degenerateartstream.blogspot.com

• Enjoy some understated, occasionally creepy photos by Ms. Rinko Kawauchi.
• Get ready for cool public art coming to a civic infrastructure project near you.
• Metro’s Ride Free Area is still set to end later this month, with no replacement service finalized. The transition’s probably gonna be rough.
• Contract talks between Boeing and the engineers’ union are going un-smoothly.
• There will be a 24-hour diner on Capitol Hill next spring, on 10th Ave. where the gay bathhouse Basic Plumbing used to be.
• The Stranger asked local artists to fantasize how they’d remake the waterfront. Their various suggestions, together or alone, are infinitely cooler than the official plans.
• Catholic bishops claim the existence of gay marriage would victimize them. Really?
• How does a young person get into a journalism career if she can’t afford to take a long-term, unpaid internship? She hopes for an inheritance.
• The owners of the New Orleans Times-Picayune won’t sell the paper, and they won’t back off their decision to cut it back to three days a week.
• Folks love them some sad songs these days.
• The company behind some of those infamous Facebook games (and their annoying ads and plugs) is fiscally stumbling.
• Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect says the Democrats recognize people’s “interdependence,” instead of the GOP’s Ayn Randian “noble selfishness.”
• Here’s the Bill Clinton barnburner speech. And here are the local-interest convention speeches by Patty Murray and ex-Costco boss Jim Sinegal.

• Jon Rafman finds amazing shots taken by Google Street Views’ nine-camera-equipped trucks, and collects them at his blog 9-eyes.com.
• In one corner, street-team advertising concern Poster Giant. In the other corner, angry women, who will not go away quietly.
• Sun Myung Moon, 1920-2012: Those who didn’t closely follow the Korean religious/political/business/publishing cult master often called him a “right wing Christian.” The “right wing” part was correct enough. The “Christian” part was misleading. Moon’s Unification Church theology and practice were really a lot more unique (i.e., weirder).
• Local college grad Alison Sargent writes in Bitch magazine about her experiences at Mars Hill Church. She describes it as another right-wing cult (albeit more traditionally “Christian” than the Moonies), and a place where “faith and feminism don’t mix.”
• Harvard researcher Steven Strauss ponders whether the rate of techno-progress in today’s world is actually slowing down.
• Bigtime political campaigns are employing polling and demographic stats work so complex, even they might not know how it works or what it means.
• Author Chuck Thompson asks why “so many Southerners think they’re the only real Americans.”

• Clint Eastwood’s invisible-Obama-in-a-chair stunt took place during the 60th anniversary week of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s allegorical novel about the black struggle in the face of social “invisibility.”
• Robert Reich’s message for an election-year Labor Day: “It’s the inequality, stupid.”
• Romney’s “533 lies in 30 weeks:” Now THAT’s an achievement!
• One of our favorite watering holes and DJ clubs, Olive Way’s The Living Room, is no longer living.
• There’s a “Seattle” restaurant (really on Bainbridge) with a most un-NorWestern strict reservations policy.
• The anti-gay-marriage campaign is engaging in potentially illegal fundraising solicitations toward area churches.
• An abandoned Ballard church that became an art gallery briefly in 2009 is now set to be razed for townhomes.
• The author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull almost got his own wings when his small plane crashed in the San Juans.
• An outfit that ran some of those big motivational seminars (that were really fronts for selling questionable investment schemes) has collapsed.
• Faye Anderson, 1950-2012: The owner of the New Orleans restaurant/bar in Pioneer Square hosted, and supported, jazz and other musics for more than a quarter century. Whether the club will survive is for her heirs to announce, and they haven’t yet.
• Hal David, 1921-2012: The acclaimed lyricist was already pushing 40 when he first teamed up with composer Burt Bacharach. For 14 years they (with singer Dionne Warwick as their mouthpiece) were an unstoppable team, with David’s deceptively simple wordplay leading listeners through Bacharach’s often complicated melodies, until the musical version of Lost Horizon blew up in their faces. What the world needs now is more expressive minds like him (and love, of course).
• As all good NorWesterners know, it doesn’t really rain here more than other parts of the U.S. Especially not in the past 42 days (and 42 nights).

