ichiro large bobblehead, available at halloffamememorabilia.com

• Well if that isn’t the just about worst thing that could happen, local-baseball-fan-wise. The M’s ship Ichiro to the Damn Yankees, for two triple-A pitching prospects. Please sell this team now.
• (Here’s a thorough overview of his illustrious career as compiled by SportsPress NW.)
• Frank Rich reminds us that if America is really “in decline,” its either the fifth or eighth such “decline” in the past six decades, depending on how you count ’em.
• A self described “conservative Republican” moves to Canada and realizes “I don’t see universal health care as an evil thing anymore.”
• Monica Guzman believes the phrase “I don’t know” is due to die off, as more of the world’s knowledge becomes a simple web search away. I’m not so sure. Seems to me there’s tons each of us doesn’t know about. At least there’s tons I don’t know about. (Though, when I answer a question with “I don’t know,” people still tend to respond by simply repeating the question in greater detail.)
• In-state tuition at Washington’s “public” universities could top $20,000 by decade’s end.
• Peet’s Coffee isn’t Seattle-owned anymore. (Did you know it had been Seattle-owned, specifically by the original Starbucks founders?)
• Alexander Cockburn, R.I.P.: The longtime Village Voice and Nation columnist and CounterPunch.org cofounder was, at his best, probably America’s most lucid leftist writer. At his worst, he defended climate-change deniers, wholesale Israel-bashers, and French neo-fascist Marine Le Pen.

buzzfeed.com

• Some nostalgist at Buzzfeed has put together a boatload of ’80s kitsch ad art, mostly from early home-computer magazines. All the unicorns, rainbows, building-sized MS-DOS computers, and disco babes in slips you’ll ever need.
• Then, you can look at how low kitsch ad art has descended since then with Bad Ebook Covers.
• Yes, it is possible for Microsoft to lose money.
• At The Daily Dot, “The Hometown Newspaper of the World Wide Web,” we learn that:

1. local web-comic and gaming fan site Penny Arcade is trying to become user supported via a Kickstarter fund drive, that
2. a females-only meetup for local Reddit.com users became the target of “online harassment” by sexist boors, and that
3. you’ll be able to register to vote in Wash. state via Facebook.

• Our ol’ pal Ronald Holden does the math and concludes that, no, the Athenian in the Pike Place Market is probably not one of America’s 10 most lucrative restaurants.
• Wash. state is #3 in both home computer ownership and home Internet use. #1? Utah. (Those publicly-prim Mormons gotta get their net porn.)
• Forbes cites the Seahawks as the world’s 25th most valuable sports team. That sounds cool, until you find out that of the 24 outfits ahead of ’em on the list, 15 are other NFL teams. (#1: UK soccer powerhouse Manchester United.)
• There are a lot fewer new small businesses in America these days. One potential reason: a “radical concentration of power” in the economy, especially in banking.
• The snarky eco-advocates who staged the phony Shell Oil press conference at the Space Needle have expanded their anti-Arctic-drilling campaign with fake billboards, including one right near Shell’s Houston HQ.
• DUH of the Day: Big companies that don’t pay their workers much, by and large, could afford to do so.
• At least one wag now claims that “Mitt Romney will not be the Republican nominee.”
• Crawford Kilian at Vancouver political blog The Tyee explains how the Ayn Randians’ utopia would be a thorough dystopia for everybody else:

Future John Galts would have to sleep in castles, behind a wall of guards protecting them from us. A philosophy that detests the “gun” of government coercion would survive only by imposing such coercion on everyone else. The masters of a Randian society would rule a wasteland of clear cuts, poisoned streams, and empty seas, except for those patches they personally owned and protected.

