Last June, I wrote a piece entitled “Notes to a Potential Girlfriend.”

That piece was all about me.

This time, I’m fantasizing/riffing about who I would like that potential girlfriend to be.

She would be, more or less, as follows:

• Any adult age; though if you’re much younger, be aware that I don’t stay up ’til 2 as often as I used to.
• Any ethnicity, skin color, or hair color.
• Won’t try to convert me into becoming a Christian, a vegan, a stoner, or a Libertarian.
• Will let me keep my “room of one’s own;” will let me keep it messy.
• Will let me hold, more or less, to my odd (but never deliberately so) tastes in food, music, apparel, and entertainment. Will let me continue to own and use a television.
• Believes in gender equality, in BOTH directions.
• Allows my needed daily work-at-home time.
• More into soul-melding, intimate lovemaking than porn-style fucking.
• Progressive populist, not alt-culture elitist. (i.e., not a square-basher.)
• Not a female me, which couldn’t exist anyway. A complement rather than a clone.
• Notices things I don’t notice. Knows things I don’t know (which covers, I admit, a LOT of ground).
• Has an open and voracious mind.
• Cares about people and the future and stuff.
• Sees the heart and humanity in other people, no matter what their niche or lifestyle.
• Has eyes that light up the night, and lips to melt into.
• Equally at home in social and private situations.
• A “city mouse.” (I’m not moving to Bainbridge.)
• Preferably not currently married. Preferably.
• NS/LD.
• Preferably without preteen kids (but that’s not a requirement).
• Preferably without implants (but that’s not a requirement).
• Isn’t looking for a guy with money (goes w/o saying).
• Isn’t looking for an “enabler.”
• Doesn’t need to conform to others’ standards of “nonconformity” (ideology-wise or fashion-wise).
• Tells me what she wants; doesn’t just expect me to already know.
• Relatively free of psychotic episodes.
• Centered, self confident, and comfortable in her self.
• Believes love is more important than self righteousness.
• Believes in herself, in others, and in me.

aol radio blog

• Overhyped meme of the day: Following last night’s Grammys, teens and young adults by the dozen are supposedly Tweeting® “Who Is Paul McCartney?” As if the entire world hadn’t been force-fed the Sixties Generation® and its incessant proclamations of itself as the apex of humanity from which all before and since is a mere subspecies. As if Sixties Generation® superstars, even those famous for singing about dogs and butter pies, haven’t been repurposed everywhere from Simpsons cameos to Guitar Hero® games. Have at least a few dozen young Americans actually found a way to mentally shut out the tactics of Nostalgia, Inc.? Could they actually be more interested in creating their own culture, their own world?
• Adultery. Sex scandals. Obsessions with sales-hustling, upscale material goods, and “branding.” Shady business practices. Welcome to the all-American materialistic world of yoga.
• Just in time for v-day, gays will be able to get married, in just a few months. As long as the out-of-state bigot megabucks campaign, just starting, doesn’t reverse it.
• The Belltown Community Center is finally set to open in June, at the former Zum upscale gym at Fifth and Bell. The building of Bell Street’s “park boulevard” makeover (specially wide sidewalks and special street lighting) starts later this year; piggybacking, as it had always been planned to, on street work City Light was going to do on Bell anyway.
• Is Rick Santorum really an extremely bigoted ass, or simply cynically pretenting to be an extremely bigoted ass?
• Going everywhere by car: it’s just sooo less popular these days.
• The drive for NBA and NHL teams in Seattle now has a “fan lobby.” It’s called Arena Solution. Its board and advisory committee includes everybody from ex-Seahawks coach Tom Mara and Sonics legend Shawn Kemp to Capitol Hill bar owner Marcus Lalario and “Seattle’s Biggest Sports Fan” Lorin Sandretzky. This group seems willing to have a new arena in either Sodo or Bellevue, as long as we get the teams to play in it.
• Working moms are often perceived as giving less than 1000-percent undivided fealty to their employers. They are role models to us all.