Today’s historic-preservation outrage involves the Jefferson Park Golf Course clubhouse. It’s a magnificent structure, “homey” yet elegant, that’s served city residents for more than 75 years. The City wants to raze it to put up a new driving range. It’s rushing through a plan to deny landmark status to the building, in cahoots with the architects that are planning the redevelopment scheme.

• This week, the southeast corner of the United States has been hammered by a massive destructive force of nature, devastating the people and the land with its wind and fury. There’s also a tropical storm.
• A deaf woman in Tacoma was arrested for a crime she was really the victim of. She was tasered and held for 60 hours without access to an interpreter. She’s now got a global support network.
• The stretch road in front of the J.P. Patches statue in Fremont may get the honorary second name of “J.P. Patches Place.”
• Dan Froomkin doesn’t want more jobs. He wants more decent-paying jobs than today’s corporate sector seems willing to provide.
• As Seattle’s libraries and their patrons endure their fourth annual end-o’-summer closed week, the son of an ex-Seattle Public Library bigwig believes libraries need to reinvent themselves by ditching those dumb ol’ books, or at least stuffing them in some inaccessible-by-the-public storage facility. Uh, thanks but no thanks.
• Meanwhile, the volunteer-run “People’s Library” at 23rd and Yesler plans to remain open after the city libraries reopen, at least through the end of this month.
• Pierce Transit, already socked by over-dependence on local sales tax revenue, could face potential total shutdown (or something close to it) if a tax increase measure doesn’t pass.
• An extreme-right-wing militia cult wanted to bomb a Wash. state dam and poison the state’s apple crop.
• Higher prices, less selection. Isn’t liquor privatization wonderful?
• In the no-rules/new-rules world of self-e-publishing, you can get your book all the rave reviews it needs, and for a reasonable price.
• Bill Nye, who’s usually right about these things, proclaims that creationist fantasy is not healthy for children and other living things.

via theatlanticwire.com

• Microsoft’s new logo is so highly appropriate. They’re literally proclaiming themselves to be a bunch of perfect squares!
• Parker’s Casino and Sports Bar, the legendary Aurora Avenue roadhouse (once known as the Aquarius Tavern) where everyone from Paul Revere and the Raiders to Heart got their starts, has been gutted and may be demolished.
• Thirty-eight percent of Seattle homeowners still have “underwater” mortgages.
• James Fogle, 1937-2012: The Drugstore Cowboy author spent three quarters of his life behind bars, for robberies fueled by a lifelong drug habit. Never learned any better way to live.
• Beloit College’s annual list of things today’s college frosh don’t know about includes such expected fading memories as VHS tapes, film cameras, car radios, The Godfather, and printed airline tickets. SeattlePI.com’s Big Blog adds that today’s 18-year-olds never personally experienced the Frederick & Nelson department store, the career of Sir Mix-A-Lot, and The Far Side comic strip.
• Also mostly forgotten: the fact that Belltown’s American Lung Association building, finally razed for a high-rise apartment complex following years of ownership squabbles, was once the regional office of Burroughs Computer. In honor of that connection, the tower’s topping-off ceremony ought to include a reading from Naked Lunch.
• Today’s Scrabble-related crime story comes to you from Kamloops, B.C.
• Item: “All nine people injured during a dramatic confrontation between police and a gunman outside the Empire State Building were wounded by gunfire from the two officers.” Comment: So much for the idea that all you need to stop people with guns is more people with guns.
• A HuffPost blogger claims “straight identifying” guys are having more gay sex than out-gay guys.
• The “indie” music site Pitchfork Media posted a reader poll of top all-time favorite recordings. Almost all of them were by white guys (even more predominantly so than Pitchfork’s own coverage range of acts).
• The late founder of the San Diego ComiCon was quietly outed. Very quietly.
• The tiny, India-designed “car that runs on compressed air” is not really pollution-free. You need energy to power air compressors. Usually electric power. Power that’s often generated from coal or oil or plutonium.
• Only in Putin’s Russia could there be such a wholesale rehab of the Stalin legacy.
• On a “radical left” U.S. website, a Russian writer bashes Pussy Riot for being anti-populist, anti-Christian, in it just for the money, and led by (wait for it)… a Jew.
• The Campaign, that comedy movie previously mentioned here in regard to its stars’ Pike Place Market promo fiasco, turns out to be a bold and broad satire of today’s corporate-bully-controlled politics.
• Today’s rant against “the Fanatical GOP” comes to you courtesy of Robert Reich.…
• …while Lindy West thoroughly demolishes a National Review writer’s quasi-homoerotic ode to Mitt Romney’s alleged masculine prowess.
• Carlos Castaneda: Author. Guru. New Age legend. Harem keeper. Manipulator. Liar. Fraud.
• As I keep telling you, right-wingnuts actually do read books. They read wingnut books. A lot of wingnut books, it turns out.

