painting the needle for its big b-day party

Keith Seinfeld at KPLU recently asked, “Why does Seattle still care about the world’s fair?”

That’s an excellent question.

As international expos go, Seattle’s was relatively small.

And it took place a full half century ago.

Until Mad Men came along, that era was widely considered to have been a dullsville time, a time wtih nothing much worth remembering.

The “Space Age” predicted at the fair would seem would seem ridiculous just a few years later. It predicted domed cities and cheap nuclear power. It predicted computers in the home (in the form of fridge-sized consoles) and video conferencing (with a special “picturephone”), but it didn’t predict the Internet.

It sure didn’t predict the racial, sexual, musical, and social upheavals collectively known as “The Sixties.”

And a lot of the fair’s attractions were so utterly corny, you can wonder why they were taken seriously even then. Attractions such as the world’s largest fruitcake. Or the Bubbleator (essentially just a domed platform on a hydraulic lift). Or the adults-only risqué puppet show (by the future producers of H.R. Pufnstuf).

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Yet a lot of us do care about all that. And not just us old-timers either.

And not just for the physical structures the fair left behind (the Space Needle, the Science Center, etc.).

The fair was the single most important thing that happened in Seattle between World War II and the rise of Microsoft. (The launch of the Boeing 707 was the next most important.)

The fair revved up the whole Northwest tourism industry, just as jet aircraft and Interstate highways were getting more Americans to explore other parts of their nation. This once-remote corner of the country became a top destination.

The fair was a coming-out party for a new Seattle.

A Seattle dominated not by timber and fishing but by tech. Specifically, by aerospace.  Boeing had only a secondary role in equipping the U.S. space program, but its planes were already making Earth a seemingly smaller place.

The fair didn’t start the Seattle arts and performance scenes, but it gave them a new oomph.

Seattle Opera and the Seattle Repertory Theatre were immediately established in the fair’s wake.

ACT Theatre came soon after. Visual art here was already becoming famous, thanks to the “Northwest School” painters; the fair’s legacy led to increased local exposure to both local and national artists.

The fair established a foothold for modern architecture here.

Before the fair, there hadn’t been a major change to Seattle’s skyline since the Smith Tower in 1914. (The few new downtown buildings were relatively short, such as the 19-story Norton Building.)

The Space Needle became the city’s defining icon, instantly and forever.

The U.S. Science Pavilion (now Pacific Science Center) established the career of Seattle-born architect Minoru Uamasaki, who later designed the former World Trade Center.

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Speaking of tragedy and turmoil, some commentators have described the fair’s era as “a simpler time.”

It wasn’t.

The Cuban missile crisis, revealed just after the fair ended, threatened to turn the cold war hot.

The whole Vietnam debacle was getting underway.

The civil rights and black power movements were quickly gaining traction.

The birth control pill was just entering widespread use.

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which helped launch the U.S. environmental movement, came out while the fair was on.

So yes, there were big issues and conflicts in 1962.

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But there was also something else.

There was optimism.

In every exhibit and display at the fair, there was the notion that humans could work together to solve things.

And, at least at the fair, most everything was considered solveable.

I wrote in 1997, at the fair’s 35th anniversary, that its creators sincerely felt Americas would strive “to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.”

It’s that forward-looking confidence that got lost along the road from the Century 21 Exposition to the 21st century.

It’s something many of us would like to see more of these days.

And that, more than Belgian waffles or an Elvis movie, is why Seattle still cares about the World’s Fair.

And why you should too.

(Cross posted with City Living.)

souvenir display at the world's fair anniversary exhibition

alliance for pioneer square via seattlepi.com

• An artistic ad poster, promoting the native American cause “Honor the Treaties,” was wheat-pasted in multiple copies all over a series of artists’ murals in Pioneer Square. The “Honor” campaign didn’t do it, and neither did the poster’s original artist. It was PosterGiant, the city’s leading poster putter-uppers.
• Congress just might kill off “Boeing’s bank.”
• One idea to save journalism is the concept of a nonprofit news website. Several of these are already up in scattered spots around the country. But the IRS is taking its own sweet time processing some of their applications for official nonprofit status.
• Here’s King County Metro’s current plan for bus changes effective September. A few new routes would be added, but a lot of key current routes would be reduced or dropped.
• You’ve only got 44 more days to enjoy your state liquor stores.
• This story speculating about potential “robot prostitutes” reminds me of (1) that whole “dildonics” nonsense in the 1990s, and (2) Westworld. Remember: Nothing can possibly go wrong….

anti-riaa ad from the electronic frontier foundation; via university of texas

Two reasons why Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney’s recent verbal sparring partner, should not be considered a spokesperson for the Obama campaign or for any “progressive” thing:

(1) She became a PR shill for BP, post-gulf-spill.

