• Missed the transit of Venus? Fret not! You can still catch The Myrtle of Venus!
• The lovely graphic at the left of this site’s “sidebar” column, inviting donations for the Cafe Racer shooting victims, was done by our ol’ pal Nick Vroman, an ex-Seattleite now in Japan. He’s also got a lovely site reviewing Japanese cult films.
• With the arrival of Wednesday came The Stranger’s package of Cafe Racer shooting and mourning articles.
• Joel Connelly calls the “war on drugs” America’s “second lost war of the half century.”
• Contemporary art, product logos, graphic design, even web page design—all these fields and more are frequently invaded by rank copycats, whose thievery can be caught red-handed at the site You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice.
• Health Scare O’ the Week: the allegedly imminent arrival of drug-resistant gonorrhea.
• The next frontier in confronting idiot misogyny: Multiplayer gaming.
• Cell phone users are using their cell phones as phones a lot less. Companies plan to respond by raising rates. Huh?
• Our heroine Amanda Palmer wanted to raise $100,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, to release and promote her next record. She ended up raking in a cool million.
• Social-economy guru Richard Florida offers up some theories behind the revival of downtown retail around the country.

• More remembrances of the Cafe Racer shooting victims come from the blog of Georgetown bar 9 Lb. Hammer and from 14-year-old Sam David, whose parents Marlow Harris and Jo David curate Racer’s “Official Bad Art Museum of Art” permanent exhibit.
• Memorials and benefit shows for the surviving victim and the families of the deceased victims continue to be scheduled and put together at a rapid pace. They include a service at St. Mark’s and a jazz jam outside the cafe, both on Sunday evening.
• What the 1 Percent do in their free time: Ex-Microsoft bigwig Nathan Myhrvold has got his own whole newly-created cooking genre. It’s called “Modernist Cuisine,” and it’s got a professional staff, a huge six-volume manual, plus a best-of cookbook for home use.
• The several people who’ve left SeattlePI.com in the past year have, to a person, declined to comment on the understaffed “online newspaper” or why they left it. Until now. Cartoonist-columnist David Horsey, now syndicated thru the L.A. Times, has written a “future of news” piece in which he mentions his ex-employer, and implies that that site has become a “click whore.”
• The reason news sites behave so desperately to gain every single “page view” is that ad revenues per page view are low and getting lower. Meanwhile, Michael Wolff says any fiscal hope for ad-supported content sites is about to implode and soon. The immediate culprit, according to Wolff, is Facebook, with its vast “inventory” of spaces and its investor expectations. But he claims that even without Facebook leading a race to the bottom,

…the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people’s behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising’s impact.…

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

• Five days and counting until Wash. state’s booze biz goes all private. Expecting greater competition to lower the price of getting besotted? Guess again, my fun-loving friends.
• Social media: a great way to organize group bullying episodes.
• David Lowery has a long, detailed, snark-filled rant about how today’s music-download biz is often worse for indie musicians than the old record biz had been. It’s also got relevance for our ongoing “future of news” topic, because part of Lowery’s shtick is to dismantle the “web gurus” and their evangelical pronouncements for/defenses of today’s online content business-as-usual.
• Yes, the Twilight series makes Emily Temple’s list of “epidemically overrated books.” But so do The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and even Finnegans Wake.
• Arun Gupta at AlterNet ponders whether the Feds are planting violent agitators among Occupy activists in order to discredit the whole movement.
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was quoted as saying that it’s harder to get a minimum-wage increase past his Legislature than gay marriage. To me that’s perfectly understandable, if the politics of gay rights are anything there like they are here (i.e., as a nice, clean, upscale, white “minority” movement).

pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com

• What’s the world’s most prolific retail brand today? 7-Eleven! And, after a few years of retreating from parts of the U.S., it’s expanding like mad.
• Coming next month and tons more exciting than any ol’ glass gallery, it’s Seattle Center’s first Seattle Science Festival! Hear Steven Hawking’s voice box live and in person!
• Nearly 40 percent of Puget Sound homeowners owe more money on their homes than the homes are now worth. Nearly nine percent owe twice as much money as their homes are worth (twice the national average).
• Anthony Robinson explains “how to talk politics with religious voters.”
• How does the Seattle LGBTQLSMFT pride parade thank the politicians who helped pass marriage equality in Wash. state? By charging them almost twice as much money to appear in the parade as it charges corporate entrants.
• Amazon’s quitting the virulently far-right lobbying group ALEC, and will make its warehouses more hospitable workplaces.
• Oregon native nations say they don’t mind high schools using Indian sports-team names, and that they do mind when PC whites try to ban such names.
• Comcast/NBC Universal might buy up all of MSNBC.com. The web site is still half owned by Microsoft (and still has a major editorial presence in Bellevue), even after NBC took full ownership of the same-named cable channel.
• The TV networks would really, really like Dish Network to not offer an “ad skipping” feature on its DVRs.
• Jonathan Chiat parses the “conservative fantasy history of civil rights,” in which the likes of Ronald Reagan and Strom Thurmond were supposedly not the racists they really were.
• Yes, a sexually demeaning image of a woman is still wrong even if the woman being insulted is anti-choice.
• Single-load “laundry pods,” delicious but deadly.
• The province of Quebec now demands that all political protests get official police approval first. Protesters immediately protested the law, in a big way.

