steven h. robinson, shorelineareanews.com

• After 82 years, Parker’s Ballroom on Aurora in Shoreline was demolished this month. Also known over the years as the Aquarius Tavern and Parker’s Casino, it originally opened as a naughty out-of-town “roadhouse” on the then-new highway from Seattle to Everett. The 20,000 square foot room (with no supporting posts inside) was a rollicking big-band venue during the swing years, then a major rock club hosting everyone from the Fabulous Wailers and the Sonics to Heart. It was a cardroom and sports bar most recently, closing earlier this year. If any attempt was made to save it, I haven’t heard of it. The site’s rumored next use: a car lot.
• KPTK-AM, aka “Seattle’s Progressive Talk AM 1090,” goes off the air the day after New Year’s. The station’s owned by the CBS Radio Stations Group. CBS has its own sports talk network in the works, and is “flipping” many of its AM outlets to make room for it. There’s already a “Save Progressive Talk” page on Facebook.
• SeattlePI.com Shrinkage Watch: Amy Rolph, most recent curator of the site’s “Big Blog,” is quitting to take an editorial post at MSN.com. PI.com still hasn’t replaced the last five people who left.
• The Lava Lounge, Belltown’s hip hangout bar since ’95, might or might not be sold within the next month or so, and might or might not be closing shortly after that.
• A homeless camp isn’t the place you want to be even when it’s not flooding.
• Hostess Update: Labor arbitration might save the venerable cake and bread maker as a going concern. Of course, that would leave the company’s “vulture capitalism” bosses in charge to keep increasing their own wages while cutting everyone else’s (and crippling the company’s ability to compete or even operate). However, a rival capital/buyout firm says it wants to take over Hostess, and keep its union workers.
• So let’s get this straight: Hope Solo, Olympic soccer star whose late dad often lived on the streets downtown, marries Jerramy Stevens, ex-UW and Seahawks football player with a history of sexual and other assault allegations—including a charge of domestic violence involving Solo herself. I’m not the only one hoping there’s no more drama in this story.
• The tiny town of Gold Bar, Snohomish County, may “disincorporate.”
• We now have the first vague idea what a new Sonics Arena might look like. It’ll look like a modern arena.
• Christy Wampole submitted an NY Times essay about “How to Live Without Irony.” Only she seems to completely misunderstand what irony even is. I could call that ironic but won’t.
• Sure enough, as soon as I plug one Kickstarter fundraiser on this site, I get folks asking me to plug their Kickstarter fundraisers also. This time, it’s a solo CD by venerable Red Dress singer Gary Minkler. He describes it as “contorted, gospel-rooted Americana (the broad definition), lyrically akin to American Modernist poetry sensibilities, shaped like cartoons but deadly serious.”
• Local web-comix legend The Oatmeal explains what “being a content creator” is like (well, other than the part where everyone wants you to do everything for free).

(NOTE: For reasons unknown to me, the first version of this post completely disappeared from the site. I’m rewriting it as best as I can remember.)

I have always called Seattle’s Dexter Avenue “Dextrose Avenue.”

That’s in honor of one of its major attractions, the Hostess Bakery.

Since some time in the 1930s, it has been a mainstay of the originally industrial, now posh-ified Cascade (now “South Lake Union”) neighborhood.

It had its logos built in to its concrete-block architecture.

Day and night, it enveloped the surrounding environs with the glorious smells of sugar, flour, egg whites, chocolate, etc. being poured, mixed, baked, and packaged.

At one time, they separated eggs and re-ground flour by hand; before the treats fully became the automated factory products they’d always appeared to be.

As a child during the early years of kids’ TV, I remember the live local kids’ hosts performing commercials, with the big cutaway props of Hostess Cup Cakes, Twinkies, Tiger Tails, etc.

(My favorites were always the Sno Balls. Even at a tender age, two side by side pink hemispheres meant something to me.)

