The above is from an ad circular in the Seattle Times, 4-9-06.

Sleep. Take a staggering variety of cold/flu medications. Sleep. Refrain from eating, in whole or in part. Consume bag after bag of store-brand cough drops. Listen to people tell me everybody’s been getting this debilitating bug, whatever it is. Make bad puns about the bird flu (“Of course it did; it didn’t walk!”). Cough up substances you don’t want me to describe, in mass quantities. Skip out on about half a dozen meetups, parties, Belltown Messenger interviews, etc. Sleep. Briefly attend a Drinking Liberally meeting at which I hear King County Executive Ron Sims talk informally about tying in any KeyArena rebuild with a larger Seattle Center makeover (he gave no specific suggestions as to what he’d like to add or delete from the complex). Sleep.

While the world was passing me by, an odd li’l Stranger essay suggested we might as well go ahead and let the Seattle Post-Intelligencer die. I, of course, utterly disagree. Ideally, I’d like the P-I to come out of its joint operating agreement with the SeaTimes as a viable, fully-independent, full-size daily. If that can’t be achieved, there are other options for keeping Seattle a two-daily town:

• Keep the JOA more or less as it is. If this is even feasible now (the Times says it isn’t), it might not be in a few years, as the new electronic media continue to drain ad revenue away from ol’ newsprint.
• Turn the P-I into an online-only operation, as the Stranger piece suggested. Intriguing but ultimately insufficient. There’s still not enough money in Net ads to support a local, mass-market operation employing 100 or more full-time journalists. One day, the money might be there.
• Turn the P-I into a separately-run section within the Times, like the current three pages of P-I Focus within the Sunday Times. The Las Vegas JOA was renegotiated a few years back, turning the Las Vegas Sun into a six- to ten-page features section within each day’s Las Vegas Review-Journal. Such an insert section might include strictly local news, features, and opinion pieces; leaving the Times itself to run stock tables, weather, sports stats, TV listings, comics, puzzles, wire copy, and syndicated columns. Such a solution would keep the P-I‘s “voice” in the public eye, albeit as a “kept” dependent to the Times.
• Turn the P-I into a freebie tabloid, either within or outside of a JOA. Free mini-dailies began in Europe in the ’90s, and are now found in a handful of U.S. cities (NYC, Chicago, Frisco, DC, Philly). They tend to be scrawny li’l things, offering the same content as regular dailies but far less of each department.Still, they provide the best current hope for a rethinking of the whole newspaper concept. Today’s big-city dailies have the same content mix they had 50 years ago, only they’ve gotten duller. There’s no absolute reason why we still have to have full local, world, sports, business, and “living” sections in every paper. There’s no reason except tradition to still print stock prices, or for the comics page to be two dozen tiny, mostly unimaginative, gag strips.

As I’ve written a few times before, the prospect of a post-JOA P-I allows all of us news fans to imagine a new type of paper for a new century. Let’s keep the imagining going. If the P-I doesn’t morph into our brave new paper, let’s start it up ourselves.

• The rediscovery of old film classics thanks to DVD.
• We’re still a two-daily-paper town, at least for now.
• Hi-def TV.
• The strong early sales for my e-book about hi-def TV.
• The so-called Blogosphere, in recent years one of the last uncompromised bastions of democratic debate.
• New awareness of body/mind diversity.
• My father’s long years of slow, pathetic decline finally ended this January.
• I’ve gotten one-third of the way out of my massive personal debt, and should be all clear by year’s end.
• I have a regular print outlet for my work, and am in negotiations about a day job.
• I’ve known some fabulous babes in my day, many with exciting and dynamic careers.
• The many fine products of North America’s convenience foods industry.
• Those who are still willing to fight back against the right-wing sleaze machine.
• Local microbrews.
• Seeing several friends survive debilitating conditions and come back with humor and dignity intact.
• Being back in my favorite neighborhood.
• Being high n’ dry.
• Having a loving, caring, loyal readership. Thank you.

…the SeaTimes for finding Sunday feature space for a topic so seldom discussed, male depression patients.

The Times claims a Louise Bourgeois sculpture, being commissioned for the under-construction Olympic Sculpture Park thanks to a donation from a Safeco Insurance manager’s estate, will be Seattle’s “first outdoor nude.” It’s not, thankfully. (Though it will be the first to be city-owned, and it will be the most prominent local example of that rarest of genres, male figures by female artists.)

…the SeaTimes and the Weekly run scare stories speculatin’ about what would happen if a huge natural disaster were to hit the PacNW, Forbes comes out with a list of the “safest places to live in the U.S.” Half of them are in our very own region, particularly Oregon’s Willamette Valley and eastern Washington’s Inland Empire. Oh well, there are plenty of other things we can get paranoid about….

…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.