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.

Seventy degrees on Easter. It felt like the whole outdoors had come back to life.

• Amazon’s PR image within the book biz has gotten to the point where even when it does demonstrably good things, like giving back to literary groups and small presses, its motives get suspected. That’s never a good sign.
• What greater downtown Seattle doesn’t need is a ____ restaurant just like the ____ restaurants of San Francisco. What it does need, and just might get in 2019, is a public school.
• There just might be a deal to settle the Lake City bike rack ruckus.
• More females in the military has come to mean, alas, more female homeless vets.
• Two Washington Monthly pundits hace compiled a list of the “Top 50 Things Accomplished by President Barack Obama.” Yeah, he’s not done everything he said he wanted to do, and even less of what lefties wanted him to do. But what he has done is still a lot.
• We told you State Sen. Val Stevens has been a part of ALEC, the notorious megabucks lobbying group that gives GOP state legislators handmade corporate-written legislation. Now, here’s a list of all the legislators in all the states with shameful ALEC ties.
• RIP Don Foster, who helped run the Seattle World’s Fair and the Seattle Rep, then built the Foster/White Gallery into the city’s premiere commercial art house.
• I thought the indie film scene was about spurning the hype n’ nonsense of Hollywood, such as the obsession with weekend box office numbers. Apparently I was wrong.

Not voting = voting a straight right-wing ticket. Period.

If you think you’re “too political” to sully your ideological purity, you’re doing just what the Koch Bros., Karl Rove, and Rush Limbaugh would like you to do.

Yes, I know several close friends will adamantly disagree with this.

These friends will agree to support ballot initiatives and referenda.

They’ll make themselves highly visible at protest events.

But they won’t be seen supporting a living breathing politician, except the occasional minor-party candidate like Nader.

Otherwise, they’re content to just protest all the bad things that get done, without doing anything practical to get good things done.

So righteous. So superior. So black-n’-white.

I, however, believe in shades of gray.

The non-theoretical world is a land of deals, hustles, and heartbreaks.

Obama always claimed to be a centrist. You should not feel betrayed when he turned out to really be one.

Yes, he’s compromised, with the defense lobby, the food lobby, the national security lobby, etc.

But the answer to only getting half of the agenda you want is not to throw it all away, to let the whole system be taken over by the guys who want total “freedom” for corporations and the rich, and brutal oppression toward the rest of us.

The only way to make anything happen in that world is to be in it, not to pronounce yourself too perfect to risk being sullied.

And don’t just run a Presidential candidate. Thanks to the Electoral College, there’s no practical way to get elected President without a nationwide, year-round party infrastructure behind you.

You want an American left that’s a real thing? Push for policies AND people, top to bottom, every district, every state.

Run through the Democratic Party structure when you can; through indie campaigns when you must. Markos Moulitsas of the Daily Kos calls this a push for “not just more Democrats but better Democrats.”

Building a national, permanent movement involves a lot of long, hard, boring work. It’s the opposite of the WTO anarchists’ slogan “Live Without Dead Time.”

But it’s the only way to make national, permanent changes.

Protesting, no matter how vigorous and high-profile, is never enough.

(P.S.: There’s been a highly active comment thread about this topic on Facebook lately.)

• Appropriately enough for the former Amazon HQ building, the PacMed Tower on Beacon Hill will be sold this month via an online auction.
• How does Soap Lake (the town) like the idea of changing the name of Soap Lake (the lake)? Not much at all.
• State budget impasse? Still as impassed as ever.
• Working Washington, the advocacy group mentioned in this space on Wednesday, wanted to run bus and light-rail ads on behalf of Sea-Tac airport workers stuck at lifetime minimum wage. Sound Transit said no.
• A government/civilian panel studying the basketball/hockey arena scheme issued what appear on the surface some mealy-mouthed conclusions. However, the “many important issues to be worked out” about the plan mostly seem to involve transportation in the area, which will have to be dealt with anyway.
• Climate change, in the long term, could cost the Wash. state economy $10 billion a year.
• How’s a financially-squeezed Greece gonna keep supporting archeological digs?
• Lynn Stout at the Atlantic believes much of the whole “psychopathic” behavior in the corporate world can be traced to the idea that companies must aim only for shareholder value, at the cost of all other financial or social results.
• A consumer website asked its readers to pick the “Worst Company in America.” Runners-up: BankAmericrap and AT&T. Winner: Electronic Arts.
• Tech-biz analyst Rocky Agrawal claims Groupon is “not a coupon or marketing company” so much as it’s “essentially a sub-prime lender.” That, and his prediction that merchants who sign up for Groupons are those that are really desperate to drum up business, leads Agrawal to predict it’s “poised for collapse.”
• Forbes looks for the future of books and sees not mere e-books but full multimedia apps.
• Forty-eight years ago this week, IBM announced the System/360 mainframe computer line. Products compatible with it are apparently still being made.
• The new interpretation/visualization of Jesus: Not only white but hipster-esque.
• Applebee’s: Not a drive-thru restaurant.

