Here’s something I haven’t seen in a while. A new print zine. Eight photocopied pages, issued at an attempted regular frequency.

Even the content within it parties like it’s 1999.

It’s called Tides of Flame: a Seattle anarchist paper. Four issues have been produced so far.

Its slogan is “joy — freedom — rebellion.”

The joy promoted here is principally the joy of busting stuff up and calling it a political act. Yep, we’re back with the flashiest (and, to me, the least important) aspect of the ol’ WTO protest, the dudes who confused destructive hedonism with revolution.

Particularly in the first issue, which starts out with a photo of a shattered and tagged window at the Broadway American Apparel store. This occurred as part of a “direct action” episode earlier this summer during gay pride week. The zine describes it as “an unpermitted dance party” staged by “uncontrollable elements within the queer and anarchist circles.”

Why did they hate American Apparel, which puts gay rights slogans in its ads? Because the company’s been “endorsing the legalization and normalization of queers…. Clearly, the attackers had no intention of being either legal or normal that night.”

The first issue also contains a well-composed ode to the contradictions of urban “alt” culture. (Even if the essay starts by referring to “the useless phallus of the Space Needle.” Anyone who looked at its curves and angles can see it’s a feminine symbol!)

Other issues defend the prolific grafitti artist Zeb and promote “fare dodging” (riding buses but refusing to pay).

But mostly they’re against things. Cops. Prisons. Bureaucrats. Banks and the economic elite (an admittedly easy target). Urban gentrification. “Cutesy street art.” Wide swaths of modern society in general.

As with most U.S. “radical” movements built on the wild-oat-sowing of young white people, the Tides of Flame zine and its makers give emphatic simple answers to questions about the outside world, but raise unaddressed questions about their own program.

Can they reach out to make coalitions beyond their own subcultural “tribe”?

Have they got any ideas for building a better world, beyond just smashing this one?

At least there’s a sign the zine’s makers are asking some of these questions among themselves.

That sign is the zine’s regular “Forgotten History” section, recounting past radical actions in the city and region, including the Seattle General Strike of 1919.

(There’s more of this recovered history at the site Radical Seattle Remembers.)

• Warren Buffet “saved” Bank of America with a $5 billion investment. So now what should he do with it? How about breaking it up? Sell Merrill Lynch to help pay for Countrywide’s involvement in the mortgage bubble and subsequent crash. Then turn the retail banking operation into regionalized spinoffs attuned to their local communities rather than to the Wall St. casino.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Seattle Bike Blog believes SW editor Mike Seely’s “ill-informed and widely off base” rant against the City’s “road diet” programs (re-laning schemes, sometimes including separate bike lanes) is part of a desperate agenda to bash Mayor McGinn for anything and everything, including programs actually started by the previous mayor.
• Media Matters parses, and debunks, the arguments made by media toadies in favor of Boeing’s union busting drives.
• Seattle’s new art mecca? The now sparsely occupied interior-decorator showrooms at Georgetown’s Seattle Design Center.
• James Altucher lists some little known facts about the recently retired Steve Jobs. These include several less than flattering things. None of those involve his role in the outsourcing of almost all North American consumer-electronics manufacturing.…
• …while Kelefa Sanneh believes the iPod phenom, with its penchant for mixing and mashing, has driven the music biz back toward flashy hit singles.
• The story we linked to yesterday, the one that was all aglow about Iceland flouting the global bankers? Seems it was somewhat exaggerated, alas.
• And for political point making combined with snarky laffs, explore the highly unauthorized by any campaign committee site, “What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far?“

Steve Jobs had essentially retired from Apple Inc.’s day to day management back in January. On Wednesday he simply made this move official.

Thus ends the second (third, if you count the NExT/early Pixar years) era of Jobs’s involvement in, and leadership of, the digital gizmo industry.

I will leave it to others more laser-focused on that industry to give the big picture of Jobs’s work and legacy. But here are a few notes on it.

Jobs and Steve Wozniac did not, by themselves, “invent the personal computer.” Many individuals and companies had seen what the early mainframes could potentially do in the hands of smaller-than-corporate users. The early “hacker culture” was a tribe of programmers who worked in corporate, institutional, and particularly collegiate computing centers, who snuck in personal projects whenever and wherever they could get processor time.

