• 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.

1931 model bookmobile, from historylink.org

• If you believe the rumor sites, Amazon’s working on a for-profit, by-mail lending library program. For a monthly or annual fee, you’d get all the (physical and/or “e”) books you can handle; but you’ll have to return ’em before you can get more. The company’s already announced “Kindle Library Lending,” a scheme for borrowing Kindle-format e-books from libraries (which can already offer book files in other ebook formats). (UPDATE: Some rumor sources say Amazon’s lending-library program would only involve e-books.)
• Could, would, should ex-county exec Ron Sims run for Seattle mayor in ’13? And could he count on an endorsement from non-relative Dave Sims? Or the video game creatures The Sims?
• Update: Capitol Hill’s B&O Espresso will stay in business at its current location for at least another year.
• Another fiscal year in Washington state, another attempt to kill the Basic Health program.
• Bank of America announced at least 30,000 layoffs. But the business media doesn’t want to talk about the firings, just the Almighty Stock Price.
• Remember, freedom lovers: When SpongeBob is outlawed, only outlaws will eat Crabby Patties.
• Procter & Gamble and other companies respond to the collapsing middle class by repositioning their product lines into distinct “luxury” and “bargain” tiers.
• Daily Kos readers have submitted more than a hundred ideas for how Obama could boost U.S. jobs without the approval of congressional Republicans.
• Is today’s Republican party a doctrinaire religion (as Andrew Sullivan claims), or “sadism, pure and simple” (as Alan Grayson alleges)?
• There’s a big “Seattle Design Festival” coming next week. One of the guests is architect-writer August de los Reyes. His presentation is “A 21st Century Design Manifesto.” The festival’s site says, “Topics include vampires, werewolves, starfish, bamboo shoots, video games, and natural user interface.” Dunno ’bout you, but I’ve never heard vampires described as having a natural interface before.

1979 ad from vintagepaperads.com

• This list of (mostly dreadful) declining beer brands by the Big Two and a Half (that’s AB InBev, MillerCoors, and the Miller-produced Pabst brands) would seem like a ray of hope for true beer lovers—except that their place on the shelves has been usurped by other brands from the same companies.
• Microsoft is putting out a tablet computer next year. And this time, they hope to get it (and its marketing) right.
• A former Sea Gal (the Seahawks’ cheerleaders/dancers), who became a Price Is Right model, was named in a lawsuit by another Price Is Right model against that show’s producers.
• What’s behind the disembodied feet washing up in B.C. and Washington? As Spike Lee once famously asked, is it the shoes?
• The state Dept. of Employment Security is laying off almost 400 of its 2,500 employees. Alas, it’s not due to a lack of work.
• There’s going to be a graphic novel about the Green River killer. Or rather, about a detective who’d spent many years on the case, written by said detective’s son.
• Teamsters leader James Hoffa came to town. He reiterated what he’d said in Detroit about defeating the right wing. That is, he reiterated what he’d really said, not the right-wing media’s deliberate distortion of it.
• As I’ve written before, one of Seattle’s favorite activities is to proclaim “what this town needs.” Now there’s a whole site where you can leave your own ideas in that regard. It’s Changeby.us.
• SeattlePI.com has an intriguing list of local ’90s celebrities and where they are now. No, Rev. Bruce Howard isn’t mentioned. No, I don’t know what happened to him.
• French women don’t get fat, so the book says. But they do get sexually frustrated. And they sue over it.
• Update: A few days ago we linked to a guy who wished Apple would get around to charitable giving at last. It’s getting around to charitable giving at last.
• Half of Americans ages 16-24 are now unemployed.

