menu screen from 'mickey, donald, goofy: the three musketeers'

• We’ve just gotten over the official end of VHS a couple years ago, when now some are predicting the DVD’s similar fate. Sure, online streaming is cool if you have the bandwidth and can stand the re-buffering pauses at inopportune moments. But what about the bonus features? I’ll say it again: what about the bonus features? I want my bonus features, dammit!
• Our long local nightmare is over. What did it take to get the Mariners to actually win a baseball game after three ghastly, fallow weeks? Perhaps it was the sudden, tragic passing of one of the team’s charter employees (and best loved stadium figures), Rick the Peanut Guy.
• The city’s got a new Transit Master Plan. It identifies corridors that could use some transpo beefing up. One of them is Ballard (where, if you recall, the Monorail Project was to have gone). Now the city thinks it’d be a nice place for a streetcar (which, unlike a monorail, will be subject to the same traffic jams as cars). (BTW, this wish list is irrelevant to the more vital task, that of preserving what transit options we’ve got now from budgetary decimation.)
• On the national front, Jim Hightower pleads for any national politician to pay attention to working people instead of partisan idiocy; while Earl Ofari Hutchinson explains why Obama can’t take the big unilateral steps on the economy that FDR took. And Andrew Sullivan calls today’s GOP “not conservatives but anarchists,” obsessed only with destroying the Obama presidency even if the nation’s destroyed along with it.
• With its never-say-die attitude toward expanding its range of market segments, Costco’s re-formulated initiative to privatize liquor sales has qualified for the November ballot.
• And remember, tonight’s “Last Thursday,” the final public event in the prematurely condemned 619 Western artist studios.

from boobsdontworkthatway.tumblr.com

• Comic and fantasy artists, and their fans, have long been stereotyped as guys who don’t know anything about women. Here’s visual evidence supporting the allegation, in a blog entitled “Boobs Don’t Work That Way.” (And here’s some advice from artist Max Riffner on how to draw women as if you paid attention to them.)
• Wu’s boo-boo puts Wu in deep doo-doo.
• If all-electric cars take off, how will we make and distribute the electricity needed to run them?
• Author Robert S. Becker is one of the commentators who sees the ideological roots of American conservatism in the heritage of the Deep South, in its economy of big corporate farms led by self-styled “rebels” and operated by cheap and/or enslaved labor.…
• …while Paul Krugman has had it up to here with the myth that there’s a “centrist” silent majority, made up of “swing voters” who somehow happen to completely agree with the D.C. pundit caste.
• Phony debt “crisis” conspiracy theory of the day: Are Republicans luring Obama into unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, as an excuse to impeach him?
• The post-lockout Seahawks will do without the star quarterback who stayed a little too long.
• Councilmember Nick Licata would like a city park dedicated to Seattle writers. I might have a snark about this a little later on.
• This year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada will be the last. Now, all the Seattle artists who only show their work at Burning Man might have to actually exhibit it to (gasp!) locals.

• Among the Plan Vs, Plan Ws, and Plan Xs to resolve the Republican-invented “debt ceiling crisis” (which, as pundit Eric Byler notes, is “as fake as professional wrestling“) is a joint House/Senate committee that would have extra-ordinary powers to shape legislation that the full bodies would not get to amend. Huffington Post calls it a “Super Congress.” Now if we only had a “Super President,” like the one in a 1967 TV cartoon of the same name. (Yes, I am old enough to have seen the show during its one network run, and yes, I did.)
• Speaking of fantasy entertainments, Hong Kong scientists claim their tests with photons prove nothing can go faster than light. Then, they extrapolate from that to claim that therefore, time travel is impossible. Well, there are any number of Whovians who would argue about that.
• The King County Council failed to vote on Monday about the utterly necessary plan to save Metro Transit. Let’s hope the delay means enough votes are being attained.
• Who (heart)s, or at least partly defends, the Oslo terror killer? There’s Glenn Beck. And there’s a Wall St. Journal op-ed imploring its readers not to let a little thing like a mass murderer dissuade them from the true paths of racism and Islamophobia. Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, identifies the shooter as an example of “Christianism,” which he defines as “the desperate need to control all the levers of political power to control or guide the lives of others.”
• Good news for all of us who’ve been totally bummed out by the Mariners’ record dive—turns out there will be pro football this year after all.
• If you’re going to the UW campus, don’t masturbate in public. Leave that to the profs.

