boxx corp.

• A Portland company is about to bring out the “Boxx” scooter, an all-electric two wheel vehicle (30 mph top speed; 40 miles per charge). It’s got a lot of cool sounding features, but its main attribute is its shape. Yes, it looks like you’re driving a really big white smartphone or 4G-era Mac desktop unit. The design is not only spiffy but practical for the company, because it can ship the whole thing via UPS. But how will it look (let alone perform) on the road? You’ll have to guess that part. The company’s website appears to not include a single image of the thing being driven, or even in the same shot as a human. (The thing’s only 40 inches long. Calculate the other dimensions on your own and guess whether your particular rump would fit on it.)
• The “offshoring” of making stuff: Apple’s the current poster child for the practice and its related sins. Before that, Nike and Walmart were. But really, says Larry Dignan at ZDNet, it’s our fault for wanting so much cheap stuff. I disagree. Dignan might live in the upscale bubble of the techie caste, where consumers could choose higher-priced domestic products if more were available. But outside of those rarified circles, too many of us absolutely have to equip our households (and our home offices) as economically as possible (partly due to a lousy domestic economy, which is partly due to all that offshoring).
• Author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers explains why a white person (i.e. Jan Brewer) shoving a finger in the face of a black person (i.e. Obama) is a “teachable moment” in race understanding.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates looks at the latest revelations about Ron Paul’s old newsletter business and concludes Paul might not have actually been a racist, just a cynical exploitive suck-up to racists.
• Eric Boehlert claims at least one or two Republican operatives are dismayed at how the whole party has kowtowed to the Fox “News” Channel’s “radical, fear-based agenda.”
• Meanwhile, Richard Eskow compares the GOP debates to “bad 1950s style science fiction;” specifically as the candidates…

…play their parts in an implausible story of a world that could never exist, acting out nonexistent conflicts while delivering dialog that insults the intelligence. That’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they think you are.

• Does David Horsey really believe Newt Gingrich stands a serious chance of becoming president (or rather, that America stands a serious chance of being saddled with such a corrupt egotist getting “the nuclear button”)? Or is he simply being provocative for its own sake?
• Ex-UW public affairs prof Hubert Locke, meanwhile, listens to Gingrich’s debate rants and hears plenty of “racial code words.”
• This is a fairly long and complex story, but the gist appears to be this: Current state GOP boss (and former KVI hate-talk host) Kirby Wilbur set up a Washington branch of the Koch Bros.’ astroturf lobbying group Americans for Prosperity. National AFP HQ helped Wilbur’s guys traipse through a loophole in state laws about partisan political committees, by claiming to instead be a “grassroots” lobbying group, a group that wasn’t really endorsing candidates or policy positions. Even though it ran cleverly-worded stealth attack ads against 13 Democratic legislators, just before the ’10 elections. By deftly skirting around state Public Disclosure Commission guidelines, Washington AFP didn’t have to reveal its money sources. What’s more, it might get to do so in the future, depending on how the state PDC decides to clarify its rules.
• State Attorney General (and GOP gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna tries to prove he’s hep with the digital generation by spearheading a crackdown against Facebook “clickjacking” scams.
• With private liquor sales coming to Washington (but only at large retail spaces), here come the out-of-state big-box liquor chains.
• Male and female co-CEOs of a world famous company battle in and out of the courts over full control, leading to a restraining order against one of them. It could be a plot for a potboiler novel or a made-for-TV movie, but probably not for an Archie Comic.
• RealNetworks, the local outfit that pioneered streaming online audio/video, just sold a bunch of patents to Intel for $120 million. In other news, RealNetworks still exists.

