shewalkssoftly.com

• Is there anything more ritualistically ridiculous than the standard commercial “sexy” Halloween costume? Speaking of which….
• Nancy Cohen at Playboy.com warns all aficionados of porn, erotic books, birth control, and non-procreative sex in general that the extreme right wing wants to shut all that down.
• And the neo-Riot Grrrl graffiti gang has mega-tagged one of the Aurora Ave. motels that was shut down as an alleged hooking site. Their message: Respect sex work and sex workers.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s management would really, really like you to continue (or resume) reading and even buying the paper, despite its owners’ giving away free ad space to GOP Gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna. (The Times has run “issue” advertising for gay marriage and against the estate tax, but this is the first time they’ve donated to a candidate.)
• The under-new-management (sorta) Seattle Weekly did something the Stranger might have done. It commented on the Times bosses’ McKenna ad by running their own “independent expenditure” ad praising Google as “the most totally fucking awesome company in the history of mankind.” Let’s see if that gets the Weekly listed any higher in the ol’ search rankings.
• Art Thiel believes the best chance of an NBA team in Seattle might not be moving an existing one, but getting a new expansion team.
• I know you can’t get enough of those extra-unique Mormon church doctrines.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic notes how only white people get to make “jokes” about wanting to “take a swing” at a dark skinned President.
• The BBC watches the supposedly alarming trend of “passive-aggressive Wi-Fi names.” Particularly network names aimed at other residents of the same apartment/condo complex, such as “Your Music Is Annoying” or “We Can Hear You Having Sex.”

first newsweek cover, 1933, via taylormarsh.com

So after 80 years, umpteen awards, hundreds of little insights and major scoops, and (particularly lately) a lot of dross, Newsweek magazine will fold in December. The name will live on as a section within the DailyBeast.com website; but we all know this is an ending, not a “transition.”

It’s a shame. But it’s been a while in coming.

The Washington Post Co. unloaded Newsweek a few years back, just to have one fewer money-losing journalistic enterprise on its books. It was propped up for a little while by audio-equipment tycoon Sidney Harman; but he died last year, and his family stopped subsidizing the mag.

That left Newsweek at the mercy of DailyBeast, the punditry and gossip site run by media mogul Barry Diller and serial failed magazine editor Tina Brown.

Circulation, at 3 million a decade ago, dropped by more than half. Brown imposed several sleaze cover stories this summer and autumn; these only led some former fans to wish it put out of its misery.

No one, except laid off employees and their kin, will mourn what Newsweek had become.

But many of us will mourn what it had been.

When News-Week: The Magazine of News Significance began in 1933, Henry Luce’s Time had been publishing for a decade. Many readers, particularly at the dawn of FDR’s New Deal era, had grown weary of Luce’s unabashed conservative slant. News-Week gave these readers a similar formula of digests and analysis, but with a nonpartisan, sometimes even pro-Dem POV.

The Washington Post Co. bought Newsweek in the 1950s, and beefed up its original reporting. It never overtook Time in circulation or revenue, but frequently outshone its rival in getting the biggest stories and the most insightful angles on the same stories.

These days, there are any dozens of websites and blogs and aggregator algorithms serving up customized, bubble-ized, non-threatening headlines and punditry and spin about the national political/economic sphere.

But there’s less and less original reporting for these sites to slice, dice, and interpret.

And there are fewer big places that serve a variety of points of view, challenging readers to think outside of their respective ideological boxes.

We need more of what Newsweek, at its peak, served up every seven days.

