happy bite of seattle consumers

• Food vendors, start your engines. The City Council likes you.
• A Vancouver news site describes last month’s Canuck riot as a desperate attempt by the city’s young males to momentarily escape “a state that could be described as a deficit of the real, which is dangerous and unstable place, full of unfocused outrage and an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement that constantly simmers just below the surface.”
• As past allegations of phone tapping, computer hacking, and other dirty dealings resurface against Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. businesses (which still aren’t directly implicated in the current U.K. phone hacking scandal), Peter Cohan at Forbes suggests News Corp. shareholders would have themselves a much more robust business if it weren’t for Murdoch, his kinfolk, and their insistence upon continuing to run newspapers.
• One anti-tunnel measure stays on local ballots; a second gets kicked off by a judge.

• One of the ex-News of the World editors allegedly being investigated in the phone-hacking scandal—CNN star Piers Morgan.
• Why film industry incentives in Wash. state should be brought back—not just for Hollywood location shoots but for home-grown productions, like the Spokane production co. trying to sell a network sitcom.
• What we miss with Sonics basketball gone—$100 million dollars in economic activity per year.
• A West Seattle nursery owner faces foreclosure, due largely to Bank of America bureaucracy.
• A gay activist infiltrated Michelle Bachmann’s hubby’s “therapy” operation and now claims, yes, the outfit does attempt to make people “ex-gay.”
• The Scott Walker junta in Wisconsin has gotten lotsa money and advice from a right wing foundation once led by a John Birch Society boss.
• Lori Gottlieb avers that “the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods.”
• A Microsoft mobile-software architect foresees a future universal operating system from MS, or a “single ecosystem,” encompassing PCs, tablets, phones, TVs, etc. But it might not carry the “Windows” brand.
• Good news! According to GQ, Seattle is only America’s 34th worst dressed city!

(Answer to yesterday’s riddle: The $25,000 Pyramid.)

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

all my children newspaper ad 1986

Just when we had programmed the ol’ DVR to record the final two months of All My Children, came word that it (and sister show One Life to Live) might just come back from the dead like Lazarus Tad.

ABC announced it had licensed both long-running daytime soaps to something called Prospect Park, a production company run by ex-execs of Disney (ABC’s parent company). The venture would continue production of new episodes, to be shown online only (not on broadcast or cable TV).

Given that online advertising draws far fewer bucks per viewer/reader than broadcast or print advertising, and given that no five-day-a-week scripted TV drama has succeeded anywhere but on the traditional big three networks (except the noble experiment that was Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), many commentators on soap-themed online message boards have doubted the viability of such a venture.

Now comes word that there might be a government subsidy involved.

Really.

The unconfirmed rumor is that Prospect Park was waiting for, and received, money from some grant program intended to help jump start “new media ventures.”

That’s just one of the many still unanswered questions about this supposed reprieve for two of entertainment’s most venerable brands, for stories that have unfolded for more than four decades.

When will they be revealed?

Apparently very slowly.

• Local business promoters have prepared an “infographic” hawking Seattle as the best place to start a hi-tech company.
• First, Sonic Boom Records said it would close its recently moved Capitol Hill branch. Now Everyday Music says high rents are forcing it out of its own site on the Hill. The store says it will move, somewhere.
• Seattle Goodwill tried several times over the past 12 years to redevelop its Rainier Valley campus. One scheme would have razed its beautiful mega thrift store for a Target. With the collapse of that and other concepts, Goodwill is finally going ahead with a limited plan to build a new job training complex.
• Alex Carson explains why “Seattle Mariners baseball is like an Elvis Costello album.” An album Carson hasn’t actually heard.
• In more tragic baseball news, a fan at a Texas Rangers game leaned over a railing to catch a ball and fell over.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna spoke to Young Republicans in Bellevue, and tried to have a Democratic Party operative kicked out of the room, even calling police.
• Meanwhile, a national “Christian Left” group bought ad space on Facebook for a quite inoffensive little message. Facebook pulled the ad after conservatives complained.
• A Portland judge approved a bankruptcy plan for the Northwest Jesuits. It sets aside more than $150 million for past victims of abusive priests.
• Meanwhile, a Centers for Disease Control report claims more than half of us had harrowing childhoods, “featuring abusive or troubled family members or parents who were absent due to separation or divorce.” In other news, Leave It to Beaver was never real.

• There’s a new theatre troupe in town. And it’s dedicated to works by local writers!
• Vancouver authorities continue in their methodical drive to track down and identify cell phone pix of Stanley Cup rioters.
• In today’s bring-back-the-Sonics blather watch, the owner of a Chicago minor league hockey team might (just might, mind you) be scouting sites for a new suburban arena. If this effort actually gets anywhere, know Seattle politicians will fight it.

• Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said he’d like to be involved in an effort to bring men’s pro basketball back to Seattle. But, he claims, there’s a “real estate problem.” This problem can only be solved with a new arena, which would cost $300-500 million. KeyArena, Ballmer asserts, is too small; though it’s actually well in the range of NBA arena capacities. What it lacks are more luxury boxes and an NHL-friendly hockey configuration. Ballmer also apparently didn’t mention that as long as the City of Seattle owns KeyArena, it won’t subsidize a new building that would compete for concerts and other bookings. Even if the city had the money, which it doesn’t. (Question: Could KeyArena be expanded again without knocking down the nearby Northwest Court complex?)
• For decades, University of Washington administrators have chafed at the presence of all those pesky college students walking around, diverting time and attention away from the world-class-research-institution stuff the administrators would much rather focus on. Now, the current UW bigwigs have come across a solution, in the form of a whoppin’ 20 percent in-state tuition hike. Students plan to protest.
• The federal government has indeed sold the former Rick’s strip club building. And yes, the new owner will probably open another strip club there.
• Howard S. Wright, the construction giant that built the Space Needle and Columbia Center, was sold off to a Texas company.
• Could it really rain more at airports?

(Note: As was the case during my earlier flirtation with morning headlines circa 2007, these won’t necessarily appear every day.)

• Scientific American looks at scare stories claiming a pandemic of Fukushima-related infant deaths in the northwest US (i.e., here). Their conclusion: unneeded fear mongering “supported” by highly selective statistics.
• Still want something to fear? How about the “Big One” earthquake? Some folks at some conference in Portland say there’s a 10 to 15 percent chance of it showing up in the Northwest sometime in the next 50 years.
• Want an ultimate example of gay-related “You’re Doing It Wrong”? How about hating the commercialization of the gay pride movement, and using that as a lame excuse to trash storefronts (including many small businesses as well as chains) on Capitol Hill?
• Emerald Downs had a “horses gone wild” episode. Four humans were hurt, one really bad. One of the two horses involved was “put down.”
• Our ol’ pal Michael Upchurch had a SeaTimes review of a bio book about Zoe Dusanne, one of the unsung heroes of the Seattle art-gallery world. She was an African American woman entrepreneur who helped promote those 1950s “Northwest School” painters, and brought works by the NY/Europe big boys here alongside them.
• Sometime Seattleite Timothy Egan wrote a white-boomer-centric ode in the NY Times to the recently deceased Bruce Springsteen sideman Clarence Clemons. (During Springsteen’s peak years, Clemons was the only living black musician on many “album rock” radio stations’ playlists). At the Collapse Board site run by ex-Seattleite Everett True, writer Scott Creney gently yet thoroughly demolishes Egan’s anglocentric ode:

He says well-meaning things about whites stealing rock and roll from blacks — no mention of hip-hop though. Or what Clarence might have thought about playing to arenas and stadiums filled with next-to-zero black people. (Springsteen’s audience is pretty much exclusively white.) Or, for that matter, how Timothy felt standing in a room full of white people congratulating himself on America’s ability to successfully and peacefully integrate itself, due solely to the fact that there was a black guy in the band playing saxophone.

• Yay to New York for approving gay marriage. We almost forgive you for that dumb NYT paean on Fri., lauding the Portland Timbers soccer team for being almost as successful as the Sounders.
• In other sports news, the UW is soliciting naming rights to the soon-to-be-remodeled Husky Stadium’s “field,” starting in 2013 and continuing “in perpetuity.”
• Big corporations don’t want to be forced to reveal how their CEOs’ salaries compare to their average payrolls. Ah, poor zillionaires….
• Rolling Stone had a harrowing piece a while back about a teenage girl who set herself up as an Internet fashion plate and video blogger, only to attract adult lechers and worse.
• There’s a new art gallery in town, Prographica, specializing in “fine works on paper.” In one of those happy coincidences, its staff includes a UW MFA grad named Kimberly Clark.

This hour (as I’m writing this), Qwest Field (home of the Seahawks and Sounders FC) has officially been rechristened CenturyLink Field, after the telecom giant that took over the mourned-by-nobody Qwest.

It’s as good an official date as any to mark the end of the last of the Baby Bells, the seven regional landline phone companies created with the fed-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. (The other six re-merged into Verizon and “the New AT&T.”)

Pacific Northwest Bell was one of three old AT&T units spun off as “US West.” It was a phone company, run by phone company people, as the communications world began to change all around it. All was fine and dull for a decade and a half.