As the first microprocessor chips came on the market, several outfits came up with primitive programmable computer-like devices built around them, initially offering them in kit form. One of those kit computers was Jobs and Wozniak’s Apple (posthumously renamed the Apple I).

That begat the pre-assembled (but still user-expandable) Apple II. It came out around the same time as Commodore and Radio Shack’s similar offerings. But unlike those two companies, the two Steves had nerd street cred. This carefully crafted brand image, that Apple was the microcomputer made by and for “real” computer enthusiasts, helped the company outlast the Eagles, Osbornes, Kaypros, Colecos, and Tandons.

Then the IBM PC came along—and with it MS-DOS, and the PC clones, and eventually Windows.

In response, Jobs and co. made the Apple III (a failure).

Then the Lisa (a failure, but with that vital Xerox-borrowed graphic interface).

Then came the original Macintosh.

A heavily stripped-down scion of the Lisa, it was originally capable of not much besides enthralling and inspiring tens of thousands into seeing “computers” for potential beyond the mere manipulation of text and data.

The Mac slowly began to fulfill this potential as it gained more memory, more software, and more peripherals, particularly the Apple laser printer that made “desktop publishing” a thing.

But Jobs would be gone by then. Driven out by his own associates, he left behind a company neither he nor anyone else could effectively run.

Jobs created the NExT computer (a failure, but the machine on which Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web), and bought Pixar (where my ol’ high school pal Brad Bird would direct The Incredibles and Ratatouille).

The Mac lived, but didn’t thrive, in the niche markets of schools and graphic design. But even there, the Windows platform, with its multiple hardware vendors under Microsoft’s OS control, threatened to finally smother its only remaining rival.

Back came Jobs, in a sequence of maneuvers even more complicated than those that had gotten him out of the company.

Out went the Newton, the Pippin, the rainbow logo hues. In came the candy colored iMac and OS X.

And in came a new business model, that of “digital media.”

There had been a number of computer audio and video formats; many of them Windows-only. For the Mac to survive, Apple had to have its own audio and video formats, and they had to become “industry standards” by being ported to Windows.

Thus, iTunes.

And, from there, the iTunes Store, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and an Apple that was less a computer company and more a media-player-making and media-selling company. The world’s “biggest” company, by stock value, for a few moments last week.

Jobs turned a strategy to survive into a means to thrive.

Along the way he helped to “disrupt” (to use a favorite Wired magazine cliche) the music, video, TV,  cell-phone, casual gaming, book publishing, and other industries.

We have all been affected by Jobs, his products, and the design and business creations devised under his helm.

He’s backing away for health reasons. But we’ve all been the subjects of his own experiments, his treatments for “conditions” the world didn’t know it had.

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The post-Jobs Apple is led by operations chief Tim Cook, whom Gawker is already calling “the most powerful gay man in America.” That’s based on speculation and rumor. Cook hasn’t actually outed himself, keeping his private life private.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.

The Puget Sound Business Journal has been running a reader poll to name “Seattle’s most respected brand.”

The finalists are Windermere Real Estate and Chateau Ste. Michelle.

Other contenders included Nordstrom, Canlis, Columbia Bank, the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Starbucks, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Northwest Harvest.

But where were Dick’s Drive-Ins, Pyramid Ales, Fantagraphics, Big John’s PFI, Sub Pop, or Tim’s Cascade Chips?

Oh right. They’re not freakin’ upscale enough.

Then forget it.

