…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.)

Yr. obt. cor’s’p’n’d’nt is once again providing freelance book reviews to The Seattle Times. The first of the new batch is out today, concerning Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.

After three days, I’ve decided I sorta like the new-look Seattle Times.

The three-deck headlines on most major articles are a convenient and nearly-poetic throwback to the old days of newspapering. The newly consistent headline style on brief stories makes it easy to find what you might want to read. The new text typeface seems larger, without significantly reducing the amount of verbiage per column-inch. Even the photo reproduction seems higher-res.

No major move in a corporate enterprise takes place out of context. There are reasons for revamps such as that of the Times. The paper’s trying to put its joint-operating-agreement “partner,” the Post-Intelligencer, out of business. It wants the local reading public to believe the Times deserves to be Seattle’s only big daily paper.

From the ’50s through the ’70s, the Times was the fat and unsassy voice of the local business establishment, as dull as dishwater and as awkward as a bad karaoke singer. Redesigns in 1980 and 1992, and the JOA’s launch in 1983, put the paper on the road to higher readability. Now, it’s a real newspaper again. (I still don’t want it to become the only paper in town, though.)

I haven’t planned any big to-dos for the occasion, since I couldn’t think of a funky theme to go with the age of 47. But then, sure enough, the SeaTimes runs a piece about a Portland schoolteachers who’s got a fan club for the number 47.

So, for one night only, I’ll have my own 47 Fan Club.

Join me Tuesday night at Bill’s Off Broadway, starting at 7:47. I don’t know what we’ll do, but it’ll be prime.

The Seattle Times preview special is all about pitching; a major change from as late as 1994, when Mariner coverage was all about short-field home runs.

The section also lists where 23 of this year’s Ms live. Three spend the off-season in Seattle; two call the suburbs home. Three live in Arizona; two each in California, Florida, and the Dominican Republic; one each in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Kobe, Japan (guess who?). So, when Griffey moaned about wanting to live closer to his family, he might have either been less than sincere or was behaving as a stuck-up diva. (Not that I’d wish his injury-plagued post-Ms career on anybody.)

I AGREE COMPLETELY with Mark Rahner: The biggest threat from the mad-cow scare is having to face the smug crowing of fundamentalist vegans. Four close acquaintances have either emailed me vegan sermons or personally taken me to “raw food” restaurants for ice-cold carrot-and-eggplant soup. They remain close acquaintances, but they haven’t converted me.

Yes, the meat-processing industry’s rife with corruption and shoddy “efficiency” practices. But I’m not going to protest sweatshop clothing factories by walking around naked; at least not when it’s twenty degrees outside.

WE’VE BASHED The SeaTimes a bit this year, but we love the paper’s first (annual?) winter solstice contemplation.

A Seattle Times oped piece making nasty swipes at corporate welfare overkill.

POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST JOHN LEVESQUE points out the central irony of the P-I‘s strategy in trying to preserve the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times: “The paper that wants to put the Post-Intelligencer out of business is responsible for selling ads in the Post-Intelligencer.“

To restate the obvious: This marriage cannot be saved.

Last month, the P-I won the first round of courtroom battles over keeping the JOA. The Times wants to kill the agreement and, at the same time, the P-I. The P-I claims it can’t survive without the JOA, in which its printing, sales, delivery, and PR functions (everything except the paper’s editorial content) is contracted to the Times. Given the lousy job the Times has done (deliberately or otherwise) at maintaining the P-I‘s ad volume and subscriber base, I’d say the P-I can’t survive with the JOA.

Seattle still needs two dailies. It needs two separate dailies.

The best-case scenario for settling this flap would be a compromise court settlement, in which the P-I gets its own sales force again, while the Times still prints and delivers both papers until new arrangements are made (such as the Times selling its job-printing subsidiary in Tukwila, Rotary Offset Press, to the P-I). But don’t expect such a rational move from a Times management out for blood.

Underlying the whole dispute, but not overtly mentioned by either party to it: The fact that the traditional big American daily paper is an industrial-age anachronism. As I mentioned around the time the Seattle dailies went on strike three years ago, I believe there is a way for newspapers to become more competitive, with one another and with other info/advertising media–if they became leaner and more specialized, and established a more direct rapport with their readership (without necessarily turning to Fox-esque sleaze).

If the P-I does succumb to the current courtroom wars, and even if it doesn’t, there’s a great opportunity to create a new kind of newspaper for a new media age. Nothing like this has been tried in the U.S. since USA Today was first formulated 20 years ago.

Wanna help create it? Lemme know.

Housing activist John Fox wrote an insightful letter to the Seattle Times, chiding the paper’s tabloidesque scandal-mongering attacks on City Councilmember Judy Nicastro.

It seems Nicastro and two other councilmembers got campaign funds from strip-club owner Frank Colacurcio Jr. (whose dad had been a big local political influence-peddler back in the “tolerance policy” days of the early ’70s).

Apparently in return, the three councilmembers voted yes on a minor zoning change, allowing Colacurcio to build a bigger parking lot outside his Lake City venue, Rick’s.

The Times and certain other local media are trying hard as heck to make this into a brouhaha of election-altering proportions. But, as Fox points out, there are many people who’d like Nicastro ousted, and many of those have bigger political connections than Colacurcio Jr. People such as the landlords and developers who’ve felt inconvenienced by Nicastro’s work as an advocate for affordable housing. Some of these people are putting big bux into the campaign coffers of Nicastro’s opponents, so they can get sweetheart deals that would make Colacurcio Jr.’s look paltry indeed.

My own take on this: I’m glad the council, or at least a piece of it, is willing to be seen doing something in favor of sexual expression (albeit the most commercialized form of sexual expression). Maybe now they’ll lift the city’s decade-old ban on new strip joints, and allow the kind of healthy thriving grownup-entertainment biz Portland’s got.