• Yep, there are dumb sex-advice magazine articles for men too.
• To learn about a culture or an era, learn its slang.
• Tom Davis, 1953-2012: The original Saturday Night Live writer-performer was, and will be, always known as Al Franken’s partner in a series of sharp, stinging skits. Franken then went on to radio and the U.S. Senate. Davis went on in and out of assorted addictions.

wikimedia commons, via komo-tv

• Drugs? Guns? Codeine pain pills? Forget it. What U.S. Customs is really cracking down against on the Canadian border is a bigger threat to America than all those combined. Beware the dreaded candy Kinder Eggs.
• Starbucks apparently has an image problem in NYC.
• How to get shoppers away from dot-coms and back to the malls? How ’bout wine bars, yoga classes, craft-making groups, and jeans stores with special butt-view mirrors?
• Outside estimates put the cost of a spiffed-up Seattle waterfront near a cool billon. That’s a heckuva lot for what’s essentially just another group of “world class” windswept plazas (and we’ve already got more than we need of those). I still say: scrap most of that, bring back the Waterfront Streetcar, and put an amusement park at Pier 62-63.
• The big winner in the demise of Washington’s state liquor stores? Oregon’s state liquor stores.
• Deja Vu’s Dreamgirls really doesn’t want to leave SoDo, not even for a big buyout by the arena developers.
• In the immortal words of Mr. Costello, I don’t wanna go to Chelsea.
• Link Light Rail is three years old and more popular than ever.
• Macklemore’s new pro-gay-marriage hiphop track is getting quite the national attention.
• Boeing wants more engineers and more training for future engineers. Oh, and it also wants more Federal money.

There was a competition going on for short films about Seattle. Some of the entrants (at least they seem like they could be) are showing up online. F’rinstance, here’s a poetic ode to the city by Riz Rollins; and here’s Peter Edlund’s Love, Seattle (based on the opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and dedicated to team-and-dream stealer Clay Bennett).

• Health scare topic of the day: “Rabit bat bites.”
• Online scare topic of the day: “We’re all Internet addicts, and we’re screwed, says Newsweek.”
• Those hipster fashionistas at Vice magazine have devised a “Wheel of Punk,” a wheel chart proclaiming what is the most and least punk. The punkiest, in their summation: “Pre-Rollins Black Flag.” The un-punkiest: the Eagles.
• Unpaid Plug O’ the Day: My fellow Stranger refugee Inga Muscio has a “Stop Thinking, Start Writing” class starting here in Seattle later this week.
• Another year, another round of public college fee hikes.
• Another year, another plea to finally get ourselves a progressive state income tax.
• PETA ranks Safeco Field as baseball’s second most “vegetarian friendly” ballpark. #1: would you believe Philly?
• Yep, Senate Republicans don’t want you to find out who’s funding their campaigns.
• “The average Canadian is now richer than the average American.” And not just in Canadian Tire Money.
• There’s a commercial for tourism to Colombia with the slogan “The only risk is wanting to stay.” Forget about those pesky drug wars. Just enjoy the quaint cities and unspoiled beaches. They’re saying this openly and forthrightly.
• It’s one thing to see Photoshopped® fakes of movie stars’ heads on nude models’ bodies. But when a guy sticks Frida Kahlo’s head on nude models’ bodies (bodies that obviously don’t have the real Kahlo’s injury scars), some Kahlo fans get righteously pissed off.

the bon marche at northgate circa 1956, via mallsofamerica.blogspot.com

• Emily Badger at the Atlantic pontificates that “The Shopping Mall Turns 60 (and Prepares to Retire).” Malls are actually 62 years old, counting from Seattle’s own Northgate. Badger’s timeline dates from urban planner Victor Gruen, who published a prototype concept in an architectural magazine two years after Northgate opened. (The one thing Gruen’s design had but Northgate hadn’t (yet) was a roof on the central plaza.) Badger is right, though, that malls have passed their peak as American institutions. The last new one opened in ’06; big-box stores and strip malls have stolen a lot of their business and clout.
• After years of speculation, MSNBC.com is now wholly owned by Comcast/NBC Universal. It’s immediately been renamed NBCNews.com. Microsoft sold NBC its half of the online joint venture, having divested its interest in the same-named cable channel back in ’05. NBC claims the site’s Redmond-based staff will stay in the Seattle area. [Update: 100 techies will stay here, but around 80 editorial jobs could move to New York.] Microsoft claims it will start its own news site later this year.
• Meanwhile, a recently-unearthed NBC documentary about the deep south during the civil rights struggles reminds us that, at the time, many white southerners actually believed that black people liked being segregated.
• Trend-analyst Richard Florida never said the rise of the “creative class” would be a panacea for the professional caste, or for the cities that hope to attract this caste.
• A hockey fan site ponders what the heck Seattle’s anti-arena factions are thinking:

There aren’t many cities that would seriously consider turning their backs on an investment of nearly $300 million in private capital within their boundaries, particularly during trying economic times.

• Celeste Holm, 1917-2012: The Oscar-winning film star and venerable stage actress had been in financial straits in her latter years. She was estranged from her family after she married a 41-year-old opera singer when she was 87. One of those family members was son Theodor Holm Nelson, the computing visionary who coined the term “hypertext” and inspired much of the conceptual underpinning of this whole WWW thang.

• A note to marketers everywhere (not that they’ll ever listen): As soon as you bill something as being “For Women” (not any specific women, just “Women” as a single mushed-together whole), a woman who doesn’t identify with your targeted “psychographic” will cry foul. Latest example: Pix, an iPad-based “photography lifestyle magazine for women.” It’s full of fluffy fashion, make-up, and shopping tips, and light on the notion of photography as a serious endeavor or of its readers as serious people. Bringing in the deserved snark is Stella Kramer, Pulitzer-winning photo editor (and Seattle punk-zine pioneer).
• When basketball vet Charles Barkley hosted Saturday Night Live, the cut-off-at-the-end 12:50 a.m. skit had him shilling for his own homespun “Barkley’s Bank” as an alternative to the world renowned Barclays Bank. These days, that’s where I’d rather trust my money.
• Hooray to local gallery-scene and edgy-installation-art vet Scott Lawrimore, who just got an important curatorial job at the Frye Art Museum.
• A “Christian” anti-sex website wants to scare teens into abstinence by making up scare stories about condoms.
• Courtney Love just keeps getting into messes, legal and otherwise. Sad, really.
• Howard Schultz wants U.S. businesses to start making more jobs and stop whining all the time. Or something like that.
• Art Thiel would like you to get the facts n’ figures about the Sonics Arena proposal (which aren’t all in yet) before you get emotional about it in either direction.
• A UK High Court judge declared Samsung’s new tablet computer isn’t an iPad ripoff, because it doesn’t “have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.” Or as a BBC commentator interprets the ruling, the judge decided it’s not as cool.

comicsbronzeage.com

Just Sayin’ Dept: Here’s something that hasn’t been publicized much in the World’s Fair 50th anniversary celebrations.

• Could the Almost Live! cast (or a key portion of it) be reuniting in a new project? A site called The206.tv is being coy n’ teasing about it, at least for now.
• Cafe Racer will reopen. And it’ll look better than ever.
• Seattle’s own Ezell’s has the nation’s greatest fried chicken, according to a highly manipulable Esquire online poll.
• Danny Westneat sees the Sonics Arena plan as a much better deal than the one that was used to rebuild Husky Stadium.
• No, there won’t be a zip line in West Seattle’s Lincoln Park.
• No, there won’t be an Airbus factory in Wash. state. But Gov. Gregoire would really like Airbus to buy parts and services from some of the same local subcontractors and suppliers that service Boeing.
• Just as Rush Limbaugh has his paid phony callers, Mitt Romney buses and flies in loyalist rooters to his campaign speeches. Even to the NAACP!
• It’s the 20th anniversary of the first photo ever posted to a Web site. It was a plug for a retro-cabaret combo comprising “administrative assistants and significant others of scientists” at CERN, the Swiss lab where both the WWW was invented and the Higgs-Boson Particle was discovered. The hereby-linked article includes some of their science-nerd-chic novelty repertoire.
• No, online-meme followers, Bill Gates did not speak at some random unidentified high school and tell the kids, “Life is not fair. Get used to it.” That whole text comes from a newspaper op-ed column dating back to 1996.

