1931 soviet book jacket; new york public library via allmyeyes.blogspot.com

• Love old timey design elements in photography, fashion, furnishings, books, posters, ads, packaging, and everywhere else? Then you’ll love Linda Eckstein’s fastidiously curated site All My Eyes.
• Conversely, Angela Riechers at Print magazine’s site disdains all this obsessive old-schooling. Riechers claims the world of graphic design, and perhaps the world as a whole, is becoming infested with “toxic nostalgia.” Among the symptoms she sites is Churchkey, the Seattle microbrew beer that comes only in cans that require an opener.
• Amazon’s sales rose 29 percent over the same quarter last year. But the company reported almost no profits, thanks to big investments in robotic warehouse systems. (Remember what we always say when robots are in the news: “Nothing can possibly go wrong….”)
• David Brewster found someone to take over management of the local-punditry site Crosscut. He’s a longtime functionary at the Gates Foundation. Let’s see how well he can transition from a nonprofit that doesn’t have to raise money, to one that needs to do a lot of that and soon.
• At the end of a long rant, Paul Constant describes Mitt Romney as:

A cowering man in a suit on the screen, waving his hands in front of his face and begging Robocop not to kill him for profiting, for draining the United States dry and exploiting the pain and hard work of others, for doing what businessmen do.

• Meanwhile, Devin Faraci at something called Badass Digest describes The Dark Knight Rises as feeling “like it is composed entirely of knee-jerk conservative nonsense.”
• A (non-cable-dependent) TV network tells you how you, too, can cut the cable.

• Because we need them, here are more memories of J.P. Patches from City Councilperson Jean Godden and from KING-TV’s Evening Magazine.
• The local media were confused about the new downtown Target. It really opens on Sunday, not today (Wednesday). No, it was me who was confused by the store’s official statements. It did have a “soft” opening today.
• Ex-mayor Charles Royer, who also co-chairs the Central Waterfront Committee, strongly disagrees with Knute Berger’s assertions about the cost of the waterfront remodel project.
• Good news transit-wise: Third Avenue, Seattle’s primary bus street, may look a little less seedy in the months ahead.
• Bad news transit-wise: Metro is shortchanging the Magnolia neighborhood. Under current plans, all bus service to that semi-detached area will shut down at 9:30 p.m. starting in September.
• Chick-Fil-A’s official homophobic policy is related to its official “Christian” policy.
• Sherman Hemsley, 1938-2012: All in the Family’s first Mr. Jefferson was Lionel, who appeared in the first episode in 1971. Lionel’s father George remained an offscreen character for more than two years. Producer Norman Lear wanted Hemsley for the role, but he was contractually tied to the Broadway play Purlie. Lear instead used Mel Stewart as George’s brother Henry until Hemsley could appear. Then in early 1975, CBS needed a rush replacement for the tanking sitcom Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers (yes, that was the show’s full title). A pilot for a Jefferson family spinoff was hurriedly prepared and aired as an All in the Family episode. The resulting series lasted eleven years, still a record for a scripted show with African-American stars. (And in a totally unrelated note, Hemsley allegedly loved prog rock.)

dangerousminds.net

kiro-tv via marty corey

The last time the city seemed in this much mourning over a single death was for another media personality, Dave Niehaus. And he’d only been part of the Seattle zeitgeist since 1977.

Wedes had been western Washington’s surrogate dad since 1958, when he starred in KIRO-TV’s first local show on the station’s first day on the air.

He’d already played several kidvid roles on Minneapolis TV. He took over the “J.P. Patches” character name and makeup design (originally a creepy unibrow look) from another Twin Cities actor, then took that with him to Seattle.

Even after most of the other local kids’ hosts around the country hung up their respective hats, KIRO kept the Patches show going. Even the legendary network show Captain Kangaroo had only its second half-hour seen here, because J.P. commanded the 7:30-8:30 a.m. hour.