from thestand.org

• The Longview longshoremen’s labor action has spread to the Port of Seattle, which is what it took to get the Seattle media to notice it. While few were looking, Wash. state became one of the few places where labor is directly striking back.
• Ready for another cold, rainy and/or snowy winter?
• So much for the great biotech job boom hope: Dendreon is laying off at least a quarter of its staff.
• Who’s replacing C.R. Douglas as a public affairs host at the Seattle Channel? The same guy Douglas replaced on KCPQ.
• Update: Here are some remembrances of the tragically gone-from-us Espresso Vivace favorite Brian Fairbrother.
• Seattle-based activists have filed suit to block the State Route 520 replacement project.
• I like the Tiger Bar in Georgetown. It’s sad to hear about one of its owners allegedly going off-hinge.
• Pete Jackson has vivid memories of Everett’s last pulp-and-paper mill.
• The combined offices and server farms of Google are responsible, in the company’s own estimates, for 1.5 million tons of CO2 sent into the atmosphere annually. But Google insists it’s still more energy-stingy than the average dot-com.
• I won’t link to very many 9/11 anniversary hype pieces, but here’s Janine Jackson wondering if we can ever get our civil liberties back.
• There have long been people who’ve whined about the imminent death of “the word” in a culture cluttered up with images. But now here’s a voice from the other side as it were. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Dave Marash proclaims that “for the first time in history, mankind is developing a universal language: video.” In particular, he cites the amazing news footage generated by world broadcasters and by amateurs in this year’s Mideast uprisings. But then Marash bashes U.S. TV news for not showing enough of these pictures, instead filling time with pontificatin’ pundits.

• Radical activists associated with Adbusters magazine want to organize a long-term “occupation” of Wall Street, with the aim to force an end to the “politics of greed.” Paul B. Farrell isn’t so sure it’ll work.
• Bad news of the day: Espresso Vivace general manager Brian Fairbrother was badly injured in a cycling accident. (Yes, he wore a helmet.) On Wednesday, loved ones decided, in accordance with his previously stated wishes, to remove life support.
• Good news of the day: The INSCAPE arts center in the former immigration building got a $10 million grant for needed structural upgrades and interior refits.
• Eh? news of the day: Wash. state’s slashing of higher-ed support was only tied for worst in the nation, with three other states.
• Update #1: The Belltown substance-abuse center boss accused of trying to rape a boy? He wasn’t the psychologist he’d claimed to be.
• Update #2: That Snohomish County stink mentioned here yesterday? It’s chicken byproduct.
• The long-delayed development at Ballard’s former Sunset Bowl site is finally underway.
• Turns out that creepy plastic faced “king” mascot wasn’t the only scary thing about Burger King.
• Tacoma: The city that knows when to say no.
• The City’s got this “Only in Seattle” program, promoting local businesses in various neighborhoods. The program’s Belltown edition was unveiled Wednesday. The four honored outfits were two upscale restaurant-bars, one upscale furniture emporium, and Federal Army & Navy Surplus.
• Coming to a 7-Eleven near you (depending on where you are): A locker where you can pick up your Amazon purchases. 7-Eleven in Japan has had this for years. It’s great for people who work during the day and live alone (or with other people who also work during the day).
• The Wall St. Journal discovers grunge nostalgia.
• The Seattle Weekly/Village Voice Media/Backpage.com sex ad mess just gets messier, as politicians of more stripes use it for cheap grandstanding.
• Cartoonist Ruben Bolling seems to wish George Lucas could digitally alter the past 10 years.
• The St. Petersburg Times fact checked Wednesday’s GOP Presidential debate and came up with at least two statements deserving the ultimate “Pants On Fire” rating.
• Our ol’ pal Tim Harris appeared with C.R. Douglas in a great segment on KCPQ on the topic of “Homeless in Seattle.” If you’re wondering how something this insightful got on a program entitled Q13 Fox News, let me repeat (for what seems like the umpteenth time): KCPQ has no connection to the Fox News Channel (except for airing the latter’s Fox News Sunday “spinterview” show). KCPQ is an affiliate of the Fox Broadcast network. KCPQ is really owned by the (Chicago) Tribune Co. I wish the station itself would make this clearer.

The Muscular Dystrophy Association parted ways with Jerry Lewis, and cut its annual telethon this year down from 21.5 hours to six.

The two moves are inter-related, of course.