I’d mentioned that the Capitol Hill Times, the weekly neighborhood paper for which I’d worked in a couple of stints, is now owned by a legal services entrepreneur as a vehicle for legal notice ads.

The new-look CHT has now appeared.

It looks clean and modern.

And it looks like the new management is truly interested in providing space (if not much money) toward neighborhood news coverage.

And it’s got a locally based editor, Stephen Miller, who seems to really want intelligent discussion of the issues of the day.

That’s certainly what he says in his column for the Feb. 8 issue.

It’s about Seattle University’s Search for Meaning Book Festival, held the previous Saturday. Besides book sales and signings, the festival included speeches and panels by authors representing myriad flavors of religion in America.

Miller talks about the need for good questions instead of easy answers.

And he talks briefly about some search-for-meaning related trends in the news, as discussed by speakers at the festival. Among them:

The threat of Sharia law. A Mormon nearing the White House. Federal funds paying for abortions. A redefinition of marriage.

Except that trends 1 and 3 do not really exist.

Nobody’s trying to impose Sharia law in any part of the U.S.

There is no federal funding for abortions, and nobody’s proposing to start any.

These are merely right-wing scare campaigns.

They’re just as fake as the right-wing-only cable channel’s annual hype over a nonexistent “war on Christmas.”

If Miller did not want to address this complicating factor in his limited print space, he could have described these “trends” more accurately as allegations, promoted by some of the festival’s speakers.

Miller’s column asks us to pursue “intelligent discussion.”

A big part of that is distinguishing what’s really going on in the world from the spin and the bluster.

gasoline alley antiques

• Last time, we discussed what any potential Seattle NHL hockey team should be called. “Go 2 Guy” sports commentator Jim Moore has a simple answer—the Totems. That was the name for Seattle’s teams in the old Western Hockey League. (That league disbanded shortly after Vancouver, its marquee franchise, joined the NHL.)
• Mayor McGinn has promised that city tax money won’t go toward building a new basketball/hockey arena. This does not mean it will be an all private-enterprise endeavor, or that it would be cost-free to Seattle taxpayers.  The city will have to vacate at least one long block of Occidental Avenue South, essentially giving that land to the arena developers. It might also have to move in on any holdout landowners at the site, essentially forcing them to sell. The project might involve city-backed bond sales and/or tax breaks on construction and ticket sales. And certainly a new arena will compete with the city-owned KeyArena for the Storm, Seattle U basketball, the Rat City Rollergirls, concerts, corporate meetings, evangelical crusades, etc.
• David Meinert, meanwhile, believes McGinn might actually get a second term in ’13.
• The unionization drive at the new Longview grain terminal finally succeeded.
• The truckers’ strike at the Port of Seattle is having effects.
• The state legislature might approve textile-based traction devices, invented in Europe. Get ready for “tire socks.”
• A Vancouver USA attorney wants to overthrow the state’s Congressional redistricting scheme. He alleges the new districts are too incumbent-friendly.
• The one, way insufficient, state tax reform scheme in the current Legislative session is getting bogged down in the specifics.
• The pseudo-“religious” anti-gay bigots may not show up at the Powell children’s funeral after all. (The tragedy that led to this is, as we all sadly know, the work of a criminally insane straight guy.)
• Anthony B. Robinson ponders why Wash. state’s Democrats can accomplish gay marriage and other “social agenda” things, while the state government’s revenue system sends it, and us, ever closer to civic oblivion.
• Charles B. Pierce at Esquire is succinct: “Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Destroying America.”
• Health insurance rates keep rising, as the insurance giants pocket more and more of that increased cash inflow.
• What happens to pizza-parlor robot rock bands after they die? Avid collectors, including some in Seattle, try to reanimate them.

