nanowrimo.org

I participated in National Novel Writing Month again this year. Came out of it with most of the first draft of something I’m tentatively calling Horizontal Hold: A Novel About Love & Television. More details as I come closer to making it presentable.

• There’s one of them online petition thangs out to try to persuade the CBS Radio Stations Group to keep KPTK-AM and its “Progressive Talk” format on the air.
• Bruce Pavitt’s put out an Apple “iBook” about the Nirvana/Mudhoney/TAD tour of Europe in 1989. And he’s talking about how he sold Sub Pop as a brand signifying coolness to two continents.
• The Seattle branch of Gilda’s Club is keeping its name. This is news because other outlets of the drop-in cancer support organization aren’t keeping the name. One reason: some young adults these days don’t remember who Gilda Radner was. That’s almost as sad as cancer itself.
• Daily Kos contributor “MinistryOfTruth” has some advice for Republicans trying to rebuild their party: “Don’t have a base of idiots.”
• Steve Fraser at TruthOut, meanwhile, wishes to remind you that the so-called “fiscal cliff” is, like so much else, a political invention.
• The business-press buzzword of the month: “Insourcing.” GE’s restarting work in some previously abandoned appliance factory buildings; and Apple’s assembling some iMacs in the U.S. with plans to expand. Just don’t expect this to be the one answer to the unemployment crisis. Factory work these days is so automated, and CAD/CAM design work can make it so efficient, that there’s not that much labor in the cost of a lot of stuff, no matter where it’s made.
• Finally, let’s all reflect (and refract) in the glory that was gay marriage license midnight madness at the Console Color TV Building (King County Admin) downtown, Wednesday night/Thursday morning. Actual gay weddings start Sunday.

kirotv.com

themediaonline.co.za

I’ve recently become obsessed with deliberately awful online writing.

By this I specifically mean copy that’s not really meant to be read by humans, only by Google’s search-engine algorithms. (The term in the trade is “SEO,” for “search engine optimization.”)

Texts are stuffed with “keywords” and boldfaced (or “strong”) phrases. The pages may have their own domain names, chosen to be close to whatever a search user is really looking for. Header tags and other “metadata,” unseen by the reader but seen by the search engine, are endlessly tweaked for optimum pickup.

These pages can be some of the least useful, least informative, and least readable stuff in the whole WWW.

This is particularly annoying when the pages deal with self-help and how-to topics (which is most of the time).

Partly that’s because a lot of it comes out of low-paying “content mill” operations, who outsource a lot of their work to Third World contractors of questionable English-language skills.

And partly it’s because the mills generally don’t give a darn about communicating any knowledge, only about gaming the system for a few bucks.

The business model is that you get your page ranked high in searches. Then you convert those page views into income, by pasting in either Google’s own “AdWords” slots or “affiliate ads” for Amazon and others that pay the site a sliver of any sales (or both).

The propagators and champions of SEO can be as annoyingly hype-laden as any other “web gurus.” They’re not only unapologetic for the formulaic blandness of their product, they’re proud of it. One guy known as “Webwordslinger” (real name: Paul Lalley) even boasts that…

Bill Shakespeare–you know, The Bard–would have made a terrible web writer. He never gave a thought to keyword density and didn’t even know what strong text was or how to use it in web writing.

•

If this kind of bad Web writing exists solely to make money, then it’s even more stunning to see examples that don’t even have the monetization part figured out.

A kind reader recently referred me to an extremely unofficial site promoting the Seattle Great Wheel, the Seattle waterfront’s new star attraction.

Only the site, “Pier57ferriswheel.com,” seems to have no affiliate links and definitely has no AdWords links.

What it does have is warmed-over text rewritten from other sites about the Great Wheel, and a little link at the bottom for the Wheel’s official page (or rather, for its official Facebook page).

•

Some critics would look at all the bad commercial copy online and claim proof that Americans (or at least Americans younger than themselves) have become a nation of illiterate boobs.

I have a different take.

