TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to the memory of Julie London, the former B-movie actress who was turned into the prototypical lounge singer by second husband Bobby Troup; then was hired, with Troup, by first husband Jack Webb to star in his TV show Emergency. We’re all crying a river over you, Julie.

MORE LITTLE ANECDOTES inspired by real estate. This time, memories of rock joints of the recent past.

Linda’s Tavern opened in early 1994 on the site of what had been the Ali Baba restaurant. Four years earlier, the Ali Baba had hosted some of the first freak-show performances by former pest-control salesman Jim Rose (advertised with word-heavy flyers headlined “He Is NOT A Geek”). Shortly after Linda’s opened, the Ali Baba sign became part of a shrine to Rose and his “sick circus.” The shrine wasn’t at Linda’s but at Moe’s Mo’Rockin’ Cafe, at the present site of ARO.Space.

The Kincora Pub is in one of those buildings that’s had umpteen different identites. In the ’70s and early ’80s it was Glynn’s Cove, one of Capitol Hill’s last true dive bars. Then it was the live-music club Squid Row, which (after a failed jazz-fusion format) emerged in 1987 as one of the few places to hear those loud, slow rock bands everybody in America would soon think was the only kind of rock band in Seattle. (Things got so loud iin there, the doors could only be opened between songs to appease the neighbors.) More recently it was Tugs Belmont, successor to the still fondly-remembered pioneering gay dance club Tugs Belltown.

The Vogue, dean of Seattle dance clubs, now resides within the DJ-circuit neighborhood on Capitol Hill anchored by ARO.Space. Its former site on First Avenue, seen here, still stands vacant after more than a year. It had first opened as a leather gay bar in the mid-’70s; then in late 1979 became Wrex, one of the first joints in town devoted to that new wave/punk/whatever-you-called-it music. It became the Vogue in 1983, pioneering a post-disco, not-exclusively-gay dance shtick (including the town’s longest running fetish night). It still hosted live acts on off nights, including Nirvana’s first Seattle gig in 1988.

The Hopvine Pub on 15th Ave. E. was once a somewhat more rough-hewn joint called the Five-O Tavern. The Five-O had hosted blisteringly-loud rock gigs in the mid-’80s. Even after noise complaints stopped those shows, it remained a hangout for young-adult heteros at a time when most other Capitol Hill bars were either gay or yuppie. It’s now a finely-appointed microbrew joint, but still attracts some of the ex-Five-O crowd, with singer-songwriter gigs by the likes of Pete Krebs and Marc Olsen.

TOMORROW: Secrets for making a magazine catch on.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Before you pour yourself into the pair of jeans you used to wear in college or bust out those bike shorts, check for the presence of camel toes….”
• Now available in the U.S., the Hello Kitty Toaster! (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail)…

WHEN I FIRST HEARD the news of the big Belgrade uprising, I instictually tuned to CNN–only to see a regularly-scheduled episode of TalkBack Live with Pat Buchanan’s and Ralph Nader’s vice-presidential running mates.

CNN’s Headline News channel had its regular briefs about medical discoveries and education reform.

CNBC had its normal stock-market wheel. MSNBC could only be bothered with updates about the situation, briefly interrupting its normal daytime-talk discussion on improving one’s parenting skills.

Only The Fox News Channel and BBC America were willing to interrupt their normal routines for the live riot footage CNN used to be known for.

CNN and MSNBC did get around, at the top of the hour, to covering the apparent downfall of Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic. But as the day went on, they (and Fox News Channel) kept up an annoying habit of treating the most important single world-news event so far this year as a sideshow to the day’s previously scheduled “lead story”–the evening’s forthcoming debate between Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman.

All the U.S. cable news channels under-reported the opposition takeover. But CNN seemed the most preturbed at this real-world interruption to its planned agenda.

