via musicruinedmylife.blogspot.ca

The Fastbacks, the “Seattle Scene’s” most enduring band (and one of its most loveable), recorded lots of great cover songs (originally by the Raspberries, the Sweet, and even Sesame Street!) in addition to their many originals. Some of these were buried on “tribute” compilation CDs. Here’s a list of 17 such tunes, and a slightly longer but still incomplete list.

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• According to Richard Metzger, the greatest document of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles musical career is a concert doc filmed in Seattle—in the acoustically notorious Kingdome, even.
• David Meinert’s growing restaurant empire will include the successor to Capitol Hill’s legendary dive bar the Canterbury.
• Time to restart the neo-Sonics rumor mill again. Now, Chris Hansen and co. are reportedly negotiating for an expansion franchise.
• The state’s thinking of authorizing private pot smoking clubs. I only ask that they be ventilated in such a way as to keep that weed stink off the streets.
• The Republican-stalled Legislature still hasn’t saved King County Metro Transit. But, on the Seattle-only transit front, Mayor McGinn still plans to invest in a new downtown streetcar line. This probably means the mourned Waterfront Streetcar will remain dead for the foreseeable future.
• Meanwhile, the second Monorail Initiative tell-all book is out. It’s called Rise Above It All. It’s written and self-published by Dick Falkenbury, the ultimate political outsider and co-instigator of the plan that would have had trains on grade-separated tracks, roughly where the RapidRide C/D bus goes now.
• MTV’s playing music videos (remember them?) again. But just for half a day, on the Fourth of July.
• A woman at the big video-game industry confab Tweeted® a complaint about the lack of female starring characters in new video games. Cue the bigoted trollbots in 5, 4, 3….
• R.I.P. Arturo Vega, associate of the Ramones for their entire band-career and designer of the group’s “All American” logo (still worn on T shirts by people who weren’t alive when the band was together).
• Steven Spielberg sez the reign of action mega-blockbusters (and of the big Hollywood studios!) is only a few box-office flops away from being over. Then he says audiences can expect really high prices for the privilege of seeing a movie in a theater (yes, even higher than they are now).
• Robert Reich sez we could have full employment, even in an age of robotized manufacturing and other techno-“innovations,” if we only had the political will to make it so.
• A UK pundit with the appropriate name of Tom Chatfield agrees with me that society, far from becoming “post literate,” is actually more dependent upon written language than ever. And he ponders whether it’s a good thing:

There is no such thing as a private language. We speak in order to be heard, we write in order to be read. But words also speak through us and, sometimes, are as much a dissolution as an assertion of our identity.

• Turns out the heroine from Brave isn’t the only female character in cartoons (and toys) to have been “tarted up” in recent years. Just look what they’ve done to Strawberry Shortcake!

ebay photos, via thestir.cafemom.com

jordan stead, seattlepi.com

• The J.P. Patches memorial street sign is a thing. A wonderful thing.
• Was an area teen denied entrance to her high school prom because she had large breasts, or because her gown had revealed too much of them?
• The guy who took highly unauthorized pictures of himself atop the Space Needle (and not in an approved way) has been found out.
• The living members of Alice in Chains were in a web chat, where they offered the following (facetious) advice to young bands:  “Just quit now. Save yourself before it’s too late.”
• A local musician gave an informal poll of his colleagues to determine the best and worst places to play in Seattle.
• A moment of silence, if you will, for the career of disgraced now-ex Snohomish County executive Aaron Reardon.
• One of those regional speech variants surveys lists, among other differentiating words, the ways people in different parts of the country pronounce “crayon.” The article didn’t list the way everyone in my school said it: “color-cren.”
• Ex-Seattleite Lindy West, as some of you know, appeared on a cable talk show to debate the issue of whether rape “jokes” were, by their nature, unfunny. (She essentially said they were.) The usual way-stoopid web trolls showed up on comment boards, claiming that both (1) they’re not tools of “rape culture,” and (2) they wished someone would rape West. What?
• Big Pharma has been looking for years for a “Viagra for women.” Now a company supposedly has a “female libido booster.” And (male) scientific observers and pundits are expressing worry that it might work too well, unleashing that long-feared chaotic force that would enflame the planet in unabashed… (Better stop before I start talking like a semiotician.)
• Elsewhere, Swiffer thought it would be cool to depict the WWII icon “Rosie the Riveter” as a cleaning-obsessed housewife. Uh, nope.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks if Libertarianism is so great, how come no country on Earth has ever tried it? (Of course, the same thing could be said about “real” Socialism, etc.)
• CollegeHumor.com offers sample home pages answering what would happen “if all news sites worked like BuzzFeed.” (Or Huff Post, or any of a score of click-whoring aggregation sites.)

