…play nice with your free Wi-Fi.

…feel a lot as if I was a townsperson in It’s A Good Life, the Jerome Bixby story made famous in a Twilight Zone episode starring future comic-book writer and Barnes & Barnes novelty singer Bill Mumy.

Our whole society (local, national, global) is being ruined by the collective equivalent to that story’s boy villain–a pre-adolescent mindset of greed and vengeance. Not only must we obey fully, we must obey cheerfully. We must always think good thoughts, even as everything we love is torn asunder. In “lifestyle” journalism, that means the writer must, MUST, MUST absolutely, gushingly adore whatever the upscale demographic target market’s expected to like. Huge ugly vehicles? Snooty restaurants? Fantastic! Development schemes devised to give the waterfront to Paul Allen? Gotta love ’em! Gutting health-care and education funding to support subsidies to Boeing and Amgen? It was good that the politicians did that!

…behind Wonder Woman. Really.

SEATTLE RANKS #8 on somebody’s list of America’s “best-mannered” cities. NYC was #7.

A FEDERALLY-FUNDED STUDY claims conservative politics rises from a psychology of “fear and aggression, dogmatism, and the intolerance of ambiguity.”

LET’S TRY to figure this one out: A 19-year-old woman claims to have been date-raped at the “Watts Motel” in north Everett. (There’s a “Waite’s Motel” in north Everett, but not a “Watts Motel;” but let’s continue.) She puts up a few web pages of semi-incoherent poetry and prose about her violent ordeal, and about her still-ambiguous feelings toward her assailant.

But here comes the weird part. She puts all this material on ThePlunge.com, a party-planning website. She adds bikini pix, supposedly of herself, and invites her readers to sign up for a gangbang orgy party (billed on her main page as “hot wild passionate sex”), in the same motel room, on the one-year anniversary of her date-from-hell. (She writes, “i am interested in men, women, sex, pleasure, sex toys, getting naked, walking around naked, touching you, feeling you…”)

Part of me wants to think, or to hope, it’s all a hoax. I want to reach out to either the victim or the hoax-writer, whichever is real, and tell her/him/them/whoever that life isn’t really so totally bleak/sick as to require either really planning such a “party” or joking about one.

But another part of me wants to go to the party.

I AGREE COMPLETELY with Mark Rahner: The biggest threat from the mad-cow scare is having to face the smug crowing of fundamentalist vegans. Four close acquaintances have either emailed me vegan sermons or personally taken me to “raw food” restaurants for ice-cold carrot-and-eggplant soup. They remain close acquaintances, but they haven’t converted me.

Yes, the meat-processing industry’s rife with corruption and shoddy “efficiency” practices. But I’m not going to protest sweatshop clothing factories by walking around naked; at least not when it’s twenty degrees outside.

I’m kinda-sorta intrigued by the Scion, Toyota’s new unabashedly-boxy compact wagon, just starting to be sold in the U.S. But the website blows. All demographic-target-marketed, it’s an over-the-top laff riot in trying to identify the vehicle with hot young photo models. (One page even proudly uses the gag-phrase “Generation Y!”) Let’s hope, when Scions do become widely available, that the car’s better than the ads.

GET LOST IN a long, long list of all the year-end “top” and “bottom” lists you could ever want.

HAVE WE BECOME a “planet of the nerds?” And is that a bad thing or not?

PAUL GRAHAM has put a lot of thought n’ pondering into the eternal dilemma of “Why Nerds are Unpopular.” Among his theories: They don’t, or won’t, or don’t know how to, play the “popularity” game.

IF YOU BELIEVE a Murdoch tabloid’s account of a Stanford research study, women are indeed turned on by porn videos after all! Just not by skanky, silicone-y ones.

BRITAIN’S NEW STATESMAN has a cool li’l long piece by Simon Blackburn in defense of lust.

EVERETT EHRLICH ARGUES that Internet-age info gathering will, sooner or later, make the major political parties obsolete. One can only hope this is one Net-prediction that actually comes to pass…

ONE OF THE FEW intelligent conservative publications out there, The World & I (founded by pals of Unification Church honcho Sun Myung Moon), has a long, intriguing essay about “The Feminization of American Culture.” The writer, Leonard Sax, implies a connection between the rise of feminine values and a rise in “environmental estrogen,” due to chemical leakoffs from all the plastic products lying around our homes and landfills.

I’d already heard about the latter phenomenon in a Hugo House lecture a couple years ago by Olympia postcard designer Stella Marrs. Marrs didn’t think the pervasiveness of estrogen-like chemicals was a good thing, for women or anybody. Recent medical disputes about the long-term effects of (deliberate) estrogen therapy regimens, such as a possible increased breast-cancer risk, might back her up on this.

Which brings me to the good friend of mine who’s studied a lot about the Greek Amazons, warriors of legend who would undergo masectomies to gain better bow-and-arrow skills. Are the women of the industrialized world, Sax’s article asks, gaining more dominance at the expense of their own health?