As you might have perceived from the new image added to the top of the left-hand column, we’ve got another amazing, stupendous, enticing tome for your perusing pleasure.

Seattle’s Belltown is about exactly what you think it’s about. It covers 1.5 centuries of falling hills, rising buildings, homes, bars, theaters, hotels, P-Patches, streets, shops, and life. Get your copy now.

Our OFFICIAL PREMIERE is Thursday, December 6, 5-7 p.m., at M. COY BOOKS, 121 Pine Street. Be there or be trapezoidal.

As I mentioned a few days back, I’m working to make my music history book Loser fully available again. This time, I’m dealing with a print-on-demand outfit whose largest standard page size is smaller than the one used for the last Loser print run.

That’s little problem for the original 1995 pages; Art Chantry had designed them for a 10-inch-tall page, rather than the 11-inch-tall size the original publisher used.

But I subsequently designed the 1999 addenda (Chantry was living out of state at the time) for a full 11-inch page. I’ve been adapting those 45 pages to the smaller dimensions without cuting anything.

Now for the big question: How much updating should I make to the 1999-edition text?

Got the October Belltown Messenger done. It’ll be out (and online) next week, and it’s a smash if I do say so myself (and I do).

Been working on a deal to get my old local music book Loser more available.

Been trying to teach myself at least enough programming to bring this site into the 21st century, tech-wise.

Finally, after decades of failed attempts and almost-but-not-quites, there will be a real supermarket in downtown Seattle.

It’ll be an IGA franchise in the lower level of the old Kress variety store at Third and Pike. Vanishing Seattle readers have seen a lovely pic of the soda fountain counter that had been there.

There are now more than 18,000 residents in greater downtown, including more than 10,000 in Belltown/Denny Regrade. But we’ve had to either attain sustenance at convenience stores, deli-marts, the individual small merchants of the Pike Place Market, or out of the neighborhood (lower Queen Anne, Broadway, the International District, or now the Whole Foods at Denny and Westlake).

I love Pike Place, but it ain’t exactly one-stop shopping, and it’s bigger on produce and meat than on packaged goods.

Whole Foods is OK if you shop around for bargains, but it’s not quite an everyday supplier of staples for us non-zillionaires.

Metropolitan Market, Uwajimaya, the Tribeca Building Safeway, and the Uptown QFC aren’t really our ‘hood; going there’s a deliberate shopping adventure, not a quick supply run.

Then there’s the online-ordering-and-delivery solution, available via Safeway, Albertsons, and promised soon from Amazon. That also has its downside–you’ve gotta order a lot to avoid a delivery charge, and you’ve gotta be home during the multi-hour “delivery window.”

So this is a great step forward for those of us who live downtown (and for the 160,000 or so who work or visit downtown each weekday).

The store is set to open in February. I can hardly wait.

One mistake in the P-I story about this: There never was a QFC at “811 Pike Street.” That was a misprint in the Polk City Directory; a QFC was, and is, at 811 East Pike Street.

There were smallish A&P (on Second near James) and Tradewell (at the current Fourth & Pike Rite Aid site) stores in past decades. And there was the Security Public Market in the current Bed Bath & Beyond space at Third and Virginia; like Pike Place, that was a sort of grocery mall in which each department was individually owned and operated.

Got another little essay in the Capitol Hill Times, this one about how and why apartment and condo residents could be more sociable.

Got the August Belltown Messenger out, with three long pieces by yrs. truly.

And I’ve turned in another photo-history book to Arcadia Publishing. Seattle’s Belltown will be out in November, tentatively, and it’ll be just as fabulous as Vanishing Seattle. More on this later.

These past two weeks I’ve been hard at work on the next photo-history book, Seattle’s Belltown. (If anyone has any images of the Trade Winds, the Belltown Cafe, the original Tugs, the Weathered Wall, or the original Vogue, contact me immediately!)

Thanks to the 50-plus people who partied with me last Friday as I became 50-plus. (No, I don’t have any pix. I’m not that self-centered.)

I don’t think of myself as an oldster. Some generous people have said I don’t look like one, either. Except for a strange craving for afternoon naps I started having last year, I still see myself as the frustrated ex-college student trying to get his life started already. (I was going to write that I still feel like a 25-year-old, but that didn’t mean I was going to get one.)

It turns out there’s one celebrity born on my day in my year: Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. He even made a circuitous reference to his birthday in the strip published that day.