kurzweilai.net

• Did the U.S. Air Force really think up plans for a supersonic flying saucer in the 1950s? And would it have been practical (i.e., would it fly)?
• What does it mean to be “indie rock royalty” these days? It means you can play Radio City Music Hall and still have to share a studio apartment. Speaking of which….
• KEXP’s pledge-drive playlist of the most important records of the past 40 years is essentially a canon of “indie” music classics, plus a few “mainstream” mentors. Nevermind predictably tops the listener survey. The list is top-heavy with the Pixies, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., New Order, Arcade Fire, etc. etc. The list’s only surprise is its paucity of female artists. The top woman-fronted act, the Pretenders, appears at spot #51.
• A HuffPost blogger disparages Vancouver as “No Fun City,” a place where nightlife is essentially nonexistent. I can recall ages ago when I looked up to Van as having the bars and live-music venues Seattle could only dream of having. Since then, Seattle has vastly changed while Van has, if anything, become more moribund.
• The Olympic Peninsula’s northwest tip has no teen vampires, but it is an ideal spot to measure climate change with solid empirical data.
• Even “underground food market” dining operations (one-night-only food courts) have to have health permits.
• Nintendo’s next game machine will be a tablet. It will also stream video content to TVs. It could be big.
• Amazon’s paying a cool billion to buy the Paul Allen-owned buildings it occupies in South Lake Union.
• Stalking and harassing apartment residents is no way to sell cable TV.
• Seattle’s next would-be mega-developers? The Bill Pierre car-selling family.
• Can the waterfront tunnel be built without massive city subsidies (that the city really doesn’t want to pay)?
• Stranger staffer Kelly O tells a San Francisco website “12 Things You Should Know About Seattle.” These things include (too much) pot, (endangered) graffiti murals, and (yummy) street hot dogs.
• White cops shooting at nonwhite civilians with little or no true justification: it’s not just happening here.
• I had a boring and/or miserable time in the Boy Scouts. But, as we’re all learning, it could have been worse. Much, much worse.
• CNN contributor Simon Hooper asks if we can finally get over Beatles (and James Bond) nostalgia now.
• A self-described “middle aged punk” gives forth a back-in-my-day-sonny lament, nostalgizing about getting beaten up by jocks.
• Don’t look now, but Walmart workers are trying to organize.
• Having solved all of the world’s other problems, 60 Minutes sics its fangs on the designer-eyeglass-frame monopoly.
• Today in right-wing sleaze, two GOP senators are asking defense contractors to fire thousands of people just to make Obama look bad; while Arizona is suppressing the votes of up to 200,000 Latino-descent citizens in the name of “cracking down on illegals.” Also, a Legislative candidate in Arkansas says parents should be allowed to put “rebellious children” to death.
• The University of Idaho’s getting the world’s biggest collection of historic opium pipes. Hey, you gotta have something to do out there.
• Forbes contributor Steve Cooper believes content-based websites could make more money by directly selling stuff on their sites, instead of running low-profit ads for other companies selling stuff. That biz model might work for sites focused on entertainment or lifestyle topics (music, food, bridal, travel, etc.). For local newspapers’ sites, it’d be a tougher fit.
• Don’t look now, but rain (remember that?) might finally appear locally later this week.

via fastcompany.com

• Dean of indie animators Bill Plympton offers a handy “Guide to Telling Animated Stories.” Lesson #1: “Having a great idea is more important than being a great artist.”
• The New York Post doesn’t like Dina Martina. Of course, they’ve been so wrong about so much so often….
• One reason the Republicans are running so scared this election: it could be the last election cycle to be dominated by TV ads, and hence by the megabucks they cost. Local news ratings around the country are teetering, especially among young adults. (And don’t expect 3D TV to save the business.)
• Buried in this story about Fender Guitars’ fiscal trouble in the techno era is the info that Fender’s biggest wholesale customer, Guitar Center (the 500 lb. gorilla of music-store chains) is controlled by Mitt Romney’s ol’ pals at Bain Capital.
• George W. Bush was kept far away from the GOP convention but is front n’ center at an “alternative investment summit” in the Cayman Islands.
• Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster looks back at his creation, now under semi-new ownership again. Brewster still seems not to understand why the Weekly had become vulnerable to the Stranger’s early-1990s rise. For 15 years, the Weekly had operated under the unbending assumption that its original target audience, the (formerly) young urban professionals of the Sixties Generation, were the absolute only people who mattered in this town or ever would matter. By ignoring the wants (or even the existence) of people born after 1952, Brewster left a huge hole for some underfunded entrepreneurs from the Midwest to fill.
• Jeremy M. Barker would like to remind you that, even when its performers appear nude on stage, “Contemporary Dance Is Not Stripping.” I agree. It’s infinitely sexier.

