…feel a lot as if I was a townsperson in It’s A Good Life, the Jerome Bixby story made famous in a Twilight Zone episode starring future comic-book writer and Barnes & Barnes novelty singer Bill Mumy.

Our whole society (local, national, global) is being ruined by the collective equivalent to that story’s boy villain–a pre-adolescent mindset of greed and vengeance. Not only must we obey fully, we must obey cheerfully. We must always think good thoughts, even as everything we love is torn asunder. In “lifestyle” journalism, that means the writer must, MUST, MUST absolutely, gushingly adore whatever the upscale demographic target market’s expected to like. Huge ugly vehicles? Snooty restaurants? Fantastic! Development schemes devised to give the waterfront to Paul Allen? Gotta love ’em! Gutting health-care and education funding to support subsidies to Boeing and Amgen? It was good that the politicians did that!

AFTER SEEING a Red Green Show skit about customizing an ordinary modern car with a cut-up fiberglass canoe, I found a webpage about concept and prototype cars from the fifties and sixties. Damn, I wish some of those things had been really made.

…here’s a CBC news report about that wacky new fad, “A network called ‘Internet.'”

WE’VE NOT HERETOFORE discussed the Lord of the Rings movies, except to bemoan that their merchandising rights are controlled (and have been humongously exploited) by John Fogerty’s least-favorite record mogul Saul Zaentz. But the current New Yorker has a fond but not fawning essay comparing the films, not unfavorably, both to Tolkien’s original books and to Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle operas. Along the way, the essay gives particular praise to the one member of the films’ creative team with the closest New York connection, composer (and original Saturday Night Live bandleader) Howard Shore.

…to Art Carney, the long-enduring actor who went from The Honeymooners to the original Broadway cast of The Odd Couple to a slew of ’70s and ’80s comeback films.

Unfortunately, none of the initial online obits for Carney I saw mentioned perhaps his most poignant role, that of real-life Wash. state curmuddgeon and volcano victim Harry Truman in St. Helens.

Have written 8850 words. (I don’t warranty them to be good words.) About 80 percent of my projected remaining scenes are now in breakdown/outline form.

The self-imposed deadline exercise has shown me just how much unproductive routine has accumulated in my current life of long-term underemployment. To make more writing time, I’ve cut my TV viewing to three shows (Black and White Overnight, Coronation Street, and Zed). I’ve cut my news reading to one paper a day. I’ve cut my email reading down to messages real individuals have written specifically to me. Next to be cut: The fourteen web sites I try to look at at least every other day.

MTV’s SN magazine, a tiresome rote exercise in the branding of bland corporate entertainment as somehow daring and edgy. I used to defend MTV and its spinoff projects from the unholier-than-thou culture critics. I can’t anymore. It’s not that SN (or MTV itself) is a dangerous influence on our children; just the opposite. It’s an irrelevant nothing, as loud and as trite as the global-superstar acts it showcases. And it’s a mouthpiece for the major record labels, an institution whose sleazeball tactics against its own fan base are giving it a public black eye from which it may never recover.

I’m now adding this paragraph later that same day. Upon further pondering, SN is superficially not all that different from some of the more superficial alt-music magazines of recent vintage (you know, the ones filled with one-page, big-picture, few-words puff pieces about rising young alterna-celebrities). You can interpret that as meaning either that the independent music press has sunk to MTV attention-span levels, or that MTV’s nakedly stealing indie-music shticks for the umpteen-hundredth time to prop up its illusion of street credibility, or something in between the two.

…starts pondering whether TV viewership’s in a death spiral, at least among the young-adult-male demographic all the advertisters want, you’ve gotta wonder if it just might be true. On the other hand, the ABCNews.com article herein linked reads like one of those overblown instant-trend stories seen all over the newspaper living sections, stories that often prove not to be as universally prophetic as they say they are.

Yet the question may still be begged: Is network TV, as we know it, a lumbering dinosaur of a business? Sometimes, such as when Fear Factor or Joe Millionaire is on, it sure seems that way. Other times, such as when King of the Hill or Letterman is on, it still seems like it’s got some of its old industrial-age oomph left in it. Then there are times, such as when a soon-to-be-forgotten rote show like I’m With Her is on, when it seems too far gone to even worry about, like a cool old-time restaurant you never go to anymore but you’d greatly mourn if it went under.

FROM A NATION that still has at least a semi-free press, comes a huge CBC investigation into all those 9/11 conspiracy theories. What the Canadian TV team was able to confirm as facts is a tiny piece of the theory pie, but even that’s full of scary stuff about the Bushes, the bin Ladens, the small-town cameraderie of the global oil-political elite, and geopolitical strategems that totally backfire.

…today to Rod Roddy, the mellifluous and illustrious announcer on Soap, Press Your Luck, and for 17 years on The Price is Right, now deceased at age 66 from cancer. Long may he orate from that great Plinko board in the sky.

…but here high atop MISC World HQ we’re sitting high-N-dry, watching the rain and flooding footage on cable, avoiding anything to do with the World Series, and pondering what kind of age we live in that finds both Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love popping the same drugs.

…has come and gone, alas, without a pennant, a division title, or even a lousy wild-card berth. And it’s all because of a half-dozen or so needless losses in August and September to teams we shoulda beat more often (Rangers, Orioles, Angels).

Now what? This might very well have been the final go-around for the current core M’s lineup. Edgar Martinez may very well be gone next year; so could Mike Cameron, Mark McLemore, Freddy Garcia, Carlos Guillen, and Joel Piniero. The ’04 Mariners could easily become a “rebuilding year” squad. The Supersonics have had seven rebuilding years in a row, so you know what that could mean.

On the other glove, the M’s just might acquire just the right just-before-their-peak young players and/or seasoned vets to finally get over the top. I hope for that, but expect otherwise.

A COUPLE OF DUDES with way too much time on their hands created a huge map of the Simpsons’ town of Springfield.

Paul Allen’s gonna spend $100 mill to fund a research study utilizing mice to explore the genetic development of brains. By this time next year, the lab space in Fremont just might become HQ of assorted plots to take over the world.

AS PROMISED, here are the last of my Bumbershoot Ought-Three pix, at the big R.E.M./Wilco gig in High School Memorial Stadium. (No, the stadium’s not named in honor of dead high schools, even though Seattle’s got two or three of those.)

This year’s stadium “stage sponsor” was Comcast, the local-monopoly cable company (formerly AT&T, formerly TCI, formerly Group W, formerly TelePrompTer). Several of these successive companies have had logos that matched their business models.

TCI, you might recall, had a symbol of a sun (or satellite) beaming a signal to the Earth, exemplifying the old-media premise of everybody getting their entertainment/news/culture from one central source.

AT&T’s ringed circle visualized the company’s post-Bell System dream of wiring the world, back in the days before wireless-mania.

And Comcast has a stylized version of the circle-C copyright symbol, that icon of reverence to an increasingly concentrated (and increasingly vilified) intellectual-property industry.

The two acts on stage Monday night bridged one or two generation gaps, and cut across subcultural niche-appeal.

Wilco’s act, if described literally, would read like the description of an early-’70s “country rock” band. Wilco’s not like that. It’s simply a great, intelligent, inventive pop and rock group, which doesn’t “cross over” between categories so much as it defies easy categorization. (No wonder their record label dropped them just as they made their best record to date, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, as depicted in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.)

Little new seems to be sayable about the livin’ legends of R.E.M., except that (1) they’re more or less a Seattle band these days, and (2) they still make beautiful-sad-upbeat-energetic-soft-hard-fast-slow-memorable music, even in the promlematic environment of a stadium show.