The Stranger, the weekly free tabloid with which I have an off-and-on stormy relationship, celebrated its tenth anniversary this week. The actual ten-year mark came last September, but obviously a lot of folks weren’t in the mood for celebrating anything back then.

I was asked to write something for it. It didn’t run in that issue (they promise it’ll run next week).

It’s a remembrance of local publications that have come and gone during the Stranger’s lifetime:

• The Rocket: The bible of Northwest rock had already been going for 12 years when the Stranger started. Shortly after that, publisher Charles Cross sold out to some Californians who drove it into the ground. Its demise in October 2000 is still mourned by many.
• Kutie: Sometime Stranger art director Hank Trotter’s moonlighting venture was a skin mag in the classic early-’60s style, full of the tease and style missing from today’s formula porn. Sometimes, the only way you knew the pictures were new was from the models’ tattoos. Five issues came out between 1997 and 2000; content from the unpublished issue #6 can be seen at www.kutie.com.
• Seattle Union Record: During the big newspaper strike of November 2000-January 2001, Newspaper Guild members put out their own thrice-weekly free tabloid. Freed from the dumbing-down demands of management, the newsies created a model for some future alternative urban daily.
• Metropolitan Living: The former publisher of The Employment Paper had what seemed in 1999 to be a smash idea: A slick, oversize monthly about local celebrities and upscale lifestyles; given away free to all at vending boxes, but intended strictly for the platinum-card elites. It lasted about a year and a half.
• Arts Journal: Another vehicle for luxury-goods ads, this one was mailed free to people who’d given money to Seattle’s bigtime arts groups. Its content was often outstanding; too bad most folks who’d really care about it (artists, actors, playwrights, etc.) seldom got to see it.
• Redheaded Stepchild: A visual-arts zine that was almost all text, this photocopied monthly newsletter chiefly covered professional and personal survival issues for contemporary art-makers. It started in mid-1999 and ran a little over a year, before its volunteer staff found better things to do.
• Seattle Gay Standard: An ambitious effort at a real competitor to the long-established Seattle Gay News. The Standard had ambitious stories, gorgeous color photos, and a relative paucity of boys-arguing-about-the-wallpaper cartoons. But it got caught up in the same 2001 ad slump that befell Metropolitan Living and Arts Journal.
• Perv: The Stranger’s own Dan Savage was one of the masterminds behind this 1996 gay-print alternative, a monthly four-page broadsheet focusing on the Capitol Hill queer club scene.
• Rock Paper Scissors: Ex-musician Thomas Marchese’s attempt to fill the Rocket’s void. The defiantly un-slick weekly free tabloid ran weekly from June to August 2001, and gave particular emphasis to the neo-metal community.
• The Seattle Scroll: Matt Asher’s fortnightly essay-and-opinion paper started in the fall of 1996 with a novel format–a single oversize sheet of book-stock paper, rolled up instead of folded. By its end one year later, it had become a regular tabloid. Asher was last heard from writing a novel in Vermont. The Scroll’s “media editor,” Jesse Walker, later worked in LA for a libertarian-leaning think tank.

Declare it legal, then assess past-due taxes on it.

…on the web before (aguably, the whole civilian Internet has been one big wacky and dubious “investment opportunity”). But this just might be the prize of the bunch. Someone’s trying to line up investors to start a chain of hetero anonymous-sex clubs. You’d be steered into a totally-darkened bedroom and be met by an opposite-gender patron you’d never met before and might never meet again. Left unanswered by the entrepreneur-wannabe: If this is a non-prostitution enterprise (i.e., one in which everyone pays at least something to participate), how is it going to attract paying female patrons? (Found by Memepool.)

