chibi neko's 'bad literature bingo' review of 'fifty shades of grey;' mybookgoggles.blogspot.com

The world of books, specifically the world of “women’s” books, is roiling with scandal and outrage.

First, there was a book-review site called “ChickLitGirls.” It sent emails to small and self-publishers who wanted their boks reviewed on the site. It claimed it had become overwhelmed by such requests; but that publishers could ensure not only a review but a positive one for one small payment of $95.

The site quickly disappeared once authors and bloggers started complaining about its practices, only to get emails from the site’s operators describing the criticism as “harassment and threat” and threatening to sue.

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Along with the scandal concerning positive reviews, there’s also one concerning negative reviews.

Specifically, about reader-submitted reviews posted to the influential social media site Goodreads.

Some people love to post nasty, snarky reviews. (And, let’s face it, the explosion in self-published ebooks means lots of easy pickings for any would-be online insult comic.)

But some of these posts cross or at least stretch the line between critiquing the work and defaming the author.

And, as you might expect, a lot of self-e-published authors are sensitive souls, unused to having their work dissected and pilloried on the public stage.

Thus, there’s now a site called Stop the GR Bullies. Its express purpose: to expose and vilify Goodreads contributors who get too nasty.

Of course, “too nasty” is a matter of personal judgment.

At least one book blogger, using the name “Robin Reader,” believes Stop the GR Bullies is itself bullying toward Goodreads users who’d simply posted negative but not “bullying” reviews:

Something is very wrong with us, and by “us” I mean the online community of (largely) women authors and readers. What is wrong is the “outing,” threatening, shaming, and silencing of readers who are perceived to be too critical of or hostile to authors. And for those in this online community who believe that this is not their concern or their harm, I would ask them to think again.

Fellow book-blogger Foz Meadows similarly asserts:

…Simply disliking a book, no matter how publicly or how snarkily, is not the same as bullying. To say that getting a handful of mean reviews is even in the same ballpark as dealing with an ongoing campaign of personal abuse is insulting to everyone involved.

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In completely non-related book news:

• Two industry groups now call e-books “the dominant single format” in adult fiction sales.
• Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is just soooo last year. Now, the hip shtick is to rewrite classic novels by, er, inserting explicit sex scenes.

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.

wikimedia commons, via komo-tv

• Drugs? Guns? Codeine pain pills? Forget it. What U.S. Customs is really cracking down against on the Canadian border is a bigger threat to America than all those combined. Beware the dreaded candy Kinder Eggs.
• Starbucks apparently has an image problem in NYC.
• How to get shoppers away from dot-coms and back to the malls? How ’bout wine bars, yoga classes, craft-making groups, and jeans stores with special butt-view mirrors?
• Outside estimates put the cost of a spiffed-up Seattle waterfront near a cool billon. That’s a heckuva lot for what’s essentially just another group of “world class” windswept plazas (and we’ve already got more than we need of those). I still say: scrap most of that, bring back the Waterfront Streetcar, and put an amusement park at Pier 62-63.
• The big winner in the demise of Washington’s state liquor stores? Oregon’s state liquor stores.
• Deja Vu’s Dreamgirls really doesn’t want to leave SoDo, not even for a big buyout by the arena developers.
• In the immortal words of Mr. Costello, I don’t wanna go to Chelsea.
• Link Light Rail is three years old and more popular than ever.
• Macklemore’s new pro-gay-marriage hiphop track is getting quite the national attention.
• Boeing wants more engineers and more training for future engineers. Oh, and it also wants more Federal money.

There was a competition going on for short films about Seattle. Some of the entrants (at least they seem like they could be) are showing up online. F’rinstance, here’s a poetic ode to the city by Riz Rollins; and here’s Peter Edlund’s Love, Seattle (based on the opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and dedicated to team-and-dream stealer Clay Bennett).

