Mayor McGinn found places at Seattle Center to put both a for-profit Chihuly glass-art gallery and a new home for KEXP.

The latter, which will include a live-performance studio with viewing windows, will be built out with no city funds. Expect even-longer pledge drives on the station starting next year.

The space will be in the Northwest Court buildings. That’s where the Vera Project is now and SIFF Cinema will be soon.

Of course, this means all of the Northwest Court’s rental spaces will be taken over by permanent tenants. Hence, they are no longer available for Bumbershoot’s visual and literary arts exhibits. This will result in these programs either getting diminished, or relocated to other Center spots. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

“The Funky Monkey 104.9,” one of the last commercial stations still playing new hard rock in the region, has flipped to “Gen X,”  a 1990s nostalgia format. I’m not ready for this, let’s put it at that.

This day began for me by reading about the 90th anniversary of commercial radio.

It ends for me with thoughts about possibly this city’s greatest radio personality, Dave Niehaus, whose death was announced this evening.

He was the Mariners’ chief announcer for all of the team’s 34 seasons. He was heard on every game the team played with only 101 exceptions.

Most of those rare days off occurred in recent years. While his voice never lost its timbre, he’d become visibly shaky while seen holding his mic on FSN’s pregame telecasts. His quick wit and command of the game had begun to occasionally falter. Longtime listeners (including charter listeners like me) could tell he was in the twilight of his career.

Yet he held on to the very end, to the last regular season game of 2010.

Niehaus was the one thru-line from the Kingdome days to today, from the early years of Al Cowens and Funny Nose Glasses Night to this year’s half season of pitching ace Cliff Lee.

His voice, even when narrating tales of diamond futility, always held the promise of summer. And now it always will.

Not only does next Monday bring the televised return of Conan O’Brien, but it brings an end to Seattle’s original all sleaze-talk station. Fisher Broadcasting is switching KVI-AM from conservatalk to oldies music.

Insert your joke about but-they’ve-been-mired-in-the-past-all-this-time here.

“A smart heroin addict is still a heroin addict.”

A Facebook correspondent said that to me, after I rebutted his anti-television screed.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

I’m writing to confess something.

Yes, I am an addict.

Specifically, I am addicted to what members of certain online message boards call “stim.”

That’s short for “stimuli.”

In my case, for a broad array of mental/emotional stimuli.

Among many other things, I am addicted to:

• The beat and the chords and the melody of a great pop song.
• The urgency of news headlines, as delivered in any medium.
• The telegraph-inspired urgency of old network radio “news on the hour” themes.
• The scrolling headlines and stock tickers on cable news channels.
• The wild juxtapositions of time/space/narrative in an old newspaper.
• The similar juxtapositions in a well-curated blog.
• The sound of a phonograph needle hitting the scratchy outer groove of a vinyl record.
• The frenetic beauty of a Merrie Melodies cartoon.
• The typography and design of old magazines and newspapers.
• The look and build of an old building, even one that was considered ordinary in its time.
• The all-out attempts at persuasion seen in old advertisements, pamphlets, political badges, and printed pop ephemera of all types.
• The glow of a neon sign; the stasis of its daylight background base.
• The noise, beats, sights, and smells of many industrial processes (including those that were sampled in the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack).
• The poignancy of urban decay, of streets and structures whose once-noble aspirations have faded with time.
• The “instant insight” of a well turned phrase.
• The “gotcha” moment of a particularly awful pun.
• The sight of a female figure, revealed in artistic, alluring, and/or fun ways.
• All of the sounds, touches, tastes, and scents associated with heterosexual pleasure.
• A sugar rush.
• A caffeine rush.
• The sated feeling after a big meal.
• The exotic thrill of a foreign film, particularly a foreign mass-entertainment film. The song-and-dance spectacles of Bollywood, in which generalized sensuality triumphs over sexual prudery. The audacious blare of an Italian “giallo” soundtrack. The milieu of early British Hitchcock films, just foreign enough to unsettle.