At his peak, Wedes had a morning show, an afternoon show, and a Saturday morning show to boot (Patches’ Magic Carpet). Along with loyal sidekick Bob Newman (as Gertrude, Ketchikan the Animal Man, and assorted other characters), Wedes masterminded a mostly ad-libbed realm of clever wordplay and character-based gags. He didn’t really do normal “clown” bits, such as juggling or pantomime comedy. J.P. was a character all his own, who just happened to wear greasepaint.

Ensconced in his “magic house” at the City Dump (which, in real life, was where the University Village mall is now), he presided over a supporting cast of humans, quasi-humans, and puppets (almost all played by Newman), going through happy little comedy skits and slapstick storylines in between cartoons and commercials (the latter of which Wedes performed live until the Feds said he couldn’t anymore).

And he kept doing it until 1981, well after national advertisers and cartoon syndicators stopped servicing his kind of local shows. At its end, it had been the longest-running local kids’ show in the country.

KIRO kept him on the payroll as a floor director until 1990.

And he maintained a personal-appearance schedule, donning the costume and the makeup for everything from county fairs to Soundgarden concerts.

A statue of J.P. and Gertrude was erected in Fremont in 2008. A version of the show’s set was rebuilt at the nearby History House. Archie McPhee’s made a bobblehead figure. Wedes and Bryan Johnston co-authored a coffee-table book of Patches show memories. Wedes and Newman appeared on several KCTS pledge-drive specials, built around home-video compilations of the show’s existing episodes (of which, alas, there aren’t many).

Finally, Wedes felt the need to stop these appearances last autumn, when his blood cancer got too bad.

But the love remained.

His show’s purpose had been to sell sneakers and junk food to impressionable tots. But he had a sincerity that shone through both the jokes and the merchandising.

And people got it. Even people who’d not seen the original show, but had only known Wedes from the later live appearances.

To close, here’s what KIRO’s retrospective newscast quoted Wedes as having been his show’s only message: “Have fun, take care of your parents and your brothers and sisters, and be a good friend to everyone.”

buzzfeed.com

• Some nostalgist at Buzzfeed has put together a boatload of ’80s kitsch ad art, mostly from early home-computer magazines. All the unicorns, rainbows, building-sized MS-DOS computers, and disco babes in slips you’ll ever need.
• Then, you can look at how low kitsch ad art has descended since then with Bad Ebook Covers.
• Yes, it is possible for Microsoft to lose money.
• At The Daily Dot, “The Hometown Newspaper of the World Wide Web,” we learn that:

1. local web-comic and gaming fan site Penny Arcade is trying to become user supported via a Kickstarter fund drive, that
2. a females-only meetup for local Reddit.com users became the target of “online harassment” by sexist boors, and that
3. you’ll be able to register to vote in Wash. state via Facebook.

• Our ol’ pal Ronald Holden does the math and concludes that, no, the Athenian in the Pike Place Market is probably not one of America’s 10 most lucrative restaurants.
• Wash. state is #3 in both home computer ownership and home Internet use. #1? Utah. (Those publicly-prim Mormons gotta get their net porn.)
• Forbes cites the Seahawks as the world’s 25th most valuable sports team. That sounds cool, until you find out that of the 24 outfits ahead of ’em on the list, 15 are other NFL teams. (#1: UK soccer powerhouse Manchester United.)
• There are a lot fewer new small businesses in America these days. One potential reason: a “radical concentration of power” in the economy, especially in banking.
• The snarky eco-advocates who staged the phony Shell Oil press conference at the Space Needle have expanded their anti-Arctic-drilling campaign with fake billboards, including one right near Shell’s Houston HQ.
• DUH of the Day: Big companies that don’t pay their workers much, by and large, could afford to do so.
• At least one wag now claims that “Mitt Romney will not be the Republican nominee.”
• Crawford Kilian at Vancouver political blog The Tyee explains how the Ayn Randians’ utopia would be a thorough dystopia for everybody else:

Future John Galts would have to sleep in castles, behind a wall of guards protecting them from us. A philosophy that detests the “gun” of government coercion would survive only by imposing such coercion on everyone else. The masters of a Randian society would rule a wasteland of clear cuts, poisoned streams, and empty seas, except for those patches they personally owned and protected.

