king5.com

This past weekend saw, at last, the moment for which TV viewers in the entire region had waited, patiently and otherwise, for a long long time.

But enough about the season premiere of Downton Abbey.

Instead let’s welcome the return to local screens of my ol’ UW Daily buddy John Keister and his longtime cohort Pat Cashman, plus the debut of Cashman’s son Chris, on their new sketch comedy show The [206].

It airs after Saturday Night Live at 1 a.m. Sundays, when reruns of Keister and Cashman on Almost Live! had aired since that show’s 1999 demise. It also airs Sundays at 7:30 and 11:30 p.m. on KONG-TV.

At the time Almost Live! was canceled, KING said the video landscape had become too fragmented to support a local comedy/entertainment show. That scene is even more fragmented now; and there are so many other electronically based home entertainment options (including the one you’re looking at now).

So what makes this show feasible now, when AL! was no longer feasible then?

In three words: Outsourcing, Downsizing, and Tech.

• Keister, the Cashmans, and their business partners own and package the show themselves. They even sell some of the commercial slots. KING/KONG picks up the show on a “barter” basis.
• The new show has only three regular writer-performers (all male, for what it’s worth), instead of the old show’s eight or nine.
• It’s shot and edited by a small crew using compact digital equipment. The studio parts are taped, in two-episode batches (no breaking-news references), at a small rental space—in Bellevue. (Fret not; Bellevue jokes are still part of the repertoire, as are Tacoma, Renton, and Kent jokes.)

via interestingengineering.com

• Circa 1833, one W.D. Kellogg published a lithograph entitled A Map of the Open Country of Woman’s Heart. It goes, as the hereby-linked article states, “from the mole traps in the Province of Deception, to the city of Moi-meme in the Land of Selfishness, to the Plains of Susceptibility in the Region of Sentimentality.” There’s no Aorta of Righteous Disgust, though. Speaking of which….
• Yep, it’s the meme of the day: “Binders Full of Women.”
• You’ve heard of wanted criminals (and debtors) getting caught via phony contests and giveaways. But a chewing-gum survey?
• The debut of Microsoft’s “Surface” tablet computer mark’s the company’s biggest effort yet to take control of its own destiny, away from the desktop/laptop PC makers. However, it doesn’t mean they’re actually making the things themselves. Speaking of which….
• A Shanghai newspaper got a guy in to work as a Foxconn factory laborer. As it happened, he got onto the iPhone 5 assembly lines. Note: Most consumer electronics products today, no matter the brand, are made under similar conditions.
• Paul Buchheit at AlterNet lists “Five Ways Corporate Greed Is Bankrupting America.”
• The latest company to be bled to the point of death under Bain Capital (which Mitt Romney’s “officially” not part of anymore): Clear Channel, the owner of too many hundreds of radio stations and employer and/or syndicator of most of the worst right-wing talkers.
• A class action lawsuit accuses Morgan Stanley of deliberately targeting Af-Am households for junk mortgages, believing them to be less knowledgable or to have less access to legal recourse.
• An ex-American Apparel store clerk talks low pay, long hours, and being expected to laugh at non-skinny women.
• Today’s teenage scare story is brought to you by vodka-soaked tampons.
• The Arizona National Guard and its recruiters hunted homeless people in Phoenix with paint guns, and bribed/pressured some of them (and some of their own female members) to show their tits.
• A guy puts a song up on the digital music services. Some other guy “samples” the entire track, dubs a few bird-chirping sound effects onto it, puts it up on the same digital music services, and way outsells the original. The maker of the original gets perturbed.
• The ever-vigilant xkcd reminds you that every Presidential election has set one precedent or another (some more trivial than others).

via kathrynrathke.blogspot.com

All good tidings and shout-outs to my fellow Stranger refugee and prominent commercial illustrator Kathryn Rathke. She’s created the new official logo for Wendy’s restaurants. The deceptively simple mascot caricature took three years of client approval and market testing.

• I’ve now read ThoughtCatalog.com’s “23 Things To Know About Seattle.” Yep, it’s dumb.
• Did Paul Ryan “borrow” his story about naming his daughter “Bean” from Kurt Cobain?
• The anti-gay-marriage campaign: lying full-time, lying from the start.
• Note to “guerrilla marketers”: Spray-painting your logo on Seattle sidewalks is illegal.
• America’s fastest growing religion: none of the above.
• Once again, “For Women” product advertising proves to be an exercise in ridiculousness. (Today’s example: beef jerkey.)
• The late UK children’s entertainer (and original Top of the Pops host) Jimmy Savile has been posthumously outed as a serial assailant of underage girls. Some of his victims are hounding the BBC to learn what the broadcaster knew, and didn’t do, about his crimes.
• Despite what my ex-boss Mr. Savage might imply, a teenager doesn’t have to be gay to be bullied to the edge of sanity. This is what happened to a 15-year-old girl in the Vancouver suburbs, who took her own life after posting a YouTube video showing how she’d been harassed and bullied online.

