• Our ol’ pal Wendi Dunlap has scanned and posted the first two issues of her vital ’80s Seattle pop-rock zine Yeah! Great work, then and now.
• Amy Rolph has an online slideshow of 15 iconic Seattle fashion statements. Not included: “Skinny white boy with exposed boxer shorts.”
• Our own U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who conveniently doesn’t run for re-election in ’12, was named one of the Dems on the deficit-cuttin’ “super congress.” Also named: John Kerry and frequent DINO (Democrat In Name Only) Max Baucus (drat).
• For the third consecutive year, all Seattle Public Library branches will be closed for a week later this month, with all staff on unpaid leave.
• Seattle Weekly has struck back at Mayor McGinn with all the editorial influence and rhetorical force it’s got these days.
• Now showing on the Seattle waterfront, the “world’s fastest sailing ship.” It’s Russian and it’s really big.
• Amazon UK: Profiting from the UK street riots as a seller of baseball bats and other “weapons”?
• Anybody shedding a tear for the fiscally ill Bank of America? No?
• Apple was, for a brief time Tuesday, America’s biggest company. If you measure the size of a company by the Almighty Stock Price. Which I don’t.
• The big recall in Wisconsin seems to have fallen one seat short of ending Republican control of that state’s senate. As one might have predicted, it all came down to the county with the GOP elections boss already known for questionable integrity and/or competence.

• Some guy who’s writing his own Seattle music-scene book has just listed me among the most “underrated Seattle music people.” Considering that the only public musical performing I’ve done is karaoke, I guess that’s an accomplishment.
• Today’s sermon against the deep bore tunnel comes from the Tacoma News Tribune, which chides the state Dept. of Transportation for refusing to make its tunnel-related records public.
• What they didn’t want to release, an internal memo about the tunnel project’s financial prospects, has been leaked online by tunnel opponents.
• R.I.P. Mark Hatfield, an actual sane Republican (back when there was such a thing) and one of the first national lawmakers to public acknowledge the Vietnam war was a huge mistake. The hereby-linked Oregonian obit claims Hatfield had been on the short list for the GOP VP nomination in ’68; but Richard Nixon chose the more “southern strategy” friendly (i.e., demagogue-like) Spiro Agnew.
• Obama insists that the Standard & Poor’s nonsense notwithstanding, America is still “a triple-A country.” So why don’t we try harder to break into the majors? (At least it’s better than the bush leagues, where we were when the seeds of this mess were planted.)
• Virginia Heffernan asks, and believes she has an answer, why grade-school students can write very lucid blog posts and lousy class papers. She calls for a move away from industrial-age rote learning and a return to “socratic learning.”
• Michael Wolff says he knows how to get the Rupert Murdoch empire out of the U.S.—sic ’em with the RICO Act.
• There’s panic on the streets of London, and spreading to other U.K. cities. It was originally inspired by protests against police brutality. Guardian commentator Nina Power offers another reason—increasing inequality in that land (still not as bad as it is here). The same paper also quotes academicians who see large parts of a whole young generation who believe they have no future. Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?

• Our ol’ pal David Goldstein floats the idea that Metro Transit perhaps should be broken up, with Seattle resuming authority over in-city bus routes (including funding authority), intercity routes given over to Sound Transit, and King County keeping the rest of the system. (Seattle ran its own bus routes before Metro was formed in the early 1970s.)
• Meanwhile, Jason Kambitsis at Wired.com believes transit is a civil rights issue. It allows lower-income people to get to work and other places without the relative huge expense of car ownership.
• Another bicyclist was struck by another hit-and-run driver in Seattle. Fortunately, this victim will live.
• In what might be a grandstanding move but is still welcome, state Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna is lashing out about what he calls Bank of America’s shoddy foreclosure practices…
• …and the Washington Mutual execs who steered the state’s last homegrown big bank into the heart of the mortgage-bubble disaster won’t be prosecuted.
• The Mariners have finally gotten rid of designated hitter Jack Cust, whose very name invokes what M’s fans have done a lot of this year.
• The young City of SeaTac finally got its first big protest march (by and for hotel workers).
• Would the Midwestern funny-money fiddlers who now run Boeing really ruin the company’s whole quality reputation and value chain just to stick it to Wash. state? Maybe.
• When inappropriate quasi-racist comments about Obama will be made, Fox News will make them.
• Another slice of the media biz that’s in apparently inexorable fiscal decline: cable porn. The Gawker.com story about this, naturally, can’t stop repeating the word “shrinkage.”
• To end on a fun note, here are some cool pictures of old cassette tapes.

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.

