Karen Feigenbaum believes it’s the movie stars.

Some people who sincerely want social workers to understand today’s teens have compiled a somewhat ridiculous glossary of supposed youth buzzwords. Some of the terms on the list are at least a decade out of date (“baby daddy,” “mack”). Most are demeaning, particularly when stuffed and mounted in this particular context (“skeeza,” “thugged,” “pigeon”). If anyone, besides clueless white mall rats, actually uses more than a few of the phrases in everyday conversation, I’d be truly surprised.

A random survey finds our own Safeco Field the second-most popular ballpark among baseball players. For opposing teams this year, it’s been real popular, alas….

…that one year the NBA Eastern Conference series will match the Pacers and the Hornets, so the pun-lovin’ sports media would all rediscover the golden age of American Motors cars.

…here’s “the condensed Bill Clinton memoir.”

Joshua Orkent responds to the entry below:

“That sad, chained penis was none other than ‘Dick Cheney!’Get it? The other puns represented in that ensemble were the leafy green
George ‘Bush’, a large black bowl of Condoleeza ‘Rice,’ and my personal
favorite, a long pink ‘colon’ Powell! Didn’t you wonder why those characters
were rolling a tank over the statue of liberty?

I must admit, it took me a little while to figure it out as well, but I
really liked that troupe, and was glad to see someone making reference to
the administration’s unusually noun-like names. Though having made a ‘Dick’
puppet, I wonder why they didn’t create a big skanky ‘Bush?’ Seems like
there would be more dramatic potential. Well, no one looks to the Solstice
Parade for logic.”

HEREWITH, THE SECOND and last part of our recent visit to the Fremont Solstice Parade and street fair. Today, some of the more overtly “political” statements made there.

Despite this “wall of shame” and other anti-right-wing displays, the Bush-Cheny ’04 campaign bravely staffed a booth at the street fair.

The megaphone guy is calling for John Kerry to show some backbone during the current campaign.

This Statue of Liberty balloon has just been re-inflated, to thunderous crowd applause, after having been deliberately run over by a cardboard replica of a U.S. Army tank.

I’m not sure what this sad, chained penis is meant to represent. The stripped and abused Iraqi prisoners? U.S. society’s repression of Eros? Seattle’s moratorium on new strip clubs? “Alternative” culture’s sexist stereotype of the phallus as the “root” of all evil?

In any other era, a line of belly dancers probably wouldn’t seem all that “political.” This year, it’s a statement. Yes, there are positive cultural contributions from the Arab world; female-empowering contributions, even.

Every year, the parade includes at least one entry based on a big local-news story. This time, it was the big move into the big, beautiful new Seattle library (which, I’ve now decided, is an airport terminal for voyages of the mind). The paucity of objects on the carts these folks are pushing might represent the library’s slashed operations budgets.

You might not think of the Oompa-Loompas from Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as political, but I do.

Dahl was one of the wisest and most subversive authors of “children’s” literature. I’ve always thought Charlie was a prescient parable/parody of conservative economics. Willy Wonka, you might recall, is a ruthless capitalist who’s fired his unworthy local workforce, then reopened for business with a crew of happily servile, low-wage immigrants.

Indeed, in the 1964 first edition, the Oompa-Loompas were (in the words of Dahl biographer Jeremy Treglown) “a tribe of 3,000 amiable black pygmies who have been imported by Mr. Willy Wonka from ‘the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before.’ Mr. Wonka keeps them in the factory, where they have replaced the sacked white workers. Wonka’s little slaves are delighted with their new circumstances, and particularly with their diet of chocolate. Before they lived on green caterpillars, beetles, eucalyptus leaves, ‘and the bark of the bong–bong tree.'”

Dahl re-created them as white fantasy creatures for the 1971 Willy Wonka movie and subsequent reissues of the book.

The end of the parade didn’t mean the end of the statements. The art-car display included this minivan decorated by Calif. conceptual artist Emily Duffy. Recalling our recent discussion about the limits of “positive attitudes,” we can ponder what Duffy believes are the deleterious effects of fashion advertising.

Duffy believes the fashion biz thrives parasitically, by bullying women into hating themselves and their bodies. But the industry’s ads, magazines, and in-store displays are exclusively filled with overt “positivity.” In Fashionland, everyone’s happy, confident, full of pep and/or attitude.

But it’s a happy fantasy land populated only by those deemed by the industry’s gatekeepers to meet one ideal of perfection or another.

An NY Times Sunday-magazine piece claims “the happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments.”

…no more dead-Gipper links, but Slumberland had one I couldn’t resist: A mock campaign site for “Bush/Zombie Reagan 2004!” “Difficult times call for great leaders — men of vision, strength and courage. Men like George W. Bush and the shambling, reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan.”

The Lucking Fakers were thoroughly trounced. The mighty Detroit Pistons, a real basketball team (as opposed to an overpaid, overhyped bunch of divas) handily won the basketball championship Tuesday night.

The victory was a mighty blow for all that is right and good in America, and a slap against the NBA’s powers-that-be and its “broadcast partners” (ABC, ESPN, TNT). In the post-Jordan era, the league and the networks have conspired to treat the Lucking Fakers as The Team That Deserves Everything, The Team You MUST Love. All 29 other squads received as much combined respect as the Harlem Globetrotters’ sham opponents.

Back during the regular season, TNT could barely bother even covering game one of its weekly doubleheaders; instead, the channel spent two and a half hours plugging the Lucking Fakers’ forthcoming appearance in game two.

In the playoffs, the national print media joined the broadcasters in predicting a Lucking Fakers walkoff. Sure, the Pistons had more teamwork, more energy, and more balance, but they didn’t have more endorsement deals!

So the Pistons’ victory, not just by an edge but by a trounce, proves that there’s still room for sports in American sports.

…but still worth a click: Robert Kuttner’s cogent rant about “America as a One-Party State.”

…very proud of the human race after glancing through the vast array of gross-out stereotype references contained at “The Racial Slur Database.”

A British cable channel is claiming to offer the ultimate low-budget “reality” series. Watching Paint Dry would be “exactly what it says on the tin. Every day a different kind of paint will be put on to a wall and you get the chance to vote for your favourite. Confirmed contestants include matte, silk, gloss, satin, vinyl, eggshell textured and smooth masonry—all of whom are eagerly looking forward to their first brush with fame.” Something tells me this is a cheeky hoax, but it’s still fun to imagine.

…yet most charming, piece of protest music this year comes from none other than Mr. “Look on the Bright Side” himself, Eric Idle.

…upon our recent piece on Seattle writing, Ryan Boudinot has submitted “A Primer: How to Write a Great Northwest Novel.”