In recent weeks, CNN has been shaken by management resignations and firings. These lead from the main CNN channel’s downward drift in the ratings. During the stock-market madness this year, CNBC has had more daytime viewers than CNN. Fox News Channel often outdraws CNN in areas where both appear (it’s still on fewer cable systems).

CNN seems today like CBS News has seemed for a while; as a slow-moving, square-thinking organization increasingly lost in a fast-moving world and a faster-moving news business. Fox News, with its outspokenly conservative talk hosts, and MSNBC, with its shameless exploiting of whatever’s the current one over-reported story (e.g. Monica Lewinsky), have let the 20-year-old CNN seem positively stodgy.

But CNN could change, if it wanted to. And it doesn’t have to wait for America Online to take over CNN’s parent company, Time Warner.

CNN could take a cue from the BBC and reinvent itself as the “class act” of the cable news biz. That won’t be cheap or quick. But it can be done. Dare to cover the big stories the other channels don’t find sexy enough. Forego the noise and smoke for more thoughtfulness.

Will they do it? We’ll have to see as the weeks and months go on.

The news continues.

TOMORROW: Fun at the High Tech Career Expo.

ELSEWHERE:

• Naked News is just what its title implies–a daily ten-minute newscast in streaming video, delivered by nude anchorwomen….
• From stereographs to the Commodore 64 and the Betamax, it’s all on the List of Dead Media (found by Pif)….

THE POKEMON FAD might be fading fast, but it’s still a useful metaphor for much of human society. The Japanese-invented cartoon universe of 151 cute “Pocket Monsters” is, like many anime creations, much more complex and layered than U.S.-devised kiddie fare.

Thus, its characters can even be used to symbolize the U.S. Presidential election.

Herewith, our first-ever “Poke-President” guide:

AL GORE: The perfect Poke-world stand-in for Droning Al is Jigglypuff– the wide-eyed Pokemon who defeats its opponents by singing a lovely song that puts them all to sleep. Jigglypuff thinks its song is merely beautiful; when all other Pokes and humans go snoozin’ as a result, it takes out a felt-tip pen and draws scornful patterns on their faces. Sort of like a policy wonk chiding us for not fully appreciating his 151-point economic platforms.

GEORGE W. BUSH: Most perfectly represented by the cross-eyed Psyduck. This Poke-critter attempts to disable its fighting foes by sending out a psychic “confusion attack,” only to usually end up making itself too confused to even know which way it’s going. It’s even capable of staring itself down in a reflecting pond to the point of paralysis. Still, it’s cuddly and sympathetic in its usually pathetic attempts to hold its own in the arena of combat.

PAT BUCHANAN: There are several bad-guy Poke-critters who could symbolize our aging borderline-bigot, but the most appropriate is Koffing. This Pokemon floats through the air to launch a lethal “smokescreen attack”–subjecting the other Pokemon (and its own trainers) with an unbreathable cloud of thick black smoke. Thus, it’s a perfect match for Pat, who (heart symbols) big polluters and is always blowing a lot of hot air.

RALPH NADER: Fighting Ralph’s most apropos Poke-counterpart is the fire-breathing Charizard. One of the most powerful good-guy Pokemon, Charizard’s a never-say die competitor–when there’s a truly important cause at stake. But it can’t be bothered to take part in the commercialized nonsense of organized Pokemon cockfighting (the Poke-world’s counterpart to organized sports, and hence a great metaphor for the meaningless gamesmanship rites of organized politics). When asked to combat just for the sake of combatting, it will blow flames in the face of its would-be trainers and go back to sleep.

TOMORROW: On the Sound Transit commuter train.

ELSEWHERE:

• Still-classic graphic wonders, the posters from the Works Progress Administration….
• What Karl Marx sez about globalization (found by Arts and Letters Daily)…./UL>
  

LAST FRIDAY AND ALL THIS WEEK, I’ve been reminiscing about Seattle during the fall of 1975.