collegehumor.com

joshua trujillo, seattlepi.com

• There was a remembrance in Cowen Park marking one year since the Cafe Racer tragedy.
• Unlike some of the “radicals” fighting against low wages at fast-food joints, I actually patronize fast-food joints. And I want the fine people who prepare my meals to be properly compensated for the fine work they do.
• The FBI investigated the song “Louie Louie” for two whole years, only to find a simple love lyric made unintelligible.
• Will legal pot in our society lead, invariably, to corporate pot?
• To Microsoft’s regret, it just can’t get people to say “Let’s Bing it.”
• Our ol’ pal Gillian Gaar reports the “Welcome to Aberdeen: Come As You Are” sign might come down.
• Who, besides “out o’ sight, out o’ mind” NIMBYs, benefits from the suburbanization of poverty?
• A Cheerios commercial features a nice interracial family. The usual dorks and trolls respond as you’d predict.
• Lawrence Lessig would like a Democratic Party that’s less beholden to corporate funders.
• Texas: future Democratic stronghold?
• Some people will miss making fun of Michelle Bachmann. I won’t.
• The Chicago Sun-Times, once billed as “Chicago’s Picture Newspaper,” is firing all its photographers.
• No, Ms. magazine, the 10 most important things American women could not do before the 1970s wold probably really include more important things than “read Ms. magazine.”
• Istanbul was Constantinople. Now it’s a battleground of democracy vs. shady dealmaking.
• WikiLeaks dude Julian Assange sees today’s Google as an increasingly reactionary gang of government-butt kissers.
• Let’s close with a haunting look at a run down (but still open!) tourist site, the Flintstones theme park in Arizona.

messynessychic.com

via theatlantic.com

• The Atlantic has unearthed a 1999 Microsoft ad, touting the e-book future that was supposed to be jump started by the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Reader software package. It’s taken a bit longer than that for events in this “Future of Reading” timeline to come about. But one thing has happened already: the luddites who’ve long dominated the book community are loudly touting the benefits of “Real Books From Real Trees for Real People.”
• Once again, I insist that Windows 8 is not the cause of the PC sales slump. Rather, it’s the fact that everybody’s agog about phones and tablets instead. And the fact that so much PC functionality these days is based on online and “cloud”-based activity, so home users feel no need to buy new hardware.
• Traffic on Wash. state roadways is at a 10-year low. Yet Republicans keep pushing a cars-only transportation budget.
• Meanwhile, Knute Berger remembers the people who fought the R.H. Thompson Expressway, a freeway which would have eradicated the Central Area and ruined the Arboretum.
• David Schoenfeld at ESPN.com says it’s time to sacrifice M’s manager Eric Wedge.
• There’s a public school tucked away in Seattle’s residential north end. In recent years, the Indian Heritage School program was housed there. More recently, the school district’s talked about replacing the buildings on the site. That would mean destroying murals depicting local indigenous heroes. Activists have fought to keep the murals. They may succeed.
• A cold-calling “charity” campaign, which recently phone-bombed Seattle households, may be a pure scam with little or no proceeds going to its stated cause.
• Collector speculation pricing in music has affected the price of new vinyl editions.
• “Mothers Now Top Breadwinners in 4 of 10 U.S. Homes.”
• Today in what you never hear about in the right-wing media, the Bush-era IRS gleefully persecuted liberal groups.
• The Russian-owned news/opinion channel RT has hired Larry King.
• Facebook vows to crack down on user-posted rape “jokes.”
• Philip G. Ryken at the Gospel Coalition site has a snarky list of “How to Discourage Artists in the Church.” Some of its bullet points also apply to discouraging creative work in the larger world, such as “Treat the arts as a window dressing for the truth rather than a window into reality.”
• PolitiFact rates at least half the things Republicans say as “false,” and employs exaggeration tricks to find at least some Democrats lying.
• Tired of folks my age griping about how things used to be? Make up your own “meme” slogan for the face of “Old Economy Steven”!

quickmeme.com

ap via nbc news

While I’ve been busy doing whatever (looking for a new home, etc.), I missed a few big birthdays here in online-land.

