While we all would’ve preferred the Major League Soccer title game to include Sounders FC, the fact that the game took place here anyway (it’s a “neutral site” affair, like the NFL Super Bowl) was still a great cap to a great maiden season for bigtime soccer (or as bigtime as it gets in the US) in Seattle.

The afternoon before the big game, fans played a pickup game of street ball at First and Pike. This was literal street ball, 30-second dash plays in the middle of the intersection during its four-way WALK lights.

And if the Sounders couldn’t get to the MLS Cup, at least it was won by the non-LA, non-superstar squad.

Last week, the UW football squad won its first game in more than a year. Today, it won its first important game in an even longer time.

And what a game it was.

The dreaded USC, longtime 500-lb. gorilla of the Pac-10 Conference and current #3-ranked team in the nation, was expected to trounce the lowly Huskies. Instead, a last-second field goal created one of the biggest upsets in Husky history.

I love it, I love it, I love it. (Did I tell you I love it?)

…and best wishes to top local music producer Conrad Uno (Young Fresh Fellows, PUSA, and more). He and his lovely bride Emily Bishton renewed their wedding vows at Safeco Field on Sunday. The here-linked Seattle Times article mentions almost nothing about Uno’s musical career.

…just where Link light rail will take us starting next month, I found myself directed to a Google Maps page that still includes the Longacres horse racing track. Alas, Longacres disappeared in 1992, when the World Wide Web was little more than a glint in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes.

By the way: The light rail’s initial southern terminus, the “Tukwila-International Boulevard Station,” is smack dab in the middle of nothing but Sea-Tac Airport’s outer sprawl. There will be a shuttle bus from there to the airport terminal until December, when Link’s own airport stop’s ready. I’ve found no official word on whether any other Metro routes will be revised to stop anywhere near the TIB. Right now, none do, except for a couple of commute-only express runs.

But I’ve a less hectic day-work schedule this week, so let’s try to catch up on the recent news:

• Microsoft’s new on-campus mall includes a miniature, officially licensed “Pike Place Market” area. Like all of the MS “Commons,” it’s open only to MS employees and guests. This is wrong on more levels than I want to enumerate here, but I’ll settle for just a few concerns: Does it include the Athenian Inn? Farmer-run produce stalls? The magic shop?
• 
  Can you dig it?: It’s official. The Alaskan Way Viaduct will be replaced by a tubular hole in the ground beneath First Avenue, a hole which won’t have exits to downtown or Belltown. Bah.
• 
  Otherwise, our Democratic-controlled Legislature behaved very GOP-esque. It passed an all-cuts budget, decimated social services, and quietly shut down any talk about making our state tax system less regressive.
• 
  Sand clogs the pipes at the Magnolia sewer plant, due to all the sand put on city roads last December. Hey, let’s make a new artificial beach!
• 
  GM to dump thousands of jobs, hundreds of dealers, and the whole of Pontiac. (Oh yeah, Saturn and Hummer are gong away too; but my urban-hipster conditioning prevents me from mourning Hummer, and I’m too old to have any teenage memories of cruising the strip-mall roads in a Saturn.)
• 
  Sounders FC’s off to a smashing start; while the Mariners approach their ’01 glory days. Nice.

IT’S MID-APRIL, and that means two topics are filling the op-ed sections across America’s newspapers:

(1) Calls for income tax “reform” (i.e., commentators wishing lower taxes for members of their particular favorite subcultures, and higher taxes for members of other subcultures); and

(2) Conservatives (plus a few highbrow-academic liberals) pontificating prosaically about baseball as The Most Perfect Thing On Earth.

I happen to like baseball. I just don’t like most of the people who write about it as some secular/sacred rite.

Herewith, some of the real resons folks such as George Will love the sport:

• It’s got lots of numbers and stats. Those academic types love such abstract-logic building blocks. So much more fun to keep track of numbers and stats than to follow a sport where raw athletic prowess makes more of the show.
• It can be long and boring, and hence reward its diehard adherents with the sanctimonious feeling of being able to appreciate something that puts ordinary people dozin’.
• It’s not based around a male sexual metaphor. Instead of relishing in something as crudely pagan and life-affirming as symbolic insemination moments (like football, soccer, hockey, et al.), it symbolizes an obsession Republicans can more easily identify with–
• It’s all about control vs. chaos. That PBS miniseries five years ago noted that baseball’s “the only game where the defense controls the ball.”
• The defensive star is at the literal center of the action. A soccer or hockey goalie merely stops offensive attacks. A baseball pitcher, by contrast, is the start of every play, the instigator of all action, the man who’s personally credited with winning or losing the game for the whole team.
• The game ends with the regaining of control (i.e., an out). The only exception is a bottom-of-the-last-inning play that scores a go-ahead run. The offensive side can only cause enough moments of chaos that cause enough damage before order is regained.
• It has a historic hierarchy. Major League Baseball as we know it was formed in 1903. The same 16 teams were in the same 11 Northeastern cities for 50 years. And in most of those years, the three New York teams regularly stood atop the standings; the old St. Louis Browns and Washington Senators regularly occupied the cellar. Everywhere else, baseball was “The Minors,” teams graded AAA to D and usually controlled by a major-league team’s farm system.
• A “Perfect Game” is one in which nothing happens. In bowling, the only other major sport to have the concept of a perfect game, such a game is one in which everything happens.

But you don’t have to dislike baseball just because certain tweedy butt-kissers like it. There’s plenty to enjoy about the game. If the Repubs can root for the defensive players who maintain order, you can root for the hitters and runners who, every so often, succeed in breaking through for glorious moments of triumphant chaos.

TOMORROW: James Twitchell, an academic author who (hearts) the culture of marketing.

ELSEWHERE:

• If you liked the They Might Be Giants cover of “Why Does the Sun Shine?”, here’s the original, along with the rest of the Science Songs LP series! (found by Memepool)…

I keep wanting to know what Go2Guy thought of the Huskies’, Zags’, and Sounders’ spectacular wins. He’s not there. What entertainments do Gene Stout and William Arnold want me to feel guilty about missing this weekend? No way to know. Tomorrow, the Sunday preview paper will bear only the Seattle Times name. Which, if any, P-I comics will be carried over into it?

…for the know-nothing videophobes in our audience (ignorance of your culture is NOT considered cool):

• Bill Maher asked Newark mayor Cory Booker why America’s economy needed to keep growing all the time; doesn’t everybody already have more than enough? Booker quietly reminded him that not everybody does. Another guest, bio-ethicist Peter Singer, chided Paul Allen for devoting too much of his charity money to projects in the affluent Northwest; Booker chimed in with the observation that plenty of folks and organizations in the NW could really use that money.
• Angie Mentink on Fox Sports Net Northwest, during a postgame discussion of the UW men’s hoops team and its historic Pac-10 regular-season title, on why the team and its fans should save some celebration energy ’til after the Pac-10 tournament: “There’s a difference between feeling ‘happy’ and feeling ‘satisfied.’ It’s something I’ve tried to teach my husband about.”
• A Today segment discussed frugal living with a tabletop tableau of “simple life” stuff—a Netflix envelope, a Scrabble board, a package of store-brand toilet paper, a drip coffee maker, etc. Excuse me, but you think we haven’t already familiarized ourselves with these?Unless the show’s producers are on the vanguard of a new media meme. Let’s call it “the upscale downsizing.” This schtick is to talk about economizing precisely for people who haven’t had to economize. It demographically separates the newly downscaled from those of us who’ve already been here a while.

Bonneville International, which just regained ownership of KIRO Radio last year, will switch KIRO-AM to all sports talk next April. KIRO-AM’s news and news-talk fare will move exclusively to 97.3 FM.

Thus will end more than 35 years of what was successively billed as “KIRO Newsradio 7,” then “KIRO Newsradio 71,” then “710 KIRO.” (Each more precise frequency reference responded to the prevalence of more precise tuning displays on car radios.)

KIRO-AM is one of the city’s oldest stations. It goes back to the Old Time Radio golden age, during which it amassed a larger collection of CBS Radio network recordings than CBS itself had (a collection of phonograph records that’s now owned by the UW). It eased into a middle-of-the-road music and news format by the early 1960s.

In the early 1970s, Bonneville spent its way to the top of the local ratings by ditching the DJs (except on weekends) and hiring a full news reporting staff.

I heard Nixon’s resignation speech on KIRO. I heard the start of the first Gulf War on KIRO. The voices of Bill Yeend, Dave Ross, Jim French, the late Wayne Cody, et al. are permanently etched in my brain’s ROM.