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.

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.

As the eyes of the Earth turn again to Mars, let us look back at one of the most surreal and modern-arty “educational” films ever made, the Disney studio’s animated docudrama Mars and Beyond. Made in luscious color, it premiered in black and white on the Disneyland anthology TV show in 1957, just months after the Soviet satellite Sputnik launched the “space race.”

• The beautiful 1906 former home of the progressive Seattle First United Methodist Church will become the next home of the homophobic, reactionary Mars Hill Church.
• Ezell’s Fried Chicken isn’t Ezell’s fried chicken anymore. Ezell Stephens was kicked out of the operation by now-former business partners. He’s now got a new chicken chain, Heaven Sent.
• Gibson Guitar now admits it did, indeed, illegally import endangered “exotic woods.”
• Companies who treat customers rudely can’t hide in the age of social media. Today’s example: Horizon Air.
• Local singer-songwriter and lush-soundscape creator Erik Blood has a new concept album, all about nostalgia for the days of “porno chic.” Title: Touch Screen.
• Another creative indie music maker, “geek rock” troubadour Jonathan Coulton, wonders out loud what’ll happen when home 3D printers can produce fully functional substitutes for manufactured consumer goods.
• And Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan decries the Pitchfork festival circuit as the ruination of any real “alternative” music.

nytimes.com via nytsyn.com

• As a fedora wearer since when fedoras weren’t cool, I frankly don’t identify with Montauk, NY’s demonizing of the midcentury style headgear. It has to do with the old fishing town’s backlash against being colonized by (what the NY Times story about it calls) “hipsters.” But (to use NY-area geographic parlance) the Montaukers aren’t really dissing Urban-Outfitters-clad, emo-listening shoegazers from Brooklyn, but rather Ralph-Lauren-clad, gourmet-cilantro-eating 1-percenters from the Hamptons.
• What’s wrong with residents putting in a common sandbox for neighborhood kids along a “planting strip” between a residential street and its sidewalk? Nothing, except of course it doesn’t look boringly world-class enough.
• Item: “Poll shows Americans are losing faith in religious institutions.” Comment: Oops, there goes another leg of the Republicans’ shrinking “base.”
• On a related note, lotsa local Catholics love ’em those activist nuns.
• Following up on a topic discussed here previously, Jacob Silverman at Slate would like online book critics to be a little more, you know, critical.
• You probably didn’t see “the saddest story in the Olympics.” NBC didn’t really cover it. (It involved the women’s side of  a “second tier” Olympic sport (fencing), in a match that included no U.S. athletes.)
• From Annie Hall to (500) Days of Summer (and even stretching back to Bringing Up Baby), there’s been a particularly American romantic-comedy heroine type which the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin has labeled the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” This is the sparkly, spunky force-O-nature who exists, as Rabin puts it, “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” (The sitcom Dharma & Greg can be considered an MPDG premise stretched out.) I can attest that such women do exist in real life, and that relating to them, in my experience, is no trip to eternal bliss.
• Local filmmaker Drew Christie offers a short “animated op/doc” (whatever that means) about Hollywood’s recent “allergy to originality.”

If you’re going art-crawling this next First Thursday, be sure to see a mini version of the digging machine that will create the Viaduct-replacement tunnel. Go see it even if you normally find such things to be, er, boring.

