from pulpcovers.com

• Teenage boys don’t read “young adult” fiction. Publishing industry people and school administrators want to change that, by supplying printed-word versions of video-game-esque adventures and sports-heroism sagas. It’s apparently not working. The answer, if you’re not a school administrator, is simple—pulp!
• OKCupid.com claims Portland and Seattle top the nation in personal ads from people “seeking casual sex.” It doesn’t say whether any of the advertisers actually attain their goal.
• From where you wouldn’t expect street theater, some 200 people dressed in Great Depression character costumes held a “soup line” vigil outside Rep. Dave Reichert’s Mercer Island office.
• Local directing wonderkind Lynn Shelton says she won’t be able to make any more movies in Washington until the state brings back filmmakers’ tax incentives.
• As new gambling opportunities have sprouted around the country, horse racing’s taken a nosedive. Fewer races are being staged, and fewer horses are being bred to run in them. One bright spot in the biz: Emerald Downs.
• Are Seafair and Daffodil Festival queens really insufficiently qualified to run for Miss America? And is this another example of our state falling behind in preparing its youth?
• As the Mitt Romney Presidential campaign ramps up, it’s time for a look back to the roots of anti-Mormon fervor. According to authors David Bigler and Will Bagley, it dates back to the initial spread of the LDS “tribe” across the inland west, back in the frontier days.
• Lame excuse dept: Hershey’s made money by having foreign students come to the U.S. for what the students thought would be an educational adventure but turned out to be sub-minimum-wage factory work. Hershey’s now tries to get away with it by saying it was really a subcontractor that did it.
• The latest fad in online fraud? “Review mills” churning out fake accolades for restaurants, books, or anything else you want accoladed.
• Financial analysts examined Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s cell phone division. Their conclusion: Google “bought a patent portfolio and got a mobile phone business thrown in for free.”
• And few seem to have noticed, but this month is the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC. And of the operating software running it, a little something called MS-DOS from a little company on the Eastside.

1983 ad from vintagecomputing.com

• Hewlett Packard’s spinning off or selling its PC hardware business, and shutting down its smartphone and tablet lines altogether. The hereby linked article doesn’t mention HP’s printers, or their worth-their-weight-in-gold ink cartridges.
• Krist Novoselic’s staging an all-star Nevermind tribute show on Sept. 20, during the breakthrough Nirvana album’s 20th anniversary week. It’ll be a fundraiser for Susie Tennant, a longtime local music industry fixture who’s going through some nasty cancer treatments.
• Sarah Ann Lloyd at Seattlest’s take on the state’s drive to make bars pay thousands in back “opportunity to dance” taxes, which the bars had never heard of before: It’s a vague ordinance, open to too-wide interpretation.
• As we’ve already reported, the County Council’s compromise to save Metro Transit includes dumping the downtown Ride Free Area, starting in Oct. 2012. Real Change’s Timothy Harris alleges Metro management was in on “this opportunistic attack on the poor,” in order to “get the visible poor off the bus.”
• Stephen H. Dunphy at Crosscut claims there are “two economies” in the Seattle area, (1) high-tech and (2) everything else. Guess which one’s actually working?
• If you’re in that stagnant second economy, you might consider retraining in a new field. If so, you might think of this as absolutely the wrong time to slash community college funding.
• Casino losses have funded something important. It’s the Tulalip Tribes’ new $19 million cultural heritage center.
• In non-tunnel road news, construction of the new 520 bridge is set to start next year, even though the state doesn’t have the money to build anything on the bridge’s Seattle end.
• There are (relatively) little guys in the gasoline business. They’re the station owners, trapped in unequal marriages with their franchisor/suppliers. One such case has resulted in 17 ex-Arco stations in Tacoma and environs and a bitter legal dispute between a multi-station franchisee and BP.
• Can ex-UW president Mark Emmert, now running the NCAA, actually do anything to stem big-money corruption in college sports?
• Bill Clinton now claims to be a vegan. Does that mean he’s going to become as annoyingly sanctimonious as the rest of ’em?
• Someone’s found a use for print newspapers! It involves stealing them in bulk for the purpose of “extreme couponing.”
• Here comes the backlash against Standard & Poor’s, about three years late.
• According to the “hacktivists” at Anonymous, a defense contractor and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got together to infiltrate and sabotage progressives in online social networks. One scheme involved fake a Facebook profile using the real name of a Maxim model.
• R.I.P. Gualtiero Jacopetti, creator of the original Mondo Cane and many of the “shockumentary” films that followed it.
• Elsewhere in filmland, here’s an essay praising Chinese underground cinema as real independent cinema. No official support. No submissions to state censorship committees. No theatrical or above-ground video releases. No commercial potential. No careerist ambition. No bosses except Art herself.
• Here’s a Vegas hotel implosion story with a difference—the 27-story tower has never been opened.

