• In the absence of even an unorganized “save the Fun Forest” campaign, the beloved old fashioned amusement park in Seattle Center will close in 2009.
• Washington Mutual Bank, whose national fortunes have risen and fell with the housing bubble, is laying off over 3,000 workers.
• Some 380 gallons of diesel fuel spilled from a factory-trawler boat at the Port of Tacoma.
• The current ETA on fully restoring car-ferry service to Pt. Townsend? Perhaps a year.
• Barack Obama’s coming to Seattle tonight (Tuesday). The campaign event, at the Showbox Sodo (formerly Premiere, formerly Fenix) costs $100.
• UW athletic director Scott Turner is this year’s sacrificial lamb for football mediocrity.

• You won’t love it at Levitz anymore. The discount furniture chain, which has teetered in and out of insolvency for several years, is finally throwing in the seat cushion.
• Safeco Insurance has fulfilled its duty to propping up the downtown real-estate biz by moving into two existing downtown Seattle office towers.
• I-5 in southwest Washington is slowly reopening in stages. Meanwhile, receding floodwaters leave what P-I headline writers call a “Deluge of sewage.” Say that five times fast.
• A Federal Way sixth grader has invented a device using kitchen gloves and semi-porous plastic bubbles, which can inject medicines into the body without needles. Just the thing for squeamish junkies everywhere.
• Yep, King County’s fully, officially, joined the housing-price bubble “pop.”
• And there’s a fun story about professional horse’s ass Tim Eyman getting into a hissyfit at a Yakima city council meeting and getting forcibly removed.

• The LGBT Community Center, which just got its own Capitol Hill building a couple years back, is now in fiscal trouble. It may close by month’s end. Does cultural acceptance of other sexual preferences necessarily lead to assimilation, and in turn to the death of niche-subculture institutions?
• Is Paul Allen getting a “sweetheart deal” from the City in regards to his South Lake Union development projects? Many have rumored such allegations, and now City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is vocalizing ’em.
• No, Snohomish cops, UW profs taking industrial-art photographs are not terrotists.
• Microsoft’s shut down a holiday greetings Web page that featured a sometimes foul-mouthed Santa.
• In decades past, private, for-profit lending libraries offered books for rent, sometimes in genres or to audience niches public libraries wouldn’t or couldn’t fully serve. Now, some web entrepreneurs want to bring back the concept, in the form of “a Netflix for books.”
• And, yep, there’s still lotsa flood damage and closed roads and highways throughout Western Washington.

• Seattle’s first snow scare of the season was, as I’d expected, a bust, but here comes another.
• What the P-I calls “affordable-housing developers” (what, you didn’t know there were any of those?) rant that the City of Seattle doesn’t provide enough zoning and other incentives to let ’em profitably build more units for folks closer to “median” income levels. Of course, with the few megarich driving “median” income levels ever higher, the definition of for-profit “affordable” housing inches further away from what working families can afford.
• Meanwhile, Bellevue officials ponder regulations to deal with suburban “megahomes” that flaunt their materialistic corpulence over their neighbors.
• The last of the four Pine-and-Belmont bars has closed prior to condos taking over the half-block. Manray’s demise ends a tradition that goes back nearly 20 years, when Squid Row took over what had been a dive-bar space called Glynn’s Cove. Squid Row begat Tugs Belmont, which begat Kincora. Then came Bimbo’s/Cha Cha, Manray, and the Bus Stop (which begat Pony). The strip’s demise got the expected long mega-coverage in The Stranger; the Cha Cha had been the longtime favorite watering hole of several Stranger staffers.
• The P-I catches on to a story first iterated a year or more, I believe, by the Weekly, that Costco treats its workers nicer than the Wall St. investment community thinks it should, resulting in greater sales and profits. Why, if word of this leaks out, the whole economic excuse for screwing the masses could collapse!
• You don’t have to go to Wash. DC to see Democrats cowering in submission. They’re right here, ramrodding an emergency session of the State Legislature to appease Tim Eyman.

• The Seahawks pulled off a come-from behind miracle victory in St. Louis, cemented when the other team couldn’t score from First and Goal in the last minutes.
• The Seattle Marathon: More profitable and less charitable than you may have thought.
• Do state citizens really suffer from “tax fatigue”? Perhaps not.
• That surplus ferry boat that was gonna be sold on eBay? Not surplus no more.
• Critics accuse software titans of being too mercenary toward little guys caught using file-shared warez.
• Nationally, old-line Southern retro-segregationist Trent Lott will resign from the U.S. Senate; perhaps so he can more quickly join the lobbying biz.
• Despite attempts by an online-retail trade association to promote “Cyber Monday,” the first office day after Thanksgiving’s not yet replacing “Black Friday” in the shopper’s lexicon.
• Besides, Bill Clinton’s treasury sec’y sez recession’s a-headin’ our way.

