I’ve been loyal to the Ivar’s waterfront fireworks show for years, only to learn that the competing Lake Union fireworks show’s a lot more spectacular.

Fourth of July revelation #2: My annual enjoyment of the SciFi Channel’s Twilight Zone marathon was rudely and abruptly discontinued when the channel switched to Extreme Championship Wrestling. This is even worse than moldy Saved by the Bell reruns on the Cartoon Network, or right-wingnut commentator shows on Headline News.

Seattle Weekly editor Knute Berger’s announced his resignation, six months after the paper was bought by the Arizona-based New Times chain. Berger (nephew of former Guiding Light soap star Barbara Berjer) spent his current editorship functioning as an old-guard defender of the faith, maintaining a sense of the paper’s (and the city’s) heritage in spite of parent-company pressure to cheapen and “modernize” the product. In spite of the Stranger’s constant ribbing about Berger’s official residence in the ‘burbs (a relic of his previous helming of the Weekly‘s former EastsideWeek edition), he remained loyal to the end to a particularly “Seattle” way of looking at the world—sincere and serious, but with a healthy sprig of wryness.

Our splendider-than-splendid 20th MISCiversary hullabaloo commences at 8 p.m. in the downstairs “Grotto” room of the Rendezvous, on Second Avenue between Battery and Bell in formerly-quiet Belltown.

INSTEAD OF REVIEWING Jay Leno’s non-starter of a segment with wingnut crashing-bore Ann Coulter, I’ll comment on Coulter’s Ally McBeal-esque rail-thinness. I’ve seldom if ever commented on a female celebrity’s physical appearance, but in this case Coulter’s countenance might be a key to her mindset.

Last week at a First Thursday art opening, my fellow Belltown Messenger scribe Gillian Gaar told me she thought Coulter looked anorexic. I don’t remember everything Gaar told me, but she essentially suggested Coulter was treating herself with the same judgmental cruelty she uses on non-Bushbots. I responded that I’d known right-wingers who were vegetarians, not for moral reasons but for the sake of personal perfection.

The shrinks and the self-help authors claim many anorexics are propelled by an obsession with attaining perfect beauty, and/or an obsession with an ethereal transcendence that both denies and overcomes the limitations of bodily existence.

I’ve known only one ex-anorexic personally. This woman, who’s doing much better these days, said that at the time she felt disgusted at the idea of putting anything into her body. You could call it the ultimate chastity, and it’s another kind of perfection-obsession.

Coulter, overtly, markets herself as a proud provocateur, a daring rebel, a valiant warrior. I happen to view her as none of these, but rather as a pompous bully, an insult comic who forgot to be funny. She’s like the screechingly pathetic MSNBC incarnation of Dennis Miller, without Miller’s wordplay or comic timing.

But back to her self-image. She clearly thrives on hate, both giving and receiving. She publicly treats criticism as proof of her greatness, just before she spouts another “joke” advocating her opponents’ violent murder. It’d be easy for an armchair psychologist to interpret Coulter’s emaciated physique as a sign that she gets off on punishing herself as much as she gets off on bashing anybody who doesn’t worship Bush. In BDSM lingo, that’s mean she was a dominatrix who’s also her own submissive.

But other intrepretations could also be in play. One can imagine Coulter rigorously maintaining the visual appearance of a brittle li’l waif, to make her verbal brutality seem somehow more “against type” and therefore more “truthful.”

But it still doesn’t work. Coulter just comes off as a spoiled princess, an upscale snot crassly harping about anyone poorer or less refined than herself. She’s no crusader; she’s just a schmuck.

Note: Neither Leno nor his other guest, George Carlin, made any serious attempt to call Coulter on her BS. But at the show’s end, musical guest KT Tunstall appeared with an acoustic guitar festooned with Woody Guthrie’s old slogan, “This Machine Kills Fascists.”

…today to Vernon L. Fonk, 75. The former ambulance driver and cigarette-company wholesale rep started the Vern Fonk Insurance agency in 1964; it now has 14 offices in two states, specializing in “special risk” auto policies.

Please note: The guy who plays Vern Fonk in the agency’s delightfully wacky TV commercials is still, thankfully, with us.