Later on, after the FCC stopped local kids’ hosts from appearing in commercials (a move that essentially killed most of those shows), Hostess created animated talking versions of its goodies—Twinkie the Kid, Captain Cup Cake, Fruit Pie the Magician. (Unlike Will Vinton’s later M&M’s spots, these ads never addressed the implications of these “baked” toons inviting you to eat their relatives.)

Hostess treats will still be sold here (see below).

But they won’t be made here anymore.

The Seattle plant, and two others, will be closed.

Management blamed an ongoing bakers’ strike. (However, the mayor of St. Louis, whose Hostess branch is also closing, says he’d been informed of the closings months before the strike.)

The strikers refused the company’s demands for wage cuts and big layoffs; after the company already erased pension accounts.

That was as part of a bankruptcy procedure, the company’s second in a decade.

Hostess Brands has been slowly dying for longer than that, under three different owners.

Too many parents in recent years have demanded only “healthy” foods for their kids.

In response, Hostess re-targeted its advertising at adults, with little success.

And there are so many, many newer snack product brands, local, regional, and national.

Also, let’s not forget the impact imposed on all consumer-products companies by Walmart. It regularly sets ever smaller wholesale payments, which companies dare not challenge.

The Hostess site will surely be redeveloped, probably as a posh condo project.

A lot of these places are named after the things they’d replaced.

In this case, we should all demand the condo be christened “Twinkie Towers.”

UPDATE: Hostess Brands’ next bankruptcy move might be a staged “liquidation.” That could take several paths, but probably would involve Hostess Brands disappearing (and taking many obligations and all labor contracts away with it), then transferring assets to a shell company that would start a nonunion “new” Hostess.

via kathrynrathke.blogspot.com

All good tidings and shout-outs to my fellow Stranger refugee and prominent commercial illustrator Kathryn Rathke. She’s created the new official logo for Wendy’s restaurants. The deceptively simple mascot caricature took three years of client approval and market testing.

• I’ve now read ThoughtCatalog.com’s “23 Things To Know About Seattle.” Yep, it’s dumb.
• Did Paul Ryan “borrow” his story about naming his daughter “Bean” from Kurt Cobain?
• The anti-gay-marriage campaign: lying full-time, lying from the start.
• Note to “guerrilla marketers”: Spray-painting your logo on Seattle sidewalks is illegal.
• America’s fastest growing religion: none of the above.
• Once again, “For Women” product advertising proves to be an exercise in ridiculousness. (Today’s example: beef jerkey.)
• The late UK children’s entertainer (and original Top of the Pops host) Jimmy Savile has been posthumously outed as a serial assailant of underage girls. Some of his victims are hounding the BBC to learn what the broadcaster knew, and didn’t do, about his crimes.
• Despite what my ex-boss Mr. Savage might imply, a teenager doesn’t have to be gay to be bullied to the edge of sanity. This is what happened to a 15-year-old girl in the Vancouver suburbs, who took her own life after posting a YouTube video showing how she’d been harassed and bullied online.

We continue now to reminisce about the last Puyallup Fair (or the first “Washington State Fair,” since the new name was phased in during this year’s advertising). Of course, if you’re reading this in standard blog order, you’re seeing this second part first. Ah, the Web’s particular slant on the time-space continuum…

Some performers, such as these young fiddlers, were there for the purpose of preserving cultural traditions.

Some tried to turn old traditions into new audience-pleasers.

And some were just for fun.

Of course, all the familiar food stuffs could be had. Some of the same concessionaires have been at the fair for decades; some have no other business activities but this.

Kitchen-gadget demonstrations were everywhere and nonstop; as were booths selling stuff (below).

As were people selling ideas, including the idea of a better future.

As mentioned in our prior installment, fair officials are trying to strengthen its roots as a celebration of agriculture. Part of the plan includes year-round community and demonstration gardens, that would display produce in its “living” form.