It’s 10/11/12! The sort of date-progression that only happens 11 times in a century and is utterly, completely meaningless!

Elsewhere in randomness:

• Tully’s coffee shops try another fiscal maneuver to stay afloat, having been profitable only twice in 20 years.
• One of the three Pussy Riot martyrs is out of prison.
• Convicted serial child-rapist Jerry Sandusky blames his victims. And the media. How typical.
• Charles Mudede agrees with me that ending Metro’s Ride Free Area is a bad idea.
• That silly Korean dance-music video may have some social commentary nested within it.
• Turns out there’s a term for Romney’s debate tactic. It’s the “Gish Gallop.” It’s the spewing of so many fibs in so short a time that one’s opponent is left tongue-tied.
• Robert Reich debunks seven lies about the economy in two and a half minutes.
• And as a touch of visual spice on the first real week of autumn in the Charmed Land, here are some classic pin-up illustrations retouched with the face of Robert Downey Jr.

seattle chapter, american institute of architects via kplu.org

• What to do with the soon-to-be former 520 floating bridge’s surplus pontoons? Several folks have ideas. One of them, above, is to build a walkway just below Lake Washington’s surface, for the ever-popular “walking on water” illusion.
• Seattle’s own alt-country rising star Brandi Carlile has officially come out.
• Fast Company seems to find it odd that Microsoft’s new hardware products have embraced a newly enriched design aesthetic without CEO Steve Ballmer being in hands-on charge of the initiative. A good boss knows when (and to whom) to delegate authority.
• Amazon’s proposed three new towers won’t just be big, they’ll also be bold.
• Earlier this year we mentioned how the Swedish Hospital system said it was losing loads of money. Similar news has now come from Group Health.
• Private housing developers are getting tax breaks for building “affordable” housing units, without enough proof that they’re actually building ’em.
• Meanwhile, City Councilmember Nick Licata wants you to know that more than of Seattle’s “renter” population, 20 percent spend more than half their income on rent.
• Starbucks now has its own branded home espresso machine.
• If there’s anybody with an apparent greater sense of L’etat, C’est Moi than Seattle police, it’s Bellevue police.
• More first-birthday greetings to the Occupy movement: Bainbridge Island-based Yes! magazine uses a tree graphic to show how the movement has “born fruit.”
• Who wants to keep simple majorities in the Legislature from deciding revenue bills? Big business, of course. Like duh.
• As of Wednesday evening, HuffPost’s Electoral College map lists only one tossup state, North Carolina. Obama has taken leads (at least small ones) in all the other previously “swing” states.
• Richard Eskow of the Campaign for America’s Future claims Romney’s “47 percent” speech reveals the combination of privilege, selfishness, and rage that defines “the radical rich.” (A certain megahome-building couple in Leschi might be considered among these.)
• Those print-on-demand book machines are coming to lots more locations. But will the new models allow color interior pages, or be even halfway decent with photographs?
• Jack Hitt at The New Yorker has a hi-larious “Conservative History of the United States,” based entirely on wingnut politicians’ and pundits’ actual untrue statements.

from an estee lauder skin cream ad

… is at the bottom of this image.

realismblog.com

I’ll have more to say about Bumbershoot 2012 later.

But I have to talk about the posthumous tribute exhibit to local urban-landscape painter Christopher Martin Hoff.

The show itself was fabulous, a loving homage to a man who loved the world around him and who deftly expressed all the color, detail, and even love he saw.

At least that’s what I saw in Hoff’s works.

Gary Faigin sees something else.

He’s a cofounder of the Gage Academy of Art and a contributing art critic on KUOW.

He wrote an introductory statement displayed at the Hoff exhibit.

Faigin’s statement begins:

Seattle is not a beautiful city. Its architecture is banal, its layout arbitrary and confusing. It is redeemed by its setting—dream-like mountains and islands tantalizingly close—but one would never know that by looking at the paintings of Christopher Hoff. It was Hoff’s lifework—tragically short, as lives go—to patiently go out into the gritty streets of the Seattle urban core, day after day, week after week, in good weather and bad, and attempt to extract the timeless and poetic from what most of us see as an everyday blur.

