maisonceleste.wordpress.com

• Did Mexico’s Huichol people create what we now know as “psychedelic” art?
• Central Washington’s bad, no-good week was caused by human carelessness. (Remember what Smokey says, everybody.)
• Soon, you’ll be able to go to an Arco station and not be supporting BP—but only if you’re in southern California, Nevada, or Arizona. BP’s holding on to the Arco stations in the Northwest, and to the Cherry Point, WA refinery that feeds them.
• Save the Silver Fork! It’s an indie diner! A real one, not a hip-retro pastiche! It’s the Rainier Valley’s favorite “third place,” a site of community-gathering and conviving. It’s threatened with demolition, for nothing more than a gas station.
• As you might know, the cover model for Herb Alpert’s classic LP Whipped Cream and Other Delights is an ex-Seattleite now living in southwest Washington. And she’s still a charmer.
• The Young Fresh Fellows, deans of Seattle power pop, have a new album coming out! And you can access an online stream if you follow the band’s clever little marketing gimmick.
• Rep. Jim McDermott, for most of his political career, has been a man only a Republican could dislike. Until his wife became his ex-wife, that is.
• Just as I figured would happen, a compromise with the Port of Seattle may enable the Sonics arena scheme to go forward.
• Getty Images, Seattle’s king of stock photos, is being bought by the Carlyle Group. That’s the D.C.-based private-equity outfit with strong ties to the Bush family and to the Saudi royals.
• During the Olympics, Nike put out a T-shirt with the slogan GOLD DIGGING. A sexist slap or just good clean fun?
• Maria Konnikova at the Atlantic explains just how famous quotations get mixed up, rearranged, or misattributed.
• Among the publishing old-timers trying to make sense of the Internet age: onetime Sassy editor and “perpetual teenager” Jane Pratt.
• Angela Neustatter at the Guardian would really like married people to be a lot more accepting/forgiving of cheatin’ spouses. It’s only natural, she says. (There goes half the subject matter of classic lit and country songs….)
• Americans are having fewer babies, too few to maintain the population size. This has been happening in Japan for a while, to the point that kids’ manga and related media are in financial freefall. But what’s bad news for the makers of baby clothes could be good news for an overextended planet.
• PBS’s Frontline goes Jesus-freaky. In the process, a lot’s revealed about cultural cross-pollination. Long before hip white kids pretended to be Buddhists, Romans disgusted by their corrupt society embraced the simple love-and-respect teachings of a tiny Jewish splinter sect.
• Whites are still far more likely than minorities to have home broadband connections. But Hispanics, Asian Americans, and African Americans are more likely than whites to have smartphones. This is what could be known as burrowing under the Digital Divide.
• Cheating at tournament-level Scrabble! Is nothing pure anymore? (On the other hand, it allows me to revive the tagline from the Scrabble game show: “It’s the crossword game you’ve played all your life, but never quite like this!”)
• When the teen offspring of the One Percent post Tweets® and photos of their obscenely opulent lifestyles, it’s all fun and snark. Until somebody figures out that potential burglars/kidnappers could be reading them.
• As I keep telling you, if you don’t vote, you’re doing exactly what the extreme right wing wants you to do.
• Political spending this season has been swamped by Karl Rove’s and the Koch brothers’ Super PACs, and their oh-so-anonymous donors.
• Paul Constant describes Paul Ryan as:

A wealthy young white man who refuses to, for one second, consider what it must be like to be a woman, or a minority, or a member of the lower class, or old. A man whose words mean less than nothing.

For reasons known only to the Gods, I not only didn’t read David Guterson’s novel Ed King (Oedipus as a Seattle software mogul!) when it came out, I also didn’t notice last November, when it won a British lit magazine’s annual Bad Sex In Fiction award. Don’t be as ignorant as I was—check out an excerpt from the “winning” scene.