(2) and most important: She infamously headed the Recording Industry Association of America during the start of that outfit’s notorious “anti-piracy” extremism.

Rosen didn’t just shut down Napster and Audiogalaxy. She fostered the music-industry lobby group’s policy of punitive aggression in the name of the Almighty Intellectual Property.

After she left the RIAA, the staff she’d hired served all those ridiculous suits for ridiculous sums against lowly individual file-sharers—and against some individuals who’d never shared a file in their lives.

Elsewhere in randomland:

• Talk about going dangerously mainstream: The Stranger won a Pulitzer Prize. (It’s actually for a good piece, the one about the survivor of the South Park killer.) (Oh, the Seattle Times won one of those Pulitzer things too.)
• Financial-software giant Intuit is celebrating Tax Day by closing part of Second Avenue downtown and (as per GeekWire) “inviting people to drive golf balls down the middle of the street.”
• Neither gubernatorial candidate has so far dared to even mention this state’s #1 need: to reform our ultra-regressive revenue system.
• There’s a new local news site in town. The nonprofit Seattle Globalist is all about the intersections between here at home and the whole wide world. The ethnic communities; the local impact of world events; world culture (film, food, anime, etc.). The site’s got a launch party on the 28th at Washington Hall.
• A sports analyst says the Mariners are “ripe to be sold,” should the team’s current owners decide to sell (which they haven’t).
• Here’s one more thing some folks are bitching at Amazon about: its membership (along with many other big corps) in ALEC, the notorious right-wing pressure group that supplies GOP state legislators with pre-written, megabuck-lobbyist-dictated bills. (It also files “friend of the court” briefs in U.S. Supreme Court cases.)
• Just Plain Gross Dept.: The next stage in crash dieting is women who voluntarily live on feeding tubes for up to 10 days.
• Margaret Atwood claims “our faith is fraying in the god of money.”
• Alex Henderson at AlterNet believes America would be much better off, in several quantifiable ways, if the country could just shake off its “sexual prudery.” Some of these ways, he claims, would include lowered rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and HIV infections.

david eskenazi collection via sportspressnw.com

And a happy Friday the 13th (first of the year) and Mariners home opening day to all of you!

• Richard Beyer, 1925-2002: The Waiting for the Interurban sculptor didn’t invent Fremont’s image as a funky/artsy neighborhood. But his work publicized this image as much as anything.
• Something You Might Not Have Known Dept.: Seattle gets a small but impressive portion of its electricity from methane at an Oregon landfill.
• You’ve got two more chances to have your say about Metro’s plan to ax the downtown Ride Free Area, at County Council meetings on the 16th and the 25th. Let ’em know you want/need/demand robust free downtown transit service.
• Third Avenue in Belltown now has those “daylight-like” street lights. Next step in resurrecting Third: making the street and its buildings look cleaner.
• With the legislative session finally over, Rob McKenna can legally raise campaign money. Thus, Washington’s gubernatorial campaign is now truly underway. Watch for McKenna to simultaneously run with and against the national Republican agenda—something Jay Inslee will try to stick onto McKenna at every opportunity.
• St. James Cathedral is among the churches that won’t take part in the Catholic archdiocese’s initiative petition campaign to overturn gay marriage.
• When can you start getting a legal drink in Wash. state after 2 a.m.? Perhaps in November (just perhaps).
• Bizarre Patent Application of the Day: GeekWire says Microsoft wants to patent “monetizing buttons on TV remotes:”

It’s called “Control-based Content Pricing,” and the basic idea is dynamic pricing of video content, based on the preferences of the user at any given moment—essentially setting different prices for different functions of the TV remote.