Amid all the continuing flap about historic Seattle buildings threatened with doom, there’s one building a lot of people here would like to get rid of, as soon as possible.

It’s a lovely building for what it is. It’s perhaps the architectural ideal of its type of structure.

It’s just in the way of something a lot of people want.

It’s a long, low, large, rustic, wooden industrial building, with an arced roof and bare support beams. A delightfully rundown-looking front office emits that vital “we don’t waste our customers’ money” look.

It’s called United Warehouses. (Not to be confused with the old United Furniture Warehouse, of once-ubiquitous musical TV commercials.)

Since its opening in 1954, the structure has provided short- and long-term storage for the makers and distributors of all sorts of stuff. In recent decades, United Warehouses’ CEO Tom Herche has expanded the operation into six facilities throughout the Northwest region, plus trucking and freight-forwarding services.

The place has a new landlord. And as you might have heard, he’s got big plans for the property. Storing supplies of gardening tools and energy drinks isn’t among them.

Christopher Hansen, a local boy who made good (if you call hedge funds a “good” thing), acquired it and a couple of adjacent parcels, as a site for the big new basketball and hockey arena he wants to build.

As Hansen proved at the fan rally he staged on June 14, he’s got a lot of support among the local populace. There were thousands of never-give-up lifelong Sonics fans, who’d just love to again shout such old team slogans as “Not In Our House!” Hockey fans too, who’ve supported minor league teams and now want the NHL here.

The warehouse building stays put and in use until the arena’s ready to go up, which Hansen insists won’t be until at least one of those teams is a sure thing.

A moved NBA basketball franchise would probably be the first to arrive, because any “new Sonics” could hold court temporarily at KeyArena. That place is still a perfectly fine place for basketball (except to the league’s moneybags), but lousy for hockey.

Even then, the soonest you’ll get to see a game at the ___ Arena (Hansen will undoubtedly sell the naming rights) will be 2017.

Heck, the building hasn’t even been designed yet. I personally hope the new complex incorporates a gently arced roof design as a nod to what came before it.

And the city and county councils want their say on a complex plan to kick in $200 million in bonds to pay part of the arena’s construction, with the funds to be paid back by tax revenue the arena will generate. So far, City Councilmember Richard Conlin appears to be the most hard-to-convince, but this situation fluctuates nearly daily.

Then there’s the little matter of neighborhood traffic, as publicly moaned about by the Port of Seattle and others.

This has to be fixed anyway, as is known to anyone who’s tried to get to downtown from the south end on a Mariners game day. In that regard the arena plan is an opportunity, not a problem. And it’s best to plan and execute that road revamping in the immediate future, during or just after the viaduct replacement mess.

There’s another aspect to all this maneuvering. While it hasn’t been publicized much, the community has already benefitted from Hansen’s dealmaking.

Tom Herche’s privately-held company got nearly $22 million for the United Warehouses property. The proceeds will, in part, help Herche and his wife Mary maintain their lifelong personal commitments to local causes.

The Herches are major supporters of Childhaven, the Healing Center (a grief support community), Rebuilding Together Seattle (providing home repair for low-income homeowners), the National MS Society’s regional chapter, and the Rotary Boys & Girls Club (they host a fundraising picnic for it at the warehouse every August).

Whether or not any puck ever drops or any free throw ever rises at the United Warehouses site, Seattle has already come out a winner.

•

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

Band name suggestion of the month: “Premier Instruments of Pleasure.” (From the “Sexual Wellness” section of the Amazon subsidiary Soap.com.)

