revel body, via geekwire.com

• Seattle’s really got some high-tech hardware geniuses. Among them: the folks who’ve taken the same principles behind the Sonicare toothbrush and applied them to create advanced 21st century vibrators! (Really.)
• We’ve previously mentioned the strong presence of women’s erotica among Amazon’s e-book sales. Now come charges that some of the self-published smut books are stolen from stories posted for free viewing on erotica websites. (These allegations are against the small-time publishers, not Amazon.)
• Crazy Wall St. idea of the week (thus far): A local corporate-buyout analyst showed up on CNBC and said Microsoft should buy Barnes & Noble.
• Here’s one way to make money off of the walking renaissance. Make a big venture-funded software thing to help folks find homes to buy in walkable neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ pal Geov Parrish believes the state budget mega-crisis might, just might mind you, lead to talk, or even actual action, toward reforming Washington’s mighty regressive tax system—by far the principal failing of a local “progressive” politic that never dares challenge big business.
• On a related matter, state House Speaker Frank Chopp is floating the idea of Wash. State running its own bank, just like North Dakota. Or something as close to a bank as the state constitution now permits.
• The Mariners lose one really good pitcher, gain one maybe decent-hitting position player. What could possibly go wrong?
• Who knew the original Ladies’ Home Journal was so prescient? A 1911 list of “What Might Happen in the Next Hundred Years” predicts “telephones around the world,” airplanes used as “aerial war-ships,” automobiles “cheaper than horses,” “trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour,” grand opera “telephoned to private homes,” photographs “telegraphed to any distance,” “cameras electrically connected with screens at opposite ends of circuits,” ready-to-eat meals in stores, genetically modified foods, and even global warming. Writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr. did get a few things wrong, such as “hot and cold air from spigots,” the deliberate extinction of mosquitos, and the removal of C, Q, and X from the alphabet. Watkins also didn’t predict that his magazine would still be in business today, after many of its compatriots went to the great newsstand in the sky.
• Clever videomakers in Montana have released a thoroughly obliterating parody of a particularly dumb “rebel lifestyle” pickup truck commercial.
• And a great big thank you for those who attended the Seattle Invitationals Sat. nite, at which I performed what I hope was a respectful, straightforward rendition of the Presley classic “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care).” Since this is the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, I’d wanted to perform the best song from It Happened at the World’s Fair. But the live band didn’t know it. So here it is for all of you, in the original rendition.

auroramills.com

• Sad news in junk-food land. The makers of Hostess cakes and Wonder Bread, once known as Continental Baking but now the privately held Hostess Brands, is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A needed step for survival, or a ploy to get out of pension obligations? No matter what happens, I will always remember my early fondness for Hostess Sno Balls. Even at a tender age, two white hemispheres meant something to me somehow….
• Let’s welcome the newest member to the Northwest online news family, Olympia Newsriver. Its mission: to track the legislative progress (or lack thereof) on “key bills supported and opposed by Washington’s progressive movement.”
• Microsoft received a patent for a smartphone-based GPS system, aimed at pedestrians instead of drivers. Part of the patent application stated the software would help walkers avoid “unsafe neighborhoods.” Disguised racism, say some detractors.
• Occupy Seattle is not only without a campsite, it may also be breaking apart. One contributing factor: ideological radicals within the movement won’t commit to strictly nonviolent actions.
• Ex-Seattle mayor Greg Nickels says he might run for Wash. secretary of state.
• Seattle’s second anarchist squat house in the past year has been forcibly evicted.
• Not only is Wash. state failing its commitment to fund public schools, it’s not even trying to fund previously passed reform plans for the schools (class size reduction, etc.).
• Amazon news item #1: “Celebrity librarian” Nancy Pearl is teaming up with the e-tail giant to reissue worthy out-of-print books.
• Amazon news item #2: One or more individuals in South Lake Union have put up street posters calling out a noisy minority of the company’s workforce there, calling them inconsiderate “Am Holes.” Trust me: a certain percentage of socially deaf dorks can be found at any tech company. During the early dot-com days of the mid 1990s, such dorks seemed to be everywhere.
• Get set for more rich/poor class conflict in the coming year, just as the Republicans and many Democrats place themselves firmly on the “rich” side.
• The Gannett Co.’s local newspapers may start charging for web access soon, according to buzz within the biz. The subscription fee would kick in beyond a certain small number of pages accessed per month, the way the NY Times does it. Of course, the NYT is a big, substantial product with global reach. Could the Salem, OR Statesman-Journal (the Northwest’s last Gannett-owned daily) similarly command a price for its online presence? (No word yet on whether Gannett’s flagship USA Today will also go behind a paywall.)
• The self styled “Father of the Internet” claims online access is not per se a human right, but rather “an enabler of rights.”
• Workers at a Foxconn electronics assembly plant in China threatened mass suicide, standing on the factory roof for two days until they were coaxed down. It follows 14 suicides (plus four unsuccessful attempts) at the company’s plants in 2010. They died, and countless other workers have cracked or burned out, so western companies can get the absolute cheapest price for product.

