Seattle’s first TV station, KSRC-TV (soon to become KING-TV) signed on for the first time on Thanksgiving 1948. The debut telecast was a live high school football game, from the then-new (and apparently now doomed) High School Memorial Stadium.

In honor of this occasion, Feliks Banel offers a list of Seattle’s 25 most memorable live TV moments. In chronological order, they begin with that first local telecast and end with the Pike Place Market’s centennial concert on the Seattle Channel. In between are the first and last J.P. Patches shows, Mt. St. Helens, the Kingdome implosion, the WTO protests, and Cobain on Saturday Night Live.

Banel didn’t include, but I would’ve, the Seattle World’s Fair opening (KING, 1962), the last hour of the Dog House restaurant (KCTS, 1994), the weird Jay Leno-hosted party at the Microsoft campus for the launch of Windows 95 (KOMO, KING and KIRO, 1995), the Sonics’ final game (FSN, 2008), and perhaps one or two particularly naughty cable access shows.

Both Canlis and the Sorrento Hotel’s bar now have special cocktails named after characters in the Twilight novels and movies. Sorry, but  this is the only Cullen I’ve ever admired.

Was intrigued (if not completely satisfied) by the new Prisoner miniseries, which finished a three-night run on AMC Tuesday. It was well produced and exquisitely acted, even though the ending explained too much. (I won’t spoil it for you future BitTorrent DVD viewers.)

The old show mixed Swinging London iconography with Cold War politics, 007-esque spying with Big Brother paranoia.

The new show mixed Matrix psycho-techno-babble with corporate oppression, social-gaming fantasies with the suffocating terror that is Reagan-Bush era “family values.”

And it was fun to hear the Brian Wilson music samples. Because most of those were from Smile, which had been composed at the time of the original Prisoner series but not finished until 2004, they added a time/space distortion field that perfectly fit the story’s psycho-consciousness distortion field.

…to two eternal ’80s TV icons:

• Edward Woodward, the cool yet concerned operative in The Equalizer (and the doomed police investigator in the original Wicker Man), and
• Ken Ober, the funny and affable host of Remote Control (one of MTV’s first nonmusical shows), who afterward disappeared into Playboy Channel comedy spots and sitcom production work.

Yes, the Animation exhibit at the Pacific Science Center is one big ad for Cartoon Network.

But it’s also educational. Really.

You see, animation (even CN’s unapologetically 2-D animation) involves a lot of math, geometry, spatial relationships, optical theory (“persistence of vision”), and maybe even a daub of artistry. And that’s even without CGI. (For the purposes of this exhibit, CN’s shows are billed as being produced in traditional cel animation; in reality, even something as simplistic-looking as Code Name: Kids Next Door uses a lot of digital compositing, coloring, and assembly.)

Nickeodeon’s got a “Worldwide Day of Play” promotion today. The kiddie kable channel is airing nothing from noon to 3 p.m. except a logo for the promotion and the scrolling words (also read by a male announcer):

“Today is Nickelodeon’s Worldwide Day of Play! Turn off your TV, shut down your computer, put down that cell phone—yes, YOU!—and go ALL OUT! We’ll see you back here at 3.”

Just last nite, I was talking with my Scots drinking buddy about the early days of British TV, when both extant channels would shut down for long stretches of time every day, such as between 1 and 4 p.m. From my friend’s description, it seemed to have made the whole televisual ritual more special by being less ubiquitous.

Thanks to the kind Lori at Espresso To Go in Fremont, I recently got a look at the SeaTimes’ Washington Territorial Centennial supplement.

This was an eight-section addition to a Sunday paper in the summer of 1953. Each section ran twenty pages or more. (Remember, newspaper pages then were one-third wider than they are now.)

There’s little to no content about the state’s pre-Statehood past. Instead, what little “editorial” content there is consists of puff pieces for the advertisers.

Most of these advertisers aren’t companies selling consumer goods. They’re construction firms, timber giants, commercial truck dealerships, shipyards, cement plants, fishing-rig outfitters, metals processors, agribusinesses, restaurant-supply companies, etc. Their common, simple message: They’re proud to be part of the Evergreen State’s great industrial infrastructure.

OK, there is one huge ad for Fisher Flouring Mills and its about-to-launch subsidiary operation, KOMO-TV. The ad juxtaposes a drawing of the big Fisher plant on Harbor Island with a glamour image of that fresh, new television talent Betty White, who could be seen in her sprightly comedy series Life With Elizabeth once KOMO-TV started telecasting later that year.