seen outside the capitol hill block party

• The Norwegian mass murder suspect allegedly claims he did it to publicize a manifesto, which (besides pasting in big parts from the Unabomber’s manifesto) exhorts his countrymen toward further violence in support of racism, nationalism, and general jingoism. Look: Slaughtering innocents is not what any truly “superior” person ever does.
• Meanwhile locally, the Nordic Heritage Museum will host a vigil for the shooting victims this Tuesday evening.
• Dan Bertolet’s got a nice roundup of anti-waterfront tunnel arguments. And there’s going to be an anti-tunnel rally next Monday (Aug. 1).
• A poll shows 71 percent of Americans dislike the Republicans’ creation and bungling of the made-up “debt crisis.” Of course, polls like this one don’t matter, since today’s Republicans don’t give a hoot about anybody except the billionaires and lobbyists who own them.

oh, NOW they get customers.

• SeattlePI.com is moving, away from what had been the Post-Intelligencer building on Elliott Ave. The new office space is said to be “larger” than the space the news site had been occupying. (Let’s hope that means the site’s going to add staff, to get at least slightly closer to a comprehensive local news source.) The P-I globe’s staying put, for now.
• The Seattle weekly that’s not Seattle Weekly gets the big fawning establishment treatment as it approaches its 20th anniversary in September.
• The alleged Norwegian mass murderer (mostly of teenagers) is shaping up to be a right wing “Christian,” a virulent racist and anti-Muslim, and a member of at least one nationalist cell group. None of this has stopped right wingers in other countries from falsely attributing the murders to Muslim terrorists.
• Looks like the ’04 Presidential election may have been just as rigged as the ’00 election may have been, though with operational differences.
• Fans descended on a low-key charity basketball event to proclaim their unflagging desire to see men’s pro b-ball back in town. I also want the Seattle Supersonics back, and I want them in Seattle.
• Amy Winehouse, R.I.P.: Let’s put this succinctly as possible. Drugs suck.

first 'weekly' cover, 1976, from historylink.org

The late investor and arts patron Bagley Wright lived just long enough to see one of the local institutions he jump-started, Seattle Weekly, descend from troubled to pathetic.

First, the paper got caught up, through no fault of its own, in the PR campaign against its parent company Village Voice Media and VVM’s online escort-ad site Backpage.com. Mayor McGinn has ordered the city to not advertise in the Weekly until VVM closes Backpage.

Second, and this is something local management’s responsible for, was a cover story about an S&M practitioner accused of turning a consensual encounter with a streetwalker into a non-consensual violent assault. Feminist blogger Cara Kulwicki has called the story’s writer and SW’s editors “rape apologists,” citing the author’s speculating that the event might have simply been “a bondage session gone haywire.”

Now, they’ve put out a cover piece about local true-crime author Ann Rule. The article’s writer (who’d never written for the Weekly before) claimed Rule had written lies and/or conducted sloppy research about an Oregon woman convicted of murder, in Rule’s 2003 book Heart Full of Lies. The issue was published before SW editors figured out the article had been written by the convicted woman’s boyfriend.

Setting aside the matter of Backpage, over which the SW staff has no power, the once solidly establishment Weekly is drowning in sensationalism. Maybe it should swim back toward safer areas like politics (oops, VVM cut way back on the Weekly’s formerly formidable news staff) or arts coverage (oops, ditto).