• Frances Cobain still can’t get away from her mom’s meddling.
• A Spokane nursery put up a billboard reading “Pot Dealer Ahead.” The ad was complete with an image of some flower pots, in case people didn’t get the joke (it being Spokane and all). Some people are vocally not amused (it being Spokane and all).
• The U.S. Border Patrol in this state continues to behave like a gang of racist tools.
• North Korea just can’t keep it up.
• Reversible male contraception is finally in the domestic testing stage, despite Big Pharma’s longtime disinterest.
• Jed Lewison at Daily Kos parses the anatomy of a Mitt Romney lie, that over 90 percent of U.S. job losses have gone against women. In reality (instead of Fox News Fantasyland), most folks laid off in the Great Recession were men. But new or revived jobs the past two years have also gone mostly to men (56 percent).
• The Murdoch media empire’s phone and email tapping scandal is reaching the U.S. But Murdoch’s domestic properties are not implicated, at least not yet. This is still about Murdoch’s U.K. papers, tapping into Hollywood celebrities’ phones and emails.
• Ari Rabin-Havt at HuffPost claims right wing racism no longer bothers with coded “dog whistle” messages, but now spews its hate openly and proudly.
• What Omar Willey says about seeking good web comics applies to just about all web “content”: “How do you find all this stuff?” (The stuff worth reading, that is.)

casey mcnerthney, seattlepi.com

• Will the student-made, privately-financed, but oversize Lake City Way bike rack be allowed to stay?
• Happier real estate news for a change: El Centro de la Raza’s affordable-housing project on Beacon Hill is finally a go.
• Cornish College to Mike Daisey: No honorary degree for you!
• Sasha Pasulka at Geekwire says Seattle dot-coms really need to brush up on their marketing to users. I have an additional idea, for dot-coms here and elsewhere: Pay a living wage to the people who make the content (you know, the stuff people actually see when they log onto your site), not just the coders and the execs.
• Does anybody really want to live in “America’s #1 city for hipsters“?
• The U District’s Metro Cinemas tenplex has been sold to a Robert Redford-led consortium.
• One of the big Republicans in the State Senate wants to eliminate medical assistance to the poor, while he himself gets monthly disability payments. He sez, of course, that he really deserves the aid; while those pesky poor people are only sick because of “poor lifestyle choices” they’ve made.
• Martin H. Duke at the Seattle Transit Blog offers up one way how non-subsidized, affordable urban housing comes to exist…

…In the long term today’s affordable housing comes from yesterday’s luxury flats, and cutting off the supply of the latter will deny our children the former in the absence of massive, unsustainable public subsidy.

• The “Painter of Light” has now gone into the light.
• In what Jezebel.com claims to be a “revolutionary” business venture, three business students at a German college have placed ads for “the world’s first free sex brothel for women,” with themselves as the volunteer gigolos. They say they’ve had five “clients” thus far, out of 80 email inquiries. I wouldn’t call it a “business” per se, as no money’s involved. Rather, it’s a marketing operation, with these guys promising they’ll satisfy the women while making no demands of their own.
• Looks like it’s going to take court action to stop Michigan’s right-wing monopoly government from essentially turning that state into a dictatorship.
• Mobutu Sese Seko at Gawker decodes decades of right-wing racist-code-word politics, and sees them culminating in the backlash campaign to defame the Florida shooting victim.
• Lynn Parramore at Alternet insists big corps. are not “job creators” but rather instigators of layoffs, offshoring, and massive wage cuts; and will probably continue to be so.
• Rick Ungar at Forbes (yes, Forbes!) offers a simple answer to the health care crisis: Single-payer plans, established at the state level. He says this “dose of socialism” would be a boon to businesses in states that adopt it.
• The Economist has found at least one dead shopping center that’s being put to new use. It’s in San Antonio, and it’s become the HQ of a web hosting company. We already did this in Everett, where Fluke Manufacturing turned an old big-box strip mall into an electronic test-equipment factory. (Too bad they didn’t call the place “Ye Olde Mall.”)
• Neuroscientists claim stories “stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.” How to intrepret this: not as another excuse for the “eat your broccoli” definition of book reading; but as a lure, a promise that fiction gives you mental/emotional turn-ons of a kind you can’t get from games or movies.

via shelligator.tumblr.com

You will note we posted nothing on 4/1. We’ve had enough trouble over the years with people thinking the stuff posted here’s just made up.

