…of the umpteen-dozen unexpected joys of cable TV. AT&T Broadband just added three additional Fox Sports Net channels, re-purposing sports programming intended for FSN’s 16 or so regional branches. Right now, I’m watching a minor-league baseball game involving the Brooklyn Cyclones, the team that’s boldly brought the pro game back to a borough still mourning the Dodgers’ move to LA 45 seasons ago. Besides shots of the Cyclones’ courageous game play and their handsome-intimate new Coney Island stadium, the telecast is full of commercials for local Brooklyn businesses. There’s a horseradish maker, a lobster restaurant, a lock-and-key store, even a cement contractor! Thanks to cable, these tiny family firms can televisually strut their stuff, and this non-customer 3,000 miles away can admire the utterly charming 30-second end results.

This same set of channels also brings me FSN’s Detroit Sports Report, which is actually produced in Bellevue, WA by Fox’s Northwest Sports Report team—same announcers, same set, same everything. I wonder if any Tigers fans ever wonder why Bill Wixey & co. have probably never been personally seen within 1,600 miles of Comerica Park.

(Too bad AT&T still won’t give me the Boomerang (classic made-for-TV animation), Showtime Beyond (young filmmakers), or ABC SoapNet channels.)

The Seattle School Board has just decreed that West Seattle High School’s sports teams shall no longer be known as the “Indians.”

Fair enough; about time, some of you might say. But the board also declared the name be replaced before the start of the next school year. That means the school’s students might not get to vote on a new name.

So it’s up to us, the loyal friends of youth, to help come up with some possible replacements.

The best new WSHS team name I can think of, the “Alkis,” isn’t a tribal name but does derive from the

old “Chinook Jargon” trading language, and hence might still be too native-oriented to qualify. (And besides, some say the name’s correctly pronounced “al-key,” something the authorities might not want to be associated with minors.)

Other possibilities, equally neighborhood-centric but more palatable, include “Admirals” (from the north WS business district) and “Cranes” (from the beautifully rugged cargo-container lifts flanking the Duwamish River). But there’s gotta be something better out there. Email me with your suggestions. I’ll pass them all along to the school officials.

INANE POLITICAL IDEA OF THE HALF-WEEK: Sanctimonious, bipartisan hypocrites in the U.S. Senate have drafted an all-purpose bill to allow police to shut down virtually any public gathering at which drugs might be consumed or even discussed—raves, Hempfests, neo-hippie country festivals, and potentially even scrictly political events at which someone might state that the war on drugs wasn’t a great thing. The bill has already passed one Senate committee. You might consider letting certain people know you think this stinks.

ONE OPINION WHY Americans might never get interested in the soccer World Cup: “The only way Americans are going to learn another country’s name is if it attacks us.”

NICHOLAS MURRAY WRITES: “Nineteen Eighty-Four has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere.”

JUST A WEEK AGO, I was cautiously optimistic but still slightly worried about the 2002 Mariners, who at the time were only 4-3. Since then, they’ve only won nine straight road games against division opponents. Oh, me of little faith…

THE SPRING PRINT MISC has now been distributed to almost all the local dropoff spots. If you still have trouble getting one, consider subscribing.

AFTER ONE WEEK, can we discuss the state of the ’02 Mariners yet? Well, we will anyway. Compared to last year’s once-in-a-lifetime April, this year’s Ms are a respectable but unspectacular 4-3. Three of those four wins were come-from-behinds; two of the three losses involved insufficient comeback rallies in the late innings.

Of course, this is only against three opponents (two of whom, the A’s and Angels, are division rivals who’ve surely spent a lot on scouting to research any possible Ms’ weaknesses). And admittedly, a 4-3 week still puts a team on a pace to win a not-bad-at-all 104 games in the season.

All one can do now is hope Weeks 2 through 4 reveal a Seattle team emerging to its fuller potential.

AFTER FAR TOO LONG, substantial changes have been made to this site’s two links pages, CyberStuff and Things I Like. Many dead links have been dropped or replaced; several new items have been added. Enjoy.

SCARY: Somebody’s writing threatening messages to Sonics players, and it’s not about the team’s mediocre home record this season.

SCARIER: The ugly truth about Clear Channel Communications, the octopus of U.S. radio that’s taking over KJR and KUBE.

I KNOW I’M NOT the first to say this, but the Canadian Olympic team roolz!

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA are finally discovering something I knew all along: “It’s cool to be Canadian!”