Other folks sharing the great six/eight include Frank Lloyd Wright, Jerry Stiller, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Kanye West, Nancy Sinatra, Sonia Braga (herself still fabulous), Griffin Dunne, Supreme Court Justice Byron White, Joan Rivers, Mariner Kenji Johjima, Picket Fences costar Kathy Baker, James Darren, Bernie Casey, Colin Baker, DNA researcher Francis Crick, and some obscure Brit named Tim Berners-Lee who thought up something called the World Wide Web.

(Alas, I also share my special day with My Lai killer William Calley and Satan-spawner Barbara Bush.)

A birthday, especially one that’s a nice round number, traditionally represents a good time to look back at things.

I remember a few things about my early years–watching that primitive, five-channel television (one of my lifelong loves); teaching myself to read newspapers at around age three-and-a-half (another of my lifelong loves); getting bullied by the older kids; leaving the bucolic outskirts of Olympia (long before That College was ever built) for the comparatively sterile foothills east of Marysville (long before its casino- and sprawl-driven boom); being bored to tears by school and household chores; repeatedly discovering that a jock town held no particular fondness for smart but un-athletic boys; finding little to no interest in most bad-boy style recreations (drinking, smoking, drugging, cussing, driving, fighting); feeling imprisoned out in the (then) countryside; wishing as hell that I was among real streets and sidewalks; sitting and squirming in the back seat of a ’57 Chevy station wagon (we eventually became a “Ford family”); finding and losing religion; seeing my first live rock concert (a promo gig at the opening of a new housing development with The New Yorkers, later known as the Hudson Brothers); and discovering sex at the exact same time that the mass media did (hence failing to learn the valuable lesson that my culture had been lying to me all this time).

And I remember the day we all went to the Seattle World’s Fair. I basked in a real city experience. I stared in awe at the attractions. I calculated I’d be in my forties when all these wonderful techno-utopian predictions would come to pass. (I don’t miss not having a flying car; but the peace, prosperity, and progress they promised would still be nice.)

I might have more on this later, but I don’t guarantee it.

The vastly larger and more comprehensive second edition of my “e-book” Take Control of Digital TV is now available.

As some of you know, television as we know it ends in 2/09, when the analog broadcast transmitters shut down and everything goes digital. Before then, you’ve got a lot to learn about the new digital TV system and all the software and hardware that goes with it. I humbly believe my e’book’s the best way for you to get up to speed about HDTV, LCD, plasma, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, Apple TV, DVRs, and all the other myriad aspects of the new video universe. Get it now.

I’ll explain this further, in handy online-audio form, on the streaming Net-radio show Tech Night Owl this Thursday evening.

My book title Vanishing Seattle (actually thought up by my Arcadia Publishing editor, Julie Albright) is fast becoming a catch phrase for the accelerating corporatization of our once-modest burg. Witness this entry in the P-I’s real estate blog, mentioning the now-shuttered Central Pawn Shop on First Avenue in relation to the 1974 John Wayne action film McQ. I’d written some detailed notes a couple years back about the locations used in that film, as part of an aborted book project for Clear Cut Press. I agree with the blog post’s author, Marlow Harris (see a couple items below this one on this page), that McQ remains, if not a great movie, a great time capsule of the city as it once was.

…are gonna love Stephen Cysewski’s new collection of mostly old street-scene photos, “Wandering in Seattle.”

…Thursday night on 710 KIRO was a breeze. Guest host David Goldstein kept me on for a segment beyond the initially-scheduled hour. Several callers shared their memories of Seattle gone by; one caller recalled the Last Resort Fire Department’s continuing efforts to restore and maintain old Seattle fire trucks. Thanks to all who called, listened, or had intended to listen.

Yr. o’b’d’t Web-columnist will take to the airwaves again this Thursday night. Listen in on 710 KIRO-AM at 10 p.m., when the lovely and talented David Goldstein and I chat about the Vanishing Seattle book and perhaps many other topics.

…the Ides-O-March this year my thanking the P-I’s Bill Virgin for a really nice Vanishing Seattle book plug in his column today. Virgin’s topic: The past and future, if there is one, of that once ubiquitous institution, the gas station.

…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.

I taped a lovely interview yesterday at KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate. You’ll hear me plugging the book Vanishing Seattle when the interview airs, sometime next Thursday, 2/15. I’ll let you know the time when I know it.

AND NOW, THIS OTHER PROMOTIONAL ANNOUNCEMENT: My colleagues at Take Control Books are offering a limited-time offer on a bundle of five ebook guides to Mac software. You can learn how to get the most out of your Mac (and iPod to create, manipulate, and organize music, photos, and personal web pages. But hurry: this offer’s only good for a limited time.