•

Tim Berners-Lee opened the first public World Wide Web site on 4/30/93 at the CERN particle-physics lab in Switzerland. For the occasion, that site has been put back up at its original URL.

Berners-Lee was, and still is, an idealist. In the original CERN site’s documents, he described the WWW as something that could open up information to the masses.

Instead of “walled garden” online networks such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and the original AOL, the Web would be open to all comers and contributors. Anybody could put anything on, or receive anything from, it.

This ultimate “disruptive technology,” creator of LOLcat memes and destroyer of newspapers, record labels, and middle-class livelihoods, got its start with the most noble of intentions.

(Just like many a mad-scientist-movie experiment.)

•

By pure coincidence, the first issue of Wired magazine was out that same month.

From the start, it was intended to be a lot more important than a mere buying guide to PC gear. It was to chronicle tech as the biggest economic, societal, and even ideological movement of our time.

It posited loudmouth, alpha-male San Franciscan Libertarians as the Voice of the Future. It sneered at governments, residents of “Tired” locales (France, Manhattan, Seattle), and people who dared to think about the well-being of others as backward-thinking parasites.

In the world according to the early Wired, CEOs were the new rock stars, even the new royalty. No social or environmental issue could be discussed in its pages, unless there was a potential solution that would also enrich (or at least never inconvenience) big business.

In the end, the bosses and bosses’ lackeys Wired worshipped got most of their way.

And as cyber-critic Jason Lanier notes, the 99 Percent are still trying to pick up the pieces.

•

That same week 10 years later, Apple launched the first version of the iTunes Store.

The iTunes application had been around since 2001, when Apple bought and revamped a third-party program called SoundJam MP.

Steve Jobs had identified music (and eventually general media) playback as a technology in which Apple had to lead, for the sake of the company’s survival. Otherwise, Windows-only applications and file formats (remember WinAmp?) would shut out Mac users, threatening Apple’s presence in home environments. By making iTunes, and making a Windows version of it, Jobs and co. stayed in the home-computer game.

Two years later, Windows Media-only file protection schemes were threatening to put a lock on “legal” (commercial) music downloads. Again, the Mac and its users would be shut out. Apple’s response not only had to be Windows-compatible, it had to dominate the market on both platforms.

The iTunes Store did that, and more.

Its stand-alone hardware adjuct, the iPod, quickly dominated the new market of portable digital music machines.

And along the way, iTunes allegedly “killed the old music industry.”

(Of course, many of us felt the old music industry had deserved to die, but that’s not the point here.)

But now, the notion of music downloads seems as archaic as the notion of buying music on little compact discs.

The big hype these days is for streaming music subscriptions, a field which Apple has yet to enter.

Yet through all these industry changes, one thing remains constant.

Most recording artists themselves still get the fiscal shaft.

via geekwire.com

• A female and a male employee at a local gaming company didn’t like the kickass-warrior bikini babe poster put up prominently in the company’s office. So they made a similar poster depicting one of the company’s male characters in a beefcake pose. The company’s boss left it up.
• The Punk Singer, a biopic about Bikini Kill rad-feminist singer and zinester Kathleen Hanna, is playing SIFF this year. You may have already heard about the Odd-Couple-with-guitars romance of Hanna and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, as depicted in the film. You might not have heard about something else mentioned in the film, a serious health scare she had a while back. It’s hard to imagine someone of Hanna’s carefully crafted public image ever admitting to any vulnerability, but she does so here.
• Meanwhile, Hanna’s onetime protege Carrie Brownstein is not the first alt-music vet to “shill for American Express.” Laurie Anderson did the same gig back in the ’80s (though her ad for the card doesn’t seem to be posted online).
• Melinda Gates is the world’s third most powerful woman, according to one of those magazine list-icles. Numbers 1 and 2 are the heads of state of Germany and Brazil.