I most emphatically disagree with the first three sentences.

And I believe, without having known him, that Hoff would have done likewise.

thestranger.com

Hoff saw beauty in the everyday. In the weather. In the streets. In intersections both straight and angular. In handsome 1920s apartment buildings and in graffiti- and poster-encrusted commercial walls. In warehouses and gas stations and billboards.

He saw the beauty in all this because it was all there to be seen.

Because Seattle IS beautiful.

And not just the picture-postcard parts, the water and the mountains,the Pike Place fish throwers and the glass artists.

All of Seattle is beautiful.

Just as all of you are beautiful.

bumbershoot.org

(PS: This entry’s title, “I Acknowledge Beauty Exists,” comes from a Facebook page devoted to “body image,” inner beauty, and championing the diversity of all peoples. That page’s founders, in turn, based its name on another online activist space, “I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists.”)

• Bic thought it would be a great marketing coup to come out with a ball point pen “For Her.” (The package says, “Easy Glide: Feel the smoothness.” The Amazon snark-comments begin in 3… 2…
• Sony will sell home TVs with the same ultra-high-def resolution as the top digital cinema projectors. Why, tell me again, are we expected to still go to theaters?
• “Hipster” bashing is officially passé, now that it’s being used to sell Toyotas.
• Just as the political right seems to be collapsing into a black hole of hardcore hate, Fisher Broadcasting decides to bring right-wing talk back to KVI.
• If you really need more anti-Republican ranting (the proverbial fish in the proverbial barrell, shot with the proverbial smoking gun), there’s some here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Today’s historic-preservation outrage involves the Jefferson Park Golf Course clubhouse. It’s a magnificent structure, “homey” yet elegant, that’s served city residents for more than 75 years. The City wants to raze it to put up a new driving range. It’s rushing through a plan to deny landmark status to the building, in cahoots with the architects that are planning the redevelopment scheme.

• This week, the southeast corner of the United States has been hammered by a massive destructive force of nature, devastating the people and the land with its wind and fury. There’s also a tropical storm.
• A deaf woman in Tacoma was arrested for a crime she was really the victim of. She was tasered and held for 60 hours without access to an interpreter. She’s now got a global support network.
• The stretch road in front of the J.P. Patches statue in Fremont may get the honorary second name of “J.P. Patches Place.”
• Dan Froomkin doesn’t want more jobs. He wants more decent-paying jobs than today’s corporate sector seems willing to provide.
• As Seattle’s libraries and their patrons endure their fourth annual end-o’-summer closed week, the son of an ex-Seattle Public Library bigwig believes libraries need to reinvent themselves by ditching those dumb ol’ books, or at least stuffing them in some inaccessible-by-the-public storage facility. Uh, thanks but no thanks.
• Meanwhile, the volunteer-run “People’s Library” at 23rd and Yesler plans to remain open after the city libraries reopen, at least through the end of this month.
• Pierce Transit, already socked by over-dependence on local sales tax revenue, could face potential total shutdown (or something close to it) if a tax increase measure doesn’t pass.
• An extreme-right-wing militia cult wanted to bomb a Wash. state dam and poison the state’s apple crop.
• Higher prices, less selection. Isn’t liquor privatization wonderful?
• In the no-rules/new-rules world of self-e-publishing, you can get your book all the rave reviews it needs, and for a reasonable price.
• Bill Nye, who’s usually right about these things, proclaims that creationist fantasy is not healthy for children and other living things.