• SyFy premiered a set-in-Seattle, filmed-in-LA cheesy horror flick at the local Comicon, somehow expecting folks here would love it. They were wrong.
• (By the way, from my brief visit to the Comicon, the most popular costume inspiration this year is Cartoon Network’s playful series Adventure Time.)
• We must say goodbye to local landscape painter Christopher Martin Hoff, known for setting up his easel around town and painting street scenes on and at the spot.
• Also gone this week is Georgia/Florida novelist Harry Crews, who deftly made the most improbable scenarios seem as normal as everyday life in those states (which, admittedly, already includes some mighty improbable stuff).
• On the one hand, Amazon continues to put down roots in the Heart-O-Seattle; while most U.S. tech and dot-com outfits headquarter themselves in far-flung exurban office parks. On the other hand, the company gives damn little to local arts and charitable groups, and maintains a lower-than-low-key civic presence  (even regarding its own real estate moves).
• The Arizona-founded company now calling itself Village Voice Media turns out (thanks to an investigative campaign by another wannabe anti-Backpage.com crusader) to be half owned by its top two execs. The rest of the stock is also privately held, with a fund managed by Goldman Sachs having a 16 percent share.
• A Zoroastrian sect in England has gotten preliminary approval to build a 300-foot funeral tower, to be called the “Tower of Silence,” next to a popular seaside beach. More than just a memorial, it will actually have believers’ remains hoisted atop it, in keeping with the group’s belief that dead bodies “pollute the earth.” The local authorities say they hope to revive the town’s sagging fortunes via “funeral tourism.”
• It’s been 50 years since Michael Harrington’s book The Other America spread the idea that poor people were some “Other,” a different tribe than you and me, trapped in a “culture of poverty” rather than simply not making enough money to go around. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, Harrington helped perpetuate the dangerous meme that poor people were lazy and ignorant, when they really often work their asses off just to barely get by.
• Finally, here’s local pastor Catherine Foote with a Palm Sunday address against what she calls the “divisive fear” threatening to tear U.S. society apart.

In recent months I have resumed my primary occupation of looking for paid employment.*

During this, I have become all too aware of the dorky buzzwords found in present day employment ads.

One of the most egregious examples is the header “ROCK STARS WANTED.”

It’s seen fronting searches for everything from programmers to marketing trainees to attorneys to chain-restaurant drudges—and occasionally (very occasionally) even for musicians.

So let me get this straight: Major corporations are just dyin’ to fill their ranks with guys possessed by fatally large egos, who swagger about like they’re God’s gift to the universe, who expect every female to want to fuck them, and who stand a great chance of becoming drug casualties.

That’s not a personality profile for a corporate employee.

That’s a personality profile for a corporate executive.

Thanx and a hat tip to Urso Chappell for suggesting this topic.

*Yes, my many, many varied skills (not just “writing”) are available to help your business or nonprofit shine. Email now. Operators are standing by.

• As a treat for those of you who actually read these things (and I know there are at least a few of you out there), here’s the original version of the song that was at the center of last night’s Mad Men season premiere. It’s “Zou Bisou Bisou.” It was originally recorded in 1960 by Gillian Hills. One of the stars of the French “ye ye” genre, she also appeared in the landmark British films Beat Girl, Blow Up, and A Clockwork Orange.
• Questionable medical study of the day: Somebody says regularly eating chocolate can make you thinner.
• Here’s the site for the folks who want to bring the Seattle monorail project back from the dead. (By sticking with the previous monorail proponents’ planned Ballard to West Seattle route, they’re also inheriting its high cost, requiring two major all-new bridges.)
• Here’s WashDOT’s CGI video of how the new 520 bridge will look. Without, you know, the highway noise or smell.
• And here’s what Amazon’s proposed three new high rises would look like.
• “Unemployed Nation” is a series of “hearings,” in which the mayor, city council, and others will “listen to the men and women who have lost their livelihoods and more.” The sessions are Friday afternoon at the UW’s Kane Hall and Saturday afternoon at City Hall.
• There’s a new site up helping locals find affordable rental housing.
• The fired transgender Miss Universe Canada contestant from Vancouver would like you to think of her as “a woman—with a history.” (The protest petition is now online.)
• How to make money despite being in the news business: A Houston Chronicle society reporter was outed for moonlighting as a stripper. Apparently at least as much for the money as for any undercover writing gig (though she has made a pseudonymous blog about her stripping life).
• Under the British common-law heritage, prostitution per se has been quasi-legal in Canada. But businesses facilitating prostitution have been banned. Now, the province of Ontario’s highest court has approved legalizing brothels. The common-sense reason: it’s better for a sex worker “to work indoors, in a location under her control.”
• Another country where hooking is legal, but making money from other people’s hooking isn’t: France. That’s where the ex-Intl. Monetary Fund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, already disgraced from sexual assault charges, has been accused of involvement in a pimping ring based at luxury hotels. (I know people who believe those IMF/World Bank guys have always been pimps for the corporate elite, but this is something different.)
• Big Brother Dept.: A public school district in Brazil is issuing school-uniform T shirts with computer chips sewn in, capable of tracking every student’s every move.
• If you believe the New Yorker, the most influential and sleaziest newspaper in Britain isn’t owned by Murdoch.
• Even before the Legislature revived state tax breaks for filmmakers, one feature project (from a local writer-director) was already underway. And it’s got such great stars—Lee Majors! Gary Busey! Margot Kidder! Edward Furlong! Seahawks player Marshawn Lynch! I tell you, I sense a date with Oscar!