from stouttraveladventure.blogspot.com

• Tim Egan advises all weekend adventurers: When you go to the wilderness, expect conditions to be, well, wild.
• In today’s “fun with land use signs” news, somebody put up a fake sign on the fence outside one of the city’s several hole-in-the-ground lots where development got stopped three years ago. The new sign fictionally claims the hole will remain a hole, to be used as a “ground level ball pit pond containing 1,200,000 cu. ft. of rainbow plastic balls.”
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: For the second week in a row, its cover story is faxed in from another Village Voice Media paper, with some local-angle paragraphs inserted.
• Wazzu to in-state students: “The UW doesn’t love you; we do.”
• Starbucks boss Howard Schultz might not be giving money to politicians, but his company sure still is.
• Neighbours, the legendary Capitol Hill gay disco, threatens to sue the state over those suddenly imposed “opportunity to dance” taxes.
• Clarification: Even if Hewlett-Packard spins off or sells of its personal computer line (the company only says it’s “exploring” such moves), it’s keeping HP’s printers and their way profitable ink cartridges.
• Netscape (the first dot-com stock bubble company) founder Mark Andreessen sees HP’s move away from selling tangible physical products as more proof of how “software is eating the world.”
• The NY Times has discovered “the dollar store economy.” Naturally, the NYT sees it from the point of view of corporate management, not desperate customers.
• Could green tech be the next recession-killing boom industry (and/or the next investment bubble)?
• As another long-thought-invincible dictator fades into invisibility (at this writing), one domestic financial analyst is quoting Karl Marx to describe the U.S. economic (and hence political) unraveling. (He’s neither predicting nor calling for any revolutionary uprising here.)
• But enough of the gloom. Let’s close this installment on a happy, fun-filled note. The laugh track machine, a pioneering landmark of tape-loop technology whose canned guffaws peppered countless sitcoms, variety shows, and even cartoons from the 1950s through the 1980s, was found earlier this year, by PBS’s Antiques Roadshow.

1983 ad from vintagecomputing.com

• Hewlett Packard’s spinning off or selling its PC hardware business, and shutting down its smartphone and tablet lines altogether. The hereby linked article doesn’t mention HP’s printers, or their worth-their-weight-in-gold ink cartridges.
• Krist Novoselic’s staging an all-star Nevermind tribute show on Sept. 20, during the breakthrough Nirvana album’s 20th anniversary week. It’ll be a fundraiser for Susie Tennant, a longtime local music industry fixture who’s going through some nasty cancer treatments.
• Sarah Ann Lloyd at Seattlest’s take on the state’s drive to make bars pay thousands in back “opportunity to dance” taxes, which the bars had never heard of before: It’s a vague ordinance, open to too-wide interpretation.
• As we’ve already reported, the County Council’s compromise to save Metro Transit includes dumping the downtown Ride Free Area, starting in Oct. 2012. Real Change’s Timothy Harris alleges Metro management was in on “this opportunistic attack on the poor,” in order to “get the visible poor off the bus.”
• Stephen H. Dunphy at Crosscut claims there are “two economies” in the Seattle area, (1) high-tech and (2) everything else. Guess which one’s actually working?
• If you’re in that stagnant second economy, you might consider retraining in a new field. If so, you might think of this as absolutely the wrong time to slash community college funding.
• Casino losses have funded something important. It’s the Tulalip Tribes’ new $19 million cultural heritage center.
• In non-tunnel road news, construction of the new 520 bridge is set to start next year, even though the state doesn’t have the money to build anything on the bridge’s Seattle end.
• There are (relatively) little guys in the gasoline business. They’re the station owners, trapped in unequal marriages with their franchisor/suppliers. One such case has resulted in 17 ex-Arco stations in Tacoma and environs and a bitter legal dispute between a multi-station franchisee and BP.
• Can ex-UW president Mark Emmert, now running the NCAA, actually do anything to stem big-money corruption in college sports?
• Bill Clinton now claims to be a vegan. Does that mean he’s going to become as annoyingly sanctimonious as the rest of ’em?
• Someone’s found a use for print newspapers! It involves stealing them in bulk for the purpose of “extreme couponing.”
• Here comes the backlash against Standard & Poor’s, about three years late.
• According to the “hacktivists” at Anonymous, a defense contractor and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got together to infiltrate and sabotage progressives in online social networks. One scheme involved fake a Facebook profile using the real name of a Maxim model.
• R.I.P. Gualtiero Jacopetti, creator of the original Mondo Cane and many of the “shockumentary” films that followed it.
• Elsewhere in filmland, here’s an essay praising Chinese underground cinema as real independent cinema. No official support. No submissions to state censorship committees. No theatrical or above-ground video releases. No commercial potential. No careerist ambition. No bosses except Art herself.
• Here’s a Vegas hotel implosion story with a difference—the 27-story tower has never been opened.

