Clay Bennett’s minions have been making public statements that could only properly be responded to by laff tracks. The latest: After fielding as lousy a team as they could, moving the Sonics’ radio broadcasts to a comparatively low-rated right-wing-talk station, tarting up the Sonics Dance Team’s routines and costumes, and generally behaving like twerps, Bennett’s dudes now claim there’s no real Seattle interest in the team. As King Kaufman at Salon puts it, “This is a little like a kid who murders his parents, then begs for mercy because he’s an orphan.”

…is the new Oregon State men’s basketball coach. This means only one thing: We’re all Beaver Believers now.

Broadstripe (formerly Millennium, formerly Summit, formerly Seacom), the “little” cable company with a big image problem, has finally added a bunch more hi-def channels. They’re all versions of brands you know and love—TNT, TBS, A&E, History Channel, National Geographic, Lifetime Movie Network, and (for a little extra) Showtime.

So far, so good. We get TNT’s NBA playoffs (including, alas, the Lucking Fakers) and TBS’s baseball games (no longer exclusively starring the Braves) in their full-res, widescreen glory. The same goes for some movies, recent off-network reruns (Lawn Order: Assorted Flavors), and “reality” faves such as Ax Men (northwest Oregon never looked so beautifully foreboding).

But, and this is something Broadstripe can do nothing about, sometimes these channels aren’t showing HD material. (This is usually when they’re simulcasting the same shows as their famous parent channels.) That would only be a minor annoyance, except these channels then ruin this material by altering it into that fake-widescreen stretch-O-vision. Sometimes, even movies that were originally made in widescreen will get cropped and then stretched into unviewability. And you can’t “squeeze” it back into its proper proportions; you can only search out these shows on the channels’ regular standard-def incarnations.

The worst offender: Lifetime Movie Network, whose shelves of moldering ’80s-’90s made-for-TV victimization-and-revenge tales are almost all stretched out like digital Silly Putty comics.

The City of Seattle might build a new jail on the current Aurora Avenue site of the beloved Puetz Golf driving range.

After multiple restructurings and selling off its iconic U District office tower, Safeco Insurance has allowed itself to be eaten by Liberty Mutual. Now there’ll be one fewer corporate board to hit up for charitable donations, one fewer set of bigwigs to serve on blue-ribbon civic improvement task forces. And they’re not yet talking about how many head-office troops will be fired. But the Safeco brand will remain, which means the signs on Safeco Field stay up, at least for now.

As predicted in many quarters, the NBA’s team owners voted to pursue commissioner Stern’s screw-Seattle strategy. Only our own Paul Allen (representing the Portland Trailblazers) and Allen’s pal Mark Cuban (representing the Dallas Mavericks) said no.

It’s not over. Not by a buzzer-beater long shot.

But the way to save pro basketball in Seattle won’t be pretty. In fact, it’ll be as ugly as this past Sonics season.

Essentially, we’ve gotta keep litigatin’ to keep the team through the two more contracted seasons on its KeyArena lease; all the while assembling all the ingredients of a privately-financed, NHL-capable arena. Two different groups are trying for this. Let’s make it happen.

Saturday just happened to be the first warm day of the year; a perfect setting for the already much-documented Dalai Lama show in the pro football stadium, where he talked about compassion and coexistence for all people.

(No, I see absolutely no cynical irony in that. American football is a game of confrontation, but it’s also a game of cooperation.)

His message, and the other messages at the Seeds of Compassion confab, have been both simple and deep. I’ll probably have more to say about them later this week.

Later that evening, I found myself at the Georgetown Art Attack gallery crawl. Saw some lovely informal paintings at Georgetown Tile curated by my ol’ pal Anne Grgich; then caught some great buys at the Fantagraphics bookstore’s scratch-and-dent sale.

Sunday brought us the last day of the last bowling alley north of the Ship Canal, Ballard’s totally beloved Sunset Lanes.

It was also the day of what just might have been the last pro basketball game in Seattle. Maybe. If we don’t do something about it.

Even after a deliberately thrown season, the finale was sold out. Fans booed the home team’s owner Clay Bennett, and cheered the opposing team’s owner (Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, who opposes Bennett’s desired team move to Oklahoma City). You saw little to none of this on Fox Sports Net; under terms of its contract with the team, FSN’s announcers said almost nothing about Bennett’s threats or the real importance of Sunday’s game.

Also Sunday evening, and this takes the whole entry full circle, CNN held what it called a “Compassion Forum,” in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (appearing separately) discussed their religious and/or spiritual foundations. Of course, because they are rival applicants for a really big job, some pundits just had to compare and contrast who’s really the most faith-based.

…has compiled pix of regular people who look sort of like squarer versions of famous people, and placed them under the group title “If Celebs Moved to Oklahoma.” Not included: Kevin Durant or Kevin Calabro.

