As of this past Monday, KING-TV now claims to be producing “the first and only high-definition newscast in Seattle.” Then what’s KOMO been churning out for the past seven years, puppet shows?

Current false exclusivity claims aside, KING had previously been claiming its newscasts were in HD. But that applied only to shots of the studio anchors, and only when those anchors weren’t accompanied by superimposed graphics. But now, the whole thing’s in wide, sharp, beautiful HD. (Except for live reports from the field, which are “upconverted” from widescreen standard-def.) KING 5 Morning News on KONG 6/16 is also in hi-def now, even the cute animal-adoption segments.

…on writing a Kurt Vonnegut remembrance, what with all the verbal tonnage that gets generated whenever a “Sixties Generation Icon” (SGI) dies.

But note must be made of a particularly vile obit segment on the Fox Pseudo-News Channel. As you watch the linked clip, remember: This was a taped “actuality” piece, not a live rant by a commentator. This is from the part of the channel’s output that’s still billed as fair-n’-balanced.

If you can’t stomach watching it, I’ll tell you what you already suspect: James Rosen totally trashes the beloved author and everything he stood for, dismissing Vonnegut as a morose loser whose refusal to conform to right-wing ideological obedience sealed his pathetic, irrelevant fate.

Now: What I have to say about Vonnegut. His SGI status seemed odd to me. Vonnegut was well past 30 by ’68. He was an old-school Eugene Debs socialist. His novels and stories were sad/angry/brutal, not mellow or fluffy or self-aggrandizing. He never set himself up as anybody’s guru.

Like Stephen King, Vonnegut learned his craft selling short stories to mass entertainment magazines, back when fiction was still a big part of most big mags’ menus. It was there that he learned all the little details of comic timing, of repetition, of strong characterizations and brisk plots. He learned how to be both populist and popular.

The “So it goes” fatalism pinned on him by some obit writers was actually an attitude he’d been reacting against in his work. No, Mr. Rosen, Vonnegut wasn’t a defeatist cynic. He was an angry young man who stayed angry in his old age, and deservedly so.

He was also an artist who, in his wit and his inventiveness and his unbending adherence to moral principles, provided an aesthetic vision of how the world ought to be, even as his plots revealed/symbolized the sorry state of the world as it was.

…during what’s essentially the first springtime afternoon of the year. Ah, the smell of freshly mulched grass, the sight of Pike Place tourist hordes, the sound of road-repair jackhammers, the taste of premature California strawberries, the touch of temperate air on the skin. It’s the sort of day that lets one forget the entire S.A.D. season.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO LATELY: Still working with a team starting an exciting new online venture, which I hope to officially announce soon. One delaying factor: The difficulty of coming up with a good web-site name that hasn’t been taken.

LOSS-O-INNOCENCE MOMENT OF THE MONTH: Heard poorly-excerpted beats from The Jam’s 1980 power-pop anthem “Start” in an awful Cadillac SUV commercial last month. It was merely weeks after viewing the DVD set The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave, which contained a rousing performance of the song on Tom Snyder’s late-late-night talkfest. The set also includes a 1977 interview segment with Jam frontman Paul Weller and Joan Jett, both looking achingly young and vulnerable. Of all the fates that could have befallen that fresh-faced, 19-year-old Weller, I can think of few worse than to have become a shill for luxury sport-utes.

According to some Web site that claims to be authoritative, Seattle ranks 7 on a list of “Top US Erotica Important Cities.” NY/LA/SF are up there, of course, as are Vegas, Miami, and Chicago (the latter in honor of what’s left of Playboy’s head office, much of whose operations have been shipped off to LA and NY). Our reason for getting on the list: “Adult Websites.” (Maybe they didn’t hear that IEG/ClubLove went pffft years ago.)

Other fun alleged-facts on the page: One out of three “visitors to adult websites” are women. Ninety percent of 8-16 year-olds have seen porn online. Twelve percent of all U.S. Web sites are devoted to porn. The U.S. accounts for only 14 percent of “Worldwide Pornography Revenues,” fourth in the world; China (!) and South Korea (!!) lead that category, with fetish-fanatical Japan third. Despite this, “US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.” (The latter stat I’m particularly not so sure of; most video and online porn companies are privately held, and reliable financial data about them are notoriously elusive and exaggerated.)

…flashier than ever in HD, but were still as generally dull and self-congratulatory as ever. And WTF wasn’t Adrienne Shelly mentioned during the obit reel?

Author Marybeth Hamilton claims blues music, from its first appearance on 78 rpm records, has always been a vehicle for white intellectuals and curators to fantasize about the supposed primeval “authenticity” of ethnic folks. And it has continued to be so, on to the recent fad for Paul Simonized “world” music and the thug stereotypes deliberately perpetuated by gangsta rap.

WELL-DUH DEPT. #2: The TV show 24 is produced and written by pro-war Republicans. Who else would so lovingly depict torture as an act of heroism?

“Bush Proposes Steep Cut to PBS Funding”

I’ve watched three of the four discs in the box set Harveytoons, The Complete Series. These 1950-1962 cartoons have proven to be just as perverse, violent and corny as I remember from my childhood.

In my adult years, I’ve learned these films were originally made by Famous Studios, which had been formed in 1942 after Paramount foreclosed on the more prestigious Max Fleischer studio. I also learned that, despite at least two of the films depicting the studio as situated in sunny Hollywood, it was really one of two animation factories in New York. (The other was the even less-respected Terrytoons.)