• Ex-Seattleite Tom Spurgeon wrote for The Comics Journal after I left there, then wrote for the Stranger after I left there. More recently, he’s had a debilitating medical condition, which he doesn’t fully explain in his hereby-linked essay. What he does discuss are his thoughts during his enforced bedrest, about comics, film, and being human.
• At least five enlisted personnel at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have committed suicide in less than two months. More needless casualties of the two needless wars.
• State officials found what they apparently thought was a simple “tax loophole” whose “closing” would generate much-needed revenue. It involves imposing “dance taxes” on bars and nightclubs—retroactively—based on a decades-old ordinance intended to regulate exercise studios. Some clubs say it could put them out of business.
• Unemployment in our state is still icky big.
• Amazon boss Jeff Bezos just gave $10 million to the Museum of History and Industry’s new complex at Lake Union Park, set to open late next year.
• If you don’t have enough to be scared of, just think about the “brain-eating amoeba.”
• Headline of the day: “Social Security Declares 14,000 Living People Dead Every Year.”
• The amorphous tangle of billionaire-funded “populist uprisings” collectively known as the “tea party” is massively unpopular. I mean massively.
• PBS’s Judy Woodruff tries to explain the consequences of extreme wealth inequality on a show underwritten by corporate funders out for a nearly-exclusively upscale audience…
• …while Amanda Marcotte (no, I don’t expect you to know all these web-pundit names) looks at right-wingers’ replies to the Verizon strike and declares we’re living in a new feudalism. So where are all the Renaissance Faire costumes?
• Among the top-grossing movies so far this year, you have to go down to position #8 to find a live-action, non-sequel, non-superhero film (Bridesmaids).

j.p. at the pike place market centennial, 2007

• J.P. Patches (sometimes also known as Chris Wedes), the beloved former local kid-vid star, has announced he has terminal cancer and will retire from public appearances in the next year.
• For a time on Monday, the deal to save King County Metro transit with a car tab surcharge seemed in trouble. But enough Republican County Council members eventually came through. Yay!
• Speaking of which, you know Metro’s Route #48? The long route that goes almost all over Seattle except downtown? The Bus Chick blog relates the route’s hidden history. It was the result of a ’60s community drive to bring more bus service to the Central District, particularly directly from there to the UW.
• A book collector and an author claim storied frontier bank robber Butch Cassidy wasn’t killed in Bolivia but retired quietly to eastern Washington, where he lived until 1937. (Thankfully, that was long before the awful cartoon show that stole his name.)
• Speaking of cartoons, Renton police believe they’ve identified, and have disciplined the officer who allegedly posted those web animations critical of the department.
• The lady from suburban Detroit who got in trouble with her town council for having a vegetable garden in her front yard? She was in Seattle recently, and has some intriguing thoughts about what makes our city different from hers.
• SeaTimes writer Jon Talton really doesn’t like that Washington Mutual’s execs won’t get prosecuted for their role in the housing-bubble fiasco.
• Adventures in intellectual property: A heretofore obscure provision in the 1978 copyright law means recording artists can start reclaiming their rights to works from that era, away from the once mighty record labels, providing they give two years’ notice about it. Of course, the record labels interpret this part of the law far differently.
• Warren Buffett wants folks in his tax bracket to pay more taxes. Which will happen as soon as folks in his tax bracket no longer control the election process.