• The new Microsoft tablet device will be called the “Surface.” How, er, superficial does that sound?
• Plastic shopping bags disappear in Seattle on 7/1. You have 12 days to stock up on those magnificently reusable Bartell Drug bags while you still can.
• Local hiphop artist Prometheus Brown would like you to care about the victims of gun violence, and not only when those victims are white people from “nice” areas.
• Nick Eaton joins city and county officials in jeering at the Seattle Times‘ fact-stretchin’ anti-Sonics arena editorials. In other news, somebody still reads the Seattle Times editorials.
• The waterfront streetcars Seattle can’t seem to find a place for anymore, even though the folks loved ’em? St. Louis transit officials would like ’em.
• There’s a 20-year-old intern/blogger at NPR’s All Songs Considered named Emily White. (This is NOT the Emily White who used to work for The Stranger.) She recently wrote a confession that she’s almost never paid for the music she’s downloaded. In response, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery penned a screed denouncing her and people like her for shelling out bucks for computers and Internet connections but not for the content they thereby attain:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

• Elsewhere in piracyland, when last we mentioned The Oatmeal online cartoonist Matthew Inman, he’d complained about a “social media” humor site that had posted his art without credit or payment. Then an attorney for that site sued him for defaming his client’s character. Inman replied back by starting an online fundraising campaign for the amount of the lawsuit—only with the proceeds going to charities instead. Now, the attorney has re-sued Inman, and has sued the site hosting the fund drive and even the charities it benefits. To quote one of America’s greatest contributions to comic satire, “Whadda maroon.”

pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com

• What’s the world’s most prolific retail brand today? 7-Eleven! And, after a few years of retreating from parts of the U.S., it’s expanding like mad.
• Coming next month and tons more exciting than any ol’ glass gallery, it’s Seattle Center’s first Seattle Science Festival! Hear Steven Hawking’s voice box live and in person!
• Nearly 40 percent of Puget Sound homeowners owe more money on their homes than the homes are now worth. Nearly nine percent owe twice as much money as their homes are worth (twice the national average).
• Anthony Robinson explains “how to talk politics with religious voters.”
• How does the Seattle LGBTQLSMFT pride parade thank the politicians who helped pass marriage equality in Wash. state? By charging them almost twice as much money to appear in the parade as it charges corporate entrants.
• Amazon’s quitting the virulently far-right lobbying group ALEC, and will make its warehouses more hospitable workplaces.
• Oregon native nations say they don’t mind high schools using Indian sports-team names, and that they do mind when PC whites try to ban such names.
• Comcast/NBC Universal might buy up all of MSNBC.com. The web site is still half owned by Microsoft (and still has a major editorial presence in Bellevue), even after NBC took full ownership of the same-named cable channel.
• The TV networks would really, really like Dish Network to not offer an “ad skipping” feature on its DVRs.
• Jonathan Chiat parses the “conservative fantasy history of civil rights,” in which the likes of Ronald Reagan and Strom Thurmond were supposedly not the racists they really were.
• Yes, a sexually demeaning image of a woman is still wrong even if the woman being insulted is anti-choice.
• Single-load “laundry pods,” delicious but deadly.
• The province of Quebec now demands that all political protests get official police approval first. Protesters immediately protested the law, in a big way.

This is the Great Wheel, now taking shape at Pier 57 on the waterfront. It is already the greatest addition to Seattle public architecture since the Koohaas downtown library. The rest of the waterfront should be redeveloped around it.

