• It’s not just for writers anymore. Now fashion models, even those doing runway work at high profile industry events, are being expected to work for free.
• Does anyone even know how many listeners Limbaugh really has?
• “Modern technology can save languages as well as destroy them.”
• Construction on the First Hill (and Capitol Hill and I.D.) Streetcar starts next month. Still no decision about extending the line up Broadway.
• Oil tankers just keep getting huger and huger. And they’re coming here, or dangerously close.

crosscut.com

• Ex Seattle First Brother Bob Royer looks back at one of the city’s first prominent newspaperwomen. Fun fact: In the late 1930s, the Seattle Times had six people working in the “society” section; an expense more than made up by the amount of “women’s” oriented advertising in the section. Speaking of which….
• The P-I globe will remain standing, somewhere. That’s nice. But it’s not just the globe that I’d wanted preserved. Speaking of which….
• Newspapers are losing $7 in print ad revenue for every $1 they gain in online ad revenue. This is from a Pew Research study. The study’s authors claim papers “need to prioritize digital ad revenues” in order to survive. But what if that’s still not nearly enough? The study cites a “success story” of a small paper (20,000 print circ.) that’s now making $670,000 a year online, compared to $8 million from print ads. That doesn’t look like a bright future to me.
• The new Miss Seattle used to be a Miss Phoenix. Last December she Tweeted® how she “Ugh can’t stand cold rainy Seattle and the annoying people.” She has since apologized.
• Could liquor privatization in Wash. state really get derailed by a court challenge on techinical issues in the original initiative?
• Repercussions continue from Friday night’s Republican coup in the state Senate. The all-cuts budget they rushed through, with the help of three turncoat conserva-Dems but with no public hearings, turns out to hurt K-12 education and devastate services for the neediest.
• Also, the GOP’s parliamentary trickery doomed about 20 non-budget bills from the state House, which died because the Senate didn’t take action on them by midnight Friday.
• Meanwhile, the national Republicans, becoming shriller and stupider every week, have firmly (and probably fatally) tied their fate to the aging, non-college-educated, white male demographic. And they’re “appealing” to this last remaining constituency by treating them like idiots.
• Oh, and the even more batshit-n’-bigoted than ever Limbaugh? He’s lost a third of his ratings in the last few years. (However, some of that loss can be attributed to more accurate means of measuring radio listenership.) But in any event, the right wing “outrage machine,” which includes Limbaugh and his many imitators, may have finally become too petty and brutal for its own good.
• Besides, there’s a problem with trying to bring sexuality and women’s lives back to what they were in the 1950s. It wasn’t working then either. As local author Stephanie Coontz points out, “Teenage childbearing peaked in the fabulous family-oriented 1950s.”
• The GOP-controlled U.S. House is pushing through a bill that would crack down on protests anywhere a federal official might be present. At least, that’s what a worst-case interpretation of its “imprecise language” might infer.
• We know the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia. But did the Saudi regime itself collude in the attack? Two former U.S. Senators say maybe.
• A megarich hedge fund manager write lucidly about the failures of capitalism in regard to preserving a sustainable society.
• What if crossword puzzle editors wrote poetry?
• Finally, here is a handy pie chart of “excuses conservatives make when facts prove them wrong“:

uw archives via businessinsider.com

All of you who are going to be outside in Seattle tomorrow (Sat. 3/3) should attend my nice little chat about Vanishing Seattle. It starts at 2 p.m. at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. Be there or be fool’s gold.

• Here’s a lovely interview with my fellow Stranger refugee S.P. Miskowski. Her play Emerald City, about (among other things) Seattle’s love/hate relationship with itself, opens next Friday (3/9) at the West of Lenin space in Fremont. In the interview, she mentions that the Stranger was, indeed, a totally commercial operation from the start:

The owners were business smart. Very smart. You will never go broke in Seattle making people think they’re in a special, exclusive club that is cooler than everyone else. That is money in the bank. The fear of being provincial and dull is so powerful, there.

• Republican legislative dirty tricks: they’re not just for other states anymore.
• Norm Dicks, a stalwart of Wash. state’s Congressional delegation, is retiring.
• It’s one thing for Amazon to coax favorable pricing terms from the mega corporate publishers. But when it got into an ebook pricing impasse with a small indie distributor, it attracted the ire of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, an outfit with which one shouldn’t mess if one knows what’s good for one.
• Who else is refusing links to Amazon ebook sales pages? Apple iBooks, that’s who.
• Meanwhile, is Amazon ridiculously inflating the “before” prices of on-sale food products?
• As we’ve mentioned before, Shepard Fairey steals from street-level artists as well as corporate art. Here’s one artist who sued Fairey and won.
• Matt Taibbi notes that the late right-wing sleazeblogger Andrew Breitbart used to post private info about his ideological opponents online and threaten violence against them. In response for mentioning this, Breitbart fans posted private info about Taibbi online and threatened violence against him.
• Meanwhile, Jen Doll proclaims, “If Rush Limbaugh slut-shames you, you’re doing something right.”
• Truthout pundit Henry A. Giroux and Nation writer Dana Goldstein claim the “religious” right is against public education because it’s against people thinking for themselves.
• Robert Reich would like to remind you that increased “productivity,” per se, doesn’t necessarily add jobs. It often means cutting jobs.
• “More U.S. soldiers killed themselves than died in combat in 2010.”
• I just found out last year that there are serious grownup My Little Pony fans. I’m not sure if the Amazon customer-reviewers of this spinoff DVD are among them.