west seattle blog

• Clever entrepreneurs in Philadelphia have a line of T-shirts and posters exhorting what I and many of my fellow writers and artists have been shrieking lo these many years to cheapskate dot-com and media execs: FREELANCE AIN’T FREE!
• Good idea in the legislature #1: Looking into the abundance of “special taxing districts” around the state, with an eye toward paring them down.
• Good idea in the legislature #2: Getting rid of a Cold War-era ordinance that authorized state government to persecute, blackball, and ban “subversive” people and groups.
• Let’s all welcome the Houston Astros to the American League West (the Mariners’ division), not this year but next year. Except they might not be called the Astros by then.
• Shepherd Fairey, that “radical chic” Obama and Andre the Giant portraitist, didn’t just steal from AP wire photos. He’s regularly “borrowed” even entire images from sincerely political artists around the world, completely uncredited and uncompensated.
• SeattlePI.com is even more short-staffed than before, but it’s still got some good stuff. Like Vanessa Ho and Joe Dyer’s excellent feature on homeless people sleeping under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, who are being kicked out of there by the state. As Anatole France wrote back in 1894,

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.

delamar apartments (built 1909); from queen anne historical society

• The Seattle Transit Blog would like you to know that, despite our politicians’ continuing paeans to the preservation of the sacred single family neighborhoods, the “majority of housing units in Seattle are multifamily” (apartments, condos, townhomes, et al.).
• In a related trend, more Americans are now single than ever before. Only 51 percent of U.S. adults are married (even with the slow expansion of the right to get married).
• Same sex marriages: At various past times and places, Christians loved ’em.
• A note to all our transit usin’ friends. Check out Metro’s proposed 2012 route changes while you can still give feedback about ’em.
• A cash-strapped state? Not if you listen to the construction lobby.
• Is Amazon out to compete head-on with Netflix?
• An 83-year-old peace-activist priest was sent to a Federal detention center in SeaTac, after he participated in a civil-disobedience action at a nuclear weapons plant site in Tennessee. He’s reportedly being held in solitary confinement, and has been on a hunger strike for two weeks.
• Amy Goodman talks to people who see an “Occupy” influence in Obama’s State of the Union speech.
• But then again, lotsa folk are trying to get a ride on the Occupy ____ bandwagon. Even anti-Semitic fringies, conspiracy-theory propagators, and radical libertarians. You know, the guys who believe business somehow doesn’t have enough power.
• During this age of the incredibly shrinking newspaper, the Washington Post Co.’s main profit center has been the Kaplan “educational publishing” operation. That company’s bought a chain of for-profit colleges, now collectively known as Kaplan University. The Post Co.’s CEO has admitted, in now-revealed documents, that Kaplan U. used federal student loan funds and “predatory accounting” to jack up tuition costs to poor students.

MISCmedia isn’t “blacking out” as part of the nationwide protest against the draconian and impractical Internet censorship bills in Congress.

But you can simply not read us on Wednesday if you like.

(Goodness knows, most of the online world doesn’t read us on any particular day.)

The site, including out forthcoming special product announcement, will still be here when you come back.

smith tower construction, from seattle municipal archive

• The 1914-built Smith Tower is up for sale in a foreclosure auction. It comes four years after a condo-conversion scheme for Seattle’s first skyscraper was born, and three years after the scheme died. Let’s hope someone shows up who can bring the classy place back to glory.
• Could it be? Could it be? Could there really be snow in Seattle next week? I hope I hope I hope….
• One of those silly magazine surveys ranked Seattle as America’s fifth “gayest” city. Number one: Salt Lake City!
• Update: When we wrote last week about a scheme to bring the National Hockey League to Seattle, we noted a state legislator with a plan to help fund a new arena. The state rep’s name is Mike Hope (R-Lake Stevens). His plan: Have visiting teams pay a licensing fee to play there. No local taxpayer funds involved.
• David Goldstein again righteously picks apart the Seattle Times editorial board for its near-right-wing hypocrisies.
• The headline says it all: “New York Times Crossword Puzzlemaster Schooled on Definition of ‘Illin”.“
• Fun with reactionaries: “Rick Santorum Quotes as New Yorker Cartoons.” (Well, actually as new captions to pre-existing New Yorker cartoons.)
• You don’t have to be a gamer to get valuable schooling in non-linear narrative design from the original Legend of Zelda.