There’s more turnover at SeattlePI.com. The site’s “executive producer” Michelle Nicolosi is leaving to start her own outfit, an e-book publishing imprint called Working Press.

Nicolosi had been one of only 16 names left (out of an initial 20, plus interns) on PI.com’s content staff list; and one of those, cartoonist David Horsey, has already decamped for the LA Times. Another mainstay, ace reporter Chris Grygiel, split for the Associated Press last autumn.

Website-metrics ranking company Teqpad estimated last May that PI.com was earning about $1,000 a day from online ads. If that’s true (and it could be an undercount), it would be, at most, a quarter of what the site probably needs to support its content and sales staffs.

This means online ads, by themselves, still can’t support any but the very biggest and very smallest original-content sites.

The search for a business model for 21st-century journalism continues. None of the big media conglomerates has figured it out yet (except for business-info brands like the Wall St. Journal).

Nicolosi believes one solution could be for journalistic entities to publish short, one-shot e-books, based around single specific topics.

But that’s not the same as paying for an ongoing staff keeping tabs on the big and little parts of a community’s life and times. So the search continues.

I’m actually working on my own proposed solution.

But more about that later.

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.

My full time (with overtime some weeks) contract position with Amazon.com is now ended. A gig that was originally set to have lasted 7.5 weeks instead got stretched to 13, so I’m more than grateful.

I was not stationed at the massive new Amazon campus at south Lake Union. Rather, I was in the company’s highly obscure back office in back of the Rainier Valley Lowe’s.

(For local old timers or baseball nerds, my desk was where the left field bleachers had been at the old Sick’s Seattle Stadium, home of the old Rainiers and Pilots.)

I was in an office area previously occupied by Amazon’s accounts payable department, for which we occasionally got phone calls, to which we had no forwarding info.

The building also houses:

• the company’s central mailroom,
• its photo studio (where tall blonde models would occasionally assemble),
• a large conference room (sometimes rented out to the guys from the Pepsi plant across the street),
• office-equipment storage, and
• the workshop where they custom-make the legendary Amazon “door desks.”

I got to eat lunch at the fine fast-food outlets of the Rainier Valley; as well as two local indie treasures, The Original Philly’s and Remo Borracchini’s bakery-deli.

I worked as part of a team that varied between 12 and 32 people; at least two-thirds female. Some were otherwise stay-home moms. Some were recent college grads. Some were middle-age cranks like myself. All were damn smart and able to think their way through sometimes obtuse situations.

•

What we did all this time is a bit harder to explain.

On the Wednesday of our first week at the task, Amazon announced a line of new Kindle e-book machines.

At the same time, it announced a new, exclusive feature in its e-book files, “Xray.”

Reviewers have called Xray “an index on steroids.” It’s a hyperlinked list of a book’s references to people (real and fictional), places, ideas, topics, etc. It gives Amazon something other sellers of the same e-book titles don’t have.

The company’s crack coders created a software algorithm to generate the Xray files. But it had trouble parsing the infinite possibilities of what is and isn’t a person’s name (it regularly believed “Jesus H. Christ” and “Jack Daniel’s” to be characters in a story), and what is and isn’t a relevant phrase (publishers’ addresses don’t really belong in an index).

So every Xray file needed human tweaking.

That’s what we did, on the “Xray Quality Assurance Team.”

We used specially-programmed data tools to delete and add names and phrases in the Xray files. (To explain the process any further would risk violating my non-disclosure agreement.)

