Rolling Stone came out with its 40th anniversary issue, full of celebratory interviews with 20 genuine Sixties Generation Icons (SGIs). In keeping with RS founder Jann Wenner’s long-standing priorities, there’s a demographic purity to the choice of celebs–eighteen white males and two white females. But then again, Wenner always was one to love, say, Howlin’ Wolf principally for inspiring covers and copy songs by Brit pretty boys.

The mag also has, hidden behind a fold-out liquor ad, a list of the 40 most important songs of the past 40 years, in chronological order. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is #38, which means the editors thought only two hits of the past 15 years approached its influence. Those are by Britney Spears and the White Stripes.

As of this past Monday, KING-TV now claims to be producing “the first and only high-definition newscast in Seattle.” Then what’s KOMO been churning out for the past seven years, puppet shows?

Current false exclusivity claims aside, KING had previously been claiming its newscasts were in HD. But that applied only to shots of the studio anchors, and only when those anchors weren’t accompanied by superimposed graphics. But now, the whole thing’s in wide, sharp, beautiful HD. (Except for live reports from the field, which are “upconverted” from widescreen standard-def.) KING 5 Morning News on KONG 6/16 is also in hi-def now, even the cute animal-adoption segments.

…on writing a Kurt Vonnegut remembrance, what with all the verbal tonnage that gets generated whenever a “Sixties Generation Icon” (SGI) dies.

But note must be made of a particularly vile obit segment on the Fox Pseudo-News Channel. As you watch the linked clip, remember: This was a taped “actuality” piece, not a live rant by a commentator. This is from the part of the channel’s output that’s still billed as fair-n’-balanced.

If you can’t stomach watching it, I’ll tell you what you already suspect: James Rosen totally trashes the beloved author and everything he stood for, dismissing Vonnegut as a morose loser whose refusal to conform to right-wing ideological obedience sealed his pathetic, irrelevant fate.

Now: What I have to say about Vonnegut. His SGI status seemed odd to me. Vonnegut was well past 30 by ’68. He was an old-school Eugene Debs socialist. His novels and stories were sad/angry/brutal, not mellow or fluffy or self-aggrandizing. He never set himself up as anybody’s guru.

Like Stephen King, Vonnegut learned his craft selling short stories to mass entertainment magazines, back when fiction was still a big part of most big mags’ menus. It was there that he learned all the little details of comic timing, of repetition, of strong characterizations and brisk plots. He learned how to be both populist and popular.

The “So it goes” fatalism pinned on him by some obit writers was actually an attitude he’d been reacting against in his work. No, Mr. Rosen, Vonnegut wasn’t a defeatist cynic. He was an angry young man who stayed angry in his old age, and deservedly so.

He was also an artist who, in his wit and his inventiveness and his unbending adherence to moral principles, provided an aesthetic vision of how the world ought to be, even as his plots revealed/symbolized the sorry state of the world as it was.

…that couldn’t be saved has been saved. In a stunning victory for the Hearst Corp. and print-media-diversity lovers, the P-I and the Seattle Times have settled, suddenly ending four years of litigation over the papers’ joint operating agreement.

Apparently, the lightly-substantiated “expose” of Times anti-P-I business practices posted on the first day of Crosscut.com may have been at least somewhat accurate. The terms of the settlement seem to imply that the Times feared losing big when the dispute reached binding arbitration, which would have begun this week.

Under the terms, the Times promises to beef up P-I promotion, and to treat the P-I equally in production/printing/delivery infrastructure. Hearst gives up a JOA provision that would allow it to a share of Times profits if the P-I closes.

The new pact runs for the next nine years. By that time, online news-consumption might become so dominant that the manufacturing and shipping of printed newspapers won’t matter.

…“Microsoft is Dead”: “No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they’re not dangerous.”

(Too bad Graham, a tech-startup guru, believes the answer to MS’s troubles is to buy a bunch of Web 2.0 companies and to run them from Silicon Valley. It reminds me of Wired’s old list of prescriptions for MS, that the company should “move all software operations to Silicon Valley” because “the Evergreen State is still the sticks.”)

Let’s not judge Crosscut, the new local-affairs site run by Seattle Weekly refugees, on the basis of its day-one product. Presumably, like many Web ventures, this is a “soft launch,” a live test of the systems and features before a fuller site rolls out.

