…the troubles with this site earlier today. The domain-name issues seem to be resolved now (knock on Formica).

I’ve been promising it for years, I know. But sometime this spring I’m gonna totally redo this site. New blogging platform, new server, working comment threads, the whole 27 feet.

…who now runs a media company in Iowa believes news organizations should operate less like baseball and more like hockey. No, I don’t know what he really means by that.

…a national girlie mag created a fictional pictorial essay about a Seattle coffee shop, the “Big Cups Coffee House,” with nude baristas. Now, someone in Maine has really opened one. The owner claims to have had 150 applicants for the 10 available jobs.

I’m still trying to figure out why I can’t get comment threads on this here blog. I might have to move to a new server.

…ever-hesitatingly into the modern age. We’ve finally got an RSS feed. Now you can easily read the site on your li’l iPhone, Blackberry, or mail application. As for comment threads, maybe I’ll get around to them over the summer.

…corralled me into writing a post about myself. Perhaps some of you might also like to read it.

25 things you may have never wanted to know about me

1. I have odd minor food allergies (nuts, whole eggs), and even odder food dislikes (olives, pickles, canned string beans, eggplant, imitation meat, imitation cheese, and, emerging in recent years, hummus).

2. Despite occasional rumors to the contrary, I am not, and have never been, independently wealthy.

3. I was born in Olympia and raised in Marysville. Despite having spent most of my youth in Snohomish County, I never wore a mullet and pretty much always hated heavy metal.

4. I attended Oregon State University for one year. Once a Beaver, always a Beaver.

5. I don’t think I’m too cool to talk to you. I’m afraid you’re too cool to want to talk to me.

6. I’m lousy at hustling and marketing myself. This helps make the freelance writing career I’ve stumbled into precarious at best. That’s why I’m looking for some other line of steady work. (Yes, I am, really. Not kidding. NOT KIDDING!)

7. I wish I knew how to successfully woo the woman of my dreams (who, personality-wise, would be some mixture of Tracey Ullman, Amy Sidaris, Katherine Hepburn, Glenda Farrell in Mystery of the Wax Museum, Nina Simone, Adrienne Shelly, Kitten Natividad, Margaret Cho, Rachel Maddow, and Sonia Braga).

8. Miss Lily Banquette from Combustible Edison was my life coach.

9. I’ve gone to high school or college with people who’ve won Oscars (animator Brad Bird), Pulitzers (cartoonist Mike Luckovich), Golden Globes (Kyle MacLachlan), and local Emmys (John Kiester), and who starting-pitched a World Series game (Larry Christenson).

10. I like jazz, therefore I don’t listen to Kenny G. I like beer, therefore I don’t drink PBR.

11. I am completely indifferent toward penises other than my own.

12. Despite my self-appointed title of pop culture maven, a lot of it bores me to tears (celebrity gossip, wrestling, tabloid TV, Hollywood action movies, train-wreck divas, sword-and-sorcery novels, shoot-’em-up video games, and more).

13. After all these years, I still rebel against certain excesses of boomer-generation culture (white blues singers, Paul Simonized world beat, nature poetry, the Grateful Dead, the droning pomposity of NPR, stoner humor). Why do I even bother?

14. I’m always nervous and tense. I just am. It’s not because of anything you said or did. It’s just the way my brain works. I have a lot of what self-help author Eckhart Tolle calls “the mental noise.” It feels like a Soviet “jamming” radio station would have sounded.

15. I have a driver’s license but have never owned a motor vehicle. However, my brother the (until-recently unemployed) naturopath, owns at least six. Know anybody who’d like to buy a fully restored ’42 Lincoln?

16. My book Vanishing Seattle is the second-biggest seller in the history of the South Carolina-based Arcadia Publishing. They haven’t asked me to make any new books for them.

17. No, I won’t work for free for your for-profit Web site. No matter how cool it is.

18. I emphatically believe meat, television, sports, and male heterosexuality are NOT intrinsically evil. And don’t preach to me about veganism unless you get that fuckin’ cigarette out of your mouth.

19. Psychotic or reverse-sexist women occasionally expect me to become their submissive enabler. I invariably disappoint them.

20. I hate California. It’s cold and it’s damp. (Hint: This is a gag, based on a song lyric. Californians NEVER get it.)

21. I’ve never broken a bone, been married, been outside North America, been in a band, had a 401K, snowboarded, had an STD, piloted a plane, served in the military, killed anybody, used heroin, had my own cereal, or hosted my own commercial TV show. I’d like to do a few of these; others, not so much.

22. I have a sure-fire concept for my dream restaurant. I’ve let it remain a dream because I have no money and no management experience.

23. Fewer people confuse me with Wm. Steven Humphrey these days.

24. I was a born again Christian through high school, and attended various churches until I quit in 1978. I could accept the words of Jesus Christ. I just couldn’t accept the words of Pat Robertson.

25. Why would I want to get into S&M? I get enough pain in real life.

…the week’s big events when I have more sleep. Perhaps Thursday.