It’s only natural this discovery should happen during an Olympic Games, in which media critics (and thousands of other viewers) in norther-tier U.S. regions routinely discover the more thoughtful, less hype-centric CBC coverage.

CBC’s even more vital during a Winter Olympics, what with the Dominion’s traditional strength in hockey, snowboarding, and especially curling (the official World’s Greatest Game). This vitality was only serendipitously enhanced by the emergence of two Canadians as heroes of the current games’ biggest story.

It must be noted, however, that NBC’s coverage this time around is thankfully more CBC-like. That is, it’s more devoted (especially in its daytime blocks on MSNBC and CNBC) to actual sports coverage aimed at people who are, or could conceivably become, interested in the actual sports. Someone there finally noticed that with the network no longer airing baseball, pro football, or (after this season) pro basketball, it’d better start to do right by the one big sports package it still controls.

Over the past three biennia, NBC’s Olympics telethons drew fewer and fewer viewers, especially young-adult TV viewers, even though they’re a celebration of young-adult achievement. By dumbing-down the events and their storylines into ready-for-prime-time pablum, tape-delaying events and then showing only brief snippets of them in between interminable personality-profile segments (usually about workaholic athletes who don’t really have personalities), and by reinterpreting every event as The US vs. Those People, NBC made its telecasts a big joke to anyone who seriously participated in these sports and a squaresville turnoff to other young-adult viewers.

So this time, we get long(er) stretches of live (or, on KING, two-hour-old) events, with canned cutaway segments respectfully educating viewers on the events and their particular inherent dramatic qualities. The personality pieces are fewer, and include at least a modicum of non-US participants. (Of course, it helped the network that it had a real news story at the games to which it could give the OJ/Monica/Jon Benet tabloid treatment.)

I still prefer the CBC approach, though. For one thing, they’ve got much more curling. Also, they spent much less time reiterating every twist-N-turn in the skating-judging affair, even though it starred two Canadians. And its late-night shows are refreshing apres-ski entertainments built around the games’ outdoor concerts (several of which have starred Canadian performers). NBC has the same ol’ grating Leno, who just gets more Attitude-dependent and unlistenable as he approaches his tenth anniversary.

FOLLOW THE WAR-MOBILIZATION of America’s single most vital industry.

ONE MORE REASON I love the CBC: Tonight they ran a documentary about the first year of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, right after a one-hour profile of Olympic women’s hockey players.

…surprise-surprise, turned out to be A Real Game for once, instead of a rout or a dogged defensive stalemate. It went all the way to the last second with a long-distanct FG by the team all the experts said would never make it.

There’s just one discomforting aspect: The winners just had to be the team in red-white-n’-blue, even named the Patriots. It was an almost scriptable result right after a three-hour pregame show, a halftime musical bombast, and umpteen paid and unpaid ads, all full to the proverbial brim with flag-waving sloganeering and solemnities. The whole interminable ad campaign for “America” as a product even made the Britney Spears Pepsi spots look comparatively tolerable.

…on the field? Just look at the league’s regulations regarding what corporate logos its players can wear in public.

…those innocent Utah audiences tempted by figure skaters doing splits.

THE NEW YEAR opened with almost exactly the same Space Needle fireworks routine (seen here from halfway up Queen Anne Hill) that began the last year.

It’s as good a time as any for a year-in-review. In 2001, this region faced:

• A spectacularly horrific mass-murder-suicide attack back East, leading to the U.S.-led overthrow of a particularly odious Third World dictatorship.
• A massive economic slump.
• Skyrocketing electricity prices.
• The loss of Boeing’s HQ, thanks to a CEO who thought he could re-image the company to stock buyers as a financial-services company that also happened to make stuff.
• A daily-newspaper strike that ended with few employee gains.
• A Mardi Gras riot, followed hours later by a massive yet fatality-free earthquake.
• The closure of the OK Hotel (to the earthquake), Tower Books, Pistil Books, the Frontier Room, the Speakeasy Cafe (to a spectacular fire), the Rendezvous Bar/Jewel Box Theater, the Ditto Tavern, the Korean-owned gangsta rap T-shirt store at 3rd and Pine, the Washington Film and Video Office, assorted dot-coms (including HomeGrocer, Kozmo, MyLackey, and MediaPassage), and a couple of upscale mags intended toward the dot-com crowd.
• The deaths of journalist-historian extraordinaire Emmett Watson and Two Bells Tavern owner Patricia Ryan.
• Tenth-anniversary-of-Nirvana hype in the national media.