• Geoff Tate and the other members of local hard-rock legends Queensryche aren’t making up any time soon.
• The City Council thinks it might be a good idea to use part of any new-basketball-arena revenues to help fix traffic in the area; thereby agreeing with what I wrote here weeks ago. Would-be arena developer Chris Hansen doesn’t wanna pay for road-building himself, though. And I agree with that too; the Port of Seattle’s traffic woes in the area already exist, and would continue to exist with an arena or not. The trick is to channel some of the revenue the arena will earn to the city and state (via sales and admissions taxes mostly) into road improvements.
• There’s a “Support the Sisters” march here on Aug. 12, backing activist nuns who’ve run afoul of Vatican dictates.
• Today’s headline-O-the-day, from the Oregonian: “Car thief who was high on drugs and masturbating when he plowed into Portland crime scene will not have to register as a sex offender.” (I’m sure the headline was shorter in the print version.)
• Conor Kilpatrick basts modern libertarianism as being, in part, an effort to make rapacious corporate greed seem “hip” and “cool.”
• If your call to a U.S. company’s call center didn’t go through today, it could be due to the severe power outage in India.
• Seattle law firm Perkins Coie’s major corporate clients include the officially nonprofit Craigslist, which sends lawyers regularly to crack down on “add-on” sites.
• Chris Marker, 1921-2012: The great French maker of philosophical films did a lot more than just “influence” Anglophone productions such as 12 Monkeys. His works are worthy in and of themselves, using sci-fi memes not as a premise for action-adventure but to meditate on the human condition.
• Gore Vidal, 1925-2012: The prolific novelist, essayist, playwright/screenwriter, film/TV cameo actor, Al Gore cousin, sometime failed political candidate, and ever-lucid critic of the American political-industrial complex (“a society that bores and appalls me”) always seemed to glide from highbrow to low; from serious historical works (Burr, 1876, Lincoln) to utter farce (Myra Breckenridge); from major cultural contributions (The City and the Pillar, one of the first U.S. mainstream novels with gay-male protagonists) to for-the-money tripe (co-writing the Caligula screenplay). To the end he remained “complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

• 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

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.

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“?

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

j.r. simplot co./idaho dept. of environmental quality, via kplu

• Lots of good stuff at KPLU today. First, they’ve got some “mutant two-headed trout” found in an Idaho stream (the result of pollution from a nearby mine). Then there’s the list of potential “things you’ll find from the Japanese tsunami on Northwest beaches.” Finally, they report on the construction of the new 520 bridge’s pontoons. (I just love to say the word “pontoon.”)
• Nintendo lost a whoppin’ half billion bucks on all worldwide operations last fiscal year. That’s a heckuva lot of yellow coins.
• The UW is letting in a few more computer science majors next school year. They must have finally noticed that virtually every job advertised in Seattle requires programming knowledge.
• Get inspired! Next week there’s a “liberal Christian revival” convention in town.
• You know how the Costco-funded liquor privatization initiative promised convenience stores wouldn’t get to sell the hard stuff? Some of the winning bids for the state liquor stores were won by C-store operators, who might just turn those stores into C-stores that sell the hard stuff.
• KIRO-TV has uncovered further shocking evidence that men traveling on business will sometimes visit strippers and/or prostitutes.
• R.I.P. Ernest Callenbach, 83. The enviro-author was best known for Ecotopia, a 1975 utopian novel in which Washington and Oregon would be the outlying provinces of a San Francisco city-state. (I.e., more like a dystopia to me.)
• Flavorwire lists the “10 Grumpiest Living Writers.” Yes, Harlan Ellison is there. But, and this might surprise you, so is Garrison Keillor.
• Elsewhere in the book biz, Macmillan’s scifi division will issue e-books without copy protection. And author Warren Adler believes any talk about an Amazon e-book monopoly is just scare-tactic hype foisted by the conglomerate-owned big publishers.
• Ex-Seattleite Lindy West reminds you that talking like a total racist, then when you’re caught at it claiming it was all an ironic “joke,” is still talking like a total racist.