• The Tulalip Tribes don’t like it that Microsoft is allegedly using “Tulalip” as the internal code name of a rumored social networking project—even though anything the project produces will be renamed before it goes public. There are worse things to name a software project after than a group of disparate indigenous communities shoved onto a single reservation, where there’s now a big casino resort with a whale statue fountain.
• Nobody might walk in L.A., but bicycling there might be easier now that that burg’s city council has banned motorists from harassing bicyclists.
• More trouble for Puget Sound orcas—experts say the local whales show dangerous signs of inbreeding. Insert your own comparisons to the royal family here.
• Thurston County detectives nabbed a man suspected of stealing Hot Pockets from a local woman’s freezer. Isn’t this how Dr. Evil from Austin Powers got started?
• Gay activists, dressed as “barbarians” and armed with glitter to throw about, stormed Michele Bachmann’s hubby’s “ex gay” “therapy clinic.” (Mr. Bachmann has been quoted as calling gays “barbarians” who need to be “disciplined.)
• R.I.P. Lucian Freud, 88, British figurative painter extraordinaire, master of lumps and wrinkles and frailty and corpulence. Even when he painted young, “sexy” models, he showed them as the old people they would become.

I knew I was going to attend the final group exhibit opening/closing party at the 619 Western art studios.

I didn’t know, until Wednesday, that I already have.

The city’s Department of Planning and Development suddenly proclaimed the building’s tenants have to get out by Oct. 1, six months earlier than the previous eviction date.

And, what’s worse, the tenants can’t hold public events in the building by Aug. 1.

That means no August First Thursday openings.

from sightline.org

• Congrats. Seattle’s been named America’s sixth most walkable city by WalkScore.com. It’s absolutely purely coincidence that WalkScore happens to be based in Seattle. Why, just two months ago, the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center named Seattle America’s first most walkable city, and that outfit’s in North Carolina or somewhere like that. (I’ll have more to say about this greater topic any week now.)
• The $20 emergency car-tab surtax to save King County Metro Transit stands a good chance of becoming a referendum to the voters, now that a fifth County Council member says she’s considering it.
• Long-shot City Council candidate Dale Pusey wants to keep the viaduct, at least as a park. I heartily agree.
• If our current postal system is snarked at by the digerati as “snail mail,” what will they call it if it cuts back to three delivery days a week?
• R.I.P. Alex Steinweiss, 94, who first had the idea of making original cover art for record albums back in the 78 era, and for decades continued to be the greatest practitioner of the art form he’d invented.

• When better toilets are designed, the Gates Foundation will design them.
• R.I.P. Bagley Wright, 1924-2011. A Princeton grad from Georgia who married into the Bloedel timber family, Wright was one of the five original Space Needle investors (hence the Needle’s original corporate name, the “Pentagram Corp.”). He also helped run the Seattle Art Museum and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, cofounded the medical-devices maker Physio Control, was a key player in downtown real estate development, was a major early investor in Seattle Weekly, and sold the house where Kurt Cobain died. He and his wife Virginia amassed a large contemporary-art collection, some of which is on view at their own gallery space.
• Anand Giridharadas believes it’s all well and good for bright minds to go to work at “social entrepreneur” projects, but he insists that “real change requires politics.”
• Buried in a story about PopCap Games boss Dave Roberts is an important lesson that always needs re-teaching:

…Making simple products is way more difficult than making complicated products…. Simple is more complicated, simple is elegant, simple is harder.”

happy bite of seattle consumers

• Food vendors, start your engines. The City Council likes you.
• A Vancouver news site describes last month’s Canuck riot as a desperate attempt by the city’s young males to momentarily escape “a state that could be described as a deficit of the real, which is dangerous and unstable place, full of unfocused outrage and an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement that constantly simmers just below the surface.”
• As past allegations of phone tapping, computer hacking, and other dirty dealings resurface against Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. businesses (which still aren’t directly implicated in the current U.K. phone hacking scandal), Peter Cohan at Forbes suggests News Corp. shareholders would have themselves a much more robust business if it weren’t for Murdoch, his kinfolk, and their insistence upon continuing to run newspapers.
• One anti-tunnel measure stays on local ballots; a second gets kicked off by a judge.

