…gonna be on national cable again this weekend. A&E’s true crime series City Confidential has an episode on Saturday about the tragic slaying of singer Mia Zapata, an episode for which I gave a lengthy interview.

MISC Towers, our lovely high-rise studio condo, is now for sale at this link. It truly is lovely, and would make a wonderful home, perhaps even for one of you.

I’m still planning to sell MISC Towers. The ad should be online Thurs. or Fri. Once it sells, I’ll be out seeking new accomodations for me n’ my lovely web-publishin’ empire. I don’t smoke, and I have no animals. But I do eat meat and watch TV.

I’ve been wracked with family crises all year, and it’s just getting oh-so-slowly worse. My father’s been incapacitated by Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. My mother’s burning herself out taking care of him, and isn’t that medically perky herself (emphysema, breast cancer, a degenerative eye condition, etc.). My brother the naturopath has put his own career on hold to move up with my parents. I’m struggling to stay above the state of defeatism he and mom are bobbing in and out of . And I’ve been dealing with the effects of long-term underemployment.

So I’m selling MISC Towers, the hi-rise condo home of this fine website and ancillary projects these past four-point-five years.

It’ll be an FSBO venture at first (the ad’s coming next week).

Meanwhile, if anyone’s got a spare dry spot where I can store my massive book and ephemera collection, lemme know.

My mom’s decided she’s feeling a little better, and won’t put my father in a facility at this time. I’m holding up, and may be ready to talk about national affairs again sometime next week.

…another fun source for polling BS: The Nation‘s “Ground War 2004.”

The main reason I’ve been so gaga over online election coverage this past week isn’t the election itself.

I’m going through a tumultuous time here at (the highly mortgaged) MISCmedia Towers.

My father is dying. My mother is wearing herself out taking care of him at home, and has finally admitted such. We’ll be sending him to a residential facility, as soon as we can find one that’s not prohibitively expensive.

The cost of caring for him, plus some bad decisions to buy dot-com stocks, have seriously hurt the family’s liquid-asset situation. My parents and my brother own a lot of stuff (a minimansion, antique furniture, collectible cars), but the selling off of these assets has, in the current economic situation, gone slowly.

My brother’s naturopath practice has foundered. He’s barely affording the continuing-education courses he needs to keep his license.

And, as I’ve hinted at in the past, I’m currently not earning enough from freelance gigs to pay my mortgage, let alone the deck of credit cards I’ve been living on.

I’ve scoffed at the Bushies’ insistantly certain attitudes. But I may need to learn such an attitude myself.

I definitely need a source of material income. If you know of any paying jobs or gigs out there (no all-volunteer offers, please!), lemme know.

If you can lend me some time on a Wintel PC, long enough to brush up on by MS Office skills for the sake of admin jobs, lemme know.

If you know of a decent but non-life-savings-depleting residential care facility in the tri-county area, lemme know.

And if you just want to remember my parents in your thoughts, that’ll help too.

At one point Thursday, I finally gave up, made sure all my data were backed up, and wiped the ol’ hard drive. Spent most of Friday and Saturday restoring all the little details (the application preferences and registrations, the iTunes library settings, etc.).

Now I’m finally back to the state of being able to waste all my time online.

If there’s anybody out there who knows of a safe home remedy for excess ear wax, please lemme know.

ABC News Now, channel 114 on Seattle Comcast digital cable.

It’s cable news version 4.0. It’s not trying (yet) to compete for ratings against CNN, Fox, or CNBC/MSNBC. It’s there to give ABC an outlet for long-form coverage of live events without breaking into the main network’s entertainment schedule, and to repurpose the network’s vast archive of interviews and magazine-show segments.

It launched last month with the Democratic convention. Now we get to see its regular schedule. It’s a simple, almost-no-nonsense format. A few original shows throughout the day (such as Inside the Newsroom, where reporters in their shirtsleeves discuss the day’s ongoing events). News briefs at the top of the hour. Clips from recent editions of World News Tonight, Good Morning America, Nightline, 20/20, PrimeTime, and This Week. Simple graphics with no headline “tickers.”

And unfiltered, unedited speeches and testimony by political figures. Some of these are similar to C-SPAN events, covered by the same camera pools. But they can still be quite fascinating.

Today I saw Kerry at a Las Vegas middle school, deftly handling questions about educational funding, public transportation, and the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste dump. He behaved as a thorough professional, shaking hands firmly and giving solid eye contact.

Last night I saw Bush at a Virginia community college, mumbling something about schooling as being vital to the growth in American jobs. His incoherence without a script and his nervous body language made him look like he wanted nothing more than to get the heck outta there and back making deals with big contributors.

ABC only promises to keep ABC News Now going through Election Day. I hope it becomes a permanent fixture. Like a less-snide version of its overnight show World News Now, it’s the work of a bigtime news organization getting to play with a low-budget, low-profile outlet.

MEDEA BENJAMIN thinks there were at least a few good things in 2003.

…who wanted me to speak at a young writers’ workshop tonight: You didn’t give me an address of the place. Please send it to this alternate email location.

Join yr. web-editeur and other local NaNoWriMo survivors on Monday at two live victory parties:

• 5- PM: at Perkengruven Cafe, 4736 University Way NE;
• 7-whenever at the Big Time Ale House, 4133 University Way NE.

Yr. humble web-editor shows off his pix of his summertime Kent jury-duty misadventure at the illustrious Rendezvous, Second Avenue north of Bell Street in Seattle, as part of the Rendezvous Reading Series tonight starting at 7. Be there or be suburban.

…to all who attended the standing-room-only performance by myself and four other persons last night at Titlewave Books. Several attendees said it was the best live show they’d seen me do, whatever that means. There’ll be another one in mid-November; we’ll keep y’all posted.

As I’d mentioned to the audience last night, this morning I was scheduled to undergo a full slate of heart tests. After all today’s rounds of EKGs, ultrasounds, and treadmill trots, the ol’ MISCticker was declared fine-n’-dandy. So I’ll be around to confuse and confound all of you for many years to come.