from three sheets northwest

• Well, whaddya know? Looks like gay marriage will pass the state Senate! (It’s always been expected to pass the state House.)
• Historic-preservation bad news #1: The Kalakala, currently docked in Tacoma, started listing to one side during Friday’s wind storm. The Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to prevent the legendary streamined ferry boat from sinking. Its current owner can’t afford to restore it, perhaps not even to fix it. The owner of the dock where it’s moored wants it out. It’s been offered for sale for as little as $1. If no repair plan, new owner, and/or new dock site emerge, the Corps of Engineers could seize and dismantle it.
• Historic-preservation bad news #2: Lawrence Kreisman from Historic Seattle blasts Sound Transit, because he agency plans to demolish the Standard Records storefront on NE 65th Street, as part of its Roosevelt light-rail station project. But few people seem to care that the same project would obliterate the original QFC store.
• Bellevue’s own Redbox is now the biggest video rental company in the nation (if you count physical discs, not streams or downloads).
• “Distressed homes.” That’s the term for sales of foreclosed homes, and for “short sales” of homes for less than what’s owed on them. They’re one-third of home sales in King County these days, and half of home sales in Pierce and Snohomish counties.
• State Rep. Reuven Carlyle is the latest to express his disgust at draconian all-cuts state budgets and the “tyranny of the minority” behind them.…
• …while Knute Berger ponders whether the reluctance to admit the need for public services, and for a reformed tax system to support them, is a sign that the social fabric of our city, state, and nation could be collapsing from within.
• The next bowling alley scheduled for demolition: Robin Hood Lanes in Edmonds, a fine place at which I have bowled (pathetically, as I always do).
• You know the sorry state of newspapers and big consumer magazines. But do you know what other print genre is “staggering along” on “geriatric legs”? Manga. For one thing, the biggest U.S. outlet for translated Japanese comic magazines and graphic novels (as much as one-third of total sales) was the now-imploded Borders Books. And the Japanese home-country market for the stuff is also shrinking and aging, partly due to Japan’s declining birth rate. (Thanx and a hat tip to Robert Boyd for the link.)
• Post-SOPA item #1: Could the Internet censorship dust-up drive a wedge between Democrats and one of the few big industries (entertainment) that mostly donates to Democratic campaigns?
• Post-SOPA item #2: Even in Denmark, the copyright industry loves to disguise its proposed Internet censorship laws as “crackdowns against child pornography.”
• Post-SOPA item #3: The MegaUpload bust has led several other file sharing sites to refuse access from U.S. users, or to restrict downloads of files to the same users who’d uploaded them. But would a complete end to noncommercial piracy really lead everybody into attaining all the same content commercially? Not bloody likely.
• Why are most computers, smartphones, HDTVs, etc. made in China and not here? It’s not really labor costs, not anymore. It’s China’s hyper-efficient supply chain, its masses of skilled engineers, and its sheer scale of industrial intrastructure. Oh, and perhaps the little fact that American workers “won’t be treated like zoo animals.” (The first-linked story is about Apple, but applies to most all consumer-electronics firms.)
• Attention, Coast to Coast A.M. listeners and techno-libertarians: Folks like me aren’t down on Ron Paul because we’re scared of his awesome disruptive super-goodness. We’re down on him because we despise his “small government” hypocrisy—the freedom to discriminate, the freedom to pollute, the freedom to pay slave wages, but no reproductive rights, no gay marriage, and no legal protections for “the little guy.” That, and the racist newsletters and his lame cop-out excuses for them.
• Two great tastes that absolutely don’t taste great together—Mickey Mouse and Joy Division. (Really.)

grouchymuffin.com

Don’t ask me how or why, but I’ve again gotten volunteered into performing at this year’s Seattle Invitationals, a contest for Elvis Tribute Artists (ETAs). It starts at 8 p.m. tonight (Sat. 1/14/12) at the Experience Music Project within Seattle Center. Be there or be Pat Boone.

• It was that rare example of a small entrepreneurial outfit thriving within the nesting arms of a global brand. But no more. Raise a pure-cane-sugar-sweetened toast to the demise of Dublin Dr Pepper.
• What if they gave a gay-marriage debate and none of the “antis” came?
• A Wall St. Journal essayist believes Eastman Kodak might have survived the film-to-digital metamorphosis if only it hadn’t been HQ’d in the company town of Rochester NY, where management felt too beholden to company-owned factories and U.S.-based union workers. I say bosh. Kodak once had great marketers and designers who knew the shtick of “planned obsolescence,” issuing new consumer film formats every two years (and pressuring local processing plants to re-gear for each of them). The digital realm, where obsolescence is a natural byproduct of rapidly improving technologies, should’ve been perfect for them. But they let Japanese companies out-market them. A shame.
• Wendy Gittleson at AddictingInfo.org exaggerates a little when she claims Bain Capital (Mitt Romney’s former corporate-raidin’ firm) “owns most conservative and some liberal radio stations,” and that these forces are helping make Romney’s nomination a done deal. Bain is a non-controlling shareholder in Clear Channel (owner of some 1,000 radio stations of various formats, including KJR-AM-FM here) and Premiere Radio Networks (syndicator of many conserva-talk stars, plus libs Randi Rhodes and Jesse Jackson). And many Premiere conserva-talkers have been part of the right’s “anyone but Mitt” crusade.
• Another state’s Republicans want to force mumbo-jumbo “creationism” down public school students’ throats. And college students’ throats too.
• In 2006, the Federal Reserve Board fiddled while the housing bubble prepared to burst.
• Mr. Krugman explains better than I: “America Isn’t a Corporation.” Running government “more like a business” never works. Especially when the model for “business” is today’s dysfunctional, hyper-corrupt corporate world.