• Health scare topic of the day: “Rabit bat bites.”
• Online scare topic of the day: “We’re all Internet addicts, and we’re screwed, says Newsweek.”
• Those hipster fashionistas at Vice magazine have devised a “Wheel of Punk,” a wheel chart proclaiming what is the most and least punk. The punkiest, in their summation: “Pre-Rollins Black Flag.” The un-punkiest: the Eagles.
• Unpaid Plug O’ the Day: My fellow Stranger refugee Inga Muscio has a “Stop Thinking, Start Writing” class starting here in Seattle later this week.
• Another year, another round of public college fee hikes.
• Another year, another plea to finally get ourselves a progressive state income tax.
• PETA ranks Safeco Field as baseball’s second most “vegetarian friendly” ballpark. #1: would you believe Philly?
• Yep, Senate Republicans don’t want you to find out who’s funding their campaigns.
• “The average Canadian is now richer than the average American.” And not just in Canadian Tire Money.
• There’s a commercial for tourism to Colombia with the slogan “The only risk is wanting to stay.” Forget about those pesky drug wars. Just enjoy the quaint cities and unspoiled beaches. They’re saying this openly and forthrightly.
• It’s one thing to see Photoshopped® fakes of movie stars’ heads on nude models’ bodies. But when a guy sticks Frida Kahlo’s head on nude models’ bodies (bodies that obviously don’t have the real Kahlo’s injury scars), some Kahlo fans get righteously pissed off.

• A note to marketers everywhere (not that they’ll ever listen): As soon as you bill something as being “For Women” (not any specific women, just “Women” as a single mushed-together whole), a woman who doesn’t identify with your targeted “psychographic” will cry foul. Latest example: Pix, an iPad-based “photography lifestyle magazine for women.” It’s full of fluffy fashion, make-up, and shopping tips, and light on the notion of photography as a serious endeavor or of its readers as serious people. Bringing in the deserved snark is Stella Kramer, Pulitzer-winning photo editor (and Seattle punk-zine pioneer).
• When basketball vet Charles Barkley hosted Saturday Night Live, the cut-off-at-the-end 12:50 a.m. skit had him shilling for his own homespun “Barkley’s Bank” as an alternative to the world renowned Barclays Bank. These days, that’s where I’d rather trust my money.
• Hooray to local gallery-scene and edgy-installation-art vet Scott Lawrimore, who just got an important curatorial job at the Frye Art Museum.
• A “Christian” anti-sex website wants to scare teens into abstinence by making up scare stories about condoms.
• Courtney Love just keeps getting into messes, legal and otherwise. Sad, really.
• Howard Schultz wants U.S. businesses to start making more jobs and stop whining all the time. Or something like that.
• Art Thiel would like you to get the facts n’ figures about the Sonics Arena proposal (which aren’t all in yet) before you get emotional about it in either direction.
• A UK High Court judge declared Samsung’s new tablet computer isn’t an iPad ripoff, because it doesn’t “have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.” Or as a BBC commentator interprets the ruling, the judge decided it’s not as cool.

makela steward via rainiervalley.komo.com

Welcome to all our kind readers who still have Internet connections after “Malware Monday.” In today’s randomosity:

• Let’s congratulate the Seattle woman who just became Ms. Plus Size America.
• The Tacoma Art Museum is getting a big collection of “western American art,” and a big new building addition to put it in.
• Wash. state’s wine biz has become big enough for the Gallo empire to move in on it, buying up Covey Run and Columbia Winery. I remember, of course, the late ’70s days when Gallo was radical America’s favorite brand-to-hate, a status later taken by Nike and later still by Wal-Mart.
• Another sometimes-radical-hated company, Apple, said it will stop submitting its products for “green electronics certification.”
• Ex-Posie Ken Stringfellow has done a lot since his last solo CD in 2004, including abandoning the States to become a free man in Paris. Now he’s finally getting another set of music out, incluidng a duet with comedian Margaret Cho. Title: Danzig in the Moonlight.
• One fifth of all “adult fiction” physical books sold in the U.S. this past spring were Fifty Shades of Grey (the submission-porn story set in Seattle by a British author) or one of its sequels.
• Underwater oil-exploration teams have found the lost city of Atlantis in the North Sea, if you believe the U.K. tabloid Daily Mail (which you really shouldn’t).
• As banking-behemoth blunders spread to the Brits, one analyst notes that, within the industry, “it had become acceptable or perhaps even encouraged to provide false information.”
• David Carr summarizes recent developments in the newspaper biz, and, as you might expect, sees a biz whose troubles just keep getting worse.
• Romney (hearts) the Koch Bros., those campaign-funny-money far-right oil/chemical/paper-towel barons who occasionally claim to be “libertarian” (as in, you know, protecting the “freedom” of mega-corps to control everything and ruin the planet).
• Extreme heat, like they’ve had everywhere in the contiguous states except here, is lousy for the fish.
• And finally, local-politics site extraordinaire PubliCola is back! Yaaaayy!

