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.

Thursday’s Oregonian has a rather complex story of violence and desperation, set at a Goodwill outlet store.

It seems the subculture of “professional thrifters,” shopping for stuff to resell on eBay, Amazon and elsewhere, has gotten more extreme, and even brutal, during the Great Recession. Folks are spending all day in the bigger thrift stores, pawing over everything and even pushing other shoppers out of their way.

The story particularly mentions one used-book reseller named Pedro Rolando Reynaud Erazo. Along with his brother and an entourage of assistants, he spent his days grabbing books by the armful at Goodwill outlets (the bigger warehouse stores, where stuff that doesn’t sell in the regular Goodwills gets sent). They used portable bar-code scanners to help find the few volumes with resale value, then tossed all the rest. During these day-long sieges, they’d push other shoppers and even store employees out of their way.

A female shopper charged Erazo with following her around the Hillsboro Goodwill outlet store, yelling and calling her names. And more:

He pushed her on 10 occasions. He punched her. He even warned her: “(y)ou should be afraid of me. They’re not going to stop me. I can do whatever I want.”

The woman applied for, and received, a “stalking” (restraining) order against the aggressive entrepreneur.

But an appeals court reversed the ruling; claiming that…

she hadn’t proven that Erazo subjected her to at least two “contacts” that would cause her to fear for her own safety. The court ruled that while the punch qualified as one contact, the 10 shoves weren’t truly dangerous. What’s more, Erazo’s reported threat didn’t instill “a fear of imminent and serious personal violence.”

Anyway, the article continues, Erazo is no longer a threat to this particular woman, as he’s left the state of Oregon.

He now lives in the Seattle area.

And his organization has reportedly operated the same “hoarding” and “scooping” tactics at thrift stores and used-book sales around here since at least 2010.

One thing this ongoing grossness proves is something I’ve been saying for some time: books really are a big business.

(Note: There are other online pieces about Erazo. But I’m not linking to them because they veer off into stupid racist tirades, under the excuse that he was born in Honduras. His aggression and his attitude problem would be just as icky and dangerous if he were a WASP fratboy.)

• The demise of the (print) Encyclopedia Britannica has led the Best Week Ever site to recall the books’ still famous 1990s TV commercials. The site doesn’t mention it, but the spots were created by comedy/commercials genius Stan Freberg and star his son Donavan (he later ran a porn site, but now photographs actors’ and wannabe actors’ portfolio shots).
• What if they gave a shopping mall and nobody came?
• Goldy reminds you that you can’t support essential public services like education from state sales taxes (and little else) anymore.
• Ex-Seattleite Mike Daisey’s monologue show rallying against the labor practices of Apple’s Chinese subcontractors? It turns out to have been full of distortions and “dramatic license.”
• Nobody’s actually trying to move the Portland TrailBlazers to Seattle. Some guy at the Weekly simply thinks it would be a good idea.
• A self proclaimed Libertarian (you know, the dudes who think the oil companies and Wall Street don’t have enough power) says we must protect porn’s right to exist, because the next industry to be cracked down on would be advertising.
• Robert Reich reminds you that America’s “moral rot” isn’t gays and abortion, but rather “the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.”

Learn how we and our immediate forebearers ate!

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks) at Broadway and E. Roy on curvaceous Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

Be there or be yesterday’s “fresh sheet.”

• The World Trade Organization (remember them?) sez Boeing gets unfair subsidies from the U.S. gov’t.
• Are an ad agency’s “homeless hotspots” at the SXSW music festival really more demeaning than the Seattle company that  still calls itself “Bumvertising“?
• No, Michael Medved. We’re not secretly jealous of Rush Limbaugh and his awesome power. We’re disgusted by his puerile stupidity, bullying, and bigotry (and yours too).
• The Oregonian won’t run the Doonesbury comics about the GOP’s war against women. A local cartoonist responds by depicting the paper’s readers choosing to “abort” their subscriptions.
• Is there really something particular about the training of soldiers at Lewis-McChord that’s led to these dreadful stories about abuses of power in the Afghan field? Or is it just a coincidence, based on the fact that the base has grown so big, with so many troops transferring in and out of it?
• One of the 1980 American hostages in Iran would rather not see history repeat itself thank you.
• Blogger/editor Maria Popova believes websites should formally adopt a “curator’s code” identifying direct and indirect links via special unicode symbols.