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• Today’s lesson in what’s horribly wrong with the Romney/Ryan economic plan comes courtesy of Al Franken.
• Matt Hasselbeck doesn’t like the CenturyLink Field visiting-team lockers; says they’re so small they risk violating “man-rules.”
• What happens when allegedly pro-pot people try to start a political campaign against the legalizing-pot initiative ain’t pretty.
• In Illinois, a Bain Capital-controlled company is not only firing its workforce and shipping the equipment to China, but is making the fired workers train their Chinese replacements.
• Consumer scandal of the day: “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10-Year-Old Daughter and Didn’t Care.”
• Folks under the age of 33 are now buying more books than the legends-in-their-own-minds baby boomers. The boomers will almost surely ignore this, and will continue ranting about how everyone younger than themselves is a subhuman idiot.

geneticist.tumblr.com

• Artist Lisa Nillson creates elaborate human-body cross sections using “only pieces of rolled paper.”
• Here are links to the musical numbers left out of NBC’s Olympic closing-ceremony telecast, including Ray Davies.
• Magazine single-copy sales in the U.S. are down 10 percent from a year ago. Expect more stupid “stunt” covers as the desperation sinks in.
• Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin really dislikes voter suppression drives.
• Last Picture Show writer Larry McMurtry has become one of America’s biggest used-book superstore operators. Until now.
• Joe Kubert, 1927-2012: The master of gritty realistic comics and illustration was best known for war comics such as Sgt. Rock. He was equally adept at superhero titles (Hawkman), personal and autobiographical works, graphic journalism, and art-instruction courses. His impact on the art cannot be underestimated.

buzzfeed.com

• As we leave the mythical Mount Olympus, let us attempt to forget the particularly bizarre spectacle that is synchronized swimmers’ makeup.
• The first big motif of the Olympic closing ceremony: nostalgia for newspapers.
• By now you’ve heard all the deliciously inappropriate, wrong-for-America economic and social stances of would-be-veep Paul Ryan. And you know that Ryan is a rabid disciple of selfishness goddess Ayn Rand (as are so many right-wing operatives these days). What it all adds up to, according to Markos Moulitsas:

Democrats are campaigning with a swagger, having fun. They know they’ve got the advantage.… We need to embrace reality and shove reality down the GOP’s throats. Because yeah, we are ahead, objectively so. We’re winning and we’ve got to own it. They can whine about biased polls and biased media and biased everything that doesn’t conform to their little Fox News bubble world, all the while we do the work necessary to seal the deal.

• Meanwhile: “Decline of good jobs linked to workers’ decreased bargaining power.”
• Meanwhile, meanwhile: Kudos to Jon Talton for getting the phrase “depredations of the plutocrats” into the Seattle Times.
• Wash. Post pundit Aaron Blake feels GOP deliberate distortions and misquotes of Obama constitute exemplar horse-race style campaiging. Jay Rosen feels, well, differently.
• Harvard’s Steven Strauss explains why the 21st century was supposed to bring us techno-utopia but instead meagerly spits forth gimmicky social-media sites promoted as “revolutions.” In such an environment of “incremental innovations,” Strauss adds, corporate bureaucrats will be more valued than hotshot entrepreneurs.
• Mississippi has a county where school kids who get in even minor trouble are automatically sent to prison.
• A Las Vegas Denny’s is going to feature its own in-house wedding chapel. “With this onion ring….”
• Port of Seattle officials were for (or at least indifferent toward) the Sonics arena scheme before they were against it.
• One of the West Seattle Water Taxi boats caught on fire.
• An ex-UW pediatrics prof is accused of waterboarding his own daughter.
• Google’s making it harder to search for free downloads of copyrighted media. Finally: a market advantage for other search engines.
• Austrian archeologists, rummaging through an ancient castle, found some 15th-century vintage bras. No, they weren’t worn by (insert name of over-40 female celebrity here).
• I disagree with the Sight & Sound magazine poll putting Vertigo atop the greatest films of all time. But I understand why the poll’s “programmers, academics, and distributors” would pick it. Vertigo is eminently open to academic interpretation. It’s full of “meta” themes about identity and illusion; all within the context of a big-budget Hollywood thriller in luscious Technicolor and VistaVision (Paramount’s sideways-film process, a precursor to IMAX).

