operators allege the company’s been overcharging them with rent and fees.
• Coca-Cola’s marketing a stevia-sweetened “Coca-Cola Life” drink, with vague claims of “healthiness,” but only in Argentina.
• Could the building blocks of life on Earth have come here from Mars?
• It turns out that Larry Summers, the onetime Harvard president who may be nominated to head the Federal Reserve, was involved in the World Trade Organization and its 1999 efforts to force big financial deregulation upon all its member countries. (You may remember a little protest when the outfit had its convention here.)

erika j. schultz via twitter

• Macklemore draws massive crowds to a music-video shoot at Dick’s on Broadway, just for a glimpse of him lip-syncing parts of one track over and over.
• Courtney Love, meanwhile, doesn’t understand why Seattle doesn’t massively worship her. That’s just so Californian of her.
• When it comes to getting elected Seattle mayor, is it more important to go to the Microsoft campus than to the Rainier Valley?
• Meanwhile, John Naughton of UK weekly paper The Observer claims Microsoft has been “sleeping on the job” ever since Bill Gates left.
• Seattle Weekly, under its previous management, ran a piece charging true-crime author Ann Rule with “sloppy reporting” in a book about a woman who was convicted for killing her fiancé. Nothing in the paper mentioned that the article was written by the killer’s current boyfriend. Now Rule’s suing theWeekly’s new management.
• Architecture cannot save classical music. (For that matter, building projects are not, per se, a solution to all of society’s ills, even though Democratic-controlled local governments like to think they are.)
• One of the topics never discussed in conservative spin media is how conservative operatives really work. So you’ll have to tell your conservative relatives about the Koch brothers, and why they’re a menace to even the people on whose behalf they claim to speak.
• Salon’s David Sirota, to whom we’ve linked before, wrote a piece comparing Obama to George Zimmerman and terrorist Anwar Al-Awlaki to Trayvon Martin.
• Murdoch’s NY Post tries to smear food stamp recipients as immigrant welfare cheats, despite a total lack of evidence.
• Indie record labels, as a whole, have a bigger market share than either of the three remaining majors.
• Health Scare of the Week: Vitamin supplements usually aren’t needed (and could give you cancer).
• Monsanto false-rumor update: No, the genetically-modified seed giant hasn’t bought the security and mercenary-army company formerly known as Blackwater. However, the two firms are allegedly working together on a project to supposedly infiltrate and defame Monsanto/GMO opponents. Allegedly.
• How Will and Kate named the new royal diaper-filler: “I will name him George, and I will hug him and pet him…”

factmag.com

• Somebody thought it would be cool to try to laser-etch a phonograph record onto wood. The result sounds a bit like the early, dial-up-connection versions of RealAudio.
• Item: Indoor pot growing uses lotsa electricity. Comment: You mean stoners aren’t the purest-O-the-pure eco-saints? Next thing, you’ll be saying electric cars and wood stoves aren’t pure-green either.
• Oh, Those Kids Today! #1: Monica Guzman insists today’s under-30 folks aren’t entitlement-obsessed narcissists, but rather are “people waking up to their own power and not being willing to compromise it.”
• Oh, Those Kids Today! #2: Young adults are even driving less than prior generations. How un-American can ya get?
• The Legislature’s special session could see a Dem-controlled State Senate again. Maybe.
• Seattle teachers who refused to administer standardized tests have achieved a partial victory.
• Just last week, we bemoaned the idiotic prose and strained “corporate hip” attitude of KOMO’s “young skewing” local website Seattle Pulp. Now the whole site’s dead, without even leaving its old posts alive.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 126): No. But we should have the final, final answer (for this year at least) on Wednesday. Don’t get your hopes back up. But hold on to the love.
• Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Plunder thought it would just be keen n’ dandy to play tracks by Sonics-purist and Seattle’s-honor-defender Macklemore in their arena. Nope, no way, uh-uh, no siree bub.
• Might Microsoft buy Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebook hardware operation just to kill it?
• Amazon’s fledgling in-house book publishing operations might expand to include “literary fiction,” whatever the heck that means anymore.
• Disappeared local institution we neglected to mention earlier: the Green Lake Baskin-Robbins.
• Weird crime story of the week: “Woman who killed ex with insecticide-laced JÃ¥germeister pleads guilty.”
• It’s illegal but it happens anyway: denying employment to people for the sin of being in debt due to being unemployed.
• Katy Evans at the Tacoma group blog Post Defiance notes how indie live music has become a more complicated, bureaucratic, and problematic biz, especially in towns like hers in the shadow of bigger towns.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s own reporters have to pay for website subscriptions to their own work. Except they can “opt out” of it if they insist.
• You remember how the New Orleans Times-Picayune went to only three print issues a week? No more. They’re now putting out newsstand-only editions on the four non-home-delivery days, just like the Detroit papers are.
• Talking into computers and expecting them to understand you has always been, and apparently will continue to be, little more than a screenwriters’ conceit.
• Anthony Galluzzo at Salon wants you to stop the hipster-bashing already. He says it’s old, tired, and becoming classist.
• Jim Tews, who describes himself as “a decent white male comic,” insists that most white guys performing standup are not sexist boors.
• No, Rolling Stone readers, Nirvana is not the fifth worst band of the ’90s. That would actually be Sugar Ray.

