udhcmh.tumblr.com

• The above vintage paperback cover comes from a blog located in a college town—Columbus OH, not Spokane WA. (Found via Pulp International.)
• The Seattle Police have an on-staff graffiti interpreter. And he says only 3 percent of Seattle’s graffiti has anything to do with street gangs.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna may have found his most potent nemesis—not election rival Jay Inslee but 90 women who are suing McKenna for participating (in the name of the people of Washington) in the right wing’s anti-Obamacare crusade.
• Scott North at the Everett Herald looks back to Wash. state’s own U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his role in making forest conservation a real thing.
• Amazon, continuing in its quest to become kings of all media, is starting its own movie production company. And it’s soliciting concepts for “TV style” web shows—sitcoms and kids’ shows, live-action and animated. And unlike some online “screenwriting contest” scam sites, they don’t keep the rights to works they don’t use.
• “He who controls the Spice controls the universe.”
• As the Seattle arena proposal moves forward quickly, ex-City Council member Richard McIver suggests putting it instead in the Rainier Valley, near the Mt. Baker light rail station and I-90. (It would also be near the former site of Sicks’ Stadium, home of minor league baseball for 30 years and Major League Baseball for oen year.)
• Meanwhile, a member of the ownership team that stole the Sonics has lost his chairman role at Chesapeake Energy, due to alleged conflicts of interest. Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy.
• From the verdant town of Corvallis (where I spent two formative years of my life) comes the tale of a bright young woman who became a hit with a sports-gambling blog, then became a top contributor to ESPN.com, and then allegedly used this fame to scam would-be business colleagues.
• Ashton Kutcher sure can get all high-horse righteous when he’s denouncing the sex industry. But perpetuating racist stereotypes in commercials—that’s something he apparently doesn’t mind at all.
• Some people don’t want to be Americans anymore. They’re one-percenters trying to flee tax evasion charges.
• Former Wall Street operative Alexis Goldstein describes the milieu of Big Finance as a place where people strive…

to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.…

Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.

The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures are in for the six months ending in March.

They show the Seattle Times‘ circulation continuing a steady decline, to 237,000 daily and 300,000 on Sunday. That’s 6.6 percent lower than one year ago.

What’s more, each figure includes about 30,000 paid subscribers to the Times‘ print-replica .pdf edition (the only paid online product the Times offers so far).

So the daily print Times is now beneath 206,000 buyers. That’s just a few thousand more than it had in 2009, when it added the P-I‘s former subscribers. (Back in 2000, the Times and P-I had a combined circulation of 400,000.)

Elsewhere in the report, the NY Times now has more paid online readers than print readers.

escapistmagazine.com

• The Star Wars universe is explained in handy infographic form.
• Rob McKenna is given an opportunity to prove he’s not part of the War on Women. Result: Epic Fail.
• More details about the big waterfront renovation plan have been released. They show a great improvement over the original concept (which, as you may recall, was essentially just a bunch more “world class” windswept plazas, a commodity greater downtown already has in abundance). These proposals actually include stuff people can recreate with. Like a climbing wall, and a swimming pool on a barge in the water.
• The Real Change-sponsored protest against homeless-camp removals went off without a hitch. Now let’s get our officials to do more for the homeless instead of merely against them.
• Wash. state now has over 700 wineries. Twice the number in ’07.
• The first Boeing 787s you’ll be able to get on from Sea-Tac will go from here to Tokyo starting later this year.
• How does DC Comics’ plan for a Watchmen prequel series gibe with the original graphic novel’s creator Alan Moore? If you know anything about Moore, you’ll know he doesn’t much care for the idea.
• Obama is picking his fights carefully, choosing for whom he’s going to strongly fight. Pot users: it’s still not your turn.
• Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune announces the “Death of Facts,” following one too many tea bagger fabrication.
• The newest thing to be paranoid about: what employers think about your Klout score. (Yes, the hereby linked article explains just what a “Klout score” is. It has something to do with how active you are on Twitter, or something like that.)