2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue

• The Lenin statue in Fremont is privately owned, and is for sale. But nobody apparently wants to buy it.
• Minorities: Bellevue’s got a lot more of ’em these days, sez the Census. Seattle’s got a lot fewer.
• Art Thiel wants you to know the big Husky Stadium rebuild, to begin this winter, involves no taxpayer funds. Just private donations and bond issues to be repaid out of UW Athletics income.
• Ex-State Rep Brendan Williams wants Washington state’s progressives to “get some backbone” about preserving vital services in the state budget.
• Starbucks boss and Sonics seller Howard Schultz’s latest big idea: Big election-campaign donors like him should vow to boycott funding election campaigns. Of course, if Democratic donors like Schultz are the only ones doing the boycotting….
• There’s a plan to create a “Jimi Hendrix Park,” next to the African American Museum at the old Coleman School. It would be the fifth Hendrix memorial of one type or another (not counting the Experience Music Project, which parted ways with the Hendrix heirs during its development). Cobain still has just that one unofficial park bench in Viretta Park and a city-limits sign in Aberdeen.
• Rolling Stone put out a reader poll declaring the top punk acts of all time. The list put Green Day on top and included not a single female. FlavorWire has come to the side of justice with its own in-house listing of “15 Essential Women Punk Icons.” The NW’s own Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, and Sleater-Kinney are on it, as is onetime Seattleite Courtney Love.
• Many, many indie-label CDs were in a warehouse that burned during the London lootings. Some labels might not survive the blow.
• Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac sez Apple’s invented all the big things it’s going to invent for a while. We’ve heard this one before.
• And for those of you heading back into the working life (you lucky stiffs, you), take heed Peter Toohey’s thoughts (partly inspired by the late David Foster Wallace) on “the thrill of boredom:”

Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.

from buzzfeed.tumblr.com

• Spencer Kornhaber at the Atlantic offers a 20th anniversary tribute to Nickelodeon’s original “Nicktoons” cartoon shows (Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy). In a break from most commentary about these shows, Kornhaber lavishes attention on the legacy of Doug and gives R&S only a brief aside.
• Fired KUOW weather commentator Cliff Mass has resurfaced with a new gig at KPLU. It’s good to have competition, even among local public radio stations.
• No, the county won’t move its juvenile court and jail into the landmark Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon’s head offices had been). The building and its site just aren’t well configured for such use.
• To go with the planned light rail station for the area, the city’s thinking of rezoning the Roosevelt business district for dense condo and mixed use buildings, up to 85 feet tall. Some folk in the neighborhood aren’t sure this is such a splendid idea. I’m willing to entertain the scheme, as long as the original QFC store (marked for death by the rezoning scheme) remains as a protected landmark.
• Our climate is actually pretty good for solar power, it turns out. It’s just that hydro power is so cheap, solar can’t really compete without incentives.
• Local painter Scott Alberts says all artists need to do to cease “starving” so much is to have a product to sell and someone to potentially sell it to. (Of course, some artists’ most passionately inspired works don’t have mass market appeal.)
• I’ve reached a point of acceptance on a topic that used to enrage me. I have now come to terms with the fact that we will never be rid of the sixties nostalgia industry.
• Richard Charnin claims he can statistically prove the Wisconsin recall elections were stolen.
• Matt Stoller has a new thing for everybody to worry about. Global industrial consolidation means more and more vital things are made in fewer and fewer places, things ranging from broadcast-production quality videotape to flu vaccines. And when the places that make them get disrupted (such as by the Japan tsunami), you get instant worldwide shortages.
• Paul Krugman claims he’s got a surefire, if partial, solution to both the sluggish economy and the federal debt:

…It would involve more, not less, government spending… rebuilding our schools, our roads, our water systems and more. It would involve aggressive moves to reduce household debt via mortgage forgiveness and refinancing. And it would involve an all-out effort by the Federal Reserve to get the economy moving, with the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems.

illo from the 1962 world's fair guide book

• Knute Berger looks back at predictions for 21st century greater Seattle made during the 1962 World’s Fair. Surprisingly, population growth in the region is a bit lower than was then predicted. Still no flying cars or domed cities, though.
• The grownup Frances Bean Cobain has posed for a fashion shoot. All thin, dark haired, and attitude-y. But all those cigarettes? They’re not rebellious, just icky.
• Joni Balter, a member of the SeaTimes‘ “all taxes = bad” editorial board, surprisingly issues an essay decrying politicians who sign on to simplistic pledges, such as GOP operative Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes ever” pledge.
• Could the revised, Costco-invented, liquor privatization scheme actually increase state revenues? And, more importantly, would any extra revenues be eaten up by alcoholism-treatment costs and DWI prosecutions?
• Somebody’s prediction for where home prices will rise the most in the next year? Tacoma.
• If AT&T gets to take over T-Mobile USA, the latter’s 30,000 employees (including the 3,000 or so at its Bellevue national HQ) could be essentially done for.
• The state’s economy’s not getting any better any time soon.
• The plea-bargained “barefoot bandit” has a movie deal. All the proceeds will go to his crimes’ victims.
• A “revolutionary collective” has announced plans to protest Metro’s threatened service cuts by refusing to pay bus fares. Somehow I think this won’t help.
• Bert and Ernie are as (officially) non-gay as Laverne and Shirley.
• Standard & Poor’s and its fellow investment rating agencies have spent millions on lobbying to keep the financial markets unregulated. We all know how well that’s worked out.
• Bee Lavender at HipMama (the site based on the alt-culture parenting zine) has her own first person perspective on the London riots:

Many of the people out on the streets this week are usually invisible. They are part of an underclass, an underworld, where the rules are different and you have to take what you can to get through the day. Given the chance, many would in fact make something better out of their lives – but they don’t get the chance. What little equilibrium existed even a year ago has now vanished, and they are raging. Because they have no hope, no future, nowhere to go and nothing to do.

from furnitureminiature.com

• It’s the official best time ever to buy a house in Washington. Just set aside some of that vast expendable income you’ve got—what, you don’t?
• Before you rant about the presence of so many UW and WSU athletic brass on this list of the state’s highest paid employees, remember these coaches aren’t paid by the taxpayers, but by their programs’ self-generated revenue streams. And many of the other five UW officials on the top 10 get some or all of their salary from grants or other non-state sources.
• The state’s going to forcibly evict the homeless who’ve set up sleeping quarters alongside I-5, again.
• You ready for the repositioning of canned coffee as a hipster nostalgic comfort item?
• Remember that Rick Perry religious rally last weekend, with all the fringe-right-wing and racist/homophobic preachers? Turns out more than three times that event’s audience went to a free school supplies giveaway in the same city that same day.
• One of those “a new study reports” stories claims rich people are “less empathetic” than lower-class folk. One of the study’s makers concludes that “our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back.”
• The English riots: It’s the income disparity, and the despair of the non-zillionaires.

