…the Seafair Torchlight Parade drew thousands from the whole tri-county region to Fourth Avenue on July 25, to witness the usual sequence of drill teams, marching bands, floats, horses, big balloons, clowns, and politicians. This year’s grand marshalls were ex-Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren and local radio legend Pat O’Day.

KIRO-TV’s parade telecast ended promptly at 10 p.m., so the station could air a rerun of one of CBS’s near-identical detective shows. The telecast ended before the Seafair Pirates came into camera range, which is exactly like cutting off the Thanksgiving Day Parade before Santa shows up.

Now, the station has posted video of the Pirates’ performance online, perhaps as a make-up offering to angry parade-telecast viewers.

…sees the mess that big money (or big potential money) has made out of health care, news, and other essential services, and declares that “Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.”

Maher cites a past time when the network news was a loss-leader division, medicine was small and personal, and “war profiteer” was an insult.

Of course, those were also the days before any TV channels charged subscription fees, but that’s beside the point.

The point being: Wall Street’s been vampirizing the nation’s lifeblood. And not just during the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble.

Earlier this year, I met an IT consultant whose clients have included a huge HMO provider. She insisted the health insurance companies aren’t to blame for America’s health-care cost crisis; it’s just the system that’s gone haywire.

I think it’s a little more personal than that. I believe the insurance companies (some avidly, some more reluctantly) sold out to the profiteers over the past three decades, as the ultimate American financial icon ceased to be the Almighty Dollar and instead became the Almighty Stock Price. Whole industries that weren’t intrinsically set up to reap windfall profits were retooled for just that purpose, just so they’d be considered great investments.

This year’s financial meltdown is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to realign not just health care but the whole unstable superstructure of the economy.

…is there can be only one contender for Most Boring Novel Subject of All Time.

I speak, of course, of novels about the lives (or lack thereof) of writers.

For the most part, us scribes are sedentary documentators and grammar geeks. Quiet folks leading ordinary existences as “home office” denizens or day-jobbers in such unglamourous places as college English departments.

Fictional writer characters often have more adventuresome lives than real-life writers, albeit sometimes to the point of incredulity.

Christopher Miller’s brilliantly funny new novel, The Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank, features not one but three fictional writers. They’re all introverted losers, and not of the loveable kind. But they’re damn funny.

The eponymous Dank is a farcical extreme of the sedentary-writer type. He’s a prolific, and mildly successful, sci-fi hack (based only superficially on Philip K. Dick). While himself obese and almost fatally lethargic at any task except writing (and sometimes even at that), his tall tales abound with rugged crimefighters, womanizing spaceship captains, and gallant adventurers.

His pathetic life and more pathetic works are recounted to us, shortly after his death, by a dueling pair of biographers, who’d both been rivals for Dank’s friendship—the annoyingly laudatory Bill Boswell and the even-more-annoyingly disdainful Owen Hirt. As they (mostly Boswell) provide alphabetically-ordered accounts of Dank’s stories and the events (and non-events) of Dank’s life, we slowly (over 522 pages) learn what went on among these three losers, then what really went on among them. Without revealing spoilers, let’s just say that both Boswell and Hirt turn out to be gravely unreliable narrators.

While Dank, Boswell, and Hirt are all dreadful writers, Miller is a terrific one.

The Cardboard Universe is chock full of allusions (to everyone from Nabokov to Vonnegut to various real sci-fi scribblers), Oulipo-esque clever writing tricks, and how’d-he-do-that surprise payoffs.

But you don’t have to know about any of Miller’s references to laugh out loud at his tale. It’s uproariously funny, especially as the world of our three antiheroes retreats to the northern California college town where they all live, then to the block surrounding Dank’s house, then (with Dank’s exile from public life) to the confines of his house, then to the insides of Boswell’s own questionable sanity.

That’s not a place as vast as the far galaxies, but it can be just as scary, and a lot more entertaining.

…boss Richard Nash insists the (for-profit) book business “cannot be saved (as it is).”

…to “spirit snakes,” prepare to be amazed by the “Strange Critters of the Pacific Northwest.”

Over the past four days, tens of thousands of words have been issued online, in print, and on the air about Walter Cronkite and his 19-year run helming the CBS Evening News.

Folks my age are just about the youngest to remember Cronkite’s run on the broadcast, or at least most of it. Yes, there were only three networks then, with ABC a far third in news viewership and news budgets. There was no NPR; PBS’s way-underfunded precursor, National Educational Television, stayed away from the live-news genre. Broadcast news basically meant the NBC and CBS evening newscasts, plus their Sunday interview shows, news segments on the early-morning shows, and hourly radio headlines.

Star journalists in old-time radio had peppered their broadcasts with personality, and with personal opinions. The networks quickly considered that approach wrong for TV.