Band name suggestion of the month: “Premier Instruments of Pleasure.” (From the “Sexual Wellness” section of the Amazon subsidiary Soap.com.)

• The new Microsoft tablet device will be called the “Surface.” How, er, superficial does that sound?
• Plastic shopping bags disappear in Seattle on 7/1. You have 12 days to stock up on those magnificently reusable Bartell Drug bags while you still can.
• Local hiphop artist Prometheus Brown would like you to care about the victims of gun violence, and not only when those victims are white people from “nice” areas.
• Nick Eaton joins city and county officials in jeering at the Seattle Times‘ fact-stretchin’ anti-Sonics arena editorials. In other news, somebody still reads the Seattle Times editorials.
• The waterfront streetcars Seattle can’t seem to find a place for anymore, even though the folks loved ’em? St. Louis transit officials would like ’em.
• There’s a 20-year-old intern/blogger at NPR’s All Songs Considered named Emily White. (This is NOT the Emily White who used to work for The Stranger.) She recently wrote a confession that she’s almost never paid for the music she’s downloaded. In response, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery penned a screed denouncing her and people like her for shelling out bucks for computers and Internet connections but not for the content they thereby attain:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

• Elsewhere in piracyland, when last we mentioned The Oatmeal online cartoonist Matthew Inman, he’d complained about a “social media” humor site that had posted his art without credit or payment. Then an attorney for that site sued him for defaming his client’s character. Inman replied back by starting an online fundraising campaign for the amount of the lawsuit—only with the proceeds going to charities instead. Now, the attorney has re-sued Inman, and has sued the site hosting the fund drive and even the charities it benefits. To quote one of America’s greatest contributions to comic satire, “Whadda maroon.”

• Missed the transit of Venus? Fret not! You can still catch The Myrtle of Venus!
• The lovely graphic at the left of this site’s “sidebar” column, inviting donations for the Cafe Racer shooting victims, was done by our ol’ pal Nick Vroman, an ex-Seattleite now in Japan. He’s also got a lovely site reviewing Japanese cult films.
• With the arrival of Wednesday came The Stranger’s package of Cafe Racer shooting and mourning articles.
• Joel Connelly calls the “war on drugs” America’s “second lost war of the half century.”
• Contemporary art, product logos, graphic design, even web page design—all these fields and more are frequently invaded by rank copycats, whose thievery can be caught red-handed at the site You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice.
• Health Scare O’ the Week: the allegedly imminent arrival of drug-resistant gonorrhea.
• The next frontier in confronting idiot misogyny: Multiplayer gaming.
• Cell phone users are using their cell phones as phones a lot less. Companies plan to respond by raising rates. Huh?
• Our heroine Amanda Palmer wanted to raise $100,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, to release and promote her next record. She ended up raking in a cool million.
• Social-economy guru Richard Florida offers up some theories behind the revival of downtown retail around the country.

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

meowonline.org

• Music/performance-art goddess and ex-Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer explains the secret to her astounding success at raising a recording budget thru Kickstarter. It’s all about the long work of gathering and nurturing as many online supporters as you can:

Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that I curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on… all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY.… And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.