This is the Great Wheel, now taking shape at Pier 57 on the waterfront. It is already the greatest addition to Seattle public architecture since the Koohaas downtown library. The rest of the waterfront should be redeveloped around it.

• Is Mike McGinn becoming just like all Seattle’s other recent mayors, a “progressive” who totally sucks up to the real estate developers?
• The state liquor stores won’t all close on May 31. Most will close one to four days earlier. A few have already closed. The stores that are still open have dwindling inventory. Since the supermarkets don’t start selling booze ’til June 1, consider stocking up for the Memorial Day weekend now.
• Getty Images, the Seattle-based king of stock photo licensing, may be up for sale (again).
• The Chicago head office of the company now calling itself Boeing got shut down by anti-NATO protesters. That almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if they’d stayed in Seattle Tukwila.
• South Lake Union is finally getting something useful (besides the Ace Hardware franchise): a Goodwill store!
• The proposed new basketball/hockey arena will work out just fine traffic-wise.
• Breaking news: people like to get stuff if they don’t have to pay for it.
• Hewlett-Packard announces huge layoffs; blames declining demand for PCs in favor of other digital-media devices.
• Paul Krugman, seemingly effortlessly, totally dismantles the Romney economic platform….
• …while author Charles Ferguson explains how “Wall Street became criminalized.” (As if it hadn’t always been so.)
• Unlike author Patricia Williams, I don’t blame book bannings and other assaults against public education on an “anti-intellectual” American people, but on the right-wing politicians who actually committed the assaults. Just as I don’t blame the megabanks’ crimes on their depositors.
• Knute Berger offers some “Simple Rules for Staying Sane in Seattle.” My own first rule: make sure you were already sane before you got here.
• The company whose merged predecessors gave us such great product names as Cheez Whiz, Cool Whip, and Chicken in a Biskit announced it’s de-merging. The spinoff company’s new name: “Mondelez.” Doesn’t quite fall trippingly off the tongue.
• In science fiction and astrology, “Planet X” (as in the Roman numeral for 10) is a hypothetical tenth planet orbiting out beyond Pluto. Now, some astronomer says he’s found it, and it’s three times the size of Earth. No word yet on whether it holds massive deposits of illudium phosdex, the shaving cream atom.

dangerousminds.net

• With the death of Robin Gibb, only one Bee Gee (Barry) is still with us. I could try to say something about this tragic loss; but, you know, it’s only words.…
• The UK mag NME lists “50 Massively Depressing Facts About Music.” Most of them have to do with great artists who’ve sold a heckuva lot fewer units than mediocre artists with great marketing. In other words, the same gripe the oldsters used to say about that teenybopper “rock n’ roll” crap pushing out quality material like “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”.
• As SIFF moves into full gear, a UK film critic has pot out a book listing 100 Ideas That Changed Film. I haven’t seen the full book, but I have seen the list. Not included in it: product placement, Tyler Perry, or “soundtrack” records that don’t include the actual music in the movie.
• The downtown condo biz is apparently back from the dead.
• Wearing hot pink duct tape in lieu of a top in a bar: cool. Freaking out and attacking cops: not so cool.
• The big Facebook IPO is apparently a failure. The offering’s megabank underwriters had to step in and maneuver in order to keep the stock’s price at or near the offering price through the course of the first day. Perhaps “retail investors” felt Facebook was too reminiscent of the first-wave dot coms (no real “product,” just a lot of site visitors (for now; that could drastically change). Or perhaps there just aren’t as many suckers who still have money to waste anymore.
• Thanks in part to our country’s innumerable tax loopholes, the U.S. has done better than some countries at keeping its own super-rich, instead of losing ’em to citizenships-of-convenience in the Caribbean or Singapore (or wherever Mick Jagger officially resides these days).
• “Black bloc” anarchist protests are getting more violent. Official reactions to them are getting more violent than that, on a virtually logarithmic scale.
• Radical playwright Bertolt Brecht had some caustic caution words against folk who considered themselves too good to be involved in politics. (I don’t know whether Brecht said these words before or after he became a stooge for the East German regime.)

u.s. geological survey

Happy Mount St. Helens Day!

