That’s at least one potential explanation why his occasional public remarks are sounding less like the sayings of a Zen master and more like those of Yogi Berra.

The official MLB.com baseball scoreboard page lists completed games as “Final,” except for the game today involving the Nintendo-affiliated Mariners (who won, yay!). A completed Mariners game is denoted with “Game Over.”

…playoffs begin with Seattle fans once again relegated to spectator status, Danny Westneat suggests a simple, elegant solution. If the Sonics/Storm owners put up as much money as they would have put up for a new suburban arena, let’s get the state and/or county to front the remainder of what it’d take to fix up KeyArena (hey–remember that joint?) with a bigger food court and a few more tiers of seating. The teams not only stay in Seattle, they stay in Seattle. Everybody’s happy except the sports-hating hippies (and the owners, if they were really only looking for an excuse to move the franchise).

…Sonics/Storm owners now say they wanna split town, after the State Legislature failed to sign off on one singularly lopsided arena-subsidy proposal. The cynics are already saying that was the owners’ plan all along–to make one halfhearted offer and then promptly go east.

The amazing thing about him wasn’t that he became a “colorful local celebrity” as a lowly beer vendor in the old Kingdome. It was that he successfully capitalized on that fleeting celebrity. As a disc jockey on the old KXA-AM, he proved eminently capable of holding an audience’s attention with little screaming and no visible body language.

…will stay in Seattle at least one more season. But they still wanna go to the former Cirque du Soleil site in Renton as quickly as they can get the public to pay for it.

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.”

Yes, lowly OSU has outplayed the University of Spoiled Children, in the college-football upset of the year.

And a heads-up to baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, who won the World Series (or, as one might alternately say, the Detroit Tigers lost it).

The former UW football star and early NFL great was best known locally for the namesake diner-bar he ran on Broadway for some 50 years. Generations of hipsters fondly recall Steele’s lovable but gruff presence behind the bar, ready at a moment’s notice to snipe at any young whippersnapper who dared to rest an elbow on a table.

…do on the air, if you’re a playoffs baseball announcer: #3. Hurl an ethnic slur at Lou Piniella.

…(can you even imagine he used to be on SportsCenter?) expounds again, this time on why it is indeed possible to criticize Bush without being a terrorist sympathizer.

…since a post to this site. What can I say except (1) I’m sorry, (2) I’ll try to do better, and (3) I’ve got some great print work I’ve been workin’ on that’s comin’ at ya real soon?

Meanwhile, our Capitol Hill Times friends have a full list of all the beer and wine products you can’t buy downtown anymore. Yet that abominable California product sold under the once-respectable Pabst name still remains freely available.

Autumnal conditions gracefully settled into the greater Seattle area on Tuesday, Sept. 12. We’re cloudy and cool once again, and will probably stay this way, more or less, for the next six months. I like it. If you don’t like it, here’s the URL for Florida real estate.

How high are fans’ expectations for the Seahawks? Let’s just say they’re undefeated, but not undefeated by enough.

And the UW Husky footballers are doing better than expected, having won two squeakers.

Roq La Rue’s Tiki Art Now 3 exhibit is still up. If you go this week, you’ll probably have a more pleasant viewing experience than was had by we who attended the packed-to-overflowing opening night.

I’m sending off the page proofs of my next book, Vanishing Seattle, to the publisher today. There’s only a slight chance copies will be available prior to Xmas; but you’ll still be able to preorder. If you do so through MISCmedia.com, you’ll get a truly lovely gift card to let your lucky recipient know of the memorable reading experience awaiting when their copy does arrive.

Excuse us if we’re not yet really impressed by the newly corporate-approved legal movie download hype. Even if one (1) of the services is Mac-friendly. At this point in time, those physical artifacts known as DVDs still provide greater selection, higher image quality, (usually) lower consumer costs, and fewer pesky rights-management shackles.

It looks like Seattle First United Methoidist Church may move to Belltown after all, even as its previously announced deal with developer Martin Selig goes pffft. Under the new deal, rival developer Nitze-Stagen will take over the church’s historic sanctuary for commercial uses, put an office tower on the rest of the church’s existing land, and help the church buy the Third and Battery site Selig was going to give away to it.

Tomorrow’s primary day here in WashState. I beg of you to all get out and defeat the far right’s highly funded drive to pack the state Supreme Court with anti-environmentalists.

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.

…to my ol’ alma mater Oregon State, this year’s national college baseball champs. You can’t lick our, well, you know…