• Another local bicyclist was struck, and at this writing remains in critical condition, after getting struck by a hit-and-run driver (in, as if you hadn’t guessed, an SUV).
• Crooks in a local art heist had very specific tastes. They only took stuff by one guy, Hispanic-heritage painter Esteban Silva.
• The NY Observer claims Brooklyn’s becoming more like Portland, or rather like the Portlandia Portland.
• Could “Sonics Appreciation Night” at tonight’s Mariners game be one of the greatest single events in M’s history? It’ll certainly rank among this sorry year’s highlights.
• Besides the usual fringe-right-wing suspects, here’s someone else who seems to believe the Norway massacre wasn’t all that awful. It’s Morrissey. He apparently thinks the existence of fast food is a worse crime.
• James Warren, who knew Obama back when, insists the guy’s no Clinton “centrist” but a seeker of deals, a professional bargainer. But is he enough of a hard bargainer?
• Meanwhile, even John Boehner is apparently not looney-right enough for the looney-right…
• …While Robert Reich suggests another force pressuring the Democrats into caving to shock-treatment budget cuts—the Wall St. bond rating cartel.
• The traditionally cars-before-people Eastside is getting its very own light rail line. Sometime in the next decade. Unless Bellevue Square tycoon Kemper Freeman, who hates transit, has his way and stops it.
• Science Guy 1, Fox News 0.

oh, NOW they get customers.

• SeattlePI.com is moving, away from what had been the Post-Intelligencer building on Elliott Ave. The new office space is said to be “larger” than the space the news site had been occupying. (Let’s hope that means the site’s going to add staff, to get at least slightly closer to a comprehensive local news source.) The P-I globe’s staying put, for now.
• The Seattle weekly that’s not Seattle Weekly gets the big fawning establishment treatment as it approaches its 20th anniversary in September.
• The alleged Norwegian mass murderer (mostly of teenagers) is shaping up to be a right wing “Christian,” a virulent racist and anti-Muslim, and a member of at least one nationalist cell group. None of this has stopped right wingers in other countries from falsely attributing the murders to Muslim terrorists.
• Looks like the ’04 Presidential election may have been just as rigged as the ’00 election may have been, though with operational differences.
• Fans descended on a low-key charity basketball event to proclaim their unflagging desire to see men’s pro b-ball back in town. I also want the Seattle Supersonics back, and I want them in Seattle.
• Amy Winehouse, R.I.P.: Let’s put this succinctly as possible. Drugs suck.

from sightline.org

• Congrats. Seattle’s been named America’s sixth most walkable city by WalkScore.com. It’s absolutely purely coincidence that WalkScore happens to be based in Seattle. Why, just two months ago, the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center named Seattle America’s first most walkable city, and that outfit’s in North Carolina or somewhere like that. (I’ll have more to say about this greater topic any week now.)
• The $20 emergency car-tab surtax to save King County Metro Transit stands a good chance of becoming a referendum to the voters, now that a fifth County Council member says she’s considering it.
• Long-shot City Council candidate Dale Pusey wants to keep the viaduct, at least as a park. I heartily agree.
• If our current postal system is snarked at by the digerati as “snail mail,” what will they call it if it cuts back to three delivery days a week?
• R.I.P. Alex Steinweiss, 94, who first had the idea of making original cover art for record albums back in the 78 era, and for decades continued to be the greatest practitioner of the art form he’d invented.

• A Japanese American community activist wants part of S. Dearboarn Street rechristened “Mikado Street,” the name of one of Dearborn’s 1890s predecessors. The question not raised in the linked news story: Can ethnic pride be boosted by the use of a name associated with British comic stereotyping? Or, conversely, could this move help “reclaim” the word?
• Tacoma’s biggest private employers these days? Hospital chains.
• Is Microsoft trying to build its own social networking site? Heck if I know.
• State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown sez Wash. state just might be ready to approve gay marriage.
• Simon Reynolds finds a lot of retro classic rock n’ soul tributes on today’s pop music charts. And he’s sick and tired of it.

street food vendor, 1930s, singapore; from the-inncrowd.com

• More kinds of yummy street food could soon come to Seattle, as a deregulation proposal makes its way to the full city council.
• Also, the city’s asking the state Liquor Board for the authority to let some Seattle bars stay open after 2 a.m.
• Those toll-happy state bureaucrats are thinking about charging for the I-5 express lanes.
• Playboy has a natty profile of fast rising music/comedy/performance-art star Reggie Watts. Unlike New York mag’s Watts profile from last year, this piece gives full credit to his long formative years in the Seattle music scene.
• Lynnwood motorist sees ducks crossing the freeway, slows down. Semi driver behind said motorist doesn’t see ducks, doesn’t slow down.
• Hanford could become America’s newest, glow-in-the-darkiest national park.
• In nanny-state news, some doctor in Boston said obese children should be taken away from their parents.
• Clever Brit engineers have devised a $25 computer (basically a memory stick with a cheap little CPU attached; no screen or keyboard included) that schools could just give out to kids.
• Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell does turn out to have a larger agenda behind his offer to say “uncle” for now on the debt ceiling nonsense. He wants to bring back the “balanced budget amendment,” one of those recurring ideas that sounds hot on right-wing talk radio but doesn’t work in real life. The amendment McConnell wants would impose the same budgetary rules on the federal government that have already made California ungovernable.
• Those right-wing governors and state legislators around the country—how, you may wonder, do they simultaneously introduce the same brutal anti-labor, anti-women, anti-middle-class, anti-voter legislation? A lot of it comes from the same right wing think tank. And yep, the Koch brothers are in on it, big.
• American progressive pundits still seek a connection between the News of the World phone hacking scandal and Rupert Murdoch’s US media operations. Until they find one, let’s remember that the London-based NOTW aggressively spied on plenty of Hollywood movie stars. Its targets included actors working for Murdoch’s 20th Century-Fox—and even the Murdoch family’s celebrity friends.
• As he has a few times in the past, Jean-Luc Godard has again declared that “film is over.”

