• Garance Franke-Ruta at the Atlantic wishes U.S. feminist demonstrators had more dignified, less confrontational visual icons under which they could march. Symbols like “Columbia,” the historic female representation of the nation/continent/hemisphere. Of course, there’s this little matter about how this icon is now best known as a movie-studio logo—now owned by Sony….
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 63): No. But Chris Hansen is taking names for a “priority ticket” waiting list.
• Do you wanna believe Knute Berger, who mourns the pending loss of certain local architectural landmarks to developers and their megabucks lawyers? Or David Moser at Citytank, who believes higher-density urban neighborhoods are the only way to keep lower-income folk from being shoved out to costly, car-dependent suburbs?
• Richard McIver, 1942-2013: The 12-year Seattle City Council vet, who was the lone “token black” on the district-less council, was a regular champion for civil-rights issues and for neighborhoods the city often took for granted. And he made a great foil for Grant Cogswell.
• Military officials don’t like a proposal in the state legislature to let “payday loan” companies trot out even more predatory lending products (which are often, but not solely, aimed at troops and their families).
• Yep, police still don’t want police reforms. But they insist it’s a “labor issue.”
• The Center School can again teach its “Citizenship and Social Justice” class. But the school district has imposed vague, unspecified restrictions on how it can be taught.
• Meanwhile, Ta-Nehishi Coates wants to remind you that even “good people” can turn out to be racists.
• Fret not, Tiffany Willis claims: America is irreversably “becoming more liberal.”
• Cord Jefferson at Gawker believes when journalism is only open to people who don’t need a paycheck, only people who already have money will be journalists; and, possibly, only stories of interest to people who already have money will be reported.

editorandpublisher.com

Former Seattle Times staffer Glenn Nelson has thoughts of his own about the paper’s pending online paywall (or, as he calls it, its “digital tin cup”).

Nelson mentions how, following his Times years, he served in several “subscription-model Internet startups.”

At those places, Nelson kept fretting that the Times would suddenly wake up and smell the digital coffee, then trot out online products based on the vast manpower the paper had (at the time) in sports, entertainment, food, and business coverage, and in photojournalism. (Nelson doesn’t think a better Times local-news site would have mattered, because “general news already was being rendered a commodity on the Internet.”)

These sites, had they been created, would have blown away any indie-startup competition.

But they never showed up.

•

Meanwhile, news-biz pundit Alan D. Mutter dissects why many people under the age of 45 don’t like print newspapers. It’s because they’re just too inconvenient to have around.

Mutter quotes venture-capital exec Mary Meeker as claiming…

…that young people don’t want to own CDs, haul around books, buy cars, carry cash, do their own chores, or be committed to a full-time job. Instead, they use their smartphones to buy, borrow, or steal media; rent shared cars at home and book shared rooms when they travel; hire people to buy groceries or cut the grass; and use apps from Starbucks and Target to pay for lattes and redeem coupons. Many of the digital natives even prefer short-term gigs that allow them to arrange their work around their life, rather than arrange their life around their work.

Actually, many younger (and older) adults would like full time jobs if there were any around to be gotten. But that’s beside the point here.

More important is Mutter’s observation that…

…The warmed-over digital fare offered by the typical newspaper falls well short of the expectations of two whole generations of consumers who are not only empowered by technology but also damn well sure of how to get what they want.

via vintageseattle.org and capitolhillseattle.com

• The old Club Broadway disco on Capitol Hill, previously a Masonic Scottish Rite Cathedral, was torn down ages ago, leaving only a “stairway to nowhere.” Surprisingly, given all the other re-development activity nearby, the lot’s going to stay vacant for the foreseeable future.
• How do you honestly talk about the humanities in high school, when one parent’s complaint means you can’t say anything about “racism and social justice”?
• Meanwhile, Knute Berger has a great piece at Seattle magazine about our fair city’s unfair past; specifically, explicit racial discrimination in housing. It existed openly and legally (with contractual “covenants” binding home buyers to never resell to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or even Jews) as late as 1968. Berger notes that…

In 1964, Seattle voters soundly defeated an “open housing” ordinance that would have let anyone live anywhere. It lost by more than 2-to-1.