storebrandsdecisions.com

• The Capitol Hill Seattle blog has a handy dandy map showing the retailers who’ve applied to sell hard liquor as soon as the state liquor stores close. They include Safeway, Kroger’s QFC and Fred Meyer, Walgreens, Target, Albertsons, and of course Costco. Indie stores that have applied include Pete’s Wines on Fairview, Full Throttle Bottles in Georgetown, Ralph’s in Belltown, Pioneer Square Market, Madison Market Co-op, Wine World in Wallingford, and Viet Wah in the International District. Bartell’s, PCC, Whole Foods, Rite Aid, and Trader Joe’s have not applied, at least not yet.
• We must say goodbye to David Ishii, who owned a leading Pioneer Square bookstore for some 30 years.
• Finally! Some Dems in the state Legislature are suing to overturn the “supermajority” requirement for any tax reform bills.
• Higher parking rates in greater downtown: could they actually be increasing business at local merchants?
• A wholesale donut bakery in Georgetown was found with flies, rat poop, and snail near the food products. (Doubles the nutritional value.)
• Andrew Breitbart RIP: The far-right blogger, speaker, and all around bully died of an apparent sudden heart attack. How does one humanely grieve a man who did the exact opposite to others?
• Playboy wants to run a nightclub on Richard Branson’s proposed private tourist space station. Because nothing says gentlemanly posh quite like being stuck in a steel tube which may or may not feature artificial gravity.

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.

• King Street Station isn’t just getting “restored.” It’s getting architecturally-appropriate new stuff added to it.
• The basketball/hockey arena proposal announced Thursday is exactly as I, and many others, had predicted. All the money will come from private sources, and from city/county bonds to be paid back by arena revenues. Now comes the long wait, on three fronts. The city and county councils have to sign on. The project has to be designed. And it won’t get built until an NBA or NHL team (preferably both) actually come here.
• On a related note, Aaron Levine at KCPQ says it’s still OK to hate NBA boss David Stern.
• A lonely expanse of lawn on Beacon Hill is slated to become a neighbor-run park dedicated to edible plants. Welcome to the “food forest.”
• Lisa Rochon at the Toronto Globe and Mail makes “The Business Case for Beautiful Libraries.” Yes, she mentions Seattle’s.
• KIRO-TV.com headline: “Marysville teachers protest for statewide budget cuts.” Uh, they’re actually protesting against the cuts. This must be the same sort of sentence construction as the oft-heard talk about folks staging “a fundraiser for muscular dystrophy.”
• Now we know why Michael Nesmith wasn’t on last year’s Monkees reunion tour, and hadn’t performed many solo gigs lately either. He’d been slowly going blind. But he’s cured now. (It was undiagnosed cataracts.)
• Today’s Republicans aren’t even trying to get the votes of non-dittoheads anymore.
• In the 1990s it was e. coli in Odwalla apple juice. Now it’s arsenic in “organic brown rice syrup,” whatever that is.
• Mars Inc. will impose maximum calorie counts on its candy bars. Think of it as a way to reduce product sizes, keep the prices the same, and call it a “health” move.

candy wrapper archive via aol/lemondrop.com

tinyprints.com

• We may hear today (Thu 2/16) from the ex-Seattle financier who wants to build a new basketball/hockey arena and move an existing NBA team to it. No word from that other guy who allegedly wants to move an NHL team here.
• Dystopian novelist Gary Shteyngart went to Seattle for a travel mag. The resulting piece is super sad, in parts. But he also describes Seattle and Portland as…

…the last places in America where books are still a dominant part of the culture, consumed, discussed, pondered, and critiqued with gusto.