One of the Seattle attorneys suing Apple and five big book publishers for e-book “price fixing” explains why he did it (without saying whether or not Amazon’s involved in his move):

The new system was clearly not helpful to consumers, as it meant that they could no longer shop for a bargain amongst retailers. Instead, prices at each retailer would be identical. Alongside the elimination of competition between retailers over price, the agency model allowed, we believe, a 30 to 50 percent increase in the price of the ebooks.

Each publisher’s decision to sign an agreement with Apple was not illegal by itself. What would be illegal, however, would be the coordination of five of the largest publishers joining forces to thwart price competition. Given the nearly simultaneous timing of the actions of these five publishers, and the fact that their actions coincided with the launch of the iPad, we believe there was coordination.

from buzzfeed.tumblr.com

• Spencer Kornhaber at the Atlantic offers a 20th anniversary tribute to Nickelodeon’s original “Nicktoons” cartoon shows (Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy). In a break from most commentary about these shows, Kornhaber lavishes attention on the legacy of Doug and gives R&S only a brief aside.
• Fired KUOW weather commentator Cliff Mass has resurfaced with a new gig at KPLU. It’s good to have competition, even among local public radio stations.
• No, the county won’t move its juvenile court and jail into the landmark Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon’s head offices had been). The building and its site just aren’t well configured for such use.
• To go with the planned light rail station for the area, the city’s thinking of rezoning the Roosevelt business district for dense condo and mixed use buildings, up to 85 feet tall. Some folk in the neighborhood aren’t sure this is such a splendid idea. I’m willing to entertain the scheme, as long as the original QFC store (marked for death by the rezoning scheme) remains as a protected landmark.
• Our climate is actually pretty good for solar power, it turns out. It’s just that hydro power is so cheap, solar can’t really compete without incentives.
• Local painter Scott Alberts says all artists need to do to cease “starving” so much is to have a product to sell and someone to potentially sell it to. (Of course, some artists’ most passionately inspired works don’t have mass market appeal.)
• I’ve reached a point of acceptance on a topic that used to enrage me. I have now come to terms with the fact that we will never be rid of the sixties nostalgia industry.
• Richard Charnin claims he can statistically prove the Wisconsin recall elections were stolen.
• Matt Stoller has a new thing for everybody to worry about. Global industrial consolidation means more and more vital things are made in fewer and fewer places, things ranging from broadcast-production quality videotape to flu vaccines. And when the places that make them get disrupted (such as by the Japan tsunami), you get instant worldwide shortages.
• Paul Krugman claims he’s got a surefire, if partial, solution to both the sluggish economy and the federal debt:

…It would involve more, not less, government spending… rebuilding our schools, our roads, our water systems and more. It would involve aggressive moves to reduce household debt via mortgage forgiveness and refinancing. And it would involve an all-out effort by the Federal Reserve to get the economy moving, with the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems.

The Thursday Northwest-getaways tab was axed. It was another of those sections that existed only to sell ads, and which was utterly failing in that goal. Four tab pages of regional event listings were added to the Friday entertainment tab, and two pages of regional destination stories were added to the Sunday travel section.

Also, the Friday “Your” page in the regular paper (the last vestige of the daily “living” section) was axed.

This means 16 half pages and one full size page were reduced from the weekly page count; with four half pages and two full pages added. The net reduction is five full-page equivalents, from a SeaTimes that’s already been cut-crazed in the past three years.

The op-ed pages on Wednesday and Friday were axed, leaving a single opinion page Monday-Saturday.

Sunday sports was cut to eight pages plus ads. We’ll see if any pages get restored for college football season, traditionally the biggest time for Sunday sports coverage.

The Saturday “Weekend Preview Edition” of the Sunday paper is now a cutdown miniature, with all the ads (including the insert flyers) but less editorial (even canned wire copy). No local news content (not even the pre-written feature “cover stories”). Only four pages of sports copy (heavy on previews of Sunday’s and the following week’s events).

The SeaTimes is expanding in one department. It’s taking over the Everett Herald’s home delivery operation.

from thelmagazine.com

There’s bad news today for the book snobs out there.

(You know, the droning turned-up-nose guys who love to whine that Nobody Reads Anymore, except of course for themselves and their own pure little subculture.)