Then came Phillip Anschutz. I’ve mentioned the California mogul before here, principally in connection with his link to local anti-evolution advocates and to his ownership of the Examiner.com content-mill sites (which rely on “news” stories from unpaid writers).

Anschutz had bought the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1996, just so he could lay fiber-optic phone and data lines across its rights of way. When he sold off SP to the Union Pacific, he attained permission to lay lines along UP’s rights of way as well. Since this was the digital age, these lines could transmit voice, video, and data; though Qwest’s original principal business was long-distance phone service.

To further his business-to-business communications plans, Anschutz bought US West in 2000. Not long after came the complaints by local phone customers. Qwest was “slamming” home users, switching their long distance service to its own subsidiary without permission. Qwest telemarketed like crazy, calling customers at all hours to repeatedly offer its (weak, costly) cell phone add-on plans. Qwest underfunded its regulated landline business, to the point that it couldn’t install phone lines in new subdivisions on time. Unlike AT&T and Verizon, Qwest didn’t get into the cable TV business.

(On the plus side, Qwest refused to go along when the Bush-era National Security Agency asked phone companies to hand over records of everybody’s phone calls, for wiretapping purposes.)

Now, Qwest’s data, landline-voice, and business telecommunications services are owned by the company formerly known as Central Telephone, then Century Telephone (or “CenturyTel”). As an acquirer of other companies’ landline territories, CenturyLink already covered more square miles in Washington and Oregon than Qwest had serviced.

Oh, and some of us still remember another “Qwest”—the old record label run by ex-Seattleite Quincy Jones. Jones has announced he’s using the name again, now that nobody else is.

In a lot of cases, it was “nice” middle class boys n’ girls powered by alcohol and an anything-goes attitude. In other breaking news, the earth is round.

Up in the land of real health care and real ketchup flavoured potato chips, a few hundred dudes n’ dudettes used the Canucks’ dramatic collapse in the hockey playoffs as an excuse to rip it up in the streets, looting stores and setting cop cars afire.

Initial reports state the fracas may have been larger and more intense than the similar riots following the Canucks’ 1994 playoff defeat, but was contained more quickly.

Of course, Seattle had its own street riot in the 1990s. But ours was about petty things like global politics and trade; nothing this important.

I watched the game, and a little of the postgame riot coverage, at Teddy’s Off Roosevelt, one of Seattle’s major Canuck fan gathering spots. The crowd was noticeably belligerent  during the first period. But as the Boston Bruins expanded their lead, the Canuck contingent became more steadily morose. Drunken despair is just as futile as violent frustration, but can leave fewer cleanup bills and insurance liabilities.

A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.

Seattle sports fans are used to the national media giving their teams no respect. This NY Times blog entry about the Seahawks, by the paper’s crack political-statistics nerd and poll watcher Nate Silver, is easily the harshest dis of them all.

I know a LOT of people who are spending this day and upcoming night wishing a good riddance to this epic fail of a year we’ve had.

The economy in much of the world (for non-zillionaires) just continued to sluggishly sputter and cough. Thousands more lost jobs, homes, 401Ks, etc.

The implosion of the national Republican Party organization cleared the way (though not in this state) for a wave of pseudo-populist demagogue candidates who only appeared in right-wing media, because those were the only places where their nonsensical worldviews made pseudo-sense. Enough of these candidates made enough of a stir to take control of the US House of Reps., which they have already turned back over to their mega-corporate masters.

And we had the BP spill, continuing mideast/Afghan turmoils, violent drug-turf wars in several countries, floods in Pakistan, a bad quake in Haiti, the deaths of a lot of good people, and a hundred channels of stupid “reality” shows.

Locally, a number of ballot measures were introduced to at least stem the state’s horrid tax unfairness, while staving off the worst public-service budget cuts. They all failed.

And the South Park bridge was removed without a clear replacement schedule, the Deeply Boring Tunnel project continued apace, the Seattle Times got ever crankier (though it stopped getting thinner), and our major men’s sports teams were mediocre as ever. Seattle Center bosses chose to replace a populist for-profit concession (the Fun Forest) with an upscale-kitsch for-profit concession (Chihuly).

Alleviating factors: (Most) American troops are out of Iraq. Something approximating health care reform, and something approximating the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, both passed. Conan O’Brien resurfaced; Jon and Stephen worked to restore sanity and/or fear. The Storm won another title. The football Huskies had a triumphant last hurrah; the Seahawks might get the same. Cool thingamajigs like the iPad and Kinect showed up. Seattle has emerged as the fulcrum of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre. The Boeing 787’s continued hangups have proven some technologies just can’t be outsourced.

My personal resolution in 1/1/11 and days beyond: To find myself a post-freelance, post-journalism career.