I hereby promise to post more of these in the near future.

• Update: Looks like B&O Espresso will stay open, perhaps through the bulk of next year.
• The City Council’s trying, again, to ban plastic grocery bags. I say it’s none too soon, particularly for those awkward, flimsy Safeway bags that routinely break or spill their contents. It’s impossible to take them home on a bus and expect to get home with all one’s purchases intact.
• SeattlePI.com’s most famous employee, political cartoonist David Horsey, is going to work for the LA Times. He’ll draw and write commentaries about the 2012 election cycle. PI.com will most likely still get to run Horsey’s work on its site. Since the demise of the print Post-Intelligencer, Horsey has seldom addressed local issues anyway, preferring to cover national topics for syndication. The upside of this move is that, just maybe, the Hearst bosses who’ve kept a tight rein on PI.com’s purse strings might reassign Horsey’s salary to beef up the site’s news staff. The site desperately needs more staff-created content to be a first-stop local news destination.
• AT&T to T-Mobile: Let’s call the whole thing off.
• Scientific American claims there’s evidence for the long standing portrayal of creative people as eccentric. I can assure you, however, that eccentric people are not necessarily creative.
• Simon Mainwaring at Forbes.com claims anti-corporate fervor actually provides an opportunity for corporations to enhance their brand images, by hyping themselves as socially responsible.
• Katha Pollitt has her own take on the late Christopher Hitchens. Among other things, she found him way short of acceptability on women’s-rights issues; even though he invoked those among his excuses for supporting Bush’s wars.

If you tried to access this site on Tuesday, you would have found an ugly, undesigned mess.

That’s because my site (and email) server company disconnected me for nonpayment, without previously bothering to tell me in any way, shape, or form that a payment was due.

The texts on the site remained up, but the WordPress-based formatting and most of the images were locked away. It took about three hours to get everything back and properly configured again.

In other news, my current contract job might finally end Friday. More regular postings should follow.

But for now, a few random linx:

• Seattle’s about to honor the now really-really retired J.P. Patches by naming a city dump transfer station after the beloved TV clown.
• The on-again, off-again plan to save Capitol Hill’s beloved B&O Espresso is off again, and the joint will close for good by New Year’s. It had been open during the entire time I’ve lived in Seattle.
• The latest alleged threat to the spoken word? “Vocal fry.”
• Conspiracy theory of the minute: Could former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens have been one of the supposedly, mysteriously ill fated BP whistleblowers?
• Joseph Stiglitz sees bigger long-term trends at work behind the economic blech. It’s a shift away from industry as the basis of commerce, not just in the U.S. but globally.
• Studies show that users of tablet computers and ebook machines are using them quite a bit for long-form texts, causing The Economist to proclaim “the rebirth of reading.” I’ll have more to say (tangentally) about this next week.

Before Thomas Frank became a renowned author of geekily-researched anti-conservative sermon books, he co-ran a tart, biting, yet beautifully designed journal of essays called The Baffler.

It was based in Chicago for most of its existence. Its original focus was the intersecting worlds of corporate culture (including corporate “counterculture”), entertainment, and marketing. (It’s where Steve Albini’s 1994 screed against the music industry’s treatment of bands, “Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked,” first appeared.) As Frank’s concerns steered toward the political, so did The Baffler‘s.

Its one consistent aspect was its irregular schedule. Though it was sometimes advertised as a “quarterly,” only 18 issues appeared from 1988 to 2009.

This will now change.

The title was bought in May by essayist/historian John Summers. Last week, Summers announced he’s attained backing from the MIT Press. MIT and Summers promise to put out three Bafflers a year for the next five years.