'every driver every time it ever rains ever'

• I’m still trying to decide how I feel about When You Live In Seattle, a site of original GIF-animation “memes.”
• What follows the XBox 360? “XBox One.” This is not to be considered a comment on the gaming platform’s market share.
• Our ol’ pal Sean Nelson’s got his first solo CD out at long last. And, as you can here at the hereby-linked stream, it’s very much worth the wait.
• May Day protesters say they’re not spoiled children of privilege having a lark, but people with serious grievances against the government, particularly an increasingly militarized police.
• Amazon’s letting people sell fan-fiction ebooks for money on the Kindle platform. Just as long as the fan fictions take place in the “universes” for which Amazon’s got official licenses. And they can’t have any porn in ’em.
• In a rare victory for neighborhoods and small businesses, lower Queen Anne’s Tup Tim Thai restaurant won’t be rent-hiked out of existence after all.
• Threats against reproductive rights aren’t just for red states anymore.
• Pot: Good for pigs, bad for dogs?
• Apple has not “cheated” on its federal taxes. It simply took advantage of every legal tax dodge its lawyers could discover (or advocate for), just like so many other corporate titans.
• Despite what you might have read on inflammatory websites, PBS did not “kill” a documentary critical of the Koch brothers, the billionaire backers of many extreme-right-wing political endeavors (and of some major PBS affiliate stations). It was ITVS, a separate nonprofit program supplier, that declined to include Citizen Koch among the indie films it packages to the PBS network feed and to local public-TV stations. Citizen Koch still exists, and is still playing the festival circuit.
• Actually, there are real reasons why the IRS should investigate the Kochs’ “Tea Party Patriots” and similar nonpartisan-in-name-only outfits.
• When the Executive Branch started stalking Fox News and the AP (allegedly for those outfits’ investigations of CIA documents about North Korea), was it just a continuation of the sort of tactics played against WikiLeaks?
• Google boss Larry Page has a plan to fix what’s wrong with the world—more anti-government, corporate Libertarianism. Exactly the direction that got the world into these (economic, ecological) messes.
• Australian writer Elmo Keep believes free and cheap downloads are killing just about all professional media/arts endeavors.
• Henry Grabar at the Atlantic calls the anti-flouridation movement (recently victorious in Portland and several other cities) “history’s weirdest alliance of paranoiacs.”
• Meanwhile, NY Times essayist Maggie Koerth-Baker claims to know “why rational people buy into conspiracy theories.” Or so the Germans would have you believe….
• A famous author’s Wikipedia page got “edit trolled” by a rival author.
• In the countdown toward Arrested Development’s revival on Netflix streaming, NPR.org’s got a thorough chart chronicling the recurrence of more than 150 running gags through the original series.
• Some guy on YouTube edited together Hamlet quotations and references from 198 different movies and TV shows. Not included: Chewbacca’s “Alas, poor Yorick” pantomime with C3PO’s temporarily disconnected head.
• Yes, at one time people really wrote by hand, and did it this well. It took a lot of intense practice.

slate

• Happy Mt. St. Helens Day!
• Nordstrom was caught capturing and tracking the smartphone data of users who wandered through its (real-world) stores. Once the story broke out, the retail said it wasn’t doing it anymore.
• A UW prof’s using meditation to teach students to conquer online distractions.
• I’m still trying to determine if the Milwaukee slam poet Matt Cook, publicized in the hereby-linked page, is the same guy who was the Stranger’s first editor (and an unsung co-creator of that publication’s informal-snarkiness aesthetic).
• Just as there are with vinyl records (and even 8-track tapes), there are people who staunchly defend VHS videocassettes and the culture they engendered. (Before VHS’s 30-year run as an active medium, the idea of “owning” your favorite movies was little more than a fantasy.) These analog nostalgists now have a documentary about them, taped in part at Seattle’s Scarecrow Video.
• Carl Gibson at the political blog Nation of Change believes we should “move beyond ‘left vs. right,'” just before he iterates what is basically a center-left political platform.
• Frank Zappa, as you all know, loathed drugs but loved him some hot groupie sex. His personal secretary, however, was allowed to turn him down.
• Abstinence-only education, and the growing evidence that it’s really harmful, has proven to be one of the (many) topics that bring web comment trolls into full rabid-bigoted rage.
• The UK’s Daily Telegraph refers to the Fast & Furious action-film series as Hollywood’s first “bisexual blockbuster.”
• Does the still relatively little-used Google Plus have an alluring “tragic beauty” to it?
• From all the hype you can hear about it these days, 3-D printing is either the best thing since sliced bread or the best thing since “industrial hemp.”
• After just three weeks, the online revivals of All My Children and One Life to Live are each cutting back from four half-hour episodes a week to two.
• Here’s a cool public art piece in Australia. It’s a hugeass hot air balloon in the form of a fantasy whale with human breast shapes stuck on, apparently just for fun.

