• First the bus tunnel, now the Space Needle fireworks show suffers from a software glitch.
• Music industry wants UW students to pay big bucks for alleged file sharing. UW administration runs interference.
• While the Sea. Times has added the NYT crossword, the P-I, thankfully, hasn’t had to drop it. Thank heavens for non-exclusive contracts.
• A McDonald’s customer in Vancouver, USA suddenly felt strange and had to sit down. No, it wasn’t from the food. Turns out she was giving premature birth without heretofore knowing she was preggers. The boy’s first words will probably not be “Supersize me.”

• Wash. state insists on giving kids “medically accurate” sex-ed info instead of the federally-mandated abstinence-only nonsense, loses federal funding.
• MS and Amazon decide they’d rather fund Democrats, at least for this cycle.
• Would you like the King County Courthouse to continue looking like a poorly “modernized” ’60s efficiency-architecture victim or have it restored into the stately authoritative edifice it once was?
• A UW frat member was arrested for shooting a gun at tin cans in the frat house’s basement. Hey, at least he wasn’t aiming outside.
• What??? Evergreen State Coll.’s actively soliciting students from in-state???
• Huckabee (hearts) regressive taxation, Wash. state-style.

Tacoma’s own Ventures, kings of instro surf-pop lo all these years, have got their totally deserved berth in the Rock n’ Roll Hall O’ Fame.

• Also from T-Town, somebody wants to replace part of the historic ex-Heidelberg brewery with a hotel. Yep, preservationists don’t like the idea.
• Columbia Winery will move its winemaking and bottling operation from Woodinville to eastern Washington. Its retail and “hospitality” operations, which employ more people than its wine production does, will stay on this side of the mountains.
• And the old Olympia brewery might be “sold on the courthouse steps” if a bankruptcy trustee, representing the bottled-water venture that tried to buy it, can’t negotiate a sale.
• In allegedly healthier drinkies, a big Colorado agribiz operation has been selling “organic” milk in several states. Health-food advocates call foul, claiming the big agribiz operation’s breaking or bending the rules on what can be called organic.
• Mayor Nickels’s son Jacob was sentenced for his role in a casino scam operation. Insert your own “Nickels slots” joke here.
• As you might have already heard, twelve ex-Mariners are on the Mitchell Report list of baseballers who’ve allegedly used or trafficked in steroids. Meanwhile, P-I columnist Art Thiel compares the whole scandal to “a look through the keyhole at a ballroom full of elderly, naked dancers. Something exotic is going on, but exactly what isn’t clear, and few are in any trouble aside from embarrassment. At least the line for the keyhole is short.”
• A GOP state legislator from the Eastside decides he’d rather be a Democrat.
• Another urban church is thinking of selling its historic building. University Baptist, a local leader in diversity and social-justice causes for more than two decades, hasn’t decided what to do yet, but has decided to offer up the building and see what offers show up.
• Gov. Gregoire’s latest plan to end the worn-out-ferry-boat crisis: Build three new boats ASAP (insert newsreel footage of the Kaiser shipyards in WWII here), lease one boat from Pierce County immediately, and run special foot boats from Seattle to Pt. Townsend. (I’m holding a group excursion on one of these boats in the next week or two; keep watching this space for details.)
• Sound Transit showed off its plans for an elaborate University transit station. In keeping with the current UW pecking order, the light-rail stop would be close to the football stadium and the medical center, farther from the upper-campus liberal arts buildings.

• In the absence of even an unorganized “save the Fun Forest” campaign, the beloved old fashioned amusement park in Seattle Center will close in 2009.
• Washington Mutual Bank, whose national fortunes have risen and fell with the housing bubble, is laying off over 3,000 workers.
• Some 380 gallons of diesel fuel spilled from a factory-trawler boat at the Port of Tacoma.
• The current ETA on fully restoring car-ferry service to Pt. Townsend? Perhaps a year.
• Barack Obama’s coming to Seattle tonight (Tuesday). The campaign event, at the Showbox Sodo (formerly Premiere, formerly Fenix) costs $100.
• UW athletic director Scott Turner is this year’s sacrificial lamb for football mediocrity.

• The LGBT Community Center, which just got its own Capitol Hill building a couple years back, is now in fiscal trouble. It may close by month’s end. Does cultural acceptance of other sexual preferences necessarily lead to assimilation, and in turn to the death of niche-subculture institutions?
• Is Paul Allen getting a “sweetheart deal” from the City in regards to his South Lake Union development projects? Many have rumored such allegations, and now City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is vocalizing ’em.
• No, Snohomish cops, UW profs taking industrial-art photographs are not terrotists.
• Microsoft’s shut down a holiday greetings Web page that featured a sometimes foul-mouthed Santa.
• In decades past, private, for-profit lending libraries offered books for rent, sometimes in genres or to audience niches public libraries wouldn’t or couldn’t fully serve. Now, some web entrepreneurs want to bring back the concept, in the form of “a Netflix for books.”
• And, yep, there’s still lotsa flood damage and closed roads and highways throughout Western Washington.

