Sonicsgate, the locally made documentary about the theft of Seattle’s oldest pro sports legacy and the locals who aided and abetted it, can now be viewed online in its entirety. And here’s (most of) ESPN’s Outside the Lines episode about the sad saga, which does a decent job of summarizing the main tragic plotlines.

MISCmedia is dedicated today to Bob Blackburn, the original voice of the Seattle Supersonics, who passed on today at age 83. He’d outlived the team that had fired him in the early 1990s, then ceremonially retired his microphone. Survivors include son Bob Jr., who performed in several Seattle rock bands as well as serving as his dad’s broadcast assistant. (He’s now in Florida and producing “podcast” Internet radio shows.)

Let’s close this with Blackburn pere‘s longtime closing line to his KIRO-AM sports reports:

This is Bob Blackburn, reminding you that sportsmanship is a part of our American tradition. Be a good sport, whatever you do. So long.

Seattle’s first TV station, KSRC-TV (soon to become KING-TV) signed on for the first time on Thanksgiving 1948. The debut telecast was a live high school football game, from the then-new (and apparently now doomed) High School Memorial Stadium.

In honor of this occasion, Feliks Banel offers a list of Seattle’s 25 most memorable live TV moments. In chronological order, they begin with that first local telecast and end with the Pike Place Market’s centennial concert on the Seattle Channel. In between are the first and last J.P. Patches shows, Mt. St. Helens, the Kingdome implosion, the WTO protests, and Cobain on Saturday Night Live.

Banel didn’t include, but I would’ve, the Seattle World’s Fair opening (KING, 1962), the last hour of the Dog House restaurant (KCTS, 1994), the weird Jay Leno-hosted party at the Microsoft campus for the launch of Windows 95 (KOMO, KING and KIRO, 1995), the Sonics’ final game (FSN, 2008), and perhaps one or two particularly naughty cable access shows.

…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.

…and the whole greed/corruption/warmongerin’ Bush era dept.: Saturday’s Sunday-preview Seattle Times will have its editors’ choices for the top local news stories of the year. Here’s mine:

1. Washington Mutual goes pffft.

2. The Sonics go blort.

3. Safeco goes doink.

4. General economic and real-estate kerplunk-ness.

5. Obamamania a huge hit locally; Democrats win just about everything except the 8th Congressional District.

6. December’s Snowtopia brings beauty, wonder, photogenic bus wipeouts, and the sudden discovery that not everyone loves the Nickels administration.

7. Seattle music rules again (Fleet Foxes, Grand Archives, Saturday Knights, the Dutchess and the Duke, Team Gina, Mono in VCF).

8. The incredible shrinking newspapers.

9. We learn just how corrupt the Port of Seattle’s been.

10. Northwest Afternoon goes twok.

Some runner-up stories, in no particular order: Whooped-up nonsense over an atheist billboard at the state capitol; all major local sports teams have pathetic seasons at once; the local news media discover gang violence when it strikes in white neighborhoods; Twilight mania; Amazon Kindle a hit; Alaskan Way Viaduct and SR 520 replacement choices drag on; another round of school-closure threats.

We’ll miss ’em: Edward “Tuba Man” McMichael; politicians Ruby Chow, Jeanette Williams, and Ellen Craswell; sculptor/video artist Doris Chase; sports promoter Dick Vertlieb; Ellensburg installation artist Richard Elliott; DJ/jazz promoter Norm Bobrow; Blue Moon Tavern co-owner Bob Morrison.

And Su Job. The fiber artist, arts promoter-advocate, and 619 Western studio landlady passed peacefully at 7 p.m. Christmas night.

But not as eloquent about it all as this guy.

To mix sports metaphors, the city punted. Nickels took a dive. They settled for a settlement. They whored out to Clay Bennett. They took sheckels of gold (and the vaguest of non-promises by the NBA for a new team in some future decade) instead of continuing the fight to keep the Sonics here.

The separate Howard Schultz lawsuit continues, and is our only remaining chance to keep this team, OUR team, our first big-league team.

This feels worse than the 1978 finals loss, the 1996 finals loss, and the trading of Ray Allen combined.

The “Save Our Sonics” rally outside the new Federal Courthouse on Stewart Street was far more exhilarating than anything seen on the KeyArena floor this past year (except the Obama rally).