Our goal was to have 6,500 titles ready by the time the new Kindle models came out or shortly thereafter. By this past midweek, we’d exceeded 8,000. I worked, in whole or in part, on almost 1,500 of those.

•

Since “books” are a widely diverse lot, each Xray editing job was different.

Some titles (self-help guides or tech instructionals) contained lots of phrases but few to no names. Others (short stories sold as stand-alone products) had names but no significant phrases.

Some had compact casts of characters and limited place names. Others, such as epic historical tomes, contained literal “casts of thousands.”

The absolute toughest e-books to figure out were the umpteen-volume fantasy sagas, such as The Wheel of Time and the Game of Thrones sequels. They’ve got hundreds of made-up people names, plus hundreds of equally made-up names for places, tribes, deities, swords, etc.

But no matter how tricky any particular job was, our goal was accuracy above speed.

We picked the titles to work on from a database of Amazon’s most popular e-books, both “paid” and “free.” The latter include sample chapters of forthcoming books as well as public-domain classics. (I helped edit the Xray for The Idiot, and sure felt like one afterwards.)

•

I’ve long ranted in this space and elsewhere that, despite four decades’ worth of pseudo-intellectual hype about “The Death of The Book,” the written word remains a vital medium, commercially as well as in other aspects.

My thirteen weeks with Xray helped to confirm this belief.

The job also gave me an insight into what’s selling in the e-book sphere.

You’ve got all your regular NY Times and USA Today bestsellers, present and past.

You’ve got your expected genre items:

• Thrillers.
• Whodunits.
• Regency romances.
• Sword n’ sorcery.
• Space operas.
• Twilight knockoffs.
• Bridge to Terabithia knockoffs. (In the knockoffs, the fantasy worlds the kids travel to are real.)
• Inspirational lessons.
• Celebrity tell-alls.
• Cookbooks and diet guides.
• Political sermons of all stripes. (Yes, my fellow lefties, right-wingnuts do read books. They read wingnut books.)
• And, oh yeah, “serious literature,” or whatever that’s called these days.

•

And there’s one genre that I, and the rest of the Xray Quality team, were surprised to find so prevalent among the top selling e-books.

Sometimes, it’s euphemistically billed as “erotic romance.”

What is is, is women’s smut.

You might already know that your regular formula romance novels, the Harlequins and the Silhouettes and such, include explicit sex scenes these days. (Only “Christian” romances don’t.)

But lately—and specifically in the e-book realm, where no one else can see what you’re reading—stories primarily or totally about sex, written for and by women (or at least under women’s pseudonyms), have become a major cottage industry.

I’d say they made up a good 5 percent of the database of Kindle bestsellers, at least.

They range in length from full size novels to short-short stories.

Some are self-published. Others come under the logos of established romance imprints, or their subsidiary lines. Still others are issued by professional, e-book-only companies. The latter have authors’ guidelines as strictly detailed as those of print romance publishers.

And formulaic they are.

For one thing, the traditional romance happy ending is a must. No matter how wild the sexual adventures, the heroines have to end up in committed relationships by the end.

The prose styling is also strictly regulated. No Anias Nin poetic flourishes; just simple declarative sentences and an established vocabulary of descriptions. Breasts are never fondled or groped but always “cupped.”

The plots are equally formulaic.

Several of them star mousy, modern-day women who travel back in time and into the arms of shirtless Scottish Highlanders.

In other formula plots, the male lust objects are equally studly—young corporate tycoons, Navy SEALs, cowboys, police detectives, firefighters, zombie hunters.

Or they’re vampires. Or shape-shifters of assorted types. There are werewolves, were-leopards, were-foxes, were-rats, and were-ravens.

And, quite often, the heroine has simultaneous sex with two, three, or four men. Sometimes these men are brothers. Other times they have sex with one another as well as with the heroine. But they always end up in permanent polyandrous households.

The self-published smut stories often have more traditionally “smutty” formulae. Amazon won’t deal in sex stories involving underage characters or blood relatives (except for the aforementioned groups of brothers sharing the same woman). But there are plenty of just-over-18 tarts seducing stepdads and stepbrothers.

