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YES, FEEL JUST LIKE A MARATHON RUNNER WHO’S COLLAPSED TWO MILES FROM THE END
Aug 4th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

RANDOM LINKS FOR 8/2/12
Aug 2nd, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

perfect sound forever, via furious.com

  • It was my first real lesson in how to make a print periodical that was neither a corporate “slick” nor an amateur “zine.” It was my entree into several musical worlds, most importantly that of U.S. indie pop/rock. Let us remember the brief, glorious life of New York Rocker.
  • Can Washington’s state parks really survive if they have to become self supporting?
  • Correction of the day (NY Times):

An earlier version misstated the term Mr. Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. in a debate. It was crypto-Nazi, not crypto-fascist.

  • In the Matrix movies, identity is easily transmutable and fluid. Think about that when you learn that director Larry Wachowski now wants to be known as Lana.
  • How do all those “rugged individualist,” “rebel” Tea Party operatives act and sound so much alike? They get special training in exactly what to say, do, and believe.
  • Meanwhile, “Conservative Movement” operatives are finally starting to turn against one another, using the same tactics of loud lies they’ve always used against progressives and centrists.
  • The latest winner of one of those dumb magazine declarations about “America’s coolest city”? Houston.
  • If a Waterworld dystopia ever comes to be, expect the One Percenters to hole themselves up in fancy-as-all-heck “floating cities of the future.”
  • Human waste off the Northwest coast, now with extra caffeine.
  • The anti-“social media” backlash is fully underway. One disgruntled Facebook advertiser says it was charged for “clicks” on its ads that turned out to have been mostly generated by “bot” programs. And Ewan Morrison at the Guardian implores self-publishing authors to spend less time incessantly hawking their “brands” on Twitter, Facebook, et al., and more time actually, you know, writing.
IS THE AGE OF GENERIC PRODUCTS COMING BACK?
Aug 1st, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

OUTER SPACE IS SO BORING!
Jul 31st, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

Let’s face it, my fellow futurists.

Outer space is boring. Or rather, being out there would be boring.

No air, no water, nothing to do for light-years.

This is the expression held by German music hall star Marika Rökk (1913-2004) in her big production number “Mir Ist So Langweilig” (“I Am SOOO Bored”). It’s from the 1958 revue film Bühne Frei für Marika (“Stage Free for Marika”).

She portrays an ice princess on some desolate planet, surrounded by a family of male toadies. She langorously sings of yearning for something to do that’s not the same old same old.

She peers out her space telescope, sees happy Earthlings dancing, and immediately sets forth in an amazing gyroscope/spaceship (!).

The ship takes her to a quasi-racist German depiction of an African jungle.

She picks up a (real) snake and dances with it, lying down and spreading her legs (!).

She cavorts for a while with some “natives” and a (real) elephant. (She rubs the bare chest of one of “native” males to see “if the dirt comes off.”)

But even that’s not enough to slake her boredom for long.

(Thanx and a hat tip to Mr. Dante Fontana’s Visual Guidance Ltd.)

RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/29/12
Jul 29th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

The Burke Museum has posted a lovely You Tube video showing how the Pioneer Square area was not only settled by Seattle’s founders but altered, filled in, and transformed from a little isthmus into the historic district it is today.

  • A B.C.-based blogger about classic cartoons offers his own tribute to J.P. Patches, on whose show he first saw many of those shorts.
  • Meanwhile, sometime Seattle musician (and this year’s Seafair grand marshal) Duff McKagan cites the Patches show as exemplifying/promoting a quirky, particularly “Seattle” sense of humor.
  • Paul Constant believes the Seattle library levy would stand a better chance of passage if its promoters expressed more appreciation toward librarians, not just toward buildings and acquisitions.
  • The Dept. of Justice deal with the Seattle Police includes a court appointed monitor and strict reporting of “uses of force.”
  • You’ve got about a month to get your needles together for the big quilters’ convention.
  • A Florida renegade Republican claims his state party has deliberately tried to suppress the black vote.
  • Paul Krugman suggests Mitt Romney’s wealth, and the insularity that goes with it, is his potential undoing.
  • If you don’t have health insurance, today’s Republican Party officially doesn’t give a flying frack about you.
  • The number of “swing states” in this Presidential election: 8. That’s it.
  • Pat Buchanan really needn’t worry about the Republicans facing long-term oblivion as America becomes steadily less white. Some future generation of GOP operatives could easily dump the racism (disguised and otherwise), and instead proclaim that passive-aggressive fealty to Big Money is for everyone.
  • Roger Rosenblatt wants writers to “write great;” that is, to go beyond the merely personal and embrace reality’s greater issues.
  • In the opposite direction from “writing great,” there’s now an online Fifty Shades of Grey-esque cliché generator.
  • And finally, this day’s most incisive, most informative piece of Seattle Times reportage:

RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/26/12
Jul 25th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

This is the UW’s Lander Hall dormitory, where thousands of students over the past four-plus decades have slept, drank, toked, screwed, and even studied. It’s being razed this summer so the U can build a new (though not necessarily less ugly) residence-hall complex. It was really time for the building to come down. So much so, that a big slab of a concrete wall cracked off during demolition last Saturday. It crashed down on the closed cab of the excavator machine. The operator is still in the hospital.

  • It’s garbage strike time, right during the dog-days-O-summer! “Oh it’s the moooost/stinkiest tiiiime/of the year….”
  • We now know what will (partly) fill the old Borders Book site downtown. It’s Yard House, a Calif.-based bar and grill chain with one of those 100-plus-beer-tap bars.
  • The ferry Kalakala’s current owner is suing the state. He claims they’ve unnecessarily impeded his efforts to restore the historic bucket-O-bolts.
  • In one of its rare unsigned editorials, the Stranger gives some darned lucid reasons for supporting the Sonics arena scheme.
  • Defenders of Chick-Fil-A’s homo-hatin’ include ex-Sen. Rick Santorum and a fictional teenage girl, invented by the fast food chain’s PR reps.
  • Wednesday was the fourth straight night of police brutality-inspired protests in Anaheim CA. It’s become a cycle. Every police over-reaction leads to protests, that become targeted with another wave of over-reaction.
  • NPR talks to a guy who claims to know “how to manipulate people to say ‘yes.’” Yes, the story mentions how these techniques might show up on a future pledge drive.
  • Google may be cracking down on sites that use “search engine optimization” tricks to manipulate their way to the top of the search rankings. That would be nice, since (as previously griped about here) so many of those sites turn out to be worthless arrays of bland, uninformative self-help texts.
  • When Buckyballs are outlawed, only outlaws will accidentally swallow tiny spherical magnets.
BOOK REVIEW REVUE
Jul 20th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

chibi neko's 'bad literature bingo' review of 'fifty shades of grey;' mybookgoggles.blogspot.com

The world of books, specifically the world of “women’s” books, is roiling with scandal and outrage.

First, there was a book-review site called “ChickLitGirls.” It sent emails to small and self-publishers who wanted their boks reviewed on the site. It claimed it had become overwhelmed by such requests; but that publishers could ensure not only a review but a positive one for one small payment of $95.

The site quickly disappeared once authors and bloggers started complaining about its practices, only to get emails from the site’s operators describing the criticism as “harassment and threat” and threatening to sue.

•

Along with the scandal concerning positive reviews, there’s also one concerning negative reviews.

Specifically, about reader-submitted reviews posted to the influential social media site Goodreads.

Some people love to post nasty, snarky reviews. (And, let’s face it, the explosion in self-published ebooks means lots of easy pickings for any would-be online insult comic.)

But some of these posts cross or at least stretch the line between critiquing the work and defaming the author.

And, as you might expect, a lot of self-e-published authors are sensitive souls, unused to having their work dissected and pilloried on the public stage.

Thus, there’s now a site called Stop the GR Bullies. Its express purpose: to expose and vilify Goodreads contributors who get too nasty.

Of course, “too nasty” is a matter of personal judgment.

At least one book blogger, using the name “Robin Reader,” believes Stop the GR Bullies is itself bullying toward Goodreads users who’d simply posted negative but not “bullying” reviews:

Something is very wrong with us, and by “us” I mean the online community of (largely) women authors and readers. What is wrong is the “outing,” threatening, shaming, and silencing of readers who are perceived to be too critical of or hostile to authors. And for those in this online community who believe that this is not their concern or their harm, I would ask them to think again.

Fellow book-blogger Foz Meadows similarly asserts:

…Simply disliking a book, no matter how publicly or how snarkily, is not the same as bullying. To say that getting a handful of mean reviews is even in the same ballpark as dealing with an ongoing campaign of personal abuse is insulting to everyone involved.

