1917 seattle metropolitans; from seattlehockey.net

Could Seattle actually get a National Hockey League team before it gets another NBA basketball team?

That’s what CBC Hockey Night in Canada commentator Elliotte Friedman seems to believe.

Friedman notes that the NHL wants to stop collectively owning the fiscally imperiled Phoenix Coyotes.

Friedman also says one of the top Coyote contenders is a Chicago minor-league hockey owner, who’s helping assemble land for a new arena in Seattle’s Sodo area, just south of Safeco Field.

Seattle’s hopes are supported by a move in the Legislature to somehow finagle state support for a new arena during this upcoming session.

What Seattle’s got in its favor:

• A large regional TV market. (Seattle would have the only U.S. NHL franchise west of Denver and north of San Jose. It’s already the second biggest U.S. metro area without an NHL team, after Houston.)
• Several rich potential investors.
• A natural rivalry situation with the Vancouver Canucks.
• A populace that’s supported minor league hockey for several decades (including current junior teams in Kent and Everett), and which includes many CBC hockey viewers.

What Seattle’s not got in its favor:

• No past NHL heritage; especially when compared to Quebec City, Friedman’s other pick for a likely new Coyotes’ home. The Seattle Metropolitans of the old Pacific Coast Hockey Association did win the Stanley Cup back in 1917. But compared to the former Quebec Nordiques’ fan memories, the Metropolitans are a mere trivia answer.
• No suitable place to play in town. Ex-Sonics owner Barry Ackerley made sure KeyArena would be only barely hockey-capable; its awkward hockey configuration requires temporarily removing the entire southern lower seating area. Quebec City already has the ex-Nordiques rink and is building a new bigger one, even without a team to play in it.

Despite these reservations, Friedman suggests it might be in the league’s financial best interest to place the Coyotes in Seattle, ready or not, and then award an expansion team to Quebec.

So, where would any Seattle Ex-Coyotes play, until a new specially built arena is ready (at least two seasons)?

• There’s KeyArena, such as it is.
• There’s the Tacoma Dome, which hosted minor league hockey from 1991-95. It seats a good 17,000 in its hockey configuration, though sightlines can be darn poor in places.
• There are the junior-hockey rinks in Kent and Everett. The latter seats 10,000 people, about as many as KeyArena’s ice configuration.
• And, of course, there’s Paul Allen’s Rose Garden in Portland.

My own favored option would be to simply expand KeyArena to the south; even though that would displace its current main tenants (the WNBA Seattle Storm and Seattle U. men’s basketball) for one season apiece.

But if an all new building is deemed really necessary, it should be (1) in Seattle proper (like the current Sodo arena scheme is) and (2) built with as little state or municipal subsidy as possible.

As a postscript, here’s a circa mid-2000s essay from the fan site SeattleHockey.net, detailing past attempts to bring the NHL here.

Local news items, and my one-take comments on them, should return in greater quantity starting Wednesday. Meanwhile, some more stuff from here and from the larger online world:

• Eric Scigliano says Seattle can’t inspire a comedy like Portlandia or the old Almost Live! because we’re no longer lovable “underdogs.” I say bah. If that were the case, there would be no great comics from New York. (Of course, a lot of New York comedy is about individual lovable underdogs trying to survive life in New York.)
• David Goldstein gently chides SeattlePI.com’s most famous remaining employee, political commentator Joel Connelly, for suggesting that (1) Seattle liberals should be more kind and appreciative toward moderate Republicans, and that (2) moderate Republicans still exist.
• Here’s one person who defends Village Voice Media’s sex-ad site who doesn’t work for Village Voice Media. She’s Jill Brenneman, a self described sex-workers’ advocate.
• A blogger about “natural health and freedom” sees ordinary folks becoming more violent in ways that remind him of corporate/governmental/military brutality. He calls it “trickle down tyranny.”
• A writer of space-opera novels pens a “private letter from genre to literature,” in which he says highbrow-lit fans should learn to appreciate the world of the bestsellers.
• Glenn Greenwald believes that despite his racist legacy, Ron Paul still offers up some ideas progressives should listen to. As for me, a white supremacist who wants to legalize pot is still a white supremacist.
• Mental Floss offers a list of nostalgic sounds of yesteryear—the sounds of rotary phones, manual typewriters, and TV channel selectors.

