…local news of note the past couple of days, except for one item of great importance. Yr. o’b’d’n’t web-scribe will tape a segment for KING-TV’s Evening Magazine this Tuesday. No word yet when it will air. Stay tuned for further details.

Last night I finally saw the local Spanish-language newscast on KUNS-TV, Fisher Communications’ Univision affiliate. The same program also airs in Portland on KUNP, also Fisher-owned.

As you might expect, the broadcast makes heavy use of redubbed footage from Fisher’s Anglophone KOMO and KATU. But it also has original coverage of stories aimed at the Univision audience (immigration, citizenship, farm workers, etc.) The sports segment that Friday included a lot of Latin American soccer highlights before it previewed the NFL playoffs. An in-studio interview with a lady painter, featuring cutaway shots of her works, included two langorious and uncensored nudes—a rare sign of a local broadcast station’s respect for its audience’s maturity.

Then there were the commercials. They featured, besides redubbed versions of familiar Anglophone spots, two categories you normally don’t see on local newscasts—Christian music CDs and class-action lawsuit attorneys.

The Univision audience, at least around here, is thus perceived by its sponsors to be both pro-Jesus and anti-corporate.

Political types who wish to reach the nation’s growing Latino segment might wish to ponder this.

• The easy half of the equation has been solved, as Clay Bennett agrees to sell the Storm to owners who’ll keep the WNBA team here. The hard part, wresting the Sonics from his reverse-Midas-touch hands, now begins in earnest.
• Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess in the first place by selling the teams to Bennett is making new moves at his day job. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz has fired his CEO, retaking the reins himself. Can he return the coffee chain to its former fast-growin’ ways, in spite of all the obstacles? (Among the latter: espresso drinks coming to McDonald’s.)
• Some folks got pretty snow this morning; the heart of Seattle, again, didn’t. Damn.
• The Port of Seattle’s fiscal shenanigans will be investigated by the Feds.
• House prices finally begin to go down in the area. (Insert your own “going down” joke here.) Still, local biz leaders insist it’s not that drastic really. Meanwhile, developers who’d planned to condo-convert Seattle’s historic Smith Tower are scaling back their plans; now only the top 12 stories will be converted.
• My second-ever adult job (such as it was), the student newspaper Polaris at North Seattle Community College, is a goner.
• Blacks are more likely than whites to get busted for having or smoking pot, even though that’s now the city’s official lowest law enforcement priority.
• In more positive law-related news, “serious crime” (as the FBI defines it) is way down in western Washington’s cities these days. That, alone, won’t stop the media from exploiting the occasional random shooting, or stop the talk-radio nebbishes from preaching the city=danger, suburbs=serenity meme.
• An election year’s underway. You can tell because a politician, in this case Gov. Gregoire, is trying to generate headlines on the get-tougher-on-drunk-drivers line, the encroaching-surveillance-state issue on which no one dares to disagree.
• Woodland Park Zoo tries again to make its own cute li’l baby elephant.
• The men’s fashion headline of the year is “Return to Elegance.” Just as it’s been every year since at least 1978.
• 12,000 people in Idaho lost electricity due to a stray cat wandering through a substation. Brian Setzer remains at large.
• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their cablecasts, just in time to give writerless jokes about the New Hampshire primary.

…as you may know. But I like sometime NPR contributor John Hockenberry’s account of how he never quite fit in at Dateline NBC. He alleges the show’s producers (1) wanted only stories with an “emotional center,” but only if those emotions were the ones the producers wanted to exploit, (2) didn’t get that the Internet age was irreversably fragmenting the former mass audience, and (3) were too caught up in corporate-culture nonsense that actively discouraged creative thinking.