The Guardian parsed the NY Times‘ latest financial numbers. Some of its conclusions:

• The NYT’s online paywall seems to be working at attracting paying readers. But what works for the NYT, with its strong national brand and its loyal national audience, might not work for local papers (including the NYT Co.’s Boston Globe).
• Online ad revenue for news sites may be plateauing or even shrinking. So much for the notion, often heard among “future of news” web gurus, that all you have to do is hustle like hell for page views and social-media tie-ins, and ad revenue will automatically follow.

foodbeast.com

• Margarita flavored Bud Light: sign of the apocalypse #6 or #7?
• Winning bids for the state liquor stores (or rather, for the right to apply for licenses, negotiate leases, and take over inventory at the stores) are now in. Individual winners have apparently not yet been posted anywhere, but the store at 12th Avenue and East Pine Street went for a cool half million. The state’s total take (should all the sales go through): over $30 million, more than four times estimates reported just last Friday.
• Yesterday, we mentioned how Deluxe Junk, the lovely vintage everything store that’s one of the last remnants of “Fremont funk.” faced a sudden eviction by the Masonic lodge that owns its building. Apparently there’s a settlement; alas, Deluxe Junk will still leave the premises, at the end of June.
• The Real Change folks will get their protest camp in Westlake Park after all.
• One little-publicized event at the big Space Needle anniversary gala: a protest by Needle restaurant workers.
• The Canucks have made sure there won’t be riots in the Vancouver streets this June.
• Here’s a long, loving profile of ex-Seattleite and comix genius Lynda Barry.
• Google and Facebook: They’re hot now, but could they stumble as computing goes mobile?
• Author Michael J. Sandel places blame for the market-ization of almost all of western society. He says the economists did it.
• Paul Krugman blasts Romney, assuredly not for the last time.
• A Georgetown prof really dislikes the Facebook-spawned overuse of the verb “Like.”
• Toby Litt in Granta wonders whether long-form literature can hold an audience, or even be considered relevant, in an age of multitasking and incessant distraction. I say bah. Folks who can finish umpteen-level video games or watch entire TV-show seasons in one weekend can enjoy a story of a few hundred pages.
• Sorry, but I can’t trust any list of the “ten most harmful novels for aspiring writers” that excludes Bukowski.
• The top black women’s magazine hired a white guy as managing editor. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, that he turned out to be a not-so-secret racist wingnut.
• Steven Pearlstein reminds you that some politicians actually want you to be turned off from politics. Remember: Not voting = voting a straight right-wing ticket.
• Making stuff in China will cease being cheap sooner or later. China’s other outsourcing advantages might remain (lax environmental enforcement, autocratic government, brutal suppression of dissent).
• TV ratings, both broadcast and cable, are way down, especially among younger viewers, and especially in terms of “real time” viewing (i.e., without DVRs; i.e., with the commercials). The hardcore TV haters will naturally ignore this, and will continue to insist that Everyone Except Them is a vidiot sheeple.

alliance for pioneer square via seattlepi.com

• An artistic ad poster, promoting the native American cause “Honor the Treaties,” was wheat-pasted in multiple copies all over a series of artists’ murals in Pioneer Square. The “Honor” campaign didn’t do it, and neither did the poster’s original artist. It was PosterGiant, the city’s leading poster putter-uppers.
• Congress just might kill off “Boeing’s bank.”
• One idea to save journalism is the concept of a nonprofit news website. Several of these are already up in scattered spots around the country. But the IRS is taking its own sweet time processing some of their applications for official nonprofit status.
• Here’s King County Metro’s current plan for bus changes effective September. A few new routes would be added, but a lot of key current routes would be reduced or dropped.
• You’ve only got 44 more days to enjoy your state liquor stores.
• This story speculating about potential “robot prostitutes” reminds me of (1) that whole “dildonics” nonsense in the 1990s, and (2) Westworld. Remember: Nothing can possibly go wrong….

goodreads.com

• Science fiction author John Scalzi would like to remind you that none of the players in the big e-book pricing battle are really on “your side” as book readers/consumers. Not Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, or the Big Six publishers. They’re all after their own respective bottom lines:

Amazon wants you to stay in their electronic ecosystem for buying ebooks (and music, and movies, and apps and games). So does Apple, Barnes & Noble and Google. None of them are interested in sharing you with anyone else, ever. Publishers, alternately, are interested in having as many online retailers as possible, each doing business with them on terms as advantageous to the publishers as possible.