The new plan would also replace many of the venerable livestock barns.

Veterinary regulations meant sheep and cattle could not be on the premises the same day. Instead, there was a milking demonstration with a plastic cow. (This, I believe, is where non-dairy creamer comes from.)

No such restriction was needed for the horses, or the young horsemen and horsewomen competing in the equestrian finals. The sign on the fence: NO PARENTS OR COACHING ALLOWED.

No months of training and grooming are required to ride the plastic Wally Gator vehicles in the fair’s massive amusement-park area. Damn, I still want this kind of fun within the Seattle city limits again.

These clean-cut young gents had won a huge-ass plush bear at the carny games. But they didn’t have room (or just didn’t want) to drive it home. So they tried to sell it off to passersby outside the grounds. They even proclaimed the bear was really a magic genie that would grant the purchaser’s every wish.

Sound Transit has a bus from downtown Seattle to downtown Puyallup (via Federal Way, Auburn, and Sumner). It ends at the Puyallup Sounder commuter-rail station, right by a classic small-town downtown garnished with street-corner public art works.

Civic authorities have restored this brick-wall painted sign advertising the company that created both the Puyallup fair scone and KOMO-TV.

A brisk ten-block walk took me to the fairgrounds entrance, guarded over as always by the noble cow heads.

While marketed since 1978 as “The Puyallup Fair,” the event’s official title has always been the Western Washington Fair. A new name, “Washington State Fair,” was phased in starting this year. This will surely lead to confusion with the smaller Evergreen State Fair in Monroe.

But I, along with almost every local old-timer, will always think of the fair as “The Puyallup,” thanks to a TV/radio jingle that has been embedded in our minds for more than three decades.

Along with the revised name, fair officials showed off a plan for a revised fairgrounds. The master plan would rein in the commercial exhibits that have sprawled over more of the grounds, and install outdoor agricultural demonstration areas. The idea is to re-emphasize the fair’s roots as a showcase for people of “the land.”

Other exhibits included a mini “factory tour” honoring the 100th anniversary of a Tacoma legend, the Brown & Haley candy company. Booth ladies outside were selling special commemorative Almond Roca tins. I asked if any of them contained Bjork’s life savings. They didn’t get my reference to the film Dancer in the Dark, alas.

In the fair’s Hobby Building, someone installed a private collection of memorabilia relating to another Tacoma institution, Nalley’s Fine Foods. The diversified processed-foods giant had made everything from pickles to potato chips; it closed last year, after decades of mismanagement by various out-of-state owners.

As a pop-culture compulsive, you know I always adore the collection showcases at the Hobby Building. This year folks showed off their stuff relating to the Girl Scouts (above), Lego, Dr Pepper, Sailor Moon, the Seattle World’s Fair’s 50th anniversary, Starbucks gift cards, and the Happy Face symbol.

I’ll have some more of this lovely stuff in a future post; so stay tuned.

As promised, here are my observations of Bumbershoot 2012, Seattle’s annual big culture buffet.

As others have noted, it was a sunny but not unbearably hot three-day weekend, bringing out strong-sized crowd despite the steeper than ever ticket prices. (It was either charge $50 a day, or go back to having no musical stars bigger than Hall & Oates.)

Behold, my first ever deep fried candy bar (a Snickers). Gooey. Messy. Yummy.

How are curly fries made? With good old American industrial knowhow, that’s how.

They may call it the Seattle Center Armory now, but to me it will always be the Center House and/or Food Circus.

In this post-record-industry age, live gigs are more important than ever to a band’s financial model. So are gig posters, as lovingly seen at the latest Flatstock exhibit.

The historic video games exhibit (still up) shows the young’uns what real entertainment was like, 8-bit style.

But amid all the fun there’s some deadly serious stuff. World Vision International would like you to know AIDS is still devastating much of Africa.

