from 'fantomaster' at flickr.com

The first Washington governor of my lifetime could also be considered the state’s first “modern era” leader.

At a time of postwar complacency, just after the fading of “red scare” smear campaigns (yes, there were McCarthy-esque witch hunters here too), Rosellini enacted a bold progressive agenda.

He backed the Seattle World’s Fair.

He helped organize the cleanup of Lake Washington, once a mightily polluted body. He boosted college funding.

He established a separate juvenile justice system, and improved horrendous conditions at adult prisons and mental hospitals.

He boosted economic development and infrastructure investment, including the SR 520 bridge that now bears his name.

And yeah, he also stayed lifelong allies with the likes of strip-club maven Frank Colacurcio Sr., which eventually led to the ex-governor’s last, less-than-positive headlines in the 1990s.

You can disapprove of the Colacurcio connection and still admire Rosellini’s steadfastness to longtime friendships.

And you can look at the whole of Rosellini’s works and see a man who did all he could for what he believed in, even if it cost him most of his political capital before his first gubernatorial term was up.

Would there were more like him today.

Music scene tie in: Gov. Rosellini’s press secretary was Calvin Johnson Sr., father of the K Records swami.

fanpop.com

• R.I.P. Charles Napier, 75. The square-jawed actor appeared in everything from Rambo to Silence of the Lambs and the first two Austin Powers films. But I’ll remember him for his over-the-top roles in four Russ Meyer sexploitation classics, especially as the maniacally villainous Harry Sledge in Supervixens.
• They waited from last night until this afternoon, but city police and Parks Department crews took down Occupy Seattle’s tents at Westlake Plaza. Twenty-five protesters were arrested and released. Protesters say they’ll remain at Westlake, with or without camping gear.
• Memo to Gov. Gregoire: The poor are not a budget line item to be x’ed out when it becomes incovenient.
• Consolidation marches on, health care division: Swedish and Providence want to merge.
• Could (or should) Microsoft buy Yahoo?
• Say goodbye to another big chain bookstore, the University Village branch of Barnes & Noble. Trivia: Its space was originally a branch of the long forgotten department store Rhodes of Seattle. Rhodes’ main store was where the north wing of the Seattle Art Museum is now.
• UW women’s soccer legend Hope Solo is one of four athletes to appear pseudo-nude on alternating covers of ESPN The Magazine’s “Body Issue.”
• A registered sex offender, being transported from Florida back to eastern Washington to face molestation charges, snuck out of the van somewhere in North Dakota. His excuse for escaping, upon getting re-caught: He was hungry because he was a vegetarian.
• Two NY Times bloggers claim domestic debt forgiveness would have drastic economic side effects. This means insiders are beginning to treat domestic debt forgiveness as a serious possibility.
• SST Records honcho Greg Ginn really hates YouTube.

wash. state dept. of transportation

• More digging at the south end of the Viaduct, more cool archeological finds. Mostly different kinds of bottles.
• Here’s exactly why yet another all-cuts state budget would be a horrible, horrible thing.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Two more fired writers. More layoffs across the Village Voice Media chain.
• Under pending City legislation, homeless camps would no longer have to pack up and move every few months.
• For years, Seattle-based Trident Seafoods dumped fish guts into the waters outside its Alaska plant. The result was a “dead zone” at the ocean floor, which the company now vows to clean up.
• The Mariners will open next year’s regular season in Tokyo.
• The all-new DC Comics, now with more formulaic quasi-porn.
• Frank Rich gives one cheer to Rick Perry. The reason: Perry represents the complete and utter death of namby pamby near-right “bipartisanship.”
• And, oh yeah, Amazon announced some new hardware products.