• Tech blogger Baldur Bjarnason says “I like Amazon,” then goes on to explain how it “could be beaten” in the e-book sphere by some competitor(s)—but not by Barnes & Noble or Kobo (“I think they’re toast”).
• And Amazon’s nascent publishing arm is taking over U.S. print and e-book rights to all of Ian Fleming’s original James Bond novels.

anti-riaa ad from the electronic frontier foundation; via university of texas

Two reasons why Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney’s recent verbal sparring partner, should not be considered a spokesperson for the Obama campaign or for any “progressive” thing:

(1) She became a PR shill for BP, post-gulf-spill.

(2) and most important: She infamously headed the Recording Industry Association of America during the start of that outfit’s notorious “anti-piracy” extremism.

Rosen didn’t just shut down Napster and Audiogalaxy. She fostered the music-industry lobby group’s policy of punitive aggression in the name of the Almighty Intellectual Property.

After she left the RIAA, the staff she’d hired served all those ridiculous suits for ridiculous sums against lowly individual file-sharers—and against some individuals who’d never shared a file in their lives.

Elsewhere in randomland:

• Talk about going dangerously mainstream: The Stranger won a Pulitzer Prize. (It’s actually for a good piece, the one about the survivor of the South Park killer.) (Oh, the Seattle Times won one of those Pulitzer things too.)
• Financial-software giant Intuit is celebrating Tax Day by closing part of Second Avenue downtown and (as per GeekWire) “inviting people to drive golf balls down the middle of the street.”
• Neither gubernatorial candidate has so far dared to even mention this state’s #1 need: to reform our ultra-regressive revenue system.
• There’s a new local news site in town. The nonprofit Seattle Globalist is all about the intersections between here at home and the whole wide world. The ethnic communities; the local impact of world events; world culture (film, food, anime, etc.). The site’s got a launch party on the 28th at Washington Hall.
• A sports analyst says the Mariners are “ripe to be sold,” should the team’s current owners decide to sell (which they haven’t).
• Here’s one more thing some folks are bitching at Amazon about: its membership (along with many other big corps) in ALEC, the notorious right-wing pressure group that supplies GOP state legislators with pre-written, megabuck-lobbyist-dictated bills. (It also files “friend of the court” briefs in U.S. Supreme Court cases.)
• Just Plain Gross Dept.: The next stage in crash dieting is women who voluntarily live on feeding tubes for up to 10 days.
• Margaret Atwood claims “our faith is fraying in the god of money.”
• Alex Henderson at AlterNet believes America would be much better off, in several quantifiable ways, if the country could just shake off its “sexual prudery.” Some of these ways, he claims, would include lowered rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and HIV infections.

david eskenazi collection via sportspressnw.com

And a happy Friday the 13th (first of the year) and Mariners home opening day to all of you!

• Richard Beyer, 1925-2002: The Waiting for the Interurban sculptor didn’t invent Fremont’s image as a funky/artsy neighborhood. But his work publicized this image as much as anything.
• Something You Might Not Have Known Dept.: Seattle gets a small but impressive portion of its electricity from methane at an Oregon landfill.
• You’ve got two more chances to have your say about Metro’s plan to ax the downtown Ride Free Area, at County Council meetings on the 16th and the 25th. Let ’em know you want/need/demand robust free downtown transit service.
• Third Avenue in Belltown now has those “daylight-like” street lights. Next step in resurrecting Third: making the street and its buildings look cleaner.
• With the legislative session finally over, Rob McKenna can legally raise campaign money. Thus, Washington’s gubernatorial campaign is now truly underway. Watch for McKenna to simultaneously run with and against the national Republican agenda—something Jay Inslee will try to stick onto McKenna at every opportunity.
• St. James Cathedral is among the churches that won’t take part in the Catholic archdiocese’s initiative petition campaign to overturn gay marriage.
• When can you start getting a legal drink in Wash. state after 2 a.m.? Perhaps in November (just perhaps).
• Bizarre Patent Application of the Day: GeekWire says Microsoft wants to patent “monetizing buttons on TV remotes:”

It’s called “Control-based Content Pricing,” and the basic idea is dynamic pricing of video content, based on the preferences of the user at any given moment—essentially setting different prices for different functions of the TV remote.