E-books don’t really have covers, only promotional images on their respective Web pages. For many low-budget e-book-only smut titles, these images are amateurishly Photoshopped from licensed stock photos, or from unlicensed “found” online pictures. The effect is, of course, extra cheesy goodness!

An anonymous member of our team (not me, I swear) collected some of these images, along with blurbs and excerpts from the cheesiest of these smut stories, and put them on a blog called Wet & Wilde.

This, my friends, is what massive technological investments by companies here and overseas have led up to.

And even if most of it doesn’t arouse me, I’m glad it’s out there.

I hereby promise to post more of these in the near future.

• Update: Looks like B&O Espresso will stay open, perhaps through the bulk of next year.
• The City Council’s trying, again, to ban plastic grocery bags. I say it’s none too soon, particularly for those awkward, flimsy Safeway bags that routinely break or spill their contents. It’s impossible to take them home on a bus and expect to get home with all one’s purchases intact.
• SeattlePI.com’s most famous employee, political cartoonist David Horsey, is going to work for the LA Times. He’ll draw and write commentaries about the 2012 election cycle. PI.com will most likely still get to run Horsey’s work on its site. Since the demise of the print Post-Intelligencer, Horsey has seldom addressed local issues anyway, preferring to cover national topics for syndication. The upside of this move is that, just maybe, the Hearst bosses who’ve kept a tight rein on PI.com’s purse strings might reassign Horsey’s salary to beef up the site’s news staff. The site desperately needs more staff-created content to be a first-stop local news destination.
• AT&T to T-Mobile: Let’s call the whole thing off.
• Scientific American claims there’s evidence for the long standing portrayal of creative people as eccentric. I can assure you, however, that eccentric people are not necessarily creative.
• Simon Mainwaring at Forbes.com claims anti-corporate fervor actually provides an opportunity for corporations to enhance their brand images, by hyping themselves as socially responsible.
• Katha Pollitt has her own take on the late Christopher Hitchens. Among other things, she found him way short of acceptability on women’s-rights issues; even though he invoked those among his excuses for supporting Bush’s wars.

If you tried to access this site on Tuesday, you would have found an ugly, undesigned mess.

That’s because my site (and email) server company disconnected me for nonpayment, without previously bothering to tell me in any way, shape, or form that a payment was due.

The texts on the site remained up, but the WordPress-based formatting and most of the images were locked away. It took about three hours to get everything back and properly configured again.

In other news, my current contract job might finally end Friday. More regular postings should follow.

But for now, a few random linx:

• Seattle’s about to honor the now really-really retired J.P. Patches by naming a city dump transfer station after the beloved TV clown.
• The on-again, off-again plan to save Capitol Hill’s beloved B&O Espresso is off again, and the joint will close for good by New Year’s. It had been open during the entire time I’ve lived in Seattle.
• The latest alleged threat to the spoken word? “Vocal fry.”
• Conspiracy theory of the minute: Could former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens have been one of the supposedly, mysteriously ill fated BP whistleblowers?
• Joseph Stiglitz sees bigger long-term trends at work behind the economic blech. It’s a shift away from industry as the basis of commerce, not just in the U.S. but globally.
• Studies show that users of tablet computers and ebook machines are using them quite a bit for long-form texts, causing The Economist to proclaim “the rebirth of reading.” I’ll have more to say (tangentally) about this next week.

• Get an early start on your holiday shopping needs with the Seattle Catalog. It’s a a select listing (in print and online) of handmade art and decor items, ranging from the decorative to the whimsical.
• On Saturday, Occupy Seattle was the fifth biggest “occupy” gathering in the country. On Monday, the city authorities cleared the site out again, with more protesters arrested.
• As Eric Scigliano notes, the Westlake site of Occupy Seattle has been a place of contention and dispute for five decades, ever since it was first christened as the world’s fair monorail’s end point.
• If GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna’s supposed to be such a “moderate,” how come he’s got far-right dungeon master Karl Rove speaking on his behalf at a Bellevue fundraiser?
• A Bellevue cemetery now has a special golfers-only section.
• Legalizing pot, now more popular than ever.
• You might have expected this: The right-wing site “We Are the 53 Percent,” purporting to speak on behalf of “real” taxpayers, is a total fraud.
• Wacky headline atop a tragic story: “Teen girl forced to wear armor, fight stepfather with wooden sword.” Within the story, you learn the Yelm medieval re-enactor’s stepdaughter was also beaten and punched, as punishment for going to a party without his or her mom’s permission.