This is good news, because we need its uncompromising voice more than ever.

from geekgirlworld.com

• The first ever Seattle GeekGirlCon happens this weekend at Seattle Center. Why are geek girls so cool? Because they ask questions. They investigate. They seek solutions. They get things done. (Though personally, I like real-life geek girls more than the fictional action-fantasy ones.)
• Mayor McGinn now says the city will “work with” the Occupy Seattle protesters, whatever that means. (It might not mean much.)
• Environmental advocates want the Duwamish River cleanup to be cleaner than what the feds have claimed would be good enough. How clean? Clean enough that fish caught in the Duwamish would be safely edible.
• Why would anybody lobby against a Tibetan-themed retail development in Kirkland? It’s not like it would be worse than what used to be on the site—a burger joint and a dry cleaners.
• The Tri-Cities’ regional history museum might close, after the feds withdrew funding for its Hanford nuke exhibits.
• Ex-Seattleite and professional gadfly Mike Daisey has some less-than-reverent words about Steve Jobs, in advance of the NY debut of his Jobs-themed performance piece (which already played Seattle in shakedown-cruise form).
• It’s the end of the road for Mazda rotary engine cars.
• In a sane world, the folks who bleat about “supporting the troops” would do more for the 1 million jobless Iraq/Afghanistan veterans. Then again, in a sane world those wars wouldn’t have been started.
• Paul Krugman sees signs of hope from the Occupy ____ movement, and sees nothing but growth in its immediate future.
• Annie Lowrey crunches the numbers behind the Occupiers’ claims, and finds that, indeed, the top 1 percent have gotten immensely richer while most everyone else has struggled to stay even or worse.
• Atrios suggests an alternative to big bank bailouts:

…you could give free money to everyone else assuming some of that money would be deposited in banks and/or used to pay down debt owed to those banks.

The summer doldrums in news-type postings seem to have ended. Enjoy.

• The hugely hyped fiscal crisis at the U.S. Postal Service might simply be the result of a Bush-era manufactured scheme to bust the postal unions and sell off the whole operation to privateers; a scheme that can be reversed. We need a delivery system that literally works for us, not for hedge funds. And we need first class mail (you know, letters) and second class mail (magazines). Those services, traditionally, have been marginally profitable at best. FedEx can’t do these. It’s simply not built to do them.
• CoCA commissioned a whole outdoor art group exhibit for Carkeek Park. A parks employee decided on his own that one of the pieces, hung up by wires, might hurt a tree. On his own volution, the parks employee cut down the wires. The delicate art piece fell and was “heavily damaged.”
• If you weren’t sure about Howard Schultz’s political crusade, we now know he’s in league with NoLabels.org. That’s NY mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “bipartisan” (read: near-right) PR drive to sell a national political agenda. Said agenda is heavy on deficit slashing and “entitlement” abandoning and corporate tax cutting, and way-light on directly assisting the jobless and the non-zillionaires.
• The “transit improvement” component in the Viaduct replacement tunnel plan? It’ll run out of money even before the tunnel opens.
• The Brightwater sewage treatment plant near the King-Snohomish county line isn’t even running yet, but SnoCo residents are already complaining about the stink. Officials insist the plant’s not to blame.
• The Seattle Public Library’s third annual budget-cutting closure week made the NY Times.
• Today’s on-the-one-hand story: While the city’s trying to squeeze every potential nickel out of every metered street parking space, it continues to subsidize under-market-rate parking at Pacific Place.
• What happens when a multimedia art program in NYC devoted to confronting “notions of individual and collective comfort and the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility” is fully funded by a global automaker? You get some devout anti-corporate pontification against the whole concept, natch.
• Amnesty International’s got a handy, if incomplete, checklist of lies in Dick Cheney’s memoir.…
• …while here’s the oft-linked-to “Goodbye to All That,” ex-GOP operative Mike Lofgren’s indictment of today’s Republican party as an unholy alliance of corporatists, fundamentalists, and war-machinists.
• Not specifically political, at least overtly, is business consultant Ron Ashkenas’s guidance on how to deal with irrational people:

Don’t try to fight irrationality with rationality. It will only make you more frustrated and the other person more defensive. No matter how many well-constructed arguments you offer, you won’t make headway until you understand the underlying motivation that is driving the other person.