• Two suburban high school teachers took part in an antiwar protest. The administration wants to punish ’em. Students are rallying around ’em in support.
• It’s the first, probably exaggerated, snow scare of the season.
• How not to hide pot in your car: Package it as a Christmas present.
• The tragedy surrounding the failed UW-devised AIDS vaccine moves further from “noble failed experiment” toward “real scandal.” A UW researcher allegedly faked test data and altered lab images. (The researcher in question was conducting AIDS-related research not directly related to the vaccine trials.)
• Reverse-sprawl dept.: Ski maker K2’s moving its head offices from Vashon Island to south Seattle. The products will still all be made in China.
• The SeaTimes posits two Eastside transportation solutions: Add passenger rail, cancel plans to widen I-405.

• Remember how the Bellevue Art Museum had this big cash crunch that led to a drastic restructuring? Turns out part of its problem was its former chief financial officer. She’s charged with embezzling $300,000 from the organization, because, police say she said, a recent divorce had left her “financially compromised.”
• We won’t have the Sugar nightclub to kick around anymore.
• In the “you call this higher education?” dept., unnamed members of a UW frat house allegedly shouted racial and anti-immigrant slurs at a random Asian-looking guy walking outside, and threw a water balloon out at him from their window. Police are investigating it as a “malicious harassment” case.
• A couple tried to have bathroom sex on a Southwest Airlines flight from Seattle to Vegas. The plane made an unscheduled stop in Portland, where the forbidden lovers were kicked off.
• Today’s best dumb criminal, as Keith Olbermann would say: A 42-year-old metal thief. Cops found an electric sign had gone out along I-90 near Snoqualmie Pass, discovered wiring was missing from the sign’s control box, and found the stolen wires in the bed of a pickup parked nearby. The driver was in the truck’s cab, sleeping.

UW scientists say they can alter poplar trees with rabbit DNA to create pollution-sucking trees. According to a P-I piece, these Frankentrees can “naturally render a list of cancer-causing pollutants–benzene, trichloroethylene (TCE), vinyl chloride, chloroform–non-toxic.”

Now, let’s have these PoMo tree surgeons create plants that could do something really useful, like ridding the indoor air of cheap perfume stink, or even patchouli.

…a student at the UW School of Communications, around the time some kids apparently broke into a 1957-vintage “time capsule” and snuck in some panties and porno mags. But no, I didn’t do it. I could guess who did, but it would only be speculation.

Yes, lowly OSU has outplayed the University of Spoiled Children, in the college-football upset of the year.

And a heads-up to baseball’s St. Louis Cardinals, who won the World Series (or, as one might alternately say, the Detroit Tigers lost it).

The former UW football star and early NFL great was best known locally for the namesake diner-bar he ran on Broadway for some 50 years. Generations of hipsters fondly recall Steele’s lovable but gruff presence behind the bar, ready at a moment’s notice to snipe at any young whippersnapper who dared to rest an elbow on a table.

…I never in a million years would’ve expected to start a blog, somewhere in the middle would have been the UW’s Henry Art Gallery. But here it is. It’s called Hankblog and it’s a real charmer.

…money-grubbing deal by University of Washington standards, administrators have agreed to a sweetheart deal with Dell to exclusively promote Dell’s sad li’l MP3 player and the Windows-only Napster music service.

When I was a DJ on KCMU, it was a UW student operation. Long before it morphed into KEXP, it had phased out the volunteer student staff for trained professionals.

Now, thanks to the miracle of the Internet, UW student radio is back, under the rubric “RainyDawg Radio.” And it’s great.

It’s a hi-res audio stream with all your indie pop faves, new discoveries to surprise and arouse you, and an intense local focus. Kudos to all involved.

Everybody’s favorite volcanic vomit launcher, Mount St. Helens, is giving us another amazing demonstration of its indigestive fury. For your listening and air-guitar playing pleasure, I suggest you play the Presidents of the United States of America’s classic “Volcano” whilst watching any news coverage of the steam and/or ash spews.

I was editor of the UW Daily at the time of the mountain’s big blast in ’80. In addition to the usual local-angle stories about the UW seismology lab, we had Ike Johnson, a student photographer with a pilot’s license, who risked life and limb to fly toward the eruption. The pics he brought back weren’t the most spectacular of all the shots made that day, but they were our exclusive.