This “House of the Immediate Future” was named after a model home full of futuristic devices at the ’62 World’s Fair. The new one exemplifies affordable-housing designs that could be factory-built, then installed on small real-estate footprints.

A few inflatable rides are no substitute for the late, great Fun Forest.

The Toyota-sponsored “Whac-A Hipster” game. Hipster-bashing has become corporate,and therefore beyond passé.

The heart of the “Put the Needle on the Record” exhibit, a mini-recording studio where you can record your own music and/or voices for a time capsule, is this recording lathe that cuts real phonograph-record masters.

Today’s greatest ETA (“Elvis Tribute Artist”), El Vez, does his massive act with a massive in-house video production (like all the big music stages had this year).

An inflatable icon of the original Elvis stood over two exhibits.

To the right, the Record Store, a display of classic vinyl LPs with DJs and live small combos.

To the left, the Elvistravaganza. Marlow Harris and Jo David applied their kitsch curatorial touch to the World’s Fair’s most enduring celebrity visitor. I contributed my (quite modest) ETA talents at the all-day karaoke stage.

As I departed the Center grounds to the soothing strains of Hey Marseilles, I regretted the many acts I hadn’t seen but felt enlivened and revived by the ones I had seen.

As the eyes of the Earth turn again to Mars, let us look back at one of the most surreal and modern-arty “educational” films ever made, the Disney studio’s animated docudrama Mars and Beyond. Made in luscious color, it premiered in black and white on the Disneyland anthology TV show in 1957, just months after the Soviet satellite Sputnik launched the “space race.”

• The beautiful 1906 former home of the progressive Seattle First United Methodist Church will become the next home of the homophobic, reactionary Mars Hill Church.
• Ezell’s Fried Chicken isn’t Ezell’s fried chicken anymore. Ezell Stephens was kicked out of the operation by now-former business partners. He’s now got a new chicken chain, Heaven Sent.
• Gibson Guitar now admits it did, indeed, illegally import endangered “exotic woods.”
• Companies who treat customers rudely can’t hide in the age of social media. Today’s example: Horizon Air.
• Local singer-songwriter and lush-soundscape creator Erik Blood has a new concept album, all about nostalgia for the days of “porno chic.” Title: Touch Screen.
• Another creative indie music maker, “geek rock” troubadour Jonathan Coulton, wonders out loud what’ll happen when home 3D printers can produce fully functional substitutes for manufactured consumer goods.
• And Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan decries the Pitchfork festival circuit as the ruination of any real “alternative” music.

• Because we need them, here are more memories of J.P. Patches from City Councilperson Jean Godden and from KING-TV’s Evening Magazine.
• The local media were confused about the new downtown Target. It really opens on Sunday, not today (Wednesday). No, it was me who was confused by the store’s official statements. It did have a “soft” opening today.
• Ex-mayor Charles Royer, who also co-chairs the Central Waterfront Committee, strongly disagrees with Knute Berger’s assertions about the cost of the waterfront remodel project.
• Good news transit-wise: Third Avenue, Seattle’s primary bus street, may look a little less seedy in the months ahead.
• Bad news transit-wise: Metro is shortchanging the Magnolia neighborhood. Under current plans, all bus service to that semi-detached area will shut down at 9:30 p.m. starting in September.
• Chick-Fil-A’s official homophobic policy is related to its official “Christian” policy.
• Sherman Hemsley, 1938-2012: All in the Family’s first Mr. Jefferson was Lionel, who appeared in the first episode in 1971. Lionel’s father George remained an offscreen character for more than two years. Producer Norman Lear wanted Hemsley for the role, but he was contractually tied to the Broadway play Purlie. Lear instead used Mel Stewart as George’s brother Henry until Hemsley could appear. Then in early 1975, CBS needed a rush replacement for the tanking sitcom Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers (yes, that was the show’s full title). A pilot for a Jefferson family spinoff was hurriedly prepared and aired as an All in the Family episode. The resulting series lasted eleven years, still a record for a scripted show with African-American stars. (And in a totally unrelated note, Hemsley allegedly loved prog rock.)