…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:

• Boeing fires Phil Condit; cuts costs by closing the fancy new Chicago HQ, establishing a less top-heavy corporate structure, and installing a smaller main office back in Seattle.
• The new Seattle Seahawks football stadium is named after the largest consistently-profitable company still based here. At Costco Park, all soft drinks come only in 24-packs.
• Two National Hockey League teams in U.S. small markets go broke. One moves to Winnipeg, the other to the Tacoma Dome.
• Baseball commissioner Bud Selig gets “contracted.”
• New York Mayor Bloomberg is forced to resign amid worldwide public outcry over his plan to tear down Yankee Stadium.
• Inventor Dean Kamen shows off a working, affordable, two-seater solar car. Every Republican state governor in America vows to never allow the thing on the streets.
• The major record labels lobby for emergency “survival” legislation allowing them to retroactively cancel all artist royalties whilst setting up government subsidies for executives’ mansions and cocaine budgets.
• Clever rust-belt entrepreneurs form a joint company to buy up underused and/or abandoned factories and mills. Their clothes, shoes, DVD players, garden tools, and other products all carry the same patriotic-themed brand name (perhaps “AmeriMade”). Their ads’ message: If you’re not willing to pay more for an AmeriMade product, you’re a bin Laden sympathizer.
• Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives, despite endless rants emanating from Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, the Wall St. Journal, The McLaughlin Group, etc. that anyone who doesn’t vote a straight Republican ticket is a bin Laden sympathizer. The new Congressional leadership begins to openly ask whether permitting further broadcast-media consolidations would be unwise.
• The New Republic runs a lead editorial admitting it is no longer a “liberal” magazine, and hasn’t been since 1983.
• Amazon.com becomes “profitable” by spinning off all its slower-selling product lines (hardware, appliances, sporting goods, etc.) to co-branded joint ventures with traditional retailers. The hardware operation, f’rinstance, becomes “Jack’sHometownHardwareAndBaitShop.com, Powered by Amazon.”
• Osama bin Laden is found in November on a remote island just like a soap-opera villain, having had plastic surgery to look like a whole other person.
• A cheap, simple-to-manufacture AIDS treatment drug is announced. Unfortunately for Muslim African leaders, it turns out to be made from reprocessed pork semen.
• High definition (or at least medium-high definition) TVs finally become popular, chiefly for viewing DVDs.
• Politicians in slumping tourist states propose Nevada-style regulated brothels, sparking a rift between the corporate and moralistic branches of U.S. conservatism.
• Gangsta rap completes its disappearance from the music scene when its last major audience (white mall kids) collectively decides it would rather pretend to be Mexican.
• An NFL head coach admits reports that he’s gay.
• Somebody figures out how to turn a profit from a “content-based” website. But the formula’s still too labor-intensive, and the potential return too low, to interest any but the smallest mom-and-pop sites.
• A major retail chain is reorganized as a co-op of local store operators.

FROM SRI LANKA (“a world where suicide bombings are so routine they don’t make a ripple in the international news”), ten lessons in how not to fight terrorism.

THE GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: The corporate record labels are reeling in major losses, due mainly to the collapse of their longstanding business plans (the incessant hyping of a few bland superstars).

DESPITE THE TALIBAN’S FALL, there are still places on Earth where the simple enjoyment of pop music and nightlife is met with stern rebuke.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN, the NY Times’s second-most-anointed right-winger, facetiously proposes an all-nude airline, “Naked Air,” as a potential security solution.

If Friedman had been more of a journalist and less of a think-tank ideologue, he might have remembered that during the ’70s first wave of skyjackings, the unjustly forgotten humor columnist Arthur Hoppe wrote a much more entertaining piece based on the same premise. Hoppe proposed a Jaybird Airlines, in which not only would all passengers board the plane naked as a jaybird, but the male passengers would be assigned comely Seatmates to “entertain” them whilst in-flight. (Female passengers, in Hoppe’s piece, were expected to merely sit back and listen to the stewardesses (dressed in designer shoes and smartly-fashioned hats) explain the procedures for the unlikely event of a water landing.) The piece ends, of course, with a passenger attempting to take control of the plane–to prevent it from landing.

A British-based condom manufacturer has issued a survey which claims Americans have a lot more sex on the average, with more partners, and starting at an earlier age, than folk in Britain, Germany, Japan, and 24 other major industrial countries.