• It’s the end of the line, sad to say, for onetime Northwest timber giant Pope & Talbot. A court has approved a plan to auction off all of P&T’s remaining assets.
• A Bremerton area woman was arrested for gambling with counterfeit money at the Clearwater Casino. Authorities say she had meth in her purse at the time. Trust me: When you’re sober, those Hell Bank Notes from Chinatown gift shops don’t look a thing like U.S. currency.
• Some of Dino Rossi’s major donors in the 2004 gubernatorial election are backing incumbent Christine Gregoire this time around.
• The Everett Elks Club, the old Mill Town’s predominant social club and nightlife institution for pretty much ever, is being demolished for condos. Once boasting 5,000 members (about a third of the town’s adult male population), it peaked in the ’30s and ’40s, when private clubs in Washington were allowed to have slot machines and were the only places allowed to serve liquor by the drink. I was only in the current Everett Elks building (built in 1962) once, on a father-and-son night. I remember it as a vast, labyrinthine place, with a huge meeting room on the top floor, a male-only “Stag Room” bar and a showroom on the ground floor, and athletic facilities in a series of basements and sub-basements (swimming pool, gym, handball courts). Everything exuded an air of genteel masculunity, albeit toned town to fit the more prole tates of the local community. By that time, though, the Elks had begun their national decline; younger adults were far less interested in joining a group with an official pro-war stance and a white-males-only membership policy.
• And, oh yeah, the Cougs won the 2007 Apple Cup against the Huskies, with a spectacular last-minute touchdown run by the highly appropriately named Alex Brink.

In the early 1990s, “grownup toy” and gift shops sold a faux-Chia novelty product called “Barbara’s Bush.” Above, a less genteel product for a more X-treme time.

…the Cascadia Corridor doesn’t seem like such an island surrounded by hostile waters, as the inland West learns Democrats are cool.

• Another nightclub shooting. This one was at Sugar, near the Comet Tavern on Capitol Hill. Three patrons were injured. Apparently the shooter was celebrating “National Ammo Day” one or two days early.
• Mars Hill Church hasn’t opened its new Belltown branch yet, but the SeaTimes sez its five current locations, with 5,000 average total weekly attendance, make it “Seattle’s largest congregation.” And with growth has come the controversial firings of two pastors.
• Reps. Norm Dicks and Adam Smith say we’ve still really got to get the heck outta Iraq.
• Today’s online scare story comes to you from the state Attorney General, who wants us all to be deathly afraid of strangers offering Wi-Fi connections.
• Dino Rossi apparently was raising campaign funds before he officially announced he was running for Governor again.
• The bigot billboard near I-5 in Lewis County is still out there, with “Uncle Sam” spouting one cruel “joke” after another.
• Did ya know Washington State Ferries still actively uses 80-year-old boats? They are, and yeah, they’re showing their age.
• Caffe Vita is making documentary videos about the lives of coffee growers in various countries.

• Protestors almost stopped an Army cargo shipment from the Olympia waterfront to Fort Lewis. You’d think the officials in charge would know better than to sneak anything even peripherally associated with the Iraq war past the turf of Evergreeners….
• An Eastern Washington political scandal that doesn’t involve closeted gays: A newly-elected Republican member of the Yakima city council has admitted his wife posted a bunch of anonymous blog posts bashing the guy’s Democratic opponent.
• Just a week after the Roads n’ Transit referendum’s crash n’ burn, King County’s getting into the foot-ferry business. It’s taking over the Vashon-Seattle passenger-only route from the state, and looking into adding cross-Lake Washington service.
• Meanwhile, the county also planned to raise bus fares a quarter. It’s the first such rise in six years, and it comes just as County Exec Ron Sims is trying harder to push folks onto buses.
• And Gov. Gregoire says she’s taking over responsibility for planning and funding a replacement for the 520 bridge. R n’ T would’ve only funded a piece of the megaproject’s cost anyway.
• In a stunning blow to pundits who’d claimed last week’s local votes showed an anti-tax fervor, the measure to allow future school-funding votes to pass by a simple majority seems to be passing.
• In biz nooze, Redhook Ale Brewery (Seattle’s first microbrewer, dating back to 1982) is fully merging with Portland’s WIdmer Brothers. The combined firm will be based in Portland and maintain both companies’ brands…. Starbucks prepares to issue its latest financial results Thursday, amid questions whether the chain’s lost its way while supermarkets and fast-food chains add better cups o’ Joe…. Amazon.com’s launching an exclusive line of gay and lesbian themed jewelry items; visual motifs weren’t mentioned, but let’s hope they don’t include those ugly saturated-color rainbows.