• Our ol’ pal Wendi Dunlap has scanned and posted the first two issues of her vital ’80s Seattle pop-rock zine Yeah! Great work, then and now.
• Amy Rolph has an online slideshow of 15 iconic Seattle fashion statements. Not included: “Skinny white boy with exposed boxer shorts.”
• Our own U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who conveniently doesn’t run for re-election in ’12, was named one of the Dems on the deficit-cuttin’ “super congress.” Also named: John Kerry and frequent DINO (Democrat In Name Only) Max Baucus (drat).
• For the third consecutive year, all Seattle Public Library branches will be closed for a week later this month, with all staff on unpaid leave.
• Seattle Weekly has struck back at Mayor McGinn with all the editorial influence and rhetorical force it’s got these days.
• Now showing on the Seattle waterfront, the “world’s fastest sailing ship.” It’s Russian and it’s really big.
• Amazon UK: Profiting from the UK street riots as a seller of baseball bats and other “weapons”?
• Anybody shedding a tear for the fiscally ill Bank of America? No?
• Apple was, for a brief time Tuesday, America’s biggest company. If you measure the size of a company by the Almighty Stock Price. Which I don’t.
• The big recall in Wisconsin seems to have fallen one seat short of ending Republican control of that state’s senate. As one might have predicted, it all came down to the county with the GOP elections boss already known for questionable integrity and/or competence.

• Some guy who’s writing his own Seattle music-scene book has just listed me among the most “underrated Seattle music people.” Considering that the only public musical performing I’ve done is karaoke, I guess that’s an accomplishment.
• Today’s sermon against the deep bore tunnel comes from the Tacoma News Tribune, which chides the state Dept. of Transportation for refusing to make its tunnel-related records public.
• What they didn’t want to release, an internal memo about the tunnel project’s financial prospects, has been leaked online by tunnel opponents.
• R.I.P. Mark Hatfield, an actual sane Republican (back when there was such a thing) and one of the first national lawmakers to public acknowledge the Vietnam war was a huge mistake. The hereby-linked Oregonian obit claims Hatfield had been on the short list for the GOP VP nomination in ’68; but Richard Nixon chose the more “southern strategy” friendly (i.e., demagogue-like) Spiro Agnew.
• Obama insists that the Standard & Poor’s nonsense notwithstanding, America is still “a triple-A country.” So why don’t we try harder to break into the majors? (At least it’s better than the bush leagues, where we were when the seeds of this mess were planted.)
• Virginia Heffernan asks, and believes she has an answer, why grade-school students can write very lucid blog posts and lousy class papers. She calls for a move away from industrial-age rote learning and a return to “socratic learning.”
• Michael Wolff says he knows how to get the Rupert Murdoch empire out of the U.S.—sic ’em with the RICO Act.
• There’s panic on the streets of London, and spreading to other U.K. cities. It was originally inspired by protests against police brutality. Guardian commentator Nina Power offers another reason—increasing inequality in that land (still not as bad as it is here). The same paper also quotes academicians who see large parts of a whole young generation who believe they have no future. Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?

from gasolinealleyantiques.com

• Just a reminder: I’ll be reporting (perhaps even “liveblogging,” just perhaps) Sunday from the hydroplane races.
• And another reminder: The hydroplane boats are the stars of Seafair Sunday. The Blue Angels are the intermission act, and as such are expendable.
• Today’s sermon against the waterfront tunnel project comes from activist Cheryl dos Remedios, who implores “Seattle’s arts and heritage community” to oppose the scheme.
• You know when the Uptown Theater closed, and I said it was too bad SIFF didn’t take it over? Guess what—SIFF’s taking it over.
• An AIDS remembrance billboard on the Broadway light-rail station construction fence was censored, because it showed a small blurry image of a guy’s butt. It’s another example of how our civic establishment prides itself on accepting alternative sexualities, but only as long as people don’t get too, you know, sexual about it.
• An Army vet claims he was tortured by his fellow Americans as a prisoner in Iraq. His suit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cleared a legal hurdle this week.
• Michael Moore remembers when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers. Moore calls it the start of the war on the middle class.
• Paul Krugman asks why the heck anybody still trusts those mortgage-bubble-crisis abettors at Standard & Poor’s anyway.
• Catch-22 of the week: Employers only hiring folks if they’re already employed somewhere else.
• Now that you’ve read this (and perhaps the articles linked hereto), go look at something real for a few moments to reduce “computer vision syndrome.”