• You know how Amazon’s now building three 50-story towers on the Toyota of Seattle, King Theater, and Sixth Avenue Motor Inn blocks. But word just got out that the e-tail giant has options to buy three nearby blocks from the Clise family, who’ve owned the lots since the 1930s. One of these houses the Hurricane Cafe, which for 19 years has carried on the 24-hour dining tradition of the legendary Dog House that preceded it (without, alas, the previous joint’s class).
• Jon Talton wishes Boeing execs would go on an “apology tour” to their workers, the Puget Sound area, and their shareholders, expressing their sorriness over pretty much everything they’ve done this past decade.
• In where-are-they-now? news, ex-Nirvana drummer Chad Channing is back with a new band, Before Cars.
• Gonzaga men’s basketball: #1 in the nation. UW men’s basketball: don’t ask.
• A Republican apologizes for something! It’s for claiming that bicycles pollute just like cars.
• Pot as a business model goes over well in Yakima.
• There are two pending death-penalty cases in King County. They’re both now on hold.
• Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon asks, “Did the Internet kill Girls Gone Wild?” The answer, for good or ill, is no. Joe Francis, founder of the public-nudity video label, is simply going into bankruptcy protection to weasel out of money he owes to a Vegas casino magnate. It’s a personal matter, not directly related to the company.
• Morrissey is still a self-righteous egomaniac, but at least he’s a morally consistent self-righteous egomaniac.
• An LA record-store chain is selling its own digitized versions of out-of-print LPs for download. The company claims it’s legal (it sets aside a portion of each sale into an escrow account, to be sent to copyright claimants if they ask). But is it right?

• Seattle artist Ellen Ziegler’s mom was a ballet dancer—and a onetime girlfriend of the great Mexican comic actor Cantinflas. Ziegler’s turning this story into a very-limited-edition art book.
• In other news about local women and art and books and images of hotness, Charlotte Austin and Ciolo Thompson have created The Better Bombshell. In it, a variety of writers and artists of both genders contemplate that age-old issue of female role models and what they should be now.
• Online “cyber-bullying” isn’t just for teens anymore. The disgraced now-former Snohomish County executive did it too.
• The Oatmeal explains why “How to Suck at Your Religion.” (Essentially: if you preach brotherhood but practice bigotry, etc….)
• The drive to preserve the Bauhaus coffeehouse’s building, by getting it named an official historic landmark: rejected.
• The lawsuit challenging the Sonics arena scheme: rejected.
• Even Republicans believe Tim Eyman’s “lying whore” comment against Gov. Inslee went too far.
• PONCHO, granddaddy of Seattle arts fundraising groups (and inventor of the “charity auction”), is no more.
• Can private tech colleges, charging $30,000 or more for degree programs, really solve Wash. state’s learning gap?
• Eastern Washington, now with more radioactive sludge.
• Life imitates Portlandia, at least 30 times.
• Chuck Thompson at the New Republic derides microbrews, and the brewpubs who sell them, as icons of silly urban gentrificaiton. But they’re really, really tasty icons of silly urban gentrification.)
• The sad tale of the “food critic on Food Stamps” finally has a happy ending. Ex-Tacoma News Tribune restaurant reviewer Ed Murrieta finally found a job, after spending years among the long-term unemployed. He now writes blurbs for Sacramento’s tourism board.
• In Virginia, a white mom wants white kids not to have to read books about past racial violence.
• I know I’m not the only one who still remembers LaserDiscs, those 12-inch analog video discs that were the best way to see movies at home in their day.
• Here’s an artistic vision of a future car-free Manhattan, funded by (who else?) a car company.

webclipart.about.com

As the many unattached among us face with dread the day devoted, by Hallmark and other marketers, toward luvvey-duvvey cutesy-poo, comes a new study on “the old man-woman thing.”

Authors Bobbi J. Carothers and Harry T. Reis claim, among other things, that:

• Instead of a clear demarcation of “female” and “male” behaviors and thoughts, there’s more of a continuum among individuals.
• Gender itself is less a factor in psychological differences among people than race, nationality, subculture, etc.

Imagine the possible implications!