• Amazon reportedly still wants more Seattle office space.
• Liquor privatization starts phasing in on March 1, when restaurants and bars can buy booze direct from producers and out-of-state distributors.
• That $340 million state budget “windfall”? A lot of it’s due to past slashings of social service programs.
• The state Legislature still doesn’t have a plan to halt horrendous budget cuts. But it is working to bring back incentives for out-of-state film productions.
• It’s the end of the smelting line for the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry. The longtime site of statue-making, and home base of the first efforts to save the ferry Kalakala is going to become a restaurant, a bar, and a restaurant-bar supply house.
• Forget about radio, the printing press, penicillin, the wheel, or even gum with flavor crystals. The Internet is “the greatest thing that mankind has ever created.” Or so says the don of crazy cat captions.
• Is Microsoft helping fund a creepy right-wing campaign to force “climate change is just a theory” curricula in K-12 schools?
• In reality, as opposed to right-wing-media fantasyland, there is no war on religion in this country. And wrestling is fake too.
• Sean Hannity held a panel discussion about the birth control pseudo-controversy. The panel included men of several races and religions, and not even one woman. (Has even one woman spoken for the anti-birth-control side in any public forum, other than Sarah Palin?)
• Nancy Grace has become, if it can be imagined, even sleazier.
• Lest We Forget Dept.: It’s the 70th anniversary of the forced detention of Americans of Japanese descent.
• One anniversary not commemorated by many, except by Noam Chomsky: The 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War. (Or rather, of U.S. involvement in same.)

aol radio blog

• Overhyped meme of the day: Following last night’s Grammys, teens and young adults by the dozen are supposedly Tweeting® “Who Is Paul McCartney?” As if the entire world hadn’t been force-fed the Sixties Generation® and its incessant proclamations of itself as the apex of humanity from which all before and since is a mere subspecies. As if Sixties Generation® superstars, even those famous for singing about dogs and butter pies, haven’t been repurposed everywhere from Simpsons cameos to Guitar Hero® games. Have at least a few dozen young Americans actually found a way to mentally shut out the tactics of Nostalgia, Inc.? Could they actually be more interested in creating their own culture, their own world?
• Adultery. Sex scandals. Obsessions with sales-hustling, upscale material goods, and “branding.” Shady business practices. Welcome to the all-American materialistic world of yoga.
• Just in time for v-day, gays will be able to get married, in just a few months. As long as the out-of-state bigot megabucks campaign, just starting, doesn’t reverse it.
• The Belltown Community Center is finally set to open in June, at the former Zum upscale gym at Fifth and Bell. The building of Bell Street’s “park boulevard” makeover (specially wide sidewalks and special street lighting) starts later this year; piggybacking, as it had always been planned to, on street work City Light was going to do on Bell anyway.
• Is Rick Santorum really an extremely bigoted ass, or simply cynically pretenting to be an extremely bigoted ass?
• Going everywhere by car: it’s just sooo less popular these days.
• The drive for NBA and NHL teams in Seattle now has a “fan lobby.” It’s called Arena Solution. Its board and advisory committee includes everybody from ex-Seahawks coach Tom Mara and Sonics legend Shawn Kemp to Capitol Hill bar owner Marcus Lalario and “Seattle’s Biggest Sports Fan” Lorin Sandretzky. This group seems willing to have a new arena in either Sodo or Bellevue, as long as we get the teams to play in it.
• Working moms are often perceived as giving less than 1000-percent undivided fealty to their employers. They are role models to us all.

gasoline alley antiques

• Last time, we discussed what any potential Seattle NHL hockey team should be called. “Go 2 Guy” sports commentator Jim Moore has a simple answer—the Totems. That was the name for Seattle’s teams in the old Western Hockey League. (That league disbanded shortly after Vancouver, its marquee franchise, joined the NHL.)
• Mayor McGinn has promised that city tax money won’t go toward building a new basketball/hockey arena. This does not mean it will be an all private-enterprise endeavor, or that it would be cost-free to Seattle taxpayers.  The city will have to vacate at least one long block of Occidental Avenue South, essentially giving that land to the arena developers. It might also have to move in on any holdout landowners at the site, essentially forcing them to sell. The project might involve city-backed bond sales and/or tax breaks on construction and ticket sales. And certainly a new arena will compete with the city-owned KeyArena for the Storm, Seattle U basketball, the Rat City Rollergirls, concerts, corporate meetings, evangelical crusades, etc.
• David Meinert, meanwhile, believes McGinn might actually get a second term in ’13.
• The unionization drive at the new Longview grain terminal finally succeeded.
• The truckers’ strike at the Port of Seattle is having effects.
• The state legislature might approve textile-based traction devices, invented in Europe. Get ready for “tire socks.”
• A Vancouver USA attorney wants to overthrow the state’s Congressional redistricting scheme. He alleges the new districts are too incumbent-friendly.
• The one, way insufficient, state tax reform scheme in the current Legislative session is getting bogged down in the specifics.
• The pseudo-“religious” anti-gay bigots may not show up at the Powell children’s funeral after all. (The tragedy that led to this is, as we all sadly know, the work of a criminally insane straight guy.)
• Anthony B. Robinson ponders why Wash. state’s Democrats can accomplish gay marriage and other “social agenda” things, while the state government’s revenue system sends it, and us, ever closer to civic oblivion.
• Charles B. Pierce at Esquire is succinct: “Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Destroying America.”
• Health insurance rates keep rising, as the insurance giants pocket more and more of that increased cash inflow.
• What happens to pizza-parlor robot rock bands after they die? Avid collectors, including some in Seattle, try to reanimate them.