kirkland reporter

• Hendrix fetish art objects are, by definition, creepy. Here’s one that’s even creepier than most. It’s a sculpture of the musician shaking hands with former local DJ (and current rehab-center spokesman) Pat O’Day. It’s being auctioned off, having been seized from O’Day’s son to help settle a lawsuit involving the son’s onetime Kirkland jewelry store. That store closed suddenly in ’03. Several customers then claimed they’d consigned jewelry to Jerry O’Day that was neither returned nor paid for.
• The Kalakala’s current would-be rescuer says the drive to restore the streamlined ferry has busted him and rendered him homeless.
• The Husky men’s basketball squad’s predestined appointment w/destiny was done in by the First Brother-in-Law.
• One pundit’s prediction for the ’12 Mariners? Not as dreadful as last year.
• Facebook: Bringing people together. Including one local man’s two (simultaneous, unknowing) wives.
• One fifth of the Port of Seattle’s container traffic is moving to Tacoma.
• George Monbiot describes Ayn Rand’s worldview (i.e., what the Ron Paulies and even many Tea Partiers aspire toward) as “the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed.” Speaking of which….
• Yes, there really is a Republican war against birth control. And yes, there really is no floor of utter sleaze beneath which today’s Republicans will not descend. (They’d advocate the return of slavery and poll taxes if they thought it would “test well among the base.”)
• Could one of America’s worst housing markets really be roaring back to life?
• The battle over e-book pricing heads (potentially) to the courts, as the Feds prepare to sue Apple and five of the Big Six U.S. publishers. The allegation: by letting publishers set retail e-book prices, Apple and the publishers conspired to keep said prices up.
• A Facebook zillionaire named Chris Hughes has bought The New Republic. Result: the usual inaccurate media descriptions of the opinion magazine as a “liberal bastion” and “influential in progressive circles.” TNR ceased to be liberal before Hughes was born. In recent decades it has (heart)ed Joe Leiberman, the Iraq War, and just about everything Reagan and the Bushes ever did. Hughes, who’s worked on Obama’s ’08 campaign, just might bring TNR back to what people who’ve never read it think it still is.
• For Intl. Women’s Day, the Guardian profiled a new addition to Forbes‘ list of world billionaires—a woman who’d earned her fortune (she didn’t just inherit it). She’s the inventor of Spanx undies.
• Said billionaires’ list includes eight (male) Washingtonians. You already know about Gates, Allen, Ballmer, Schultz, Bezos, and McCaw. The other two are the founders of Oakley sunglasses (who moved to the San Juans from Calif.) and video-game maker Valve Corp. In total, Forbes counts 1,226 billionaires, up from 140 in ’87. The 1% just keep getting 1%-er.

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

• 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.

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.

• The City of Seattle and the Port of Seattle are getting together to publicize local music at Sea-Tac airport. The campaign will involve piped-in music and in-terminal announcements read by local music stars, plus videos, still images projected on screens, and a local music feed on the airport’s WiFi network. There’s an opening party with four live bands on Saturday. That’s all nice, but what would really make it rock would be Maktub covering Brian Eno’s Music for Airports!
• In the ashes of Masins Furniture’s departure from Pioneer Square and the loss of the nearby 619 Western art studios, ambitious developers say they want to turn two of the three adjoining Masins buildings into “PiSquare Arts,” a complex of work and live/work spaces. The developers vow to make the units “as affordable and artist friendly as we can.” Can any non-subsidized remodel create actual artist spaces, not just architectural offices falsely billed as “artist spaces”? We shall see.
• Who doesn’t like the state’s apparently about-to-pass gay marriage bill? Catholic leaders. Who doesn’t like the Catholic leaders’ dislike? Catholic laypeople.
• Some wags are snickering at Michelle Obama’s current Reader’s Digest cover. They claim she’s making a hand gesture that looks like the American Sign Language image for a certain body part. Of course, she could just be giving a shout-out to her brother, who coaches a certain college basketball team with a certain team name.

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.

1917 seattle metropolitans; from seattlehockey.net

Could Seattle actually get a National Hockey League team before it gets another NBA basketball team?

That’s what CBC Hockey Night in Canada commentator Elliotte Friedman seems to believe.

Friedman notes that the NHL wants to stop collectively owning the fiscally imperiled Phoenix Coyotes.

Friedman also says one of the top Coyote contenders is a Chicago minor-league hockey owner, who’s helping assemble land for a new arena in Seattle’s Sodo area, just south of Safeco Field.

Seattle’s hopes are supported by a move in the Legislature to somehow finagle state support for a new arena during this upcoming session.