What this might mean:

• Despite 20 years of the Religious Right’s anti-sex tirades (or maybe at least partly because of them), U-S-of-A-ers are just as buggery-obsessed as ever.
• The Muslim fundamentalists, and other overseas moralists, are right to fear the global reach of American corporate-pop culture. As countless staid Catholic and Mormon parents in this country already know, there’s nothing to get kids to challenge tired authority systems quite like the promise of nookie. Especially when it’s seen in the context of a whole American-export cultural shtick of sugar drinks, rock n’ roll, blue jeans, the open road, big cars, etc.
• This era of U.S. supremacy in the quantity (if not necessaarily quality) of coitus coincides with U.S. supremacy (for better or for worse) in military and economic power. This puts the lie to the Right’s claims that the non-repression of lust would turn us into a weak and vulnerable nation.
• Indeed, it might justify the rival claim, made by followers of Tantric yoga and of the late psychologist Wilhelm Reich, that a healthy sex life is a sign of, and contributor to, general personal vitality and social energy.
• Of course, more sex isn’t always better sex. Included in the survey’s average of 124 matings per year per American must be plenty of awkward adolescent experiments, unsatisfying marital acts, abusive relationships, lonely hooker dalliances, premature ejaculations, preorgasmic women, unwanted conceptions, and unimaginative fantasies. The continued prosperity of sex-ed guidebooks and videos shows that the most isn’t always the best.
• Porn doesn’t necessarily lead to promiscuity–or to monogamous vitality either. The least-sexually-active country in the survey is Japan, a place teeming with strip joints and raunchy adult comic books.
• These averages, if true, are still just averages. Please don’t feel anxious or depressed if you’re currently not getting any. And don’t stay in a lousy relationship just out of the fear of involuntary chastity.

(This article’s permanent link.)

THE GUY WHO TRIED to move the Seattle Mariners to Tampa is now in line for a cushy federal appointment, despite his career history of shady dealings.

A SCOTTISH JOURNALIST wonders why the recent media hype over the “porno chic” women’s-fashion fad hasn’t involved actual porn performers.

“44 REASONS NOT to get a boob job.” (By the (male) author of “Why I’m Still Not a Libertarian.”)

YR. HUMBLE EDITOR was recently awarded the honor of being one of the 18 jurors who selected the “MetropoList 150,” the Museum of History and Industry/Seattle Times list of the 150 most influential people in the 150-year history of Seattle and King County.

I’m quite satisfied with the final list, available at this link. There’s almost nobody on it I wouldn’t have wanted on it.

Nevertheless, there are several names I wrote in which didn’t make the final selection. In alphabetical order, they include:

• LYNDA BARRY: South Seattle native and acclaimed cartoonist and author. Her novel Cruddy was set in a fictionalized Rainier Valley.
• STEVEN J. “JESSE” BERNSTEIN: Poet and short-story writer of urban decay and dystopian fantasy.
• TED BUNDY: Clean-cut law student and serial killer.
• DYAN CANNON: West Seattle native who became a movie sex symbol at age 32.
• RAY CHARLES: R&B legend whose career started in Seattle’s old Jackson Street jazz scene.
• FRANCES FARMER: West Seattle-born actress with an ill-fated Hollywood career.
• CHET HUNTLEY: UW grad and pioneering network TV news anchorman.
• MARY KAY LETOURNEAU: Middle-school teacher who bore two children by a student, causing much public hand-wringing and analysis.
• MIKE LUKOVICH: Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and UW Daily grad.
• FLOYD SCHMOE (1895-2000): Seattle Quaker leader, mountaineer, and tireless peace activist.
• LESTER SMITH & DANNY KAYE: Seattle businessman Smith, first on his own and later in partnership with movie star Kaye, ran a string of radio stations (including KJR); they also were the Mariners’ original owners.
• DEWEY SORIANO: Was awarded ownership of the 1969 Seattle baseball franchise on the basis of his skill in managing the Pacific Coast League. He didn’t have the financial resources to keep the Pilots going, and the team was sold and moved to Milwaukee after one season.
• ICHIRO SUZUKI: Mariners sensation; first Japanese-born “position player” (non-pitcher) in the U.S. Major Leagues.
• EDDIE VEDDER: Singer for the rock band Pearl Jam. The group’s dispute with TicketMaster in 1993 presaged many later disputes by artists and fans against the bigtime music industry.
• ANN & NANCY WILSON: Leaders since 1973 of Heart, the first Seattle rock band to attain international prominence. Proved you could be all woman AND all rock.
• TOBIAS WOLFF: Acclaimed author and memoirist (This Boy’s Life).