• Yep, there are dumb sex-advice magazine articles for men too.
• To learn about a culture or an era, learn its slang.
• Tom Davis, 1953-2012: The original Saturday Night Live writer-performer was, and will be, always known as Al Franken’s partner in a series of sharp, stinging skits. Franken then went on to radio and the U.S. Senate. Davis went on in and out of assorted addictions.

There was a competition going on for short films about Seattle. Some of the entrants (at least they seem like they could be) are showing up online. F’rinstance, here’s a poetic ode to the city by Riz Rollins; and here’s Peter Edlund’s Love, Seattle (based on the opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and dedicated to team-and-dream stealer Clay Bennett).

• Health scare topic of the day: “Rabit bat bites.”
• Online scare topic of the day: “We’re all Internet addicts, and we’re screwed, says Newsweek.”
• Those hipster fashionistas at Vice magazine have devised a “Wheel of Punk,” a wheel chart proclaiming what is the most and least punk. The punkiest, in their summation: “Pre-Rollins Black Flag.” The un-punkiest: the Eagles.
• Unpaid Plug O’ the Day: My fellow Stranger refugee Inga Muscio has a “Stop Thinking, Start Writing” class starting here in Seattle later this week.
• Another year, another round of public college fee hikes.
• Another year, another plea to finally get ourselves a progressive state income tax.
• PETA ranks Safeco Field as baseball’s second most “vegetarian friendly” ballpark. #1: would you believe Philly?
• Yep, Senate Republicans don’t want you to find out who’s funding their campaigns.
• “The average Canadian is now richer than the average American.” And not just in Canadian Tire Money.
• There’s a commercial for tourism to Colombia with the slogan “The only risk is wanting to stay.” Forget about those pesky drug wars. Just enjoy the quaint cities and unspoiled beaches. They’re saying this openly and forthrightly.
• It’s one thing to see Photoshopped® fakes of movie stars’ heads on nude models’ bodies. But when a guy sticks Frida Kahlo’s head on nude models’ bodies (bodies that obviously don’t have the real Kahlo’s injury scars), some Kahlo fans get righteously pissed off.

Tuesday was WB-Day in greater downtown Seattle and much of the south end.

In this case, I mean not Warner Bros. but Wave Broadband, the locally based company that’s taken over the bankrupt, inferior-in-so-many-ways Broadstripe Cable.

On Tuesday, starting about 12:20 a.m., the new Wave channel lineup began to “propogate” on my DVR.

Some of the new channels are walled behind new pay-tiers. These include Boomerang (retro cartoons), Ovation (arts and classical music), Comcast SportNet (Portland TrailBlazers basketball), and the Fox and MGM movie channels.

But there are still new fun attractions on the basic and digital-basic tiers, channels Comcast customers have had for some time: IFC, Current, This TV (KOMO’s digital sub-channel).

But the big (or rather, wide and crystal-clear) news is the added hi-def lineup. We now get the HD versions of KSTW (at last), CNN, MSNBC, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, AMC, TCM, Discovery, the Science Channel, and several more.

The Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Whale Wars, and the like are the sort of big-country spectacle that’s just not worth watching in ordinary-def when you can get it in fabulous-def.

Then there’s the likes of Factory Made and Build It Bigger. I’ve come to call these shows “Work Porn.”

You watch them in the day, when you’re sitting with the TV in the background and a laptop in front of you, staring at online job applications.

You see them working. Up and about. Doing stuff. Making stuff.

You get to live vicariously through their active days.