I’d arrived in town in September of that year after a childhood spent in Olympia and Marysville, WA and Corvallis, OR. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, except cease living with my parents and stay the heck out of the military.

Within two days I’d found what would now be called a “mother-in-law” apartment in Wallingford (in a home run by a devout Catholic couple with a Mary shrine in the front yard; within a year, they got a brand-new Betamax VCR equipped with “Swedish Erotica” tapes.) Days later, I got a graveyard-shift job at the U District Herfy’s (a once locally-prominent burger chain; that particular branch is now a Burger King).

I hadn’t many career expectations at the time. Writing was something I seemed to be good at, but I also could see myself in acting, local TV, music, retail, graphic design, even bike-messengering (which I wound up doing for a while).

Some of my initial memories:

• Metro Transit. I’d grown up with school buses, but hadn’t lived in a jurisdiction with municipal bus service. How convenient! You just stand in one spot for as long as half an hour and you’ll get anywhere you want to go (except some really obscure places or places out in the ‘burbs).

• My first neighborhood. I’d known Wallingford only as a hillside by the freeway. I soon discovered a perfect little neighborhood with an independent supermarket (the Fabulous Food Giant), two indie drug stores, an indie hardware store (Tweedy & Popp, still there), an art-house movie theater, the original Dick’s Drive-In, and block after block of handsome old bungalows. At the time, it was still a working-stiffs’ area. Before long, it would be taken over by professors and lawyers; by now even they can’t afford it.
• Pioneer Square. Corny as it now seems, I remember eating a cinnamon roll on a late-summer afternoon outside the old Grand Central Bakery on Occidental Park and thinking this was the perfect time and place to be at.
• Daytime TV. Game shows and entertainment-talk shows I knew; but this new night job left me sedate enough at midmorning to finally begin to appreciate the slow-grinding emotionality of the soaps.
• Late-night TV. Johnny Carson had been around almost as long as the Space Needle. I’d seen his show very rarely as a teen. Now I got to see it any night I wasn’t working. Either I’d just gotten old enough to realize he wasn’t that tremendously funny, or his move from NY to LA had killed his creative spark. Today, I’m more apt to believe the latter.

  That fall, a weekly Carson rerun would be replaced by a new show, initially titled NBC’s Saturday Night. The contrast only made Carson’s shtick seem even dumber (but in an endearing sorta way).

• The movies. Marysville’s only theater at the time was a drive-in (which for a while showed “hard R” films in full view from I-5). Corvallis had a few indoor cinemas, showing mostly mainstream Hollywood product. But in Seattle I got to see the whole cinematic gamut; especially with that newly-minted Seattle International Film Festival, and with Randy Finley’s almost-as-new chain of art houses (the first of which is now the Grand Illusion).
• Hippies and ex-hippies. Until I started meeting a number of them in person, I had no idea how docile and mumbly-voiced they could be, or how much of a superior species they thought they were, just because they’d been to a couple of protest marches five years before.

  (My teenage encounters with the fundamentalist-Christian universe had already taught me to beware those who claimed they were the only ones going to Heaven on the basis of picayune doctrinal trivia.)

• Minorities. I’d known native Americans and a few Asian Americans, but African Americans were a new in-person experience. They mostly turned out to be almost nothing like the media images of them at the time, even the “positive” media images.
• Chronic depression. Despite having lived a squeaky-clean life to that point, I was still barely awake toward the 4 a.m. end of my work shifts at the burger joint, and was fired quite promptly. To be cast out from supposedly one of the world’s easiest jobs sent me into what I now realize was a blue funk of prescribable-for proportions.

All in all, it was a time of diminished expectations, of a big city that still, mistakenly, thought it was a helpless little cowtown.

Despite everything that’s happenned for the better around here since then, and there’s been a lot, I miss something of that funky humility.

MONDAY: Back to the future with the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever written.

