A Portland sportswriter sees the TrailBlazers hiring the ex-Sonics announcer, and imagines a secret plot to ship the NBA team to Seattle (apparently a secret to everyone in Seattle). In more fact-based reportage, we view more Cobain-sploitation coming across the USA; trouble for Virginia Mason Med. Center; K Records trying to right its fiscal ship; the rise of the “upper middle class” (aka the people all those “upscale” products are aimed at); and political organizing for renters.

A “slow news” weekend ends with the the Viaduct’s surprise early reopening (unless they’d secretly planned it this way all along). Also: Creamed Cornish?; Boeing’s greatest fiscal hits and misses; the potential start of another Wash. wildfire season; and how to sneak an arena proposal past today’s City Council.

It’s (a potentially four-day) Cinco de Mayo, just as America’s most prominent Hispanophobe inches closer to the highest office in the land. In other subjects, sales of a tech-office staple take a dive; the Lynnwood lawyer with the sexist Tweets® against the City Council is already in trouble; the City contracts out homeless-removal to a private company; and Seattle’s biggest obsolete piece of office equipment’s moving.

Ivan (the Tacoma shopping-center gorilla) lives! In other stuff: GiveBIG’s big website crash; a different kind of “peak oil”; Seattle’s “not so hidden” racist heritage; and the pro b-ball team we’ve still got.

Now that would-be arena builder Chris Hansen can’t buy two blocks of a little-used city street, he says his plan will go forward, but how? Also for your Tuesday perusal: The Lusty Lady space won’t host the Punk Rock Flea Market after all; the big housing levy’s going to the ballot; a little music/art space closes; an old-school local rock promoter dies;  and more May Day anarchist aftermath.

May Day Anarchy 2016 would seem like a farcical exercise, except that people got really hurt. We also explore the looming final (sorta) step in the Sonics Arena saga; the climate-change kids’  court victory; more backlash against the Nooksacks’ “disenrollments;” and a tech-connected print-book publisher folding.

Welcome to Viageddon! And to another potential May Day of window-bustin! We also view a City attempt to keep snooping into garbage; a potential partial breakthrough in the Sodo arena fracas; drones maybe getting too close to whales; and the usual gazillion weekend activities including Indie Bookstore Day.

The Mariners are now under new (sorta) management. But that’s not the only story this day. There’s also a threat to the Fremont Outdoor Cinema; the future of Seattle parks; birds doing a big hit on a (non-Boeing) jet; the mystery of the disappearing bike-lane plans; and HALA’s potential to worsen downtown’s demographic cleansing.

The Nooze-day for Tooze-day includes a victory for bike-share lovers; genuine Nancy Pearl ice cream; more fallout from the Legislature’s school-funding punt; a creepy Cobain art show (that doesn’t even show him); and someone who likes Amazon’s physical bookstore.

For your perusal, we have we have bigger things made of wood than have been made before; an attempt to bring back nuclear power; Portland’s “toxic moss;” Foo Fighters’ non-breakup; and a tragic update to one of the Sonics’ movers.

Sooper Toosday settled nothing, and neither did the City Council committee vote on saving bike sharing. But we do know that Boeing’s planning a 100th birthday bash; a heroin treatment center’s re-opening; squatters are speaking out in favor of squatting; and one of the guys who “plundered” the Sonics is in big trouble (can you feel the schadenfreude rising?).

sigcis.org

It’s usually awkward to be outed as a flaming racist.

It’s infinitely worse when you are in certain lines of business.

Owning a professional basketball team is one of those lines of business.

So, after all hopes of the scandal “blowing over” evaporated, rookie NBA commissioner Adam Silver put a “banned for life” fatwa on LA Clippers owner/racist/adulterer Donald Sterling.

This means, among other things, that Sterling can’t attend games or take an active management role in the team that he still, for now, majority-owns. He’ll be encouraged, but apparently not forced (at least not yet), to sell the team. That last part could conceivably lead to a court case.

Yet, already the rumors are abuzz that the Clippers could (just could, mind you) potentially move to Seattle.

Obviously a lot would need to occur for that to happen.

Sterling would need to be eased, or forced, out.

Other LA buyers would have to be turned down in favor of Steve Ballmer and Chris Hansen. (Former Malcolm in the Middle star Frankie Muniz has supposedly talked, or been talked about, about fronting a group to buy the team.)

The Clippers’ share of Staples Center would have to be sold back to the Lakers and the NHL’s LA Kings.

The league’s other team owners would have to be convinced that having two teams in the #2 TV market (even if that second team is the traditionally hapless Clippers) would be less lucrative than regaining a team in the #12 TV market.