• Letterman, and his writers, staged a gala comeback Wednesday night. Could this be the turning point in the election?
• Seattle’s Landmarks Preservation Board agrees with us that the Ballard Denny’s building is potentially worth keeping. Meanwhile, Robert Jamieson quotes the manager of Seattle’s last extant Denny’s as being mad as hell about Saturday night ruffians. And he’s not even on upper First Avenue.
• What with shrinking ice caps and endangered polar bears, what do the Bushies want for Alaska? More offshore oil drilling!
• Child Protective Services could use a lot more social workers. Gov. Gregoire wants to help, at least a little.
• Could Wash. state voters really have a pivotal role in the Presidential nominating process this time ’round?
• A coyote was seen in the general vicinity of Magnolia Bluff. Insert your own joke here.
• Tim Eyman hates transit, loves roads.

Why doesn’t the Music Choice cable channel called “Musica Urbana” have any bands from downstate Illinois?

• “A 29-year-old Wenatchee man told police a pterodactyl caused him to drive his car into a light pole…”
• The film Dancer in the Dark notwithstanding, no woman has ever been sentenced to death in Wash. state. Sadly, this might change.
• Spokane Catholics have raised $8 million to help pay abusive-priest lawsuit settlements.
• Help a rural flood victim— donate a cow.
• Sonics fans (and, yes, there still are many of us) have a new mantra. During last night’s laugher against the even more pathetic Timberwolves (which the Sea. Times chose to cover on sports-section page D14), when fans were encouraged to make noise during an opposing-team free throw, the repetitive shout came loud and clear from the rafters on down: “Clay Bennett sucks! Clay Bennett sucks!” TV announcer (and all around good guy) Kevin Calabro responded with a brief giggle, before he returned to strictly commenting on the action on the floor.

With a high “five” from John Curley to the big ‘KING Mike’ balloon/float, the downtown holiday shopping season is among us.

I know I’m not the only one who saw something subliminally S/M-like about the real woman locked up inside a giant snow globe.

Then, at the Black Friday parade’s conclusion, always comes the fake snow shot out from TSFKATBM (that’s “the store formerly known as The Bon Marche”).

…goes out today to TV producer Verity Lambert, one of the first women with that career in the UK. She shepherded everything from Quatermass to Jonathan Creek, including the original Doctor Who, for which she stretched a Saturday-afternoon kids’ show budget to astounding, if now dated-looking, extents.

This is what happens to local celebs who move to LA intending to enjoy the A-list lifestyle. An author who’s either Bill Nye’s ex-wife or ex-fiancee vandalized his backyard garden with an OD of weed killer. He charges she was trying to poison him; she says it was just a psycho-moment’s prank, and that she’d only wanted to destroy his flowers.

A new DVD release of the first few Sesame Street episodes from 1969 includes this disclaimer: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

I was already a preteen when the show debuted, so don’t blame the Street for how I turned out. But I certainly remember the show’s original, pre-Elmo incarnation.

I remember identifying with Oscar (whose lucid if negative zeitgeist was treated with patronizing laughs by the human stars) and Bert (whose intelligence and earnestness only made him an easy target for Ernie’s “friendly” harassments).

I remember a creeping sense of regimentation behind all the committee-written, consultant-contrived, lesson-planned “fun.”

And, of course, my quickly dirtifying pubescent mind could think of new and innovative ways to play “Which of These Things Belong Together?”

In recent years, I’ve rediscovered the now un-PC Muppet song “I Want a Monster to Be My Friend.”

Heck, for that matter, a lot of Sesame Street moments took on a whole new understanding the day I learned the Canadian slang meaning of the word “cookie.”

Drew Carey was at the George & Dragon pub in Fremont on Monday afternoon.

During a typically packed UK soccer day (there was a satellite TV match showing between Arsenal and Reading), Carey showed up in a chauffeured minivan with a small entourage. He plugged his recent status as a goodwill ambassador for U.S. pro soccer (you know, that game where nothing’s made up and the points do matter). Specifically, Paul Allen and partners have recruited Carey as a minority investor in their Major League Soccer expansion team, to launch at Qwest Field in 2009. (Rumor has it that somebody else sought the franchise, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

Carey’s big promo point during the speech (which he repeated that night as a Monday Night Football booth guest): The team will offer “club memberships.” For a projected $100/year, hardcore fans will (1) get an exclusive package of merch, and (2) get to vote every few years or so about the team’s future, even getting to fire the general manager.