IN ADDITION, here are some names nominated by other people (with the descriptions these anonymous nominators wrote) for whom I voted, but who also failed to make the final cut:

• DICK BALCH: Local Chevrolet dealer and irreverent pitchman for cars (smashed cars with sledgehammer on TV ads).
• OLE BARDAHL: Proprietor of Bardahl, the Ballard-based engine additive company known for its hydroplanes (the Miss. Bardahl) and its giant neon sign.
• SIR THOMAS BEECHAM: A renowned English conductor, Beecham became the director of the tiny Seattle Symphony in 1941. He is remembered most for his quote, “If I were a member of this community, really I should get weary of being looked on as a sort of aesthetic dust-bin.”
• PETER BEVIS: Founder and director of the Fremont School of Fine Arts and the Fremont Foundry, established in 1986. An artist who makes molds of road kill, Bevis’s work illustrates the recklessness of people in nature. He bought the Kalakala back to Seattle.
• BOB BLACKBURN: Longtime voice of the Seattle Supersonics, from their first season in 1967 until the early 1990s.
• BOBO THE GORILLA: Bobo introduced Seattleites to the great apes and to “exotic” wildlife in general; he taught a whole generation to abandon diabolical “King Kong” images of gorillas. He inspired better zoo husbandry and perhaps paved the way for primate preservation attempts. In his current taxidermied form, his legacy lives on.
• STAN BORESON: Scandinavian musician, comedian, and host of the long-running children’s program KING Clubhouse.
• BERKLEY BREATHED: Cartoonist, Bloom Country.
• FRED BROWN: The former Sonic star, who help lead them to their only title in 1979, influenced a generation of ballplayers locally and nationally through his long-distance gunning which inspired the term “From downtown…” now heard in broadcasts everywhere, but is as Seattle–and omnipresent–as “Skid Road.”
• HIRAM CHITTENDEN: An officer in the Army Corps of Engineers and one of Seattle’s first port commissioners, Chittenden worked to develop the Port of Seattle. He oversaw the construction of the Lake Washington Canal and locks, which now bear his name.
• JOHN CONSIDINE: Considine’s “People’s Theater” was a Seattle success, which led to his preeminent career as an impresario. He helped pioneer early Edison films and established the famous vaudeville circuit. Considine and his brother Tom were involved in the notorious killing of Seattle’s police chief, William L. Meredith.
• LLOYD COONEY: Former KIRO-TV station manager and editorial commentator.
• D.B. COOPER: Infamous airline hijacker (flight from Portland to Seattle) who may or may not have gotten away.
• JACK ENDINO: Recording engineer/producer who made early studio recordings of Nirvana, Soundgarden, the U-Men and other proto-grunge acts.
• JEAN ENERSEN: Television news anchor for KING-TV.
• RANDY FINLEY: Founder of the Seven Gables Theatre chain, which, along with the Seattle International Film Festival, fostered and bolstered Seattle’s appetite for fine cinema.
• CHARLES FRYE: Frye was a partner in Frye and Bruhn, Meatpackers. He founded the Frye Museum atop Seattle’s First Hill, an institution that is one of Seattle’s leading museums today.
• BOB HARDWICK: KVI disc jockey in the 1960s and 1970s, known for wacky on-air antics.
• DENIS HAYS: Director of the Bullitt Foundation; created Earth Day in 1970.