•

In completely non-related book news:

  • Two industry groups now call e-books “the dominant single format” in adult fiction sales.
  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is just soooo last year. Now, the hip shtick is to rewrite classic novels by, er, inserting explicit sex scenes.
RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/20/12
Jul 19th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

buzzfeed.com

  • Some nostalgist at Buzzfeed has put together a boatload of ’80s kitsch ad art, mostly from early home-computer magazines. All the unicorns, rainbows, building-sized MS-DOS computers, and disco babes in slips you’ll ever need.
  • Then, you can look at how low kitsch ad art has descended since then with Bad Ebook Covers.
  • Yes, it is possible for Microsoft to lose money.
  • At The Daily Dot, “The Hometown Newspaper of the World Wide Web,” we learn that:
  1. local web-comic and gaming fan site Penny Arcade is trying to become user supported via a Kickstarter fund drive, that
  2. a females-only meetup for local Reddit.com users became the target of “online harassment” by sexist boors, and that
  3. you’ll be able to register to vote in Wash. state via Facebook.
  • Our ol’ pal Ronald Holden does the math and concludes that, no, the Athenian in the Pike Place Market is probably not one of America’s 10 most lucrative restaurants.
  • Wash. state is #3 in both home computer ownership and home Internet use. #1? Utah. (Those publicly-prim Mormons gotta get their net porn.)
  • Forbes cites the Seahawks as the world’s 25th most valuable sports team. That sounds cool, until you find out that of the 24 outfits ahead of ’em on the list, 15 are other NFL teams. (#1: UK soccer powerhouse Manchester United.)
  • There are a lot fewer new small businesses in America these days. One potential reason: a “radical concentration of power” in the economy, especially in banking.
  • The snarky eco-advocates who staged the phony Shell Oil press conference at the Space Needle have expanded their anti-Arctic-drilling campaign with fake billboards, including one right near Shell’s Houston HQ.
  • DUH of the Day: Big companies that don’t pay their workers much, by and large, could afford to do so.
  • At least one wag now claims that “Mitt Romney will not be the Republican nominee.”
  • Crawford Kilian at Vancouver political blog The Tyee explains how the Ayn Randians’ utopia would be a thorough dystopia for everybody else:

Future John Galts would have to sleep in castles, behind a wall of guards protecting them from us. A philosophy that detests the “gun” of government coercion would survive only by imposing such coercion on everyone else. The masters of a Randian society would rule a wasteland of clear cuts, poisoned streams, and empty seas, except for those patches they personally owned and protected.

RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/19/12
Jul 18th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

wikimedia commons, via komo-tv

  • Drugs? Guns? Codeine pain pills? Forget it. What U.S. Customs is really cracking down against on the Canadian border is a bigger threat to America than all those combined. Beware the dreaded candy Kinder Eggs.
  • Starbucks apparently has an image problem in NYC.
  • How to get shoppers away from dot-coms and back to the malls? How ’bout wine bars, yoga classes, craft-making groups, and jeans stores with special butt-view mirrors?
  • Outside estimates put the cost of a spiffed-up Seattle waterfront near a cool billon. That’s a heckuva lot for what’s essentially just another group of “world class” windswept plazas (and we’ve already got more than we need of those). I still say: scrap most of that, bring back the Waterfront Streetcar, and put an amusement park at Pier 62-63.
  • The big winner in the demise of Washington’s state liquor stores? Oregon’s state liquor stores.
  • Deja Vu’s Dreamgirls really doesn’t want to leave SoDo, not even for a big buyout by the arena developers.
  • In the immortal words of Mr. Costello, I don’t wanna go to Chelsea.
  • Link Light Rail is three years old and more popular than ever.
  • Macklemore’s new pro-gay-marriage hiphop track is getting quite the national attention.
  • Boeing wants more engineers and more training for future engineers. Oh, and it also wants more Federal money.
RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/18/12
Jul 18th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

There was a competition going on for short films about Seattle. Some of the entrants (at least they seem like they could be) are showing up online. F’rinstance, here’s a poetic ode to the city by Riz Rollins; and here’s Peter Edlund’s Love, Seattle (based on the opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and dedicated to team-and-dream stealer Clay Bennett).

RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/17/12
Jul 16th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