via yowpyowp.blogspot.com

Having finally gotten the Boomerang cable channel, I’ve become re-acquainted with the early Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows (Huck, Yogi, Quick Draw, ‘Stones, Top Cat, Jetsons, Jonny Quest). They didn’t have fluid movement but they had great visual composition. They had pleasing character designs and cool semi-abstract backgrounds. They had funny dialogue. Then the company got too big and everything went downhill. This B.C.-based blogger explains it all thoroughly, including the links between the Jetsons look and the Space Needle (hint: ours came first).

• Chris Ballew’s jaunty li’l song from the J.P. Patches memorial celebration is now a video.
• Seattle’s Capitol Hill was rated America’s eighth “hippest” neighborhood in one of those questionable magazine surveys.
• Good (media) news, for once: the Village Voice Media chain of papers, including Seattle Weekly, was “taken private” in a management-led buyout. This might mean actual newspaper people in charge again. And Backpage.com, VVM’s oft-criticized sex ad website, will not be part of the new Voice Media Group.
• We’ve long snarked at TV shows that were set in Seattle but made in L.A. or Vancouver. Now, though, it turns out it’s the L.A. production community that’s worried about “runaway” shows. Of all the new hour-long dramas on the five broadcast networks, all but two are being shot somewhere else. Even one show about young actors trying to make it in Hollywood is filmed in Toronto.
• Take out the highly GOP-biased Rasmussen poll, and Obama’s currently ahead (at least slightly) in every so-called swing state.
• The Obama campaign released a fun little online commercial showing how campaigns take opponents’ statements out of context—using real sliced-and-diced Romney quites.
• Romney’s son admits his dad cheats and laughs about it, then says “that’s what we need in the White House.”
• What happens when a Koch Bros.-funded super PAC tries to stage a pro-Wall St. rally? It gets infiltrated by “satirical” anti-Wall St. activists in suits and dresses.

andraste.com via the smoking gun

• A Seattle fetish photographer puts up some shots taken inside a cemetery. Legal rancor ensues. Trust me on this: The dead people don’t give a darn.
• Heather Artena Hughes, 1967-2012: The longtime local actress/singer/dancer/comedienne did everything from torch songs and burlesque bits to parody wrestling matches. She was a regular in the Match Game Belltown shows. Everyone who knew and/or worked with her called her a near-goddess of skill and verve.
• Nordstrom is expanding into Canada. (No “designer toque” jokes from this corner.)
• Why do the Mariners brass still oppose the Sonics arena scheme? Could it be because the M’s could conceivably want their own cable channel, and any neo-Sonics team could conceivably compete with that?
• The city of Auburn has a “wall of shame,” decrying banks that hold on to foreclosed homes and leave them to decay.
• A JPMorganChase analyst claims the iPhone 5 (just announced this week) “could prop up the entire U.S. economy.” Douglas Rushkoff at CNN is more than a little skeptical about this claim.
• AT&T wants the legal right to abandon the landline-phone biz, and with it all demands for “network neutrality” that keep it from manipulating what websites its customers get to see.
• The broadcast/cable/satellite TV industries, and their attorneys, continue to make the online streaming of “free” TV a near-impossibility.
• It’s a little too late for the chain’s Washington locations (the regional franchisee went under a year or two back), but Hooters is trying to be more female-friendly.
• It’s not much of a comic (just dialogue scenes), but there’s still novelty value to a lawyer making a five-page strip as a legal brief in the Apple/Amazon ebook pricing suit.
• USA Today just brought out a massive print/online redesign. Nice to see a print paper fighting for continued relevance, instead of just fading away.
• Amanda Palmer raised over a million bucks on Kickstarter for a new album. Not getting a slice of that: local pickup musicians on her tour stops.
• The Pussy Riot protesters might get out of jail next month. Just might.
• “Did the Republicans deliberately crash the U.S. economy?” Or was that merely collateral damage in the game of supplying as many favors as possible to its billionaire campaign donors?
• How do you get and keep more women in the tech industries? One way is to not require programming experience in filling non-programming jobs (such as middle management).
• What will it take to get more black ballet dancers?