junkee.com

factmag.com

• Somebody thought it would be cool to try to laser-etch a phonograph record onto wood. The result sounds a bit like the early, dial-up-connection versions of RealAudio.
• Item: Indoor pot growing uses lotsa electricity. Comment: You mean stoners aren’t the purest-O-the-pure eco-saints? Next thing, you’ll be saying electric cars and wood stoves aren’t pure-green either.
• Oh, Those Kids Today! #1: Monica Guzman insists today’s under-30 folks aren’t entitlement-obsessed narcissists, but rather are “people waking up to their own power and not being willing to compromise it.”
• Oh, Those Kids Today! #2: Young adults are even driving less than prior generations. How un-American can ya get?
• The Legislature’s special session could see a Dem-controlled State Senate again. Maybe.
• Seattle teachers who refused to administer standardized tests have achieved a partial victory.
• Just last week, we bemoaned the idiotic prose and strained “corporate hip” attitude of KOMO’s “young skewing” local website Seattle Pulp. Now the whole site’s dead, without even leaving its old posts alive.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 126): No. But we should have the final, final answer (for this year at least) on Wednesday. Don’t get your hopes back up. But hold on to the love.
• Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Plunder thought it would just be keen n’ dandy to play tracks by Sonics-purist and Seattle’s-honor-defender Macklemore in their arena. Nope, no way, uh-uh, no siree bub.
• Might Microsoft buy Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebook hardware operation just to kill it?
• Amazon’s fledgling in-house book publishing operations might expand to include “literary fiction,” whatever the heck that means anymore.
• Disappeared local institution we neglected to mention earlier: the Green Lake Baskin-Robbins.
• Weird crime story of the week: “Woman who killed ex with insecticide-laced JÃ¥germeister pleads guilty.”
• It’s illegal but it happens anyway: denying employment to people for the sin of being in debt due to being unemployed.
• Katy Evans at the Tacoma group blog Post Defiance notes how indie live music has become a more complicated, bureaucratic, and problematic biz, especially in towns like hers in the shadow of bigger towns.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s own reporters have to pay for website subscriptions to their own work. Except they can “opt out” of it if they insist.
• You remember how the New Orleans Times-Picayune went to only three print issues a week? No more. They’re now putting out newsstand-only editions on the four non-home-delivery days, just like the Detroit papers are.
• Talking into computers and expecting them to understand you has always been, and apparently will continue to be, little more than a screenwriters’ conceit.
• Anthony Galluzzo at Salon wants you to stop the hipster-bashing already. He says it’s old, tired, and becoming classist.
• Jim Tews, who describes himself as “a decent white male comic,” insists that most white guys performing standup are not sexist boors.
• No, Rolling Stone readers, Nirvana is not the fifth worst band of the ’90s. That would actually be Sugar Ray.