What Seattle’s got in its favor:

• A large regional TV market. (Seattle would have the only U.S. NHL franchise west of Denver and north of San Jose. It’s already the second biggest U.S. metro area without an NHL team, after Houston.)
• Several rich potential investors.
• A natural rivalry situation with the Vancouver Canucks.
• A populace that’s supported minor league hockey for several decades (including current junior teams in Kent and Everett), and which includes many CBC hockey viewers.

What Seattle’s not got in its favor:

• No past NHL heritage; especially when compared to Quebec City, Friedman’s other pick for a likely new Coyotes’ home. The Seattle Metropolitans of the old Pacific Coast Hockey Association did win the Stanley Cup back in 1917. But compared to the former Quebec Nordiques’ fan memories, the Metropolitans are a mere trivia answer.
• No suitable place to play in town. Ex-Sonics owner Barry Ackerley made sure KeyArena would be only barely hockey-capable; its awkward hockey configuration requires temporarily removing the entire southern lower seating area. Quebec City already has the ex-Nordiques rink and is building a new bigger one, even without a team to play in it.

Despite these reservations, Friedman suggests it might be in the league’s financial best interest to place the Coyotes in Seattle, ready or not, and then award an expansion team to Quebec.

So, where would any Seattle Ex-Coyotes play, until a new specially built arena is ready (at least two seasons)?

• There’s KeyArena, such as it is.
• There’s the Tacoma Dome, which hosted minor league hockey from 1991-95. It seats a good 17,000 in its hockey configuration, though sightlines can be darn poor in places.
• There are the junior-hockey rinks in Kent and Everett. The latter seats 10,000 people, about as many as KeyArena’s ice configuration.
• And, of course, there’s Paul Allen’s Rose Garden in Portland.

My own favored option would be to simply expand KeyArena to the south; even though that would displace its current main tenants (the WNBA Seattle Storm and Seattle U. men’s basketball) for one season apiece.

But if an all new building is deemed really necessary, it should be (1) in Seattle proper (like the current Sodo arena scheme is) and (2) built with as little state or municipal subsidy as possible.

As a postscript, here’s a circa mid-2000s essay from the fan site SeattleHockey.net, detailing past attempts to bring the NHL here.

seattle sounders fc, via seattleweekly.com

• ‘Twas a lovely low key event in glorious Greenwood Thursday evening, debuting our latest book Then & Now: Seattle. Thanks to all who attended and to the staff of Couth Buzzard Books.
• The greatest American-born soccer player in perhaps-ever has retired. There’s a monument to him in his hometown, Olympia.
• Besides the expected police over-reactions in various cities, right wing sleaze artists are trying to discredit the Occupy ______ movement by committing acts of vandalism and blaming it on the movement. There’s also a falsely credited photo circulating around right-wing blogs. It depicts a protest march with banners reading “Fuck the Troops” and “No Gods No Masters.” The right-wing blogs claim it to be a recent Occupy Wall Street scene. It’s really from Portland, and it’s from a 2007 antiwar protest.
• Danny Westneat is wrong. The Occupy ______ people don’t want to get “government handouts.” They want the people and companies who don’t need government handouts, but get them anyway, to get at least fewer of them.
• I guess there’s never an off-season for jokes based on “Seattle” stereotypes.
• Seattle Public Schools are way popular. This bodes well for the city’s survival as a place where ordinary, non-affluent folk can continue to reside.
• The guy being blamed around Facebook and Twitter for stiffing a Capitol Hill waitress and calling her fat? He’s not the guy that did it.
• With fewer undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. these days (despite what the lying right-wing media claims), there’s a shortage of farm workers. That shortage has hit the Washington apple orchards.
• One side effect of the proposed Swedish-Providence medical merger: The nuns who run Providence want nothing to do with abortion services, and will veto any continuation of elective abortions at Swedish. Swedish management’s trying to get out of the resulting PR brouhaha by helping to fund a new Planned Parenthood clinic.
• Dear animal activists: “Liberating” critters bred to be homebodies doesn’t always work. Especially if the critters aren’t native to the particular wilds you’re sending them into.

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.

College football season is among us. This means I need to remind some of you:

The University of Oregon is the Ducks and is in Eugene. (It is also known sometimes as “Nike U.”)

Oregon State University is the Beavers and is in Corvallis.

I attended (briefly), and am still fiercely loyal to, the latter. Once a Beaver, always a Beaver.