Hurry hurry! Get your nominations for MISCmedia’s 2012 In/Out list in TODAY!

Now for your dose of randomosity:

• The UW Huskies sure scored them a ton-O-points in the Alamo Bowl. Now, if only the defensive squad had made the plane trip.
• Glenn Greenwald insists Obama’s playing Clintonesque strategy games by governing as a “centrist Republican.” Through this, Greenwald surmises, the actual Republicans are forced to move so far to the right that they’re alienating everybody who doesn’t only listen to the right-wing-only media. I would say that’s a nice theory, but a little too simple.
• Instead of sailing on the air currents in a balloon, why not on top of a balloon? On a bunch of balloons stuck together? Oh, and with no motor, so you go wherever the winds take you?
• After three decades of wishing and working toward it, we might actually be near the end of AIDS.
• There’s an alleged under-the-table campaign underway to get the current federal nuclear regulatory boss fired. His crime? Not caving to industry lobbyists.
• Winner of today’s screw-the-consumer “convenience fee” scam: Verizon.
• IFC network boss Evan Shapiro does a better job than I’ve done at answering the anti-TV snobs (you know, those dudes who boast of having never watched a second of the medium in 10 years, yet who also claim to know enough about it to make blanket statements about its unmitigated evilness).

If you tried to access this site on Tuesday, you would have found an ugly, undesigned mess.

That’s because my site (and email) server company disconnected me for nonpayment, without previously bothering to tell me in any way, shape, or form that a payment was due.

The texts on the site remained up, but the WordPress-based formatting and most of the images were locked away. It took about three hours to get everything back and properly configured again.

In other news, my current contract job might finally end Friday. More regular postings should follow.

But for now, a few random linx:

• Seattle’s about to honor the now really-really retired J.P. Patches by naming a city dump transfer station after the beloved TV clown.
• The on-again, off-again plan to save Capitol Hill’s beloved B&O Espresso is off again, and the joint will close for good by New Year’s. It had been open during the entire time I’ve lived in Seattle.
• The latest alleged threat to the spoken word? “Vocal fry.”
• Conspiracy theory of the minute: Could former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens have been one of the supposedly, mysteriously ill fated BP whistleblowers?
• Joseph Stiglitz sees bigger long-term trends at work behind the economic blech. It’s a shift away from industry as the basis of commerce, not just in the U.S. but globally.
• Studies show that users of tablet computers and ebook machines are using them quite a bit for long-form texts, causing The Economist to proclaim “the rebirth of reading.” I’ll have more to say (tangentally) about this next week.

Remember the big plan to revive All My Children and One Life to Live as online-only soap operas? Ain’t gonna happen. The economics just weren’t there.

'off the mark' by mark parisi

• R.I.P. Bil Keane, 1912-2011. The Family Circus cartoonist plied the same realm of family homilies and deceptively simple line work for a half century. If Keane’s characters never generated the licensing income of Garfield or Dennis the Menace, they did provide a consistent note of light amusement. By staying within their own fantasy realm, with only the slightest whiff of contemporary pop-culture references. Even more notable was Keane’s good-natured willingness to let other cartoonists spoof the Circus’s delicately insular universe.
• Local singer-songwriter Heather Duby was in a horrid accident in New Jersey. She lost part of one finger, and almost lost both her hands. She’ll need a lot of rehab. There is, as you might expect, a benefit concert 11/26 at the Crocodile.
• Just what the hell is Microsoft doing as a prime sponsor of the Koch brothers’ (funders of all things wingnutted and anti-planet and anti-democracy) big Tea Party conference?
• Brendan Coffey at Forbes lists our own Russell Investments as one of the four companies that essentially control the financial world, for good or ill.
• Reuters notes Seattle’s explosion as a high tech hub. Now let’s work on getting more jobs here for non-programmers.
• The long-lost deleted scenes from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet have been found in a Seattle warehouse, and will be a bonus feature on the film’s DVD reissue.
• Punk rock history is becoming an academic specialty. Maybe I should apply for that teaching certificate.
• Amanda Hess at Good magazine depicts the late Andy Rooney as a reactionary crank who hated minorities, uppity women, and pretty much anything newer than the electric typewriter. She also describes Rooney as a man “who saw the world from his seat in a darkened library of hardcover books.” The combo of book collecting and reactionary crankiness, alas, exists far more frequently in this world than “book people” will admit.
• Paul Krugman proclaims solar energy as now being widely cost effective in many applications.
• Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” PR campaign wasn’t enough to save one horrendously bullied gay teen from suicide. In response, CBC comedy-show host Rick Mercer issued a call for more immediate action:

It’s no longer good enough for us to tell kids who are different that it’s going to get better. We have to make it better now, that’s every single one of us. Every teacher, every student, every adult has to step up to the plate.

sotnight.blogspot.com

I know some of these are a few days old. My present life is just that hectic, yes.

• The CBS Radio Stations Group, in its infinite wisdom, is transferring ex-child actor Danny Bonaduce’s morning talk gig from Philadelphia to Seattle’s KZOK-FM. In the recent past, celebrity offspring Ron Reagan Jr. and Scott (son of Bob) Crane fared well as Seattle radio personalities. Can Shirley Jones’s pretend-spawn do likewise?
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Perhaps in a pathetic attempt to get back at Mayor McGinn, over the latter’s allegiance to the crusade against SW sister company Backpage.com, the paper filed a public disclosure request seeking any instances of McGinn’s office using swear words in emails.
• Farm worker shortages aren’t just for Alabama anymore.
• Even Ken Schram agrees: The state can’t get out of its fiscal mess by cuts alone.
• Living costs (led by rent) have risen faster in Seattle than in the state as a whole.
• Separated at Birth: Microsoft’s new “video of the future” and AT&T’s 1993 “You Will” commercials?
• Much of what “they” say about the Internet today, was said at its infancy 15 years ago.
• Could hydroponic farming, that old pot-inspired technology, actually become a viable way to grow veggies in cities and suburbs?
• A blogger at the site Zen Peacemakers says the economic reform movement shouldn’t be about “the 99 percent,” but about uniting everybody toward a common, better future.
• Right wing outrages of recent days include a Halloween-themed Virginia Republican email depicting a zombie Obama shot in the head.
• And in corporate outrages of recent days, Citigroup settled (without admitting guilt) a case in which the big bank allegedly, knowingly, sold worthless mortgage-burger securities, while simultaneously “selling them short” (essentially betting they would fail). And the big banks still insist that all they have is an “image problem.”
• Kemper Freeman outrages of recent days include the Bellevue Square mogul and anti-transit obstructionist spearheading a trumped up “crusade” against a pro-transit Bellevue politician.
• And in deference to what has become America’s favorite adult holiday, here are the Occupy Seattle pumpkins at Westlake.

king-tv

denny hall, the uw campus's oldest building

• We’ve always known the Univ. of Washington has one of America’s most beautiful campuses. Now it’s finally getting national recognition in that regard.
• Meanwhile, the UW is participating in a research study into drunk Facebook photos.
• Mayor McGinn says he admires the spirit behind the Occupy Seattle folks, but still orders them to remove their tents from Westlake Plaza or risk getting arrested. Protesters say they’ll take the risk.
• The American Planning Association calls Tacoma’s Point Defiance Park one of America’s “great public spaces.” As the old bumper sticker says, “Admit It, Tacoma. You’re Beautiful.”
• NYTimes.com’s automated ad placement bots placed an ad for Starbucks’ Italian Roast above an article about you-know-who.
• Starbucks boss Howard Schultz’s next idea to save the economy: donation boxes in the stores, where customers can contribute to community development groups. They’d use the cash to help small businesses create jobs. Of course, if Schultz really wanted to help jump-start the economy at the personal level, he could pay his own baristas a living wage….
• The message from the Gates Foundation, the City of Seattle, and others: Don’t be no fool, stay in school.
• The Zune, Microsoft’s would-be iPod killer, is dead.
• Layoffs hit another supposedly recession-proof industry, nuclear-waste cleanup.
• A cause of death I, for one, hadn’t heard of—”detergent suicide.”
• Lee Fang believes the Occupy Wall Street protests “embody the values of the real Boston Tea Party.”
• Paul Krugman analyzes big bankers’ testimony in a Congressional hearing about the financial crisis. He sees the bankers claiming to be clueless, as an alternative to admitting to be evil.
• Obama’s finally speaking out against GOP state legislatures’ spate of anti-voting laws.
• The Fox broadcast network is threatening to cancel The Simpsons unless its voice actors accept a 45 percent pay cut.
• And now for fun, here are some fun Mexican movie-theater lobby cards.