Can you imagine today’s SeaTimes managing to sell even a fraction of all that ad space to local companies that have nothing to sell to a mass audience?

As we’d known for almost six months, Guiding Light shone for the last time on Friday, after 72 years on radio and TV.

The show’s finale, and the dozen or so episodes leading to it, comprised a relative whirlwind of happy-ending stories, salted only by the sudden death of one of the show’s villains and the unresolved fate of one of its heroes (last seen in a high-noon shootout with another villain). This spate of happily-ever-afters, while out of keeping with the show’s tradition of complicated tragedy, was still in keeping with the show’s (and the genre’s) other tradition of deux ex machina improbabilities.

As overall TV viewership drifts downward, and the old-line networks’ market share is further eroded by cable and other alternatives, we’re reaching a point when original scripted dramas for one-time, daytime-only airing become fiscally unfeasible. As I’ve written here before, this would result in losing the only U.S. TV genre to feature open-ended storylines with no season breaks. The only other products in this country to offer that type of storytelling are certain comic books and comic strips. Online “webisode” dramas could adopt open-ended formats, but so far none have.

Mount Holyoke College prof Douglas J. Amy insists that “Government is Good,” and has a whole detailed site all about why.

Cenk Uygur, meanwhile, explores the other side of this ideological divide, and decides today’s big business power-grabbers aren’t interested in democracy or even capitalism; but that’s only to be expected from “corporatists.”

Political PR maven Jonah Sachs insists progressives have gotta stop being so damned rational. He argues that public opinion in this country isn’t swayed by analytical arguments but by emotional appeals.

Guess who uses social-media sites the most? That long-neglected demographic caste, the stay-home moms.

Paul Krugman wrote it weeks ago, but I’m still trying to get to the end of his long essay asking the musical question, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? The answer to his query’s easy, really. Economics is either the most or second-most fraudulant “science” out there (competing with sociology). Economic theory has less to do with the world most of us live in and more in common with the virtual worlds created by or for role-playing gamers

Henry Gibson, who passed away Monday, had a long and solid acting career ranging from Nashville to Magnolia and Boston Legal. But he’ll always be known as “the Poet” on the original Laugh-In. Gibson was a prime example of that show’s basic premise. Laugh-In was suit-and-tie guys (what we’d now call the Mad Men generation) looking gently askew at Those Darned Hippies. Saturday Night Live, by contrast, WAS Those Darned Hippies.

At least Gibson died without the tragic career footnote faced by Peter, Paul and Mary co-singer Mary Travers. She faced her cancer-ridden final months with the indignity of having one of her group’s hit songs reworked into the unauthorized political hatched-job “Barack the Magic Negro.”

…sees the mess that big money (or big potential money) has made out of health care, news, and other essential services, and declares that “Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.”

Maher cites a past time when the network news was a loss-leader division, medicine was small and personal, and “war profiteer” was an insult.

Of course, those were also the days before any TV channels charged subscription fees, but that’s beside the point.

The point being: Wall Street’s been vampirizing the nation’s lifeblood. And not just during the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble.

Earlier this year, I met an IT consultant whose clients have included a huge HMO provider. She insisted the health insurance companies aren’t to blame for America’s health-care cost crisis; it’s just the system that’s gone haywire.

I think it’s a little more personal than that. I believe the insurance companies (some avidly, some more reluctantly) sold out to the profiteers over the past three decades, as the ultimate American financial icon ceased to be the Almighty Dollar and instead became the Almighty Stock Price. Whole industries that weren’t intrinsically set up to reap windfall profits were retooled for just that purpose, just so they’d be considered great investments.

This year’s financial meltdown is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to realign not just health care but the whole unstable superstructure of the economy.

WIll Futurama replace its entire voice cast, or is it just a publicity stunt?

…which I’m not, might claim MSNBC keeps Pat Buchanan on precisely because he makes conservatives look soooooo archaic, bigoted, and just plain dumb.

…makes films. He also collects films. Here’s a full hour culled from his vault of vintage toy commercials—Batteries Not Included.

Celebrity can be a fickle thing. So can typecasting. Fawcett was only on Charlie’s Angels for one season, 22 episodes (plus a three-episode return in the show’s fourth season). Yet that one role, and the accompanying glamour-image marketing, established her celebrity persona for life. From serious film roles to two Playboy appearances, nothing she did since overcame that initial inconography of the nipples, the teeth, and especially the hair. Only her slow, very public death did that.

…And, one guy claims, the TV business will soon follow.