• Frances Cobain still can’t get away from her mom’s meddling.
• A Spokane nursery put up a billboard reading “Pot Dealer Ahead.” The ad was complete with an image of some flower pots, in case people didn’t get the joke (it being Spokane and all). Some people are vocally not amused (it being Spokane and all).
• The U.S. Border Patrol in this state continues to behave like a gang of racist tools.
• North Korea just can’t keep it up.
• Reversible male contraception is finally in the domestic testing stage, despite Big Pharma’s longtime disinterest.
• Jed Lewison at Daily Kos parses the anatomy of a Mitt Romney lie, that over 90 percent of U.S. job losses have gone against women. In reality (instead of Fox News Fantasyland), most folks laid off in the Great Recession were men. But new or revived jobs the past two years have also gone mostly to men (56 percent).
• The Murdoch media empire’s phone and email tapping scandal is reaching the U.S. But Murdoch’s domestic properties are not implicated, at least not yet. This is still about Murdoch’s U.K. papers, tapping into Hollywood celebrities’ phones and emails.
• Ari Rabin-Havt at HuffPost claims right wing racism no longer bothers with coded “dog whistle” messages, but now spews its hate openly and proudly.
• What Omar Willey says about seeking good web comics applies to just about all web “content”: “How do you find all this stuff?” (The stuff worth reading, that is.)

gjenvick-gjonvik archives

Three of the Big Six book publishers (Hachette, News Corp.’s HarperCollins, and CBS’s Simon & Schuster) have settled with the U.S. Justice Dept. in the dispute over alleged e-book price fixing.

The publishers still insist they’re innocent; but they agreed in the settlement to not interfere with, or retaliate against, discounted e-book retail prices.

Apple, Pearson’s Penguin, and Holtzbrinck’s Macmillan have not yet settled; they also insist they did not collude to keep e-book prices up. Bertlesmann’s Random House was not sued.

This is, of course, all really about Amazon, and its ongoing drives to keep e-book retail prices down and its share of those revenues up. The big publishers, and some smaller ones too, claim that’s bad for them and for the book biz as a whole.

In other randomosity:

• Thanks in no part whatsoever to regressive cuts-only Republicans and their pseudo-Democrat enablers, Wash. state has a budget, and not nearly as horrid a one as we could have had. The real issue, fixing the state’s ultra-regressive revenue system, was again kicked down the road.
• The Legislature also failed to approve new means to pay for transit. However, it turns out Seattle still has the transit-funding mechanism approved a decade ago for the scuttled monorail campaign. That’s what the group called “Seattle Subway” hopes to use to fund more in-city rail miles (which, despite the group’s name, wouldn’t necessarily be below ground).
• Emily Pothast has unkind, not-nice, really un-positive things to say about the Kirkland developers who want to gut Pike/Pine’s anchor block.
• At the formerly Microsoft-owned Slate, Tom Scocca explains, in detail, just why today’s iteration of Microsoft Word so greatly sucks.
• Matt Groening reveals, 22 years later, that yes, The Simpsons‘ Springfield is based on Springfield, Ore. (also known as Eugene’s evil twin).
• Another crack in the edifice of Homophobia Inc.: The guy who first promoted the idea of “curing” gay people through “therapy” says he now believes it’s a crock of shit.
• Meanwhile in the world of Incarceration Inc., two Penna. judges admitted they took bribes from a private prison operator to sentence juvenile suspects to terms at said private prisons.
• A 25-year-old bride got herself a lavish wedding for free by pretending to have terminal cancer. The marriage has already crumbled; jail might be next.
• Someone’s posted to Facebook a cartoon chart-graphic about “How to Focus in the Age of Distraction.” Rule #1: Get the heck off of Facebook.
• Sometime in the mid 1990s I made a throwaway music-scene prediction, as part of a larger rant that the future is seldom linear. I said, “There could be a big hammered dulcimer revival in the 2010s, causing teens in the 2020s to yearn for the good old days of techno.” Speed up the timeline, substitute the recent “beard bands” for the dulcimers, and we seem to have gotten there.