ELSEWHERE:

• Dennis Miller’s Monday Night Football jokes and references explained for you in microscopic detail! (found by Dandot)….
• “How to Win an Argument with a Vegetarian”

LAST FRIDAY, I began a recollection of what Seattle was like in the fall of 1975, when I first came to the allegedly Big City after a childhood in much smaller burgs.

I’d already mentioned the only “alternative” paper at the time, The Seattle Sun; and its target audience niche, a Capitol Hill-centered clique of 25-to-35-ers who just wanted to settle down after doing whatever they’d done in The Sixties.

The mainstream media in town were also fairly tame at the time.

The Seattle Times, still an afternoon paper, was still as wide as the Wall Street Journal and as plain-looking as a cheap suburban tract house. It always ran a half-page photo on Page 3, which was almost always of a dog or Mount Rainier. Its features section, then called “View,” had many cute stories about somebody doing something important who was–gasp–a woman!

The P-I, meanwhile, was a feisty archrival to the Times in those pre-Joint-Operating-Agreement days (well, except for the editorials, which usually touted the same Chamber of Commerce party line). It still had some of that old Hearstian spunk in it; at least in the sports pages, which were then mostly about the Sonics, college sports, and out-of-town stuff. There were no Mariners or Seahawks yet; though the P-I’s lovable geezer Royal Brougham (who’d been at the paper since WWI) was already drumming up oldtime rah-rah support for our soon-to-be local heroes.

Local TV was a far different animal then than now. Newscasts were heavy on in-studio commentators and grainy 16mm film. Portable video cameras were just being introduced, and were largely used as gimmicks (as they mostly still are). That meant a lot of interviews, press conferences, and staged media events (held before 1 p.m. so the film could be edited by 5); interspersed with a few of the fires and police chases that now dominate local newscasts across the country.

And there was still a good deal of non-news local TV. J.P. Patches and Gertrude still ran a bizarre, funky kiddie show on KIRO, whose influence on the local theatrical and performance scenes lasted for decades. KING had morning and evening talk shows, providing endless interview slots to all the itinerant book-pluggers crisscrossing the nation. KOMO had a “religious program” called Strength for These Days, which ran at 5:45 a.m. weekdays and consisted entirely of the same film footage of ocean waves and windblown trees every day, accompanied by choir music.

Seattle radio was an even odder beast. For one thing, AM stations still dominated.

For the grownups, KVI’s dynamic eccentrics Bob Hardwick and Jack Morton engaged a spirited ratings battle against KOMO’s personable square Larry Nelson and KIRO’s fledgling news-talk format.

For the kids, KVI and KING-AM played an odd top-40 melange of anything that happened to be popular (Dolly Parton, Lynard Skynard, Helen Reddy, Barry White, Edgar Winter, Tony Orlando, Donny Osmond).

For the older kids, the FM band found KISW and KZOK blasting Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and their metal brethern out to Camaro-drivin’ teens from Spanaway to Stanwood.

The UW, meanwhile, had a little FM operation, KUOW, which played blocks of classical music (competing with the then-commercial KING-FM) and that newfangled network newscast with those really soft-talking announcers. (The U also ran a smaller operation, KCMU, as a laboratory for broadcast-communications students to play Grateful Dead songs and mumble their way through the weather report.)

And there was an honest-to-goodness radical community station, KRAB-FM. Its announcers often hemmed and hawed their way through a set list, but they played everything from Thai pop to big-band to political folk. It had talk blocks, too: Vietnamese children’s fables, classical lit, rambling speeches by already-aging hippie celebrities about why Those Kids Today had become too apathetic. KRAB stumbled through internal politics and mismanagement until 1984. Its frequency is now occupied by KNDD.)

TOMORROW: The Seattle arts scene at the time.

IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a fun rumor for all you conspiracy theorists (which I’m not): Could OPEC countries be scheming to raise oil prices and engender U.S. voter restlessness against Gore/Lieberman? (found by Progressive Review)

ELSEWHERE:

• Got one of those new telephone prefixes that never had a name to go with it? Add your own, from this official 1955 Bell System list of “Officially Recommended Exchange Names” (found by Clarke Stone)….