via jerry beck at indiewire.com

• Jonathan Winters, 1925-2013: The groundbreaking comic actor was a made-it-look-easy genius at everything from improv to scripted character roles, from pathos-touched bits to pure zaniness. And his first and last film credits are both in cartoons.
• BuzzFeed lists 35 “Truths About Seattle.” Not all of them actually are true. Not everyone, for instance, works at Microsoft.
• If we really are witnessing the “Death of the PC,” it’s neither Microsoft’s nor Apple’s fault. It’s just that with so much PC use and even functionality centered on Web-based stuff, home users have fewer reasons to upgrade their hardware. (OK, maybe Windows 8 isn’t helping.)
• Seattle will have two teams this summer in the Women’s Premier Soccer League, which claims to be the “largest women’s league in the world” based on the number of teams (70, coast-to-coast). It will also field teams this season in Issaquah, Spokane, Eugene, and something called “Oregon Rush.” (The league’s more exclusive “Elite” division will also have a Seattle team this year, name to be announced.)
• Those forever out-of-order escalators in the Seattle Transit Tunnel have logged their first fatality.
• Bruch Nourish at the Seattle Transit Blog has an idea for improved transit across the Ship Canal: make the Fremont Bridge for transit (and bikes and walkers) only.
• Seattle and New York are vying to be the capital of “Big Data.” I’m still not clear just what “Big Data” is.
• Sports blogger Chuck Culpepper has a lovely remembrance of the late local college basketball coach Frosty Westering.
• Would anybody want to go to a hospital where nurses have to take unpaid overtime and no breaks?
• A British author claims “news is bad for you, and giving up reading it will make you happier.” I know this becuase I read it on a newspaper’s site.
• Reader’s Digest in bankruptcy: But does it still pay to increase your word power?
• Candy doesn’t make you fat. Or so a major candy-industry PR campaign would have you believe.
• The scandal isn’t that Mitch McConnell was caught talking like a scumbag. The problem is that McConnell is a scumbag.
• Having apparently grown tired of waging the War on Women, the Rabid Right is now waging a full-on War on Sex.
• Porn industry revenues have fallen by almost two thirds in the past eight years. The usual suspect: free online content. A less usual suspect: could audiences finally be tiring of formulaic, loveless mating exhibitions?
• Besides books (yes, really), the other legacy-media segment that’s best survived the digital-age “disruption” (a term I’ve already said I hate) is cable TV programming. But with more and more “cord cutters” among the populace, can the cable channels’ owners still demand their lucrative “bundling” deals with service providers?
• America’s most implausible entertainment export these days might be the popularity of subtitled Jon Stewart clips in China.
• Let’s close today with a guy who’s painstakingly made miniature models of iconic TV show settings.