reramble.wordpress.com

• Even I, in my near-encyclopedic knowledge of classic TV, could only guess nine out of a group of 15 modern and vintage series represented by three iconic images each.
• My ol’ UW Daily staffmate Pete Callaghan has a zinger accusing the Mariners of calculated hyprocisy about the basketball/hockey arena scheme. Callaghan says M’s bosses “seek to hog the pubic arena trough.”
• Lisa Arnold at Crosscut believes nonprofits that serve poor people ought to more actively pressure local governments to do more for these folks.
• In the whiter but not safer suburbs, there’s a new robbery shtick going down: (1) Break into a car in a movie-theater parking lot. (2) Fish out the car’s registration papers. (3) Go to the listed (and probably unoccupied) house and rob it.
• The scheme to essentially stifle the use of Seattle Community College campuses as protest sites? Scuttled, at least for now.
• All this Internet data you’re getting these days is stored on and fed from mighty “server farm” installations. The ones around here run on clean, nonpolluting hydro power. Except when they don’t.
• The big book publishers and Amazon are at less than palsy-walsy terms again.
• Meanwhile, various parties have tried to set up indie e-book sites that would sell the big publishers’ titles as well as indie product. But the big publishers insist on using restrictive copy-protection codes, which require costly technical resources on the server end, which these small e-tail operations can’t afford.
• The Republican Presidential nominating race is over. The sincerely bigoted demagogue is gone, leaving the out-of-touch smarmy zillionaire who’s pretended to be a bigoted demagogue. Get ready for the Super PAC-driven, ultra-negative attack ads and the whispered “dog whistle” scare tactics to begin in 5, 4, 3….
• Elsewhere in politics-of-hate-land, one of the authors of the “Defense of Marriage (a.k.a. anti-gay-marriage) Act” has come out as a lesbian and has renounced her past public stance.
• Economist Jonathan Schlefler claims the “invisible hand,” 18th century writer Adam’s Smith’s concept of a natural equilibrium that settles in when free markets are free to do as they will, does not exist. In macroeconomic circles, this is akin to Copernicus saying the sun doesn’t orbit the earth.
• Some folks imagine themselves to be so close to the celebrities they follow in the media, that they see nothing untoward about asking them to be prom dates.
• The City of Vancouver Engineering Department, which apparently has jurisdiction on all street and sidewalk use there, has banned bagpipe buskers (Say that five times fast!). The excuse: they’re too noisy. The Scottish-descended mayor, who got sworn into office in a kilt, vows to overturn the rule.

oldtime (print) proofreading marks; via nisus.se

It’s a couple months old but still a worthy topic of debate. It’s ex-Microsoftie Michael Kinsley bitching about how the Web has brought forth an explosion in written content—much of which is tons of total dreck.

Even a lot of professionally written online stuff, Kinsley gripes, is poorly thought out, poorly constructed, and sloppily assembled.

I say that’s just what happens with an explosion of activity in any “creative” field, from neo-punk bands to televised singing contests to self-published horror novels.

The trick is to (1) have a way to find the good stuff, and (2) encourage folks to strive for better work.

As for the first part, there are tons of aggregation sites and blogs (including this one) that link to what some editor thinks is “the good stuff.”

The second part still needs work.

One problem is that so much of the Web is run by techies. Dudes who know the value of tight, accurate, effective code, but who might never have learned to appreciate the same values in words.

A bigger problem is that, even at sites run by “content” people, there’s intense pressure to put everything online the second it’s written, and to slavishly avoid taking the time or staff money to edit anything.

It would help if more sites felt an incentive to put out better stuff. (A big incentive would be to maybe, just maybe, even pay writers and editors a living wage).

Don’t think of the ol’ WWW as code and wires.

The Web is words (and pictures and sounds), distributed via code and wires.