…has jumped all over a mini hype-bandwagon started a week and a half ago by KOMO-TV, which apparently just discovered that you can find escort ads on the Internet. So now we get P-I scribe Robert Jamieson pleading for a populist uprising against Craigslist.com for allowing said advertisers to use its URLs, without compensation.

Of course, this is pure anti-Internet FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

(Not to mention it’s attacking a victimless act performed by consenting adults in the privacy of their own blah-blah-blah.)

And, of course, these advertisers would simply find other online fora for their messages should Craigslist ever lock ’em out. Indeed, many of these advertisers are already using several other online “spaces,” including weekly papers’ sites, their own sites, and “review” message-board sites.

So why pick on Craigslist?

Could it be because Craigslist’s other ad categories are taking a big bite outta the daily papers’ want-ad revenue?

Naah. It couldn’t be that….

…but I love old toy commercials better.

• “Hard-core GOP flee Bush, pollsters find.”
• Someone’s planning a cable-TV channel just for infants. Something tells me it’ll also find an outside-the-target-demographic audience of ravers and stoners.
• Stan Stapp, the pioneering neighborhood-newspaper publisher whose passing was announced yesterday, was one of the last old-time newspapermen. The North Central Outlook, which his family owned from 1922 to 1974, was fiercely devoted to both neighborhood coverage and to what used to be called “spot news.” Somehow, Stapp and his longtime associate editor Trudy Weckworth balanced homespun folksiness with an “if it bleeds, it leads” sense of priorities. This mix was most exemplified in Stapp and Weckworth’s notorious police-beat column, “Hash Ground Fresh Weekly” (which they periodically revived, either solo or as a collaboration, in several later papers).
• In the “Hash” spirit, here’s a nice heartwarming story about a stripper fighting back against police entrapment.

• Bill Clinton’s attached his name to a drive to get soda pop out of grade and middle schools. Remember: When being a Pepper is outlawed, only outlaws will be Peppers.
• We must say goodbye to financial reporter and early PBS star Louis Rukeyser. His pallbearers, I’m sure, will be “the elves who compile our technical market index.”
• The guy in charge of Ohio’s either incompetent or corrupt election system is now that state’s official GOP gubernatorial nominee. As if you’d expect him not to win somehow.
• Lay’s potato chips—now with “good” cholesterol.
• Sign of the Apocalypse #532: Mickey Mouse goes CGI.

Bush attended the annual White House reporters’ banquet Saturday night. Faux-reporter and self-deemed superpatriot Stephen Colbert gave a shockingly satirical speech, totally in character.

The so-called “MSM” chose not to discuss the speech, preferring to report on the banquet with footage of Bush himself appearing in a comedy skit with a lookalike. But online videos and transcripts of Colbert’s performance spread all over. As have bloggers’ responses to it.

A freshly-minted “Thank You Stephen Colbert” fan-blog has logged more than 10,000 responses from grateful viral-video viewers. (Say that five times fast.)

• Are progressive teachers being witch-hunted by right-wing goon squads?
• My ol’ hometown is located within one of the most populous U.S. counties that doesn’t have a four-year college. That might change one of these years.
• Guess what? Initiative hawker and professional demagogue Tim Eyman’s behaving just like a lying, homophobic bigot.
• Is ex-Seattleite news anchor Lou Dobbs becoming a “mad prophet of the airwaves,” or is it just a big ratings stunt?
• Will right-wing corporate forces soon try to censor the Internet?
• Tom DeLay–out; the system of coordinated corruption of which he was a cog–still in.
• The ought-six Mariners: Looking pretty good, except for the bullpen.
• Daylight Savings Time is back among us, bringing sunsets after 7:30. Damn, it feels good.

The highly recommended new version of Doctor Who premieres tonight on the SciFi Channel.

MEANWHILE IN PRINTLAND, I’ll have a couple of big announcements next week about a current produce future project. Until then, let’s get caught up with some of the new paper periodicals showing up around town.

Even as the daily-newspaper biz is wreaked by decline and consolidation, slick magazines are suddenly finding financial backing. At one time, almost nobody even tried to charge money for a local mag (except Seattle and Washington CEO). Now there are two new entrants this month alone.

First out of the gate: Seattle Metropolitan. It’s from the pubilshers of Portland Monthly, staffed largely by Seattle Weekly refugees, and promises to be out every damned month.