• Those men and women who classify the entire opposite sex as the Evil Other-with-a-capital-O are just wrong!
• Attempts to “pink-ify” consumer products, in order to market them as “For Women,” are really just as stupid as they already seem.
• Dating and “speed seduction” courses intended to reveal the mysteries of the opposite-sex brain are big wastes of money. (Which some of you already know.)
• There’s even less of an excuse for movie studios not to create more “active” roles for female characters, or for the rest of corporate America to pay women less.
• And instead of fighting and manipulating and jostling for power as “man” and “woman,” we’re really fighting and manipulating and jostling for power as “people.”

boingboing.net

• Seattle artist Shawn (“Beatkit”) Wolfe’s simple absurdist gag about tech product hype, the “RemoverInstaller,” is 20 years old and still going strong in a new “anniversary edition.”
• Alden Mason, 1919-2013: The master Northwest landscape painter deftly switched to beautiful yet playful abstractions, then again to cartoony acrylic works that fit right in with the “pop surrealist” movement (yes, that term again). The point is, he kept looking for something new to do, and always did it well.
• Even before it’s digested Seattle Weekly, the Canadian-owned Sound Publishing has bitten off its biggest local media morsel yet, acquiring the Everett Herald from the Washington Post Co. Not included in the sale are the Herald’s building or its printing plant. (Sound already has a plant in Everett that prints its assorted suburban and small-town weeklies.) The Seattle Times now runs the Herald’s home-delivery operation.
• Surprising nobody, Chris Hansen’s group has officially applied to the NBA to move the Sacramento Kings (which Hansen’s group has already applied to buy) to Seattle.
• REI boss Sally Jewell is, barring Republican obstruction tactics, the next Secretary of the Interior.
• City Councilmember Sally Clark participated in the “One Night Count” of Seattle’s homeless. Her team found a dead woman.
• Does everybody on a gluten free diet really need to be?
• Budapest’s current nightlife fad, that of “ruin pubs,” is threatened both by upscale development and by commercialized fake ruins.
• The Society of Illustrators thought it got a good deal when it contracted the printing of its latest Annual of American Illustration to a Chinese printer. That was until the plant refused to print a page containing an unflattering caricature of Mao. The society got its book copies with a blank page where that piece was supposed to be. It was later printed separately and hand-inserted into each copy.

alex nabaum’s 'the evolution of china'

via imcdb.org

• What was that car in that movie? There’s an online database for that.
• As we patiently await the NBA owners’ vote that will likely bring back the Sonics, there’s word of a hockey team that may be in need of a buyer and/or new home. Seattle, alas, doesn’t have an NHL-ready space. The hockey configuration of KeyArena is too small and awkward. Until a new arena’s built, the closest thing we’ve got is the Tacoma Dome, whose ice-making gear was removed and would need replacing.
• City Councilmember Jean Godden vividly explains why we cannot, dare not, return to the bad old days before legal abortion.
• A homeless camp in Bremerton was shut down after five years.
• Charles Mudede finds sublime meaning in Macklemore’s “Thrift Store” rap.
• KOMO has kind words for Jet City Stream, the new all-local online radio station.
• The recently-deceased dad of local music-scene vet Ben London was an innovative avant-garde composer.
• One of those online coupon dot-coms doubled its sales and still lost over half a billion.
• The return of vinyl has inevitably led into the return of cassette-only music releases and evrn cassette-only labels.
• Zoe Triska at Huff Post really hates classic novels with inappropriate, “commercial” covers tacked on, especially when they’re aimed at teen girls:

kentaro lemoto @tokyo, via daily kos

• Hey McDonnell Douglas Boeing, how’s that whole foreign outsourcing thing working for ya?
• Add to the endlessly growing list of cool places disappearing: the Alki Tavern, where bikers once held drunken brawls in front of a spectacular Elliott Bay view. Yep, the real estate’s going for luxury condos. Damn.
• Already gone before we could say goodbye: Costa’s Opa, Fremont’s anchor Greek eatery for 32 years. The villain in this story is the same as the one in the Queen Anne Easy Street Records disappearance: unChaste Bank.
• The NY Times has officially “discovered” Pike/Pine. Does that mean the place is, you know, “over”?
• City bureaucrats still don’t want meals for the homeless to be served, you know, where the homeless are.
• There might be nothing sicker, and sadder, than allegations of sexual harassment at King County’s sex crimes unit.
• Not every Catholic priest does horrible things to boys. At least one’s been caught dealing meth and having sex with (adult) cross-dressers.
• Atari has faced “Game Over” before. But this time, its fate is in the hands of obscure holding companies and hedge funds.
• Last week’s Saturday Night Live tribute to the tropes of (clothed dialogue scenes in) ’70s softcore movies definitely qualifies as a “10 to 1” sketch, the edgier or just odd stuff often snuck in at the show’s end.