fanpop.com

• R.I.P. Charles Napier, 75. The square-jawed actor appeared in everything from Rambo to Silence of the Lambs and the first two Austin Powers films. But I’ll remember him for his over-the-top roles in four Russ Meyer sexploitation classics, especially as the maniacally villainous Harry Sledge in Supervixens.
• They waited from last night until this afternoon, but city police and Parks Department crews took down Occupy Seattle’s tents at Westlake Plaza. Twenty-five protesters were arrested and released. Protesters say they’ll remain at Westlake, with or without camping gear.
• Memo to Gov. Gregoire: The poor are not a budget line item to be x’ed out when it becomes incovenient.
• Consolidation marches on, health care division: Swedish and Providence want to merge.
• Could (or should) Microsoft buy Yahoo?
• Say goodbye to another big chain bookstore, the University Village branch of Barnes & Noble. Trivia: Its space was originally a branch of the long forgotten department store Rhodes of Seattle. Rhodes’ main store was where the north wing of the Seattle Art Museum is now.
• UW women’s soccer legend Hope Solo is one of four athletes to appear pseudo-nude on alternating covers of ESPN The Magazine’s “Body Issue.”
• A registered sex offender, being transported from Florida back to eastern Washington to face molestation charges, snuck out of the van somewhere in North Dakota. His excuse for escaping, upon getting re-caught: He was hungry because he was a vegetarian.
• Two NY Times bloggers claim domestic debt forgiveness would have drastic economic side effects. This means insiders are beginning to treat domestic debt forgiveness as a serious possibility.
• SST Records honcho Greg Ginn really hates YouTube.

first cover of macworld (1984), via kuodesign.com

To quote a film he financed, Steve Jobs has now gone to infinity and beyond.

As we mentioned six weeks ago when he announced his official retirement from Apple, Jobs and partner Steve Wozniak weren’t the only guys in the mid ’70s to think of building small computers around those newfangled microprocessor chips.

There had been, and would have continued to be, microcomputers for avid programming mavens, and microcoputers for grunt number-crunching in business.

But Jobs and his crew had bigger dreams.

I’m writing this while watching Rachel Maddow’s reminiscence about Jobs’s first defining moment on a mass stage, the debut of the original Macintosh:

That was revolutionary. Personal computing for persons; for people who didn’t know from computers. It was the first real breach of the distance between the immense power of computing and regular people’s ability to act on that power.

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 from an eleven-year exile, he took this concept to newer levels. His company created entire product categories, even entire industries.

Many people have taken many lessons from Jobs’s life and work.

What would I add in?

Just one of his more enduring slogans.

“Think Different.”

Don’t settle for conformity, or even for conformist nonconformity.

Mix-and-match artistic disciplines, business models, cultural influences, technical pathways, creative procedures, and philosophical visions.

Put everything in the pot.

Keep stirring.

denny hall, the uw campus's oldest building

• We’ve always known the Univ. of Washington has one of America’s most beautiful campuses. Now it’s finally getting national recognition in that regard.
• Meanwhile, the UW is participating in a research study into drunk Facebook photos.
• Mayor McGinn says he admires the spirit behind the Occupy Seattle folks, but still orders them to remove their tents from Westlake Plaza or risk getting arrested. Protesters say they’ll take the risk.
• The American Planning Association calls Tacoma’s Point Defiance Park one of America’s “great public spaces.” As the old bumper sticker says, “Admit It, Tacoma. You’re Beautiful.”
• NYTimes.com’s automated ad placement bots placed an ad for Starbucks’ Italian Roast above an article about you-know-who.
• Starbucks boss Howard Schultz’s next idea to save the economy: donation boxes in the stores, where customers can contribute to community development groups. They’d use the cash to help small businesses create jobs. Of course, if Schultz really wanted to help jump-start the economy at the personal level, he could pay his own baristas a living wage….
• The message from the Gates Foundation, the City of Seattle, and others: Don’t be no fool, stay in school.
• The Zune, Microsoft’s would-be iPod killer, is dead.
• Layoffs hit another supposedly recession-proof industry, nuclear-waste cleanup.
• A cause of death I, for one, hadn’t heard of—”detergent suicide.”
• Lee Fang believes the Occupy Wall Street protests “embody the values of the real Boston Tea Party.”
• Paul Krugman analyzes big bankers’ testimony in a Congressional hearing about the financial crisis. He sees the bankers claiming to be clueless, as an alternative to admitting to be evil.
• Obama’s finally speaking out against GOP state legislatures’ spate of anti-voting laws.
• The Fox broadcast network is threatening to cancel The Simpsons unless its voice actors accept a 45 percent pay cut.
• And now for fun, here are some fun Mexican movie-theater lobby cards.