I say that, instead, the written word has become more important than ever.

The written word is the lifeblood of commerce in the Internet Age. Far more than it was in the days when magazines and TV ruled marketing.

But too few of the bureaucrats and hotshot entrepreneurs in charge realize this.

They think they can throw up the cheapest trash they can get and just manipulate it into profits, by using ever-trickier shticks (including “article spinning” software!).

But it doesn’t work that way. Not in the long term.

Google-ranking is a fad. Heck, Google itself might turn out to be a fad.

To establish a “brand,” to sell stuff, or to simply stand out from the crowd, you’ve gotta take your text seriously.

It’s an art (or at least a craft), not a formula.

And it takes a professional to do it up right.

Someone, say, like me.

• Missed the transit of Venus? Fret not! You can still catch The Myrtle of Venus!
• The lovely graphic at the left of this site’s “sidebar” column, inviting donations for the Cafe Racer shooting victims, was done by our ol’ pal Nick Vroman, an ex-Seattleite now in Japan. He’s also got a lovely site reviewing Japanese cult films.
• With the arrival of Wednesday came The Stranger’s package of Cafe Racer shooting and mourning articles.
• Joel Connelly calls the “war on drugs” America’s “second lost war of the half century.”
• Contemporary art, product logos, graphic design, even web page design—all these fields and more are frequently invaded by rank copycats, whose thievery can be caught red-handed at the site You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice.
• Health Scare O’ the Week: the allegedly imminent arrival of drug-resistant gonorrhea.
• The next frontier in confronting idiot misogyny: Multiplayer gaming.
• Cell phone users are using their cell phones as phones a lot less. Companies plan to respond by raising rates. Huh?
• Our heroine Amanda Palmer wanted to raise $100,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, to release and promote her next record. She ended up raking in a cool million.
• Social-economy guru Richard Florida offers up some theories behind the revival of downtown retail around the country.

Jim Bracher at the Seattle Backpackers Magazine site offers a mostly-positive review of our somewhat-new book Walking Seattle:

The author’s knowledge of Seattle is extensive, comprehensive, and impressive. I didn’t realize part of Perkins Lane is still closed after the mudslides in ’97 (p. 64), and I’d forgotten the horror that dominated the news after the murders at the Wah Mee club in ’83 (p. 79). He also reminded me of The Blob (p. 58), a building I’d forgotten even though I used to walk by it almost daily.…

This guy knows architecture. I know bungalows from Queen Anne, but he knows Art Moderne from Beaux Arts.… Architecture helps tell the story of a city. The current downtown Seattle Library is a statement about what we want the city to be, what we want others to see when they look at us, and what sort of buildings we want to see when go out. All the buildings of Seattle’s past were designed for the same purpose. The bungalows, the big homes of Queen Anne Hill’s past, all tell the story of what was going on in Seattle. It’s a cool history. I wish Humphrey had told more of it.…

He’s a good writer. The prose flows. Reading through the tour descriptions is easy and clear…. I’d love more story-telling. He’s capable of it and the book shows he knows it.

Bracher also has some dislikes about the book. Almost all of those relate to the publisher’s series format (page size, layout, etc.).

And he wishes there was a smartphone app for it.

Guess what? There is! It’s an add-on virtual tour guide that works within the iOS/Android app ViewRanger.

But on the whole, he likes Walking Seattle.

And you will too.

As promised, here are the pix of my Sunday Amtrak-trek to the not so naughty border town of Bellingham.

The journey is beautiful. You should take it early and often. WiFi, a snack car, legroom, scenery galore, and all with no driving.

The trestle over Chuckanut Bay just might be one of the great rail experiences of this continent. It really looks like as if train is running straight across the water’s surface.

The Bellingham Amtrak/Greyhound station is just a brief stroll from Fairhaven, the famous town-within-a-town of stately old commercial buildings, and a few new buildings made to sort of look like the old ones.

My destination was in one of the pseudo-vintage buildings. It’s Village Books, a three-story repository of all things bookish.