• SAM ISRAEL: A hermit who lived in Eastern Washington, amassed over 500 properties, worth between $100-$200 million at the time of his death (1994). He owned over 30 downtown properties, 14 of which were located in Pioneer Square. Due to his negligence many of his properties were vacated and fell into disrepair. However, the low rent helped spawn a lively artists’ scene in Pioneer Square.
• QUINCY JONES: Garfield High School’s musical prodigy has more Grammy nominations than anyone else in history. Jones has written film scores, sonatas, and popular music, done arrangements for other artists and performed throughout the world with his own band and orchestra.
• RICK “PEANUT MAN” KAMINSKI: If you attended an event at the Kingdome from the 1970s to the 1990s, you saw Kaminski throwing bags of peanuts to his customers, along with a tennis ball sliced open enough for the patron to place his money inside for the return toss.
• JOHN KEISTER: The quintessential bittersweet Seattleite who remembers how it used to be before so many people moved here, Keister used his position as host of KING -TV’s Almost Live! weekly comedy program to poke fun at Kent, Bellevue, Ballard and other Seattle suburbs and neighborhoods.
• NORM LANGILL: Founder of One Reel, producer of Bumbershoot and other cultural events.
• GARY LARSON: creator of The Far Side, a hugely popular cartoon panel. Prior to Larson’s retirement in 1995, the cartoon strip appeared in 1,900 daily newspapers in 40 countries, and was translated into 17 languages.
• GYPSY ROSE LEE: West Seattle’s Lee, with her sister June Havoc, performed in a kiddy vaudeville act that toured the nation. She parlayed her experience into a famous striptease that was a hit at the Zeigfeld Follies. Her life was portrayed in the musical Gypsy.
• LOGGERS: When white men first came to the Seattle area travel was long and difficult between Seattle and Tacoma. With the arrival of the loggers travel became significantly easier.
• DARRLY MACDONALD: Co-founder of the Seattle International Film Festival and purveyor of Seattle’s now firmly-established reputation as a city of cinematic connoisseurs.
• HELENE MADISON: When 19-year-old Madison returned to Seattle with three gold medals in swimming from the 1932 Olympic games, the city raised a celebration, including a ticker tape parade. Two pools in Seattle are named after Madison.
• VIC MEYERS: Seattle jazz-band leader who ran for mayor in 1930 on the whim of some practical jokesters at the Seattle Times. He was eager to lend himself to the joke, and Times reporters wrote him up throughout the “campaign.” After losing the election, he won the election for the lieutenant governor of the state.
• LORENZO MILAM: Founder of KRAB radio in 1962. KRAB was among the earliest community radio stations in the country. It was one of the voices and centers of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s.
• SIR MIX-A-LOT (Anthony Ray): Seattle’s first national rap star, who hit it big with his “Posse on Broadway” single.
• DAVE NIEHAUS: He has been delivering colorful descriptions of Mariner baseball since the team was established in 1977. His enormous contribution to Mariner baseball was recognized when he was asked to throw out the ceremonial first pitch in the inaugural game in Safeco Field.
• MARNI NIXON: Broadway singer. Among her famous roles was singing for Audrey Hepburn in [the film version of] My Fair Lady.
• BILL NYE: Seattle star (and former Almost Live! character) on PBS’s Bill Nye The Science Guy, seen by millions of kids nationwide.
• PAT O’DAY: High profile disc jockey on KJR radio through the ’60s. The first disc jockey in Seattle to really start playing rock ‘n roll, an action for which he earned 37 percent of the radio audience.