dangerousminds.net

wikimedia commons, via komo-tv

• Drugs? Guns? Codeine pain pills? Forget it. What U.S. Customs is really cracking down against on the Canadian border is a bigger threat to America than all those combined. Beware the dreaded candy Kinder Eggs.
• Starbucks apparently has an image problem in NYC.
• How to get shoppers away from dot-coms and back to the malls? How ’bout wine bars, yoga classes, craft-making groups, and jeans stores with special butt-view mirrors?
• Outside estimates put the cost of a spiffed-up Seattle waterfront near a cool billon. That’s a heckuva lot for what’s essentially just another group of “world class” windswept plazas (and we’ve already got more than we need of those). I still say: scrap most of that, bring back the Waterfront Streetcar, and put an amusement park at Pier 62-63.
• The big winner in the demise of Washington’s state liquor stores? Oregon’s state liquor stores.
• Deja Vu’s Dreamgirls really doesn’t want to leave SoDo, not even for a big buyout by the arena developers.
• In the immortal words of Mr. Costello, I don’t wanna go to Chelsea.
• Link Light Rail is three years old and more popular than ever.
• Macklemore’s new pro-gay-marriage hiphop track is getting quite the national attention.
• Boeing wants more engineers and more training for future engineers. Oh, and it also wants more Federal money.

comicsbronzeage.com

Just Sayin’ Dept: Here’s something that hasn’t been publicized much in the World’s Fair 50th anniversary celebrations.

• Could the Almost Live! cast (or a key portion of it) be reuniting in a new project? A site called The206.tv is being coy n’ teasing about it, at least for now.
• Cafe Racer will reopen. And it’ll look better than ever.
• Seattle’s own Ezell’s has the nation’s greatest fried chicken, according to a highly manipulable Esquire online poll.
• Danny Westneat sees the Sonics Arena plan as a much better deal than the one that was used to rebuild Husky Stadium.
• No, there won’t be a zip line in West Seattle’s Lincoln Park.
• No, there won’t be an Airbus factory in Wash. state. But Gov. Gregoire would really like Airbus to buy parts and services from some of the same local subcontractors and suppliers that service Boeing.
• Just as Rush Limbaugh has his paid phony callers, Mitt Romney buses and flies in loyalist rooters to his campaign speeches. Even to the NAACP!
• It’s the 20th anniversary of the first photo ever posted to a Web site. It was a plug for a retro-cabaret combo comprising “administrative assistants and significant others of scientists” at CERN, the Swiss lab where both the WWW was invented and the Higgs-Boson Particle was discovered. The hereby-linked article includes some of their science-nerd-chic novelty repertoire.
• No, online-meme followers, Bill Gates did not speak at some random unidentified high school and tell the kids, “Life is not fair. Get used to it.” That whole text comes from a newspaper op-ed column dating back to 1996.

Happy 7/11 everyone! And we’ve got a new place to get our free regular Slurpee® on this only-comes-but-once-a-year day. This brand new 7-Eleven franchise is on Virginia Street between 8th and 9th, in the cusp between Belltown, the retail core, South Lake Union, and the Cascade district. It’s got all your favorites—burritos, Big Bite® hot dogs, $1 pizza slices, bizarre potato-chip varieties, coffee lids with sliding plastic openings. It closes nightly at midnight, though (sorry, hungry Re-bar barflies at closing time).

• I can tell you that hate-filled, hyper-aggressive online “comment trolls” existed back in the 1980s days of bulletin board systems (BBSs) and 300-baud acoustic modems. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times sees their antecedents back even further. A lot further.
• There’s only one million-selling music album so far this year. It actually came out last year.
• Jon Talton explains how tax cuts are “the god that failed.”
• ACT Theatre will have the U.S. premiere of a play by Brit mega-playwright Alan Ayckbourn next year. And he’s personally coming over to direct it. This is just about the most establishment-prestige you can get in the play world.