• Catholic anti-right-wing-archbishop protests: they’re now held every Wednesday, and they’re not for Catholics only.
• Opponents of liquor privatization in Wash. state are making one last-ditch legal challenge. They might get a decision in two weeks, after the state liquor stores will have already closed.
• There are now fewer non-Hispanic white babies in the U.S. than there are all other ethnicities of babies put together.
• The TED speech by an early Amazon investor about economic inequality and how the rich aren’t really job creators? The speech that wasn’t put up on TED’s site? It’s now been put up on TED’s site.
• And here’s the video of Children’s Hospital cancer patients lip-syncing a Kelly Clarkson anthem.
• More than 30 percent of British adults plan to buy an e-book in the next six months.
• Is North America approaching “peak car“?

zgf architects via seattle times

• If you’re gonna build a condo tower that’s utterly, totally out of scale with the historic district immediately adjacent to it, it might as well be a real PoMo monolith.
• UW researchers say they may be able to prove the existence of “gaydar.”
• With a little over two weeks to go before the state liquor stores go away forever, some of the auction sales of the outlets fell through. Eighteen stores will be re-bid.
• Now we know why they call it Bitter Lake. It’s had raw sewage flowing into it for at least a decade.
• The dream is over: Dennis Kucinich won’t run for Congress from Wash. state.
• Amazon’s first non-Bezos-family investor gave a hot speech about income inequality in America, and how rich folks like himself really just aren’t “job creators.” (It was given at a TED conference, but isn’t one of the videos posted on that organization’s site. But you can read it; which I prefer doing anyway.) (And to be fair, here’s a different economic-inequality speech that was posted on TED’s site.)
• Is this the beginning of the end for soft drink sales in America? If the fizz really does die out, remember: Those who forget New Coke are doomed to repeat it.

The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.

• King County Exec Dow Constantine was caught with an email revealing he’d had an affair with a co-worker. At a press conference, “No Drama Dow” (who has an unmarried live-in partner) quietly admitted the indiscretion.
• The city and county could announce they’re signing off on the Sodo arena plan as early as today.
• KOMO’s Ken Schram insists that the poor (and everybody else) should still get to buy things with cash.
• A community activist group says light rail has accelerated the gentrification of the Rainier Valley, making the mixed-race neighborhood a lot paler.
• Video footage helps a May Day protester escape prosecution.
• The wages of not supporting the iPhone: T-Mobile USA‘s laying off another 900 workers.
• First it was nuns. Now the right-wing Catholic bishops are harassing the Girl Scouts. (Make your own joke about how everybody knows they prefer boys.)
• ‘Future of News’ Dept.: A spokescritter for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad news app The Daily (no relation to the infinitely more distinguished UW Daily) insists the online newspaper is on the road to profitability.
• Even with health insurance, medical care is getting prohibitively expensive.
• America’s real first gay president? Buchanan.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks, “Why do conservatives hate freedom?”…
• …while “MinistryOfTruth” at Daily Kos makes brutal accusations toward your sterotypical teabag conservative:

I don’t think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn’t exactly like you.

• Here are some lovely pix of a Kansas City amusement arcade circa 1968. Not a single video monitor in sight.

sobadsogood.com

This is from Sunday’s “Color Run” downtown, a 5K benefitting Ronald McDonald House. Runners were splashed with “color dust” at points along the route. (Note: This is not at all to be confused with the 2005 teen novel The Rainbow Party, or with the false rumor that that novel depicted a real-life fad.)

