…Rudy Giuliani to kick around anymore. In other nooze:

• It’s a June trial date for the case of Seattle v. Sonics. That way there won’t be any distractions in the way like, say, playoffs…
• The state will stop the hideous practice of shipping inmates to out-of-state private prisons, far from families and appeal attorneys.
• When an independent entrepreneur deliberately bilks folks who pay into doomed investment schemes, he’s called a criminal. When, oh let’s say, banks and mortgage companies do it…
• “29 reforms.” Remember this number. It’s the number of changes a task force sez the city needs to make to bring more accountability to the Seattle Police.
• For now, Costco won’t get to buy beer and wine direct from their makers. A court said the chain has to still buy thru wholesalers in this state.
• Patty Murray hearts Hillary Clinton.
• Did you know Panasonic made TV sets in Vancouver USA? (Emphasis on the past tense.)

• The UW wants $300 million for a Husky Stadium upgrade, half of that from pubilc sources.
• Clay Bennett’s people claim nobody would miss the Sonics.
• Mt. St. Helens: gathering a second wind or tiring out?
• Washington Mutual lost nearly $2 billion last quarter.
• Sensational media stories aside, crime in Seattle is its lowest in 39 years.
• What’s on the rise: The oceans, and therefore Puget Sound.
• What’s on the swift decline: Those silly stock prices.
• Did a Fed. Way judge try to cover up her affair with a defense attorney whose cases she was trying?
• My ol’ hometown of Marysville might get its very own UW branch campus.
• The feds’ great idea for preserving Columbia River salmon stocks: Kill the sea lions who gather at the dams for all-you-can-eat fish dinners.

• The easy half of the equation has been solved, as Clay Bennett agrees to sell the Storm to owners who’ll keep the WNBA team here. The hard part, wresting the Sonics from his reverse-Midas-touch hands, now begins in earnest.
• Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess in the first place by selling the teams to Bennett is making new moves at his day job. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz has fired his CEO, retaking the reins himself. Can he return the coffee chain to its former fast-growin’ ways, in spite of all the obstacles? (Among the latter: espresso drinks coming to McDonald’s.)
• Some folks got pretty snow this morning; the heart of Seattle, again, didn’t. Damn.
• The Port of Seattle’s fiscal shenanigans will be investigated by the Feds.
• House prices finally begin to go down in the area. (Insert your own “going down” joke here.) Still, local biz leaders insist it’s not that drastic really. Meanwhile, developers who’d planned to condo-convert Seattle’s historic Smith Tower are scaling back their plans; now only the top 12 stories will be converted.
• My second-ever adult job (such as it was), the student newspaper Polaris at North Seattle Community College, is a goner.
• Blacks are more likely than whites to get busted for having or smoking pot, even though that’s now the city’s official lowest law enforcement priority.
• In more positive law-related news, “serious crime” (as the FBI defines it) is way down in western Washington’s cities these days. That, alone, won’t stop the media from exploiting the occasional random shooting, or stop the talk-radio nebbishes from preaching the city=danger, suburbs=serenity meme.
• An election year’s underway. You can tell because a politician, in this case Gov. Gregoire, is trying to generate headlines on the get-tougher-on-drunk-drivers line, the encroaching-surveillance-state issue on which no one dares to disagree.
• Woodland Park Zoo tries again to make its own cute li’l baby elephant.
• The men’s fashion headline of the year is “Return to Elegance.” Just as it’s been every year since at least 1978.
• 12,000 people in Idaho lost electricity due to a stray cat wandering through a substation. Brian Setzer remains at large.
• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their cablecasts, just in time to give writerless jokes about the New Hampshire primary.

• “A 29-year-old Wenatchee man told police a pterodactyl caused him to drive his car into a light pole…”
• The film Dancer in the Dark notwithstanding, no woman has ever been sentenced to death in Wash. state. Sadly, this might change.
• Spokane Catholics have raised $8 million to help pay abusive-priest lawsuit settlements.
• Help a rural flood victim— donate a cow.
• Sonics fans (and, yes, there still are many of us) have a new mantra. During last night’s laugher against the even more pathetic Timberwolves (which the Sea. Times chose to cover on sports-section page D14), when fans were encouraged to make noise during an opposing-team free throw, the repetitive shout came loud and clear from the rafters on down: “Clay Bennett sucks! Clay Bennett sucks!” TV announcer (and all around good guy) Kevin Calabro responded with a brief giggle, before he returned to strictly commenting on the action on the floor.