NOW THAT EITHER a summer or winter Olympic Games occur every other year, the whole mega-ritual has become almost too familiar to seem really special; especially as packaged for American network TV.

The drill can be as painful as mile 24 of a marathon, and lasts much longer. Network officials invariably overpay for the rights to the games, then decide American viewers aren’t really interested in the sporting competitions.

So they end up televising only brief snippets of the various contests–just enough to set the stage for the supposed real audience grabbers, the slickly-edited personality profiles and human-interest vignettes.

During these segments, the athletes try their hardest to project enough personality to become instant celebrities (and, with luck, score big endorsement deals). But their constant training since learning to walk has turned most of them into no-fun workaholics, scarcely able to complete a coherent sentence.

And even when events are playing (taped hours before and edited in such a way as to destroy a game’s natural pacing), the announcers do everything possible to create a “feel-good” narrative storyline that’ll appeal to 18-35 female viewers who don’t normally watch sports.

That means U.S. competitors are often billed as the “stars,” whether in real contention or not.

It means events that are supposed to appeal to the target audience (gymnastics, swimming, women’s track and field) get priority time and attention, while others are left in obscurity.

It also means the technical, less-flashy elements of a sport are ignored whenever possible, in favor of highlight-reel spectacle moments.

Compare and contrast, meanwhile, to the CBC coverage, which has drawn cult followings in U.S. border towns such as Seattle and among big-dish satellite subscribers.

CBC does play a lot of attention to its country’s competitors; but since there are far fewer of them, it means the channel shows long stretches of field hockey, water polo, and many other NBC-unfavorite sports that happen to have a strong Canadian entrant.

CBC’s lower-budgeted coverage relies more heavily on the international-feed video, which emphasizes straightforward, no-nonsense coverage. To this footage, the Canadian network adds announcers who not only know the sports they’re covering, they assume their viewers care about the sports too.

And because it encourages its viewers to care about the games themselves, rather than just the instant celebrities, CBC isn’t afraid to show them live. This year, that means afternoon events in Sydney air in prime time in Toronto (late afternoon out here). Evening events in Sydney air late-night in Pacific Time, in the wee hours in the east.

NBC could’ve done this with its pair of subsidiary cable channels, but apparently couldn’t get over the “this is the way we’ve always done it” syndrome. The result: Anemic ratings and widespread disinterest; while the CBC broadcasters are becoming the games’ real heroes to those Americans capable of receiving them.

We’re probably seeing the end of the Olympic Games, as American television viewers have known them. The mass audience NBC wants can’t be corralled in by human-interest pap anymore because it doesn’t exist anymore. The next games could be covered on a broadcast channel with highlight shows (that don’t pretend to be more than highlight shows), on cable with live coverage of events with an adequate audience draw, and on the Net with unedited, multiple streaming-video feeds of everything. (Yes, even the Modern Pentathlon.)

In the post-mass-market age, nobody cares about media products packaged for people who don’t care. In sports coverage, you’ve gotta find, nurture, and build niche audiences among people who know and care about the particular sports being covered.

In the case of the Olympics, if you aggregate enough niche audiences for all the component sports, you could still have something.

TOMORROW: Web content as shareware.

ELSEWHERE:

• Despite all the Marion Jones cover stories, media coverage of women’s sports still has a ways to go….
• Hollywood’s last defender of free speech: Mr. Showgirls!…
• Make up your own X-treme sport! (found by Memepool)….

LIKE THE PRE-DOT-COM SEATTLE, Canada has long been a place whose most prominent cultural identity has centered on its collective moping about whether it has a cultural identity.

And like the old Seattle stereotype, the subsidiary tenets of the Canadian stereotype are of a generic North American region with a smidgen more politeness than most, and an economy centered around the hewing of wood and the gathering of water.