Why I was there: to give a slide presentation about my book Walking Seattle.

Why people 80 miles away wanted to hear somebody talk about the street views down here? I did not ask. I simply gave ’em what they wanted.

Some two dozen Bellinghamsters braved the sunbreaks punctuated with snow showers to attend.

Afterwards, some kind audience members showed me some of B’ham’s best walking routes. Among these is the Taylor Dock, a historic pedestrian trestle along the waterfront.

Yes, there had been an Occupy Bellingham protest. Some of the protesters made and donated this statue on a rock near Taylor Dock.

Apparently there had been windy weather the previous day.

After that I took a shuttle bus downtown, where I was promptly greeted by a feed and seed store with this lovely signage.

The Horseshoe Cafe comes as close as any place I’ve been to my platonic ideal of a restaurant. Good honest grub at honest prices. Great signage. Great well-kept original interior decor.

(Of course, I had to take advantage of sitting in a cafe in Bellingham to trot out the ol’ iPod and play the Young Fresh Fellows’ “Searchin’ USA.”)

Used the remaining daylight to wander the downtown of the ex-mill town. (Its local economy is now heavily reliant on Western Washington U., another victim of year after year of state higher-ed cuts.)

But I stopped at one place that was so perfect, inside and out. It proudly shouted its all-American American-ness.

Alas, 20th Century Bowling/Cafe/Pub will not last long into the 21st century.

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

wallyhood.org

My adventure in Bellingham this past Sunday was cold but lovely. Will post a complete post about it a little later on.

And I’ve got another presentation coming up this Saturday, right here in Seattle! It’s at 2 p.m. at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in pontificous Pioneer Square. (That’s right across from Zeitgeist Coffee.) This one concerns my ’06 book Vanishing Seattle, and perhaps all the things that have vanished around here since then. Be there or be frostbitten.

Now, to catch up with a little randomness:

• Writer Jonathan Shipley would like to hear from anyone who lived or worked at or was involved in the Home of the Good Shepherd (1906-70), the former Catholic “wayward girls” institution, whose building is now a community and arts center.
• One of my current projects is an essay about the “future of news.” It will start with the proclamation that web ads, by themselves, will almost never pay enough to support original, professional journalism. No matter how hard you pander to the advertisers.
• The admirable local-politics site Publicola has faced this fact, and has begun appealing for donations.
• Facebook: Soon to have more ads in your “news feed” from companies you don’t even “Like®”.
• Under current legislation, city authorities would have more authority to kick people out of Westlake Park (including protesters?).
• Ron Sims says it better than I can: We’ve cut too much from higher-ed in this state already.
• Gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna won’t endorse a GOP presidential candidate. This is smart strategy for the current state attorney general. If he wants to win even a single moderate crossover vote, he’ll need to stay as far away as he cam from the “I’m a bigger bigot than you!”/”No, I am!” Republican presidential field.
• The Seattle Times, now mostly ensconced in its new smaller digs, has put up a retro Times Square-esque news ticker sign, where people stuck in traffic halfway up Denny Way can learn all that’s going on.
• The construction bust (at least in greater downtown): Wasn’t it wonderful? Now there’s gonna be 40 stories of apartments next to the Paramount.
• I’ve been a skeptic of Bill Gates’s education-reform schemes (i.e., bust the teachers’ unions, and spend on fancy tech even if it means firing teachers). But today he makes a good point, that you can’t get employees to work better if you treat them as objects of incessant ridicule.
• The Koch brothers: Not only big anti-Obama Super PAC donors/organizers, but also leading oil price speculators. I’m not alleging any dot-connecting, but you might.
• Jonathan Chiat at New York magazine has a theory for why the far right wing (and its corporate puppet masters) are tripling down on the hate- and fear-mongering this year. It’s because the far right’s traditional chief audience (non-college-educated whites, particularly white males) is aging and dwindling, both in number and as a part of the total electorate. This may be the last Presidential election in which this audience can be effectively exploited.
• Did Ralph Nader really endorse Ron Paul, or is the hereby-linked rant a gross exaggeration?
• Ex-Seattle monologuist Mike Daisey talked a bit about sweatshop labor in his Apple-themed piece last year. Now he’s bashing the defenders of the Chinese factory system.
• It’s the fourth anniversary of the last Leap Day. That was when the soap opera Guiding Light (then the longest-running dramatic production in the world) introduced a new reality-show-like production technique. (Even the studio scenes were shot with hand-held minicams.) The new look failed to save that show, or the three other soaps (which held to their standard styles) that got canceled after GL was.

