• Fret not about Bill Gates’s pending retirement from MS’s day-to-day operations. The whole joint’s hardwired around his mindset. MS will continue to produce and market just as it’s been doing.
• Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to read/solve the NY Times crossword in the Seattle Times. No word on whether it’ll continue in the P-I.
• One more reason to quit smoking: A guy asks two Belltown lowlifes if they’ve got a light, gets robbed.
• Wash. state will boldly go where Greyhound no longer bothers to go, bringing intercity bus service to the state’s small towns.

• That temporary passenger ferry between Seattle and Pt. Townsend? Some folks would like it to be a little less temporary.
• Meanwhile, some guy’s hoping to start a commercial passenger train between Bellevue and Snohomish—just the thing for bringing new customers to my mom’s antique-mall spaces there!
• One way to annoy the sandals-and-wool-socks voting block: Propose mandatory licensing for bicyclists.
• The bus tunnel: Still shut.
• The American Stasi is on the watch for peculiar behavior at airports. Insert your own joke here.
• The White Christmas thang sure looked damn great yesterday afternoon, whilst I was returning to Seattle from northern realms. Could we get an encore?
• The local holiday ended in typical fashion, with the ceremonial State Patrol officer shooting a naked guy who was walking across I-5.
• Idaho police academy students got to choose their own graduating-class slogan: “Don’t suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], go out and cause it.”

…I hope, this evening (Friday), 6:30-8:30 p.m., for the fantabulous next book event starring yr. loyal web-author. It’s at Not A Number, an artistic and subversive gift and card shop on N. 45th in wondrous Wallingford.

IN OTHER, LESSER FRIDAY NOOZE:

• A shop after my own head, Bernie Utz Hats (sometimes inexplicably spelled “Byrnie” Utz), may or may not move next year. Seattle’s last downtown specialty hat store has been at Third and Union for 68 years.
• The next big thing, NW music-wise: That’s the current hype for Kimya Dawson, she of the K Records singer-songwriter stable, now featured on the Juno soundtrack.
• The bus tunnel is still shut.
• The Port of Seattle just got some worse news, in the form of a state audit questioning its spending and construction-project oversight.
• In the “DUH!” department, experts report that more commuters means worse traffic jams, drunk driving is a bad thing, the Bushies are stonewalling tougher fuel-economy standards, and the Okies want a pro basketball team.
• Willie Nelson’s giving $40,000 to charities in Vancouver USA, where he worked as an itinerant DJ back in the 1950s.
• Dumb criminal of the week: A guy who not only allegedly has sex with minors, but videotapes it, sometimes on public property.
• Feds are investigating whether Washington Mutual Bank deliberately used inflated property appraisals in selling mortgages.
• No Crocodile news, except for a benefit show for ex-employees on Sunday the 30th.
• The Neah Bay/Makah region along the Washington coast doesn’t just have rogue whalers. It’s also got ocean waves, which some believe can be used to make electricity.

• There’s finally enough funding to fully restore/rebuild the landmark Hat n’ Boots gas-station building in Georgetown. Yay!
• City officials now insist forcibly destroying homeless people’s camps is good for them.
• The bus tunnel was closed all day Wednesday and will remain closed Thursday. The culprit: The new computer system Metro installed to control all the tunnel’s systems. It’s not running MS Vista, is it?
• Is it really so bad for Port of Seattle cops to make a homemade music video showing off their anti-speeding radar guns? If it was made on public time with publicly funded equipment, maybe so.
• Nothing new on the “save the Crocodile” front.
• We DO know that the Comet has a new owner. We just don’t know who. (Let’s hope the new mgmt. hires less-unnecessarily-violent bouncers.)
• The Seattle School District wants to efficiently site a high school and middle school at the same location. Just think of all the ways the “tweens” could learn from the older kids: “You call that a beer bong? Let me show you how it’s really done.”