• Half of Mt. Baker Adams’s glaciers are gone. Will the Republicans exhort us to let them finish the job?
• Sue Basko from Occupy L.A. has a guide to stop your protest from getting “hijacked,” either by peripheral single-issue groups, cults of personality, or opponents who want to make you look bad.
• Retired TV news producer Sandy Goodman calls today’s Republican Party “The Single Biggest Threat to America.”
• Harold Pollack reminds us that Ron Paul has more baggage, beyond the racist diatribes issued under his name.  Seems Paul’s purist devotion to the “you’re on your own” social meme extends to hating Medicare, Aid to Dependent Children, and other safety-net mainstays.
• The question shouldn’t be whether Pat Buchanan’s out at MSNBC. The question should be why the channel kept him on for so long, as a Morning Joe panelist and pundit/interviewee on other shows. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d suggest he was the channel’s house conservative because its leaders liked to make conservatives look bad.
• PoMo alert: Here come buildings designed vaguely like trees, but which are not in trees and do not directly incorporate trees (except to the extent that they have lumber in them).
• The most wholesomely erotic sight you’ll likely see this week: underwater stills of one naked Russian woman and two whales (also naked).

4cp.posterous.com

• John Hilgart has a whole web-gallery site of old-time comic book art, in the form of enlarged details from individual panels. And he’s got an aesthetic essay praising the medium as it had been in the pre-“graphic novel” days. Hilgart’s specifically talking about the comics’ crude, now obsolete, four-color printing process. His essay’s title: “In Defense of Dots.”
• Paul Constant offers up a long, devastatingly funny essay on the Iowa Caucuses, without once mentioning Dan Savage’s successful re-definition of “santorum.”
• Chauncy DeVega’s take on the caucuses: The GOP has now fully coalesced around a platform of “‘common sense’ racism.”
• You might not have heard lately from “Walden Three,” Greg Lundgren’s scheme to put a multimedia arts center into the old Lusty Lady building, and to privately fund it all under the auspices of a documentary film shoot. Lundgren’s still at it.
• In the fixed game of job blackmail, Seattle’s gain is often some other burg’s loss. That’s what happened when Russell Investments moved north from Tacoma. Now it’s happening again with the demise of Boeing Wichita.
• Blogger “Rottin’ In Denmark” has posted a love letter to Seattle, entitled “My Hometown Is Better Than Yours.” Much more than a mere series of tourist photos, it’s a series of municipal one-upsmanship boasts captioning each still:

Seattle invented bricks and mortar in the 5th century BC. Then in the 20th century AD, it invented Amazon.com and made them obsolete.

The sun is literally always shining. Those clouds were artificially pumped in because there were out-of-towners visiting and we didn’t want them to stay.

(beneath a shot of an Olympic Sculpture Park installation) This is a totem we erected to protect us from Courtney Love.