kono packi, the capital times (madison wi)

Independents, swing voters, “moderates,” “compasisonate conservatives”—the Republican Party, at the federal and state levels, officially doesn’t give a damn about any of these people.

Or more likely, the Republican Party has given up trying to bring them back into the fold.

The only audiences today’s Republicans have anymore are the people cocooned in the “conservative bubble.”

That is, the people who ONLY listen to and read conservative-ONLY media (Faux News, conservatalk radio, the Drudge Report, Regnery Books, etc.).

People who listen to nothing but the one-sided party-line right wing spin on everything.

Partly because these guys look, talk, and use the buzzwords of a particular “Real Americans” subculture.

These pundits and politicians, and the megabuck lobbyists who wholly own them, have real agendas that often run counter to the self-interests of their audiences, and especially counter to these audiences’ proclaimed moral/social values. (Joking about wishing you could murder all your opponents, then claiming to be “pro-life”? Really?)

I’m working on an essay for the general election season, tentatively titled Talking To Your Conservative Relatives.

One of its lines of reasoning will go as follows:

Don’t believe the hype.

To be more specific, don’t believe the demographic and psychographic marketing.

(Yes, I’ll explain what those things are. Essentially, they’re the schticks advertisers use when they talk about the “cigarette for women” or the “diet drink for men.”)

To be more specific, be EVEN MORE SKEPTICAL of politicians, pundits, etc. who claim they speak on behalf of your own values (including the values of family, hard work, faith, freedom, etc.).

The more these guys insist they’re “one of you,” the more you have to sniff out for the putrid scent of a confidence game going on.

Without any further ado, the big new product announcement promised here on Tuesday.

Actually, it’s an old product.

But a new way to buy and enjoy it!

It’s The Myrtle of Venus, my short, funny novel of “Sex, Art, and Real Estate.”

It’s now out in ultra handy e-book form, for the insanely low price of merely $2.99.

Yes, that link goes to the “Kindle Store.” But you don’t need a genuine Kindle machine to read it. They’ve got free apps for Macs, PCs, iPads, and lots of mobile platforms.

Why should all of this site’s loyal friends and true download it?

Because it’s alternately sexy, hilarious, and poignant.

Because it takes you back to those heady days of the real estate bubble.

Because it’s a rollicking tale of eleven lively characters who combine, clash, and re-combine.

The action all occurs amid the dying days of an artists’ studio cooperative. The artists’ new landlady, the World’s Blandest Woman, wants them out. But the artists have a plan. They’ll seduce her into becoming one of them.

But their best laid plans don’t get her laid the way they plan.

What happens next is as wild as it is unpredictable.

To find out, you’ll just have to get the thing and read it already.

MISCmedia isn’t “blacking out” as part of the nationwide protest against the draconian and impractical Internet censorship bills in Congress.

But you can simply not read us on Wednesday if you like.

(Goodness knows, most of the online world doesn’t read us on any particular day.)

The site, including out forthcoming special product announcement, will still be here when you come back.

myonepreciouslife.wordpress.com

As an entire region continues to impatiently await the promised, wondrous Snowtopia hinted at on Sunday but only teased about in the two days since, here’s some beautiful flakes of randomness for ya.