Instead, network news telecasts held to a strictly objective stance and a hierarchy of priorities. The stories picked, and the way they were told, were pretty much the same as the wire-service items in local papers (thus speeding the demise of afternoon papers).

Cronkite was almost tailor made for this formula. He’d been a wire-service reporter during WWII, so he knew that form’s specific demands. His official yet personable demeanor made him a welcome regular presence at the dinner hour—even as he introduced film footage of wars, revolutions, race riots, and plane crashes.

Night after night, Cronkite and his NBC/ABC rivals (including UW grad Chet Huntley) relayed what the government and corporate officials had said that day about the economy, diplomacy, and all those newfangled “lib” movements. Each telecast held to a predictable rhythm of introductions, filmed field reports, in-studio analysis bits, and a light human-interest piece at the end. Even as the world seemed to be crumbling in those 11 years between JFK’s death and Nixon’s resignation, Cronkite’s tone and that of the program surrounding him held constant.

If commentators now remember Cronkite’s anti-Vietnam War commentary from 1968, it’s because that was the only time he overruled his no-stance stance. (He did daily essay pieces for CBS Radio, but those were even-handed analyses of topics in the news.)

CNN launched toward the end of Cronkite’s anchoring years, and originally held to the classic TV-news formula of importance, credibility, and objectivity. But over the decades, cable news has swung back toward the old radio news formula of personality punditry, with the added ingredients of celebrity nonsense and nonstop live ambulance chasing.

It’s possible to re-create a solid square newscast like the one Cronkite ran. You’d need a small core team of writers and producers, surrounded by a crew of analysts and correspondents. And you’d need at least a few field camera crews to shoot the footage you couldn’t get from pool coverage or off of C-SPAN. The whole thing would cost little more to make than The Daily Show.

But who’d need it? We’ve got Jim Lehrer for the official statements and the mealy-mouthed analysis. We’ve got the current incarnations of the network newscasts to list what some corporate team thinks are the day’s biggest events.

No, Cronkite was a figure of his time. He contributed greatly to his time; especially in his long retirement, when he spoke his mind much more openly.

What we need, and what many of us in the online sphere are groping to invent, is the new news.

As promised yesterday, here are more images from Link Light Rail’s spectacular opening weekend.

I’m surprised how few people, now and during Link’s years of construction, noted the utter appropriateness of the route’s principal siting on Martin Luther King Jr. Way—formerly Empire Way, named for the “empire builder,” James J. Hill—a railroad tycoon.

Like a lot of Western towns, Seattle was made, and nearly broken, by the railroads. When the Northern Pacific decided to build its own company town (Tacoma) instead of making Seattle its western terminus, Seattle boosters persuaded Hill to bring his rival Great Northern line here. (The NP and GN eventually merged into the Burlington Northern, now BNSF.)

As big rail built Seattle as a center of shipping and industry, local rail built the city’s neighborhoods. In a few cases this was literally true, as developers built trolley lines to service their newly-built tracts.

Now, civic planning bureaucrats and “urban density” advocates hope that can happen again.

The operative phrase is “transit oriented development.” You might have read about it in The Stranger or at Publicola.

The idea is that, alongside the shiny new tracks and the trains that run on them, there should be shiny new residences, stores, and commercial structures. These would attract more regular riders for the trains, while bringing new economic activity to these neighborhoods.

(And they’d provide work for the construction biz, Seattle Democrats’ most loyal backers. And they’d help slow the ongoing tilt of the region’s population ratio from the city to the suburbs, a tilt that affects the city’s state and federal funding clout in many ways.)

So you get townhomes, neo-rowhouses, senior housing projects with ground-floor retail, midrise apartment/condo structures, and the promise of many more.

Some of these would be on tracts now owned by the city or Sound Transit, which were used as staging areas during Link’s long construction period. (It’s the taxpayers’ bad luck that the project bought this land while prices were going up, and is selling it as prices are going down.)

Of course, people already live and work in these neighborhoods (despite what you might surmise from “urban pioneer” stories in the local lifestyle mags). Light rail’s benefits shouldn’t just be for the new (read: upscale white) residents and workers, or for those current residents who happen to own saleable land.

For far too long, Seattle’s entire southeast quadrant (save for the Lake Washington waterfront) has been the city’s ignored stepchild. It’s the first place where halfway houses and social-service agencies get sited, and the last place where fancy shops and restaurants go. It’s got a lot of households that didn’t fare well when the region as a whole boomed, and that aren’t doing well now.

I’d like to see a transit oriented development that enhances the lives of south Seattle’s current populace, and doesn’t merely displace it.

…I like McGraw-Hill’s books and magazines better than their records.