• To be celebrated this weekend: one hundred years of Volunteer Park.
• Paul Constant attends an “American Idol for Startups.” He finds a bunch of hopeful entrepreneurs showing off gimmicky little smartphone apps based on “tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality,” and promoted using jargon “as tepid and lifeless and dumb as any language that ever existed.”
• Now that all companies, nonprofits, and individuals in the western world have been exhorted to revamp their entire existences around the Web, they’re about to be exhorted to forget all that and re-revamp their entire existences around “mobile media.”
• We knew it was coming (it’s in the way of Amazon’s TriTowers HQ project), but it’s still sad to see the King Cat Theater closed for good.
• The “24 hour news cycle” is sooooo day-before-yesterday. But it does make for a lot of fun reporting mistakes.
• Meet this election’s top right wing attack groups (or at least as much about them as has been uncovered to date, which isn’t much).
• A Portland motivational blogger meets one of the original computing pioneers, and gets, well, motivated.
• Media reports about Olympic champion Gabby Douglas have been loaded with racial dog-whistle jargon.
• A self-professed “skeptic” and “rationalist” claims to be more skeptical and rational than other self-professed “skeptics” and “rationalists”:

Let’s admit it, skepticism does have a way to make us feel intellectually superior to others. They are the ones believing in absurd notions like UFOs, ghosts, and the like! We are on the side of science and reason. Except when we aren’t, which ought to at least give us pause and enroll in the nearest hubris-reducing ten-step program.

wikimedia commons

• The warm weather’s speeding up the life cycle of the aphids spreading “zebra chip” disease to Washington’s potato crops, making the spuds unsalable.
• Let’s raise a thousand guitar picks to the 10th anniversary of Seattle’s All Ages Dance Ordinance, and the repeal of the infamously restrictive “Teen Dance Ordinance” (which had banned almost all all-ages live music shows for nearly two decades). A lot of people worked a lot of years to make that happen. They can tell you that change doesn’t really happen any other way.
• It began in ’10, took last year off due to funding problems, but is back this weekend. It’s Seattle Founders Days in Belltown, a weekend celebration of one of America’s liveliest neighborhoods, its spectacular past and its portentious future.
• When truly affordable housing remains in short supply anywhere in Seattle, should the Seattle Housing Authority sell off huge chunks of Yesler Terrace to “market rate” developers?
• RealNetworks, after many losses, turned a profit this past quarter. But it’s only because they sold a bunch of patents to Intel.
• Now that the reservoirs are all lidded, your best chance for a peek at Seattle’s water supply comes with a “Tap Tour” to the Cedar River Watershed.
• Romney outrage of the day (this will probably be a regular department for the next 90 days): Bain Capital’s original investors included figures tied to El Salvador’s murderous right-wing death squads.
• One more reason why no state can afford a Republican one-party government: Louisiana’s set to dole out public education bucks to anti-science fundamentalist private schools.
• The Susan G. Komen Foundation announced new national bosses, who might (just might, mind you) end the homophobia and Planned Parenthood-bashing of the group’s recent past. But it’ll probably remain an outfit less interested in health care than in big-bucks corporate sponsorships.
• We here in BlueStateLand like to scoff at slimy voter suppression tactics elsewhere. But why aren’t Washington’s own majority-Hispanic pockets seeing more majority-Hispanic voting profiles?
• You could live directly above the future U District light rail station, as soon as 2021.

pitchfork media via cartoonbrew.com

The third most famous band from Aberdeen, the Melvins, talk about their “disastrous” first tour, accompanied by appropriately simple Flash animation. (The second most famous band from Aberdeen, of course, is Metal Church.)