…a few days since we last met. But here are some recent events in the nooze:

• A plan’s been announced to keep the Sonics, or move in some other NBA team to replace ’em. Yeah, it involves public arena subsidies. But the arena in question would still be our good ol’ KeyArena/Coliseum. And private interests would pick up a huger share of the tab than in any previous scheme. Of course, there’s the li’l matter of convincing current owner Clay Bennett and NBA commissioner David Stern (who hates Seattle even more than the Seattle Times editorial board does).
• No matter how much money the UW raises in its many assorted fundraising/begging programs, it just keeps on making tuition ever-less affordable. Congress doesn’t like it.
• Some self-styled radical environmentalists want to preserve exurban forest lands from sprawl. Their solution: Set fire to an unoccupied cul-de-sac, a fire which, if set at some other time of the year, could conceivably spread and burn said forest land.
• The first televised Mariners game of the pre-season is on local cable at noon today (Monday). I know it’s a game that doesn’t “count,” but hey, neither did the Ms’ last 20 or so games last season.
• Once you start looking into Port o’ Seattle corruption, it can truly become a bottomless pit.
• How to get high school kids interestedin reading newspapers: Run sensational surveys of students’ oral-sex experiences. (Hey, it’s the taste sensation that’s sweeping the nation!)
• Airbus, with a domestic company fronting for it, got the Air Force tanker plane contract Boeing really really wanted. Next stop: litigation.
• Here’s what to do the next time you see a bus with an unconscious driver heading your way.
• Since certain right-wing radio guys have no qualms about using or misusing people’s names in order to make character-assassination implications, let’s compare Vladmir Putin’s handpicked successor/flunky Dimitry Medvedev with the locally based GOP-talk spewer Michael Medved: One is a sniveling, butt-kissing toady to a ruthless, anti-democratic despot with delusions of godhood. And one is the new President of Russia.

…on the Obama speech soon. You can read about Clinton’s Tacoma event at Horse’s Ass. In other nooze:

• You won’t get to shake it like a Polaroid picture much longer. The company’s shutting down production of instant-film cameras, and will stop selling the film next year. A moment of silence for the billions of instances of immediate gratification past.
• That pitching ace the Ms were out for? Signed.
• Golf’s U.S. Open is coming to Tacoma (at a public course!) in 2015.
• A Seattle police officer has been fired after a particularly heinous abuse incident, involving an underage suspect and a patrol-car partition.
• All three of Washington’s major mountain passes are closed at the same time.
• The Mountaineers Building (nee the Norway Center) on Lower Queen Anne: Yep, it’s been sold. Yep, it’ll be replaced by yet another six stories of mixed-use.

…discover the shocking fact that skiers like snow in the mountains. In other nooze:

• The UW’s latest big fundraising campaign hit its goal five months early. No word whether they’ll just keep going to fund that new stadium remodel.
• Capitol Hill activists hope to prevent another spate of gay-bashing crimes this next summer.
• Driving in snowy mountain passes is tough. Attacking a snowplow driver sure doesn’t help.

…if any of you find these morning headline thangs useful. I find them useful, at least. So without further ado:

• There’ll be another Sound Transit referendum. We just don’t know when or for how much.
• But there won’t be legislation to provide state funding for a Husky Stadium rebuild.
• There’s a heartwarming human interest story about several local radio vets and legends who’ve put together an online radio station with the aid of Seattle Community Colleges, streaming the sounds of Seattle airwaves’ past.
• More Port of Seattle shenanigans were recently unearthed, including a sweetheart deal to cover up cost overruns on the Sea-Tac third runway.
• Seattle’s homeless population is up 15 percent from the last “one night count.”

…for Evening Magazine went lovely yesterday morning. We shot at a variety of locations, including the freshly re-closed (alas) Andy’s Diner and the under-destruction Rainier Cold Storage building.

Elsewhere in recent days:

• Blood bank bias. Say that five times fast.
• The next local company to potentially get bought out: Getty Images.
• Today’s AT&T: Wannabe Internet censors.
• Washington Mutual used to call itself “The Friend of the Family.” We didn’t know “the family” meant its own top execs.
• Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren: One more year, then it’s quits.
• With all the hoopla concerning oil spills and sludge, one can forget that diesel watercraft pollute the air too.
• This is the dawning of the age of asparagus.
• More Catholic boy-abuse claims are made, this time dating back to the 1950s.
• A research study by two “nonprofit journailsm organizations” concludes: Bush lied. A lot.

• 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.

…a fountain of snowflakes descend upon the frozen tundra of Green Bay, I knew the gods would be with the other team, not with ours.

In other Sunday nooze:

• I’m briefly quoted in a SeaTimes obit for Gunther Woerne, who ran Woerne’s European Pastry Shop in the U District for several decades.
• How’s historic preservation going here these days? Eh, so-so.
• Could “social networking” dot-commers save the Crocodile?
• Damn, there was more gunfire outside a Belltown bar; this time the Spitfire Sports Bar.
• So-what’s-new dept.: A state ferry’s been drydocked for some needed fixing.