• After nearly a decade of study and planning, Seattle’s finally giving up on the idea of a city-owned broadband network. Pathetic.
• Time is running out for any hope of saving the historic streamlined ferry Kalakala. Estimated cost of a full restoration: $50 million.
• Ah, if only the Mariners still had some of the players they’d let slip away. If only….
• A Long Island, NY woman is accused of using her hot-dog truck as a cover for arranging “compensated dates” (to use a recent Japanese euphemism). No “sausage” or “buns” puns here, at least not today.
• A Utah woman claims to have found cocaine packed in a box of tampons. Just think of it as an extra measure of pain relief that also leaves you feeling fresh.
• Bill Maher says what everyone except Fox News viewers already knows—that many of the most fervent Obama haters are racist, with different degrees of denial.
• Meanwhile, a Washington Monthly writer believes the Presidential election will be decided by Hispanic voters (i.e., one of the groups the Rabid Right is most virulently bigoted against).
• There’s an anonymous novel out of Portland (originally self published by the author, who only calls himself “The Author”). It’s getting a lot of attention. It’s about a young man’s doomed relationship with “someone who considers Courtney Love to be her role model.” What makes it extra-special is it’s formatted like one of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” kids’ books. Only every choice “you” make leads to the same miserable ending. I also like the title: Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life.
• Not only are grad students getting buried in piles of student-loan debt, they might not even get into the careers for which they’re studying (cf. the rising number of Ph.Ds on food stamps).
• A marketing analyst calls 2012 “the year of inverse retro-futurism.” Whatever the heck that is.

designboom.com

• The resurgent micro-car movement has a new achievement, the micro RV!
• Lightning, mudslides. Just another mid-spring day in Seattle.
• Gov. Gregoire takes the bold step of insisting Wash. state needs new tax revenue, now that she’s no longer running for anything.
• A (female) anti-choice activist was invited to speak at the UW by campus Catholics. The lecture’s deliberately provocative title: “Do Women Have Too Many Rights?”. Pro-choice women, naturally, showed up to protest and to put the truth to the speaker’s lies. Things did not go smoothly.
• Roger Valdez at the Seattle Transit Blog suggests citizens take control of preserving neighborhood landmarks by getting together to buy them.
• Developers of the big (175-foot) waterfront ferris wheel are making sure it’ll attract riders year round. Riders will be in “enclosed gondolas, equipped with heating and air conditioning.”
• Darn, those proposed new Amazon office towers would be mighty big n’ slick.
• Boeing’s Wash. state employment may peak this year at about 83,000, then dwindle.
• Health Scare of the Day: Wazzu researchers believe exposure to toxic chemicals might lead to a risk of ovarian cancer, a risk that could be passed on to your great-granddaughters.
• It’s the end of an era for non-NY/LA/SF based national media. Playboy is moving its last Chicago-based operations to LA. The Chicago Tribune even published an editorial about it.
• I don’t always follow ’em, but you might try blogger Barb Sawyers’ “15 Ways to Write Tight.”
• The Starz series Magic City is having a hard time finding actresses and extras in Miami who could pass for women living in 1959 (i.e., without implants).
• I was at the Prole Drift art gallery this past First Thursday. Saw a big painting of what looked a lot like a dead mall. A desolate exurban landscape. A big, nearly empty parking lot. Long, lo-rise buildings with neither windows nor signs. A main entrance at the center. I told the gallery owners I was in a Facebook group of dead mall enthusiasts. They quickly told me the painting was really of a modern prison.

buddy bunting, via prole drift gallery

• Brendan Kiley tries to parse out what exactly we should call the busters up of stuff on May Day. How about “testosteronic dorks”?
• Joel Connelly, meanwhile, calls the window-breakers “the worst enemies of worthy change.”
• Seattle Times business writer Jon Talton proclaims that “what we have witnessed in recent years in America is not capitalism,” but rather destructive cronyism.
• Ex-Microsoftie turned political activist Jeff Reifman has launched an initiative campaign called I-103. It would establish a “community bill of rights” and a set of workers’ rights, take a symbolic stand against “corporate personhood,” and restrict corporate campaign contributions for city elections. We’ll see how far it gets in a town that likes to be “progressive” only as long as business interests don’t feel threatened.
• Could Microsoft’s investment in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division finally give MS a toehold in the tablet market?
• The thing about Amazon Kindle e-book readers is that people really need to see them in person in order to understand/appreciate/want them. That’s the one thing Amazon’s not built to provide. So it sells Kindles through chain stores. Only these chains are getting tired of folks looking at stuff in their stores then going to buy it online. One of ’em, Target, will stop selling Kindles in retaliation.
• There’s a new intercity bus line in town. BoltBus will take you straight to Portland in 3.25 hours. Buses leave four times a day from 5th Avenue South near the transit tunnel station. Fares are $27 but with discounts for early reservations and low-demand runs. It’s not really a competitor to Greyhound, because the latter is operating the route under contract.
• Another female teacher, another teenage male student, another sex scandal. This is getting beyond the cliché stage.
• In today’s China, HuffPost blogger Tom Doctoroff writes, many forms of non-marital sex are still illegal; but more and more people engage in them anyway, often openly. Doctoroff says this illustrates China’s current vacillation between “prudence and prurience,” between “‘comfortable’ domesticity and extra-curricular indulgence.” What Doctoroff doesn’t mention: sexual behavior is like that everywhere, in all eras.
• A creative-writing prof claims he’s isolated the 12 winning ingredients of successful bestselling novels. Only thing is, those same ingredients also appear in a lot of works that don’t sell.