• Forbes calls Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer the “worst CEO” of a major U.S. company.
• Is the time right again for huge, dense residential mega-projects? The Seattle Housing Authority thinks so. It wants to rebuild Yesler Terrace (a WWII-era low-income apartment site) with a whopping 3,000 privately developed “market rate” units plus office space. That would help subsidize at least as many low-income units as are there now. It would also create a huge new upscale neighborhood just uphill from the International District, and would sop up perhaps 20 percent of new housing construction activity in the whole city.
• Item: A Seattle restaurant’s basement was one huge pot growing operation. Comment: Once again, life imitates the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Guess what? The hedge fund tycoon who wants to own a Seattle basketball team might use the team and the arena deal as hedge fund opportunities!
• Tragic news: Tacoma’s selling two closed library buildings in low income neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ acquaintance Trimpin has another mechanical music/art installation. And it’s even more haunting than his previous works.
• Lit-blogger Nicole Cushing has a beautiful interview with a Seattle treasure, horror author and punk/goth scene vet Willum Pugmire.
• Dept. of Forgotten American History: Author/activist/songwriter Julia Ward Howe created Mother’s Day as an antiwar statement.
• Here’s a concise explanation of just why “business people are terrible at governing.”
• From Cleveland to Pittsburgh and even Detroit, the young and hip (but not rich) are flocking to the Rust Belt cities!
• There’s a new iPad-only online satire magazine called “Punch!”. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the legendary UK satire magazine Punch (published from 1841 to 1992!). Instead, its makers are inspired by the 1980s-1990s U.S. snark mag Spy.
• Publishers of e-books have determined that the best way to keep their authors’ names in the public eye is to have new stuff by them two or more times a year. This means established “name” authors are busier than ever churnin’ out the product.
• Do you, like these e-book authors, desperately need writing inspiration? Take random gibberish letters. Run them through a spell checker. Boom! Random words and phrases to trigger your imagination.

npr.org

• NPR’s Lam Thuy Vo has made a lovely infographic about the billions in earnings resulting from America’s “exports of ideas.” Movies and TV shows bring in $13 billion in overseas revenue. Software: $35 billion. Trademark licenses: $14 billion. “Industrial processes” (patents): almost $36 billion. Now you know why the “intellectual property” industries are so extremely adamant about sealing any potential leak in their legal privileges.
• Elsewhere in infographic-land, here’s a visual essay delineating how marketers, and those who sell services to marketers, have always gamed the system in both “old” and “new” media.
• Obama came to Seattle right after outing himself as a gay-marriage supporter. Yes, there was a lot of cheering for a calculated, Clinton-esque “triangulation” move, carefully strategized to gain more votes than it would cost. And I’m fine with that (the announcement and the local rave reactions to it).
• Tim Eyman: Complete tool of Big Oil and the 1 percent.
• A non-native redwood tree was planted in Tacoma more than 100 years ago. It was recently cut down, executed for the crime of having roots undermining nearby sewers and house foundations.
• Note to news sites: Editing stuff before you post it is a good idea. Especially with headlines involving the name “Dicks.”
• I’ve defended Amazon about other things, but they really oughta keep the HVAC in their warehouses in working order.
• Couldn’t happen to un-nicer guys: Chase loses a cool $2 billion on a single hedge fund.
• A Seventeen reader is petitioning the not-as-classy-as-it-used-to-be magazine. She wants it to depict models more realistically, without excessive Photoshopping.
• The singer for the band Against Me! says he’s going to become a woman. I can just imagine the package tour with Jayne County, Genesis P. Orridge, and Wendy Carlos.
• Public-sector unions in the UK (a place where such institutions still have a big measure of clout) have staged massive protests against government “austerity”…
• …while here at home, two TruthOut.org contributors claim U.S. conservatism has “hit rock bottom,” having devolved into “an unappealing philosophy of political exclusion, environmental degradation, and economic hopelessness.”

(Just a little dose of random-osity for you all today.)

• Everyday household chemicals (antihistamines, cleaners, flame retardants) become toxins when they get into our rivers.
• Flu and whooping cough have closed an entire high school.
• My colleague/compatriot/rival in the local history trade, Paul Dorpat, got named a “Living Landmark” by the preservation group Historic Seattle.
• The next waterfront traffic reroute begins today.
• The (Ron) Paulines may make procedural trouble at the state GOP convention.
• Noam Chomsky warns the Occupiers they’d better prepare to be in it for the long haul.

meowonline.org

• Music/performance-art goddess and ex-Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer explains the secret to her astounding success at raising a recording budget thru Kickstarter. It’s all about the long work of gathering and nurturing as many online supporters as you can:

Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that I curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on… all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY.… And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.