via jim linderman on tumblr

• Dear Bellevue Police: People have sex. Sometimes the people who have sex are co-workers. Deal with it.
• You missed the suddenly announced closing night at Cafe Venus and the Mars Bar. It’s been around at least 16 years (the space, in a lovely old Eastlake Ave. apartment building, was the Storeroom Tavern previously). It hosted countless bands. It was cooler than all get out. Its status has been in doubt, like the statuses of so many cool spaces, for several years now.
• C.B. Hall at Crosscut reminds us that real “bus rapid transit” isn’t like Metro’s “RapidRide.” The real thing has its own lanes, for one thing.
• The Seattle Times couldn’t possibly be buying Seattle Weekly. That makes about as much sense as HP buying Compaq (oh wait, that actually happened).
• Shelby Scates, 1932-2013: It’s not just that we’re losing some of the great local journalists of our time, but that there’s no means to develop worthy successors.
• A 2007 anti-Iraq-war protest at the Port of Tacoma led to six arrests. Now the case is finally going to court.
• As the Legislative session nears, Brendan Williams at Publicola pleads for state Democrats to stop talking like diluted Republicans.
• We’re Number Five! (In terms of lousy traffic.)
• How did Vancouver’s economy do during the soon-to-end Hockey Lockout II? Not that badly.
• Newsweek refugee Andrew Sullivan’s new site won’t have ads. P-I refugee Monika Guzman agrees with the strategy. Guzman claims online ads earn too little money these days, and many sites that try too hard to attract ad revenue turn into useless “click whores.” But the problem then becomes attracting enough readers who like you enough to support your site by other means (pledge drives, merch/book sales, etc.).
• Hamilton Nolan at Gawker insists that real journalism means writing about someone(s) other than your own narcissistic self.
• “Intercity bus and rail ridership up, as car and air travel remain flat.”
• Folks luuuvvv those big online college courses. As long as they don’t have to pay for ’em.
• Frank Schaeffer isn’t the first pundit to note the geographical coincidence between today’s “red states” and yesteryear’s “slave states.” Nor will be be the last.
• In Iceland, like in France at one time, kids can only be named from names on an approved list. One 15-year-old girl is trying to fight that.
• The college football post-season was mostly a dud. But here’s one “highlight.” It’s the weird one-point safety Kansas State committed after blocking an Oregon point-after-touchdown.

via nutshell movies

For the 27th consecutive year (really!), we proudly present the MISCmedia In/Out List, the most venerable and only accurate list of its kind in the known English-speaking world.

As always, this is a prediction of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming year, not necessarily what’s hot and not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some Hostess Brands stock to sell you.

chris pirillo via google plus

In sociology, the controversial and oft-disputed “broken windows theory” claims that crime in an urban neighborhood can go up or down depending on how the locals perceive the place as a “nice” (orderly, civil) place or a “scary” (anything-goes) place.

This post is about an entirely different “broken Windows” theory.

It’s the perception, in some of the tech and business press, that Microsoft Windows is “broken.”

They’re not talking about the software itself being broken (as in inoperable), but the business model behind it.

Especially in regards to “upgrade” sales of the new Windows 8 for multi-desktop businesses.

The naysayers say Windows 8 does so many things so differently than previous versions that there’s a steep “learning curve,” and that businesses may not want that sort of disruption in their day to day operations if they don’t have to take it.

Another alleged issue: Windows 8 is supposed to provide one seamless operating environment among PCs, tablets, and smartphones. Only the tablets and the smartphones still aren’t selling all that well, compared with Apple and Android products.