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”

There sure were a lot of people at the West Seattle Street Fair on an early Friday evening.

The ol’ Junction particularly teemed with kids. At times you couldn’t make your way down California Ave. without scrambling between traffic jams of double-wide plastic strollers.

Chris Ballew’s “Casper Babypants” act had a perfect captive audience.

On the main stage, Leslie Beattie, Kurt Bloch, and Mike Musburger (with the unseen-here Jim Sangster) in Thee Sgt. Major III warmed up an already warm audience with a rousing set. But the highlight of the night was yet to come.

Yes. For the first time in more than a decade, Bloch, Kim Warnick, Lulu Gargiulo, and Musburger were to perform a full set of their intense, brutally joyous (or is it joyously brutal?) power pop.

The street and the adjoining fenced-off beer garden were crammed with geezers like me who remembered the Fastbacks’ 1979-2001 reign. The street also had dozens who had not been yet born during that time. All were treated to one of the most electrifying, frenetic, and all-out rockin’ hours seen anywhere, at any time, by anyone.

If you ever saw the Fastbacks before, you know what I’m talking about. Even if you only heard them on record, you can imagine how great they were this night. All the great Bloch riffs. All the tomboyish Warnick/Gargiulo vocals, singing with gleeful passion about stuff you might not imagine could be portrayed that way (loneliness, depression, frustration).

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?

• Local business promoters have prepared an “infographic” hawking Seattle as the best place to start a hi-tech company.
• First, Sonic Boom Records said it would close its recently moved Capitol Hill branch. Now Everyday Music says high rents are forcing it out of its own site on the Hill. The store says it will move, somewhere.
• Seattle Goodwill tried several times over the past 12 years to redevelop its Rainier Valley campus. One scheme would have razed its beautiful mega thrift store for a Target. With the collapse of that and other concepts, Goodwill is finally going ahead with a limited plan to build a new job training complex.
• Alex Carson explains why “Seattle Mariners baseball is like an Elvis Costello album.” An album Carson hasn’t actually heard.
• In more tragic baseball news, a fan at a Texas Rangers game leaned over a railing to catch a ball and fell over.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna spoke to Young Republicans in Bellevue, and tried to have a Democratic Party operative kicked out of the room, even calling police.
• Meanwhile, a national “Christian Left” group bought ad space on Facebook for a quite inoffensive little message. Facebook pulled the ad after conservatives complained.
• A Portland judge approved a bankruptcy plan for the Northwest Jesuits. It sets aside more than $150 million for past victims of abusive priests.
• Meanwhile, a Centers for Disease Control report claims more than half of us had harrowing childhoods, “featuring abusive or troubled family members or parents who were absent due to separation or divorce.” In other news, Leave It to Beaver was never real.

This holiday, as I do on this holiday every year, I sing our nation’s song the way it was originally meant to be sung.

Which is to say, as an ode to the eternal, worldwide, ‪joys of drinking and screwing‬‏.

And if you like your poetic homages to the grape mixed in with a little faux-Terry Gilliam animation, try this version.

(Slow news day edition.)

• In case you wanted another reason to cuss Boeing’s current management (besides paying no taxes whilst living off the Pentagon teat), Glenn Hurowitz at the local eco-zine Grist chides ’em for falling behind Airbus in the race to make more eco-friendly aircraft. Then he cites this as just one more example of Boeing’s corporate ball-dropping:

Boeing is still paying for abandoning its once-successful strategy of long-term investments in innovative, groundbreaking products like the 747 jumbo jet in service of short-term profits meant to goose its quarterly earnings.

• Longtime readers know I almost never quote NPR here. (Heck, I almost never listen to that marathon snoozefest of self absorption.) But here’s a neat little item by them about “how much does it cost to make a hit song?” The song in question is a producer-driven Rihanna track. As one web-page commenter to the story noted, nowhere in the entire piece is the word “musician” uttered. Indeed, nowhere is it mentioned how any non-vocal sounds on the recording are created.
• If there were still going to be daytime soaps, here’s a new potential plot chiché for them: frozen fertilized embryos. Siblings conceived at the same time but born years apart.
• David Swanson thinks he knows how we actually could get Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court…
• …while Ezra Klein’s got a handy rhetorical device for following the federal debt-ceiling debate hoohah. Whenever a Republican is quoted blathering about “taxes,” replace the phrase with “blowing up the moon.”