• To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Paul Allen and Amazon will get to build 160-foot-tall office buildings in South Lake Union.
• Can the Sonics be saved? Some say yes! Among them: MS head honcho Steve Ballmer. There’s a lot more dealmaking and haggling to go, though.
• What should be done with the ex-Public Safety Building block downtown, which has been a big hole in the ground for more than two years now? Some city officials (read: Mayor Nickels) would like a “civic square” project. This turns out to be, as you might have guessed, a privately-developed office/condo tower with a bit of a bricked public plaza at the base.
• Pike Place Market officials want to raise $80 million, presumably from public sources. They claim the money’s needed for essential infrastructure improvements, some of which weren’t done when the Market was “saved” in the ’70s.
• How to save Pt. Townsend’s tourist biz: How ’bout a passenger ferry direct from downtown Seattle?
• The SLUT’s first day of passenger service was interrupted for half an hour when somebody found a stray ball bearing in the track.
• Meanwhile, Lake Union businesses are already helping pay for the next phase of transportation improvements–additional bus runs on two existing Metro routes.

• It’s your first day to ride the SLUT, though city fathers hope it won’t be your last.
• Corporate consolidation hits the “alt” music world, as LA-based megapromoters have bought the Showbox and Showbox Sodo nightclubs. Ex-Showbox owner Jeff Steichen will still run the clubs for AEG Live/Anschutz Entertainment Group. That company’s owned by Philip Anschutz, the Denver financier and promoter of various right-wing social and political causes. Outfits he owns, in whole or in big pieces, include Qwest, Regal Cinemas, a string of free daily tabloids in DC, SF, and Baltimore, and the film company that made The Chronicles of Narnia and Atlas Shrugged. Organizations he’s supported include Seattle’s own Darwin-deniers at the Discovery Institute, as well as the astroturf lobby that’s been generating almost every “indecency” complaint sent to the FCC. It’d generally be safe to say he’s not the kind of chap indie-rock folks might want to give money to.
• Someone who’s likely one of Anschutz’s least fave politicians, Sen. Obama, made a quick campaign stop at the Showbox Sodo Tuesday.
• If you thought Rainstorm 2007 was dreadful, which it was, just be glad it didn’t wash away part of 405.
• My old hometown has become a leading source of weird crime stories lately. The latest: A father charged with drugging his own baby.
• Seattle’s rep as Eco-City USA? T’weren’t always thus.
• Should the City condemn land owned by the the Central Area Motivation Program and replace its food-bank building with a fire station? As you might guess, many say no.

• As the floodwaters from Rainstorm 2007 still linger, the blame game commences. Was the state laggardly in building Chehalis River flood control systems after allocating money to do so? Does Seattle have an insufficient drainage infrastructure? And, of course, does climate change/global warming have anything to do with all this unseasonably warm rain coming here via the “pineapple express?”
• Jones Soda’s CEO, whose surname (naturally) is Van Stolk, will leave the company at the end of the month. Jones’s massive growth in recent years has come with allegations of financial irregularities at the Seattle-based “boutique soda” marketer.
• Seattle was named #6 on a Brookings Institution list of America’s “most walkable cities.” Portland was #5. Washington DC (Brookings’ home town) made the top spot.
• Seattle Center’s future fate is still undecided, but one legacy building has a new, at least temporary, use. Seattle Opera will stick some staff members and scene storage into Mercer Arena, the former Seattle Ice Arena (home of the 1917 Stanley Cup champions!). The structure, which has also housed rock concerts, the old Seattle Reign women’s basketball team, and many other events, has been idle the past four years.
• The Lake Union streetcar finally has an official opening day. It opens for pubilc rides on Wednesday, Dec. 12. Yes, the clever folks who promoted the unofficial nickname of South Lake Union Trolley, or “SLUT,” promise to be on hand, proudly sporting “Ride the SLUT” T-shirts.
• Amateur film-based photography’s rapid decline hits home. PhotoWorks, formerly Seattle FilmWorks, is selling itself to American Greetings Corp. Seattle FilmWorks was originally a piece of American Passage Marketing, which posted gazillions of ad posters on college campus bulletin boards hawking everything from magazine subscriptions to term paper “research guides.” It originally bought Kodak 35mm movie film, repackaged it for still cameras, and sold it by mail in film-and-processing joint deals.

• Two suburban high school teachers took part in an antiwar protest. The administration wants to punish ’em. Students are rallying around ’em in support.
• It’s the first, probably exaggerated, snow scare of the season.
• How not to hide pot in your car: Package it as a Christmas present.
• The tragedy surrounding the failed UW-devised AIDS vaccine moves further from “noble failed experiment” toward “real scandal.” A UW researcher allegedly faked test data and altered lab images. (The researcher in question was conducting AIDS-related research not directly related to the vaccine trials.)
• Reverse-sprawl dept.: Ski maker K2’s moving its head offices from Vashon Island to south Seattle. The products will still all be made in China.
• The SeaTimes posits two Eastside transportation solutions: Add passenger rail, cancel plans to widen I-405.