• We’ve got to save Metro Transit from the devastating cuts that have decimated Snohomish and Pierce counties’ transit systems. There’s a public forum about it on Tuesday, 5/14, 3 p.m. at Union Station. (Despite the unfortunate, pseudo-snarky tone of the hereby-linked article at KOMO’s SeattlePulp.com, its message is important.)
• While upscale NIMBYs fight to keep those dirty non-upscale people out of their “clean” neighborhoods via attacks on “aPodments” (the only affordable, non-subsidized housing being built in town these days), the building of mass-produced “exclusive” luxury apartment towers continues unabated.
• Seattle Weekly Shrinkage Watch: Restaurant reviewer Hanna Raskin (with whom I appeared last year at a MOHAI/Seattle Public Library “History Cafe” panel) has quit, rather than accept a lower-paying job as a “food and drink editor.” Back in the Weekly’s heyday, restaurant reviews were more prominent than any other “culture” category, accounting for almost a quarter of the paper’s cover stories. Now, they might or might not be part of the paper at all. (The Weekly’s also fired its music editor Chris Kornelis.)
• Meanwhile, the Weekly’s onetime sister paper the Village Voice is down to 20 editorial staffers. Its two top editors received orders from on top to cut five of those positions. Instead, they quit.
• Amitai Etzioni at the Atlantic claims “the liberal narrative,” which he defines as support for big-government paternalism, “is broken.” No, it isn’t. It’s government itself that’s broken, and only the “liberal narrative” has the means to fix it.
• Jeanne Cooper, 1919-2013: The dowager “Duchess” of The Young and the Restless had played the same role for just short of 40 years. Before that she’d been in countless westerns and dramas (The Twilight Zone, Perry Mason, etc. etc.). Her three kids include L.A. Law/Psych star Corbin Bernsen.
• In not-at-all-surprising news, YouTube will add paid-subscription channels.
• Let’s close on a happy note (on the 80th anniversary of Hedy Lamarr’s breakthrough film Ecstasy) with Hysterical Literature, a video project by photographer Clayton Cubitt. In each segment a woman reads from a favorite book while, out of camera range, a second woman gives her a Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator treatment. (NSFWhatever.)

via criminalwisdom.com

neil hubbard via cousearem.wordpress.com

• It was 37 years ago this month: The TMT Show, the first faint stirrings of Seattle punk rock culture. May Day of the Bicentennial year. Three bands rented a hall in the Odd Fellows building on Capitol Hill. About 100 people showed up. From these DIY roots sprang, directly or indirectly, all the noise that emanated from this burg ever since.
• The City Council’s revised South Lake Union rezone: even fewer affordable housing units than Mayor McGinn’s plan, but more preserved Space Needle views for condo owners.
• The old Seattle Rep space, which became the Intiman Playhouse, is now the “Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center.”
• Ray Harryhausen, 1925-2013: The king of stop-motion animated fantasy was better known than his films’ official directors, for a good reason. Those dudes were simply in charge of the live-action scenes. The filler, if you will. Harryhausen was the films’ real auteur.
• Ex-Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein sez search engines are getting rich off of the pirated works of fine people such as himself.
• I’m not so sure that there really is a “Conservative Quest to Eliminate Facts.” It’s more universal than that.
• It’s not so much that the tech companies listed in one woman’s Tumbler blog “Only Hire Men,” but that they seem to presume only men will even apply to work there.
• Dear Crowdfunders: Millionaire celebrities and billionaire media titans don’t need your Kickstarter money. Really.
• Even the bosses of America’s hyper-bloated “security” bureaucracy don’t seem to know all that’s in it.
• Recent “good news” about newspapers’ paid readership (in print and online) seems, in some cases, to be exaggerated.
• Blogger Mark Manson has “10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America.” Number 5: “The quality of life for the average American is not that great.” Number 6: “The rest of the world is not a slum-ridden shithole compared to us.”
• Allen Clifton at Forward Progressives isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, to remind you Jesus probably neither a corporate lobbyist nor a Tea Partier.
• The downside of traditional publishing: A Brit lady who writes popular children’s books really wants her publisher to stop putting them inside pink covers. She says pink turns boy readers away and distracts from her stories’ often-serious content.
• The downside of modern publishing: An American gent who’s written three novels “to good reviews” (if not good sales) tries self-publishing and finds it to be “the worst.”
• I’d be more interested in Out of Print, Vivienne Roumani’s forthcoming documentary about the digital publishing “disruption,” if the director didn’t seem so obsessed with making everyone younger than herself look like an idiot.
• Let’s close for today with some wonderful old Greek and Greek-American music from the 78 era.