When Paramount parceled out its old theatrical shorts to TV distributors, it told those buyers to remove the Paramount name and logo from all distributed prints. Thus, when Harvey Comics bought one of the Paramount cartoon packages (plus the rights to all the starring characters therein), Paramount’s “Noveltoons” jack-in-the-box logo became “Harveytoons.”

These retitled films were first televised Sunday afternoons on ABC in 1959. I first saw them three or four years later, when they were syndicated onto local weekday kids’ shows. (As I recall, they aired locally with Brakeman Bill on KTNT, later KSTW.)

I’m surprised at how many moments from the films have been part of my brain’s hard-wiring, after all these decades:

• Casper drinking lemonade and turning pink.
• Herman the mouse turning Katnip into a Christmas tree, then sticking the cat’s tail in a power outlet to light him up.
• In another film, Herman (disguised as a mouse St. Peter) threatening Katnip with a toss into “the fiery furnace” (really a coal-fired home furnace).
• Baby Huey mistaking lab chemicals for “sody pop” and burping fireballs.
• A one-shot musical set in a “candy town” nightclub, with a gun-toting sourball cutting in on a dancing lollypop: “All right Lolly, drop that gum!”
• The “Crazytown Manufacturing Co.” factory, where an entire log is mechanically whittled away to create a single toothpick.

Some aspects of the films which I hadn’t remembered:

• The drawing, animation, backgrounds, and music are all of a much higher quality than I realized as a kid–at least in the package’s earlier films. Starting with the shorts bearing 1956 copyright dates, the budgets started going down. Full character movement gave way to simpler “cycle” animation.
• And Casper, the dominant character in the Harvey package (Popeye was Famous Studios’ biggest star, but those films were sold to a different syndicator) seemed overly infantile to me when I was six, but it resonates more strongly now.

Casper, as first created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in 1945, was a cloying object lesson in “fair play, overcoming peer pressure and being accepted for who you are (not by how you appear),” to quote a reviewer at imdb.com. As the Famous crew over the years turned the premise into a repetitive gag formula, its life lessons seemed a bit shallow–particularly when juxtaposed against the brutal hijinx of Herman and Katnip.

But in today’s sociocultural context, it makes more sense.

Casper is a sensitive, intellectual (the films often open on him reading a hardcover book), optimistic kid, who wants to spread amity, love, and cooperation in the world–in short, a progressive Democrat.

The other ghosts (later standardized in the comic books as the Ghostly Trio) are snotty schoolyard bullies who thrive on propagating fear, misunderstanding, and discord–in short, conservative Republicans.

Most of the “living” humans and animals in the Casper films have been indoctrinated by anti-ghost propaganda into fleeing at first sight of Casper, even though Casper has only the best of intentions. Heck, the other ghosts are never seen performing anything more harmful than frat-boy pranks.

But those pranks are what the other ghosts “live” for. The other ghosts not only want Casper to be perceived as scary, they want Casper to become scary. By refusing the ghost agenda, Casper is a rebel against, and a threat to, the dominant (ghost) culture.

Ironically, Casper usually gets out of trouble when the predators threatening his new-found friends see Casper and flee in fright. Casper’s curse is also one of his gifts.

But Casper’s bigger gift is perseverance. One new friend at a time, he effectively spreads his message of togetherness. For a non-corporeal being who’d apparently “died” at a presexual age (an aspect of his story that wasn’t discussed until the 1995 feature film), he’s got a lot of interest in helping corporeal humans live better lives together.

I could think of worse role models.

I met the legendary cartoon producer-mogul circa 1993, at a gallery opening during the height of the collectible-animation-cel craze. He could recite every Tom and Jerry short scene-for-scene, but had trouble remembering the titles of some of the TV series that had come out under his name. (Hey, I’d have forgotten any past involvement with Inch High, Private Eye and The Funky Phantom, let alone Scrappy-Doo.) He also sighed about how he and everyone he knew wanted to get out of L.A., and mentioned the possibility of retiring to the Northwest. He did nothing of the sort, of course; until almost the end, he was still pitching projects and working as a consultant to Warner Bros., even after the conglomerate changed Hanna-Barbera into “Cartoon Network Studios.”

…misguided Ren and Stimpy “adult” revival show was a flop, but he’s still a great scholar of cartooning and animation. His personal blog provides an ongoing lesson in these deceptively simple looking art forms. A recent entry on the Chuck Jones short Inki and the Minah Bird lauds Jones for having “the idea to constantly try new things and experiment and always be restless and never satisfied with anything. I might be the last person on earth who remembers the concept of ‘progress’ as a positive thing, a concept that just a few decades ago was the American philosophy that made the country the greatest, most influential and fastest moving nation in history.”

Of course, that same idea of “progress” has caused the film in question to become banned from authorized screenings and TV showings, due to the questionable racial portrayal of the African hunter boy Inki.

“Doctors say how we taste affects health.” The Colbertian response: Yes. If we weren’t so delicious, bears wouldn’t stalk us.

…when right wingnuts take a SciFi Channel show too seriously? What happens when the show changes its storyline, muddying its once-supposedly-clear political metaphors?

…has called it quits after 36 years, six locations, hundreds of productions, and a huge 2004-5 fundraising drive that was supposed to have saved it. Apparently director Alison Narver couldn’t get her Jeopardy!-loser brother to finagle a donation from Ken Jennings after all.

General Electric’s gonna slash 700 jobs at NBC and Universal Studios. More importantly, but buried in this linked story, is that NBC will drop all dramas and comedies from the 8-9 PM prime-time hour, presumably starting either next season or this next midseason, presumably filling the hour with more cheap “reality” shows.

…do on the air, if you’re a playoffs baseball announcer: #3. Hurl an ethnic slur at Lou Piniella.