artist's rendering; via kiro-tv

• Millions in the making, the big Seattle waterfront roller coaster is finally on the way! Estimated opening: July 4th.
• You all need to read Judy Lightfoot’s piece at Crosscut about people forced to live in their vehicles at highway rest stops—even people with full time jobs.
• On a related note, the state’s (official) jobless rate has dropped just enough to disqualify the state’s unemployed from 26 weeks’ worth of extended benefits.
• The state’s finances, services, and basic sense of humanity are swirling down the drain. Tim Eyman, of course, doesn’t give a shit.
• Dept. of Correction: It turns out public breastfeeding is already legal in Wash. state. Yesterday’s “Random Links” piece implied otherwise.
• Queen Anne Books has got itself a lucky new owner.
• It’s official: there’s a whooping cough epidemic in our state.
• Seattle Center asked the public for input on new public-space designs for the place. Only they announced it on Tuesday with a deadline of Wednesday. And we’re asked to choose between three plans, all designed by out-of-state firms, and all reeking of “world class” emotional coldness.
• Three deserving local theatre troupes will get to share the performance space at the bottom of a new mixed-use development on Capitol Hill.
• Who doesn’t look at a bizarre press release issued on April 1 with at least a little skepticism? The Puget Sound Business Journal, that’s who. (The hoax was from Ivar’s, announcing a 100-flavor chowder dispenser to rival the Coca-Cola Freestyle pop machine.)
• The Mariners are acting all NIMBY-y about getting a basketball/hockey arena next door.
• As the Seattle Times finishes up its recounting of every complaint anyone’s got against Amazon (including some pretty serious allegations), labor advocacy group Working Washington is inviting people to register their own snark on the etailer’s sales page for a “Fair Share Pie Cutter.”
• Despite the plethora of comic book-based movies and related merch, actual comic book sales have collapsed in recent years (even more than newspapers). But one reviewer sees a ray of hope emerging amidst the pall of gloom. It’s the new higher-res iPad.
• Just declassified and in hot demand, it’s all the data from the 1940 Census.
• Celebrity-snark writer Dustin Rowles depicts sitcom has-been Kirk Cameron as a complete douchebag, albeit one of the pseudo-Christian rather than the regular Hollywood variety.
• Morley Safer snarks at the bigtime art world. New York mag’s Jerry Saltz snarks back.
• Your daily dose of political outrage: Paul Buchheit at Buzzflash lists some “preposterous but persistent conservative myths;” Stephen D. Foster Jr. at Addicting Info lists 40 particularly disgusting quotes by GOP politicos demonstrating the “values Republicans want to destroy America with;” and Laura Clawson at Daily Kos recounts the utter failure of a particularly dorky would be right-wing sting operation against a commuity organizing group.
• And let’s all get ready for Easter with (direct from the Betty Crocker Kitchens) the original “Bunny Butt Cake.”