Turns out, according to a study co-sponsored by two industry groups, book sales are actually up over the past three years!

Yes, even during this current economic blah-blah-blah!

Ebook sales have particularly exploded.

But regular dead-tree volumes are also up; except for mass market paperbacks (perhaps the most vulnerable category to the ebook revolution).

Adult fiction sales rose 8.8 percent from early ’08 to late ’10. Also doing well, according to the NYT story about the study: “Juvenile books, which include the current young-adult craze for paranormal and dystopian fiction….” (Good news for people who love bad news, to quote a Modest Mouse CD.)

Oh, as for that other commercial communications medium? You know, the medium that the book snobs call their sworn enemy?

The AP headline says it all: “Pay TV industry loses record number of subscribers.”

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Has the above inspired you to get with the program, hop on the bandwagon, follow the fad, and start buying some more books for your very own?

I have a great little starter number, just for you.

• Our ol’ pal Wendi Dunlap has scanned and posted the first two issues of her vital ’80s Seattle pop-rock zine Yeah! Great work, then and now.
• Amy Rolph has an online slideshow of 15 iconic Seattle fashion statements. Not included: “Skinny white boy with exposed boxer shorts.”
• Our own U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who conveniently doesn’t run for re-election in ’12, was named one of the Dems on the deficit-cuttin’ “super congress.” Also named: John Kerry and frequent DINO (Democrat In Name Only) Max Baucus (drat).
• For the third consecutive year, all Seattle Public Library branches will be closed for a week later this month, with all staff on unpaid leave.
• Seattle Weekly has struck back at Mayor McGinn with all the editorial influence and rhetorical force it’s got these days.
• Now showing on the Seattle waterfront, the “world’s fastest sailing ship.” It’s Russian and it’s really big.
• Amazon UK: Profiting from the UK street riots as a seller of baseball bats and other “weapons”?
• Anybody shedding a tear for the fiscally ill Bank of America? No?
• Apple was, for a brief time Tuesday, America’s biggest company. If you measure the size of a company by the Almighty Stock Price. Which I don’t.
• The big recall in Wisconsin seems to have fallen one seat short of ending Republican control of that state’s senate. As one might have predicted, it all came down to the county with the GOP elections boss already known for questionable integrity and/or competence.

The Seattle Times has affirmed something I’ve known personally for a while now.

The only jobs to be had in this town are for software programmers.

Can I learn to program at my stage of life?

And if so, any recommendations where/how?

And would it even be worth it?

I’d rather not go through a whole costly course of study, only to find the companies still want only to hire the young and/or already employed.

And I don’t want to study technologies that will cease to be in demand after I’ve started studying them.

• Our ol’ pal David Goldstein floats the idea that Metro Transit perhaps should be broken up, with Seattle resuming authority over in-city bus routes (including funding authority), intercity routes given over to Sound Transit, and King County keeping the rest of the system. (Seattle ran its own bus routes before Metro was formed in the early 1970s.)
• Meanwhile, Jason Kambitsis at Wired.com believes transit is a civil rights issue. It allows lower-income people to get to work and other places without the relative huge expense of car ownership.
• Another bicyclist was struck by another hit-and-run driver in Seattle. Fortunately, this victim will live.
• In what might be a grandstanding move but is still welcome, state Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna is lashing out about what he calls Bank of America’s shoddy foreclosure practices…
• …and the Washington Mutual execs who steered the state’s last homegrown big bank into the heart of the mortgage-bubble disaster won’t be prosecuted.
• The Mariners have finally gotten rid of designated hitter Jack Cust, whose very name invokes what M’s fans have done a lot of this year.
• The young City of SeaTac finally got its first big protest march (by and for hotel workers).
• Would the Midwestern funny-money fiddlers who now run Boeing really ruin the company’s whole quality reputation and value chain just to stick it to Wash. state? Maybe.
• When inappropriate quasi-racist comments about Obama will be made, Fox News will make them.
• Another slice of the media biz that’s in apparently inexorable fiscal decline: cable porn. The Gawker.com story about this, naturally, can’t stop repeating the word “shrinkage.”
• To end on a fun note, here are some cool pictures of old cassette tapes.

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.