• To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Paul Allen and Amazon will get to build 160-foot-tall office buildings in South Lake Union.
• Can the Sonics be saved? Some say yes! Among them: MS head honcho Steve Ballmer. There’s a lot more dealmaking and haggling to go, though.
• What should be done with the ex-Public Safety Building block downtown, which has been a big hole in the ground for more than two years now? Some city officials (read: Mayor Nickels) would like a “civic square” project. This turns out to be, as you might have guessed, a privately-developed office/condo tower with a bit of a bricked public plaza at the base.
• Pike Place Market officials want to raise $80 million, presumably from public sources. They claim the money’s needed for essential infrastructure improvements, some of which weren’t done when the Market was “saved” in the ’70s.
• How to save Pt. Townsend’s tourist biz: How ’bout a passenger ferry direct from downtown Seattle?
• The SLUT’s first day of passenger service was interrupted for half an hour when somebody found a stray ball bearing in the track.
• Meanwhile, Lake Union businesses are already helping pay for the next phase of transportation improvements–additional bus runs on two existing Metro routes.

With the Sonics’ continued slide of ineptitude (13 losses in a row, counting last season’s last five games), some observers are wondering whether management’s deliberately trying to lose, a la the movie Major League, to help smooth the road for a move out of town.

Of course, such a strategy would require Clay Bennett and co. to have some degree of intelligence and competence, neither of which they’ve evinced thus far.

As some of you know, I don’t dress up for Halloween, but I admire and honor those who do. As part of this annual celebration, I’m searching for this year’s raddest costume ideas.

Here’s one list of dress-up ideas, most of which are quite commercial and lame.

But what would be better?

This year’s most lampoonable real-life figures (Paris, Britney, Lindsay, and Larry “Wide Stance” Craig) are more walking tragedies than icons of joy.

This year’s scariest real-life figures (the Bushies and their wholly-owned media advocates) are blustery and certainly larger than life, but have a rigidly anti-fun, soulless undertone to their personalities. They’re not the funnest people to pretend to be.

So what else is out there?

If you want to be really tasteless, you could go as a smoke-inhalation-vicitm Malibu Barbie and Ken, complete with charred-out surfboards.

You can prove your up-to-date popcult awareness by being Hannah Montana, Ugly Betty, Stephen Colbert, the horny healers of Gray’s Anatomy, diet-book hawker Dr. Oz, Hiro from Heroes, an iPhone, a flat screen TV, an unemployed mortgage broker, Dennis Kucinich and his tall uber-bride, the I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER cat, a YouTube video clip of somebody doing something stupid, or a fat-n’-sassy Al Gore.

Or, of course, you could band together with fellow partiers and go as the most monstrous, most frightening sight imaginable.

I speak, of course, of the High School Musical cast.

As always, please send in your pix and scene reports from costume events over the next week.

Greg Nickels’s big plans for south Lake Union originally didn’t include the Wawona, the 110-year-old Pacific Schooner that’s been docked since the ’70s at what’s now South Lake Union Park.

This week, the Wawona’s fate was apparently decided at a meeting of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Board. Northwest Seaport, the nonprofit that now owns the ship, would have it drydocked, disassembled, many pieces replaced, and reassembled on land near its current pier. The whole operation would take $2 million. Northwest Seaport has only raised $400,000 thus far toward the ship’s long-term restoration. But they’re hoping the SLU area’s higher visibility will translate into higher visibility for their cause.

At the same meeting, representatives of developer David Sabey discussed their plans for the old Georgetown brewery site. Sabey’s people said they won’t even try to preserve the facade of the site’s southernmost building (the former Rainier Cold Storage), which they said was too far gone to restore into anything. They might, however, consider carefully dismantling the building’s front wall so it can be rebuilt in front of some new structure.

Oh, and did you hear Sabey wants to buy, and save, the Sonics and Storm? He’d put up a new arena for the basketball teams on the old Associated Grocers land he now owns near Boeing Field.

Sabey’s current record at preserving threatened Seattle institutions is now 0-1. (He was the last owner of the Frederick & Nelson department store, which had greatly fiscally deteriorated before he came in.) Saving the Sonics would make him a true Comeback Kid.

• Oklahoma City’s mayor, a pal of Sonics owner Clay Bennett, drops hints that Bennett and co. may already be planning the team’s move.
• You remember that ultra low-fare airline offering super-cheap seats from Bellingham to Columbus, OH? It’s not anymore.
• Canadian transportation experts voice concern that B.C. Ferry crews may be enjoying too much “B.C.bud” on the job.
• For an off-off-year election, some races are definitely heating up. Examples: Seattle City Councilmember David Della’s decreasingly rational rants about opponent Tim Burgess; the Seattle School Board battle between incumbent Darlene Flynn and centralized-curriculum advocate Sherry Carr; the skirmish for King County Prosecutor between business-as-usual Dan Satterberg and dynamic challenger Bill Sherman; and something I don’t quite understand in Renton.
• And everybody’s supposed to be afraid, very afraid, of Windstorm 2007, coming Thursday, or not.