sherriequilt.blogspot.com

• Arts consultant Colleen Dilenschneider believes museums need to stop depending on huge blockbuster shows and do more to build regular day-to-day audiences.
• Sorry to say, but the Village Green Nursery in West Seattle isn’t out of the underwater-mortgage woods yet.
• It took a year-long special investigation to determine that no, an instructional assistant at a Seattle elementary school did not kiss a student’s foot.
• Sometimes whole swaths of the universe can coalesce at a single moment, such as a meeting on whether to allow a McDonald’s at Sea-Tac Airport.
• Here are more pix of the new 520 bridge, images that are far prettier than the real thing will ever be.
• And here’s a pic of the new Capitol Hill mixed-use project with live-theater spaces on the ground floor, an image far prettier than that real thing will ever be.
• The bid to keep the NBA’s Kings in Sacramento (and hence out of Seattle) has hit a few snags; while a new developer has a new arena scheme, that would be built on land he doesn’t own and isn’t for sale.
• State Sen. Val Stevens, tireless opponent of gay rights and corporate-lobbyist suckup extraordinaire, is retiring. Fun fact: Stevens used to be a director of ALEC, the infamous megabucks lobby group that supplies right-wing state legislators across the country with pre-written extremist legislation.
• Syndrome of the day: Now you’re supposed to worry about yourself if you keep too many files on your computer.
• Jim Hightower has more details about the right wing war against the Post Office.
• James Silver at the Atlantic claims perhaps 1 in 10 Wall Street operatives is a “psychopath.”
• The story of a movie song, and the need to acquire the right to its use, is a tale that meanders through Iran, France, Portugal, Florida, Connecticut, a leaking boat, and the cast of As the World Turns, until it stops with a retired female airline pilot.
• We close with fun ’60s pop-star collage covers from 16 magazine.

via boingboing.net

ap photo via newstimes.com

• At the time of this writing, the Seattle Mariners are in first place as the winningest team in Major League Baseball! (This may be subject to change by the time you read this.)
• In other sporting news, the Husky men’s basketball team valiantly lost its NIT semifinal game in overtime; thus tying for the status of this year’s 71st best college team.
• You might be able to ski on the Fourth of July around here this year.
• Two years in the making, the downtown Target is set to finally open on July 29.
• Metro Transit’s downtown Ride Free Area ends two months after that.
• Meanwhile, Washington’s first food-only Walmart store is about to open at an ex-Kmart site in Bellevue.
• One-third of all homes sold in King County these days are sold for all cash (i.e., to speculators or rental operators).
• An Army PR guy says Joint Base Lewis-McChord is “not having any issues that other Army bases aren’t having, too.”
• This is from October but still fascinating—an in-depth look at the Columbia River, its watershed, its hydroelectric industry, its fishery, and the people who try to balance the needs of each.
• Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon would really like you to know there really are non-wingnut Christians out there.
• The rumored Apple-branded TV set is still just a rumor. But Farhad Manjoo at Slate reports that Microsoft’s XBox already brings the magic of online streaming-video search to TV sets.
• Slate also has a fond remembrance to the inventor of the frozen bagel and a handy guide to Quebeçois cuss words.
• Now we know why Bud, Miller, and Coors all sold out to foreigners. Light-beer sales are in a nosedive, perhaps a permanent one.
• John Cassidy at the New Yorker claims the right-wing assault on health care reform, as seen this week at the Supreme Court, is “a very bad joke.”

• The local progressive organizing group Fuse Washington has put up The Slanted Times,  a spot-on jibe at our local really-conservative-but-pretending-to-be-centrist monopoly daily. Why bother? Because, as the anonymous authors put it…

The Seattle Times editorial board advocates for the rich and powerful in Washington state every day. They have used their editorial page to attack any proposal that would lay a finger on the 1% or their expansive stock portfolios. At the same time, they do their best to ensure kids, seniors, and low-income families absorb billions in budget cuts year after year.