On the at-least-somewhat brighter side:

• The Mariners had a once-in-a-lifetime regular season. (We’ll forget about the AL Championship Series.)
• The UW football team won the 2000-2001 Rose Bowl (we’ll forget about the 2001-2002 Holiday Bowl).
• Evictions and demolitions of funky old buildings slowed down, thanks to a collapsed market for shoddy-yet-costly condos.
• Our own delicious print MISC mag blossomed into an even tastier broadsheet with nearly two dozen contributing writers and artists (thanks, cats and chicks!).

…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:

• Boeing fires Phil Condit; cuts costs by closing the fancy new Chicago HQ, establishing a less top-heavy corporate structure, and installing a smaller main office back in Seattle.
• The new Seattle Seahawks football stadium is named after the largest consistently-profitable company still based here. At Costco Park, all soft drinks come only in 24-packs.
• Two National Hockey League teams in U.S. small markets go broke. One moves to Winnipeg, the other to the Tacoma Dome.
• Baseball commissioner Bud Selig gets “contracted.”
• New York Mayor Bloomberg is forced to resign amid worldwide public outcry over his plan to tear down Yankee Stadium.
• Inventor Dean Kamen shows off a working, affordable, two-seater solar car. Every Republican state governor in America vows to never allow the thing on the streets.
• The major record labels lobby for emergency “survival” legislation allowing them to retroactively cancel all artist royalties whilst setting up government subsidies for executives’ mansions and cocaine budgets.
• Clever rust-belt entrepreneurs form a joint company to buy up underused and/or abandoned factories and mills. Their clothes, shoes, DVD players, garden tools, and other products all carry the same patriotic-themed brand name (perhaps “AmeriMade”). Their ads’ message: If you’re not willing to pay more for an AmeriMade product, you’re a bin Laden sympathizer.
• Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives, despite endless rants emanating from Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, the Wall St. Journal, The McLaughlin Group, etc. that anyone who doesn’t vote a straight Republican ticket is a bin Laden sympathizer. The new Congressional leadership begins to openly ask whether permitting further broadcast-media consolidations would be unwise.
• The New Republic runs a lead editorial admitting it is no longer a “liberal” magazine, and hasn’t been since 1983.
• Amazon.com becomes “profitable” by spinning off all its slower-selling product lines (hardware, appliances, sporting goods, etc.) to co-branded joint ventures with traditional retailers. The hardware operation, f’rinstance, becomes “Jack’sHometownHardwareAndBaitShop.com, Powered by Amazon.”
• Osama bin Laden is found in November on a remote island just like a soap-opera villain, having had plastic surgery to look like a whole other person.
• A cheap, simple-to-manufacture AIDS treatment drug is announced. Unfortunately for Muslim African leaders, it turns out to be made from reprocessed pork semen.
• High definition (or at least medium-high definition) TVs finally become popular, chiefly for viewing DVDs.
• Politicians in slumping tourist states propose Nevada-style regulated brothels, sparking a rift between the corporate and moralistic branches of U.S. conservatism.
• Gangsta rap completes its disappearance from the music scene when its last major audience (white mall kids) collectively decides it would rather pretend to be Mexican.
• An NFL head coach admits reports that he’s gay.
• Somebody figures out how to turn a profit from a “content-based” website. But the formula’s still too labor-intensive, and the potential return too low, to interest any but the smallest mom-and-pop sites.
• A major retail chain is reorganized as a co-op of local store operators.

FOLLOWING THE TRAGIC November crash of a jetliner in New York City, the press and the government spokesfolk repeatedly proclaimed there were “no apparent links” between the crash and the terror attacks two months previous. In a world wracked by acts of deliberate harm, the authorities felt a compelling need to reassure all of us that accidents indeed still occurred.

Herewith, some other major and minor tragedies with no, repeat NO, apparent links to terrorists:

• The Mariners’ failure to win the American League pennant.
• The Ash Wednesday earthquake.
• Dead dot-coms.
• Your loser boyfriend who wanted you to have sex with his dad as a Christmas present.
• Sappy Meg Ryan movies.
• Pro basketball’s continuing domination by the Lucking Fakers.
• Oldsmobile dying; Isuzu continuing to live.
• The ex-roommate who keeps making collect calls in your name.
• The boss who keeps threatening to fire you for not doing what she never told you she wanted you to do.
• Your girlfriend always wanting to do it when you don’t, and never wanting to when you do.
• The Napster shutdown.
• An “economic stimulus” bill that gives everything to corporate management, nothing to the unemployed.
• Cell-phone contract terms.
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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