• After nearly a decade of study and planning, Seattle’s finally giving up on the idea of a city-owned broadband network. Pathetic.
• Time is running out for any hope of saving the historic streamlined ferry Kalakala. Estimated cost of a full restoration: $50 million.
• Ah, if only the Mariners still had some of the players they’d let slip away. If only….
• A Long Island, NY woman is accused of using her hot-dog truck as a cover for arranging “compensated dates” (to use a recent Japanese euphemism). No “sausage” or “buns” puns here, at least not today.
• A Utah woman claims to have found cocaine packed in a box of tampons. Just think of it as an extra measure of pain relief that also leaves you feeling fresh.
• Bill Maher says what everyone except Fox News viewers already knows—that many of the most fervent Obama haters are racist, with different degrees of denial.
• Meanwhile, a Washington Monthly writer believes the Presidential election will be decided by Hispanic voters (i.e., one of the groups the Rabid Right is most virulently bigoted against).
• There’s an anonymous novel out of Portland (originally self published by the author, who only calls himself “The Author”). It’s getting a lot of attention. It’s about a young man’s doomed relationship with “someone who considers Courtney Love to be her role model.” What makes it extra-special is it’s formatted like one of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” kids’ books. Only every choice “you” make leads to the same miserable ending. I also like the title: Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life.
• Not only are grad students getting buried in piles of student-loan debt, they might not even get into the careers for which they’re studying (cf. the rising number of Ph.Ds on food stamps).
• A marketing analyst calls 2012 “the year of inverse retro-futurism.” Whatever the heck that is.

liem bahneman, via komo-tv

• There’s a moon! It’s in the sky! It’s called the supermoon!
• From the Sunday Seattle Times: The Smith Tower is on the rebound; there are sympathetic words toward Occupy Seattle sympathizers; the ex-Kleenex factory in Everett is a toxic waste site; and local students are learning to compose soundtracks for movies and video games.
• We knew it was coming. Now the original QFC supermarket on Roosevelt Way closes on Saturday.
• What the heck does Jay Inslee gotta do to get some press?
• Silicon Valley analyst Farhad Manjoo can’t figure out Amazon’s long-term business strategy, and ponders whether the company even has one. Hey, I don’t fully understand gravity, but I still know it’s there. Of course Amazon has a strategy. Several of them. It aims to be the world leader in online sales of tangible physical stuff, plus intangible digital stuff; to be the go-to company for online retail back-end functions and fulfillment; to rule “cloud computing” and outsourced computer services; and to remain the 500-lb. gorilla of the book biz. There now, wasn’t that simple?
• At the same site, Trevor Gilbert believes he’s figured out why Seattle has so many leading video-game companies.
• The voters of France, like the protestors of Greece, have utterly and thoroughly rejected recession-extending “austerity” regimes. They’ve elected their first Socialist government in 16 years and sending Nicolas Sarkozy packing. Will this send Sarkozy’s wife, ex-supermodel Carla Bruni, back on the runways?

designboom.com

• The resurgent micro-car movement has a new achievement, the micro RV!
• Lightning, mudslides. Just another mid-spring day in Seattle.
• Gov. Gregoire takes the bold step of insisting Wash. state needs new tax revenue, now that she’s no longer running for anything.
• A (female) anti-choice activist was invited to speak at the UW by campus Catholics. The lecture’s deliberately provocative title: “Do Women Have Too Many Rights?”. Pro-choice women, naturally, showed up to protest and to put the truth to the speaker’s lies. Things did not go smoothly.
• Roger Valdez at the Seattle Transit Blog suggests citizens take control of preserving neighborhood landmarks by getting together to buy them.
• Developers of the big (175-foot) waterfront ferris wheel are making sure it’ll attract riders year round. Riders will be in “enclosed gondolas, equipped with heating and air conditioning.”
• Darn, those proposed new Amazon office towers would be mighty big n’ slick.
• Boeing’s Wash. state employment may peak this year at about 83,000, then dwindle.
• Health Scare of the Day: Wazzu researchers believe exposure to toxic chemicals might lead to a risk of ovarian cancer, a risk that could be passed on to your great-granddaughters.
• It’s the end of an era for non-NY/LA/SF based national media. Playboy is moving its last Chicago-based operations to LA. The Chicago Tribune even published an editorial about it.
• I don’t always follow ’em, but you might try blogger Barb Sawyers’ “15 Ways to Write Tight.”
• The Starz series Magic City is having a hard time finding actresses and extras in Miami who could pass for women living in 1959 (i.e., without implants).
• I was at the Prole Drift art gallery this past First Thursday. Saw a big painting of what looked a lot like a dead mall. A desolate exurban landscape. A big, nearly empty parking lot. Long, lo-rise buildings with neither windows nor signs. A main entrance at the center. I told the gallery owners I was in a Facebook group of dead mall enthusiasts. They quickly told me the painting was really of a modern prison.

buddy bunting, via prole drift gallery