The Wash. state legislature’s in session, trying to somehow resolve the perfect storm of fiscal bad news. With fewer beat reporters covering state politics in Olympia (KIRO-TV’s “South Sound bureau” mostly covers crime-and-mayhem stories from that subregion), two online resources have emerged.

Let’s give a warm MISCmedia welcome to the independent nonprofit Olympia Newswire, and to the state-owned cable channel TVW’s cutely named blog, The Capitol Record.

MISCmedia is dedicated today to Bob Blackburn, the original voice of the Seattle Supersonics, who passed on today at age 83. He’d outlived the team that had fired him in the early 1990s, then ceremonially retired his microphone. Survivors include son Bob Jr., who performed in several Seattle rock bands as well as serving as his dad’s broadcast assistant. (He’s now in Florida and producing “podcast” Internet radio shows.)

Let’s close this with Blackburn pere‘s longtime closing line to his KIRO-AM sports reports:

This is Bob Blackburn, reminding you that sportsmanship is a part of our American tradition. Be a good sport, whatever you do. So long.

I’m old, but I’m not old enough to remember the live TV anthology dramas seen in the DVD box set The Golden Age of Television. But I am old enough to remember when these particular eight kinescope films were reshown on PBS in 1981.

Producer Sonny Fox, who’d compiled the PBS series, mostly selected stories that had remained famous via feature-film remakes (Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Days of Wine and Roses, No Time for Sergeants, et al).

The box set presents the shows exactly as Fox had re-edited them. The plus in this: the introductions and cast/writer/director interviews Mr. Fox had added at the beginning of each installment. The minus: some of the closing credit sequences are truncated or missing.

Because so many pre-1978 live (and even taped) TV shows were never copyrighted, many other DVDs of live anthology episodes are now on the market, as single discs and in sets. They tend to include the original credits, and often even the original commercials. Criterion, which released this set, could have done likewise.

As for the plays themselves, you get nine and a half hours of raw, Actors’ Studio-style over-emoting, performed by actors who were already famous or who became famous or who aren’t even trivia answers now, performed within tiny studio sets under harsh monochrome lighting.

Utterly fascinating.

The NY Times has officially decreed Seattle’s official indigenous fast-foodstuff. It’s teriyaki.

Civilian moon colonies, snow-shoveling robots: the world of 2010, as once imagined in Bob Guccione’s Omni magazine.

New York media vet and gossippeer Tina Brown has issued a brief list of “Things to Stop Bitching About in 2010.” Among them, she’d like to banish the notion that “newspapers are dying because of the Internet”:

What a load of Spam! American newspapers are dying mostly because they were so dull for so long a whole generation gave up on them. They needed to innovate back in the Fax Age of the 1980s but were too self-important and making too much money with their monopolies to acknowledge it.

It’s the madcap return of the MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got a great house for sale at its 2007 price.

Carl Franzen at the Atlantic compiles other sites’ “Odd, Overreaching ‘Decade’ Lists.” Among them is Billboard’s list of “One Hit Wonders of the 2000s.” This one’s a particularly odd list, mainly because the pop charts have become so meaningless. Back when commercial music radio meant something, the Top 100 chart meant what you’d be allowed to listen to on the ol’ AM/FM. But now, the likes of Gnarles Barkley and Macy Gray can carve out decent careers for themselves without returning to the top of singles-sales.

Reader’s Digest might have been the first “aggregation site.” Its original concept was to take existing articles from other magazines and rewrite them into a unified, compact package.

Then it became a near-right, squarer-than-square money machine.

Now, the NYTimes reports, both the magazine and the company that bears its name are hollowed-out shells of their former selves. A leveraged buyout led to millions in debts, massive layoffs, and the installation of new execs spouting acronym-heavy motivational schticks.

They’re even abandoning their mammoth quasi-colonial suburban offices. Which, despite the mag’s mailing address, are not in Pleasantville NY, but in another town a dozen miles away.

I want my next career to be creating and designing paperless papers and ebooks for tablet computers, and authoring platforms to help others do likewise.

I don’t have any appreciable coding experience, but that shouldn’t matter. I should just align myself with people who do.

Besides, the skills I do have are a lot rarer.

I’m a combo writer/editor/designer/media historian/social media pioneer/big-picture seer.

And I love books without hating tech.

So let’s get started.

Now where will we get our industry-insider news about the shrinking print-media business?

Kansas City Star TV critic (yes, a few daily papers still have one of those) Aaron Barnhart describes the past 10 years as having been a time when “technology put culture in the hands of many people.” In other words, gadgets and the Intrawebs and infinite cable channels allowed people…

…to produce, consume and comment on culture, exercising powers that had previously been off-limits to the untrained. They broke the back of the music business with the aid of iPods and social networks. They humbled the newspaper industry with the help of Google. They raised the existential question of what exactly are radio and television.

Barnhart ought to know about what online communications can do. After all, he originally broke into professional media-punditry by posting a weekly David Letterman fan newsletter to Usenet discussion boards.

Newsweek’s end-of-the-Oughts package includes a bizarre little fantasy piece by David Rakoff. Rakoff imagines that had Gore gotten into the White House in ’00, he’d have done many of the same dumb things Bush did.

The newly independent AOL says it’s got a whiz-bang system to generate online content by determining just what material will attract certain users toward certain ads.

Seattle’s own No Depression (now, sadly, online only) made Paste’s list of the “20 Best Magazines of the Decade .”