• Knute Berger’s found some unused ideas for the 1962 World’s Fair, many of which were rightfully unused.
• The state budget supercrisis is causing even the state ferry system to consider dropping whole routes. Buh bye, Bremerton. Was nice to know ya.
• Eric Scigliano raises the battle cry: Save the Phone Book! (The white pages, at least.)
• One proposal to (partly) stem the state’s fiscal megacrisis: A capital gains tax.
• Another such proposal is to move all business-tax collection to Olympia, cutting cities and counties out of the action.
• The city of Seattle wants to shut down outdoor homeless-feeding operations. Is this humaneness, or is it the “disappearing” of poverty?
• Union-bustin’, vote-suppressin’, billionaire-coddling Wisc. Gov. Scott Walker is really, really unpopular.
• Now that she’s sold her news-aggregation-site empire to AOL, is Arianna Huffington going to become a Republican again?
• The fight against sweatshop-made sports merch spreads from colleges to pro teams, including the Dallas Cowboys.
• Fond birthday wishes to perhaps the greatest living American.
• If anyone here has ever had any doubts, the most recent race-to-the-bottom GOP debate shows it again: racist bigotry is neither clever nor cool. It’s just stupid.

And finally, I will have a new product announcement in this space tomorrow. It’s something all loyal MISCphiles will want to have for their very own.

classickidstv.co.uk

• Greenwood. It’s truly a lovely neighborhood. A great place to spend an autumnal evening in the company of fellow Seattle social history fans. Specifically, fans of our latest product, Then & Now: Seattle. It all transpires starting at 7:30 p.m. today (Thursday) at the Couth Buzzard Books and Cafe, 8310 Greenwood Ave. N. Be there.
• The media’s parental scare story of the week: Teens are supposedly soaking gummy candies in alcohol and scarfin’ them down for a quick buzz.
• The state’s moved one step closer to allowing Seattle bars to stay open later.
• Gay marriage, now less unpopular than before.
• Occupy Seattle’s still going strong; but is it being taken over by folks protesting for protesting’s sake?
• Community colleges in Washington can now declare themselves in states of “financial emergency.” Unions representing the college’s (mostly already underpaid) teachers are worried it could lead to further and faster layoffs.
• After the construction slump and the shrinkage of print newspapers, what more could go wrong for the wood products industry? Well, China used to buy Northwest-made finished lumber, but now it just wants raw logs.
• The vast majority of non-governmental arts funding in this country goes to big establishment institutions with decidedly white, upscale audiences. This will come at no surprise to friends of mine who’ve tried to drum up corporate and foundation support for smaller but established performing-arts outfits, only to learn said corporations and foundations only give to the “SOB” (symphony, opera, ballet).

ap photo via seattlepi.com

• Get your lovely self on down to our glorious Then & Now Seattle book release, Thursday evening at the Couth Buzzard in glorious Greenwood. (You know you want to.)
• Oh those City Market cartoon sandwich signs, just as tasteless as ever.
• Occupy Seattle, or at least the overnight sitting-in aspect of it, might move to City Hall after all. Josh Feit, meanwhile, says the protesters should focus on their cause(s), not on “tents and umbrellas.”
• Seattle Times shrinkage watch: The paper’s inviting bids from developers to take over its landmark headquarters building. Under the scheme, the paper would move its remaining employees to a nearby former furniture warehouse.
• HorsesAss.org explains what a “majority minority” legislative district could look like, and what it could mean.
• NYC police can’t evict the Occupy Wall Street protesters because the “park” they’re camped out in is privately owned by a corporate real-estate developer.

Mark your calendars.

I’ve got another live book event on Thursday, Oct. 13, 7:30 p.m., at The Couth Buzzard Books and Espresso Buono Cafe, 8310 Greenwood Ave. N.

And there will be another new book by me debuting at this event.

More details shortly.

Some 50 people attended our fantabulous Walking Seattle event Saturday at the Elliott Bay Book Company.

At least half of those followed along as we took a short stroll through upper Pike/Pine during a lovely equinox early evening.

Thank you all.