youchosewrong.tumblr.com

  • Ever feel like life’s one big choose-your-adventure book and you’re hopeless stuck on the wrong path? Then enjoy these unhappy endings at “You Chose Wrong.”
  • It turns out that with NBC taking full control of MSNBC.com (it already wholly owns MSNBC TV), some or all of the website’s 80 Redmond-based editorial positions will move to the New York region. Just what I need: more laid off journalists in the Seattle area competing for the same scarce jobs.
  • The teases of an Almost Live! reunion have been partly revealed. The new venture, The (206), will be an online, not broadcast, series. (This probably means short self-contained skits, not half-hour package episodes.) The only announced performers so far are John Keister, Pat Cashman, and Cashman’s son Chris.
  • Got construction or construction-management knowhow but not a job? Do as Gordon Lightfoot said and be Alberta bound.
  • When sunscreen is outlawed in Tacoma schools, only outlaws won’t have face blisters.
  • KPLU remembers the Seattle (specifically, Cornish College) roots of avant-music giant John Cage.
  • Kitty Wells, 1920-2012: The original “queen of country music” had a rawer, less subdued sound and image than Patsy Cline (the only female country singer urban hipsters have heard of, still). Wells’ biggest hit, “(It Wasn’t God Who Made) Honky Tonk Angels,” was an answer song to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life.” Today, only country historians remember the latter.
  • The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only “online newspaper,” might disappear by the end of the year. The real Daily, thankfully, is here to stay.
  • Huffington Post blogger Spencer Critchley (which would be a great character name for a romance-novel hero!) says Romney’s guys are foolishly running a TV-style campaign in the Internet age. By this, Critchley isn’t talking about ad expenditures so much as the operating mentality, imagining that a candidate’s superficial “brand image” is all that matters.
RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/13/12
Jul 13th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

  • A note to marketers everywhere (not that they’ll ever listen): As soon as you bill something as being “For Women” (not any specific women, just “Women” as a single mushed-together whole), a woman who doesn’t identify with your targeted “psychographic” will cry foul. Latest example: Pix, an iPad-based “photography lifestyle magazine for women.” It’s full of fluffy fashion, make-up, and shopping tips, and light on the notion of photography as a serious endeavor or of its readers as serious people. Bringing in the deserved snark is Stella Kramer, Pulitzer-winning photo editor (and Seattle punk-zine pioneer).
  • When basketball vet Charles Barkley hosted Saturday Night Live, the cut-off-at-the-end 12:50 a.m. skit had him shilling for his own homespun “Barkley’s Bank” as an alternative to the world renowned Barclays Bank. These days, that’s where I’d rather trust my money.
  • Hooray to local gallery-scene and edgy-installation-art vet Scott Lawrimore, who just got an important curatorial job at the Frye Art Museum.
  • A “Christian” anti-sex website wants to scare teens into abstinence by making up scare stories about condoms.
  • Courtney Love just keeps getting into messes, legal and otherwise. Sad, really.
  • Howard Schultz wants U.S. businesses to start making more jobs and stop whining all the time. Or something like that.
  • Art Thiel would like you to get the facts n’ figures about the Sonics Arena proposal (which aren’t all in yet) before you get emotional about it in either direction.
  • A UK High Court judge declared Samsung’s new tablet computer isn’t an iPad ripoff, because it doesn’t “have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.” Or as a BBC commentator interprets the ruling, the judge decided it’s not as cool.
RANDOM LINKS FOR 7/12/12
Jul 11th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

comicsbronzeage.com

Just Sayin’ Dept: Here’s something that hasn’t been publicized much in the World’s Fair 50th anniversary celebrations.

  • Could the Almost Live! cast (or a key portion of it) be reuniting in a new project? A site called The206.tv is being coy n’ teasing about it, at least for now.
  • Cafe Racer will reopen. And it’ll look better than ever.
  • Seattle’s own Ezell’s has the nation’s greatest fried chicken, according to a highly manipulable Esquire online poll.
  • Danny Westneat sees the Sonics Arena plan as a much better deal than the one that was used to rebuild Husky Stadium.
  • No, there won’t be a zip line in West Seattle’s Lincoln Park.
  • No, there won’t be an Airbus factory in Wash. state. But Gov. Gregoire would really like Airbus to buy parts and services from some of the same local subcontractors and suppliers that service Boeing.
  • Just as Rush Limbaugh has his paid phony callers, Mitt Romney buses and flies in loyalist rooters to his campaign speeches. Even to the NAACP!
  • It’s the 20th anniversary of the first photo ever posted to a Web site. It was a plug for a retro-cabaret combo comprising “administrative assistants and significant others of scientists” at CERN, the Swiss lab where both the WWW was invented and the Higgs-Boson Particle was discovered. The hereby-linked article includes some of their science-nerd-chic novelty repertoire.
  • No, online-meme followers, Bill Gates did not speak at some random unidentified high school and tell the kids, “Life is not fair. Get used to it.” That whole text comes from a newspaper op-ed column dating back to 1996.
RANDOM LINKS FOR 6/29/12
Jun 29th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

'jseattle' at flickr, via capitohillseattle.com

Yes, it’s been nearly a week since I’ve posted any of these tender tidbits of randomosity. Since then, here’s some of what’s cropped up online and also in the allegedly “real” world:

  • There’s still no official hint on what the proposed Sonics Arena might look like. But the wannabe developers of East Pine Street’s “Bauhaus block” have released a drawing of their proposed mixed use development. At least in its idealized-drawing form, it’s not as monstrous looking as some other recent structures in the area.
  • In other preservation battles, Seattle’s people again rally around a thing about which the elites don’t give a darn. They’re striving to bring back the Waterfront Streetcar.
  • Meanwhile, a study claims if the viaduct-replacement tunnel charges tolls high enough to pay for it, drivers will clog the surface streets rather than pay those tolls.
  • Seattle Opera faces a $1 million shortfall, and will mount fewer new shows in future years. But don’t count ’em out yet, folks. It’s not over until, well, you know.
  • The late writer-director Nora Ephron had many major achievements. Sleepless in Seattle, let us all admit, is among the least of them.
  • Did you know there was a real hostelry in Fife called the “Norman Bates Motel“? Emphasis on the was.
  • America’s cities: they’re back! (Of course, some of us knew this for some time.)
  • In a pleasant surprise, one of the Supreme Court’s pro-one-percenter flank betrayed his masters and voted to uphold Obamacare. In response, some members of the Rabid Right’s noise machine claimed the great American Experiment was over and they’d hightail it to Canada (which, uh, has had universal health care in place for some time now).
  • If you’re on liberal/progressive websites at all these days, you’ll find a lot of comment threads hijacked by folk who claim to be lefties disgusted by Obama’s centrist tactics, so much that they won’t vote this November, and want you to not vote either. At least some of these comment trolls turn out to be paid employees of right-wing dirty tricks outfits.
  • Rupert Murdoch’s splitting his News Corp. into two companies. One will contain his print properties (including HarperCollins Books, The Wall St. Journal, the New York Post, and his besieged London tabloid operation), plus the iPad “newspaper” The Daily. The other will hold his “entertainment” properties. Yes, Fox “News” goes with the entertainment half.
  • Paul Krugman tells the PBS NewsHour all about his “cartoon physics” theory of the American economy.
  • Google’s putting out a tablet device with a 7-inch color screen, just like Amazon’s Kindle Fire. But the exciting part of this Wall St. Journal link is at the bottom, where they mention another forthcoming Google hardware product. It’s a streaming-media player that attaches to TV sets, and it’ll be made in the USA!
  • Ann Althouse looks at a famous parody of trashy sex novels, and asks rhetorically if those who make and read such parodies are really bashing the potboilers’ readers (i.e., women).
  • Nordstrom’s opening a branch in New York City. Make way for NYC media outlets to describe it as a brand new startup.
  • Headline: “The media covers Kardashians, not climate change.” Comment: The media covers the-media-not-covering-climate-change more than it covers climate change.
RANDOM LINKS FOR 6/19/12
Jun 18th, 2012 by Clark Humphrey

Band name suggestion of the month: “Premier Instruments of Pleasure.” (From the “Sexual Wellness” section of the Amazon subsidiary Soap.com.)

  • The new Microsoft tablet device will be called the “Surface.” How, er, superficial does that sound?
  • Plastic shopping bags disappear in Seattle on 7/1. You have 12 days to stock up on those magnificently reusable Bartell Drug bags while you still can.
  • Local hiphop artist Prometheus Brown would like you to care about the victims of gun violence, and not only when those victims are white people from “nice” areas.
  • Nick Eaton joins city and county officials in jeering at the Seattle Times‘ fact-stretchin’ anti-Sonics arena editorials. In other news, somebody still reads the Seattle Times editorials.
  • The waterfront streetcars Seattle can’t seem to find a place for anymore, even though the folks loved ’em? St. Louis transit officials would like ’em.
  • There’s a 20-year-old intern/blogger at NPR’s All Songs Considered named Emily White. (This is NOT the Emily White who used to work for The Stranger.) She recently wrote a confession that she’s almost never paid for the music she’s downloaded. In response, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery penned a screed denouncing her and people like her for shelling out bucks for computers and Internet connections but not for the content they thereby attain:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

  • Elsewhere in piracyland, when last we mentioned The Oatmeal online cartoonist Matthew Inman, he’d complained about a “social media” humor site that had posted his art without credit or payment. Then an attorney for that site sued him for defaming his client’s character. Inman replied back by starting an online fundraising campaign for the amount of the lawsuit—only with the proceeds going to charities instead. Now, the attorney has re-sued Inman, and has sued the site hosting the fund drive and even the charities it benefits. To quote one of America’s greatest contributions to comic satire, “Whadda maroon.”
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