degenerateartstream.blogspot.com

• Enjoy some understated, occasionally creepy photos by Ms. Rinko Kawauchi.
• Get ready for cool public art coming to a civic infrastructure project near you.
• Metro’s Ride Free Area is still set to end later this month, with no replacement service finalized. The transition’s probably gonna be rough.
• Contract talks between Boeing and the engineers’ union are going un-smoothly.
• There will be a 24-hour diner on Capitol Hill next spring, on 10th Ave. where the gay bathhouse Basic Plumbing used to be.
• The Stranger asked local artists to fantasize how they’d remake the waterfront. Their various suggestions, together or alone, are infinitely cooler than the official plans.
• Catholic bishops claim the existence of gay marriage would victimize them. Really?
• How does a young person get into a journalism career if she can’t afford to take a long-term, unpaid internship? She hopes for an inheritance.
• The owners of the New Orleans Times-Picayune won’t sell the paper, and they won’t back off their decision to cut it back to three days a week.
• Folks love them some sad songs these days.
• The company behind some of those infamous Facebook games (and their annoying ads and plugs) is fiscally stumbling.
• Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect says the Democrats recognize people’s “interdependence,” instead of the GOP’s Ayn Randian “noble selfishness.”
• Here’s the Bill Clinton barnburner speech. And here are the local-interest convention speeches by Patty Murray and ex-Costco boss Jim Sinegal.

zoo atlanta via king-tv

• Ivan, 1962-2012: In the postwar years, the biggest public attractions in both Seattle and Tacoma were caged gorillas. Seattle’s gorilla, Bobo, was kept at the Woodland Park Zoo. Tacoma’s Ivan was in the indie B&I discount store, which later evolved into a low-rent mall. There, he was kept in a cage with a back concrete wall painted to resemble a jungle. After years of public pressure, the mall’s owners finally donated Ivan to Woodland Park, which in turn sent him to Zoo Atlanta.
• Just when folks are getting used to the Space Needle in its retro original “Galaxy Gold” color scheme, its owners want to change it again.
• Thanks to the state’s “top two” election law and a Stranger-fueled write in campaign, the speaker of the State House of Representatives will be challenged this November by a socialist.
• Former City Councilmember Cheryl Chow (daughter of powerful local restaurateur Ruby Chow) has proclaimed that she is a lesbian; and also, as an aside, that she’s dying of cancer.
• The best thing left at Seattle Weekly, longform-essay reporter Rick Anderson, was just laid off and placed on freelance status. Will someone local please buy the paper back from the Arizonans and make it something to be proud of again?
• A tech news site visits the Bellevue company (run by ex-Microsoft top execs) that’s become infamous for buying up patents by the thousands for the purpose of suing other companies that didn’t know these patents existed.
• PopCap Games, the Seattle-based darling of the “social gaming” realm, is firing 50 people.
• Bookstore sales rose 3.8 percent in June compared to the previous year. Sorry, book snobs—you’re still not nearly as solitary as you believe/wish you were.
• Big national corporations have turned the art of finagling sweetheart deals from local governments into a precise science. Today’s examples: sporting-goods superstores.
• ABC’s Nightline, in its 34th year, is the #1 network show in its time slot, regularly outdrawing both Leno and Letterman. Right after the elections, it’ll be pushed up to 12:35 a.m. so Jimmy Kimmel can get the 11:35 slot. And you ask why total TV viewership is down these days, what with these total geniuses running the joints.
• Charles Kenny at Bloomberg Businessweek claims to know “the real reason America’s schools stink.” According to Kenny, it’s know-nothing, do-nothing parents.
• Let’s all “Do the Felix!“