The passing parade witnesses the demolition of the former Frederick Cadillac showroom, used more recently as the Teatro ZinZanni dinner theater, for a mega-high-rise condo project…

…and the arrival of what’s officially called the Seattle Streetcar, but is already unofficially known as the South Lake Union Trolley (for the acronymic possibilities), on a test run up Westlake Avenue. Passenger service is still tentatively scheduled to commence some time in December.

• Protestors almost stopped an Army cargo shipment from the Olympia waterfront to Fort Lewis. You’d think the officials in charge would know better than to sneak anything even peripherally associated with the Iraq war past the turf of Evergreeners….
• An Eastern Washington political scandal that doesn’t involve closeted gays: A newly-elected Republican member of the Yakima city council has admitted his wife posted a bunch of anonymous blog posts bashing the guy’s Democratic opponent.
• Just a week after the Roads n’ Transit referendum’s crash n’ burn, King County’s getting into the foot-ferry business. It’s taking over the Vashon-Seattle passenger-only route from the state, and looking into adding cross-Lake Washington service.
• Meanwhile, the county also planned to raise bus fares a quarter. It’s the first such rise in six years, and it comes just as County Exec Ron Sims is trying harder to push folks onto buses.
• And Gov. Gregoire says she’s taking over responsibility for planning and funding a replacement for the 520 bridge. R n’ T would’ve only funded a piece of the megaproject’s cost anyway.
• In a stunning blow to pundits who’d claimed last week’s local votes showed an anti-tax fervor, the measure to allow future school-funding votes to pass by a simple majority seems to be passing.
• In biz nooze, Redhook Ale Brewery (Seattle’s first microbrewer, dating back to 1982) is fully merging with Portland’s WIdmer Brothers. The combined firm will be based in Portland and maintain both companies’ brands…. Starbucks prepares to issue its latest financial results Thursday, amid questions whether the chain’s lost its way while supermarkets and fast-food chains add better cups o’ Joe…. Amazon.com’s launching an exclusive line of gay and lesbian themed jewelry items; visual motifs weren’t mentioned, but let’s hope they don’t include those ugly saturated-color rainbows.

…at 5 a.m. for the past week, ever since I had to last Tuesday.

That was Election Day around here, as you may recall. I was temping for King County Elections as a ballot tabulator.

I felt like a real big-city commuter, descending into the Bus Tunnel hours before dawn, clutching my traveling coffee mug like a security blanket. And this would be the day voters decided whether to become more of a big community, by moving further from the drudgery of the solitary commute toward the shared experience of public transit.

At least that’s how I interpreted the Roads-n’-Transit referendum. Yeah, it would add a lot of expensive, wasteful highway lanes. But it would also extend the fledgling light-rail line, perhaps from Lynnwood all the way to Tacoma. (I’d really like it to go from Tulalip to Olympia, plus branch lines along the 405 and 520 corridors. But the civic planning bureaucrats thought voters might prefer the healthy-but-unfamiliar taste of transit when mixed with the fatty-but-indulgent taste of roads. Who was I to argue?)

I was soon on bus route 174, the local to Sea-Tac, through the tunnel and the Sodo Busway, doglegging to Fourth Avenue South, then down the East Marginal Way industrial strip. It’s always been one of my favorite Metro runs. Especially during commuting hours. It’s a vehicle for working-class heroes and heroines on their way to Boeing, Jorgenson Steel, Associated Grocers, Costco, the Seattle Design Center, and assorted other living-wage employers. Along the way it passes such landmarks as Andy’s Diner, the born-again Christian vacuum cleaner store, the Western Bridge Gallery, the possibly soon-to-be-last Seattle Denny’s, and several surviving mom-and-pop motels.

My destination was a tired, sixties-era concrete office building on Boeing Field property, where King County had installed its Temporary Elections Annex (known internally as “The TEA”). I got off the bus one stop too far, requiring me to walk almost a quarter mile. They say it’s always darkest just before the dawn. This was an hour or two before the dawn and was plenty dark indeed, particularly with the low clouds and fog. Auto traffic was already getting heavy.