• Seattle drivers spent two days stuck in traffic in 2010. If they had to listen to talk radio, it felt more like six days.
• Bad times in commercial real estate continue. The owner of the ex-Amazon HQ on Beacon Hill (formerly an ex-hospital) can’t find new tenants, and is close to defaulting on a big loan.
• The Census Bureau now says there are fewer LGBT cohabiting couples, here and across the country, than it had previously estimated. In this state, only 19,000.
• There won’t be a jail in between the Interbay golf course and the Whole Foods after all.
• Big Brother is watching you, cold and flu sufferers.
• The inventor of Doritos died, and Andy Rooney’s retiring.

costco store-brand whiskey, from rebelbartender.com

• The initiative to Costco-ize Washington’s liquor business? Less popular now than in previous polls.
• Good news, or as close to good news as we’re likely to get, i/r/t govt. budgets. The proposed city budget doesn’t cut human services, and the county budget doesn’t cut anything.
• MTV’s The Real World is coming back to Seattle. In other news, MTV still exists.
• Some people would apparently rather wear their vegetables than eat them.
• A Boeing 787 was finally turned over to an airline, three years late. How’s that whole outsourcing/union-busting thing workin’ out for ya?
• Nobody was hurt when Gov. Gregoire’s car was sideswiped by another car on I-5.
• You can always count on College Republicans to believe racist “jokes” are cool.
• The “Occupy Wall Street” protests finally get some media attention, thanks to brutally over-reactive cops.
• The potential price of eco-friendliness: “A car wreck that involves an electric vehicle or a hybrid can pose grave risks to emergency personnel.”
• Sean Penn, diplomatic superstar?

nordstrom photo, via shine.yahoo.com

• Those $85 Starbucks designer tees? All net proceeds go to Starbucks. One more reason Howard Schultz is in the Forbes 400 richest-people list.
• A Starbucks employee in Calif. posted a satirical song about his job onto YouTube. The song became popular; he became fired.
• After 18 years, the homey and low-key Rosebud restaurant/bar on East Pike is calling it quits. The management (which just bought the place from its previous longtime owners) homes to reopen nearby.
• Facebook’s got this big new feature that looks a lot like something already devised by a Seattle startup site.
• The Real Networks spinoff Rhapsody, a subscription online music service, has some sort of free trial thing going on via Facebook.
• Washington state: Now with even more poverty.
• You want across-the-board cuts in all state spending? Fine. Welcome some new early-release inmates, who won’t get the supervision past parolees got.
• Swedish Medical Center to lay off 150 staffers. So much for the aging-boomer-era medical boom.
• The on-again, off-again scheme to drastically redevelop the parking lot north of Qwest CenturyLink Field is on again. For now.
• An unfinished Kent parking garage will be razed and replaced by homes and stores.
• Tacoma teachers’ strike: over.
• Obama’s coming to town. You won’t get to see him.
• The always-lucid Feliks Banel sees the retirement of J.P. Patches in the context of the institutional decline of local TV (particularly local non-news TV).
• The “Occupy Wall Street” folk have finally proclaimed “our one demand”—11 of them, all big-big-picture stuff, essentially adding up to the complete re-orientation of the nation’s government, economy, and society.
• ‘Tis a sad, sad day for all who care about tradition, long-form storytelling, and frequently-remarried drama queens. The final network episode of All My Children airs today.
• On a much happier note, you can become part of a new tradition tomorrow, the tradition of the ped-powered urbanites.

• Where the state bugged out, private promoters are pitching in to promote Wash. state tourism.
• The final public appearance by J.P. Patches was a heart rendering occasion, even for those of us who weren’t there.
• As Frank Sinatra once sang, “Oops there goes a million kilowatt dam.”
• Word from Spokane is the feds still hate the medical marijuana movement.
• The best part of the Emmys was what didn’t happen.
• Today’s instance of a right-winger “joking” about how fun it would be to murder all the liberals: Andrew Breitbart.
• Netflix’s grand strategy is now revealed. The online streaming-video service and the DVD-by-mail service will be split into two separate brands, requiring separate memberships. The DVD service will be rebranded “Qwikster.” About as insipid a name as I’ve heard, at least since the first dot-com crash of a decade ago. (You know, those bygone days of Beenz, Kozmo, Flooz, MyLackey, HotBot, Go, Go2, Go2Net, et al.)