…for those of us in western Washington’s prog-politix community. Our top regional campaign prospect, Congressional candidate Darcy Burner, lost her home in a fire.

She and her family are safe. But she’ll have to find new digs within her district, at a time when she’s trying to fund a serious election run against incumbent Dave Reichert. That fundraising has gone quite well, particularly with “Netroots” donations from online supporters. Those funds can’t be used for personal expenses, of course. She and her hubby will be arranging to relocate themselves. It’ll be up to her campaign staff, and her campaign supporters, to shoulder more of the campaigning and campaign fundraising work while Burner’s personal time/attention deals with this tragic distraction.

…to the memory of J.R. Simplot, the only American to be a tycoon in both potato chips and computer chips. (He also dominated Boise’s economy, particularly in recent years, as Albertson’s and Boise Cascade got swallowed up by out-of-staters.)

…rolls along, even into primary states. Elsewhere:

• Ron Sims would really like all King County agencies to solve socio-economic inequality. (Hey you: Stop scoffing. What if they could really do it?)
• A Seattle swimwear designer’s creations are featured in the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue; as are the (fully costumed) Seafair Pirates.
• Please: If you must steal porn, use BitTorrent, not armed robbery.
• Jones Soda becomes the official fizzy drink of Alaska Airlines.
• Old nudist magazines used to sport such wholesome titles as Sunshine & Health. Now, some doctors claim a lack of Vitamin D-bearing rays really could weaken us.
• Gay-bashing attacks on Capitol Hill—on the rise.
• State GOP boss Luke Esser: Playing favorites or just incompetent?
• More fun news from my ol’ hometown: America’s first tribal TV station, streaming online.
• And the TV/movie-biz writers’ strike is over. Now Leno can go back to having other people to blame for his lameness.

• The easy half of the equation has been solved, as Clay Bennett agrees to sell the Storm to owners who’ll keep the WNBA team here. The hard part, wresting the Sonics from his reverse-Midas-touch hands, now begins in earnest.
• Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess in the first place by selling the teams to Bennett is making new moves at his day job. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz has fired his CEO, retaking the reins himself. Can he return the coffee chain to its former fast-growin’ ways, in spite of all the obstacles? (Among the latter: espresso drinks coming to McDonald’s.)
• Some folks got pretty snow this morning; the heart of Seattle, again, didn’t. Damn.
• The Port of Seattle’s fiscal shenanigans will be investigated by the Feds.
• House prices finally begin to go down in the area. (Insert your own “going down” joke here.) Still, local biz leaders insist it’s not that drastic really. Meanwhile, developers who’d planned to condo-convert Seattle’s historic Smith Tower are scaling back their plans; now only the top 12 stories will be converted.
• My second-ever adult job (such as it was), the student newspaper Polaris at North Seattle Community College, is a goner.
• Blacks are more likely than whites to get busted for having or smoking pot, even though that’s now the city’s official lowest law enforcement priority.
• In more positive law-related news, “serious crime” (as the FBI defines it) is way down in western Washington’s cities these days. That, alone, won’t stop the media from exploiting the occasional random shooting, or stop the talk-radio nebbishes from preaching the city=danger, suburbs=serenity meme.
• An election year’s underway. You can tell because a politician, in this case Gov. Gregoire, is trying to generate headlines on the get-tougher-on-drunk-drivers line, the encroaching-surveillance-state issue on which no one dares to disagree.
• Woodland Park Zoo tries again to make its own cute li’l baby elephant.
• The men’s fashion headline of the year is “Return to Elegance.” Just as it’s been every year since at least 1978.
• 12,000 people in Idaho lost electricity due to a stray cat wandering through a substation. Brian Setzer remains at large.
• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their cablecasts, just in time to give writerless jokes about the New Hampshire primary.

…archives aren’t posting on this site properly. I’ll have to look under the hood after the holidaze and see what’s (not) going on.

…post-shopping-season Sunday. This means the Sunday paper’s a much more compact product, stuffed with far fewer flyers and far easier to carry. Still, there is some news today:

• Who wouldn’t love a fancy home holiday display, depicting a full-size Santa on a cross?
• The American Stasi wants to know everything about you.
• Another old ferry has potential problems.
• Capitol Hill’s delightfully delapidated “Undre Arms” Apartments might give way to yet another mixed-use whatever blah blah blah.
• And my Belltown Messenger colleague Mary Lou Sanelli has a nice li’l essay, summarizing some of her thoughts about the novelty of urban living.

Yr. online correspondent was sheltered from Rainstorm 2007 Monday, mostly. I was called back to King County Elections, to tabulate recount votes on a single obscure race for a suburban public-hospital commission.

Of course, I had to get from my place to the bus, and from the bus to the Temporary Elections Annex on Boeing Field property. As I stood and strode amid the heavy precip and the solid gray skies, I though to myself that this was the sort of day that separated us true Nor’Westers from the SoCal weather wimps.

There was one TV in the coat-check room, emanating continuing reports of nature’s sodden fury. But I didn’t hear the full extent of the spectacle until I could get home and get online.