I entered the building, dropped my coat at the coat check, signed in on the sign-in sheets, picked up my temp ID necklace, and strolled into the Tabulation Room.

At 6:45 a.m., our supervisor (whom I’d previously met during a two-hour training session the previous week), gave us a short pep talk. Workers wheeled in steel carts bearing the courregated boxes containing vote-by-mail ballots. Promptly at 7, workers designated as “runners” handed some of the boxes to us.

In addition to the supervisor and four runners, there were political-party reps standing to one side, two computer operators (caged off from the rest of us behind outdoor chain-link fencing), and nearly 30 of us tabulators. This turned out to be far more than the job needed; I suspect administrators overhired because they wanted to test a ramping-up of the election procedures, in preparation for going to all-mail balloting.

Despite what you might have read on certain wingnut blogs in 2004, King County Elections runs a tight, efficient ship. Within one day of mailing out the ballots, they’d started to receive and process them. Every received ballot went through a series of steps in a series of rooms (opening, signature verification, checking for “overvote” errors, etc.) before it was boxed up and sent to tabulation. By law, tabulation could only occur on or after election day.

The tabulating process is a ritual in itself. First, I’d “break the seal” on the box (a plastic wristband-type device) with an envelope cutter. After double-checking various numbers written outside and on a slip inside the box, I ran the ballots (up to 300 per box) through the counting machine. (Yes, lefty conspiracy theorists, all the machines are from the dreaded Diebold Election Systems.)

It all output to a stack of server computers behind the fence. But the underlying technology is older than mainframes, going back to the punch cards that recorded the patterns for 19th century textile looms. King County’s machines now use optical scanning instead of punched “chads,” but the principle’s the same. A stack of cards gets run through a reading machine. The machine sees the proper marks in the proper places and sends word to add the proper digits to the proper tallies.

With such a major mechanical component to the process, there will, of course, be errant situations. Most of these involved faults with the mechanism that fed the ballots through the machine. These uncounted ballots were simply re-fed; the second run usually did the trick. Most boxes had one or two ballots with worse problems, including physical damage, that required them to be sent to the “dup” room (where staffers would duplicated their votes on fresh cards).

In 11 hours, as our supervisor told us the following day, my fellow tabulators and I processed more than 141,000 ballots. There was no real time to detect voting patterns; but I couldn’t help but notice that the ballots I got, which came from all over the county, expressed no great fondness for Roads-n’-Transit.

By the end of the work day, darkness had resumed outside. I had enough pep left to go drinking, at least briefly. That’s when I learned R n’ T was a goner, and with it immediate hopes for a comprehensive transport solution.

Then it was home, then to a quick bath and bed. Then it was a noise like the old Star Trek red alert sound. It was the new fire alarm in my building. Nothing threatening, just a kitchen fire on a lower floor; but it kept me outside in the cold for an hour.

Because of the relatively low voter turnout (do we still call it “turnout” after it does all absentee?) and the aforementioned overhiring of us temps, I had only 11 hours of further work over the rest of the week. The work I did get was calm, stress-free, rote procedural work, the sort of thing I tend to like.

Next year, the TEA will be replaced by an all-new ballot-processing facility in Renton. By next November, every ballot cast in the county will go through there, via the Postal Service (no more in-person polling places). Let’s hope it continues to go this smoothly.

And let’s hope I can learn to sleep in a little later.

P.S.: In case you were wondering, the more popular write-in candidate names I saw included Homer Simpson, Stephen Colbert, voters’ cats and dogs, and, in the Venus Velasquez race, “Ima Drunk.”

Sound Transit wants to extend its yet-unfinished light rail line all the way from Seattle to Tacoma. King County exec Ron Sims doesn’t like the idea.

This is an example of political turf-holding at its most basic. I disagree with Sims’s position, but respect him for taking it.

Part of Sims’s job is to promote King County as a place to live and work. Enabling easier commuting to/from Pierce County doesn’t aid that mission. It might even potentially harm that mission.

But in the big-big picture, we’re an economically integrated metroplex and had better start acting like one.

As Seattle becomes ever more haughty and costly, Tacoma’s more affordable housing is more vital. So is Tacoma’s status as a funky, unpretentious, working-class anchor.

Besides, I’d love easier car-free access to the Java Jive and the Fife Poodle Dog.

