From the lesser Washington, the Wash. Post opinion section lists the “Worst Ideas of the Decade.” Among them: The battle of Bora Bora (you know, where Bin Laden escaped), TV dancing competitions, anti-vaccination conspiracy scares, Bush’s crony capitalism disguised as “compassionate conservatism,” and “world-is-flat movies” (Crash, Babel).

Our ol’ pal Tim Egan chortles at the New Yorkers who’ve just discovered Costco, now that the big Seattle-founded retailer finally set up shop in Manhattan. Then Egan wanders, like a shopper through oversized aisles, into a more generalized rant about ignorant East Coasters.

The kind folk at United States Artists released a survey claiming 96 percent of Americans “highly value art in their lives and communities,” but only 27 percent believe that “artists contribute ‘a lot’ to the good of society.”

I can believe this.

I came of age in a Seattle that loved “legacy” (old) black music, as long as it was performed by all-white bands. A Seattle whose favorite cultural genre was the foreign art film, something that came in a tin can from creators safely far away.

I now live in a Seattle that just built a huge trinity of art museums, which take little interest in local artists and even less interest in living local artists.

It’s easy for me to imagine other folk around the country taking a similar attitude of enjoying the delicious milk of culture, as long as they don’t have to don’t have to smell the cows who make it.

UW researchers, trying to figure out how to interest more young females in computer science courses, have hit upon a novel idea—make the classrooms and lab rooms less nerdy-looking.

Jim Windolf, writing in Vanity Fair, has a lot of frowner words to say about America’s recent obsession with cuteness. And he even comes close to understanding it.

This comes when Windolf goes into the artistic roots of Astro Boy creator Tezuka Osamu, one of anime/manga’s first popularizers. Osamu made some big-eyed boyish heroes and placed them in awe-inspiringly beautiful settings. But his stories were informed by his lifelong obsessions with two related, real-life horrors—war and environmental destruction.

The current crop of ironic image artists displaying at places such as Roq La Rue take Osamu’s schtick a step or two further. These ladies and gents depict superficially cloying animals and children as portals for the viewers, drawing them into tableaux scenes portraying a full range of powerful emotions.

Newsweek’s end-of-the-Oughts package includes a bizarre little fantasy piece by David Rakoff. Rakoff imagines that had Gore gotten into the White House in ’00, he’d have done many of the same dumb things Bush did.

Whom do you believe?

Brian Eno, who says the “long tail” of online media means infinite artistic styles are in circulation at once, result in “the death of uncool”?

Or Lee Gomes in a year-and-a-half-old Wall St. Journal essay, refuting the whole Long Tail theory and insisting that “hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online”?

I’m sure Time speaks for a lot of you in describing the past 3653 days (including three leap years) as having been a “Decade from Hell.” The bright clean new century we were promised so long ago turned out to have started with the Bush coup, 9/11, two useless stupid wars, continued eco-deterioration, and a world economy that just kept contracting for most of us even in its officially “good” years.

But at least we got Ratatouille and the iPhone.

Former WTO protestor Trevor Griffey argues that the biggest legacy of the big protests in Seattle 10 years ago may be routine, pre-emptive crackdowns on civil liberties at big official confabs worldwide. Locally, Griffey (no relation) claims, the protests’ biggest consequence could be a massive dilution of police accountability enforcement.

With all the aborted/infanticided girl babies in China these days (despite heavy-handed government efforts there to stop those practices), where will that nation’s rising population of surplus males find mates? Would you believe, Tanzania? (From the (London) Times.)

Thanks to Jennifer Manlowe, I’ve heard of two researchers who’ve got a new book called Why Women Have Sex. I haven’t read the book itself, just the UK newspaper story about it.

The story claims the researchers have deteremined there are exactly 237 reasons for a (hetero) woman to do the sex—no more, no less.

You know most of the common reasons—lust, love, baby-making, social-ladder climbing, cash, barter, kicks, comfort, novelty, submission, empowerment, celebration, consolation, getting/keeping/dumping a guy, because all the other girls are doing it, because parents/teachers/preachers say not to, and so forth.

But let’s imagine some reasons that might land a little further down on the list of 237, some of the less-common reasons for sex:

• He cooked a really great dinner.
• He wore something so ugly, she had to get it off of him.
• There was nothing good on TV.
• The only good DVDs at the store were taken.
• Pilates just gets too repetitive.
• That church retreat weekend made her feel too clean.
• To crowd out the noise of the neighbors/kids/voices in her head.
• She wanted to try out a Sleep Number bed and he had one.
• She wanted to prove he wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she didn’t have implants.
• She wanted to prove the rumors about men of a certain profession/ethnic group/nationality/weight class.
• Hey, why not?

Then there are the “reasons” that would fall off the 237 altogether. For instance, I’m pretty sure no woman has ever had sex with a man just because he used a certain brand of deodorant body spray.

Some research study claims “love inspires creativity, but thoughts of sex stimulate analytical thinking.” The reasoning: “Love… is dreamy, and dreams are linked to creativity. Sex, on the other hand, is about achieving an immediate goal.”

Marie Claire magazine just declared Seattle the “best city to find single guys.” I know why.

This is a city of men who need women and women who don’t need men. A city of socially repressed geeks all vying for the attentions of empowered career women. And the more the women snub the men as unworthy of even a returned glance, the more the men ramp up the chase.

…has been blocked by Indian authorities, who cited a “national security” law authorizing the restriction of material that could damage the nation’s cultural integrity or some such. But not to worry: The site’s safely based in the UK; and, as an Indian columnist notes, “there are ways of getting around the ban by using proxy, anonymiser websites that cover your tracks.”

(Hardcore photo and video Web sites can still be viewed in India without restriction.)

…in her new anti-corporate-scheming book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, makes the provocative allegation that (as paraphrased by a Salon.com reviewer) “IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart.”

To Ms. Shell, it doesn’t matter which social caste a company courts. As long as it imports kilotons of future-landfill consumerist stuff from low-wage countries, she doesn’t like it.

Her consistency is a welcome change from the classism of many anti-corporate leftists, whose disdain for any particular corporation seems to increase with that corporation’s connection to “the wrong kind of white people.” Thus, we’re all supposed to loathe Wal-Mart (purveyors of cheap disposables to stereotyped white trash), but be at least ambivalent about Taret (purveyors of near-identical cheap disposables to hip social climbers).