craig hill, tacoma news tribune

• A Tacoma News Tribune writer finds a retreating glacier on Mt. Rainier looking, from one angle, like the Nike logo. Snark ensues.
• The new Blue Scholars music video combines Sonics nostalgia with good ol’ Seattle diversity, visually expressed in the form of working-class food joints.
• Shell’s building an oil-containment barge in Bellingham. But the thing’s leaking oil. (This is the kind of “oops!” moment anti-corporate performance artists can’t fake.)
• The University Bridge has to be closed to cars and sprayed with water once an hour when it gets this hot.
• Remember, boats shouldn’t get too close to whales.
• Apple has finally responded to the federal lawsuit claiming it and five of the top six U.S. book publishers conspired to fix e-book prices. Apple alleges Amazon was the real “driving force” behind the suit, not any government concern for the book buying public.
• Heidi Kelly at Crosscut believes “suburban women” will go for Romney/Ryan, or at least the “Generation X” women of the “Seinfeld generation” will, for reasoning I am unable to interpret/comprehend.
• Paul Ryan loves Rage Against the Machine. The bands’ members see Ryan as embodying the machine they’re raging against.
• Joshua D. Foster and Ilan Shrira at Psychology Today try to explain why people can be so easily seduced by conspiracy theories, no matter how far fetched those theories can be.
• An Oregon couple is charged with a multi-state murder and crime spree, done with the intention of racially “purifying” America.
• Meanwhile, Juan Cole insists that terrorists are terrorists even when they’re white.
• Mississippi’s scheme to outlaw abortion turns out to be remarkably similar to tactics the state used to use to prevent blacks from voting.
• Lost in the “vinyl revival”: nostalgia for the first mass-market recorded sound medium, the Edison cylinder.
• ESPN’s sports talk show Pardon the Interruption posted this mashup illo of Felix Hernandez’s perfect-game victory dance. (Wild Thing, I think I love you….)

maisonceleste.wordpress.com

• Did Mexico’s Huichol people create what we now know as “psychedelic” art?
• Central Washington’s bad, no-good week was caused by human carelessness. (Remember what Smokey says, everybody.)
• Soon, you’ll be able to go to an Arco station and not be supporting BP—but only if you’re in southern California, Nevada, or Arizona. BP’s holding on to the Arco stations in the Northwest, and to the Cherry Point, WA refinery that feeds them.
• Save the Silver Fork! It’s an indie diner! A real one, not a hip-retro pastiche! It’s the Rainier Valley’s favorite “third place,” a site of community-gathering and conviving. It’s threatened with demolition, for nothing more than a gas station.
• As you might know, the cover model for Herb Alpert’s classic LP Whipped Cream and Other Delights is an ex-Seattleite now living in southwest Washington. And she’s still a charmer.
• The Young Fresh Fellows, deans of Seattle power pop, have a new album coming out! And you can access an online stream if you follow the band’s clever little marketing gimmick.
• Rep. Jim McDermott, for most of his political career, has been a man only a Republican could dislike. Until his wife became his ex-wife, that is.
• Just as I figured would happen, a compromise with the Port of Seattle may enable the Sonics arena scheme to go forward.
• Getty Images, Seattle’s king of stock photos, is being bought by the Carlyle Group. That’s the D.C.-based private-equity outfit with strong ties to the Bush family and to the Saudi royals.
• During the Olympics, Nike put out a T-shirt with the slogan GOLD DIGGING. A sexist slap or just good clean fun?
• Maria Konnikova at the Atlantic explains just how famous quotations get mixed up, rearranged, or misattributed.
• Among the publishing old-timers trying to make sense of the Internet age: onetime Sassy editor and “perpetual teenager” Jane Pratt.
• Angela Neustatter at the Guardian would really like married people to be a lot more accepting/forgiving of cheatin’ spouses. It’s only natural, she says. (There goes half the subject matter of classic lit and country songs….)
• Americans are having fewer babies, too few to maintain the population size. This has been happening in Japan for a while, to the point that kids’ manga and related media are in financial freefall. But what’s bad news for the makers of baby clothes could be good news for an overextended planet.
• PBS’s Frontline goes Jesus-freaky. In the process, a lot’s revealed about cultural cross-pollination. Long before hip white kids pretended to be Buddhists, Romans disgusted by their corrupt society embraced the simple love-and-respect teachings of a tiny Jewish splinter sect.
• Whites are still far more likely than minorities to have home broadband connections. But Hispanics, Asian Americans, and African Americans are more likely than whites to have smartphones. This is what could be known as burrowing under the Digital Divide.
• Cheating at tournament-level Scrabble! Is nothing pure anymore? (On the other hand, it allows me to revive the tagline from the Scrabble game show: “It’s the crossword game you’ve played all your life, but never quite like this!”)
• When the teen offspring of the One Percent post Tweets® and photos of their obscenely opulent lifestyles, it’s all fun and snark. Until somebody figures out that potential burglars/kidnappers could be reading them.
• As I keep telling you, if you don’t vote, you’re doing exactly what the extreme right wing wants you to do.
• Political spending this season has been swamped by Karl Rove’s and the Koch brothers’ Super PACs, and their oh-so-anonymous donors.
• Paul Constant describes Paul Ryan as:

A wealthy young white man who refuses to, for one second, consider what it must be like to be a woman, or a minority, or a member of the lower class, or old. A man whose words mean less than nothing.