Then when it’s over you realize you’re still sitting with a laptop in front of you at home.

youchosewrong.tumblr.com

• Ever feel like life’s one big choose-your-adventure book and you’re hopeless stuck on the wrong path? Then enjoy these unhappy endings at “You Chose Wrong.”
• It turns out that with NBC taking full control of MSNBC.com (it already wholly owns MSNBC TV), some or all of the website’s 80 Redmond-based editorial positions will move to the New York region. Just what I need: more laid off journalists in the Seattle area competing for the same scarce jobs.
• The teases of an Almost Live! reunion have been partly revealed. The new venture, The (206), will be an online, not broadcast, series. (This probably means short self-contained skits, not half-hour package episodes.) The only announced performers so far are John Keister, Pat Cashman, and Cashman’s son Chris.
• Got construction or construction-management knowhow but not a job? Do as Gordon Lightfoot said and be Alberta bound.
• When sunscreen is outlawed in Tacoma schools, only outlaws won’t have face blisters.
• KPLU remembers the Seattle (specifically, Cornish College) roots of avant-music giant John Cage.
• Kitty Wells, 1920-2012: The original “queen of country music” had a rawer, less subdued sound and image than Patsy Cline (the only female country singer urban hipsters have heard of, still). Wells’ biggest hit, “(It Wasn’t God Who Made) Honky Tonk Angels,” was an answer song to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life.” Today, only country historians remember the latter.
• The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only “online newspaper,” might disappear by the end of the year. The real Daily, thankfully, is here to stay.
• Huffington Post blogger Spencer Critchley (which would be a great character name for a romance-novel hero!) says Romney’s guys are foolishly running a TV-style campaign in the Internet age. By this, Critchley isn’t talking about ad expenditures so much as the operating mentality, imagining that a candidate’s superficial “brand image” is all that matters.

the bon marche at northgate circa 1956, via mallsofamerica.blogspot.com

• Emily Badger at the Atlantic pontificates that “The Shopping Mall Turns 60 (and Prepares to Retire).” Malls are actually 62 years old, counting from Seattle’s own Northgate. Badger’s timeline dates from urban planner Victor Gruen, who published a prototype concept in an architectural magazine two years after Northgate opened. (The one thing Gruen’s design had but Northgate hadn’t (yet) was a roof on the central plaza.) Badger is right, though, that malls have passed their peak as American institutions. The last new one opened in ’06; big-box stores and strip malls have stolen a lot of their business and clout.
• After years of speculation, MSNBC.com is now wholly owned by Comcast/NBC Universal. It’s immediately been renamed NBCNews.com. Microsoft sold NBC its half of the online joint venture, having divested its interest in the same-named cable channel back in ’05. NBC claims the site’s Redmond-based staff will stay in the Seattle area. [Update: 100 techies will stay here, but around 80 editorial jobs could move to New York.] Microsoft claims it will start its own news site later this year.
• Meanwhile, a recently-unearthed NBC documentary about the deep south during the civil rights struggles reminds us that, at the time, many white southerners actually believed that black people liked being segregated.
• Trend-analyst Richard Florida never said the rise of the “creative class” would be a panacea for the professional caste, or for the cities that hope to attract this caste.
• A hockey fan site ponders what the heck Seattle’s anti-arena factions are thinking:

There aren’t many cities that would seriously consider turning their backs on an investment of nearly $300 million in private capital within their boundaries, particularly during trying economic times.

• Celeste Holm, 1917-2012: The Oscar-winning film star and venerable stage actress had been in financial straits in her latter years. She was estranged from her family after she married a 41-year-old opera singer when she was 87. One of those family members was son Theodor Holm Nelson, the computing visionary who coined the term “hypertext” and inspired much of the conceptual underpinning of this whole WWW thang.