• When an apartment tower goes up on the Lung Association site in Belltown, across from the existing Seattle Heights condo tower, that will be Seattle’s densest residential block (for the time being).
• It’s a sad day for local radio listeners. KMCQ of Covington, the freeform oldies station that had been one of the last commercial music stations worth listening to whatsoever, has switched to a strict-playlist, ’70s-’80s “classic rock” format. Damn.
• Bartell Drugs’ HQ is moving to the West Seattle Corporate Center in Delridge. That building was originally the HQ of Bartells’ onetime arch rival Pay n’ Save, which disappeared several mergers ago. (Some former Pay n’ Save locations survive as Rite Aid outlets.)
• A stock photo of the UW campus is being used in a creepy poster for a potentially creepy romantic comedy movie. (The movie in question was neither filmed, nor apparently set, in Seattle.)
• More state education money without raising taxes, as both gubernatorial candidates promise? Not bloody likely.
• Marvin Hamlisch, 1945-2012: So it’s the laughter that we remember, whenever we remember the way he was.
• Robert Hughes, 1938-2012: I’ll always remember the Australian-born art critic for a scene from the BBC series The Shock of the New. He pointed to an abstract-art chair and noted that “no human bottom” could fit in it comfortably. (Little known fact: He co-hosted the first episode of ABC’s news magazine 20/20, with ex-Esquire editor Robert Hayes.)
• Happy eighth birthday to one of my fave sources of cool and strange music clips, PCL LinkDump (née Pop Culture Links).
• Charles Mudede quotes three other pundits who suggest the only way out of today’s global economic blecch is to revive the ancient Hebrew concept of a “debt jubilee” (or something like it).

visual.ly

• According to the “Geek Zodiac,” I belong to the Year of the Astronaut. (I always liked astronauts.)
• Forbes.com freelancer Zach Slaton traces the roots of Seattle’s soccer mania back further than the 1974 NASL Sounders, to British and European immigrants who’d come here starting in the 1950s.
• A southwest Wash. man was recently discovered attempting to pass some particularly “high quality fake money.” Who says Americans have lost their manufacturing edge?
• More than 80 million Facebook accounts are really spambots or other varieties of fake, Facebook management admits.
• The Seattle Times (an old-school advertising medium) disses new-school advertising medium Yelp.com. The paper alleges that the “customer review” site promises to promote positive reviews of shops and eateries that buy ads on the site, and threatens to promote negative reviews of those that don’t buy ads on the site.
• It’s crop circle time again!
• Frank Elaison at Social Media Today would really like Net users to “focus on being positive,” and stop brutally insulting people they’ve never even met.
• The Onion (with which the Stranger has a shared pre-history) has found today’s third rail of bad-taste humor.
• Back in 2005-2006, a locally-owned small town daily in eastern Idaho (an area more heavily Mormon than Utah) ran an exposé of a boy-abuser within the adult leadership of the local Boy Scouts. The local business and governmental leadership quickly jelled their outspoken support—not around the victims or their families, but around the Scout leaders who’d conspired to cover up the crimes for years. It’s news now because one of the conspiracy’s most outspoken defenders, the head of the area’s biggest company, is now on Romney’s fundraising team. And he’s doing to Romney’s critics what he did to the newspaper back then—threaten to sue them into oblivion.