The premiere issue’s splashy enough, but a bit weak in the enthrallment department.

There’s a laughingly awful “return to elegance” fashion spread, a predictable Charles Cross essay about Beatles nostalgia, and a drab cover hyping a list of the “65 Best Ways to Love Our City.” (I normally like pieces like this, but this one seemed off a bit. Too staid.)

On the plus side, there’s a poignant MIchael Dougan cartoon depicting the spirit of Seattle as a female rock singer who became “America’s darling” at the cost of her soul. And a long but sprightly piece depicts the devolution of Bruce Chapman from political progressive to religious-right demagogue-for-hire.

Yet, for its misses, Seattle Met at least tries to be about something. Its reach exceeds its current grasp, but that’s good.

And that’s more than can usually be said about today’s Seattle magazine, which usually settles for such formula product as “the (insert number here) top (insert upscale profession here) in (insert name of city here).” Seattle recently celebrated what it claimed to be its 40th anniversary. That’s a little specious and a lot convoluted. Let’s try to delineate:

• In 1966, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt helped start Pacific Search, a regional environmental/outdoors newsletter. (Bullitt had also subsidized the first Seattle magazine, which ran from 1964 to 1970.)
• Pacific Search evolved over the years into Pacific Northwest, a slick upscale-lifestyles magazine covering a region defined broadly enough to include large swaths of northern California. Pacific Northwest never really gelled as either an editorial or an ad-sales concept, and stumbled along through the ’80s.
• The Pacific Northwest subscriber list was eventually taken over by a new venture, Seattle Home & Garden. Circa 1993, that was split into two mags, Northwest Home & Garden and the new Seattle. This mini-empire’s now part of the Minnesota-based Tiger Oak Publications.

The above is a brief recap of a complex print-family tree; I ask your advance forgiveness for missing a vital detail here or there. Even in this short form, it’s a more intriguing story than most of what Seattle has run lately.

I’ve got this theory about compelling media content: You’ve gotta have some. It’s not enough anymore to simply identify a wealthy segment of the populace, proclaim yourself to be that segment’s “voice,” and watch the ad bucks roll in. You’ve gotta make readers want you and keep wanting you, despite the plethora of other local and national media choices out there.

Seattle Met, for all its initial failings, gets this. Will Seattle learn it in response? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Elsewhere in the same city, Seattle (Sound) breaks all the rules of local music media established back in the late ’70s by the late, lamented Rocket. Seattle (Sound) is a slick mag, not a newsprint tabloid. It charges a cover price. Because it only comes out every two months, it can’t even pretend to offer complete club listings. It doesn’t devote its cover to an out-of-town superstar act. It includes all genres, from rock to rap to classical.

And it works.

The mag’s presence alone is one big statement to the world: Seattle music’s still here dammit, and it’s stronger and broader than ever.

It treats the entire combined local music sub-scenes as one big community. It dares to define its niche big yet specific–as everyone who’s even peripherally involved with local music of any kind, as a player, a listener, or a behind-the-scenes support person.

Its debut cover story’s another list piece (“Seattle Music: 50 Most Influential”). But, unlike Seattle Met‘s big list piece, Seattle (Sound)‘s list is coherent and consistent, even as it darts from the Seattle Opera to Barsuk Records to up-n’-coming production wizards.

There are a few weak spots in the first issue. (KEXP’s John Richards has remarkably little to say about the local hiphop scene.) But on the whole it’s a great intro to a great new concept. Kudos to everyone at Media Index Publishing Group (publishers of Media Inc., the essential trade mag for the Northwest’s still-struggling audio-visual and ad-production industries).

(Full disclosure: The back page of Seattle (Sound) contains a short, favorable review of a compilation CD I helped curate. More about that next week.)

…to the mellifluous Press Your Luck game show host Peter Tomarken, who’s now joined the show’s producer and announcer in Whammy Heaven.

David Lynch is now evangelizing for Transcendental Meditation.

…data confirm what I’ve always suspected/known–that TV viewers and thinkers are not mutually exclusive sets.

…to the memory of Darren McGavin, the original Kolchak the Night Stalker and daring explorer of (a Hollywood version of) the Seattle Underground.