• Seattle voters will have the chance to bring library service back from several years’ worth of drastic cuts. You know where I stand on this.
• Meanwhile, in the land of Jorge Juis Borges’ surreal library stories, the Argentine government has banned all book imports. The lame excuse is that they could contain dangerous levels of lead. Ebooks and their reading machines, and domestic reprints of foreign books, aren’t affected.
• The local Catholic Archdiocese, once a liberal “social gospel” bastion, has turned hard homophobic.
• Northwest fishermen worry about Japanese tsunami debris showing up in their waters. Talk about your deadliest catch.
• An activist group called Seattle’s greatest family-owned bakery an unfair employer, and staged a protest. Loyal customers staged a counter-protest. Cookies were tossed. Literally.
• The two African Americans who publicly claimed Seattle Police had stopped them for no good reason, got stopped by Seattle Police again.
• A dead orca in Washington waters has caused some to sing “Blame Canada.”
• The UW invented kidney dialysis. Now it’s working on what might replace it.
• The rise in cable-TV subscribers becoming former cable-TV subscribers has attracted even the financial community. One analyst hints there’d be even more cord-cutting, except that many folks are keeping cable subscriptions for Internet access.
• The alleged “liberal media” in a “liberal state” sure don’t seem to like Jay Inslee.
• We’d earlier mentioned that print newspaper ad revenues had sunk to 1984 levels. Someone took those figures, adjusted ’em for inflation, and concluded newsprint ad money is actually at its lowest level since 1950. (The U.S. population then was about half what it is now.)
• Young adults aren’t just not reading print newspapers. They’re also driving a lot less and biking a lot more.
• I’m pretty sure the only people who read the Seattle Times editorials anymore are the bloggers who righteously trash them.
• “In Russia, a lack of men forces women to settle for less.”
• How can something that barely has 10 employees and has not apparently made a cent in profits be worth a billion dollars?

The Seattle Times‘ series about Amazon.com’s corporate culture continued on Monday with a long recounting of the company’s often prickly relations with book publishers large and small; especially small.

I’ve written in the past that the six U.S. mega-publishers could sure use a “creative disruption” (to use a hoary techno-Libertarian cliché), to sweep away their hidebound old ways and become more nimble, more competitive, and more profitable.

These same new rules, once everybody’s figured out what they are, could also help out smaller imprints.

But in the meantime (which could seem like an eternity in dot-com years but the blink of an eye in book-biz years), Amazon should not push too far against the “long tail” publishers and distributors who make its “World’s Largest Selection” slogan possible.

It’s bad for the publishers and their authors.

It’s bad for the industry as a whole.

And it’s bad for Amazon.

The e-tail giant had better realize, and soon, that it doesn’t have the market muscle to push its suppliers around like Walmart does.

Except to owners of Kindle machines (which are hardwired to only download commercial ebooks if they’re from Amazon), everything its core media business sells can be bought from other sources, just a mouse click or a search-engine hunt away.

Also, many of these smaller publishers have loyal niche clienteles.

All they have to do is offer lower prices or “customer loyalty” incentives to folks buying books on the publishers’ own sites.

Or, the small pubishers could offer all sorts of “customer loyalty” incentives to their direct buyers.

It’s to Amazon’s own fiscal interest to not appear like a bully here.

Today’s lesson in why traditional websites can’t support professional local news begins at a blog called Seattle Media Maven.

It’s run as a moonlighting project by Maureen Jeude, who’s got a day job in the Seattle Times’ “strategic marketing research” department. While the blog is her own endeavor, Jeude often uses it to tout the Times and its online ventures.

Thusly, Jeude ran a piece last month plugging the Times‘ website as one of the top local media sites in the nation. She posts stats and a graph showing the site garnering about 1 million page views per day (twice that of the local runner-up, KING5.com), and 1 million unique visitors per month.

This means each Times online reader reads an average of just one article a day.

Further, if each of the 240,000 Times print buyers (not counting “pass along” readership) read only the average four stories on each edition’s front page, that alone would essentially match the Times’ online readership.

And that online readership is the 16th biggest of any U.S. newspaper.

•

Elsewhere in medialand, three research studies in the past year (by A.C. Nielsen, the FCC, and Pew Research) each purport that news sites comprise only a small percentage of total Web traffic, and that local news sites comprise only a small percentage of that.

One industry analyst, Tom Grubisich, says the studies fatally discount the role of links and summaries of news sites’ stories on other sites such as Facebook.

Another analyst, Joshua Benton, insists that news sites’ readerships make up in community influence what they lack in sheer numbers.