google earth via rhizome.org

• Clement Valla at Rhizome.org finds beauty and “the universal texture” within the mistakes of Google Earth’s 3D geographical simulations.
• The musicians’ union would like to create “sustainable” opportunities for local club bands (i.e., gigs with decent pay). Considering how fiscally precarious so many bars and clubs are, this may be a challenge.
• Amy Rolph at SeattlePI.com, trolling for weird items on Amazon to laff at, found a CD of “lullaby renditions of Nirvana songs.” Rolph calls the electronically-rendered music “creepy.” I call it more like a failed attempt to update the shtick of Raymond Scott’s old Soothing Sounds for Baby LPs.
• It’s not that “oldies” music is selling more these days. It’s that present-day music is selling less.
• When classic films meet know-nothing online reviewers, magic happens.
• Apple has again become the world’s #1 personal-computer maker, if you count iPads as computers.
• At last, a new job in this town that doesn’t require programming experience. It’s the making of fake poop, to demonstrate new third-world toilet designs for the Gates Foundation.
• Steven Rosenfeld at AlterNet believes today’s Republicans are “a truly toxic aberration,” an outfit that can only win elections by voter-suppression and other dirty tricks.
• The “future of news” gurus have long claimed that media companies only needed to hustle for all the web hits they could get, and ad revenue would naturally follow. That’s turning out to not be the case; especially with tablet and smartphone users.
• Here’s one Russian guy’s idea of how humans could live forever, for just $50 billion in startup costs:

1. First, invent remote-controlled, humanoid robots.
2. The next generation of the robots would contain transplanted human brains.
3. By the year 2045, people’s memories and personalities would be transferred as software into robotic brains. (As we always say with stories like this, “Nothing can possibly go wrong….”)

perfect sound forever, via furious.com

• It was my first real lesson in how to make a print periodical that was neither a corporate “slick” nor an amateur “zine.” It was my entree into several musical worlds, most importantly that of U.S. indie pop/rock. Let us remember the brief, glorious life of New York Rocker.
• Can Washington’s state parks really survive if they have to become self supporting?
• Correction of the day (NY Times):

An earlier version misstated the term Mr. Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. in a debate. It was crypto-Nazi, not crypto-fascist.

• In the Matrix movies, identity is easily transmutable and fluid. Think about that when you learn that director Larry Wachowski now wants to be known as Lana.
• How do all those “rugged individualist,” “rebel” Tea Party operatives act and sound so much alike? They get special training in exactly what to say, do, and believe.
• Meanwhile, “Conservative Movement” operatives are finally starting to turn against one another, using the same tactics of loud lies they’ve always used against progressives and centrists.
• The latest winner of one of those dumb magazine declarations about “America’s coolest city”? Houston.
• If a Waterworld dystopia ever comes to be, expect the One Percenters to hole themselves up in fancy-as-all-heck “floating cities of the future.”
• Human waste off the Northwest coast, now with extra caffeine.
• The anti-“social media” backlash is fully underway. One disgruntled Facebook advertiser says it was charged for “clicks” on its ads that turned out to have been mostly generated by “bot” programs. And Ewan Morrison at the Guardian implores self-publishing authors to spend less time incessantly hawking their “brands” on Twitter, Facebook, et al., and more time actually, you know, writing.

The Burke Museum has posted a lovely You Tube video showing how the Pioneer Square area was not only settled by Seattle’s founders but altered, filled in, and transformed from a little isthmus into the historic district it is today.

• A B.C.-based blogger about classic cartoons offers his own tribute to J.P. Patches, on whose show he first saw many of those shorts.
• Meanwhile, sometime Seattle musician (and this year’s Seafair grand marshal) Duff McKagan cites the Patches show as exemplifying/promoting a quirky, particularly “Seattle” sense of humor.
• Paul Constant believes the Seattle library levy would stand a better chance of passage if its promoters expressed more appreciation toward librarians, not just toward buildings and acquisitions.
• The Dept. of Justice deal with the Seattle Police includes a court appointed monitor and strict reporting of “uses of force.”
• You’ve got about a month to get your needles together for the big quilters’ convention.
• A Florida renegade Republican claims his state party has deliberately tried to suppress the black vote.
• Paul Krugman suggests Mitt Romney’s wealth, and the insularity that goes with it, is his potential undoing.
• If you don’t have health insurance, today’s Republican Party officially doesn’t give a flying frack about you.
• The number of “swing states” in this Presidential election: 8. That’s it.
• Pat Buchanan really needn’t worry about the Republicans facing long-term oblivion as America becomes steadily less white. Some future generation of GOP operatives could easily dump the racism (disguised and otherwise), and instead proclaim that passive-aggressive fealty to Big Money is for everyone.
• Roger Rosenblatt wants writers to “write great;” that is, to go beyond the merely personal and embrace reality’s greater issues.
• In the opposite direction from “writing great,” there’s now an online Fifty Shades of Grey-esque cliché generator.
• And finally, this day’s most incisive, most informative piece of Seattle Times reportage:

1931 soviet book jacket; new york public library via allmyeyes.blogspot.com

• Love old timey design elements in photography, fashion, furnishings, books, posters, ads, packaging, and everywhere else? Then you’ll love Linda Eckstein’s fastidiously curated site All My Eyes.
• Conversely, Angela Riechers at Print magazine’s site disdains all this obsessive old-schooling. Riechers claims the world of graphic design, and perhaps the world as a whole, is becoming infested with “toxic nostalgia.” Among the symptoms she sites is Churchkey, the Seattle microbrew beer that comes only in cans that require an opener.
• Amazon’s sales rose 29 percent over the same quarter last year. But the company reported almost no profits, thanks to big investments in robotic warehouse systems. (Remember what we always say when robots are in the news: “Nothing can possibly go wrong….”)
• David Brewster found someone to take over management of the local-punditry site Crosscut. He’s a longtime functionary at the Gates Foundation. Let’s see how well he can transition from a nonprofit that doesn’t have to raise money, to one that needs to do a lot of that and soon.
• At the end of a long rant, Paul Constant describes Mitt Romney as:

A cowering man in a suit on the screen, waving his hands in front of his face and begging Robocop not to kill him for profiting, for draining the United States dry and exploiting the pain and hard work of others, for doing what businessmen do.

• Meanwhile, Devin Faraci at something called Badass Digest describes The Dark Knight Rises as feeling “like it is composed entirely of knee-jerk conservative nonsense.”
• A (non-cable-dependent) TV network tells you how you, too, can cut the cable.

• Because we need them, here are more memories of J.P. Patches from City Councilperson Jean Godden and from KING-TV’s Evening Magazine.
• The local media were confused about the new downtown Target. It really opens on Sunday, not today (Wednesday). No, it was me who was confused by the store’s official statements. It did have a “soft” opening today.
• Ex-mayor Charles Royer, who also co-chairs the Central Waterfront Committee, strongly disagrees with Knute Berger’s assertions about the cost of the waterfront remodel project.
• Good news transit-wise: Third Avenue, Seattle’s primary bus street, may look a little less seedy in the months ahead.
• Bad news transit-wise: Metro is shortchanging the Magnolia neighborhood. Under current plans, all bus service to that semi-detached area will shut down at 9:30 p.m. starting in September.
• Chick-Fil-A’s official homophobic policy is related to its official “Christian” policy.
• Sherman Hemsley, 1938-2012: All in the Family’s first Mr. Jefferson was Lionel, who appeared in the first episode in 1971. Lionel’s father George remained an offscreen character for more than two years. Producer Norman Lear wanted Hemsley for the role, but he was contractually tied to the Broadway play Purlie. Lear instead used Mel Stewart as George’s brother Henry until Hemsley could appear. Then in early 1975, CBS needed a rush replacement for the tanking sitcom Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers (yes, that was the show’s full title). A pilot for a Jefferson family spinoff was hurriedly prepared and aired as an All in the Family episode. The resulting series lasted eleven years, still a record for a scripted show with African-American stars. (And in a totally unrelated note, Hemsley allegedly loved prog rock.)