1979 ad from vintagepaperads.com

• This list of (mostly dreadful) declining beer brands by the Big Two and a Half (that’s AB InBev, MillerCoors, and the Miller-produced Pabst brands) would seem like a ray of hope for true beer lovers—except that their place on the shelves has been usurped by other brands from the same companies.
• Microsoft is putting out a tablet computer next year. And this time, they hope to get it (and its marketing) right.
• A former Sea Gal (the Seahawks’ cheerleaders/dancers), who became a Price Is Right model, was named in a lawsuit by another Price Is Right model against that show’s producers.
• What’s behind the disembodied feet washing up in B.C. and Washington? As Spike Lee once famously asked, is it the shoes?
• The state Dept. of Employment Security is laying off almost 400 of its 2,500 employees. Alas, it’s not due to a lack of work.
• There’s going to be a graphic novel about the Green River killer. Or rather, about a detective who’d spent many years on the case, written by said detective’s son.
• Teamsters leader James Hoffa came to town. He reiterated what he’d said in Detroit about defeating the right wing. That is, he reiterated what he’d really said, not the right-wing media’s deliberate distortion of it.
• As I’ve written before, one of Seattle’s favorite activities is to proclaim “what this town needs.” Now there’s a whole site where you can leave your own ideas in that regard. It’s Changeby.us.
• SeattlePI.com has an intriguing list of local ’90s celebrities and where they are now. No, Rev. Bruce Howard isn’t mentioned. No, I don’t know what happened to him.
• French women don’t get fat, so the book says. But they do get sexually frustrated. And they sue over it.
• Update: A few days ago we linked to a guy who wished Apple would get around to charitable giving at last. It’s getting around to charitable giving at last.
• Half of Americans ages 16-24 are now unemployed.

• At Grist.org, Claire Thompson looks wistfully at south Seattle’s prized yet delicate ethnic/religious/class diversity, and wonders how it can survive.
• There was a big political science convention in town this past week. (An odd phrase, considering the number of politicians these days who officially hate regular ol’ science.) Anyhoo, Peter Steinbrueck spoke to the gathering about how this country needs more regional decision-making bodies to plan metro-wide futures.
• The head of Belltown’s Matt Talbot Center, a Christian alcohol/drug recovery center, was arrested and is on suicide watch, for “investigation of attempted rape” of a 10 year old boy. Let’s spare the snark and focus on the tragedy for now.
• The head of the Seattle police union apparently believes diversity, tolerance, and common human decency are somehow anti-American. This is not going to turn out well. In fact, it already hasn’t.
• Don’t look for a lot more living wage jobs any time soon. At least not from corporate America.
• Eric L. Wattree believes the nation’s #1 problem isn’t the economy (as putrid as it is), but “the Republican sabotage of America.”
• Finally, here’s a brief peek at Nicholson Baker’s novel House of Holes; specifically at the orgasm sound-effect words and phrases therein.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.

1. Saw rePRODUCTION, a one-night-only burlesque revue at Theatre Off Jackson, a benefit for NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. The dozen or so acts were even more whimsical and comedy-based than most neo burlesque routines. This only made them more, not less, sexy. The sequence of stripping-to-pasties performances was broken up with a male stripper, a male puppeteer, a female acrobat (doing an aerial suspension routine from TOJ’s lowish ceiling), a drag king MC, and M/F and F/F duets. The acts’ themes included sex ed, contraception, female ejaculation (yes, there was prop-activated “squirting” into the audience), breast self examination, unicorn-on-woman fantasy sex, menstruation, STDs (with a dancer who strips off her bottom garment to reveal plastic toy “crabs” on her G string), and an anti-abortion protestor who winds up needing the procedure herself (performed un-preachy). It was a lovely time, ecstatically pro-sexuality and pro-empowerment. Because I sat in the front row, I had the following tossed at me from the stage: A stripper’s silk glove; a baby doll; condoms; a (thankfully fake) used tampon.
2. Attended, and briefly participated in, E Meets West, the Elvis karaoke spectacular at the Feedback Lounge, down in West Seattle’s fabulous Fauntleroy. The magnificent Helen Anne Gately was there, large & in charge. The thing about Presley “tribute artists” is the amount of creativity and individualism available, within (and perhaps because of) the discipline of a fixed repertoire of songs and the range of the Presley stage personae (from 1954 leather to 1977 glitter).