Seattleites cry and wail whenever a beloved little sliver of what used to pass for “unique,” or at least locally-thought-up, culture goes away (a condo-ized old apartment building, a low-rise downtown block).

Canadians had been so apparently starved for a show of national pride that when one came along a year and a half ago or so, citizens rallied around it and even took to memorizing its lines. This unifying object of nationalistic fervor? A beer commercial.

When I visited Vancouver again last week, I set out in specific search of the Canadian (or at least a Vancouver) spirit. Something defining “Our Neighbors to the North” as more than just other than U.S. folk.

I arrived in time to see the first all-Canadian episodes of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

In a Mother Jones essay years ago, Canadian author Margaret Atwood claimed her first experience of unfairness came while reading the ads on the insides of Popsicle wrappers, offering cool little toys and trinkets in exchange for a few hundred wrappers–but closing with the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Not Available In Canada.”

Similarly, a lot of the appeal of Millionaire is that any adult with a wide knowledge of useless trivia can become a contestant. You don’t have to live in L.A. and go through two or more rounds of in-person auditions.

But you do have to be a U.S. citizen.

The CTV network has aired the U.S. edition of the British-born show, to handsome ratings, despite its viewers’ ineligibility to be contestants. The show’s done so well that the normally tight-spending CTV commissioned two hour-long episodes just for itself. It hired a Canadian host (one of its own talk-show stars), recruited Canadian contestants and audience members, and devised Canadian-content questions.

But then, to save some money, it had the specials produced in New York, using the set and crew of the ABC Millionaire.

(Yes, you heard it right: A Canadian TV show shot in the U.S.! Truly an anomaly of X-Files level weirdness.)

Anyhoo, the two episodes got more viewers than any domestically-produced entertainment show in Canadian TV history, even though no contestant won more than C$64,000 (about US$44,000; still the most ever won on a Canadian game show). CTV promised that later this season, Canada will become the umpteenth nation to air its own regular Millionaire series. A triumph of fairness for all the bespectacled, bad-hair-day-prone egghead guys from Missasagua to Kamloops, but not necessarily an ingredient in the country’s endless search for a Unique Cultural Identity.

Or maybe not. According to one critic, writing on the newsgroup alt.tv.game-shows:

“I have this ugly feeling that [CTV host Pamela Wallin] or perhaps the Canadians involved feel that she needs to do different things than Regis Philbin in order to make the show distinctively Canadian. This is one of the most common (and most exasperating) traits Canadians tend to have: we follow the lead of the USA, but add some so-called Canadian spin so that we can reassure ourselves that we’re not Americans. PW went mildly anti-Regis: no jokes, no fast pace, heck, no accent! If she’d just relax and stop trying so hard to be Canadian, it’d all work better.”

Maybe “trying so hard to be Canadian” really IS Canada’s unique cultural identity. Except that it’s darn close to Seattle’s cultural identity.

TOMORROW: Other Canadian-adventure notes.

IN OHER NEWS: If there’s a place where an “English-language-only” rule is especially inappropriate, it’d be among international long-distance operators.

ELSEWHERE:

• The role of human values in design….
• “The folks who move to Pioneer Square and bitch about the drunks are as bad as the yuppies who move to Carnation and complain about the smell of cow shit….”
• Send a banned book to censor-wannabe Joe Lieberman today!…

THE MAJOR-PARTY APOLOGISTS, especially the Democrats, are pleading with voters not to jump on any Nader bandwagon. They’re insisting there really is a difference between Gore and Bush, enough of a difference that you’ve gotta choose only one of those two–lest the nation be stuck with the other of those two.

Yet the Gore supporters’ claims of difference (which seem to involve such secondary issues as how quickly Social Security funds can be fed into the control of Wall Street speculators) continue to be contradicted by the increasingly-apparent similarities.