• JOHN OKADA (1923-1971): Author of No-No Boy, winner of the National Book Award, a novel that explores the return home to Seattle of an interned Nisei Japanese, who refused to forswear allegiance to the emperor of Japan and to fight in uniform for the United States when those questions were posed in the internment camp.
• JIM OWENS: UW football coach. Took team to three Rose Bowls
• MARTIN PANG: Started the 1995 fire in the Mary Pang qarehouse downtown. Four firemen died while subduing the blaze. In his confession, Pang said he started the fire to relieve his parents the burden of running the facility.
• BRUCE PAVITT & JONATHAN PONEMAN: Co-founders of Sub Pop, Seattle record label that originally signed Nirvana, Soundgarden and other grunge acts.
• ANGELO PELLEGRINI: Italian immigrant who settled with his family in Southwest Washington; made his mark as a UW English professor and food and wine expert. He wrote many books and gave talks on Italian culture.
• GEORGE POCOCK: Designer and builder of racing shells, including those used by 1936 gold medal US Olympic Team. Also designed the hull of Boeing’s first commercial plane.
• THE PROSTITUTES OF THE 1800s: The main reason many men originally came to the Seattle area.
• DIXY LEE RAY: Washington’s first female governor. The idiosyncratic Ray was at the helm when Mt. St. Helens erupted.
• LARRY REID: Early director of COCA (Center on Contemporary Art).
• ROSIE THE RIVETER: Popular symbol during WWII of women entering the blue-collar work force in order to keep up industrial production to support the war effort; believed to be based on women in Boeing’s work force.
• BILL “THE BEERMAN” SCOTT: Kingdome concession employee who became the defacto yell king for the Mariners, Sonics, Sounders and Seahawks (when all played under the same concrete roof).
• RUBEN SIERRA: Founder of the “multi-cultural-before-its-time” Group Theatre.
• JEFF SMITH (FRUGAL GOURMET): Author and chef who popularized good cooking for a mass audience.
• DICK SPADY: Founder, with two partners, of Dick’s Drive In, which opened in Wallingford in 1954.
• ELBRIDGE A. STUART: Created the Carnation Co., which initially focused on evaporated milk. Stuart developed a dairy farm near Tolt, which was renamed Carnation. In 1926 Carnation entered the fresh milk and ice cream business. The firm [now merged into Nestle] was known for its slogan “Milk from Contented Cows.”
• CONRAD UNO: Egg Studios owner/producer who recorded and/or released records by up and coming Seattle acts in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Young Fresh Fellows, Posies, and Presidents of the United States of America.
• GORDON VICKERY: Driving force in getting Medic One in the Fire Department. Many thousands of lives have been saved because of this.
• BURKE WALKER: Founder of the Empty Space Theatre.
• BOB WALSH: Seattle entrepreneur behind the Goodwill Games (1990) and attempts to bring the Olympic Games to Seattle.
• ROB WELLER: Former UW Husky yell king and Entertainment Tonight host credited with creation of the circular, undulating group cheer known as “The Wave.”
• BILL YEEND: Longtime host (25 years) of KIRO radio’s number-one rated morning news program.
• MARION ANTHONY ZIONCHECK: Born in Austria, Zioncheck attended the UW. After passing the state bar exam he won a seat in Congress. His mental deterioration and suicide (leaping from the Arctic Building in Seattle) were national stories.