• At Friday’s Park(ing) Day display at the Seattle Art Museum, a videographer from a Chinese-language cable access show tapes an interview using a Flip-like digital video cam, a mini spotlight, and a small Steadicam-like camera stabilizer.
• Former P-I book critic John Marshall is still unemployed, and writes for the Atlantic about receiving his final unemployment check.
• The Jo-Ann Fabric store in Olympia has a Halloween crafts section. It recently had a bat in it. A real bat. With rabies.
• A survey co-sponsored by Microsoft’s MSN.com named Seattle North America’s sixth worst-dressed city. Vancouver was #3; the top spot went to Orlando.
• Seahawks fans this Sunday will not only face a formidable opponent on the field (the dreaded Steelers) but also extreme frisking.
• Another gay/lesbian event, another would-be censorious program printer.
• Pierce County: Now with 35 percent less transit.
• Netflix: Now with higher prices and 1 million fewer customers.
• The corruption investigation against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his inner circle turns out to have begun with comments to blog posts.
• Why didn’t anyone tell me there’s a Barbie Video Girl doll with “a video camera embedded in her chest”? You could use it to reenact the cult film Double Agent 73!

(Remember, my big book shindig is one week from today (Sept. 24). See the top of this page for all pertinent details.)

seattle times announces the new team's name (1975), from historylink.org

• The always-alert local sports historian David Eskenazi looks back to the first regular-season Seahawks game, held 35 years ago this week.
• There’s more sports-related nonsense from Oklahoma. Both of that state’s big college sports programs are thinking of dumping the Big 12 practice and hooking up with the Pac 12. Comment one: Only if they return a certain non-college basketball team to its rightful home. Comment two: How “Pacific” would that be? Not much. Isn’t the whole idea of college conferences supposed to be regional rivalries?
• If we do get our rightfully deserved men’s pro basketball team back, they could always play in the Tacoma Dome.
• Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 was put on display at a developers’ conference in L.A. It sure looks different.
• State Republicans are drawing up Congressional-district redistricting maps that would create a “majority minority” district, and incidentally decrease Seattle’s voting power.
• U.S. News & World Report doesn’t exist as a print periodical anymore, but it’s still putting out its annual college rankings. The UW ranked #10 among public universities, #42 overall. At least before the next round of state budget cuts.
• Mark your calendars: There’s a “Rally for Good Jobs Now,” 11:30 a.m. Thursday (Sept. 15) in front of the Seattle Westin Hotel. It’s organized by the union-affiliated group Working Washington, protesting the Port of Seattle’s current practices, and coinciding with a convention of port administrators.
• We recently ran a link to an essay on the rise of recession literature. Now, Jaime O’Neill at the L.A. Times wants similar realism and advocacy in the visual arts by asking, “Where’s Today’s Dorothea Lange?” Apparently O’Neill doesn’t know the work of local photog Rex Hohlbein and his ongoing “Homeless in Seattle” series.
• Beware the killer cantaloupes.
• Has the online daily coupon craze passed its peak?
• Poverty in the U.S.: highest since 1933, says the Census Bureau.
• Apparently, the corporate-libertarian attitude toward health insurance extends even to their own staffs. At least that appears to be the case with a Ron Paul campaign aide, who died from pneumonia, was uninsured, and left his family with $400,000 in bills.
• As the rich get richer, so do their “toys,” such as 220- to 500-foot long “gigayachts.”
• Dave Niose at Psychology Today believes some people are simply hardwired to be disbelievers.
• Michael C. Jones debunks the anti-SpongeBob story, in which the cartoon supposedly harmed young kids’ mental development. Jones notes the researchers covered only 60 upscale, white, four-year-old tots:

The effect of the Nickelodeon series “SpongeBob SquarePants” on little kids’ attention spans was tested on, well, almost nobody.

• Let’s close with some stunning Kodachrome images of NYC in 1941-42.