• We’ve got the indie alcohol entrepreneurs. We’ve got the apples (though perhaps not the right kinds). So let’s get a bigtime hard cider industry going in Wash. state already!
• The Central Cinema, which insists it needs to serve beer and wine to adult patrons at screenings, to survive, will apparently get to keep doing so. Even during all-ages screenings.
• Dept. of Just Sayin’: In three years, it will be a novelty to find a new hiphop artist who’s not white. Like with jazz after 1965, or with soul after 1985.
• Death Cab for Cutie (you know, the quasi-local band whose singer now lives in L.A. (until recently with Zoey Deschanel)) has entitled its spring 2012 tour “Return to Bellingham.” The tour does not actually include a show in Bellingham.
• Does current Seattle zoning need to be revised, to require more off-street parking in new developments? The Seattle Transit Blog apparently doesn’t think so, at least in one instance.
• Knute Berger looks at Seattle Center development schemes and would really like someone to explain them in non-buzzword-talk.
• If you know them, you love them, and you just can’t get enough of George Tsutakawa’s fountain sculptures. Seattle gallery owner John Braseth tracked one down in Indiana, and is arranging to have it fixed up and placed somewhere in town.
• There are a few non-Deja Vu strip clubs left in the region. Just not many.
• Oliver Willis wants more real progressives running for office, and wants them to actually “stand for something“…
• …while Chris Mooney at AlterNet thinks he’s figured a way progs could successfully appeal to “the right-wing brain.”
• The Economist notes that divorce, abortion, unwed pregnancy, and violent crime are all way down in the U.S. these days. So, the essay asks, why are Republicans still exhorting about “moral decline“? Perhaps because U.S. church attendance is also way down.
• Naomi Wolf insists elite private K-12 schools are bad for America and even bad for the kids who get sent there…
• …while Adam Levin at HuffPost suggests the Feds consider ordering a cap on public-college tuition, so taxpayer-supported universities don’t become only for the 1 percenters.
• Blogger “Angry Black Lady” really doesn’t like the Republican woman who claims the Democrats are just making up the whole “Republican war on women” meme.
• It wasn’t just Marx. Keynesians and other macroeconomists are also often guilty of forgetting the human factor in their systems constructs.

• The demise of the (print) Encyclopedia Britannica has led the Best Week Ever site to recall the books’ still famous 1990s TV commercials. The site doesn’t mention it, but the spots were created by comedy/commercials genius Stan Freberg and star his son Donavan (he later ran a porn site, but now photographs actors’ and wannabe actors’ portfolio shots).
• What if they gave a shopping mall and nobody came?
• Goldy reminds you that you can’t support essential public services like education from state sales taxes (and little else) anymore.
• Ex-Seattleite Mike Daisey’s monologue show rallying against the labor practices of Apple’s Chinese subcontractors? It turns out to have been full of distortions and “dramatic license.”
• Nobody’s actually trying to move the Portland TrailBlazers to Seattle. Some guy at the Weekly simply thinks it would be a good idea.
• A self proclaimed Libertarian (you know, the dudes who think the oil companies and Wall Street don’t have enough power) says we must protect porn’s right to exist, because the next industry to be cracked down on would be advertising.
• Robert Reich reminds you that America’s “moral rot” isn’t gays and abortion, but rather “the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.”