(This article’s permanent link.)

As promised a couple weeks back, here is my preliminary list of some of what I love about this nation of ours. Thanks for your emailed suggestions; more are quite welcome.)

• Corn dogs, and the proud people who make and serve them.
• 217 cable channels, at least 10 of which are showing the same dumb movie at any given time.
• Upbeat/consensual pornos in every known fetish.
• Urban intersections with a Starbucks on every corner.
• Suburban intersections with a 7-Eleven on every corner.
• September issues of Vogue thicker than the models.
• Fabulous babes coast to coast, many of whom have powerful careers.
• Boys happily puking into bushes at Florida Spring Break.
• Dr. Seuss, Mary Engelbreit, Charles Schulz, James Thurber, R. Crumb, Chris Ware, and Dan Clowes.
• Fudge-banana swirl ice cream.
• Dodge Darts.
• The Internet, MP3s, chat rooms, multi-user dungeons, and QuickTime movies.
• Jack Benny, Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, Looney Tunes, and Corey Feldman.
• The gum that goes squirt.
• Novelty stores with chocolate nipples and penis candles.
• The sports-book room at the Cal-Neva casino in Reno.
• The films of Russ Meyer and John Waters.
• The long lonesome highway, and the proud truckers and tourists who traverse it every day.
• Ann-Margaret, Betty Page, Mae West, Willa Cather, Beverly Cleary, Ella Grasso, Susan B. Anthony, Marilyn Chambers, and Jessamyn West.
• Sleazy detective magazines, “true crime” books, film noir.
• The Brooklyn Bridge, the Gateway Arch, the Brown Derby, and the Corn Palace.
• Anyone can grow up to become a corrupt politician or a sneak-thief business executive.
• Summer in Anchorage, winter in Honolulu, autumn in New England, and spring in Seattle.
• Old Faithful, the Mammoth Caves, Monument Valley, and the Trees of Mystery.
• Dollywood, Opryland, Wisconsin Dells, Wall Drug, Enchanted Village, and the Bible theme parks of Florida.
• All-you-can-eat buffets and bottomless cups of coffee.
• BBQ beef, Cajun catfish, smoked salmon, chicken nuggets, and pork rinds.
• Potato chips, ice cream cones, Hostess Sno-Balls, and non-dairy creamer.
• Crossword puzzles.
• Gene Rayburn, Betty White, Garry Moore, Bill Cullen, and Charles Nelson Reilly.
• David Letterman, Johnny Carson, Conan O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Fred Allen, Ricki Lake, Sandy Hill, and Rosie O’Donnell.
• Indie motels with fantastical neon signs.
• Butter-Lite flavor microwave popcorn.
• No-fault divorce.
• Retractable-roof stadia.
• Millions of assorted cults (religious, celebrity, musical, medical, investment, etc. etc.).
• Muddy Waters, Ethel Waters, and Barbara Walters.
• Bix Beiderbecke, Dizzy Gillespie, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Wayne Horvitz, and Raymond Scott.
• Julie London, Vikki Carr, the Andrews Sisters, the Mills Brothers, Motown, Phil Spector, the Ventures, the Ramones, the B-52s, and the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Wine bars, sports bars, pickup bars, pickup trucks, monster trucks, semi rigs, and fork lifts.
• Aaron Copland, Henry Partch, Charles Ives, Frank Zappa, and the Residents.
• Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, Tammy Wynette, Chet Atkins, Duane Eddy, Tex Ritter, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Buck Owens, Kitty Wells, and Homer & Jethro.
• Pulp magazines, bodice-ripper paperbacks, and $100 collector’s editions of Walden.
• The Big Mouth Billy Bass, the Kitchen Magician, the Pocket Fisherman, and the George Forman Grilling Machine.
• Lou Piniella, “Louie Louie,” Louis Prima, Louis Jordan, Joe Louis, Tina Louise, and Louise Bourgeois.
• Miss America, Miss December, miscagenation, and Ms. magazine.
• Simon & Schuster, Simon & Garfunkel, and Simon & Simon.
• Folks from all the rest of the world are here.
• Quite a lot of the things I love about other countries are here too.

(This article’s permanent link.)

…its own giant penis carving.

In the usually-brightest part of an unusually glaringly bright year, three days of rain and low overcast made a most welcome appearance this week. So comfy, so refreshing, so fresh-scented. The diffused light, the soft colors of everything, the relaxing heaviness of the air. Don’t like it? Go to Albuquerque.

ELSEWHERE:

Rock stars reviewed according to their reported sexual prowess. (Found by Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

Hard to believe, but in seven states, unmarried cohabitation can still get you in trouble with the law.

Teenage girls across North America are snapping up T-shirts with risque slogans on them, including assorted variations on the number 69, Playboy, and declarations of general naughtiness.

Parents, journalists, and even a few politicians are getting predictably perturbed. (My, aren’t these grownups just so immature?)

News flash: Adolescents have hormones, and love to make a big tease among their peers. Adolescents also love to proclaim their independence and impending grownuphood, and there are few better ways to do that than by publicly announcing one’s sexual arrival.

What’s new? Just the particular pride and explicitness in these T-shirt statements.