What’s worse, PCs themselves (almost all of which still come with Windows preloaded) themselves aren’t selling like they used to, and might not ever do so again.

You sure don’t need me to tell you how important MS has become to the Wash. state economy, and that no number of XBox 360 Live subscriptions can make up for the value of all the new and upgraded Windows installations out there.

Oh well. There’s always the Plan B strategy of suing Android phone makers.

priscilla long, via the american scholar

• Priscilla Long takes you on a geological tour of North America without leaving downtown Seattle, simply by exploring the marble and other stone claddings on our office buildings.
• John Koster, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Washington’s revamped First District, says he’d oppose abortions even in cases of “the rape thing.”
• An out-of-state right-wing “SuperPAC” is sinking millions into sleazy attack ads on behalf of Reagan Dunn’s campaign for state attorney general. The Politico site seems to approve.
• When I first heard about this issue, I said I understood. I told the guy I preferred Thelonius Monk myself. Then he told me he was really criticizing a “coal train.”
• When is a nude woman in public not cool? When she punches and strikes a chair at a (clothed) elderly woman in the same apartment building.
• Thankfully, Puyallup’s organized diaper theft ring has been caught.
• As the World’s Fair anniversary winds to a close, Jon Talton wonders whether Seattle can hold its own economically in a 2062 world that could be dominated by global “alpha cities.”
• A self-proclaimed conservative Christian from Tacoma pretended to be gay for a year. Insights on humanity and understanding ensued.
• Did all those hours upon hours of “parka boy” standups by cable TV news reporters help anyone understand Hurricane Sandy’s impact? Probably not.
• David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon’s Monday night shows, performed without studio audiences, may be the greatest non-election, non-hurricane TV events of the year.
• Yes, the polling companies are still under-sampling people who only have cell phones, not landlines. The probable result: a supposedly “close race” that may really be more Obama-leaning than it appears.
• Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson reminds you that Mitt Romney really is as awful and amoral as they say he is; while HuffPost’s Michelangelo Signorile’s dug up some video of Romney spewing the most hateful anti-gay bigotry. And Christina D’Angelo claims the GOP’s devolution into a home for virulent racists is like “lynching Lincoln.”
• New Yorker book critic Arthur Krystal attempts to claim the superiority of “literary fiction” above so-called “genre fiction.” As if highbrow weren’t really just another genre.
• Chris Wade at Slate wants you to learn to appreciate the Speed Racer movie.
• Disney, having already digested ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, and the Muppets, is now taking over LucasFilm and the Star Wars properties. Immediately, a new Star Wars feature film is being planned. What I want to see is a mashup concept involving all these “universes.” Bonus points if you write this as a story for a Lifetime TV movie (half-owned by Disney).

amidst-the-everyday.com

“Amidst the Everyday,” a project by photographers-artists Aaron Asis and Dan Hawkins, aims to reveal “elements of the unseen urban environment.” You go to places around town, scan QR codes (etched in wood!) at various buildings, and receive images of their hidden treasures. (Above, one of the unoccupied-for-decades upper floors of the Eitel Building at Second and Pike.)

