…talks about “millionaires’ post-Microsoft pursuits;” including those of early-middle-aged tycoons who’ve vowed to give back to their communities.

I can think of a few other ways to use local private money to help the region–capitalistic, potentially profitable, ways even.

I’m talking about taking back key parts of the Northwest commercial identity that have been run into the ground by out-of-region consolidators.

Specifically, I call for the de-Cincinnatification of Northwest retail.

Kroger is ruining QFC and Fred Meyer. Kroger’s crosstown colleagues at Federated Department Stores have trashed The Store Formerly Known As The Bon Marche, and are preparing to do the same to Portland’s Meier & Frank.

Let’s get some locals with spare cash together to buy these chains back, to bring them home, to make them again responsive to local consumers and local communities instead of stock-market speculators.

If these tasks take more money than we can round up, we can always start smaller, by buying the Rainier and Olympia beer brands back from the Pabst/Miller joint venture that controls them now, contracting their production to underutilized local microbreweries, and making them ours again.

…to Don McGaffin, one of the most outspoken and well-spoken people to have worked in Seattle TV news back in its pre-helicopter era.

…of the best “All-Time 100 Movies” includes, besides most of the usual suspects, a few surprises–Detour, Brazil, Finding Nemo, A Touch of Zen, Talk to Her, Leolo, Miller’s Crossing, Ulysses’ Gaze, Drunken Master, Dodsworth, even the TV miniseries The Singing Detective. There’s still, alas, no critical reassessment of Revenge of the Cheerleaders.

According to the alt-media conventional wisdom, when TV and radio ratings decline, major-label CD sales slump, and major-studio movie ticket sales stagnate, it’s supposed to be a hopeful omen toward the impending demise of the “dinosaurs.” But when book sales show a similar slump, we’re all supposed to get outraged n’ frightful that those rubes out there in bad ol’ mainstream America aren’t consuming what’s good for ’em.

The truth lies elswhere.

High, low, and middlebrow content throughout the mechanical (print) and analog (broadcast) media have had to make room in the public “mindspace” for these newfangled digital media (Internet, DVDs, video games, et al.). It’ll all sort out eventually, leaving some investors (of time, energy, and/or money) into various of these media prosprous and others forlorn.

…to an email list that originally purported to be about the any-day-now triumph of “content” as an online business stretegy, but which devolved into simply re-ussuing all the top stories from the NY Times. Soon, such tactics might spread as a form of what the lawyers would call “intellectual property theft.” The paper’s about to charge annual subscriptions for its op-ed columnists, adding early access to the Sunday Book Review and other features into the deal.

Despite what the P-I‘s Bill Virgin sez, I don’t think such deals are going to work out. Of course, I could be wrong. And as a “content originator” searching for a new income stream, I might like it if I was wrong.

…believes Disney will inevitably ruin the Muppets.

…of all outlets, has discovered the music industry’s profit-focus shift from recordings to tours.

Suddenly, people with money are starting to fund pro, or at least semipro, blog sites.

Case #1: The Huffington Post, started by that socialite ex-Republican herself Arianna Huffington. She’s enlisted a whole bevy of celebrities, pundits, and celebrity pundits to contribute short opinion/essay pieces, with no promise of payment for the foreseeable future. (She’s just got the persuasive schmoozin’ skills, apparently.) The site also has a “News Wire” section, gathering links to reportage on the sites of print and/or broadcast media organizations.

Case #2: Seattlest, a local multi-author site run by a company called “Gothamist.” As the name implies, the Seattle operation is but one link in a would-be nationwide chain of “city sites.” Fortunately, the Gothamist formula template isn’t like all those “city” board games that simply inserted local place names onto the same design. Instead, it allows for local contributors to treat local topics with personal perspectives. So far, I like it.

Elsewhere: Matthew Baldwin compares the current Republican political ideology to a comic-book fictional universe—specifically, to the DC Universe of the mid-’80s, full of contradictory “continuity” and “divergent storylines.”

I’VE GOT A REPORT in the current North Seattle Sun about the Seattle cable access channel’s latest attempts to rein in the porn-compilation series Mike Hunt TV.

…by yrs. truly in the Seattle Times concerns two memoirs with one plot-point in common—that high-flyiin’ enlightenment salesman Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

…to use a quaint phrase quipped in the Seattle Times, even made the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid The Sun, despite the lack of any readily available photographs of her appearing in that paper’s preferred manner.

…(not seen in print locally) The Straight Dope claims, “Somehow I doubt coming generations are going to get nostalgic about the great video rental stores of their youth.” I dunno ’bout you, but I sure as heck miss both incarnations of Video Vertigo, the pioneering Backtrack Records and Video, and the “Hypno Video” section of Confounded Books.

The Organ, Portland’s greatest newsprint periodical since the Clinton Street Quarterly, has apparently published its last regular issue. (There’s a farewell editorial on page three, but a promo ad inside claims it will “be published on an irregular schedule” in 2005-2006.) In any event, editor Camela Raymond and staff have performed an admirable job these past two-plus years of covering the bi-state visual-arts scene, emphasizing the creative and the contemporary, and demanding that art be treated as a force for social progress. Raymond’s now taken a day job at the slick consumer-lifestyle mag Portland Monthly, so she can’t pour all her heart-n’-soul into The Organ for the time being.

The swan-song issue #13 (theme: “Resist”) includes several features of particular interest to Seattle readers:

• Raymond’s “Fragments from the Front” collects news clippings about the George Jackson Brigade, a sort of pre-WTO anti-corporate bombing and bank-robbing gang that operated in Seattle in the mid-’70s.
• Meagan Atiyeh’s “Artist in Residence” is an interview with Dutch-born painter Hank Pander, who’s got a career retrospective show at the Frye Art Museum until Jan. 16.
• Nadia Gregor’s “Signs and Wonders” is a lovely, haunting verbal travelogue along downtown Seattle’s abandoned storefronts (a topic I’ve also been quite interested in lately).
• And P-I arts writer Regina Hackett offers a review of local author Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay collection Orphans.

I’ll miss The Organ. I’d like to help make something new like it. Only this time, unlike the 2000-2003 print MISC, I don’t want to be the sole editor/publisher, and I don’t have any money to stick into it. Any ideas?

LOUSY NEWS OF THE DAY #2: Otis F. Odder aka Otis Fodder, Seattle’s own premier historian/collector/DJ of cool, strange, rate, and just plain odd recordings, is leaving town for the dreaded Frisco. (And yes, I call it “Frisco” deliberately, and the more you tell me not to, the more I’ll do it.)

LOUSY BUT EXPECTED NEWS OF THE DAY #3: “Snow Day” was pretty much over by 10 a.m., durn it.

BBC: “Web logs aid disaster recovery.”

Microsoft’s selling Slate, its online political/cultural magazine, to the Washington Post Co. You might recall it was another WashPost subsidiary, Newsweek, which gave a “Seattle-mania” cover story to original Slate editor Michael Kinsley. Now, the site (the last vestige of the Microsoft Networks’ original “shows” content plan) will be outta here. Current editor Jacob Weisberg promises only that “for the time being, several Slate employees will continue to work from Seattle.”