• A note to marketers everywhere (not that they’ll ever listen): As soon as you bill something as being “For Women” (not any specific women, just “Women” as a single mushed-together whole), a woman who doesn’t identify with your targeted “psychographic” will cry foul. Latest example: Pix, an iPad-based “photography lifestyle magazine for women.” It’s full of fluffy fashion, make-up, and shopping tips, and light on the notion of photography as a serious endeavor or of its readers as serious people. Bringing in the deserved snark is Stella Kramer, Pulitzer-winning photo editor (and Seattle punk-zine pioneer).
• When basketball vet Charles Barkley hosted Saturday Night Live, the cut-off-at-the-end 12:50 a.m. skit had him shilling for his own homespun “Barkley’s Bank” as an alternative to the world renowned Barclays Bank. These days, that’s where I’d rather trust my money.
• Hooray to local gallery-scene and edgy-installation-art vet Scott Lawrimore, who just got an important curatorial job at the Frye Art Museum.
• A “Christian” anti-sex website wants to scare teens into abstinence by making up scare stories about condoms.
• Courtney Love just keeps getting into messes, legal and otherwise. Sad, really.
• Howard Schultz wants U.S. businesses to start making more jobs and stop whining all the time. Or something like that.
• Art Thiel would like you to get the facts n’ figures about the Sonics Arena proposal (which aren’t all in yet) before you get emotional about it in either direction.
• A UK High Court judge declared Samsung’s new tablet computer isn’t an iPad ripoff, because it doesn’t “have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.” Or as a BBC commentator interprets the ruling, the judge decided it’s not as cool.

comicsbronzeage.com

Just Sayin’ Dept: Here’s something that hasn’t been publicized much in the World’s Fair 50th anniversary celebrations.

• Could the Almost Live! cast (or a key portion of it) be reuniting in a new project? A site called The206.tv is being coy n’ teasing about it, at least for now.
• Cafe Racer will reopen. And it’ll look better than ever.
• Seattle’s own Ezell’s has the nation’s greatest fried chicken, according to a highly manipulable Esquire online poll.
• Danny Westneat sees the Sonics Arena plan as a much better deal than the one that was used to rebuild Husky Stadium.
• No, there won’t be a zip line in West Seattle’s Lincoln Park.
• No, there won’t be an Airbus factory in Wash. state. But Gov. Gregoire would really like Airbus to buy parts and services from some of the same local subcontractors and suppliers that service Boeing.
• Just as Rush Limbaugh has his paid phony callers, Mitt Romney buses and flies in loyalist rooters to his campaign speeches. Even to the NAACP!
• It’s the 20th anniversary of the first photo ever posted to a Web site. It was a plug for a retro-cabaret combo comprising “administrative assistants and significant others of scientists” at CERN, the Swiss lab where both the WWW was invented and the Higgs-Boson Particle was discovered. The hereby-linked article includes some of their science-nerd-chic novelty repertoire.
• No, online-meme followers, Bill Gates did not speak at some random unidentified high school and tell the kids, “Life is not fair. Get used to it.” That whole text comes from a newspaper op-ed column dating back to 1996.