He also got in a well-received dig about how such a fan-empowerment schtick might have helped with “that basketball team you used to have.”

Maddeningly, MSNBC’s official transcript of Keith Olbermann’s latest “Special Comment,” on the silencing of a torture critic, is incomplete. The parts of the text that are up are righteously damning enough.

(Wait: Here’s the whole text now.)

John Edwards vows, if elected, to crack down on those annoying prescription drug commercials.

Leno got it all wrong. The line should be, “It’s MONDAY, time for NON-HEADLINES!” Monday morning newspapers’ “top” stories tend to be feature-y or analytical or, in the case of the Venus Velasquez DUI arrest, more than a week old.

Still, there are a few actual items of interest out there.

Turns out, for one thing, that the Coolest Adult any Seattleite of a certain age ever knew, J.P. Patches, has cancer, but still keeps up a rigorous schedule of personal appearances. The Times’s picture showed the legendary local TV funnyman looking more ilke one of Red Skelton’s sad-clown paintings. Alas.

Let’s figure this one out: The Bellinghamsters at Western Washington U. told a male ex-student he couldn’t sell Women of Western swimsuit calendars on campus, because they were allegedly “demeaning to women.” Four years before, the same administration allowed a student organization to screen erotic art movies under the series title Pornfest.

A good student of semiotics would parse her/his way to a consistent line straddling both decisions–we want to encourage students to do it, not just sit around and look in the manner of passive consumers; or, perhaps, a swimsuit calendar represents an awkward intersection of sexuality and fashion, while porn offers a more directly visceral experience and is therefore more subversive of the dominant paradigm.

We must bid a fond adieu this morning to Porter Wagoner, your quintessential Nashville pop star. Besides his own dozens of hits (my favorite: “The Rubber Room”), he had a modest little syndicated TV series for 21 years. The Porter Wagoner Show was a deceptively plain affair, designed to mimic Wagoner’s touring show. Some patter, a baggy-pants comedian, some solo songs, one instrumental number, and a couple numbers by the band’s current “girl singer.” The second woman to fill the latter role was Dolly Parton, with whom Wagoner co-wrote and co-recorded many tracks between 1967 and 1975, when she went solo.

Puget Sound Energy is being sold to Australian and Canadian investors, who will take the state’s largest private utility “private.” That is, no more stock trading; and therefore no pesky SEC reports to file about the company’s finances.

The Puget Sound Light, Traction and Power Company was Seattle’s original electric company, and also its first operator of electrified streetcars. Even after the formation of the municipally-owned Seattle City Light, Puget Power still ran its parallel, competitive electric lines until the 1950s. (The last vestige of Puget Power’s in-city operation is now the independent Seattle Steam, providing competitive electric service to a wide swath of downtown.)

Further public-power initiatives in Tacoma and Snohomish County left Puget Power with a diminished operating turf that happened to be in the path of suburban sprawl. That territory included Snoqualmie, where the company had already dammed Snoqualmie Falls and built what’s now the Salish Lodge.

In the 1990s Puget Power merged with Washington Energy, formerly Washington Natural Gas, formerly Washington Gas Company (or “GASCO”). That company had run a huge smoke-belching coal-fired gasification plant for almost half a century. The plant was rendered obsolete when natural gas pipelines reached here; it eventually became Gas Works Park. For decades after that, the gas company’s most famous landmark was the giant revolving neon sign on its office roof, the Blue Flame (or, in later street jargon, the “blue vagina”).

In recent years, Puget Sound Energy has become under fire for not getting the power back on after windstorms as quickly as Seattle City Light and Tacoma Public Utilities. It’s not all the company’s operating fault. Its service area includes a lot of rural and exurban territories, still serviced by overhead wiring. Still, the company promised last week that the new owners would pour cash in to help modernize its network. Weezell see.

And, oh yeah, the Boston Red Sox effortlessly swept the World Series.