I’ve got another piece on Seattle PostGlobe. It’s about the folks who really, really love the Film Festival.

Remember, gang: PostGlobe is not the downsized version of the old P-I Web site. It’s an all-new local news site started by P-I refugees. And it could use your suggestions and your support.

…got to pout n’ protest against California’s supreme court when it upheld that state’s anti-gay-marriage initiative.

As I wrote here last fall, it’s always fun to snipe about the state that thinks it’s so superior to the rest of us.

(Of course, longtime readers know that when I snipe at Calif., I also snipe at people here whose only idea how to improve Wash. is to blindly copy everything that’s been done there.

As if everything done there would always work here.

As if everything done there even worked there.)

But, as speakers at Tuesday’s Westlake Park rally asked, why don’t all these local protesters do more to get legal gay marriage in this state?

Well, some are.

We’ve now got the great compromise that is “civil unions.”

(And as one Daily Kos diarist put it, Tuesday’s Calif. ruling seems to pave the way for a similar compromise there.)

But plenty of activists insist that “the legal equivalent of marriage under another name” just ain’t the same thing as marriage.

And they’re right.

…his own personal bogeyman to blame for all the warmongering waste and fiscal foolishness of the Bush era. It’s the nation’s top universities, with their “culture of selfish, cutthroat behavior.”

I’m not so sure myself. Yeah, rich-kid campuses have lots of maturity-challenged spoiled brats running around, imagining that they can do any damned thing they want to and to hell with the consequences. But the whole of our civic culture’s been like that lately. There’s no one real place where it started. And it can only end with individuals demanding, and living, a better way.

…one Sam Schulman argues what just might be “The Worst Case Yet Against Gay Marriage,” as described in a New Republic snark post. Schulman goes beyond the normally accepted bounds of reactionarydom, to posit that marriage is necessary to keep straight men in proper society and to keep women from “concubinage.”

By the way, this is the Sam Schulman who used to own the short-lived magazine Wigwag—not the (now late) Sam Schulman who used to own the Sonics.

…at the top of this article about the self-publishing book boom is a startling statistic. Between self- and corporately-published titles, one book was published last year for every 500 Americans. Not one copy sold, but one whole work created. And this doesn’t count works issued solely online or as ebooks.

…a whiff of the jargon, but it’s nice to know somebody acknowledges the existence of “Pacific Northwest English.”

…really help facilitate spiritual intimacy?

…“Architecture and Resistance,” but Leebus Woods offers advice suited to all. Examples:

Resist whatever seems inevitable.Resist people who seem invincible.

Resist the embrace of those who have lost.

Resist the flattery of those who have won.

Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.

Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.

Resist getting big jobs.

Resist the suggestion that you can only read Derrida in French.

Resist taking the path of least resistance.

Resist the growing conviction that They are right.

Resist the nagging feeling that They will win.

“Better diets more costly.”

By 2016, the Democrats, more or less exactly as they are now ideologically, will become thought of as the “conservative party.” There’ll be a rump GOP running local races in the south and the inland west. There’ll be a new leftish party, probably called the Green Party but with little or no organizational link to the group calling itself that now. These other two parties will field Presidential candidates, and even pick up Electoral College votes for them. But for a while, only the Dems will be national enough to control the Presidency.

IT’S MID-APRIL, and that means two topics are filling the op-ed sections across America’s newspapers:

(1) Calls for income tax “reform” (i.e., commentators wishing lower taxes for members of their particular favorite subcultures, and higher taxes for members of other subcultures); and

(2) Conservatives (plus a few highbrow-academic liberals) pontificating prosaically about baseball as The Most Perfect Thing On Earth.

I happen to like baseball. I just don’t like most of the people who write about it as some secular/sacred rite.

Herewith, some of the real resons folks such as George Will love the sport:

• It’s got lots of numbers and stats. Those academic types love such abstract-logic building blocks. So much more fun to keep track of numbers and stats than to follow a sport where raw athletic prowess makes more of the show.
• It can be long and boring, and hence reward its diehard adherents with the sanctimonious feeling of being able to appreciate something that puts ordinary people dozin’.
• It’s not based around a male sexual metaphor. Instead of relishing in something as crudely pagan and life-affirming as symbolic insemination moments (like football, soccer, hockey, et al.), it symbolizes an obsession Republicans can more easily identify with–
• It’s all about control vs. chaos. That PBS miniseries five years ago noted that baseball’s “the only game where the defense controls the ball.”
• The defensive star is at the literal center of the action. A soccer or hockey goalie merely stops offensive attacks. A baseball pitcher, by contrast, is the start of every play, the instigator of all action, the man who’s personally credited with winning or losing the game for the whole team.
• The game ends with the regaining of control (i.e., an out). The only exception is a bottom-of-the-last-inning play that scores a go-ahead run. The offensive side can only cause enough moments of chaos that cause enough damage before order is regained.
• It has a historic hierarchy. Major League Baseball as we know it was formed in 1903. The same 16 teams were in the same 11 Northeastern cities for 50 years. And in most of those years, the three New York teams regularly stood atop the standings; the old St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators regularly occupied the cellar. Everywhere else, baseball was “The Minors,” teams graded AAA to D and usually controlled by a major-league team’s farm system.
• A “Perfect Game” is one in which nothing happens. In bowling, the only other major sport to have the concept of a perfect game, such a game is one in which everything happens.

But you don’t have to dislike baseball just because certain tweedy butt-kissers like it. There’s plenty to enjoy about the game. If the Repubs can root for the defensive players who maintain order, you can root for the hitters and runners who, every so often, succeed in breaking through for glorious moments of triumphant chaos.

TOMORROW: James Twitchell, an academic author who (hearts) the culture of marketing.

ELSEWHERE:

• If you liked the They Might Be Giants cover of “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, here’s the original, along with the rest of the Science Songs LP series! (found by Memepool)…

…for the know-nothing videophobes in our audience (ignorance of your culture is NOT considered cool):

• Bill Maher asked Newark mayor Cory Booker why America’s economy needed to keep growing all the time; doesn’t everybody already have more than enough? Booker quietly reminded him that not everybody does. Another guest, bio-ethicist Peter Singer, chided Paul Allen for devoting too much of his charity money to projects in the affluent Northwest; Booker chimed in with the observation that plenty of folks and organizations in the NW could really use that money.
• Angie Mentink on Fox Sports Net Northwest, during a postgame discussion of the UW men’s hoops team and its historic Pac-10 regular-season title, on why the team and its fans should save some celebration energy ’til after the Pac-10 tournament: “There’s a difference between feeling ‘happy’ and feeling ‘satisfied.’ It’s something I’ve tried to teach my husband about.”
• A Today segment discussed frugal living with a tabletop tableau of “simple life” stuff—a Netflix envelope, a Scrabble board, a package of store-brand toilet paper, a drip coffee maker, etc. Excuse me, but you think we haven’t already familiarized ourselves with these?Unless the show’s producers are on the vanguard of a new media meme. Let’s call it “the upscale downsizing.” This schtick is to talk about economizing precisely for people who haven’t had to economize. It demographically separates the newly downscaled from those of us who’ve already been here a while.

Just saw the documentary Obscene, a profile of longtime Grove Press/Evergreen Review publisher Barney Rosset. Rosset specialized in hibrow and “daring” lit for the GI Bill generation of college kids and for their ’60s successors.

He also specialized in anti-censorship court battles. He successively succeeded in legalizing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Now in his 80s and still feisty, he’s full of colorful stories about his life and times.

But the most shocking image in the movie involves a right-wing smear campaign against Evergreen Review in 1972.

The magazine, in its last years, had become part lit journal and part “artistic” skin mag. One issue contained an essay by WA’s own Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The appearance of Douglas’s words within the same staples as erotic art photos was enough to give then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford an excuse to call for Douglas’s impeachment.

We see a press junket event with Ford and two other Repubs. Jerry holds up the magazine, lingering on each page of the nudes, demanding that we all be outraged.

Two years later, Ford would become the beneficiary of another impeachment drive, and would propagate the self-image of a conciliatory Mr. Nice who just wanted to bring everybody together.

It’s good to learn this other side of Ford, as just another right-wing sleazemonger.

…for important occasions, no matter how miraculous modern-day media might be.

Thus, the growing list of places holding inauguration parties early Tuesday morning.

Gatherings will occur at places as big as the Paramount and as intimate as Cafe Racer on Roosevelt. Also: Spitfire in Belltown (hosted by the fab Kerri Harrop), the Baltic Room, Bill’s Off Broadway, 88 Keys (hosted by AM 1090), Sport downstairs from KOMO/KVI (hosted by MoveOn), Palace Kitchen Ballroom, Central Cinema, Seattle Center House, and the South Lake Union Discovery Center. Events at Town Hall and the Triple Door are sold out.

As usual, this annual list (the most reliable of its type published anywhere) reports the people, places, and things that will become hot or hot-hot during the following year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-hot now. If you think everything that’s big just keeps getting bigger, you probably bought WaMu stock in ’06.