…at 5 a.m. for the past week, ever since I had to last Tuesday.

That was Election Day around here, as you may recall. I was temping for King County Elections as a ballot tabulator.

I felt like a real big-city commuter, descending into the Bus Tunnel hours before dawn, clutching my traveling coffee mug like a security blanket. And this would be the day voters decided whether to become more of a big community, by moving further from the drudgery of the solitary commute toward the shared experience of public transit.

At least that’s how I interpreted the Roads-n’-Transit referendum. Yeah, it would add a lot of expensive, wasteful highway lanes. But it would also extend the fledgling light-rail line, perhaps from Lynnwood all the way to Tacoma. (I’d really like it to go from Tulalip to Olympia, plus branch lines along the 405 and 520 corridors. But the civic planning bureaucrats thought voters might prefer the healthy-but-unfamiliar taste of transit when mixed with the fatty-but-indulgent taste of roads. Who was I to argue?)

I was soon on bus route 174, the local to Sea-Tac, through the tunnel and the Sodo Busway, doglegging to Fourth Avenue South, then down the East Marginal Way industrial strip. It’s always been one of my favorite Metro runs. Especially during commuting hours. It’s a vehicle for working-class heroes and heroines on their way to Boeing, Jorgenson Steel, Associated Grocers, Costco, the Seattle Design Center, and assorted other living-wage employers. Along the way it passes such landmarks as Andy’s Diner, the born-again Christian vacuum cleaner store, the Western Bridge Gallery, the possibly soon-to-be-last Seattle Denny’s, and several surviving mom-and-pop motels.

My destination was a tired, sixties-era concrete office building on Boeing Field property, where King County had installed its Temporary Elections Annex (known internally as “The TEA”). I got off the bus one stop too far, requiring me to walk almost a quarter mile. They say it’s always darkest just before the dawn. This was an hour or two before the dawn and was plenty dark indeed, particularly with the low clouds and fog. Auto traffic was already getting heavy.

I entered the building, dropped my coat at the coat check, signed in on the sign-in sheets, picked up my temp ID necklace, and strolled into the Tabulation Room.

At 6:45 a.m., our supervisor (whom I’d previously met during a two-hour training session the previous week), gave us a short pep talk. Workers wheeled in steel carts bearing the courregated boxes containing vote-by-mail ballots. Promptly at 7, workers designated as “runners” handed some of the boxes to us.

In addition to the supervisor and four runners, there were political-party reps standing to one side, two computer operators (caged off from the rest of us behind outdoor chain-link fencing), and nearly 30 of us tabulators. This turned out to be far more than the job needed; I suspect administrators overhired because they wanted to test a ramping-up of the election procedures, in preparation for going to all-mail balloting.

Despite what you might have read on certain wingnut blogs in 2004, King County Elections runs a tight, efficient ship. Within one day of mailing out the ballots, they’d started to receive and process them. Every received ballot went through a series of steps in a series of rooms (opening, signature verification, checking for “overvote” errors, etc.) before it was boxed up and sent to tabulation. By law, tabulation could only occur on or after election day.

The tabulating process is a ritual in itself. First, I’d “break the seal” on the box (a plastic wristband-type device) with an envelope cutter. After double-checking various numbers written outside and on a slip inside the box, I ran the ballots (up to 300 per box) through the counting machine. (Yes, lefty conspiracy theorists, all the machines are from the dreaded Diebold Election Systems.)

It all output to a stack of server computers behind the fence. But the underlying technology is older than mainframes, going back to the punch cards that recorded the patterns for 19th century textile looms. King County’s machines now use optical scanning instead of punched “chads,” but the principle’s the same. A stack of cards gets run through a reading machine. The machine sees the proper marks in the proper places and sends word to add the proper digits to the proper tallies.

With such a major mechanical component to the process, there will, of course, be errant situations. Most of these involved faults with the mechanism that fed the ballots through the machine. These uncounted ballots were simply re-fed; the second run usually did the trick. Most boxes had one or two ballots with worse problems, including physical damage, that required them to be sent to the “dup” room (where staffers would duplicated their votes on fresh cards).