• Is Mike McGinn becoming just like all Seattle’s other recent mayors, a “progressive” who totally sucks up to the real estate developers?
• The state liquor stores won’t all close on May 31. Most will close one to four days earlier. A few have already closed. The stores that are still open have dwindling inventory. Since the supermarkets don’t start selling booze ’til June 1, consider stocking up for the Memorial Day weekend now.
• Getty Images, the Seattle-based king of stock photo licensing, may be up for sale (again).
• The Chicago head office of the company now calling itself Boeing got shut down by anti-NATO protesters. That almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if they’d stayed in Seattle Tukwila.
• South Lake Union is finally getting something useful (besides the Ace Hardware franchise): a Goodwill store!
• The proposed new basketball/hockey arena will work out just fine traffic-wise.
• Breaking news: people like to get stuff if they don’t have to pay for it.
• Hewlett-Packard announces huge layoffs; blames declining demand for PCs in favor of other digital-media devices.
• Paul Krugman, seemingly effortlessly, totally dismantles the Romney economic platform….
• …while author Charles Ferguson explains how “Wall Street became criminalized.” (As if it hadn’t always been so.)
• Unlike author Patricia Williams, I don’t blame book bannings and other assaults against public education on an “anti-intellectual” American people, but on the right-wing politicians who actually committed the assaults. Just as I don’t blame the megabanks’ crimes on their depositors.
• Knute Berger offers some “Simple Rules for Staying Sane in Seattle.” My own first rule: make sure you were already sane before you got here.
• The company whose merged predecessors gave us such great product names as Cheez Whiz, Cool Whip, and Chicken in a Biskit announced it’s de-merging. The spinoff company’s new name: “Mondelez.” Doesn’t quite fall trippingly off the tongue.
• In science fiction and astrology, “Planet X” (as in the Roman numeral for 10) is a hypothetical tenth planet orbiting out beyond Pluto. Now, some astronomer says he’s found it, and it’s three times the size of Earth. No word yet on whether it holds massive deposits of illudium phosdex, the shaving cream atom.

The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.

• King County Exec Dow Constantine was caught with an email revealing he’d had an affair with a co-worker. At a press conference, “No Drama Dow” (who has an unmarried live-in partner) quietly admitted the indiscretion.
• The city and county could announce they’re signing off on the Sodo arena plan as early as today.
• KOMO’s Ken Schram insists that the poor (and everybody else) should still get to buy things with cash.
• A community activist group says light rail has accelerated the gentrification of the Rainier Valley, making the mixed-race neighborhood a lot paler.
• Video footage helps a May Day protester escape prosecution.
• The wages of not supporting the iPhone: T-Mobile USA‘s laying off another 900 workers.
• First it was nuns. Now the right-wing Catholic bishops are harassing the Girl Scouts. (Make your own joke about how everybody knows they prefer boys.)
• ‘Future of News’ Dept.: A spokescritter for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad news app The Daily (no relation to the infinitely more distinguished UW Daily) insists the online newspaper is on the road to profitability.
• Even with health insurance, medical care is getting prohibitively expensive.
• America’s real first gay president? Buchanan.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks, “Why do conservatives hate freedom?”…
• …while “MinistryOfTruth” at Daily Kos makes brutal accusations toward your sterotypical teabag conservative:

I don’t think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn’t exactly like you.

• Here are some lovely pix of a Kansas City amusement arcade circa 1968. Not a single video monitor in sight.

sobadsogood.com

This is from Sunday’s “Color Run” downtown, a 5K benefitting Ronald McDonald House. Runners were splashed with “color dust” at points along the route. (Note: This is not at all to be confused with the 2005 teen novel The Rainbow Party, or with the false rumor that that novel depicted a real-life fad.)

• Forbes calls Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer the “worst CEO” of a major U.S. company.
• Is the time right again for huge, dense residential mega-projects? The Seattle Housing Authority thinks so. It wants to rebuild Yesler Terrace (a WWII-era low-income apartment site) with a whopping 3,000 privately developed “market rate” units plus office space. That would help subsidize at least as many low-income units as are there now. It would also create a huge new upscale neighborhood just uphill from the International District, and would sop up perhaps 20 percent of new housing construction activity in the whole city.
• Item: A Seattle restaurant’s basement was one huge pot growing operation. Comment: Once again, life imitates the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Guess what? The hedge fund tycoon who wants to own a Seattle basketball team might use the team and the arena deal as hedge fund opportunities!
• Tragic news: Tacoma’s selling two closed library buildings in low income neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ acquaintance Trimpin has another mechanical music/art installation. And it’s even more haunting than his previous works.
• Lit-blogger Nicole Cushing has a beautiful interview with a Seattle treasure, horror author and punk/goth scene vet Willum Pugmire.
• Dept. of Forgotten American History: Author/activist/songwriter Julia Ward Howe created Mother’s Day as an antiwar statement.
• Here’s a concise explanation of just why “business people are terrible at governing.”
• From Cleveland to Pittsburgh and even Detroit, the young and hip (but not rich) are flocking to the Rust Belt cities!
• There’s a new iPad-only online satire magazine called “Punch!”. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the legendary UK satire magazine Punch (published from 1841 to 1992!). Instead, its makers are inspired by the 1980s-1990s U.S. snark mag Spy.
• Publishers of e-books have determined that the best way to keep their authors’ names in the public eye is to have new stuff by them two or more times a year. This means established “name” authors are busier than ever churnin’ out the product.
• Do you, like these e-book authors, desperately need writing inspiration? Take random gibberish letters. Run them through a spell checker. Boom! Random words and phrases to trigger your imagination.