• Our ol’ pal David Goldstein floats the idea that Metro Transit perhaps should be broken up, with Seattle resuming authority over in-city bus routes (including funding authority), intercity routes given over to Sound Transit, and King County keeping the rest of the system. (Seattle ran its own bus routes before Metro was formed in the early 1970s.)
• Meanwhile, Jason Kambitsis at Wired.com believes transit is a civil rights issue. It allows lower-income people to get to work and other places without the relative huge expense of car ownership.
• Another bicyclist was struck by another hit-and-run driver in Seattle. Fortunately, this victim will live.
• In what might be a grandstanding move but is still welcome, state Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna is lashing out about what he calls Bank of America’s shoddy foreclosure practices…
• …and the Washington Mutual execs who steered the state’s last homegrown big bank into the heart of the mortgage-bubble disaster won’t be prosecuted.
• The Mariners have finally gotten rid of designated hitter Jack Cust, whose very name invokes what M’s fans have done a lot of this year.
• The young City of SeaTac finally got its first big protest march (by and for hotel workers).
• Would the Midwestern funny-money fiddlers who now run Boeing really ruin the company’s whole quality reputation and value chain just to stick it to Wash. state? Maybe.
• When inappropriate quasi-racist comments about Obama will be made, Fox News will make them.
• Another slice of the media biz that’s in apparently inexorable fiscal decline: cable porn. The Gawker.com story about this, naturally, can’t stop repeating the word “shrinkage.”
• To end on a fun note, here are some cool pictures of old cassette tapes.

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.

• Those newfangled “3-D printers” can even be used to make motor-powered small airplanes.
• A judge knocked down the feds’ long-term plans for Columbia River salmon restoration, calling them vague and insufficient.
• The Belltown P-Patch cottages, the neighborhood’s last remaining “single family home” structures, are getting their old lead paint stripped off and replaced.
• Thanks to federal funding cuts and other snafus, 400 otherwise homeless people could get kicked out of local shelters soon.
• Dominick Holden has a handy primer on why you should reject the deep bore tunnel.
• You don’t have to go to the “whole paycheck” store to know “healthy” food can be costly.
• What’s really wrong with American discourse? Tabitha Justice believes it’s the “argument culture.”
• Ending on a lighter note, here’s some hilarious-in-retrospect images of completely ineffectual “disguising” by the East German secret police.

bachmann family values?

• No, Michele Bachmann, slaves did not have stable marriages and families. Not when spouses could be re-sold to separate masters or be used as involuntary sex toys.
• Today’s anti-deep-bore-tunnel sermon comes to you in the form of cute CGI cartoon characters with synthesized voices.
• As for the tunnel project we like, the Capitol Hill light-rail tunnel is being dug by a 21-foot-wide boring machine nicknamed “Brenda.” Make your own 90210 jokes here.
• Painting murals on street surfaces—do they reduce traffic speeds, or encourage dangerous games of pedestrian hopscotch?
• The Midwestern union buster wannabes who now run Boeing are being very secretive in their “southern strategy.”
• Admitting your addiction to Facebook is the first step toward regaining control of your life. Yes, I found this link from Facebook.
• Woke up, it was a Chelsea mornin’ and the first thing that I heard was the historic hipster hotel’s been sold to speculators who want to turn it into rich folks’ residences.
• Post-made-up-“crisis” updates: Joe Biden allegedly called Congressional Republicans “terrorists.” Less famous commenters say the GOPpers are waging a “war on America” and claim they “fit the profile of the classic abuser.” Another e-pundit wonders whether the Bushies deliberately left the nation incurably “bankrupt, corrupt, ungovernable.”
• On a lighter note, here’s some fun stuff found at Grocery Outlet.