In 11 hours, as our supervisor told us the following day, my fellow tabulators and I processed more than 141,000 ballots. There was no real time to detect voting patterns; but I couldn’t help but notice that the ballots I got, which came from all over the county, expressed no great fondness for Roads-n’-Transit.

By the end of the work day, darkness had resumed outside. I had enough pep left to go drinking, at least briefly. That’s when I learned R n’ T was a goner, and with it immediate hopes for a comprehensive transport solution.

Then it was home, then to a quick bath and bed. Then it was a noise like the old Star Trek red alert sound. It was the new fire alarm in my building. Nothing threatening, just a kitchen fire on a lower floor; but it kept me outside in the cold for an hour.

Because of the relatively low voter turnout (do we still call it “turnout” after it does all absentee?) and the aforementioned overhiring of us temps, I had only 11 hours of further work over the rest of the week. The work I did get was calm, stress-free, rote procedural work, the sort of thing I tend to like.

Next year, the TEA will be replaced by an all-new ballot-processing facility in Renton. By next November, every ballot cast in the county will go through there, via the Postal Service (no more in-person polling places). Let’s hope it continues to go this smoothly.

And let’s hope I can learn to sleep in a little later.

P.S.: In case you were wondering, the more popular write-in candidate names I saw included Homer Simpson, Stephen Colbert, voters’ cats and dogs, and, in the Venus Velasquez race, “Ima Drunk.”

Maddeningly, MSNBC’s official transcript of Keith Olbermann’s latest “Special Comment,” on the silencing of a torture critic, is incomplete. The parts of the text that are up are righteously damning enough.

(Wait: Here’s the whole text now.)

Sound Transit wants to extend its yet-unfinished light rail line all the way from Seattle to Tacoma. King County exec Ron Sims doesn’t like the idea.

This is an example of political turf-holding at its most basic. I disagree with Sims’s position, but respect him for taking it.

Part of Sims’s job is to promote King County as a place to live and work. Enabling easier commuting to/from Pierce County doesn’t aid that mission. It might even potentially harm that mission.

But in the big-big picture, we’re an economically integrated metroplex and had better start acting like one.

As Seattle becomes ever more haughty and costly, Tacoma’s more affordable housing is more vital. So is Tacoma’s status as a funky, unpretentious, working-class anchor.

Besides, I’d love easier car-free access to the Java Jive and the Fife Poodle Dog.

John Edwards vows, if elected, to crack down on those annoying prescription drug commercials.

…Tabella is selling its space to Ballard’s Mars Hill Church. So, instead of drunken gay-bashers on Saturday nights, Western Avenue will have sober gay-denouncers on Sunday mornings. Yes, that’s an improvement.

IF ANYONE WAS AT the big and costly Hillary Clinton to-do in town Monday night, I’d love to hear about it. I do know the rightist protest scene outside Benaroya Hall wasn’t so big as it had been at her prior visits.

PARKING-LOT CZAR Joe Diamond may be dead, but he’s still a stern taskmaster. Diamond company officials earlier this month said they’d forbid tailgating parties before Seahawks football games on Diamond-owned lots. Now comes a revised edict: Go ahead and party, but don’t be seen with any booze.

SEATTLE’S MOST FAMOUS “We Never Close” restaurant is closed today. A chimney fire has shut down 13 Coins since about 4:30 a.m. Tuesday; it may reopen for tonight’s dinner shift.

IN VANISHING SEATTLE NEWS, the famous Wonder Bread neon sign will rise again, on the apartment building that’s replacing the former Central Area bakery site. Once again, the mark of wholesome blandness will draw motorists to what has traditionally been Seattle’s least whitebread neighborhood.

KUDOS TO 13-year-old Aaron Furrer of Monroe and his Guernsey heifer Dot for winning a big juniors-division prize at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WI. Buried deep in the hereby-linked article: Furrer’s family can no longer turn a profit on their 46-acre dairy farm; his dad now works as an electrical contractor just to hold on to the land.

OVERHYPED TRAGEDY OF THE DAY: “A jury Monday convicted a former stripper turned Olympia, Wash. soccer mom in the decade-old murder of her fiance. Mechele Linehan, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder for conspiring with another fiance to kill Kent Leppink, who was shot three times in 1996 near Hope, AK. Prosecutors say Linehan wanted Leppink’s $1 million insurance policy.”

IF YOU BELIEVE what you read in the papers (or on the papers’ web sites), Shirley McLaine says Dennis Kucinich once saw a UFO outside Graham, WA. Make up your own comment here.