For reasons known only to the Gods, I not only didn’t read David Guterson’s novel Ed King (Oedipus as a Seattle software mogul!) when it came out, I also didn’t notice last November, when it won a British lit magazine’s annual Bad Sex In Fiction award. Don’t be as ignorant as I was—check out an excerpt from the “winning” scene.

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• Today’s lesson in what’s horribly wrong with the Romney/Ryan economic plan comes courtesy of Al Franken.
• Matt Hasselbeck doesn’t like the CenturyLink Field visiting-team lockers; says they’re so small they risk violating “man-rules.”
• What happens when allegedly pro-pot people try to start a political campaign against the legalizing-pot initiative ain’t pretty.
• In Illinois, a Bain Capital-controlled company is not only firing its workforce and shipping the equipment to China, but is making the fired workers train their Chinese replacements.
• Consumer scandal of the day: “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10-Year-Old Daughter and Didn’t Care.”
• Folks under the age of 33 are now buying more books than the legends-in-their-own-minds baby boomers. The boomers will almost surely ignore this, and will continue ranting about how everyone younger than themselves is a subhuman idiot.

• To be celebrated this weekend: one hundred years of Volunteer Park.
• Paul Constant attends an “American Idol for Startups.” He finds a bunch of hopeful entrepreneurs showing off gimmicky little smartphone apps based on “tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality,” and promoted using jargon “as tepid and lifeless and dumb as any language that ever existed.”
• Now that all companies, nonprofits, and individuals in the western world have been exhorted to revamp their entire existences around the Web, they’re about to be exhorted to forget all that and re-revamp their entire existences around “mobile media.”
• We knew it was coming (it’s in the way of Amazon’s TriTowers HQ project), but it’s still sad to see the King Cat Theater closed for good.
• The “24 hour news cycle” is sooooo day-before-yesterday. But it does make for a lot of fun reporting mistakes.
• Meet this election’s top right wing attack groups (or at least as much about them as has been uncovered to date, which isn’t much).
• A Portland motivational blogger meets one of the original computing pioneers, and gets, well, motivated.
• Media reports about Olympic champion Gabby Douglas have been loaded with racial dog-whistle jargon.
• A self-professed “skeptic” and “rationalist” claims to be more skeptical and rational than other self-professed “skeptics” and “rationalists”:

Let’s admit it, skepticism does have a way to make us feel intellectually superior to others. They are the ones believing in absurd notions like UFOs, ghosts, and the like! We are on the side of science and reason. Except when we aren’t, which ought to at least give us pause and enroll in the nearest hubris-reducing ten-step program.

coregallery.org

If you want me to spend $5,000 for a painting of words outlining an image, the words had better be spelled properly. They should read “More Than Its Weight In Gold.” No apostrophe dammit.

nytimes.com via nytsyn.com

• As a fedora wearer since when fedoras weren’t cool, I frankly don’t identify with Montauk, NY’s demonizing of the midcentury style headgear. It has to do with the old fishing town’s backlash against being colonized by (what the NY Times story about it calls) “hipsters.” But (to use NY-area geographic parlance) the Montaukers aren’t really dissing Urban-Outfitters-clad, emo-listening shoegazers from Brooklyn, but rather Ralph-Lauren-clad, gourmet-cilantro-eating 1-percenters from the Hamptons.
• What’s wrong with residents putting in a common sandbox for neighborhood kids along a “planting strip” between a residential street and its sidewalk? Nothing, except of course it doesn’t look boringly world-class enough.
• Item: “Poll shows Americans are losing faith in religious institutions.” Comment: Oops, there goes another leg of the Republicans’ shrinking “base.”
• On a related note, lotsa local Catholics love ’em those activist nuns.
• Following up on a topic discussed here previously, Jacob Silverman at Slate would like online book critics to be a little more, you know, critical.
• You probably didn’t see “the saddest story in the Olympics.” NBC didn’t really cover it. (It involved the women’s side of  a “second tier” Olympic sport (fencing), in a match that included no U.S. athletes.)
• From Annie Hall to (500) Days of Summer (and even stretching back to Bringing Up Baby), there’s been a particularly American romantic-comedy heroine type which the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin has labeled the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” This is the sparkly, spunky force-O-nature who exists, as Rabin puts it, “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” (The sitcom Dharma & Greg can be considered an MPDG premise stretched out.) I can attest that such women do exist in real life, and that relating to them, in my experience, is no trip to eternal bliss.
• Local filmmaker Drew Christie offers a short “animated op/doc” (whatever that means) about Hollywood’s recent “allergy to originality.”