But now, the venerable publisher’s most famous print asset, BusinessWeek magazine, is up for sale, essentially to anybody willing to shoulder its losses. The hereby linked article from Ad Age claims BW‘s arch rivals Fortune and Forbes might soon face similar fates.

Remember, these are the outfits the rest of the magazine biz tried to emulate with their solid gold demographics, their cheerleading for BigCorps, and their niche of investment information (you know, the kind people are supposedly willing to pay for even online).

Yep, I was at the first day of Link Light Rail service.

Then I came back for day two.

I took a lot of images. I’m still sorting out my favorites.

So look for more in the next day or two.

It was a glorious two-day celebration of, well, of what?

Of yet another shiny New Seattle monument to world-class-osity? Not really.

To our modest li’l seaport village finally deserving to be called a Big League City? Nope.

To a cool new way to travel from downtown (almost) to the airport? Uh-uh.

Seattle’s first urban transit solution to run longer than 1.3 miles? Not even that.

No, this weekend marked the true beginning of Seattle’s Century 21. Through what is essentially pre-car technology, we’ve launched the first practical step toward a post-car era.

And it’s swift, bright, clean, and fun too!

Crowds, thankfully, were not as totally overbearing as organizers had hoped/warned. (After all, the trains will keep running after this weekend, just not for free and not with clowns and buskers performing at the stations.)

Link gets down to business on Monday. Don’t look for clues to its eventual level of success in its initial paid ridership. What will count will be long-term ridership trends. That, and also the “transit oriented development” projects penciled in on what are now vacant lots adjoining the stations. And those won’t likely get underway until people are building homes and commercial buildings again.

WIll Futurama replace its entire voice cast, or is it just a publicity stunt?

…which I’m not, might claim MSNBC keeps Pat Buchanan on precisely because he makes conservatives look soooooo archaic, bigoted, and just plain dumb.

…makes films. He also collects films. Here’s a full hour culled from his vault of vintage toy commercials—Batteries Not Included.

…an African American cultural activist gets in a Twitter exchange with a white actress who says Af-Ams are “more free and fun and light hearted”? A lot more than 140 characters, that’s what happens.

…has been blocked by Indian authorities, who cited a “national security” law authorizing the restriction of material that could damage the nation’s cultural integrity or some such. But not to worry: The site’s safely based in the UK; and, as an Indian columnist notes, “there are ways of getting around the ban by using proxy, anonymiser websites that cover your tracks.”

(Hardcore photo and video Web sites can still be viewed in India without restriction.)

Arcade, the Northwest architecture and design quarterly, devoted its summer issue to environmental themes.

But instead of hyping new “green” buildings and products, many of the issue’s essays (guest-edited by Charles Mudede and Jonathan Golob) propose a world with fewer buildings and products.

Granted, this year we’re not adding too much to the total world supply of them.

This is particularly the case with California professor Barry Katz’s closing piece, “The Promise of Recession.” Katz remembers how past designers such as William Morris sought to influence the world by promoting an honest, simple aesthetic. Then Katz imagines a near-future in which “every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to, our collective natural assets.”

This, he believes, means a lot fewer new products (of all kinds), hence a lot fewer people employed to design those products. But there would be work for “post-designers.” Some of these would revamp the already-built world to be more sustainable and more nature-friendly. Others would devise “an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.”

Similar themes are posited by Golob in “Green On Wheels.” He argues that today’s gasoline-powered automobiles are just about as efficient as they can ever be, when you figure in the costs of refining and transporting the fuel. No, Golob avers, “carrying about two hundred pounds of human being in four thousand pounds of boxy steel, glass and aluminum” is an activity whose time will soon pass, by necessity, whether we like it or not.

Also in the issue:

• Three fantasy illustrations by Jed Dunkerly, depicting speculative attempts at “Engineering the Environment”—using sky-bound sprinkler systems to rain on farmland, using offshore “wind rigs” to alter air currents, and using construction cranes to plant fully-grown trees.
• Nicholas Veroli on the meaning of “catastrophe,” and whether any situation (including the present environmental crisis) can be called one before it’s past-tense.
• Erin Kendig on Krazy!, a book documenting last year’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit exploring the surrealistic sides of comics, animation, and related arts.
• Jim Cava reviewing Tony Fry’s book Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Cava agrees with Fry’s assertion that the constant making and selling of what Cava calls “unnecessary consumables” is bad for the planet, no matter how “green” any individual product is claimed to be. Fry and Cava insist we need to redesign our whole consumerist culture, not merely individual consumer products.

If we take Fry’s case (and those of the other Arcade contributors) seriously, the human-built environment will change. It’s not just unwise to keep going the way we’ve gone this past century, it’s impossible.

The only question is what we’ll change into.