• Meanwhile, Hugo Kugiya at Crosscut explores territories we’ve traipsed through lately—the steady decline of SeattlePI.com, in terms of staffing and quantity of compelling content. A newsroom that needs to get bigger is instead getting smaller. And the site’s whole premise of “anything for page views” is dumb and unproductive. It needs new blood at the top, to reorganize it into a full service local news source—or as close to one as chintzy web advertisers will support. In the long term, it needs to become a strong enough “brand” that it could eventually command a subscription price, at least in web-app and tablet form. In the short term, that will require investing in the site’s content beyond what web ads, alone and in their current form, can pay for. If Hearst won’t do it, they should turn the brand over to local operators who will.
• Seattle Central Community College administrators tried to craft new campus-use policies, specifically to ban Occupy Seattle from coming back. The college brass tried to rush the new rules through while the college was on spring break, and fewer students (and pro-Occupy faculty) would be around to speak out. That tactic has failed. A full schedule of hearings will be held.
• It turns out the right-wing sleaze machine does have one use for African American voters—as a tactical “wedge” in anti-gay-marriage campaigns.
• Libertarian Wet Dreams Dept.: BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay says it’s looking into ways to operate outside the reach of the copyright police, even by running server computers inside unpiloted drone airplanes. All this impractical tech, just so doodz can keep downloading free video games and porn?

'water wood' by bette burgoyne; via roqlarue.com

• In deservedly glowing terms, Emily Pothast reviews Red Current (Sweet Fruit), the all-local (and all-female, though that part isn’t advertised) group show now on display at Belltown’s raucous Roq La Rue gallery. If you were there at the even-more-packed-than-usual opening night, go back and actually look at the art.
• Next step for the Seattle “Storefronts” program, in which art-related entrepreneurs take over vacant retail spaces: Auburn.
• Think Bellingham’s full of sports-hatin’ hippies? Think again, as we congratulate the WWU men’s basketball team for winning the NCAA Division II national title.
• There’s just one indignity after another in the sordid tale of a 62-year-old Spokane woman who was ordered to reapply (at less money) for her her food-service job after 19 years. With the new reduced offer too little for her to live on, she turned it down. Then she was denied unemployment benefits. Then her ex-employer contributed a Spokesman-Review guest opinion calling for harsh crackdowns against “bogus” unemployment claims. She eventually got her unemployment back, but she’s still out on her own with no health insurance and not enough retirement savings, at an age when it’s damn tough to get back into the workforce.
• Microsoft is now in the business of raiding botnet-spam operators.
• You might wish otherwise, but most holders of major public offices, and major candidates for those offices, just aren’t comfortable with supporting legalized pot. They don’t believe there’s enough mass support for it. They don’t think it’s an issue worth sticking their necks out.
• The Occupy Tacoma protest was held at a state DOT-owned park near downtown. The state’s not only closed and fenced off the park, they’ve now put it up for sale.
• A flashback to the ’00s: Some folks want to restart the plan for a Ballard to West Seattle monorail!

early 'new yorker' writer janet flanner photographed by bernice abbott; tacoma art museum

• Tacoma’s getting what was too hot for the Smithsonian, a photo exhibit of 150 years of gays in America.
• There’s an art vending machine in Ballard now! But, despite what this story says, it’s not the first in town. There’s already one at the Hideout bar on Boren and Madison.
• Local animator Drew Christie asks your sympathy for the poor, put-upon Nutria.
• The Voice of America (yes, they’re still around) reports about beloved local artist Ginny Ruffner and her courageous comeback from a horrific car crash.
• The UW men’s basketball team has won “the championship of the West” and is still in the running for U.S. sports’ most famous consolation prize.
• Folks are still trying to bring Dennis Kucinich to run for Congress in Wash. State.
• Auto racing in King County has apparently been saved.
• Who’s profiting from America’s health care system and its runaway costs? Not Swedish Hospital. They’re losing a quarter million a day.
• Microsoft’s giving police departments a software tool to create “digital fingerprints” for any online image. They say it can be useful in tracking down the sharers of child porn. But as we’ve learned, “cracking down on child porn” can be invoked as an excuse for every creepy Big Brother tactic.
• Will the Florida teen shot for apparently no other reason than walking while black ever get real justice?
• This Raw Story piece about an FCC decision, setting aside hundreds of new low-power radio frequencies for actual local stations instead of mere repeater transmitters, exaggerates when it says the move represents “a critical blow to right wing radio dominance.” After all, these new local stations could host their own homegrown right-wingers.
• A Bloomberg Businessweek reporter who wrote about what he calls “the real Foxconn” insists the massive Chinese high-tech subcontractor is actually a pretty good employer, considering.
• Dyske Suematsu asks rhetorically why more Americans don’t like jazz. Suematsu’s rhetorical answer is just standard square-bashing elitist yawn city. Look: Advanced, specialty versions of ANYTHING are going to mainly appeal to niche audiences. Light aircraft. Eighteenth-century history. Foreign film. French wrought-iron sconces from the 1930s. And so on.
• UK author China Mieville wants you to frustrate and “unsatisfy” him. Preferably now.