Today, go out and celebrate Pi Day (3/14). Tomorrow, learn about pies of the past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on cantilevered Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• We now know what’s going in where the parking garage on Second north of Stewart had been until last weekend. It’s (wait for it) a beyond-upscale luxury apartment tower, the “Viktoria” (yes, with a K). The developers are employing all the usual buzzwords (including their vow that this will be “the signature residential building in Belltown”). Construction starts within a month.
• Next threatened landmark that needs saving: The Funhouse, that delightfully seedy and decidedly downscale rock club, situated within easy jeering distance of EMP and Ride the Ducks. Yep, it’s due to yet another “mixed use” project.
• Wash. state’s next big contribution to the music world is a Korean American “pop lothario.”
• Public-school advocates calling themselves “Occupy Education” show up at Gates Foundation HQ to pick a verbal fight, about what the activists call the foundation’s “corporate brand of education reform.” Hilarity ensues.
• SeattlePI.com’s list of “most hated Seattle sports figures” relegates Clay Bennett to the #2 slot behind Howard Schultz, the man who made Bennett’s team-theft possible.
• Co-ops, locavores, Kickstarter, Etsy—Sara Horowitz at the Atlantic calls it all a revival of 1890s “mutualism.”
• Mike Lux attempts to explain why so many professed Christians behave so not-Christlike. (Lux mainly blames the Apostle Paul.)
• William K. Black at AlterNet would like to see the same kind of attention paid toward Wall Street’s corporate crimes that’s paid toward blue-collar street crime.
• Village Voice Media continues to defend its Backpage.com sex ad operation, even within an article about a group of accused child abusers who are charged with using the site to pimp out their underage victim.
• Encyclopedia Britannica, having sold only 8,000 print encyclopedia sets in the past two years, announced it won’t print any more after 244 years.
• We know junkies were stealing copper wire, but liquid Tide?
• Charlie Jane Anders at i09.com offers advice on how to be a better sci-fi/fantasy writer by being less annoyingly “clever” about it:

Try writing the same line of dialogue three different ways: 1) the quippy version, 2) the version that simply conveys the meaning of the line, and 3) the emotional subtext of the line. And then try to find the version that combines 2) and 3) as much as possible. You might find you end up with a line that’s more quotable than the witty version you originally had.

crosscut.com

• Ex Seattle First Brother Bob Royer looks back at one of the city’s first prominent newspaperwomen. Fun fact: In the late 1930s, the Seattle Times had six people working in the “society” section; an expense more than made up by the amount of “women’s” oriented advertising in the section. Speaking of which….
• The P-I globe will remain standing, somewhere. That’s nice. But it’s not just the globe that I’d wanted preserved. Speaking of which….
• Newspapers are losing $7 in print ad revenue for every $1 they gain in online ad revenue. This is from a Pew Research study. The study’s authors claim papers “need to prioritize digital ad revenues” in order to survive. But what if that’s still not nearly enough? The study cites a “success story” of a small paper (20,000 print circ.) that’s now making $670,000 a year online, compared to $8 million from print ads. That doesn’t look like a bright future to me.
• The new Miss Seattle used to be a Miss Phoenix. Last December she Tweeted® how she “Ugh can’t stand cold rainy Seattle and the annoying people.” She has since apologized.
• Could liquor privatization in Wash. state really get derailed by a court challenge on techinical issues in the original initiative?
• Repercussions continue from Friday night’s Republican coup in the state Senate. The all-cuts budget they rushed through, with the help of three turncoat conserva-Dems but with no public hearings, turns out to hurt K-12 education and devastate services for the neediest.
• Also, the GOP’s parliamentary trickery doomed about 20 non-budget bills from the state House, which died because the Senate didn’t take action on them by midnight Friday.
• Meanwhile, the national Republicans, becoming shriller and stupider every week, have firmly (and probably fatally) tied their fate to the aging, non-college-educated, white male demographic. And they’re “appealing” to this last remaining constituency by treating them like idiots.
• Oh, and the even more batshit-n’-bigoted than ever Limbaugh? He’s lost a third of his ratings in the last few years. (However, some of that loss can be attributed to more accurate means of measuring radio listenership.) But in any event, the right wing “outrage machine,” which includes Limbaugh and his many imitators, may have finally become too petty and brutal for its own good.
• Besides, there’s a problem with trying to bring sexuality and women’s lives back to what they were in the 1950s. It wasn’t working then either. As local author Stephanie Coontz points out, “Teenage childbearing peaked in the fabulous family-oriented 1950s.”
• The GOP-controlled U.S. House is pushing through a bill that would crack down on protests anywhere a federal official might be present. At least, that’s what a worst-case interpretation of its “imprecise language” might infer.
• We know the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia. But did the Saudi regime itself collude in the attack? Two former U.S. Senators say maybe.
• A megarich hedge fund manager write lucidly about the failures of capitalism in regard to preserving a sustainable society.
• What if crossword puzzle editors wrote poetry?
• Finally, here is a handy pie chart of “excuses conservatives make when facts prove them wrong“:

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

My pals at HistoryLink.org have put together a weighty historical coffee table tome called The Future Remembered.