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.

nordstrom photo, via shine.yahoo.com

• Those $85 Starbucks designer tees? All net proceeds go to Starbucks. One more reason Howard Schultz is in the Forbes 400 richest-people list.
• A Starbucks employee in Calif. posted a satirical song about his job onto YouTube. The song became popular; he became fired.
• After 18 years, the homey and low-key Rosebud restaurant/bar on East Pike is calling it quits. The management (which just bought the place from its previous longtime owners) homes to reopen nearby.
• Facebook’s got this big new feature that looks a lot like something already devised by a Seattle startup site.
• The Real Networks spinoff Rhapsody, a subscription online music service, has some sort of free trial thing going on via Facebook.
• Washington state: Now with even more poverty.
• You want across-the-board cuts in all state spending? Fine. Welcome some new early-release inmates, who won’t get the supervision past parolees got.
• Swedish Medical Center to lay off 150 staffers. So much for the aging-boomer-era medical boom.
• The on-again, off-again scheme to drastically redevelop the parking lot north of Qwest CenturyLink Field is on again. For now.
• An unfinished Kent parking garage will be razed and replaced by homes and stores.
• Tacoma teachers’ strike: over.
• Obama’s coming to town. You won’t get to see him.
• The always-lucid Feliks Banel sees the retirement of J.P. Patches in the context of the institutional decline of local TV (particularly local non-news TV).
• The “Occupy Wall Street” folk have finally proclaimed “our one demand”—11 of them, all big-big-picture stuff, essentially adding up to the complete re-orientation of the nation’s government, economy, and society.
• ‘Tis a sad, sad day for all who care about tradition, long-form storytelling, and frequently-remarried drama queens. The final network episode of All My Children airs today.
• On a much happier note, you can become part of a new tradition tomorrow, the tradition of the ped-powered urbanites.

by marlow harris, http://seattletwist.com

Tuesday’s Nirvana Nevermind 20th anniversary concert at EMP was a total blast.

Even if you weren’t there, thanks to the live stream from, er, Livestream.com.

You can still view it. Though you might want to fast forward some parts. Thanks to band set-up breaks, it took three and a half hours to get through the original CD’s 13 tracks and 10 other Nirvana songs. Each tune was re-created by a different combo. (The exception: the Presidents with Krist Novoselic; they got to perform two, nonconsecutive songs.)

The evening started off with a total sonic blast, as the reunited Fastbacks (above) completely nailed “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Singer Kim Warnick, like many of the night’s performers, had known Kurt Cobain.

Warnick’s also an ex-roommate of Susie Tennant, the longtime local music scene promoter and publicist. (Tennant had staged the original Nevermind release party at Re-bar.) Tennant has gone through a cancer scare (thankfully apparently over); the concert was a benefit for her treatment and recovery.

The Livestream page had a chat-room corner. Some chatters made snide insults about Warnick’s middle aged appearance. (Just the sort of “fans” Cobain had vocally denounced.)

All the performances were loose, spirited, and enthralling, true to Nirvana’s own rough and tumble gigging.

My own faves included, in no particular order:

• Visqueen’s full-blast “Territorial Pissings;”
• new band Ravenna Woods’ sped-up “Breed;”
• the Long Winters’ emo-y “Something in the Way;”
• Shelby Earl’s soulful “All Apologies;”
• Pigeonhed’s eerie “Heart Shaped Box;”
• Steve Mack (the local boy who made good across the pond with That Petrol Emotion) blasting through “Serve the Servants” with his current band Stag—and with a bleeding head (!).