The cherry blossoms agree with the calendar that spring has arrived. Why does the weather argue?

• Today (Tuesday 3/20) is half price Amazon gift card day.
• Seattle’s apparently on the cutting edge of privacy-free office interiors.
• Who wouldn’t love a local art exhibit of classic electric mixers, model cars, and miniature Space Needles? Nobody, that’s who.
• Who still supports Mike Daisey’s not-entirely-true “exposé” of Apple’s subcontracted Chinese gadget factories? Would you believe Steve Wozniak?
• More bad news for everybody who thinks web ads could eventually support professional online news. Turns out that 68 percent of all online ad spending goes to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. Only the latter two employ any journalists (Microsoft through its half interest in MSNBC.com; AOL through HuffPost, Patch, and other sites).
• Meanwhile in Maine, one of the most aggressively hyped “digital first/print last,” “hyperlocal,” “new media business model” companies has crashed, taking some almost 200-year-old weekly papers with it.
• Jonathan Chait at New York mag insists that Obama’s aborted budget compromise with John Boehner’s House Republicans last year was an attempt “to sell out liberalism,” which only failed because Boehner was “too crazy” to go along. I have a different interpretation. I believe Obama made a show of offering Boehner almost everything the latter wanted, knowing full well the latter would reject it anyway, as a part of the grand strategy of rendering the GOP utterly irrelevant on the national level and turning the Democrats into the new “party of business.” (Which could still be seen as “selling out liberalism,” if you want to see it that way.)
• Meanwhile, said House Republicans are desperate to keep the 1 percent’s loyalty by proposing a near total re-deregulation of Wall St. funny-money practices.
• To end on a fun note, here’s some animated “3D .gifs” by local artist Dain Fagerholm.

• 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.”

esquire.com

Welcome to daylight savings time. Welcome to the “light” half of the year. Welcome to the little piece of manmade trickery that tells us the worst of the cold, dark time is over. Even though it sure didn’t look or feel like it today.

• Esquire’s “Eat Like a Man” department ran a survey asking readers’ “most life changing burger joint.” The winner: our own Dick’s, by a mile. (Also note the beautiful Dennis Hopper-esque photo topping the story.)
• Danny Westneat notes that the Republican state senate coup-mongers’ state budget cuts essential services even more brutally than the competing Democratic house budget. Westneat concludes that this totally destroys the longstanding Republican meme that all you need for a balanced budget is to get rid of some vaguely defined “waste.”
• KOMO headline: “Car slams into dentist office, driver extricated.” It may take you a second to realize that’s not “extracted.”
• The Huskies, despite their regular season prowess, are not in the NCAA men’s basketball tourney. The only NW team in it is Gonzaga.
• More and more advertisers desert right-wing hate radio. Not just Limbaugh but the whole bigoted, bullying gaggle. Will the whole genre collapse under the weight of its own need for continued extremeness? (And remember, this is the only audience today’s Republican Party gives a damn about.)
• The next time some techno-pundit tells you that every organization (from the news media to local government) must become more like whatever’s the social media darling of the week, just remember the example of Twitter. A very famous name. A very popular site. A very pathetic business.
• Jean “Mobius” Giraud R.I.P.: The king of “clear line” Euro comix art seamlessly blended slick, sophisticated senses of draftsmanship and composition with classic fanboy adventure genre subjects (Sergio Leone-esque cowboys, space opera, sword and sorcery, erotica, even proto-steampunk). He also cofounded Metal Hurlant, the way-influential magazine known here as Heavy Metal. Too bad most U.S. media obits of Giraud only wanted to discuss the Hollywood movies he’d consulted on or which were “inspired” by his work (typical myopia).

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