joybra.com, via seattlepi.com

• Dept. of Things You Never Knew You Needed: UW business students have designed a bra with a pocket for an iPhone.
• Seattle’s (the nation’s? the world’s?) longest running serialized stage play, the Asian American-centric Sex in Seattle series, ends after 12 years with episode 20, opening this weekend.
• Amazon’s quarterly profits are 35 percent lower than a year ago. To Wall Street, that’s seen as good news somehow.
• The Sacramento Kings’ arena deal is apparently dead. The team might or might not be put up for sale any week now. Seattle has a wannabe majority owner, a perfectly functional arena, and the land and initial plans for a new arena.
• Vancouver punk legend Joey “Shithead” Kiethley sez he’ll run next year for a seat in B.C.’s provincial legislature. He’s done this twice before, on Green Party tickets. But this time he’ll run on the ticket of the New Democrats (Canada’s official national “opposition” party). He’s putting into practice his old motto, “Talk – Action = Zero.”
• Gay Divorcee Dept.: A B.C. judge has ruled that a split-up lesbian couple has to split their jointly owned sperm-bank deposit.
• Are outspoken homophobes really gay but suppressing it? All I know is for me, other men’s bodies are like eggplant casseroles. I don’t wanna eat ’em but I don’t mind if you do.
• Will the Arab world need a full-scale “cultural revolution” before women have rights there?
• Nutella: not as “healthy” as some consumers apparently thought.
• The story about Egypt legalizing sex between widowers and their dead wives? A complete hoax.
• In an interview promoting her new film Hysteria (about the first electric sex tools for women and the “medical” excuses advertised for them), Maggie Gyllenhaal talks about why there are so few emotionally powerful sex scenes in U.S. movies. My theory: Most sex scenes in mainstream films are escapist in nature. Many serve as breaks from the plot, like the songs in many musicals. These include scenes choreographed to emphasize the woman’s responses. To use such a scene to reveal a character’s personality, emotions, and vulnerabilities, to show a female character with her sense of public decorum stripped away, is a rare feat.
• Did Romney only tell 10 major lies last week?

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.

sonics first-year pennant, available at gasoline alley antiques

• As various machinations occur here and elsewhere that just might bring a new men’s pro basketball team to Seattle, national audiences can see the authoritative document of how the team we had got stolen. The Sonicsgate documentary airs this Friday at 7 p.m. PT on CNBC. There’s a viewing party at the Sport bar.
• All sorts of companies are trying to get away with hiring undocumented workers. Even an organic herb farm.
• Seattle’s next P-Patch community garden site: the roof of the Mercer Street parking garage.
• Item: “Seattle company unveils plan to mine asteroids for riches.” Comment: If this works out, the whole scarcity premise behind metals commodity prices could one day disappear. And with it would go the fortunes of certain Third World countries.
• Short sales and foreclosures still account for more than half of all home sales in Snohomish and Pierce counties, and a third of all home sales in King County.
• No, Social Security isn’t going broke any time soon. And there are simple ways to make sure it never does.
• America’s first mad cow is in California, naturally.
• Why didn’t Forbes run articles about male porn stars when ol’ Malcolm Forbes was alive?
• Ex-Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham has a long essay about the future of language in the Internet age, among other things. Lapham rightfully calls for more and better reasoned thinking online. And he echoes my own belief that the web is not primarily made of code but words. But he also casually engages in tiresome elitist stereotyping about a “postliterate sensibility” that’s supposedly “offended by anything that isn’t television.” Any guy who claims to oppose one-dimensional banalities shouldn’t repeat them himself.
• Found: Someone who misses the glory days of MySpace.