(My apologies if that word-wraps weirdly in your browser.) As we await the potential end of at least one party race, knowing we’ve got our own state caucuses this Saturday, here’s some other nooze:

• Bush’s budget has good news for Sound Transit, bad news for education and health care.
• The Legislature’s working on relief for tenants of condo-converted apartments, just as that trend seems to be reversing.
• Oregon had gay marriages, then it didn’t. Now it’s got “domestic partnerships.”
• Georgetown: Potential haven for live theater groups displaced by gentrification elsewhere.
• Tully’s Coffee, which has turned a profit in exactly one of its 16 years, might be for sale.

And these are among the stories you might discuss at work, on the bus, or in chatrooms:

• A “person of interest” is in custody in the New Year’s Eve stabbing on Capitol Hill.
• A stage musical based on the Shrek movies premieres in Seattle this fall. As you all remember, the plot of the first Shrek film involved an egomaniacal feudal lord who wanted to banish from his realm anything funky, funny, strange, or otherwise less than upscale. Seattle will be a perfect place to retell this. Speaking of which…
• Will any arts groups be left at the Capitol Hill Odd Fellows hall after the new landlord’s done raising the rents?
• Bush decreed the Navy doesn’t have to follow environmental regulations; allowing sonar transmissions no matter what they do to whales. Remember: The military is here to protect.
• The SeaTimes points with pride to a volunteer patrol that’s helping drive the hookers away from Aurora Avenue. Of course, without the hookers, all Aurora has to offer is the Beth’s Cafe 12-egg omelet.
• Reversing past trends, the developers of a partially-built condo project in Lower Queen Anne will instead convert the building to rentals.
• The Seattle Monorail Project will soon settle its affairs and shut down; while vague plans for an Eastside commuter rail line begin to take shape.
• The revised date on a city hearing to discuss preserving the endangered Manning’s/Denny’s building in Ballard: Feb. 20.
• State Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, would like the Legislature to go on record supporting Bush’s impeachment.
• Not so painless: The anesthesiology staff at Northwest Hospital asked for a pay raise. Instead, the hospital’s CEO fired them all.

…we must say goodbye to one of the legends of “outsider” music, risque cabaret singer-songwriter Ruth Wallis. The creator of “Davy’s Dinghy,” “Drill ‘Em All,” and “A Pizza Every Night” had finally been (re) discovered in recent years with an off-Broadway revue of her compositions, Boobs! The Musical.

The Moore Theatre threw a delightfully casual centennial party Monday evening. It was a textbook lesson in how to mount a fun, populist gala. It hewed to the spirit of the Moore’s original purpose as a vaudeville palace.

The above view is from the now seldom-used top balcony. Originally, this was the only part where black patrons could sit; it was accessed from a separate side entrance.

Theater personnel gave informal tours of backstage areas. Buskers performed outside and throughout the lobbies. Free drinkies and snackies abounded. Original posters and playbills hung everywhere.

Civilians were invited to consume wine and popcorn on stage, while one act after another appeared: Operetta, tap dancing, trapeze, burlesque, modern dance, standup comedy, folk music, soul music.

The night started with an old-time theater organist. It closed with a pick-up rock band, including guitarist Kurt Bloch and singer Kim Virant.

Would that all theatrical parties were this much fun. (Hint hint, Seattle Repertory Organization.)

You know those yuk-yuk news items this past Thursday and Friday, about Seattle-based FBI agents staging a raid on magician David Copperfield’s Las Vegas prop warehouse? It’s not so funny now. Turns out to involve a rape accusation.

I haven’t mentioned it much here, but I’ve been admiring the online scribblings of HorsesAss.org’s David “Goldy” Goldstein. Most recently, he’s lucidly compared the totally-made-up faux-controversy over a newspaper advertisement with the classic play/movie Betrayal.