It was weird, on Election Night, to bring a cheap, FM-only portable radio to my temp office site and try to listen (during a dinner break) to NPR’s blathering “analysis” of returns that hadn’t come in yet. KIRO had already begun simulcasting its news-talk on FM, but I couldn’t pull in that signal from where I was.

But that’s one reason why they’re doing this. The public now associates AM talk with looney right-wing demagogues. FM is now where the targeted demographic audience segments go for everything except sports (with a few notable exceptions such as KIXI and KPTK).

LET ME BE the first to bestow the most freakin’-obvious nickname onto the Mariners’ new manager: The Intentional Wakamatsu. Thank you, really.

SOME 3,000 WAMU HEADQUARTERS STAFFERS could lose their jobs in the next few months. Three thousand bankers hitting the pavement at once won’t be a good thing for all the local consumer industries (from real estate on down to doggie daycare) that have staked their futures on catering to the upper professional caste.

And where are we gonna place all these idled IT techs, comptrollers, paper pushers, junior flunkies, second-tier poobahs, and adjustable-rate adjusters? Michael Moore, on Larry King Live, suggested any automaker bailout be predicated on making the automakers start making what we need to have made (public transit infrastructure, post-petroleum vehicles). But what kind of make-work project can we create for bankers? Can we (and by “we,” I really mean Gates and Allen) launch a massive startup employing hundreds upon hundreds of bureaucrats to create an eco-friendly actuarial table? Or will we see panhandlers outside the WaMu Center tower holding professionally designed signs reading WILL WOO-HOO FOR FOOD?

The Beijing Olympic opening ceremony is the most yin/yang-y spectacle of opposites ever created outside of Hollywood (or the Lucasfilm compound in NoCal).

It’s military/industrial regimentation on a mega-massive scale, put into the service of harmony, humanity, and beauty.

It’s a cross between Busby Berkeley and Bollywood, achieved with a brutal precision that counteracts all the romanticism.

It’s both amazingly beautiful and ultimately scary.

…(see below), last Tuesday apparently saw the demise of Procter & Gamble Productions. This would also mean the end of sponsor-owned programming as a regular feature on the old-line broadcast networks.

When network radio was launched in the U.S. in the 1920s, networks would sell whole blocks of time to advertisers. The advertisers, in turn, would hire ad agencies to create and package both the commercials for the advertisers’ products and the shows that would surround the commercials. Procter and its soap-making competitors were the main sponsors of melodramatic daytime serials; thus the nickname “soap operas.” One of the first of these, The Guiding Light, was originally sponsored by Procter’s “P and G White Naphtha Soap.”

When TV came along, so did sponsor-owned programming. But TV’s higher production costs meant such ventures as The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Camel News Caravan faded from view.

But Procter & Gamble Productions (PGP) continued, like the stories on its shows. At its 1982-84 peak, PGP controlled 25 hours of network programming per week (more than Fox or The CW broadcasts these days).

Through PGP, P&G financed the shows and exerted both censorship and hiring control over them. But the shows’ actual production was subcontracted to ad agency Benton & Bowles. That agency disappeared some years ago in a series of global corporate mergers. Its TV-production unit was renamed Televest, then spun off as Telenext Media, which is apparently now an independent company.

(I know, this story’s getting to be as convoluted as any As the World Turns storyline.)

Anyhoo, on July 1, PGP’s name and logo disappeared from the ATWT and GL closing credits, replaced by that of Telenext. The shows’ official Internet message boards changed addresses from “pgpphoto.com” to “tnmphoto.com.”

Without any official notice of what, if anything, has changed, online message boards are rife with speculation.

Some users claim P&G must have sold off its interests in the shows. That wouldn’t be out of character with the company’s recent spate of portfolio-shuffling. (In recent years P&G’s bought Tampax, Gillette, Braun, and Clairol, while selling Comet, Duncan Hines, Crisco, Jif, and Folger’s.)

Of course, the credit change could just be a matter of semantics. But many of these message-board users have complained about P&G’s (mis)management of the serials, including drastic budget cuts on GL and its alleged cold feet concerning ATWT’s current gay-love storyline. Some of these users say they would like the shows to become independently owned.

Of course, even the deftest indie producer would have to be pretty clever to effectively confront the daytime-soap genre’s collapsing ratings and revenues.

But that’s a topic for another day. Tune in again.

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.