It is with a heavy heart that we must say goodbye to Publicola, for three years the go-to site for insider wonk-knowledge about Seattle political minutae.

Josh Feit and Erica C. Barnett studiously roved the corridors of City Hall and associated parties, fundraisers, caucus meetings, and planning conferences, always coming back with clear, engaging reports.

But, as we previously noted in regards to the equally ambitious SportsPress Northwest, local content sites just can’t make in on banner ads alone.

Goodness knows, Feit and Barnett did all they could.

They added arts and entertainment reviewers (officially billed on-site as the “Nerds”), then dropped them when their contributions didn’t lead to added revenue.

Later they did the same with veteran crime reporter Jonah Spangenthal-Lee.

More lately, their initial financial backers pulled out. Feit and Barnett asked for donations from readers to keep the site going. That helped them to meet an immediate cash shortage.

But Feit, Barnett, and their initial backers knew the site’s long-term prospects as a for-profit, stand-alone entity were poor.

So Publicola, as its own thing, is shutting down.

But Crosscut.com, Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster’s nonprofit local commentary/analysis site, is bringing Feit and Barnett on board. Their coverage will continue at Crosscut in twice-daily installments. Brewster and co. will stage a fund drive to support permanent employment for the two.

udhcmh.tumblr.com

• The above vintage paperback cover comes from a blog located in a college town—Columbus OH, not Spokane WA. (Found via Pulp International.)
• The Seattle Police have an on-staff graffiti interpreter. And he says only 3 percent of Seattle’s graffiti has anything to do with street gangs.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna may have found his most potent nemesis—not election rival Jay Inslee but 90 women who are suing McKenna for participating (in the name of the people of Washington) in the right wing’s anti-Obamacare crusade.
• Scott North at the Everett Herald looks back to Wash. state’s own U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his role in making forest conservation a real thing.
• Amazon, continuing in its quest to become kings of all media, is starting its own movie production company. And it’s soliciting concepts for “TV style” web shows—sitcoms and kids’ shows, live-action and animated. And unlike some online “screenwriting contest” scam sites, they don’t keep the rights to works they don’t use.
• “He who controls the Spice controls the universe.”
• As the Seattle arena proposal moves forward quickly, ex-City Council member Richard McIver suggests putting it instead in the Rainier Valley, near the Mt. Baker light rail station and I-90. (It would also be near the former site of Sicks’ Stadium, home of minor league baseball for 30 years and Major League Baseball for oen year.)
• Meanwhile, a member of the ownership team that stole the Sonics has lost his chairman role at Chesapeake Energy, due to alleged conflicts of interest. Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy.
• From the verdant town of Corvallis (where I spent two formative years of my life) comes the tale of a bright young woman who became a hit with a sports-gambling blog, then became a top contributor to ESPN.com, and then allegedly used this fame to scam would-be business colleagues.
• Ashton Kutcher sure can get all high-horse righteous when he’s denouncing the sex industry. But perpetuating racist stereotypes in commercials—that’s something he apparently doesn’t mind at all.
• Some people don’t want to be Americans anymore. They’re one-percenters trying to flee tax evasion charges.
• Former Wall Street operative Alexis Goldstein describes the milieu of Big Finance as a place where people strive…

to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.…

Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.