…a handy list of 10 steps toward a fascist nation; while “Gareth” ties Wolf’s list in with the recent organized disruption in Boston of a theatrical monologue by our ex-local pal Mike Daisey.

…has called it quits after 36 years, six locations, hundreds of productions, and a huge 2004-5 fundraising drive that was supposed to have saved it. Apparently director Alison Narver couldn’t get her Jeopardy!-loser brother to finagle a donation from Ken Jennings after all.

• The NBC coverage so far has, as my fave TV critic Aaron Barnhart calls it, “less fluff, more stuff.” Fewer interminable human-interest profiles of the participants, more footage of them participating. They’re even showing the greatest winter sport of them all, curling, live on CNBC! (Too bad NBC’s HDTV transmission can be so spotty at times, due to excess signal compression.)
• The opening festivity was a mishmosh of Cirque du Soleil-esque pomposity and truly heartfelt symbolism, such as when the Olympic flag was carried in by eight women from around the countries (though you had to have watched the CBC telecast to have learned about some of these women’s intense political activism).
• Two-man luge!
• Did I mention lots of curling in the US coverage? (But strangely enough, almost none on CBC, which farmed that part out to Canadian cable channels which we can’t get down here.)
• The downhill ski courses with painted boundaries, which the skiers have to keep from crossing.
• Women’s hockey.
• Women’s speed skating.
• The incredibly complicated (and therefore funner) new figure skating scoring rules.
• Just enough return-from-gruesome-injury moments to keep from overdoing the shtick.
• Non-USA athletes are winning a lot, and we even get to see it.

The 12th Man flag is back up on the Space Needle (or, as my pal Angelina calls it, the Spice Noodle) after having been taken down Friday night for Windstorm 2006. The pregame hype-athon is already underway. I’m psyched. I’m primed.

My big dream last night: The game’s inexplicably taking place on a Monday afternoon. But I miss most of it because I’d rather see a small intimate concert (at some place like Gallery 1412) by a noted female performance-art star who tells seriocomic monologues, accompanying herself on the cello. It’s a fascinating act, but I leave as soon as I can to catch the fourth quarter. I run to the nearest bar (ok, the nearest bar I like, which in this dream world happens to be in south Wallingford on Lake Union).

By then, the Hawks are behind 7-3; it’s apparently been a dogged defensive battle. But sure enough, our boys come through with a fumble recovery leading to a TD run in the last five minutes. (The refs spot the ball as being down within the five yard line, then our boys stick it in on the subsequent play.) The rest of the game is spent holding the other guys’ offense, a task which seems almost lost when the other guys complete a bomb pass into the red zone. But subsequent pass plays are broken up, including one in which the football lands helplessly on the ground in the end zone. Subdued celebrations commence throughout town, aided by a beautiful, unpredicted, gentle snowfall. (There are even snow flurries back inside the stadium, which in the real world won’t happen at the domed Ford Field.)

(Snow, as some of our longtime readers may know, has always symbolized boyish innocence and unfettered joy to me.)

The dream game’s results, of course, don’t predict the real game’s results. But they do reflect my own attitude.

I’ll watch the game at a WiFi-less bar, so don’t expect blogging-in-progress. I’ll write a big post-mortem later today or early tomorrow.

Immediately after the new Belltown Messenger came out, I buried myself into a freelance project that won’t see the bright light o’ day for another month. So here are some of the things that have happened this past week or so:

RONNIE BARKER, RIP: In the early ’80s, during one of my many long-term bouts with chronic depression, I became utterly fond of the Two Ronnies sketch comedy show, which KING-TV had picked up (yes, a BBC show airing an American commercial station, albeit at 2:30 a.m. or some such.) The station had just introduced 24-hour telecasting (the first in Seattle to do so), filling up the wee hours with moldie-oldie movies, repeats of the 11 p.m. news, and BBC imports brought over here by Time-Life Television. The Two Ronnies was the best of this motley schedule. It featured cute skits, whimsical monologue stories by Barker’s partner Ronnie Corbett, and fake news bits aqt the beginning and end that relied on time-tested comedy shticks and wordplay rather than anything “topical.” Barker was a genius. And now, as he would say, “It’s goodnight from him.”