1944-era logo of the first seattle star, now topping the new seattlestar.net

• With the new year we must say goodbye to Swerve, the downtown retail core’s last speciality music and video shop. Its owner had insisted the store was profitable, but she had a new opportunity out of state. With Borders gone, and new Target, Nordstrom Rack, and J.C. Penney outlets still unfinished, Swerve’s loss just adds to the number of holes in downtown’s shopping spectrum.
• Also gone is Seattlest, the locally run but out-of-town owned culture and entertainment site. Its contributors have gravitated to some new all-local startups, including SEA live MUSIC (the name says it all). Another new refuge for Seattlest vets is the cross-genre arts site The Seattle Star. Its founders deliberately chose a name previously used first by a small but spunky afternoon daily (1899-1947) and then by Michael Dowers’ still fondly remembered comix zine (1985-89).
• The indie Greenwood Market, after several years of uncertain future, is finally being razed so Kroger can expand its adjacent Fred Meyer.
• As another dreary Legislative session’s about to start, ex-State Rep. Brendan Williams bashes Oly Democrats as professional cavers.
• R.I.P. Ronald Searle, 91, satirical illustrator ne plus ultra and “Britain’s greatest graphic artist.”
• The feisty-as-ever Roger Ebert has a list of reasons why movie revenues were way, way down in ’11. “Too many sucky movies” isn’t even on the list.
• We’ve linked in the past to gadfly pundit Glenn Greenwald and his diatribes against those he believes are too capitulant toward the right. He’s added Obama, and anybody who supports Obama, to his targets. But Greenwald went too far when he alleged that Obama could “rape a nun” on live TV and his supporters would still back him.
• Speaking of rash allegations, Bloomberg.com’s got a UK academic who claims Wall Street, and perhaps U.S. business in general, has been taken over by “corporate psychopaths.”
• We close with a lovely picture of the highly unofficial “Occupy the Rose Parade” float, a 70-foot octopus made from plastic grocery bags. Looks just like an oversize version of something you’d see at any Fremont Solstice Parade.

'off the mark' by mark parisi

• R.I.P. Bil Keane, 1912-2011. The Family Circus cartoonist plied the same realm of family homilies and deceptively simple line work for a half century. If Keane’s characters never generated the licensing income of Garfield or Dennis the Menace, they did provide a consistent note of light amusement. By staying within their own fantasy realm, with only the slightest whiff of contemporary pop-culture references. Even more notable was Keane’s good-natured willingness to let other cartoonists spoof the Circus’s delicately insular universe.
• Local singer-songwriter Heather Duby was in a horrid accident in New Jersey. She lost part of one finger, and almost lost both her hands. She’ll need a lot of rehab. There is, as you might expect, a benefit concert 11/26 at the Crocodile.
• Just what the hell is Microsoft doing as a prime sponsor of the Koch brothers’ (funders of all things wingnutted and anti-planet and anti-democracy) big Tea Party conference?
• Brendan Coffey at Forbes lists our own Russell Investments as one of the four companies that essentially control the financial world, for good or ill.
• Reuters notes Seattle’s explosion as a high tech hub. Now let’s work on getting more jobs here for non-programmers.
• The long-lost deleted scenes from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet have been found in a Seattle warehouse, and will be a bonus feature on the film’s DVD reissue.
• Punk rock history is becoming an academic specialty. Maybe I should apply for that teaching certificate.
• Amanda Hess at Good magazine depicts the late Andy Rooney as a reactionary crank who hated minorities, uppity women, and pretty much anything newer than the electric typewriter. She also describes Rooney as a man “who saw the world from his seat in a darkened library of hardcover books.” The combo of book collecting and reactionary crankiness, alas, exists far more frequently in this world than “book people” will admit.
• Paul Krugman proclaims solar energy as now being widely cost effective in many applications.
• Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” PR campaign wasn’t enough to save one horrendously bullied gay teen from suicide. In response, CBC comedy-show host Rick Mercer issued a call for more immediate action:

It’s no longer good enough for us to tell kids who are different that it’s going to get better. We have to make it better now, that’s every single one of us. Every teacher, every student, every adult has to step up to the plate.

Before Thomas Frank became a renowned author of geekily-researched anti-conservative sermon books, he co-ran a tart, biting, yet beautifully designed journal of essays called The Baffler.

It was based in Chicago for most of its existence. Its original focus was the intersecting worlds of corporate culture (including corporate “counterculture”), entertainment, and marketing. (It’s where Steve Albini’s 1994 screed against the music industry’s treatment of bands, “Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked,” first appeared.) As Frank’s concerns steered toward the political, so did The Baffler‘s.

Its one consistent aspect was its irregular schedule. Though it was sometimes advertised as a “quarterly,” only 18 issues appeared from 1988 to 2009.

This will now change.

The title was bought in May by essayist/historian John Summers. Last week, Summers announced he’s attained backing from the MIT Press. MIT and Summers promise to put out three Bafflers a year for the next five years.