west seattle blog

• Graphic designer Ben Crick is in the process of creating a manifesto for designers in the 21st century, to be communicated in the form of handsome posters. Crick’s name for the project: “I Am Designer.” He doesn’t have the URL for that yet, but he’s got the posters. The third poster happens to incorporate the logos of ATV and ITC, Sir Lew Grade’s TV production companies (The Saint, The Prisoner, Thunderbirds, The Muppet Show). The first poster, though, is the one whose message I identify with:

Don’t work for free under the guise of ‘good exposure’. It is bad exposure. If you don’t value your own work, neither will anyone else.

• It’s 10th Anniversary day today (Wednesday 2/8) at Top Pot Doughnuts. You know what that means: Free Old Fashioneds!
• As I’d previously predicted, the New York design firm contracted to design a new Seattle Waterfront has come up with a set of pretentious, windswept plazas and promenades, intended more to scream world-class-osity than to provide recreation and convenience for, you know, the people who actually live here. As I’ve said before, I don’t want a waterfront in good taste. I want a waterfront that tastes good.
• A Republican in the Oregon State Senate proposed a bill that would criminalize online invitations (even Tweets®) to events where crimes were later committed. As Goldy points out, it would essentially outlaw online organizing, under the guise of cracking down on “aggravated solitication.” The bill’s DOA in the Dem-controlled Ore. Senate, but it’s still damn close to what authorities in Egypt or Syria would like to stop.

Update #1: The Komen Foundation backed down from its previous blackballing of Planned Parenthood cancer screening services—or did it?

Update #2: In yesterday’s rant about the Komen fiasco, I mentioned how the organization had attracted negative comments even before this. But I failed to provide a good link to those previous criticisms.

Here’s such a link. It goes to the trailer for Pink Ribbons, Inc., a National Film Board of Canada documentary investigating the group. It opened today in Canadian theaters; a Stateside run starts in March.

Director Lea Pool’s film (based on Samantha King’s 2006 book) had, of course, been shot, edited, and scheduled long before this week’s right-wing cave-in by Komen management.

The film’s gist: Komen management allegedly cares a lot more about promoting itself, attracting corporate partners, selling branded merchandise, and, of course, raising money than it is about detection, treatment, or “the cure.”

All-new item: A Seattle gun merchant announced a Komen-authorized pink handgun. Komen management now denies any authorization, involvement, or even pre-knowledge of this.

More sordid details keep emerging about the Komen Foundation cave-in to the right wing sleaze campaign against Planned Parenthood.

At least one top Komen official had resigned in protest over the scheme. Other insiders report Komen bosses had been maneuvering behind the scenes to rewrite its bylaws, to explicitly allow defunding PP’s cancer-screening programs.

Komen’s leaders, who appear to be the sort of folk who only listen to conservative-only “news” media, actually thought this would settle down.

Then again, people who’ve followed the Komen organization before all this have described an outfit that spends relatively little on screenings, treatments, or research, and a lot on marketing and corporate promo tie-ins and forging ties with conservative power players.

freecabinporn.com

• This site of nothing but pictures of countryside cabins (rustic to postmodern) reminds me of my young adult years, when all writers were supposed to want to live in cabins. I never did. To me, the countryside was something to escape from.
• On a similar thread, some of the same “writerly lifestyle” folks who’d demanded that I be a mellow back-to-nature lover also kept laundry lists of everything they hated about the modern world. Meet today’s incarnation of that trope, Jonathan Franzen.
• NHL hockey in Seattle: even more likely?
• Here’s something novel for ya: Scenes of women in superhero comics that female readers actually like!
• When a Google attorney goes on a Time Warner site to advocate for less draconian copyright laws, something’s going on. I don’t know exactly what, but something.
• A young Brit couple Tweeted® about their upcoming trip to the States. They said they were gonna “destroy America” by, among other hard-partyin’ things, “digging up Marilyn Monroe’s grave.” Agents arrested ’em on their arrival at LAX, detained ’em, and shipped ’em back home. They insist they were just joking. Memo to Homeland Security: Anyone who actually wants to destroy America probably won’t Tweet® about it.
• If the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation wanted to keep selling itself as the voice of defiant courage, it shouldn’t have caved to the phony right wing smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.
• Don’t watch porn on your laptop in a public library where kids can see it. Make ’em find the really good sites on their own.
• Just why do restaurant websites so consistently suck?