As predictably as the Sun rising in the east and the Phoenix Suns rising in the NBA’s West, the Sonics’ out-of-state owners have formally demanded a taxpayer-subsidized multiuse arena/palace as the prime condition for not packing up their sneakers and trucking ’em to Oklahoma City. The citizens of the state, the county, and/or Bellevue or Renton would pay to build it; the team owners would keep the profits.

It won’t be in Seattle because (1) Seattle voters passed an anti-arena-subsidy initiative last fall, and (2) besides, the team owners want a building that would be the only thing like it anywhere near it, so their own food concessions wouldn’t have to compete with off-premises restaurants and bars.

Consider this a first offer. Slam the plexiglass case over the red button and shout “No Deal, Howie.”

Both the Vanishing Seattle book and the September Belltown Messenger are outta here and on their way to your adoring eyes. So I can now resume this here corner of what used to be euphemistically called “Cyberspace.”

Among the things I haven’t gotten the time to write about these past almost two weeks:

• The 25th anniversary of the first IBM PC. Personal computers had already been around a half decade. IBM saw the character-generating on the wall and realized it had to be in that market, before its own sub-mainframe workstation computers were obsolete. An “Entry Level Systems Division” was set up in Florida, far from IBM’s mainframe designers in upstate New York. A workable and expandable machine was swiftly designed, mostly from off-the-shelf parts. Corporate schmoozing between IBM bigwigs and UW Regent Mary Gates got Mary’s son Bill the chance to bid on the operating system contract. He bought the existing QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a couple of Seattle nerds. His then-small staff made two variants, PC-DOS (for IBM) and MS-DOS (which, under the MS/IBM contract, Gates & co. could sell to anybody). From this one deal arose the Puget Sound country’s new #1 economic force, the driver of real-estate hyperinflation and the flow of money into local “alternative” culture.
• 
  The first sign of hope for saving the Sonics and Storm. The Okie owners say they’d be perfectly happy with staying in Seattle Center, as long as it’s not in KeyArena. They suggested the Memorial Stadium land, already set to be cleared under a blue-ribbon committee’s master plan for the Center grounds. That’d be perfect with me. The high school football games can go to Husky Stadium or even Qwest Field. KeyArena can be re-remodeled as a concert and convention facility. We can get an indoor arena big enough for a National Hockey League team, plus the food-court and amusement-arcade sections the Okies want. I may be the only one I know who believes this deal can indeed be worked out without excessively draining local tax coffers, but I do believe it.
• 
  Safeco Insurance plans to leave the U District; the UW plans to buy the Safeco Tower. Let’s just make sure the U keeps the IHOP, next to the tower on Safeco-owned land.
• 
  A dog-days lull in the Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer soap opera. I’ve been talking with others who, like me, would like to be involved in starting a new local-news venture should the P-I call it a day. Should this project progress, and should I become a real part of it, I’ll wind up saying less and less about it due to the ol’ non-disclosure falderal.

I’m the only person I know who refuses the conventional wisdom about the Sonics’ possible move. I believe (1) it’s not inevitable, and (2) we can and should try to prevent it.

Part of this is I’m not a reactionary “radical.” I don’t hate sports. I don’t hate television. I don’t hate working-class people. Yes, I was belittled by the jocks in high school—but I got over it.

Pro basketball is a business. And it’s a good business for a town to have, for assorted tangible and intangible reasons.

It’s good to have affluent suburbanites coming in to patronize our bars, restaurants, and pay-parking lots 41 times a year (plus 17 times for the Storm). It’s good to have blimp shots of the city skyline viewed on ESPN HD. It’s good to have basketball players (even mediocre ones) around to open supermarkets, visit sick kids, and endorse local paint stores. It’s good to have some scrappy underdogs playing under our town’s good name, fighting the good fight against the Lucking Fakers and the other bloated-superstar outfits. It’s good to have white kids rooting for black kids, and with the Storm to have boys rooting for girls.