King County Executive Ron Sims has no official jurisdiction over the city-owned Seattle Center. That hasn’t stopped him from expressing his citizen’s right to suggest how he’d change the place.

Like most of the big plans about the Center floated lately by Mayor Greg Nickels, David Brewster, and others, Rice’s plan would raze the Fun Forest amusement park and High School Memorial Stadium.

Like some of these plans, Rice’s would raze KeyArena and the Northwest Court buildings, including the current Vera Project space. (Perhaps Rice hopes to bring the Sonics and Storm to a new suburban home.)

Like all of these plans, it would add lots more green park space and fancy landscaping, creating yet another New Seattle monument to world-class-osity. (Or, as Sims’s staff puts it, “a destination known worldwide.”)

Unlike the previous plans, Sims’s would add artist live-work spaces and a transit center. His office issued a “slide show” .pdf depicting old-fashioned trolley cars along Mercer Street.

I like the trolley idea. I’d like it better if Sims had said where these trolleys would go from and to.

My take on this, and all the other Center schemes: We don’t need another sculpture park. We don’t need another impeccably manicured cover scene for architectural magazines.

We need a homey, informal “back yard” serving, and welcome to, all ages and classes, for the widest possible variety of public uses.

So I want to keep high school football there.

I want to keep carny rides there.

I want to keep miniature-freakin’-golf there.

Danny Westneat thinks we can outfox the Oklahomans who bought, and now overtly want to take away, the Sonics. Westneat thinks we can freeze ’em out with a megadose of “Seattle polite” and “Seattle process.”

I’m not so sure.

It’s true that the Okie cowboy-capitalists who bought the team are firebrands, and that the best way to fight fire is with water.

But frozen water, perhaps not.

As you know, I was never a sports-hating hippie. I believe in bigtime sports as community institutions.

I want to keep the Sonics and Storm (no, not just the Storm).

Yet, the NBA’s business model is broken. Fewer TV viewers (the inevitable result of new home-leisure technologies) mean less money to pay overpriced diva superstars. Limited arena capacities (even in bigger arenas than ours) means ticket revenues have inherent caps, no matter how high teams raise prices. Team ownership has become a speculative hobby–a zillionaire buys a team, loses money on it, then sells it at a profit to some other zillionaire.

That’s who Clay Bennett and Co. are. They know they’re unlikely to turn an operating profit on the team, wherever it is. They want pro basketball in their town as means of boosting their town’s nightlife and tourism industries, in a place traditionally lacking in both. They’d only keep the teams here if we paid them such ridiculous amounts of corporate welfare that they just couldn’t say no.

Like ex-Mariners owner George Argyros and ex-Seahawks owner Ken Behring, Bennett and his cohorts are parasitical figures who need to be expunged from the local and national sports scenes.

How?

If we all boycott the teams, Bennett will just claim we don’t deserve ’em.

If our socio-economic upper crust shuns the owners, they won’t mind; they never intended to make any friends here.

Nope. We gotta do to Bennett’s crowd what we did to Argyros and Behring–push back with legal threats and procedural stalls, until a new local ownership group can be formed.

…playoffs begin with Seattle fans once again relegated to spectator status, Danny Westneat suggests a simple, elegant solution. If the Sonics/Storm owners put up as much money as they would have put up for a new suburban arena, let’s get the state and/or county to front the remainder of what it’d take to fix up KeyArena (hey–remember that joint?) with a bigger food court and a few more tiers of seating. The teams not only stay in Seattle, they stay in Seattle. Everybody’s happy except the sports-hating hippies (and the owners, if they were really only looking for an excuse to move the franchise).

…Sonics/Storm owners now say they wanna split town, after the State Legislature failed to sign off on one singularly lopsided arena-subsidy proposal. The cynics are already saying that was the owners’ plan all along–to make one halfhearted offer and then promptly go east.

…will stay in Seattle at least one more season. But they still wanna go to the former Cirque du Soleil site in Renton as quickly as they can get the public to pay for it.

David Goldstein informs me that not only do the Oklahomans want $300 million or more in subsidies for a new Sonics arena, they’d also like free land to put it on. That might cost one taxpaying jurisdiction or another $150 million or more.

Goldstein, and several other folks I’ve talked to, believe the Oklahomans have deliberately made an offer they know we’ll refuse, as a ploy toward quickly moving the team out of state.

I say we must, and can, get this nonsense over, keep the team here, and do so without draining the public coffers. More about this later.