tom banse via kplu

• Could fewer pesticides mean more bees in Wash. state’s future?
• You know I love old Seattle, and old postcards, and old Seattle postcards.
• “Second-hand pot smoke” exists, and can potentially be grounds for getting fired.
• Against stereotype, Washington ranks among the “most stressed-out states.”
• Affordable housing in these parts is like the weather, as per the old phrase “everybody talks about it but….”
• The decimation of Metro Transit can only be averted in the special session of the Legislature. Which, as you recall, is controlled by turncoat ex-Democrat Rodney Tom (who doesn’t seem to give a damn about anything but appeasing right-wing Big Money, which is anti-transit as a matter of principle).
• Local economics pundit John Burbank says Washington should, and more importantly can, prepare for a post-Boeing future.
• George Jones, 1932-2013: He stopped loving her today.
• Okay, we’re getting a full component of air traffic controllers again. Now can we please work out sequester repeals that would benefit, you know, non-rich people?
• A bestselling author wants the federal government (which, as you recall, can’t even support public broadcasting or arts education sufficiently) to subsidize the big book publishers.
• Anybody remember Blockbuster Video? This will stoke your memories. (Incidentally, there’s supposed to be two still-extant Blockbusters in Kent and one in Edmonds.)
• Let’s close up for today with some video documentaries about women in punk.

networkawesome.com

capitol records via wikipedia

• Among the stories I missed by waiting a week to post Random Links: Heart’s well-deserved induction into the Rock n’ Roll Hall o’ Fame.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 108): No. But at least we have a date when we might (repeat, might) find out one way or the other: May 13.
• Seattle’s on-and-off-again Fourth of July festivities are on again.
• Seattle’s interim police chief says he’s really, really, really sorry for the video he made mocking the homeless back in the ’80s, using police training-video production gear.
• Is “alternative” music too female-unfriendly? Or is it just corporate “alternative” music festivals that leave the women out?
• The SunBreak explains just why privatized liquor costs more than state-liquor-store liquor did.
• Starbucks is among the companies asking for expanded U.S. tax breaks on overseas revenues.
• Washington’s attorney general wants you to know that T-Mobile’s “no-contract” cell phone plans can still cost you as much as traditional ones.
• Paul Krugman asks whether no one in power even gives a damn about the long term unemployed; while Jared Bernstein at Salon says rising income inequality can’t be fixed unless the campaign-finance system is fixed first.
• The Boston bombing media circus was a pathetic spectacle that continues to spread misinformation.
• Bad news everyone: Futurama is canceled, again, perhaps this time forever (but that’s what they said the last time).
• Speaking of shows (and characters) which have come back from the dead, the once-dead online revivals of All My Children and One Life to Live have miraculously re-revived like Lazarus Dixie. Episodes stream on Hulu.com starting Monday.
• The film itself has gone on to the big Netflix stream in the sky cloud, but the original website advertising Space Jam lives on!
• One or more of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors had been taking female writers out of a page about “American novelists” and into a page about “American women novelists.” But people complained, and the sex-segregation has stopped. This isn’t much different from indie bookstores (like Seattle’s Left Bank Books) separating “women’s fiction” from “general fiction.”
• Can we really blame the whole ’08 economic kablooey on a few coked-up financiers in London?
• AlterNet reminds you that, yes, your bad memories of George W. Bush are fully justified.