• I’m not disillusioned by the news of a potential sitcom that would carry the title Smells Like Teen Spirit. (The show concept sounds more like a ripoff of Family Ties, which is also something we don’t need.) However, I am at least a little disillusioned by the news of a potential Kurt and Courtney stage musical, which would be licensed by Courtney Love via Britney Spears’ estranged ex-manager.
• Lester Smith, 1919-2012: The Mariners’ original principal owner had, in partnership with Hollywood star Danny Kaye, a number of business endeavors. They ranged from rock-concert promotion to direct-mail marketing. But Smith (or Kaye-Smith) will always be legendary for stewarding KJR-AM during its 1955-80 golden age as Seattle’s Top 40 (or “Fab 50”) powerhouse.
• The Seattle Times‘ free ads for Rob McKenna caught the LA Times‘ attention; not to mention a less-than-kind portrayal in the SeaTimes‘ own “Truth Needle” department.
• The next step up from bicycle lanes: physically separated “bike tracks.”
• Knute Berger reiterates what I’ve been saying about the waterfront development scheme. Let’s not let it be “sanitized by good intentions.”
• Dominic Holden would like you to know the biggest reason for legalizing pot. It isn’t for the stoners (and it sure ain’t to shut up the stoner evangelists, which had been my reason).
• Joe Copeland takes up the continuing legacy of Floyd Schmoe, one of the greatest people I ever met, leader of Seattle’s Quakers and hands-on advocate for peace and reconciliation.
• The next hurdle toward getting the NBA back in Seattle has been overcome. That hurdle is Commissioner David Stern, whose butt will be out of that particular chair by the end of next season.
• A major casual-games convention may be leaving Seattle.
• UK film blogger Petra Davis looks back admiringly at the still-underrated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, 20 years old this year…
• …and, with the winding down of the World’s Fair semi-centennial, our pal Jim Demetre has some kind words for the (mostly justifiably) forgotten It Happened at the World’s Fair.
• In other film news, the Columbia City Cinema is being reopened (yay!). The new owner has repaired all the previous owner’s not-up-to-code “renovations.”
• Note to Amazon Kindle users: Buy all your e-books while you’re physically in the same country, lest you be targeted as a Terms of Service violator.
• Today’s dire-threat-to-America’s-youth story comes to you from a California high school where boys and girls alike are invited to join a “fantasy slut league.”
• Penguin and Random House are in merger talks. This is bad news, since book publishing is one of those industries that’s too consolidated already.
• Today’s lesson in the folly of products marketed as “For Women” is brought to you by Fujitsu and its “Floral Kiss” brand laptop PC.
• Among all the slimy, sociopathic, and bigoted things Republicans are saying and doing these days, add this overt racism by Sarah Palin.
• Pseudonymous Daily Kos diarist “bayushisan” wishes gamer culture had fewer macho jerks in it. (The same, of course, can be said about athiests and “skeptics,” online comment threads, U.S. politics, and even atheists and “skeptics”.)
• Paul Karr loathes the dot-commers’ worship of “disruption” as a sacred concept, and the Ayn Randian me-first-ism behind it.
• The BBC notes that “creativity is often intertwined with mental illness“…
• …and Simon Reynolds disses the “modern dismissal of genius” in today’s “age of the remix.”
• Earthquakes can’t be predicted. That hasn’t stopped a court in Italy from convicting seven scientists who failed to do so.
• Community organizer “B Loewe” believes you should not get into lefty causes to feel good about yourself, and you shouldn’t try to be your own, or your only, emotional “caregiver.” Instead, you’re to practice prosocial interdependence as both ideology and a way of life.
• Someone says something nice about so-called “hipsters!” They’re credited with helping bring back Detroit (the place, not the car companies).

shewalkssoftly.com

• Is there anything more ritualistically ridiculous than the standard commercial “sexy” Halloween costume? Speaking of which….
• Nancy Cohen at Playboy.com warns all aficionados of porn, erotic books, birth control, and non-procreative sex in general that the extreme right wing wants to shut all that down.
• And the neo-Riot Grrrl graffiti gang has mega-tagged one of the Aurora Ave. motels that was shut down as an alleged hooking site. Their message: Respect sex work and sex workers.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s management would really, really like you to continue (or resume) reading and even buying the paper, despite its owners’ giving away free ad space to GOP Gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna. (The Times has run “issue” advertising for gay marriage and against the estate tax, but this is the first time they’ve donated to a candidate.)
• The under-new-management (sorta) Seattle Weekly did something the Stranger might have done. It commented on the Times bosses’ McKenna ad by running their own “independent expenditure” ad praising Google as “the most totally fucking awesome company in the history of mankind.” Let’s see if that gets the Weekly listed any higher in the ol’ search rankings.
• Art Thiel believes the best chance of an NBA team in Seattle might not be moving an existing one, but getting a new expansion team.
• I know you can’t get enough of those extra-unique Mormon church doctrines.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic notes how only white people get to make “jokes” about wanting to “take a swing” at a dark skinned President.
• The BBC watches the supposedly alarming trend of “passive-aggressive Wi-Fi names.” Particularly network names aimed at other residents of the same apartment/condo complex, such as “Your Music Is Annoying” or “We Can Hear You Having Sex.”

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.