But the price? It doesn’t have to be bank-breaking.

As I’ve written previously, we can offer the new owners a decent, if not spectacular, arena makeover. Enough to add a food court and an amusement arcade (perhaps replacing current such facilities elsewhere on the Seattle Center grounds), and to make it more viable for hockey. Tie it in with a larger Center sprucing-up, one that would directly benefit all Center-goers and citizens. The public’s part of the arena part can be paid for by keeping the current rental-car and restaurant taxes for a few years longer.

This could have all been settled with the previous owners a year ago. We now know why it wasn’t: The previous owners were preparing to sell out and take their value-appreciation profits. Now it’s the new owners’ turn. We can make ’em a reasonable offer that, if they reject it, will make ’em look like even bigger dorks than the previous owners now look like.

But back to all the overt public cynicism: An awful lot of the folks I’ve talked to, exchanged emails with, and read online said, in varying terms, that they’d like to be rid of the Sonics as a big FU to the supposed mindset of our civic leaders, who (according to this interpretation) will normally suck up to any big, worthless corporate scheme as long as it promises to turn this into “a world class city.” The team’s loss, this line of reasoning goes, is a good-riddance event that’ll show those downtown schemers a thing or two about real priorities.

When I first started hearing this line, I initially reacted that it wasn’t “The Seattle Way” to mope around in self-defeatism. But then I remembered it is.

For every element of pioneer gumption and inventiveness we’ve got, we’ve also got a huge dose of unseemly grumpiness. We love to whine that everything in this hick town totally sucks, always has and always will. Cobain took this attitude as a personal worldview. More recently, Cobain’s former next-door neighbor Howard Schultz whined on and on that the city and us fans just didn’t understand his needs.

Now we’ve got a prospective new owner who’s talkin’ just like Ken Behring and Jeff Smulyan used to, that he really really wants to keep his new team here but we’re just being insufficiently cooperative. He’s playing his assigned role by making these cynical statements; we’re playing our assigned role by giving him cynical rejoinders in response.

But behind this scripted posturing, serious backroom dealmaking can occur, and I hope it will occur. For that is also The Seattle Way.

The Sonics and the Storm are being sold to an Oklahoma City group with the not-so-hidden agenda of taking the teams east. How quickly can this threat to a local institution be pushed back?

Remember, OKC did in a Seattle institution before. Seafirst Corp., aka Seattle-First National Bank, was our state’s oldest, largest, and most stable financial institution. But in the ’80s, Seafirst’s CEO thought it would be a good thing to go into cahoots with Penn Square Bank, a tiny OKC shopping-mall bank whose main business was financing shady oil deals. The resulting fiscal catastrophe pushed Seafirst into the outstretched paws of BankAmeriCrap.

…hockey’s Stanley Cup was won by a southern US locale that doesn’t even have a real winter.

And, oh yeah: Ex-Sonic Gary Payton finally got an NBA Championship ring.

…has issued its findings. Thankfully, they want to keep Center House and the Fun Forest, albeit with some serious upgrading. Memorial Stadium would be replaced by an “open space” above underground parking. And the Sonics would get most of the KeyArena redo money they want.

…about the Supersonics’ threatened move to the suburbs: It could, if it goes through, symbolize the Sowetoization of metropolitan Seattle. Our city built on seven hills is becoming a Mounds city—white on the inside, chocolate on the outside.

As my ex-Stranger colleague Charles Mudede has noted several times, Seattle’s housing hyperinflation has caused the geographic center of its African-American community to move south, from the Central Area to the Rainier Valley and now to the ol’ Green River valley ‘burbs of Renton, Kent, and Tukwila. So they’d be a perfect new home for NBA basketball, the semi-official Official Sport of Black America.

Given that, I still want the team to stay here in town.