dangerousminds.net

ichiro large bobblehead, available at halloffamememorabilia.com

• Well if that isn’t the just about worst thing that could happen, local-baseball-fan-wise. The M’s ship Ichiro to the Damn Yankees, for two triple-A pitching prospects. Please sell this team now.
• (Here’s a thorough overview of his illustrious career as compiled by SportsPress NW.)
• Frank Rich reminds us that if America is really “in decline,” its either the fifth or eighth such “decline” in the past six decades, depending on how you count ’em.
• A self described “conservative Republican” moves to Canada and realizes “I don’t see universal health care as an evil thing anymore.”
• Monica Guzman believes the phrase “I don’t know” is due to die off, as more of the world’s knowledge becomes a simple web search away. I’m not so sure. Seems to me there’s tons each of us doesn’t know about. At least there’s tons I don’t know about. (Though, when I answer a question with “I don’t know,” people still tend to respond by simply repeating the question in greater detail.)
• In-state tuition at Washington’s “public” universities could top $20,000 by decade’s end.
• Peet’s Coffee isn’t Seattle-owned anymore. (Did you know it had been Seattle-owned, specifically by the original Starbucks founders?)
• Alexander Cockburn, R.I.P.: The longtime Village Voice and Nation columnist and CounterPunch.org cofounder was, at his best, probably America’s most lucid leftist writer. At his worst, he defended climate-change deniers, wholesale Israel-bashers, and French neo-fascist Marine Le Pen.

buzzfeed.com

• Some nostalgist at Buzzfeed has put together a boatload of ’80s kitsch ad art, mostly from early home-computer magazines. All the unicorns, rainbows, building-sized MS-DOS computers, and disco babes in slips you’ll ever need.
• Then, you can look at how low kitsch ad art has descended since then with Bad Ebook Covers.
• Yes, it is possible for Microsoft to lose money.
• At The Daily Dot, “The Hometown Newspaper of the World Wide Web,” we learn that:

1. local web-comic and gaming fan site Penny Arcade is trying to become user supported via a Kickstarter fund drive, that
2. a females-only meetup for local Reddit.com users became the target of “online harassment” by sexist boors, and that
3. you’ll be able to register to vote in Wash. state via Facebook.

• Our ol’ pal Ronald Holden does the math and concludes that, no, the Athenian in the Pike Place Market is probably not one of America’s 10 most lucrative restaurants.
• Wash. state is #3 in both home computer ownership and home Internet use. #1? Utah. (Those publicly-prim Mormons gotta get their net porn.)
• Forbes cites the Seahawks as the world’s 25th most valuable sports team. That sounds cool, until you find out that of the 24 outfits ahead of ’em on the list, 15 are other NFL teams. (#1: UK soccer powerhouse Manchester United.)
• There are a lot fewer new small businesses in America these days. One potential reason: a “radical concentration of power” in the economy, especially in banking.
• The snarky eco-advocates who staged the phony Shell Oil press conference at the Space Needle have expanded their anti-Arctic-drilling campaign with fake billboards, including one right near Shell’s Houston HQ.
• DUH of the Day: Big companies that don’t pay their workers much, by and large, could afford to do so.
• At least one wag now claims that “Mitt Romney will not be the Republican nominee.”
• Crawford Kilian at Vancouver political blog The Tyee explains how the Ayn Randians’ utopia would be a thorough dystopia for everybody else:

Future John Galts would have to sleep in castles, behind a wall of guards protecting them from us. A philosophy that detests the “gun” of government coercion would survive only by imposing such coercion on everyone else. The masters of a Randian society would rule a wasteland of clear cuts, poisoned streams, and empty seas, except for those patches they personally owned and protected.

• Yep, there are dumb sex-advice magazine articles for men too.
• To learn about a culture or an era, learn its slang.
• Tom Davis, 1953-2012: The original Saturday Night Live writer-performer was, and will be, always known as Al Franken’s partner in a series of sharp, stinging skits. Franken then went on to radio and the U.S. Senate. Davis went on in and out of assorted addictions.