seattle dept. of transportation

• King Street Station, one of Seattle’s two historic railway passenger terminals (and the one still in use by Amtrak) has looked so drab and awful for so long. In the pre-Amtrak desperate last years of private passenger rail, the Great Northern had “modernized” the main lobby with an acoustic-tile drop ceiling and other ill-informed touches. Now, after a half-decade of planning and reconstruction, the city and private partners have finally restored the room to its full grandeur. You can read all about it here. There’s a grand opening on Wed. 4/24, 11 a.m.
• In other grand-opening news, the “Old School Pinups” photo studio has one this Fri. 4/19, 5 p.m.-on, at 1922 Post Alley.
• Something I’ve learned first hand lately: Seattle’s current boom (glut?) of apartment construction hasn’t led to lower rents, but to ever-higher rents.
• In addition to the dilemmas of cabs. vs. “for hire” vehicles and Zipcar vs. Car2Go, now a new alternative appears in town. It’s semi-pro “ride sharing.”
• No, Seattle Times guest commenter Grace Gedye, online sexist trolls existed long before Facebook. But can the rising force of “Geek Girls” conquer and defeat ’em once n’ for all?
• Another classic bowling alley bites the dust. It’s Robin Hood Lanes, in Edmonds since 1960.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet (Day 100)?: No. And we were supposed to have found out this weekend whether they’re coming back, at the NBA team owners’ annual hobnob session. But that vote’s been indefinitely delayed.
• We do know that any neo-Sonics would have to negotiate cable-TV carriage of their games with the Mariners, who just bought a controlling interest in Root Sports Northwest.
• The Oregon Ducks, aka “Nike U.,” have been slapped with NCAA penalties for football recruiting violations.
• Some Net-pundits are crowing about the simple but apparently devastating “spreadsheet error” at the heart of a 2010 think-tank study promoting “austerity economics” to attack government debt. If not for the faulty math, the study’s critics claim, the study’s claims would be seen as the nonsense they are. Yeah, but facts have seldom gotten in the way of “shock doctrine” partisans, before or since.
• Eco-Scare of the Week (non-fertilizer edition): Even before rising sea levels submerge many small Pacific islands, they’ll fatally disrupt those places’ fresh-water tables, making them uninhabitable.
• Scott Miller, R.I.P.: The Loud Family/Game Theory musician was a leading light in the ’80s power pop revival, as well as a top scholar/historian about the pop/rock sphere. For a limited time, his heirs are making six of his out-of-print albums available as free downloads.
• Blogger Nadine Friedman hates, hates, hates the latest Dove “real beauty” ad campaign. She claims it actually reinforces the standard corporate standards of female ideals.
• Aaron Steven Miller at Medium.com wants book publishers to take the lead in tech-ifying and social-media-ifying their operations, before Amazon completely crushes them. Of course, that would require book publishers to cease being, as Miller puts it…

…historically the stingiest, most fiscally conservative, most technologically resistant and investment-averse people ever, with the highest percentage of luddites per capita.

seatacmedia.org

Earlier this year, KUOW and MOHAI came up with a list of 25 “objects that tell Seattle’s story.”

They range from the obvious (a Boeing B-17, a poster announcing the Japanese-American internment, a Starbucks coffee cup) to the more obscure (an ancient, giant ground sloth).

A little more recently, SeattlePI.com ran a list of “25 things we miss in Seattle.”

These also ranged from the truly famous (the Lusty Lady sign, Frederick & Nelson’s window displays) to the lesser known (the Woodland Park Zoo’s nocturnal-creatures exhibit).

I’ve got my own list of Seattle pop culture icons. All of them are things I’ve personally seen or owned.

And yes, there are 25 of them. (Why break a routine that works?)

In no particular order, they are:

1. A Frederick & Nelson shopping bag.
2. A Dog House place mat.
3. A J.P. Patches plush doll.
4. A floppy disc of MS-DOS 1.0.
5. A P-I vending box.
6. Dr. Belding Scribner’s first artificial kidney machine.
7. The Kalakala.
8. Bud Tutmarc’s pioneering electrified pedal-steel guitar.
9. A Neptune repertory-cinema calendar.
10. A KJR “Fab 50” newsletter/record chart.
11. A mascot costume for “Nordy,” the old Nordstrom children’s shoe department spokescritter.
12. A first pressing of Nirvana’s Bleach on vinyl.
13. A work of Northwest Coast native art; or, one of artist Preston Singletary‘s upscale “tributes” to Northwest Coast native art.
14. A Space Needle ball-point pen.
15. A set of Peter Bagge-designed “grunge rock pencils.”
16. A first-edition hardcover of Sophie Frye Bass’s book Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle.
17. A Seattle Pilots pennant.
18. The Pike Place Market mural honoring pre-WWII Japanese-American farmers.
19. An Amazon.com shipping box with one of the company’s five early logos.
20. A piece of Kingdome debris.
21. An Ivar’s Acres of Clams kids’ menu.
22. A Smith Tower elevator car.
23. A Washington Mutual savings passbook.
24. The prototype 747.
25. A wooden miniature hydroplane.