Though I don’t go to many games, I like the fact that they’re here. I like the noise and energy their fans add (even in a lousy season like this past one) to Seattle Center and lower Queen Anne. I take civic pride in the inevitable Space Needle shots accompanying the sponsor billboard every time ESPN or TNT comes to telecast a Sonics game. The season the team spent in Tacoma just wasn’t the same.

I’ve been reading the usual screeds of the usual sports-hating hippies who not only don’t want to pay to keep the Sonics, but might possibly pay ’em to leave. I disagree. As I’ve written before here, I believe an amenable resolution to the team’s latest demands can be found, in the context of a larger Seattle Center redo that preserves the Center’s multi-use, multi-generational spirit.

Yes, that resolution will require the team to be responsible capitalists and not rely on heavy public subsidies and favors. But I’d demand the same from the oil companies, the drug companies, the insurance companies, etc. etc.

• “The Star Wars Guy” succumbs to his own personal demons.
• The Belltown Messenger‘s own Ronald Holden wrote a letter to the P-I thanking its editors for their recent anti-censorship statement. His letter got censored.
• Now that China’s prez has moved on to the Other Washington, here are all the “Hu” puns you’ll ever need.
• The ’05-’06 Sonics season was softball on the court, hardball at City Hall. (How I’d resolve this: Let the Sonics buy out the Fun Forest’s operators, move those attractions to the west and north sides of KeyArena (though preserving the Snoqualmie Room for the Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows), and have the city revamp the current Fun Forest indoor amusement arcade into new meeting and exhibition rooms.)

…and now Randy Johnson: How come we only hear about local pro athletes’ scandalous behaviors after they’ve been traded away?

It’s the madcap return of the MISCmedia In/Out List, the longest-running and most accurate list of its type anywhere in the western hemisphere.

As long-term readers know, this is a prediciton of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the months to come. If you think everything hot now will just keep getting hotter forever, I’ve got some Mariners season tickets to sell you.

…Seattle Times book review today. It’s about Love’s Confusions, a delightful little academic treatise comparing how various thinkers have thought about desire and devotion over the centuries.

The giant posterized face of Rashard Lewis peers down at Sonics fans, prior to the start of what would be the team’s last game of the postseason, as if to apologize for the debilitating foot injury that kept him out of the second-round series.

The team fought mightily and valiantly. But without one of its pivotal star players, the Sonics found themselves ousted by San Antonio at the last half-second of game six.

But look on the bright side: Nobody expected this Seattle team to even make the playoffs, let alone almost make the conference finals. And the Lucking Fakers aren’t even in the dance this year!

This story takes place on a Sunday afternoon at a certain decidedly non-touristy Irish pub somewhere in the greater downtown zone. (I won’t name it, because I don’t want ’em to get into any potential trouble for continuing to serve visibly intoxicated patrons.)

On a large-screen TV, the injury-plagued Sonics were somehow clobbering the San Antonio Spurs, to even up their current playoff series at two games apiece (only to fall behind again in Game Five two nights later.)

The spectacle inside the bar, in front of the screen, was even more captivating.

The first thing you’d notice, had you been there, would have been the two very young, very thin, very drunk women, whooping and hollering and flirting with everyone in sight. One wore a Mariners cap; the other wore a Red Sox cap. They’d apparently been on a girls’-day-out at Safeco Field. I say “apparently” because, while they both talked at quantity and with volume, what they said didn’t always make sense.

Among their favorite flirting targets was a tall, lanky young man seated at the bar, clad in a sweatshirt and a backwards Seattle University cap. He spoke with well-practiced Eminem-esque body language and a fake-gangsta “wigger” accent. But the musical-legend references he uttered were not in praise of hiphop royalty but the Beatles and Stones.

Over the course of our very public chat, he mentioned to me and to the drunk women that he’d been faithful to his current girlfriend fora year and a half, a commitment he hadn’t previously thought himself capable of. He also listed a series of drug possession and dealing arrests he’d undergone between the ages of 11 and 18; now, at 24, he was proud to be out of trouble and planned to stay that way.