Given that caveat, the thing’s pretty colorless and shallow at its debut.

The “big expose” piece, about the still-churning legal case between the Times and P-I, is a mealy-mouthed treatise whose allegations (of Times management actions to bury the P-I) are wonky and obscure. It doesn’t help that the writing itself is wonky and obscure.

Then there’s Knute Berger’s piece charging the Seattle School District with not kowtowing enough to the demands of upscale white families….

According to some Web site that claims to be authoritative, Seattle ranks 7 on a list of “Top US Erotica Important Cities.” NY/LA/SF are up there, of course, as are Vegas, Miami, and Chicago (the latter in honor of what’s left of Playboy’s head office, much of whose operations have been shipped off to LA and NY). Our reason for getting on the list: “Adult Websites.” (Maybe they didn’t hear that IEG/ClubLove went pffft years ago.)

Other fun alleged-facts on the page: One out of three “visitors to adult websites” are women. Ninety percent of 8-16 year-olds have seen porn online. Twelve percent of all U.S. Web sites are devoted to porn. The U.S. accounts for only 14 percent of “Worldwide Pornography Revenues,” fourth in the world; China (!) and South Korea (!!) lead that category, with fetish-fanatical Japan third. Despite this, “US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.” (The latter stat I’m particularly not so sure of; most video and online porn companies are privately held, and reliable financial data about them are notoriously elusive and exaggerated.)

Today’s front page news is “Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades.”

This spells disaster for the grumpy-grownup set.

Ever since I was a teenager (the term “teen” having been temporarily out of style then), pompous adults have relished every chance to stereotype their youngers as a gaggle of illiterate nothings.

I like to imagine this was especially true in the ’80s, when haughty “’60s Generation” people were crowding the grumpy-grownup demographic, but no. This habit has been going on long since, and it was going on long before (cf. Steve Allen’s old snipes against that silly rock n’ roll music, or the scene at the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy where an aging George M. Cohan (James Cagney) cringes at some energetic teens singing “Jeepers Creepers”).

More recently, Seattle Weekly’s new management figured the way to capture a young-adult audience (which the paper’s previous managements had either ignored or overtly spurned) was to fire the news department, decimate serious political coverage, and add dumb imitation-Onion faked features.

But this time the grumps can’t get away with their putdowns, at least not without a bigger reality-distortion field.

We’re facing what, a couple years ago, I half-facetiously named the “Long Attention Span Generation.”

We’re talking about teens who spent their preteen years devouring Harry Potter novels, each one 150 pages longer than the one before. Teens who’ve fled the instant-gratification video arcades to immerse themselves in the nonlinear, massively-multiplayer worlds of The Sims and Second Life. Teens who actually understand vast technical parts of the computers, cell phones, and online networks they use.

So, yeah, long-form narrative is quite a familiar concept for ’em. So is the activity of reading itself. (The non-porn parts of the ol’ WWW are all about words; so is text messaging.)

What this might mean in the future: Yes, I can imagine whole chat rooms devoted to Proust and Pynchon. I can foresee neo-Shakespeare fashions in London’s boppingest nightclubs (complete with codpieces, of course).

But, sorry to say, I suspect there will always be stoner boys whose idea of great writing begins and ends with Hunter Thompson.

The file-sharing software maker’s launched a “legit” download portal. As I always say after these announcements, wake me when it’s Mac-compatible.

…has proposed the impeachment of VP Cheney. The publication: GQ.

Newsweek’s got a compelling cover story this week about “Men and Depression.”

…about the forthcoming new group online venture that will include and envelope this here bloggy thang, sometime in the next month or two. But our ol’ ideological sparring partner, Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster, has announced his new “online newspaper” Crosscut will launch in March. Already, my Belltown Messenger colleague Alex R. Mayer has his own response to Brewster’s announcement, a lighthearted spoof entitled Crosscoot.

…on the station’s online program guide, but my lovely interview about the book Vanishing Seattle is supposed to be on sometime between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. on KUOW, 94.9 FM in Seattle and streaming on the Web.

HistoryLink cofounder Walt Crowley has his larynx surgically taken out today. My best wishes to Walt and his dear companion Marie.

If you’re expecting a comment about how rich people with media-proclaimed perfect bodies can have tragic personal lives, you won’t get one here.