AUGUST WILSON, RIP: With the beloved playwright’s demise, Rebecca Wells now ascends to the niche title of the best writer living in Seattle who never writes about Seattle.

STRIP UPDATE: Because a judge stopped ’em from maintaining a permanent “temporary moratorium” on new adult entertainment clubs, the Seattle City Council adopted a draconian set of restrictions on how they can operate. Like the late, unlamented Teen Dance Ordinance of the mid-’90s, this is a not-so-thinly disguised attempt to harass an unwanted entertainment genre into nonexistence. A Reuters dispatch claimed the move was ironic in the face of Seattle’s “liberal,” “tolerant” reputation.

I could’ve told ’em different.

What the nation sees as our supposed blue-state radicalism is really baby-boomer smugness; i.e., just another kind of conservatism. We’re a city whose sociocultural establishment thinks glass bowls are “art” and easy-listening sax solos are “jazz.” We’re a city that loves “diversity,” as long as it’s limited to upscale white women, upscale white gays, and dead black musicians.

We’re a city that only tolerates sex if that scary-sticky-gooey topic can be subsumed under a more acceptable rubric such as individual “empowerment.” So we embrace a certain peep-show parlor where a thick glass curtain keeps the genders neatly apart; but an establishment where women and (gasp!) men could share the same space, even (shudder!) touch one another? Must be stopped!

At least there’s some solace that four City Council members bravely voted against the ban-in-all-but-name, and that affected entrepreneurs are already planning to take the city to court.

…to two of the Seattle arts scene’s most successfully assertive promoters: Glynn Ross, who jump-started Seattle Opera and raised it into a major institution with its regular Ring Cycle performances, and Linda Farris, the pioneering Pioneer Square gallery owner and visual-art saleswoman without peer.

…in the Pike Place Market a lot lately. Here are some shots from a recent “Sunset Thursday” promotion.

This same evening was the Pioneer Square art crawl, which included this promo performance by part of the Circus Contraption troupe.

…since we’ve posted pix here. To atone, here are some acquaintances who held a li’l conceptual-art spectacle called The Brides of March last Saturday, in front of what you must still call “The Bon Marche,” or at least “The Store Formerly Known as the Bon Marche.”

Yes, I’m absolutely certain the Moore Theatre management knew what it was doing by this juxtaposition of posters in its box-office window.

This mullet obsession is annoying enough in places, such as Seattle, where it’s a retro-ironic fad. But in other places, such as this warehouse near the Everett commuter-train station, the metalhead hairstyle never went away.

Just a couple of guys in miniskirts and deliberately torn stockings, dancing to the Fame soundtrack on Broadway last week.

And to conclude for today, something we ran years ago, in a reader-submitted photo. Now we have our own visual document of the mighty MISC shipping line. This stoic cargo ship was seen docked at the Interbay grain terminal, wihch is now operated by the Louis-Dreyfus Corp., commodity merchants and traders since the 1850s. (You might have heard of a certain heiress to that family fortune.)

…opening ceremony live on CBC (one more reason Canada’s a cooler place). The thing’s a big, gaudy, lovely performance-art spectacle (think Cirque du Soleil) with gods, lovers, classical art, philosophy, history, and huge nude male sculptures.

The celebration of Greek history within the show, like most accounts of that proud nation, lingered on the ancient/classical days and rushed through everything since. As the ceremony’s parade of live tableaux depicted it, the fall of Greek creativity didn’t stem from the Romans’ conquest but from the rise of that late-Roman religion, Christianity.

PS: Yeah, the original Olympic athletes were all male and naked. But there were even more differences between then and now; some of which involved the eternal contradiction between democratic ideals and slavery.