Back when the Stranger was still assigning me stories (just never running them), I researched the long and convoluted history of the Eitel Building at Second and Pike. Mr. Savage believed it might be cool to have a story about what he described as “Seattle’s only downtown slum” or words to that effect.

I’d first come to know the 1904-built midrise medical-office building (it was called “the 2nd & Pike Building” by the 1980s) as the storefront home to Time Travelers, a record and comix shop that was a vital early punk-scene hangout.

At the time I researched that later-killed Stranger piece, its then-owner wanted to demolish it for the usual Exciting New Office/Residential/Retail blah blah blah.

But shortly afterward, in 2006, the city slapped landmark status on it, against the owner’s wishes.

At the height of the real estate bubble a few years back, Master Use Permit boards appeared on it proclaiming an imminent 16- to 22-story structure that would incorporate the Eitel’s outer facades but nothing else. That, obviously, never happened.

But now, just weeks before Target opens in the Newmark megaproject across the street, new developers announced a new scheme.

The Eitel will remain intact on the outside, with a “boutique hotel” opening inside sometime in 2014.

•

But to me it will always be what I’ve always known it to be—one of the last major surviving, un-gentrified remnants of what the Pike Place Market and surrounding blocks to be like. A hard, scruffy place whose “original elegance” had long since settled into comfy sleaze.

The Eitel’s storefronts and basement spaces have held a wide variety of uses over the decades, few of them frou-frou.

There was the original practice space for Ze Whiz Kidz, a pioneering gay cabaret troupe. There was the needle exchange. There were several indie and local-chain fast food outlets, including the current longstanding Osaka Teriyaki.

What there wasn’t was anything on floors 2 through 7. The upper floors have been boarded up since at least 1978. Even the occupied parts have had little in the way of basic upkeep.

The one major change to the exterior cladding was a black faux-deco treatment, done some time in the 1970s and not in keeping with its original appearance.

But that just made it a more lovable little victim of neglect.

Nice to know it will survive, even if it’s not as the funky place I’ve known.

• Gay marriage update: Now that the opponents of equality have filed enough petition signatures, Ref. 74 goes to the ballot in November. Pro-equality folks, who were asked to “decline to sign” the referendum petitions, will now have to vote “yes” on the referendum itself to keep marriage for all on our state’s books. (Too bad, though, about the “Approve R 74” campaign logo. It looks too much like a Hanford radiation leak.)
• Heads up, TV viewers in Comcast-less areas of Seattle. The full transition from the pathetic Broadstripe Cable to the much more promising Wave Broadband takes full effect on July 17. Soon to arrive at last: Current TV! IFC! Ovation! MLB Network! NFL Network! C-SPAN 2! And HD versions of HBO, TCM, CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network! (Still no Sundance or the French channel TV5, though.)
• In previous posts about the above topic, I’d called Wave Broadband “locally owned.” It’s now been sold to out-of-state private equity interests, but remains locally based.
• That Seattle Children’s Hospital patients’ lip-sync music video, based on the Kelly Clarkson song “Stronger?” The record label got it pulled from YouTube. You can still see it at the Huffington Post.
• CNN wants to pick a fight between Seattle and Portland, apparently in the name of regional bragging rights. Why bother?
• Some Shell Oil execs held a PR fest at the Space Needle, celebrating the opening of a new drilling platform in Alaska. Only the three-foot-tall “oil rig” drink dispenser malfunctioned, making a big mess. Lots of blogs snickered at the ill-timed fail. Except: It wasn’t real. It was all a hoax stunt, devised by anticorporate hoax-stunt devisers The Yes Men.
• We must say goodbye to Travelers Tea Co., the East Indian themed gift, food, and home-furnishings shop and cafe on East Pine, after 14 years. Travelers’ one-year-old second restaurant location on Beacon Hill remains.
• I haven’t seen ’em, but supposedly there are web-guru essays chastizing Pinterest for attracting a predominantly female user base; as if Grand Theft Auto discussion boards were valuable “mainstream” services but “girls’ stuff” was just too insubstantial for tech investors to put their money into.
• An ad man claims we’re heading into “the golden age of mobile.” He means media and advertising made for smartphones and tablets.
• Is an ex-Coca-Cola marketing exec really sincere about renouncing his junk-food-shilling past, or is he just trying to sell himself in a new shtick as a health-food marketing exec?
• The print magazine business has apparently stabilized, if you believe this account from, ahem, a print magazine.
• Colson Whitehead has a lovely memoir of his childhood as a horror movie fanatic.
• Black activist A. Phillip Randolph put out a short book in 1967 advocating A Freedom Budget for All Americans. Randolph and his co-authors claimed their plan, based on Federal economic incentive spending, would essentially end poverty in America within eight years. The whole document’s now online, and it’s full of economic-wonk language to support its claims.