Both love “free” trade and the rule of global financiers. Both want to turn up the federal $ spigot to big weapons contractors. Both would keep up the dumb ol’ “war on drugs,” and pay as little lip service as possible to campaign-finance reform. Both claim today’s is the best of all possible economic worlds; even though real-world wage and earning-power equations get decreasingly rosy the further you stray from the top-20 income percentile.

And both camps have said, or at least implied, that Something Must Be Done against all the sexy, threatening, violent, or just plain icky material out there in our pop-culture landscape these days.

They’re not saying it loudly or direclty enough to threaten the media conglomerates the candidates depend upon for hype pieces (er, “news coverage”) and, in the case of Gore, for big campaign bucks.

But they are saying it. Particularly Al Gore’s pal, and Tipper Gore’s sometime aide in crusades against musical free speech, Veep candidate Joe Lieberman.

The Lieb’s basic stump speech invokes two main themes:

• His personal devotion to Orthodox Judaism, expressed in terms Old Testament-knowledgable Christians can identify with; and
• his stoic disgust at That Filth Out There invading our movie/TV screens, our computer monitors, our CD shelves, and our magazine racks.

Lieberman and Gore have avoided, as far as I can tell, bashing NEA-supported art shows or college English classes. The Bush campaign, eager to put the GOP’s legacy of past priggishness behind it, has also been relatively muted in this regard–thus far. But the prigs still have a degree of power in the GOP trenches, and I predict it won’t be long before Bush starts trying to appeal to them.

So should we worry about these comparatively mild, but bipartisan, rants?

Yes.

If these rants become enforced public policy in the next administration, you probably won’t see direct government attempts to fully ban anything (except strip clubs).

You’re more likely to see, both within the next administration and from private groups operating under the next administration’s endorsement, targeted actions against specific “offensive” entertainments:

• Public outcries against raunchy songs (which, if past outcries are any prediction, will come mostly against black artists and/or indie labels);
• Calls for more restrictive and more consistent movie ratings;
• Further restrictions against indie and foreign films that attempt to get released uncut or unrated;
• Mandatory “V-chips,” “family hour” restrictions, and pressures on advertisers against raunchy TV shows (especially raunchy TV shows airing on channels not owned by Viacom, Time Warner, or Rupert Murdoch); and
• Mandatory (or at least really heavily encouraged) Internet “content rating systems,” censorware filters on all school and library computers, and other measures to make sure you’re unable to read nothing online that has as much sex and violence as, say, the Old Testament.
• Zoning and other pressures against outlets offering XXX videos (which, coincidentally, entirely involves video stores other than Blockbuster) and parental-warning-stickered CDs (i.e., stores smaller than Wal-Mart).

As usual, you needn’t fret for the big campaign-contributing media giants that have made zillions on raunch in commercial entertainment.

As we’ve seen with the conglomerates’ Napster-bashing, freedom and open expression aren’t among their highest priorities.

And as we’ve seen with the Napster phenom, such attempts to prop up the plutocracy of Big Media these days end up getting ever more desperate and blatant. They might not succeed in the long run, but can do a lot of damage in the attempt.

TOMORROW: Further adventures with the Razor scooter.

IN OTHER NEWS: Some 200 gay activists and supporters massed on Capitol Hill this past Saturday evening and Sunday morning, to counter-demonstrate against a series of antigay “rallies” by seven (count ’em!) supporters of a virulently bigoted Kansas preacher. Except at the end of the Saturday protests (when one counter-protester tried to approach one of the bigots, only to get shoved onto a car hood by the cops who were keeping the two camps apart), I’ve never seen so many loud and colorfully-dressed people get so worked up about a handful of inauspicious whitebreads since the last Presidential nominating conventions.

ELSEWHERE:

• Today’s most vigilant defenders of artistic freedom and crusaders against censorship–TV wrestling fans!…
• From would-be Net censors to Presidential candidates, the New Sanctimony isn’t just a threat from the rabid Right anymore….