seattle mariners via mynorthwest.com

maisonceleste.wordpress.com

• Did Mexico’s Huichol people create what we now know as “psychedelic” art?
• Central Washington’s bad, no-good week was caused by human carelessness. (Remember what Smokey says, everybody.)
• Soon, you’ll be able to go to an Arco station and not be supporting BP—but only if you’re in southern California, Nevada, or Arizona. BP’s holding on to the Arco stations in the Northwest, and to the Cherry Point, WA refinery that feeds them.
• Save the Silver Fork! It’s an indie diner! A real one, not a hip-retro pastiche! It’s the Rainier Valley’s favorite “third place,” a site of community-gathering and conviving. It’s threatened with demolition, for nothing more than a gas station.
• As you might know, the cover model for Herb Alpert’s classic LP Whipped Cream and Other Delights is an ex-Seattleite now living in southwest Washington. And she’s still a charmer.
• The Young Fresh Fellows, deans of Seattle power pop, have a new album coming out! And you can access an online stream if you follow the band’s clever little marketing gimmick.
• Rep. Jim McDermott, for most of his political career, has been a man only a Republican could dislike. Until his wife became his ex-wife, that is.
• Just as I figured would happen, a compromise with the Port of Seattle may enable the Sonics arena scheme to go forward.
• Getty Images, Seattle’s king of stock photos, is being bought by the Carlyle Group. That’s the D.C.-based private-equity outfit with strong ties to the Bush family and to the Saudi royals.
• During the Olympics, Nike put out a T-shirt with the slogan GOLD DIGGING. A sexist slap or just good clean fun?
• Maria Konnikova at the Atlantic explains just how famous quotations get mixed up, rearranged, or misattributed.
• Among the publishing old-timers trying to make sense of the Internet age: onetime Sassy editor and “perpetual teenager” Jane Pratt.
• Angela Neustatter at the Guardian would really like married people to be a lot more accepting/forgiving of cheatin’ spouses. It’s only natural, she says. (There goes half the subject matter of classic lit and country songs….)
• Americans are having fewer babies, too few to maintain the population size. This has been happening in Japan for a while, to the point that kids’ manga and related media are in financial freefall. But what’s bad news for the makers of baby clothes could be good news for an overextended planet.
• PBS’s Frontline goes Jesus-freaky. In the process, a lot’s revealed about cultural cross-pollination. Long before hip white kids pretended to be Buddhists, Romans disgusted by their corrupt society embraced the simple love-and-respect teachings of a tiny Jewish splinter sect.
• Whites are still far more likely than minorities to have home broadband connections. But Hispanics, Asian Americans, and African Americans are more likely than whites to have smartphones. This is what could be known as burrowing under the Digital Divide.
• Cheating at tournament-level Scrabble! Is nothing pure anymore? (On the other hand, it allows me to revive the tagline from the Scrabble game show: “It’s the crossword game you’ve played all your life, but never quite like this!”)
• When the teen offspring of the One Percent post Tweets® and photos of their obscenely opulent lifestyles, it’s all fun and snark. Until somebody figures out that potential burglars/kidnappers could be reading them.
• As I keep telling you, if you don’t vote, you’re doing exactly what the extreme right wing wants you to do.
• Political spending this season has been swamped by Karl Rove’s and the Koch brothers’ Super PACs, and their oh-so-anonymous donors.
• Paul Constant describes Paul Ryan as:

A wealthy young white man who refuses to, for one second, consider what it must be like to be a woman, or a minority, or a member of the lower class, or old. A man whose words mean less than nothing.

seatacradio.com

So shortly after the death of Chris Wedes (J.P. Patches) comes the loss of another beloved local media icon. Taken too young, after too many years of stoically living through pain and surgeries and chemo.

Goertzen’s natural charm and adept on-air skills made her one of the longest running local news anchors in the nation.