Abandoning the real overnight marthon format for simply a long special meant a lot of the broadcast’s elements had to be cut down.

The MDA show traditionally consists of four basic elements:

1. On-stage entertainment,
2. documentary segments depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as cute crippled waifs,
3. local cut-ins, and
4. plugs for the association’s big corporate and institutional donors.

When the show’s running time was hacked down this year, three of those parts could be reduced in both frequency and duration.

But the corporate plugs still had to all go in.

Thus, the entertainment segments had to be further hacked down.

No more time for Lewis to cut it up with his classic movie-star and song-and-dance pals. Just quick intros to songs and standup comedy routines, delivered by perky and efficient cue-card readers.

So, the 85-year-old Lewis was unceremoniously dumped, for the sake of speed and modernity.

The organization’s next step: dump the demeaning “Jerry’s Kids” typing, and depict its beneficiaries as complete, respect-deserving humans (most of whom are adults), who simply have a medical condition.

Can the outfit take this leap?

Tune in same time next year.

• So, like is this Capitol Hill retail mainstay claiming it’s barren and lonesome enough to successfully hide out in?
• Forty years after its founding, and six years after developers first threatened to demolish it for a six-story apartment complex, Capitol Hill’s legendary B&O Espresso may finally be doomed, at least as we know it. The developers plan to have a restaurant/retail space in their new building at the corner of Belmont and Olive (hence the coffee house/bistro’s name). But that space will be half the size of today’s B&O.
• KIRO-TV is still stalling in talks with its unionized technical staff. The station doesn’t explicitly want to bust the union, just to take away most of the things union crews get to do, like complain about hours and working conditions.
• Masins Furniture is leaving Pioneer Square. The Seattle Times-approved reason: The neighborhood is beset by costly parking and, you know, those people. A more likely reason: Two and a half years without folks moving into new urban housing units, and without a lot of folks having the funds to refurnish the housing units they’ve got.
• Labor Day Weekend Thought #1: How long does it take to turn from unemployed to “effectively unemployable”?
• Labor Day Weekend Thought #2: Robert Reich wants a Labor Day with fewer picnics and more protests.
• Word (or rather phrase) of the day: Mighty Whitey. Refers to the long tradition of the fictional white hero who not only sympathize with other ethnicities’ struggles “but also becomes their greatest warrior/leader/representative.” Cf. Last of the Mohicans, Snow Falling On Cedars, Avatar, and most recently The Help. Also see every white blues/soul/rap musician, especially if British.

619 western's exterior during the 'artgasm' festival, 2002

• We begin with the end of a 27-year tradition. The 619 Western Building artists will hold their actual, for-real-this-time, final First Thursday art show tonight. Like the previous one, it will actually occur in the south parking lot outside the building.
• The feds want to protect Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA from AT&T’s planned takeover.
• Port Townsend town leaders are getting a federal grant to start a privately run, tourist-oriented passenger ferry from Seattle. Rides are expected to go at $20-$25 a ticket.
• Tacoma doesn’t want any more big box chain stores for the time being.
• Employment in Puget Sound country? Rising up to mediocre. In the rest of the state? Still putrid.
• Those “tea party” scream-bots love to interrupt Democratic politicians’ town halls. But when they’re elected, they don’t like to hold any fully public meetings of their own.
• That “Latino gang problem” in south King County, mentioned in yesterday’s Random Links? Keegan Hamilton at Seattle Weekly says it’s way overblown.
• Howard Schultz’s crusade to get CEOs to stop giving to politicians seems to be working. If, by working, you mean cutting off money to Democrats, while the super-PACs giving to Republicans get ever super-er.
• The HP tablet device became so popular at really cheap close-out prices, that HP’s getting more made—to be sold at the same near-total-loss price. This is politely known as dot-com economics at work.
• Just when we got excited that JC Penney was coming back to downtown Seattle, the company has to pull one of the ultimate all-time product FAILs. Yep, we’re talking about the girls’ shirt bearing the slogan “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has do it for me.”
• Glenn Greenwald describes the “war on terror” as “the decade’s biggest scam.” Considering all the other scams competing for that title, that’s saying something.
• What sounds weirder—Al Jazeera’s claim that Dennis Kucinich tried to help Gaddafi stay in power, or the associated claim that Kucinich’s partner in the scheme was a top ex-Bush aide?
• We end with the end of a 42-year tradition. All My Children taped its last network episode Wednesday.