This is good news, because we need its uncompromising voice more than ever.

satirical ad by leah l. burton, godsownparty.com

• To CNN, it’s apparently news that conservative preachers denounce gay marriage and birth control, but can’t get themselves to preach against greed.
• Filmmakers are getting ideas from the oddest sources these days. A feature’s being shot in Seattle, based on a classified ad. (A joke classified ad, to be more precise.)
• A bigger North Cascades National Park: why not?
• Highway 520 construction crews have taken down the trees that let wealthy Eastside households imagine they were in “the country,” not next to the freeway they were actually next to.
• Whatever happened to Seattle’s neighborhood activists?
• Seattle, now with one-third more transit users per capita than Portland.
• Local scifi author Neal Stephenson asks whatever happened to America’s (and Seattle’s) hope for the future. His answer: an obsession with “certainty” at the expense of daring.
• In the online music world, Seattle-based Rhapsody has bought the subscription rosters and other assets of Napster. In other news, Napster still existed as of last week.
• It’s official. The Kress Building on Third Avenue will hold a J.C. Penney store. But they’d better let the Kress IGA supermarket stay on the lower level.
• Our ol’ pal Ronald Holden sings the praises of a better industrial food thickener.
• The head of the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization predicts print newspapers will disappear in the U.S. by 2017. In other lands, they could last as long as 2040. Believe it or don’t.
• One mainstream media outlet has finally found a way to cover Occupy Wall Street—as “New York’s newest tourist attraction.”
• The Koch Brothers are secretive, wealthy backers of all sorts of anti-democracy and anti-middle class projects on the federal and state levels. Now we learn they’ve made part of their fortune through illegal, secret chemical sales to Iran. Whooda thunkit?
• And, though I’ve not been following this at all, there apparently was a verdict in a legal appeal out in Europe somewhere.

If someone doesn’t drive, you would not call that person a driver.

If someone doesn’t dance, you would not call that person a dancer.

If someone doesn’t design buildings, you would not call that person an architect.

So why are the right-wing-only media calling corporations and billionaires “job creators”?

wash. state dept. of transportation

• More digging at the south end of the Viaduct, more cool archeological finds. Mostly different kinds of bottles.
• Here’s exactly why yet another all-cuts state budget would be a horrible, horrible thing.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Two more fired writers. More layoffs across the Village Voice Media chain.
• Under pending City legislation, homeless camps would no longer have to pack up and move every few months.
• For years, Seattle-based Trident Seafoods dumped fish guts into the waters outside its Alaska plant. The result was a “dead zone” at the ocean floor, which the company now vows to clean up.
• The Mariners will open next year’s regular season in Tokyo.
• The all-new DC Comics, now with more formulaic quasi-porn.
• Frank Rich gives one cheer to Rick Perry. The reason: Perry represents the complete and utter death of namby pamby near-right “bipartisanship.”
• And, oh yeah, Amazon announced some new hardware products.

from smelllikedirt.wordpress.com

• Seattle’s rotting produce and other food waste goes to a composting plant in Everett. Our newest export: stink.
• If, as the Times‘ Danny Westneat claims, Microsoft no longer needs over $100 million instate tax breaks, does the Times still need its own state tax breaks?
• As the last beams at the old Boeing Plant #2 come down, Jon Talton notes that the old Boeing corporate culture is also now mostly gone, replaced by Jack Welch-style cost cutters and bean counters.
• Local essayist Seth Kolloen compares the early years of Pearl Jam to the Kemp/Payton era Sonics. At least we still have Vedder & company.
• Descendents of Capt. William Clark (of “Lewis and…”) built a symbolic canoe for a southwest Wash. tribe, to replace one the captain stole way back when.
• A few right wing writers and pundits have identified the biggest force restraining their corporate masters from getting everything they want. It’s democracy. Therefore, to these guys democracy is something icky that must be done away with.
• A few handy comparisons between right-wing fantasyland and reality.
• You’ll have to listen instead of getting to read, but here’s an argument for the premise that punk rock was invented by Jews.
• Sara Horowitz sees a new “middle class poverty” in which everybody’s treated as (and as badly as) freelancers, and envisions a “jobs plan for the post-cubicle economy.”