via david haggard at flickr.com

• One of my pop-culture obsessions is the history of cartoons. That’s how I stumbled across this tragic tale of the songwriter who gave us “Whistle While You Work” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”. He was a depressive and an alcoholic who shot himself in 1942, with his music for Bambi yet to be released. He was estranged from his 20-year-old daughter from a first marriage; his last wife remarried weeks after his death, to a family employee (who then took her for everything she had and dumped her).
• One of the Seattle music scene’s longest running teamings (over 30 years!) has come to a sudden end. Hard-rock mainstays Queensryche have fired frontman Geoff Tate. Tate tells Rolling Stone the next step will be lawsuits, “and it’s probably gonna get ugly.”
• The lawyer guy who sued local web cartoonist The Oatmeal isn’t suing him anymore.
• Kurt Eichenwald at Vanity Fair says he knows exactly why Microsoft has had what he calls “a lost decade.”
• Here for your comment-thread wins is a handy list of “logical fallacies” used by people who can’t really back up their arguments.
• For a movement that allegedly seeks to persuade us all to the righteous logic of its ways, today’s right wingers can be so inhumanely rude. Today’s example: a onetime 13-year-old “teen conservative idol” who’s now resurfaced as a 17-year-old progressive. The insults by wingnut web-pundits and comment trolls against him, and against his mother, are as predictable as they are pathetic.
• The 24/7 Wall St. site has another list of brands predicted to disappear within the year. Among them: American Airlines, Suzuki cars (in the U.S.), Talbots stores, and two media enterprises that Wall Street Republicans would like to see go away (Current TV and Salon.com).
• David Auerbach at the webzine “n + 1” would like to remind you of the continuing “stupidity of computers.” Still.
• Why does broadcast radio just get blander and less listenable every year? Seattle Weekly found a new villain: the Portable People Meter, which tracks listenership more intensely than the previous diary-based ratings system. I’d place the blame elsewhere, on the huge corporate “station groups” and their anti-creative chains-O-command.
• And finally, please say hello to Gus the Diapered Duck. He appeared this past First Thursday at the Core Gallery in Pioneer Square’s T/K Building. The adjacent feet belong to his mistress, artist Kellie Talbot, who depicted Gus in a series of paintings about a New Orleans character called “Ruthie the Duck Lady.” (And yes, the T/K Building is just up the road from the old Pioneer Square Theatre building, where a certain insurance company used to have its regional sales office.)

'jseattle' at flickr, via capitohillseattle.com

Yes, it’s been nearly a week since I’ve posted any of these tender tidbits of randomosity. Since then, here’s some of what’s cropped up online and also in the allegedly “real” world:

• There’s still no official hint on what the proposed Sonics Arena might look like. But the wannabe developers of East Pine Street’s “Bauhaus block” have released a drawing of their proposed mixed use development. At least in its idealized-drawing form, it’s not as monstrous looking as some other recent structures in the area.
• In other preservation battles, Seattle’s people again rally around a thing about which the elites don’t give a darn. They’re striving to bring back the Waterfront Streetcar.
• Meanwhile, a study claims if the viaduct-replacement tunnel charges tolls high enough to pay for it, drivers will clog the surface streets rather than pay those tolls.
• Seattle Opera faces a $1 million shortfall, and will mount fewer new shows in future years. But don’t count ’em out yet, folks. It’s not over until, well, you know.
• The late writer-director Nora Ephron had many major achievements. Sleepless in Seattle, let us all admit, is among the least of them.
• Did you know there was a real hostelry in Fife called the “Norman Bates Motel“? Emphasis on the was.
• America’s cities: they’re back! (Of course, some of us knew this for some time.)
• In a pleasant surprise, one of the Supreme Court’s pro-one-percenter flank betrayed his masters and voted to uphold Obamacare. In response, some members of the Rabid Right’s noise machine claimed the great American Experiment was over and they’d hightail it to Canada (which, uh, has had universal health care in place for some time now).
• If you’re on liberal/progressive websites at all these days, you’ll find a lot of comment threads hijacked by folk who claim to be lefties disgusted by Obama’s centrist tactics, so much that they won’t vote this November, and want you to not vote either. At least some of these comment trolls turn out to be paid employees of right-wing dirty tricks outfits.
• Rupert Murdoch’s splitting his News Corp. into two companies. One will contain his print properties (including HarperCollins Books, The Wall St. Journal, the New York Post, and his besieged London tabloid operation), plus the iPad “newspaper” The Daily. The other will hold his “entertainment” properties. Yes, Fox “News” goes with the entertainment half.
• Paul Krugman tells the PBS NewsHour all about his “cartoon physics” theory of the American economy.
• Google’s putting out a tablet device with a 7-inch color screen, just like Amazon’s Kindle Fire. But the exciting part of this Wall St. Journal link is at the bottom, where they mention another forthcoming Google hardware product. It’s a streaming-media player that attaches to TV sets, and it’ll be made in the USA!
• Ann Althouse looks at a famous parody of trashy sex novels, and asks rhetorically if those who make and read such parodies are really bashing the potboilers’ readers (i.e., women).
• Nordstrom’s opening a branch in New York City. Make way for NYC media outlets to describe it as a brand new startup.
• Headline: “The media covers Kardashians, not climate change.” Comment: The media covers the-media-not-covering-climate-change more than it covers climate change.