The organizers scheduled it to coincide with the start of the city’s lawsuit trial inside the courthouse and with game 6 of the NBA finals. With the help of the local sports media, they drew more than 3,000 people to the courthouse steps.

Sonics legends were there (Gary Payton, Xavier McDaniel) to spur on the shouting. So were several men, and at least one boy, in Slick Watts getup.

As per the organizers’ permit, the 4:30 p.m. rally lasted just over half an hour, long enough to be covered live for the 5 p.m. local news. It served to drive home a crucial point in the city’s case against Clay Bennett and co.: We don’t want a settlement. We don’t want to be bought out of the team’s arena lease, at any price. We want our team. Period.

Clay Bennett’s minions have been making public statements that could only properly be responded to by laff tracks. The latest: After fielding as lousy a team as they could, moving the Sonics’ radio broadcasts to a comparatively low-rated right-wing-talk station, tarting up the Sonics Dance Team’s routines and costumes, and generally behaving like twerps, Bennett’s dudes now claim there’s no real Seattle interest in the team. As King Kaufman at Salon puts it, “This is a little like a kid who murders his parents, then begs for mercy because he’s an orphan.”

As predicted in many quarters, the NBA’s team owners voted to pursue commissioner Stern’s screw-Seattle strategy. Only our own Paul Allen (representing the Portland Trailblazers) and Allen’s pal Mark Cuban (representing the Dallas Mavericks) said no.

It’s not over. Not by a buzzer-beater long shot.

But the way to save pro basketball in Seattle won’t be pretty. In fact, it’ll be as ugly as this past Sonics season.

Essentially, we’ve gotta keep litigatin’ to keep the team through the two more contracted seasons on its KeyArena lease; all the while assembling all the ingredients of a privately-financed, NHL-capable arena. Two different groups are trying for this. Let’s make it happen.

Saturday just happened to be the first warm day of the year; a perfect setting for the already much-documented Dalai Lama show in the pro football stadium, where he talked about compassion and coexistence for all people.

(No, I see absolutely no cynical irony in that. American football is a game of confrontation, but it’s also a game of cooperation.)

His message, and the other messages at the Seeds of Compassion confab, have been both simple and deep. I’ll probably have more to say about them later this week.

Later that evening, I found myself at the Georgetown Art Attack gallery crawl. Saw some lovely informal paintings at Georgetown Tile curated by my ol’ pal Anne Grgich; then caught some great buys at the Fantagraphics bookstore’s scratch-and-dent sale.

Sunday brought us the last day of the last bowling alley north of the Ship Canal, Ballard’s totally beloved Sunset Lanes.

It was also the day of what just might have been the last pro basketball game in Seattle. Maybe. If we don’t do something about it.

Even after a deliberately thrown season, the finale was sold out. Fans booed the home team’s owner Clay Bennett, and cheered the opposing team’s owner (Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, who opposes Bennett’s desired team move to Oklahoma City). You saw little to none of this on Fox Sports Net; under terms of its contract with the team, FSN’s announcers said almost nothing about Bennett’s threats or the real importance of Sunday’s game.

Also Sunday evening, and this takes the whole entry full circle, CNN held what it called a “Compassion Forum,” in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (appearing separately) discussed their religious and/or spiritual foundations. Of course, because they are rival applicants for a really big job, some pundits just had to compare and contrast who’s really the most faith-based.

…has compiled pix of regular people who look sort of like squarer versions of famous people, and placed them under the group title “If Celebs Moved to Oklahoma.” Not included: Kevin Durant or Kevin Calabro.

…another 7 daze since I last posted. Excuses: Got none. (Except that a startup entrepreneurial venture I’d been involved with this past year seems to have gone “on hold.”)

In the nooze recently:

• That novelty Hillary Clinton nutcracker I told you about late last year? Somebody used one as the focus of a bomb scare at the Olympia state capitol. Unfunny.
• As you may have heard, the Clinton campaign’s “3 a.m.” TV commercial was assembled from purchased stock footage. The little girl in the footage is now grown up, she lives here in WashState, and, yep, she’s an Obama supporter.
• That most recent, well-funded save-the-Sonics drive heads toward a not-really-that-drastic deadline. While the plan for minimal KeyArena improvements (mostly a food court and new concourses; not that many new seats) would rely on private funding for half its cost, the would-be new owners want the state to chip in $75 million. It’d take some pushing n’ cajoling to get that request thru the Legislature’s current regular session, scheduled to wrap up darn soon. Some Legislative leaders, such as House Speaker Frank Chopp, have built their public images around the idea that they don’t cave in to such big-money demands, at least not right away. But Gov. Gregoire can still call a one-day special session to pass the funding (in my opinion, a reasonable investment for a reasonable reward). The hard part’s still persuading Clay Bennett to sell and persuading league boss David Stern to stop being Bennett’s toady.
• It’s a big night for all lovers of classic Tacoma power pop, as the Ventures get into the R n’ R Hall o’ Fame.
• The Sunday Times/P-I cut its total opinion pages (which, by contract, are alloted 50/50 to each paper) from six pages to four. When the joint Sunday edition launched, 24 and a half years ago, each paper got six pages to express its “editorial voice.”
• Boeing boosters blame McCain for that big Air Force tanker contract going to Airbus. So much for a GOP revival in this state this year.

…a few days since we last met. But here are some recent events in the nooze:

• A plan’s been announced to keep the Sonics, or move in some other NBA team to replace ’em. Yeah, it involves public arena subsidies. But the arena in question would still be our good ol’ KeyArena/Coliseum. And private interests would pick up a huger share of the tab than in any previous scheme. Of course, there’s the li’l matter of convincing current owner Clay Bennett and NBA commissioner David Stern (who hates Seattle even more than the Seattle Times editorial board does).
• No matter how much money the UW raises in its many assorted fundraising/begging programs, it just keeps on making tuition ever-less affordable. Congress doesn’t like it.
• Some self-styled radical environmentalists want to preserve exurban forest lands from sprawl. Their solution: Set fire to an unoccupied cul-de-sac, a fire which, if set at some other time of the year, could conceivably spread and burn said forest land.
• The first televised Mariners game of the pre-season is on local cable at noon today (Monday). I know it’s a game that doesn’t “count,” but hey, neither did the Ms’ last 20 or so games last season.
• Once you start looking into Port o’ Seattle corruption, it can truly become a bottomless pit.
• How to get high school kids interestedin reading newspapers: Run sensational surveys of students’ oral-sex experiences. (Hey, it’s the taste sensation that’s sweeping the nation!)
• Airbus, with a domestic company fronting for it, got the Air Force tanker plane contract Boeing really really wanted. Next stop: litigation.
• Here’s what to do the next time you see a bus with an unconscious driver heading your way.
• Since certain right-wing radio guys have no qualms about using or misusing people’s names in order to make character-assassination implications, let’s compare Vladmir Putin’s handpicked successor/flunky Dimitry Medvedev with the locally based GOP-talk spewer Michael Medved: One is a sniveling, butt-kissing toady to a ruthless, anti-democratic despot with delusions of godhood. And one is the new President of Russia.

…blogged about Friday’s huge Obamapalooza at KeyArena. Allow me to interject a few thoughts of my own.

First, it was a spectacularly attended event. Here are about half of the people who didn’t get in. KeyArena was filled above its official capacity, far surpassing any SubSonics crowd this season. They’d said the doors would open at 11. I’d shown up at 10:15 a.m. The line was still snaking around the Seattle Center grounds. I barely made it into the upper nosebleed seats.

They all showed up for what turned out to be a simple, direct spectacle. The Obama campaign showed some of its commercials on the DiamondVision screens. Local musician Jake Bergevin showed off the pro-Obama music video he’d made with Pat Wright and Matt Cameron.

Warm-up speakers were kept to a brief, all-local lineup of Mayor Nickels, Rep. Adam Smith, and Gov. Gregoire.

The Sen. Obama gave the 50-minute version of his current stump speech. No podium, no graphic “slides,” only a few strategic banners. He essentially said what he’s been saying these past months: “It’s easy to be against something. But people want to be FOR something.”

You already know what he says he’s for: Peace, prosperity, affordable health care (sans mandates), unions, civil rights, competent government, choice, economic fairness, eco-sanity, gay rights (though perhaps not gay marriage), people coming together to work for a better tomorrow.

Some pundits have claimed the biggest differences between Sens. Obama and Clinton right now are their personalities and their brand images. If so, the question then is which of these personalities, which of these brand images, is most capable of trouncing Sen. McCain and the walking ghosts of the Bushies.