Strangely enough, several genres and industries designed wholly around “stim” don’t particularly enthrall me. Casino gambling; modern video games; big budget special effects movies—I just don’t respond to ’em.

The book industry site Publishing Perspectives wrote recently about Barry Eisler, a liberal blogger and an author of “political thriller” novels.

He’s got a new novel out called Inside Out. It’s about, among other hot topics, America’s use of torture during the previous decade.

Eisler’s plugging the book on other lefty sites and radio shows.

Publishing Perspectives‘ take on this campaign: Why haven’t the  liberal media plugged books before?

Well, they have.

Ed Schultz, Jim Hightower, and the pre-senatorial Al Franken have each put out several essay collections.

Olbermann and Maddow are always interviewing authors and recommending titles. They sometimes plug the same book on three or more consecutive cablecasts.

The Nation has had at least two book-preview issues a year for as long as I’ve been reading it.

Huffington Post and Daily Kos each have plenty of book pieces.

As for this site, we’ll get back to looks at books soon. Promise.

Onetime Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg, who was more recently one of Air America Radio’s revolving bosses, says the liberal talk radio distributor could have had a chance, had its organizers been willing to lose money and plea for donations.

Air America Radio, the high-profile attempt to build a national network devoted exclusively to left-O-center talk, suddenly shut down all its live programming on Thursday. Affiliate stations will be supplied with rerun shows through Monday evening, while the company plans an orderly shutdown.

This is NOT the end of liberal talk radio.

The local stations (such as the CBS-owned KPTK in Seattle) that had carried AAR’s shows have also carried liberal shows from other distributors. These shows, such as those of Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller, will continue. Several former AAR hosts are also now with other distributors (including Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, and Mike Malloy).

The remaining AAR personalities are now free to sign with these other distributors. They include the Seattle-based Ron Reagan, the last AAR host still carried on KPTK’s pre-midnight weekday schedule.

So what did AAR in? Why did it flail about in fiscal instability for six years?

From the start, its reach was bigger than its grasp.

It wanted to start up from scratch as an all-day, coast-to-coast, unified force in broadcasting. That’s not how antenna-based broadcasting works. You’ve gotta start one station at a time, and build each show in each region. That’s what the conservative talkers did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s what the syndicators of Schultz, Miller, et al. do.

Feliks Banel offers fond recollections of the late great KJET, the AM modern-rock station that ruled a small but eventually-influential portion of Seattle’s listening audience from 1982 to 1988.

…its five-part Post-Intelligencer remembrance series. No new information here, just memories—and one really retro image of Jean Godden.

The legendary radio commentator began his national career in 1951 with what, at the time, was a standard program format—15 minutes of news headlines mixed with personal opinions. Harvey outlasted all of that format’s other, now forgotten practitioners (Lowell Thomas, Fulton Lewis Jr., Gabriel Heatter, etc.). Like many of these forebearers, Harvey maintained an attitude of just-plain-folks populism while he advocated conservative policies that pleased big corporate advertisers. And like a lot of radio conservatives past and present, his “hot” personality translated poorly into the “cooler” aesthetic of television.

Bonneville International, which just regained ownership of KIRO Radio last year, will switch KIRO-AM to all sports talk next April. KIRO-AM’s news and news-talk fare will move exclusively to 97.3 FM.

Thus will end more than 35 years of what was successively billed as “KIRO Newsradio 7,” then “KIRO Newsradio 71,” then “710 KIRO.” (Each more precise frequency reference responded to the prevalence of more precise tuning displays on car radios.)

KIRO-AM is one of the city’s oldest stations. It goes back to the Old Time Radio golden age, during which it amassed a larger collection of CBS Radio network recordings than CBS itself had (a collection of phonograph records that’s now owned by the UW). It eased into a middle-of-the-road music and news format by the early 1960s.

In the early 1970s, Bonneville spent its way to the top of the local ratings by ditching the DJs (except on weekends) and hiring a full news reporting staff.