from pulpcovers.com

• Teenage boys don’t read “young adult” fiction. Publishing industry people and school administrators want to change that, by supplying printed-word versions of video-game-esque adventures and sports-heroism sagas. It’s apparently not working. The answer, if you’re not a school administrator, is simple—pulp!
• OKCupid.com claims Portland and Seattle top the nation in personal ads from people “seeking casual sex.” It doesn’t say whether any of the advertisers actually attain their goal.
• From where you wouldn’t expect street theater, some 200 people dressed in Great Depression character costumes held a “soup line” vigil outside Rep. Dave Reichert’s Mercer Island office.
• Local directing wonderkind Lynn Shelton says she won’t be able to make any more movies in Washington until the state brings back filmmakers’ tax incentives.
• As new gambling opportunities have sprouted around the country, horse racing’s taken a nosedive. Fewer races are being staged, and fewer horses are being bred to run in them. One bright spot in the biz: Emerald Downs.
• Are Seafair and Daffodil Festival queens really insufficiently qualified to run for Miss America? And is this another example of our state falling behind in preparing its youth?
• As the Mitt Romney Presidential campaign ramps up, it’s time for a look back to the roots of anti-Mormon fervor. According to authors David Bigler and Will Bagley, it dates back to the initial spread of the LDS “tribe” across the inland west, back in the frontier days.
• Lame excuse dept: Hershey’s made money by having foreign students come to the U.S. for what the students thought would be an educational adventure but turned out to be sub-minimum-wage factory work. Hershey’s now tries to get away with it by saying it was really a subcontractor that did it.
• The latest fad in online fraud? “Review mills” churning out fake accolades for restaurants, books, or anything else you want accoladed.
• Financial analysts examined Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s cell phone division. Their conclusion: Google “bought a patent portfolio and got a mobile phone business thrown in for free.”
• And few seem to have noticed, but this month is the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC. And of the operating software running it, a little something called MS-DOS from a little company on the Eastside.

• Our ol’ pal David Goldstein floats the idea that Metro Transit perhaps should be broken up, with Seattle resuming authority over in-city bus routes (including funding authority), intercity routes given over to Sound Transit, and King County keeping the rest of the system. (Seattle ran its own bus routes before Metro was formed in the early 1970s.)
• Meanwhile, Jason Kambitsis at Wired.com believes transit is a civil rights issue. It allows lower-income people to get to work and other places without the relative huge expense of car ownership.
• Another bicyclist was struck by another hit-and-run driver in Seattle. Fortunately, this victim will live.
• In what might be a grandstanding move but is still welcome, state Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna is lashing out about what he calls Bank of America’s shoddy foreclosure practices…
• …and the Washington Mutual execs who steered the state’s last homegrown big bank into the heart of the mortgage-bubble disaster won’t be prosecuted.
• The Mariners have finally gotten rid of designated hitter Jack Cust, whose very name invokes what M’s fans have done a lot of this year.
• The young City of SeaTac finally got its first big protest march (by and for hotel workers).
• Would the Midwestern funny-money fiddlers who now run Boeing really ruin the company’s whole quality reputation and value chain just to stick it to Wash. state? Maybe.
• When inappropriate quasi-racist comments about Obama will be made, Fox News will make them.
• Another slice of the media biz that’s in apparently inexorable fiscal decline: cable porn. The Gawker.com story about this, naturally, can’t stop repeating the word “shrinkage.”
• To end on a fun note, here are some cool pictures of old cassette tapes.

from boobsdontworkthatway.tumblr.com

• Comic and fantasy artists, and their fans, have long been stereotyped as guys who don’t know anything about women. Here’s visual evidence supporting the allegation, in a blog entitled “Boobs Don’t Work That Way.” (And here’s some advice from artist Max Riffner on how to draw women as if you paid attention to them.)
• Wu’s boo-boo puts Wu in deep doo-doo.
• If all-electric cars take off, how will we make and distribute the electricity needed to run them?
• Author Robert S. Becker is one of the commentators who sees the ideological roots of American conservatism in the heritage of the Deep South, in its economy of big corporate farms led by self-styled “rebels” and operated by cheap and/or enslaved labor.…
• …while Paul Krugman has had it up to here with the myth that there’s a “centrist” silent majority, made up of “swing voters” who somehow happen to completely agree with the D.C. pundit caste.
• Phony debt “crisis” conspiracy theory of the day: Are Republicans luring Obama into unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, as an excuse to impeach him?
• The post-lockout Seahawks will do without the star quarterback who stayed a little too long.
• Councilmember Nick Licata would like a city park dedicated to Seattle writers. I might have a snark about this a little later on.
• This year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada will be the last. Now, all the Seattle artists who only show their work at Burning Man might have to actually exhibit it to (gasp!) locals.