It’s all about the Century 21 Exposition, the Seattle world’s fair that began 50 years ago this April.

It’s 300 pages of insightful prose and luscious pictures concerning what is still probably the single most important event that ever happened here in Software City.

It’s proof of what a physical book can still be—an object of desire. (And a handy blunt instrument, should you need one.)

It gives you most of the individual subplots of the fair’s story, from the miraculously perfect design of the Space Needle to the erotic puppet show (by the future producers of Land of the Lost!).

These sub-stories are woven around a main narrative line, about a cabal of squarer-than-square civic boosters who pulled off a staggering feat of a spectacle, something that melded both high art and mass entertainment into one vision of a sleek modern tomorrow (that mostly still hasn’t shown up).

And it even turned a small profit, and left a 74-acre arts-and-recreation campus in the middle of town.

You should all look it up, check it out, even get one for your very own.

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Indeed, there’s only only one small mini-gripe I’ve got with the document.

There’s a two page spread saluting “Women At Century 21.”

It honors Gracie Hansen (the brassy small-town hostess who ran one of the fair’s burlesque revues), Laurene Gandy (wife of fair exec Joe Gandy and a tireless worker for both the fair and the subsequent Seattle Center), and the other male execs’ wives (billed collectively as “Our Fair Ladies”).

But one prominent woman is not mentioned in the spread. Or in the entire book.

Dr. Dixy Lee Ray (1914-1994) was a marine biologist, a UW prof, and a science-ed host on KCTS.

Ray worked as a “science advisor” to the United States Science Pavilion at the fair. In this role, she was the pavilion’s chief spokesperson to the local media.

She then became the first head of the pavilion’s post-fair entity, the Pacific Science Center.

From there she became the highest ranking woman in Richard Nixon’s Executive Branch (running the Atomic Energy Commission).

From there she successfully ran for governor in 1976 as a “flag of convenience” Democrat.

Then she proceeded on an anti-environmentalist agenda, alienated just about the entire state Democratic Party, and lost her re-election bid in the 1980 primary.

Ray left behind a lot of political opponents.

And, admittedly, her later role with the Science Center held more authority than her role with the Science Pavilion.

But she should not be written out of the fair’s history.

walla walla union-bulletin, via bygone walla walla

• As we prepare to mark a half century since the Century 21 Exposition, another local institution also marks the big five-O. Let’s raise a Coca-Cola Freestyle and some Mexi-Fries to the fiftieth birthday of Taco Time. (The Washington Taco Time, that is; not the same-named but separate Oregon chain.)
• Cold cases may make for popular TV dramas, but the folks who actually pursue them are facing layoffs.
• The Legislative session’s more than halfway done. Still nothing even on the horizon that would address our state’s crippling, unjust revenue system.
• Stanley Siegel at Psychology Today says your tastes in porn can reveal your personality—even the person you wish you were. If true, then it means I long to live in a never-really-was vision of 1970s Europe, surrounded by dirndl-clad Alpine lasses, slinky Indonesian photographers, and clean-cut German coeds. (And cool cars and cooler music.)
• Memo to the pop music world: Dude, you’re not gettin’ Adele.
• Friday’s BP refinery fire could have been covered as an environmental disaster barely averted, or a sign that this company still can’t be trusted. Instead, the Seattle Times‘ lead proclaimed the event’s most important aspect was that it “might boost gas prices.”
• Paul Krugman explains, at length, what the Wall St. crooks did. As for righting their wrongs, he says “It’s not that simple.” (Link contains NSFW banner ads.)
• Sarah Jaffe proclaims that America is becoming “less, not more, conservative.”
• Layla Farah at Huffington Post lists 11 living both-black-and-gay icons. They are two writers, one professor, one news anchor, three film directors, one comedian, two magazine editors, and one former athlete. No singers, musicians, actors, elected officials, businesspeople, scientists, or current athletes. And, in a major act of omission, no DJ Riz.