zgf architects via seattle times

• If you’re gonna build a condo tower that’s utterly, totally out of scale with the historic district immediately adjacent to it, it might as well be a real PoMo monolith.
• UW researchers say they may be able to prove the existence of “gaydar.”
• With a little over two weeks to go before the state liquor stores go away forever, some of the auction sales of the outlets fell through. Eighteen stores will be re-bid.
• Now we know why they call it Bitter Lake. It’s had raw sewage flowing into it for at least a decade.
• The dream is over: Dennis Kucinich won’t run for Congress from Wash. state.
• Amazon’s first non-Bezos-family investor gave a hot speech about income inequality in America, and how rich folks like himself really just aren’t “job creators.” (It was given at a TED conference, but isn’t one of the videos posted on that organization’s site. But you can read it; which I prefer doing anyway.) (And to be fair, here’s a different economic-inequality speech that was posted on TED’s site.)
• Is this the beginning of the end for soft drink sales in America? If the fizz really does die out, remember: Those who forget New Coke are doomed to repeat it.

meowonline.org

• Music/performance-art goddess and ex-Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer explains the secret to her astounding success at raising a recording budget thru Kickstarter. It’s all about the long work of gathering and nurturing as many online supporters as you can:

Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that I curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on… all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY.… And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.

• After nearly a decade of study and planning, Seattle’s finally giving up on the idea of a city-owned broadband network. Pathetic.
• Time is running out for any hope of saving the historic streamlined ferry Kalakala. Estimated cost of a full restoration: $50 million.
• Ah, if only the Mariners still had some of the players they’d let slip away. If only….
• A Long Island, NY woman is accused of using her hot-dog truck as a cover for arranging “compensated dates” (to use a recent Japanese euphemism). No “sausage” or “buns” puns here, at least not today.
• A Utah woman claims to have found cocaine packed in a box of tampons. Just think of it as an extra measure of pain relief that also leaves you feeling fresh.
• Bill Maher says what everyone except Fox News viewers already knows—that many of the most fervent Obama haters are racist, with different degrees of denial.
• Meanwhile, a Washington Monthly writer believes the Presidential election will be decided by Hispanic voters (i.e., one of the groups the Rabid Right is most virulently bigoted against).
• There’s an anonymous novel out of Portland (originally self published by the author, who only calls himself “The Author”). It’s getting a lot of attention. It’s about a young man’s doomed relationship with “someone who considers Courtney Love to be her role model.” What makes it extra-special is it’s formatted like one of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” kids’ books. Only every choice “you” make leads to the same miserable ending. I also like the title: Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life.
• Not only are grad students getting buried in piles of student-loan debt, they might not even get into the careers for which they’re studying (cf. the rising number of Ph.Ds on food stamps).
• A marketing analyst calls 2012 “the year of inverse retro-futurism.” Whatever the heck that is.