• Seattle artist Ginny Ruffner’s giant plastic robotic flower pot is now fully operational at Seventh Avenue and Union Street, across from ACT Theatre and in front of the back end of the Sheraton Hotel. Any resemblance to “Wilting Willie,” the puppet flower pot from the old local kids’ TV show Wunda Wunda, is purely coincidental.
• Update #1: Upon the request of the Tulalip Tribes, Microsoft has removed the internal code name “Tulalip” from its otherwise not officially announced social networking project.
• Update #2: There will indeed be one last art party at the 619 Western studios, before all 100-or-so artists in the 101-year-old building get evicted. The hastily arranged event is “Last Thursday,” to be held, yes, on July 28.
• The state Liquor Board’s response to Seattle’s request to let bars stay open after 2 a.m.? They’ll “consider it.”
• War on Working Americans Dept.: Someone allegedly turned on heat lamps beamed at a picket line outside an on-strike Hyatt hotel in Chicago, in the middle of the worst heat wave America (except the Pac NW) has seen in years.
• There’s now a foosball table with female players! And they’re not Barbies!
• Today, we are all Sons and Daughters of Norway.

first 'weekly' cover, 1976, from historylink.org

The late investor and arts patron Bagley Wright lived just long enough to see one of the local institutions he jump-started, Seattle Weekly, descend from troubled to pathetic.

First, the paper got caught up, through no fault of its own, in the PR campaign against its parent company Village Voice Media and VVM’s online escort-ad site Backpage.com. Mayor McGinn has ordered the city to not advertise in the Weekly until VVM closes Backpage.

Second, and this is something local management’s responsible for, was a cover story about an S&M practitioner accused of turning a consensual encounter with a streetwalker into a non-consensual violent assault. Feminist blogger Cara Kulwicki has called the story’s writer and SW’s editors “rape apologists,” citing the author’s speculating that the event might have simply been “a bondage session gone haywire.”

Now, they’ve put out a cover piece about local true-crime author Ann Rule. The article’s writer (who’d never written for the Weekly before) claimed Rule had written lies and/or conducted sloppy research about an Oregon woman convicted of murder, in Rule’s 2003 book Heart Full of Lies. The issue was published before SW editors figured out the article had been written by the convicted woman’s boyfriend.

Setting aside the matter of Backpage, over which the SW staff has no power, the once solidly establishment Weekly is drowning in sensationalism. Maybe it should swim back toward safer areas like politics (oops, VVM cut way back on the Weekly’s formerly formidable news staff) or arts coverage (oops, ditto).

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?

Back to the old grind. The lovely old grind.

• The former Wash. state prison boss admitted he’d quit because he’d been caught in a Tumwater motel with a female subordinate. Insert your own “subordinate” (or “Tumwater”) jokes here.
• The advocacy group Transportation for Washington explains just why public transit financing in this state is in such a mess. (Hint: It’s the dependence on sales taxes.) The group’s also got a handy list of public hearings in King County where you can support a one-time car tab surtax, so Metro can avoid draconian service cuts.
• Ex-NYT columnist Frank Rich debuts in New York mag bemoaning “Obama’s Original Sin,” which, in Rich’s eyes, was to accept big campaign bucks from the Wall St. fat cats.
• Meanwhile, some Columbia U. politics-as-horse-race wonk wonders “What If the Republicans Lose in 2012?” I suspect they will lose, and resume shrinking into regional status, with the “centrist” Democrats becoming the new Party of Business (and perhaps the only party capable of fielding an Electoral College-winnable Presidential campaign for some time).
• A Daily Kos diarist sends along word of a breakthrough in fuel cell technology for motor vehicles. Fuel cells, as you recall from the hype two or three oil crises ago, turn simple hydrogen gas (refineable from many cheap sources)  and oxygen into energy. But they need “catalysts” to undertake this transformation. Up ’til now, those had to be made from costly platinum. But earlier this year, researchers at the (more recently fire-threatened) Los Alamos labs said they’d figured out a system using a far cheaper combo of carbon, iron, and cobalt. Of course, cheaper-running, zero-emissions cars would still be cars, promoting land-killing sprawl and long lonely commutes.

This holiday, as I do on this holiday every year, I sing our nation’s song the way it was originally meant to be sung.

Which is to say, as an ode to the eternal, worldwide, ‪joys of drinking and screwing‬‏.

And if you like your poetic homages to the grape mixed in with a little faux-Terry Gilliam animation, try this version.