I heard Nixon’s resignation speech on KIRO. I heard the start of the first Gulf War on KIRO. The voices of Bill Yeend, Dave Ross, Jim French, the late Wayne Cody, et al. are permanently etched in my brain’s ROM.

It was weird, on Election Night, to bring a cheap, FM-only portable radio to my temp office site and try to listen (during a dinner break) to NPR’s blathering “analysis” of returns that hadn’t come in yet. KIRO had already begun simulcasting its news-talk on FM, but I couldn’t pull in that signal from where I was.

But that’s one reason why they’re doing this. The public now associates AM talk with looney right-wing demagogues. FM is now where the targeted demographic audience segments go for everything except sports (with a few notable exceptions such as KIXI and KPTK).

Like many “sixties youth icons,” Carlin was already 30 by the summer-O-love. Aside from being an anti-censorship icon (who nonetheless got his share of “family entertainment” roles, he was one of the last bridges between the Ed Sullivan and Saturday Night Live eras. He also virtually invented the pay-TV comedy special genre, that most direct of storytelling formats.

…a few days since we last met. But here are some recent events in the nooze:

• A plan’s been announced to keep the Sonics, or move in some other NBA team to replace ’em. Yeah, it involves public arena subsidies. But the arena in question would still be our good ol’ KeyArena/Coliseum. And private interests would pick up a huger share of the tab than in any previous scheme. Of course, there’s the li’l matter of convincing current owner Clay Bennett and NBA commissioner David Stern (who hates Seattle even more than the Seattle Times editorial board does).
• No matter how much money the UW raises in its many assorted fundraising/begging programs, it just keeps on making tuition ever-less affordable. Congress doesn’t like it.
• Some self-styled radical environmentalists want to preserve exurban forest lands from sprawl. Their solution: Set fire to an unoccupied cul-de-sac, a fire which, if set at some other time of the year, could conceivably spread and burn said forest land.
• The first televised Mariners game of the pre-season is on local cable at noon today (Monday). I know it’s a game that doesn’t “count,” but hey, neither did the Ms’ last 20 or so games last season.
• Once you start looking into Port o’ Seattle corruption, it can truly become a bottomless pit.
• How to get high school kids interestedin reading newspapers: Run sensational surveys of students’ oral-sex experiences. (Hey, it’s the taste sensation that’s sweeping the nation!)
• Airbus, with a domestic company fronting for it, got the Air Force tanker plane contract Boeing really really wanted. Next stop: litigation.
• Here’s what to do the next time you see a bus with an unconscious driver heading your way.
• Since certain right-wing radio guys have no qualms about using or misusing people’s names in order to make character-assassination implications, let’s compare Vladmir Putin’s handpicked successor/flunky Dimitry Medvedev with the locally based GOP-talk spewer Michael Medved: One is a sniveling, butt-kissing toady to a ruthless, anti-democratic despot with delusions of godhood. And one is the new President of Russia.

…could possibly resist the clarion call of Obamamania? Douglas County, that’s who.

In other nooze:

• As you probably don’t recall, the reason WashState has both caucuses and primaries is because Bush pere‘s people cried foul after Pat Robertson’s people swamped our ’88 GOP caucuses. This time, it’s Huckabee’s people crying foul.
• Your Museum of Flight: Singlehandedly bringing back the stewardess fetish.
• Note to KEXP main man John Richards: You can host a local Seattle show, or you can move to NYC. Choose one.
• Developers’ plans for the part of First United Methodist that won’t be saved: One of them angular, reflective glass towers you see in 60 Minutes segments about emerging Far Eastern capitals.
• Doesn’t anybody wanna buy Getty Images?
• Actual headline (for the print version of this story): “How far will Microsoft go to overcome Yahoo’s rejection?” Some handy tips: Chocolate, self-esteem classes, regular gym workouts, a ‘pity party’ with friends, a nice cry, then get on with your own life.