I observed all this, mostly silently, interjecting these three with questions only at strategic intervals. I was behaving as I often do, emerging into the public sphere only to hide inside my own mind (with the aid of a book and a Sunday crossword page).

Someone seated next to me was even more withdrawn. She was making no eye contact with anyone, except when she needed another drink. She concentrated on the careful penmanship she was applying to a hardbound journal, into which she’d spent the past hour writing (as she later mentioned) about an on-the-rocks relationship.

She broke the ice with me, asking how my puzzle-solving was coming along, and sympathizing with me about that one stubborn corner. But the gangsta wannabe was more adept about opening her up. I returned from a restroom break to find him and her deep in conversation. His voice had changed, the bombastic bravado replaced by a sensitive near-whisper. He insisted to the journal writer that she could make a living as a poet, which she countered with the time-worn adage that it just couldn’t be done. He told her she shouldn’t let her soul be held hostage by any loser boyfriend.

As their conversation became more intimate, I redirected my attention toward the basketball game. About 45 minutes later, the poetess stumbled her way off of her bar stool and around me and the other patrons. She’d previously done as great a job of hiding her state of inebriation as she’d done of guarding her feelings. The white-gangsta dude did his best to keep her from falling down. I asked him to make sure she got home OK; he assured me he would.

After those two left, the thin drunk women (who’d left the bar in the company of an older man and had since come back) reasserted their command on the other bar patrons’ collective attention. They made big, loud, repetitive comments about the joys of chicken wings with Miller Lite. Somehow, I ceased caring.

…but I believe I must agree with Steve Kelley: The Sonics’ miracle season has crashed amid spectacular injuries and general burnout.

IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).

THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:

• SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE got sold out from under itself by its Atlanta conglomerate owner. SBC and its Torrefazione Italia sub-chain will be absorbed into Starbucks’ operations, with only the brand names continuing to exist. Thus ends what had been one of Seattle’s hottest retail rivalries since the demise of the Frederick & Nelson department store. (SBC is technically a year older than Starbucks, tracing its roots to a 1970-vintage Seattle Center House ice-cream stand called the Wet Whisker.) The hipster crowd has already publicly eschewed both chains in favor of mom-‘n’-pop indie cafes. Last winter, the Stranger essentially chided local indie Cafe Ladro as being too chainlike to be truly cool, despite having a mere eight stores.
• APPLE COMPUTER said it would open one of its own retail stores in Bellevue Square, invading not only the home turf of Microsoft but also that of Computer Stores Northwest, one of the country’s top independent Apple-only retailers.
• THE SONICS’ SEASON ended quietly with a decisive, meaningless victory over the Phoenix Suns. The team’s ought-two/ought-three campaign really ended weeks ago with the Gary Payton trade; it’s been in rebuilding and reloading mode ever since.
• ACT THEATER said it had raised enough emergency donations to would survive for the time being, albeit with major cutbacks. Let’s hope it gets back to the funky, audience-friendly aesthetic of its heritage, after a half-decade of dot-com-era largesse and pretentions.
• KCTS KICKED its longtime president Burnill Clark into early retirement and fired 35 employees. Yeah, it’s a recessionary cutback, but it also marks the end, at least for now, of the Seattle PBS affiliate’s years-long drive to become a major player in supplying national network programming. The ambitious venture generated some great shows (particularly Greg Palmer’s Vaudeville and Death: The Trip of a Lifetime). The loss of KCTS’s network-production unit is another setback for the local film/video production community, already struggling under the dual blows of the overall economic ickiness and cheap Canadian filming.
• THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT announced it would replace its “Artist’s Journey” attraction, the least museum-like and most theme-park-esque of its offerings, with a separate museum of science fiction memorabilia. It only makes sense for an institution founded upon computer-nerd largesse to partially rededicate itself to the nerds’ most favoritist art form of them all. You might beg the question: Will it be tacky? I damn hope so.