Three years ago, one of my ex-Stranger colleagues tried to get a deal to write a book about high school girls who were really virgins but were branded as sluts by other girls, merely for looking or acting insufficiently ladylike. Three years, of course, is the standard turnover rate for teen trends; so the younger sisters of those ‘90s shunned girls are now proudly proclaiming slutdom as a status symbol.

(Of course, today’s assertions of slutdom probably have as little to do with reality as yesterday’s accusations of slutdom.)

In keeping with a more-or-less annual tradition around these cyber-parts, here comes another fantabulous MISC Late-Summer Reading List. Its purpose: To let you know what you should’ve been investing your time with this warm-weather season, instead of frittering it away on needless time-wasters such as jobs and sex.

High Drama in Fabulous Toledo by Lily James: A raucous, giddy little novel that lives up to its title with nary a tinge of irony. Our heroine is the bored, easily distracted fiancee of a borderline-suicidal bar owner. She gets kidnapped from a 7-Eleven parking lot one night, and turned over to become the captive bride of a rich computer genius completely lacking in social skills.

After the initial shock she comes to like the adventure of her predicament; but soon becomes bored again as she realizes her captor’s domestic-suburban plans for her life. Meanwhile, her distraught boyfriend is consoled by a mysterious policewoman with, shall we say, personal issues of her own. To tell any more would spoil the ride.

High Drama is a great light-comic caper story that also happens to be classifiable as “post-feminist” or “genre-deconstucting” (the genre here being romance-novel ravishment). It’s also a highly accessible, engaging read that, in a better world, would bring wealth and renown to James and to the literary-press publisher FC2, which put it out.

The Knife Thrower and Other Stories by Steven Millhauser: One of the dozen or more tomes I’d left stacked at home from the Tower Books closing sale back in February. Shouldn’t have waited this long to read it.

This guy’s one helluva prose stylist, and he spins great yarns too. His sentences and paragraphs, lovely as they are, are always held subordinate to his fantastical plots–which, clever as they are, are always held subordinate to the heart and dignity with which he endows his characters.

Many of these tales have to do with the dark side of small-town existence, and the light hidden behind such shadows. The finest example of this is “The Sisterhood of Night,” in which a gentleman relates his town’s newest teenage fad: Girls who sneak out of their homes in the middle of the night to gather in the woods and, apparently, do nothing. No drugs, no sex, no Satanic rites; but also no peer pressure, no parental shrieks, no requirements to do or say anything. The narrator ends by wondering whether this could be more potentially subversive than any cult or gang; Millhauser leaves you feeling like it just might.

The Bellero Shie by Jay Davis: A gem of a tiny paperback. When the author was here on a reading tour in June, he left some promo copies at Confounded Books (now at 2nd & Bell in Belltown). Behind the circa-1961 corporate-manual cover are eight stories which amaze and confound in their finely-tuned haunting alienation.

In “Family Food and Drug,” an unwitting supermarket customer is put through militaristic interrogation, for the “crime” of refusing to provide personal demographic-marketing information. In “Sparky,” a man retreats from his wife and family to his only consolation, the family dog, which happens to be dead and stuffed. Yeah, it’s PoMo, but it’s PoMo with a soul–and a quietly aching one at that.

(The apparently closest thing the publisher has to an online presence is this review, which lists a California address for the outfit even though the inside cover says it’s from Illinois.)

Erogenous Zones: An Anthology of Sex Abroad, edited by Lucretia Stewart: Great premise: Literary nonfiction passages from many times and places, all about having sex far from one’s home, with someone the author didn’t set out from home with. But the adventures become repetitious after a while; particularly the ones involving hookers with the invariable hearts-O-gold and the ones involving anonymous gay-pickup sex. But it is a very handsomely-manufactured volume; and it’s fun to read some of the troubadoric descriptions from male diarists, languishing wistfully over the bodily and other charms of their long-separated meaningless-encounter partners.

In Europe, you can use scantily-clad women to sell just about anything. Even a Microsoft operating system.