Steve Jobs had essentially retired from Apple Inc.’s day to day management back in January. On Wednesday he simply made this move official.

Thus ends the second (third, if you count the NExT/early Pixar years) era of Jobs’s involvement in, and leadership of, the digital gizmo industry.

I will leave it to others more laser-focused on that industry to give the big picture of Jobs’s work and legacy. But here are a few notes on it.

Jobs and Steve Wozniac did not, by themselves, “invent the personal computer.” Many individuals and companies had seen what the early mainframes could potentially do in the hands of smaller-than-corporate users. The early “hacker culture” was a tribe of programmers who worked in corporate, institutional, and particularly collegiate computing centers, who snuck in personal projects whenever and wherever they could get processor time.

As the first microprocessor chips came on the market, several outfits came up with primitive programmable computer-like devices built around them, initially offering them in kit form. One of those kit computers was Jobs and Wozniak’s Apple (posthumously renamed the Apple I).

That begat the pre-assembled (but still user-expandable) Apple II. It came out around the same time as Commodore and Radio Shack’s similar offerings. But unlike those two companies, the two Steves had nerd street cred. This carefully crafted brand image, that Apple was the microcomputer made by and for “real” computer enthusiasts, helped the company outlast the Eagles, Osbornes, Kaypros, Colecos, and Tandons.

Then the IBM PC came along—and with it MS-DOS, and the PC clones, and eventually Windows.

In response, Jobs and co. made the Apple III (a failure).

Then the Lisa (a failure, but with that vital Xerox-borrowed graphic interface).

Then came the original Macintosh.

A heavily stripped-down scion of the Lisa, it was originally capable of not much besides enthralling and inspiring tens of thousands into seeing “computers” for potential beyond the mere manipulation of text and data.

The Mac slowly began to fulfill this potential as it gained more memory, more software, and more peripherals, particularly the Apple laser printer that made “desktop publishing” a thing.

But Jobs would be gone by then. Driven out by his own associates, he left behind a company neither he nor anyone else could effectively run.

Jobs created the NExT computer (a failure, but the machine on which Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web), and bought Pixar (where my ol’ high school pal Brad Bird would direct The Incredibles and Ratatouille).

The Mac lived, but didn’t thrive, in the niche markets of schools and graphic design. But even there, the Windows platform, with its multiple hardware vendors under Microsoft’s OS control, threatened to finally smother its only remaining rival.

Back came Jobs, in a sequence of maneuvers even more complicated than those that had gotten him out of the company.

Out went the Newton, the Pippin, the rainbow logo hues. In came the candy colored iMac and OS X.

And in came a new business model, that of “digital media.”

There had been a number of computer audio and video formats; many of them Windows-only. For the Mac to survive, Apple had to have its own audio and video formats, and they had to become “industry standards” by being ported to Windows.

Thus, iTunes.

And, from there, the iTunes Store, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and an Apple that was less a computer company and more a media-player-making and media-selling company. The world’s “biggest” company, by stock value, for a few moments last week.

Jobs turned a strategy to survive into a means to thrive.

Along the way he helped to “disrupt” (to use a favorite Wired magazine cliche) the music, video, TV,  cell-phone, casual gaming, book publishing, and other industries.

We have all been affected by Jobs, his products, and the design and business creations devised under his helm.

He’s backing away for health reasons. But we’ve all been the subjects of his own experiments, his treatments for “conditions” the world didn’t know it had.

•

The post-Jobs Apple is led by operations chief Tim Cook, whom Gawker is already calling “the most powerful gay man in America.” That’s based on speculation and rumor. Cook hasn’t actually outed himself, keeping his private life private.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.