lindsay lowe, kplu

• It’s like Animal Planet’s Whale Wars, only without the whales. It’s Greenpeace submarines trailing Shell oil-exploration rigs in the Arctic.
• There’s a “celebration of life” service for my mother today in Marysville.
• Huge swaths of Wash. state exist in a “rural information ghetto,” with little local news media, little or no broadband access, and even spotty or no cellphone reception.
• Local bands in Spin‘s all-time greatest-band-names countdown include Mudhoney and Bikini Kill. But Motorhead as the #1 greatest band name of all time? Sorry. Do over.
• Speaking of which, Duff McKagan will be this year’s Seafair Grand Marshall. Still waiting for Mark Arm’s equally deserved official recognition.
• Online Media Shrinkage Watch: Salon.com, one of the pioneers of web-based punditry, is bringing in exactly half the revenue it needs to survive.
• Who owns the rights to the classic series Route 66 and Naked City? Hard to tell. What’s more certain is that the two shows’ exec producer had some very rough final days.
• If the producers of The Looney Tunes Show had wanted to effectively depict Bugs and co. in a domestic setting, they should have perused old issues of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comic books.
• Tired of stick figure construction workers? Then look at these animated .GIFs in which the moving objects tend to be graceful women’s skirts and hair.

beautifullife.info

komo-tv

• More tsunami debris is showing up on Northwest beaches. Darn, I remember when all you’d find there were dead seals.
• Publicola, having just broken up with Crosscut, has announced its nuptials with Seattle Met. The lifestyle mag will own and host the local inside-politics blog, starting some time next month.
• The Downtown Seattle Association’s raising money to install a semi-permanent family playground at Westlake Park (which would just coincidentally make it a less hospitable locale for, say, Occupiers).
• Pearl Jam’s biggest nemesis isn’t Ticketmaster but its own ex-business manager.
• Seattle’s arts world is a nearly half-billion dollar business. And that’s just the nonprofit side.
• But the arts alone (or the gays or the hipsters) isn’t enough to drive a city’s economy, let alone turn one around. That’s the lesson from Minneapolis writer Frank Bures, who’s out to debunk pundit Richard Florida’s whole “Creative Class” shtick.
• KIRO-TV’s exposé of an elementary school janitor was a big hunk of lies n’ half-truths, according to some local “media watchdog” types.
• The president of the U. of Virginia was fired, allegedly for nothing more than insufficiently sucking up to corporate interests.

fuckyeahtwinpeaksintro.tumblr.com

Something made more than 20 years ago can still spark creative responses. Cast in point: a whole blog devoted to “Things You Can Do During the Intro of Twin Peaks.” The intro sequence for the series episodes runs a full 1:32 (the pilot’s into was even longer). Compare that to modern network dramas that might barely flash a logo at you.

• Want more Eastern Washington-set dramatics? A year old but still vital, local author Jess Walter offers a funny/poignant “Statistical Abstract for My Home of Spokane, Washington.”
• Computing isn’t just gonna keep getting cheaper. It’s also gonna keep getting more energy efficient. That means the same hydro-power-eating server farms in Eastern Washington will carry ever-bigger data loads. And that’s gonna mean even more “creative disruption;” and not just in the businesses you think of as “high tech” either.
• Print Media Shrinkage Watch: The Los Angeles Times, once the wealthiest, most ad-laden daily paper in America, has taken a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation to pay a few beat reporters’ salaries.
• Self Publishing Boom Watch: A single e-book middleman company, Smashwords, has put out over 127,000 titles by 44,000 authors thus far.
• Some of these have been on a few sites before, but here ‘s one site where you get a whole cafeteria menu’s worth of forgotten tech sounds, from the dial phone to the dot matrix printer.