…by yrs. truly in the SeaTimes today. It’s about The Great American Jobs Scam, a sprightly little collection of anecdotes about corporate welfare gone wild.

The new narrower P-I arrived at my doorstep this morning. The new narrower Seattle Times is in the vending box outside my building.

As promimsed/threatened over the previous week, the papers are an inch narrower than they were before, as are many other papers around the country these days. (The narrower size has become the de facto standard for national full-page newspaper ads.)

I still don’t see how the narrower page saves paper. In order to fit the same amount of square-inchage of editorial and ad space, a paper would have to add pages. The smaller page size means the ratio of ink area to trim area is smaller, so more paper is unprinted-upon, not less.

No, the only way this scheme can save paper is if (1) advertisers are charged the same amount of money for less space, and (2) the news hole is similarly cramped. But those measures could be accomplished on the old page size. So the expensive retooling of massive printing presses is all for show, for telling fickle stockholders that we’re really doing something to keep those unreasonable promises of 20 percent profit margins.

And as for the excising of approximately one-eighth of the papers’ news holes, I’ve always been a brevity fan. There’s no need for any paper that’s not the NY Times to try to write like the NY Times. Heck, even the Times of London writes short-n’-sweet.

NOW LISTENING TO Music Out of Century 21, a Seattle World’s Fair tie-in LP that even I hadn’t known about until last week, when it was offered online at the out-of-print music site The Collector. (It’s since “scrolled off” from that site, alas; scroll down this link to read about the disc).

It turns out to have been the product of Atello Mineo, creator of the even more wacked-out World’s Fair disc Man in Space With Sounds, and his wife Toni. (The credited “artist” on Music Out of Century 21 is big-band conductor Vincent Lopez.) This one’s not as far-out as Man in Space (pun intended, as always). But it’s still a smash, a dozen tracks of lushy lounge sounds that snap in a beat from syrupy strings to badass brass to swooning choristers. The listening experience is only enhanced by the fact that I’m watching the Space Needle out my window whilst listening to the tuneage, in the century that evoked such high hopes way back then.

…in the Seattle Times by yrs. truly concerns My Life in CIA by Harry Mathews, a deft little novella that blurs the line between fact and fiction.

…Seattle Times book review today. It’s about Love’s Confusions, a delightful little academic treatise comparing how various thinkers have thought about desire and devotion over the centuries.

…the eternally youthful ex-Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who got a big spread in the Seattle Times Sunday mag section concerning her and her hubby’s retro-futurist home.

…but I believe I must agree with Steve Kelley: The Sonics’ miracle season has crashed amid spectacular injuries and general burnout.

…in the Seattle Times today. This one’s about Strange Angel. It’s the biography of John Parsons, a sci-fi fandom pioneer, a sex-cult leader, and one of the inventors of modern rocket science.

The Seattle Times today claims a melting Arctic ice cap just might allow direct cargo shipping from Asia to eastern North America and to Europe, bypassing western US/Canadian seaports such as the Port of Seattle.

…in the Seattle Times today. It’s all about the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész, a former teenage Holocaust survivor whose works reflect a lifetime of unhealable soul-scars.

…to two nicer folk: Our close pals John and Mikey are in Sunday’s Seattle Times real estate section, in a feature story about odd ways to raise cash for a first home purchase.

The SeaTimes reports a national GOP-affiliated group just might have massively cheated its own constituency, by running fund-raising mass mailings whose proceeds almost all went to the direct-marketing contractors that sent the letters. Some of the donors were old-age pensioners who sent in most everything they had.

This sort of junk has long occurred throughout the fundraising sphere, not just in political solicitation. Sometimes the supposed recipients are overseas child-feeding programs, or domestic environmental groups. The perpetators sometimes try to get away with it by claiming the solicitation letters contained “voter education” or “public awareness” content, and were hence legitimate beneficiaries of their donors’ money.

One of the most famous direct-mail copywriters is Herschell Gordon Lewis, better known to us in the pop-cult community as a former B-movie director of classic carnival-showman sensibility and sometimes gory storylines. When the big studios muscled in on the splatter-film genre, Lewis took his gift for carny-style theatrics and applied it to direct-response selling.

Lewis was apparently not involved in this particular set of mailings, but it’d be appropriate if he were. With no one left to cheat and lie to, the right has turned to cannibalizing its own base.

…in the SeaTimes, on a funny little slacker novel called Bald.

…in the Seattle Times today. This one’s about Selling Seattle, a British academician’s view of the ’90s national-media hype about our once-fair city.

…in the Seattle Times today, this one on the McSweeney’s “humor” anthology.

…in the Seattle Times today. This one recommends Sen. Robert Byrd’s Losing America, an anti-Bush book with a difference. (Scroll to the bottom of the linked page.)