She survived in a field that is often unkind toward formerly-young females. But she couldn’t survive the tumors that wouldn’t stay dead.

geneticist.tumblr.com

• Artist Lisa Nillson creates elaborate human-body cross sections using “only pieces of rolled paper.”
• Here are links to the musical numbers left out of NBC’s Olympic closing-ceremony telecast, including Ray Davies.
• Magazine single-copy sales in the U.S. are down 10 percent from a year ago. Expect more stupid “stunt” covers as the desperation sinks in.
• Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin really dislikes voter suppression drives.
• Last Picture Show writer Larry McMurtry has become one of America’s biggest used-book superstore operators. Until now.
• Joe Kubert, 1927-2012: The master of gritty realistic comics and illustration was best known for war comics such as Sgt. Rock. He was equally adept at superhero titles (Hawkman), personal and autobiographical works, graphic journalism, and art-instruction courses. His impact on the art cannot be underestimated.

buzzfeed.com

• As we leave the mythical Mount Olympus, let us attempt to forget the particularly bizarre spectacle that is synchronized swimmers’ makeup.
• The first big motif of the Olympic closing ceremony: nostalgia for newspapers.
• By now you’ve heard all the deliciously inappropriate, wrong-for-America economic and social stances of would-be-veep Paul Ryan. And you know that Ryan is a rabid disciple of selfishness goddess Ayn Rand (as are so many right-wing operatives these days). What it all adds up to, according to Markos Moulitsas:

Democrats are campaigning with a swagger, having fun. They know they’ve got the advantage.… We need to embrace reality and shove reality down the GOP’s throats. Because yeah, we are ahead, objectively so. We’re winning and we’ve got to own it. They can whine about biased polls and biased media and biased everything that doesn’t conform to their little Fox News bubble world, all the while we do the work necessary to seal the deal.

• Meanwhile: “Decline of good jobs linked to workers’ decreased bargaining power.”
• Meanwhile, meanwhile: Kudos to Jon Talton for getting the phrase “depredations of the plutocrats” into the Seattle Times.
• Wash. Post pundit Aaron Blake feels GOP deliberate distortions and misquotes of Obama constitute exemplar horse-race style campaiging. Jay Rosen feels, well, differently.
• Harvard’s Steven Strauss explains why the 21st century was supposed to bring us techno-utopia but instead meagerly spits forth gimmicky social-media sites promoted as “revolutions.” In such an environment of “incremental innovations,” Strauss adds, corporate bureaucrats will be more valued than hotshot entrepreneurs.
• Mississippi has a county where school kids who get in even minor trouble are automatically sent to prison.
• A Las Vegas Denny’s is going to feature its own in-house wedding chapel. “With this onion ring….”
• Port of Seattle officials were for (or at least indifferent toward) the Sonics arena scheme before they were against it.
• One of the West Seattle Water Taxi boats caught on fire.
• An ex-UW pediatrics prof is accused of waterboarding his own daughter.
• Google’s making it harder to search for free downloads of copyrighted media. Finally: a market advantage for other search engines.
• Austrian archeologists, rummaging through an ancient castle, found some 15th-century vintage bras. No, they weren’t worn by (insert name of over-40 female celebrity here).
• I disagree with the Sight & Sound magazine poll putting Vertigo atop the greatest films of all time. But I understand why the poll’s “programmers, academics, and distributors” would pick it. Vertigo is eminently open to academic interpretation. It’s full of “meta” themes about identity and illusion; all within the context of a big-budget Hollywood thriller in luscious Technicolor and VistaVision (Paramount’s sideways-film process, a precursor to IMAX).

• To be celebrated this weekend: one hundred years of Volunteer Park.
• Paul Constant attends an “American Idol for Startups.” He finds a bunch of hopeful entrepreneurs showing off gimmicky little smartphone apps based on “tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality,” and promoted using jargon “as tepid and lifeless and dumb as any language that ever existed.”
• Now that all companies, nonprofits, and individuals in the western world have been exhorted to revamp their entire existences around the Web, they’re about to be exhorted to forget all that and re-revamp their entire existences around “mobile media.”
• We knew it was coming (it’s in the way of Amazon’s TriTowers HQ project), but it’s still sad to see the King Cat Theater closed for good.
• The “24 hour news cycle” is sooooo day-before-yesterday. But it does make for a lot of fun reporting mistakes.
• Meet this election’s top right wing attack groups (or at least as much about them as has been uncovered to date, which isn’t much).
• A Portland motivational blogger meets one of the original computing pioneers, and gets, well, motivated.
• Media reports about Olympic champion Gabby Douglas have been loaded with racial dog-whistle jargon.
• A self-professed “skeptic” and “rationalist” claims to be more skeptical and rational than other self-professed “skeptics” and “rationalists”:

Let’s admit it, skepticism does have a way to make us feel intellectually superior to others. They are the ones believing in absurd notions like UFOs, ghosts, and the like! We are on the side of science and reason. Except when we aren’t, which ought to at least give us pause and enroll in the nearest hubris-reducing ten-step program.

visual.ly

• According to the “Geek Zodiac,” I belong to the Year of the Astronaut. (I always liked astronauts.)
• Forbes.com freelancer Zach Slaton traces the roots of Seattle’s soccer mania back further than the 1974 NASL Sounders, to British and European immigrants who’d come here starting in the 1950s.
• A southwest Wash. man was recently discovered attempting to pass some particularly “high quality fake money.” Who says Americans have lost their manufacturing edge?
• More than 80 million Facebook accounts are really spambots or other varieties of fake, Facebook management admits.
• The Seattle Times (an old-school advertising medium) disses new-school advertising medium Yelp.com. The paper alleges that the “customer review” site promises to promote positive reviews of shops and eateries that buy ads on the site, and threatens to promote negative reviews of those that don’t buy ads on the site.
• It’s crop circle time again!
• Frank Elaison at Social Media Today would really like Net users to “focus on being positive,” and stop brutally insulting people they’ve never even met.
• The Onion (with which the Stranger has a shared pre-history) has found today’s third rail of bad-taste humor.
• Back in 2005-2006, a locally-owned small town daily in eastern Idaho (an area more heavily Mormon than Utah) ran an exposé of a boy-abuser within the adult leadership of the local Boy Scouts. The local business and governmental leadership quickly jelled their outspoken support—not around the victims or their families, but around the Scout leaders who’d conspired to cover up the crimes for years. It’s news now because one of the conspiracy’s most outspoken defenders, the head of the area’s biggest company, is now on Romney’s fundraising team. And he’s doing to Romney’s critics what he did to the newspaper back then—threaten to sue them into oblivion.

google earth via rhizome.org

• Clement Valla at Rhizome.org finds beauty and “the universal texture” within the mistakes of Google Earth’s 3D geographical simulations.
• The musicians’ union would like to create “sustainable” opportunities for local club bands (i.e., gigs with decent pay). Considering how fiscally precarious so many bars and clubs are, this may be a challenge.
• Amy Rolph at SeattlePI.com, trolling for weird items on Amazon to laff at, found a CD of “lullaby renditions of Nirvana songs.” Rolph calls the electronically-rendered music “creepy.” I call it more like a failed attempt to update the shtick of Raymond Scott’s old Soothing Sounds for Baby LPs.
• It’s not that “oldies” music is selling more these days. It’s that present-day music is selling less.
• When classic films meet know-nothing online reviewers, magic happens.
• Apple has again become the world’s #1 personal-computer maker, if you count iPads as computers.
• At last, a new job in this town that doesn’t require programming experience. It’s the making of fake poop, to demonstrate new third-world toilet designs for the Gates Foundation.
• Steven Rosenfeld at AlterNet believes today’s Republicans are “a truly toxic aberration,” an outfit that can only win elections by voter-suppression and other dirty tricks.
• The “future of news” gurus have long claimed that media companies only needed to hustle for all the web hits they could get, and ad revenue would naturally follow. That’s turning out to not be the case; especially with tablet and smartphone users.
• Here’s one Russian guy’s idea of how humans could live forever, for just $50 billion in startup costs:

1. First, invent remote-controlled, humanoid robots.
2. The next generation of the robots would contain transplanted human brains.
3. By the year 2045, people’s memories and personalities would be transferred as software into robotic brains. (As we always say with stories like this, “Nothing can possibly go wrong….”)