• A Japanese American community activist wants part of S. Dearboarn Street rechristened “Mikado Street,” the name of one of Dearborn’s 1890s predecessors. The question not raised in the linked news story: Can ethnic pride be boosted by the use of a name associated with British comic stereotyping? Or, conversely, could this move help “reclaim” the word?
• Tacoma’s biggest private employers these days? Hospital chains.
• Is Microsoft trying to build its own social networking site? Heck if I know.
• State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown sez Wash. state just might be ready to approve gay marriage.
• Simon Reynolds finds a lot of retro classic rock n’ soul tributes on today’s pop music charts. And he’s sick and tired of it.

• One of the ex-News of the World editors allegedly being investigated in the phone-hacking scandal—CNN star Piers Morgan.
• Why film industry incentives in Wash. state should be brought back—not just for Hollywood location shoots but for home-grown productions, like the Spokane production co. trying to sell a network sitcom.
• What we miss with Sonics basketball gone—$100 million dollars in economic activity per year.
• A West Seattle nursery owner faces foreclosure, due largely to Bank of America bureaucracy.
• A gay activist infiltrated Michelle Bachmann’s hubby’s “therapy” operation and now claims, yes, the outfit does attempt to make people “ex-gay.”
• The Scott Walker junta in Wisconsin has gotten lotsa money and advice from a right wing foundation once led by a John Birch Society boss.
• Lori Gottlieb avers that “the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods.”
• A Microsoft mobile-software architect foresees a future universal operating system from MS, or a “single ecosystem,” encompassing PCs, tablets, phones, TVs, etc. But it might not carry the “Windows” brand.
• Good news! According to GQ, Seattle is only America’s 34th worst dressed city!

(Answer to yesterday’s riddle: The $25,000 Pyramid.)

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

street food vendor, 1930s, singapore; from the-inncrowd.com

• More kinds of yummy street food could soon come to Seattle, as a deregulation proposal makes its way to the full city council.
• Also, the city’s asking the state Liquor Board for the authority to let some Seattle bars stay open after 2 a.m.
• Those toll-happy state bureaucrats are thinking about charging for the I-5 express lanes.
• Playboy has a natty profile of fast rising music/comedy/performance-art star Reggie Watts. Unlike New York mag’s Watts profile from last year, this piece gives full credit to his long formative years in the Seattle music scene.
• Lynnwood motorist sees ducks crossing the freeway, slows down. Semi driver behind said motorist doesn’t see ducks, doesn’t slow down.
• Hanford could become America’s newest, glow-in-the-darkiest national park.
• In nanny-state news, some doctor in Boston said obese children should be taken away from their parents.
• Clever Brit engineers have devised a $25 computer (basically a memory stick with a cheap little CPU attached; no screen or keyboard included) that schools could just give out to kids.
• Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell does turn out to have a larger agenda behind his offer to say “uncle” for now on the debt ceiling nonsense. He wants to bring back the “balanced budget amendment,” one of those recurring ideas that sounds hot on right-wing talk radio but doesn’t work in real life. The amendment McConnell wants would impose the same budgetary rules on the federal government that have already made California ungovernable.
• Those right-wing governors and state legislators around the country—how, you may wonder, do they simultaneously introduce the same brutal anti-labor, anti-women, anti-middle-class, anti-voter legislation? A lot of it comes from the same right wing think tank. And yep, the Koch brothers are in on it, big.
• American progressive pundits still seek a connection between the News of the World phone hacking scandal and Rupert Murdoch’s US media operations. Until they find one, let’s remember that the London-based NOTW aggressively spied on plenty of Hollywood movie stars. Its targets included actors working for Murdoch’s 20th Century-Fox—and even the Murdoch family’s celebrity friends.
• As he has a few times in the past, Jean-Luc Godard has again declared that “film is over.”