But think of the possibilities: If the Clippers were co-owned by an ex-Microsoft CEO, they could bring back the old Windows Office Assistant mascot “Clippy”!

For the 28th consecutive year (really!), we proudly present the MISCmedia In/Out List, the most venerable (and only accurate) list of its kind in this and all other known solar systems. 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 BlackBerry stock to sell you.

daily mail

• What’s creepier than plastic sex dolls? Watching them being assembled.
• Bauhaus Coffee, whose lovely East Pine Street building’s doomed for redevelopment, will stay on Capitol Hill for at least two more years at an as-yet undisclosed spot.
• A Forbes staff writer (not one of the mag’s online-only “contributors”) places Seattle at the top of the heap in the category of “America’s Most Miserable Sports Cities.”
• Could this year’s Seattle Hempfest be the last? (One can only hope.)
• SST Records boss Greg Ginn, Black Flag’s original lead guitarist, claims to own the Black Flag name, and is suing his ex-bandmates who are touring as “Flag.” Ginn, as you may have heard, also has his own Black Flag “reunion” tour underway. Ginn’s also suing Black Flag’s most famous ex-member, Henry Rollins, even though Rollins isn’t in either “reunion” venture.
• A male singer-songwriter offers a “feminist” anthem. Spin.com convenes a panel of biological females to diss it.
• Book-review bloggers who give “soft,” all-positive notices to bad self-published books aren’t doing a favor to anyone, including the authors.
• Thirty-three years after the cheesy docudrama movie, folks are still searching for “historic Jesus.”
• Right-wing “homeschool” history books would be hilarious if real kids weren’t being indoctrinated with them.
• Paul Krugman comes right out n’ says it:

…(T)he madness of the GOP is the central issue of our time.

via musicruinedmylife.blogspot.ca

The Fastbacks, the “Seattle Scene’s” most enduring band (and one of its most loveable), recorded lots of great cover songs (originally by the Raspberries, the Sweet, and even Sesame Street!) in addition to their many originals. Some of these were buried on “tribute” compilation CDs. Here’s a list of 17 such tunes, and a slightly longer but still incomplete list.

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• According to Richard Metzger, the greatest document of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles musical career is a concert doc filmed in Seattle—in the acoustically notorious Kingdome, even.
• David Meinert’s growing restaurant empire will include the successor to Capitol Hill’s legendary dive bar the Canterbury.
• Time to restart the neo-Sonics rumor mill again. Now, Chris Hansen and co. are reportedly negotiating for an expansion franchise.
• The state’s thinking of authorizing private pot smoking clubs. I only ask that they be ventilated in such a way as to keep that weed stink off the streets.
• The Republican-stalled Legislature still hasn’t saved King County Metro Transit. But, on the Seattle-only transit front, Mayor McGinn still plans to invest in a new downtown streetcar line. This probably means the mourned Waterfront Streetcar will remain dead for the foreseeable future.
• Meanwhile, the second Monorail Initiative tell-all book is out. It’s called Rise Above It All. It’s written and self-published by Dick Falkenbury, the ultimate political outsider and co-instigator of the plan that would have had trains on grade-separated tracks, roughly where the RapidRide C/D bus goes now.
• MTV’s playing music videos (remember them?) again. But just for half a day, on the Fourth of July.
• A woman at the big video-game industry confab Tweeted® a complaint about the lack of female starring characters in new video games. Cue the bigoted trollbots in 5, 4, 3….
• R.I.P. Arturo Vega, associate of the Ramones for their entire band-career and designer of the group’s “All American” logo (still worn on T shirts by people who weren’t alive when the band was together).
• Steven Spielberg sez the reign of action mega-blockbusters (and of the big Hollywood studios!) is only a few box-office flops away from being over. Then he says audiences can expect really high prices for the privilege of seeing a movie in a theater (yes, even higher than they are now).
• Robert Reich sez we could have full employment, even in an age of robotized manufacturing and other techno-“innovations,” if we only had the political will to make it so.
• A UK pundit with the appropriate name of Tom Chatfield agrees with me that society, far from becoming “post literate,” is actually more dependent upon written language than ever. And he ponders whether it’s a good thing:

There is no such thing as a private language. We speak in order to be heard, we write in order to be read. But words also speak through us and, sometimes, are as much a dissolution as an assertion of our identity.

• Turns out the heroine from Brave isn’t the only female character in cartoons (and toys) to have been “tarted up” in recent years. Just look what they’ve done to Strawberry Shortcake!

ebay photos, via thestir.cafemom.com