Danish engineers have been in town, researching the feasability of replacing the Montlake section of Highway 520 with a tunnel. Traffic, with its noise and unsightly bulk, would magically disappear under the ground, leaving upscale real estate in the area even more valuable.

I actually like the idea. If we must have more highway lanes from/to the burbs, might as well put ’em where we don’t have to see ’em.

Of course, there’s always the little bugger of what it would cost…

A Seattle Times Sunday editorial rejected the Roads and Transit ballot measure, following its Friday “expose” of Sound Transit light-rail construction costs.

Both pieces were built upon faulty reasoning.

About the supposed revelation of cost overruns, those “wasted” $5 million or so were out of a budget approximately a thousand times that high. Of course construction projects that drag on a decade or more are going to rise in price, especially during Seattle’s condo-mania when everything from concrete to cranes has been in overheated demand. The article failed to mention that if the original Sound Transit scheme had been approved in 1995, let alone the Forward Thrust transit scheme in 1968, we’d have gotten many more miles of light rail at a lower total cost.

And about the editorial’s assertion that we don’t need no new-fangled pubic transportation, that all we need to get around better is more and bigger highways?

The next day, the Monday Times’s big headline gave the startling news that people in Puget Sound country are driving less these days and taking public transportation more. The region’s vehicle population is still growing, but at a third its ’80s rate. And Sound Transit’s ridership has trebled since 2000. And that’s without light rail. Might the Times editorial board be persuaded to change its mind and acknowledge the value of adding more transit? Naaah…

AWAKENING FROM THE DREAM(LINER): Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner will now be at least six months late to its maiden flight.

Boeing says it’s due to multiple snags in the plane’s global outsourced production system.

So much for author Thomas Friedman’s claims about the world (of global commerce) being flat, Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat concludes.

Still, don’t expect Boeing to go back to making more pieces of its products itself. Global deals, political tradeoffs to get state-owned foreign airlines to buy the finished planes, you know…

FALLING DOWN: Shortly after the start of Sunday night’s Seattle Seahawks-New Orleans Saints football game at Qwest Field, NBC’s skycam mechanism fell from its high wires onto the field below.

The mishap occurred during a called time out. Nobody was on the playing field when the skycam suddenly became a groundcam.

Once play resumed, about ten minutes later, the Seahawks did all the crashing. The unsung Saints, in their first victory of the season, trammeled the hapless Hawks in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as its 28-17 final score. It was the Hawks’ second nationally-televised collapse in as many weeks.

THINKING GLOBALLY, PICKETING LOCALLY: The P-I Monday headline: “Stripped-down student protesters rush Macy’s aisles.”

The reality: Less flamboyant, more serious, more global.

Six female college students simply walked into the ladies’ room at the downtown Seattle store formerly known as The Bon Marche. They emerged clad in odd, but street-legal, garments assembled from black plastic trash bags. After 15 minutes on the premises, the six left to join 12 other female and male picketers outside.

The protesters’ slogan: “I’d rather wear trash bags than Macy’s sweatshop clothing.”

The protesters’ message: A statement of solidarity with unionized textile workers in Guatemala, who have been locked out by factory management. The factories in question, Cimatextiles and Choishin, make clothes for such U.S. brands as Talbot’s and Liz Claiborne.

DISSED FOR LISTENING TO DISSERS: Gov. Christine Gregoire’s been traveling the state, patiently listening to citizen gripes at town meetings. Republican Party operatives blast the meetings as a big political stunt.

Let’s figure this one out: When the gov, as part of her regular governing duty, hears the voice of the people, that’s “political.” But when, say, undeclared un-candidate Dino Rossi travels the byways to make himself heard, that’s just public service?

From here to the bigtime mainstream media, everybody loves the South Lake Union Streetcar’s new unofficial nickname, South Lake Union Trolley. Or rather, they love its juicy acronym.

And who wouldn’t love the SLUT?

Particularly since the acronym’s just so darned appropriate for a mini-transit system “railroaded” into existence by Paul Allen’s lobbying, whilst plans that would move more people thru more populous places (can you say Mo-no-rail?) get slowly hacked to death?

I expect all of you to be wearing your official unofficial SLUT T-shirts on the line’s opening day in December. Heck, you could even wear ’em at this coming Monday’s reopening of the downtown bus tunnel, another of Seattle’s under-two-miles transportation non-solutions.