from buzzfeed.tumblr.com

• Spencer Kornhaber at the Atlantic offers a 20th anniversary tribute to Nickelodeon’s original “Nicktoons” cartoon shows (Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy). In a break from most commentary about these shows, Kornhaber lavishes attention on the legacy of Doug and gives R&S only a brief aside.
• Fired KUOW weather commentator Cliff Mass has resurfaced with a new gig at KPLU. It’s good to have competition, even among local public radio stations.
• No, the county won’t move its juvenile court and jail into the landmark Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon’s head offices had been). The building and its site just aren’t well configured for such use.
• To go with the planned light rail station for the area, the city’s thinking of rezoning the Roosevelt business district for dense condo and mixed use buildings, up to 85 feet tall. Some folk in the neighborhood aren’t sure this is such a splendid idea. I’m willing to entertain the scheme, as long as the original QFC store (marked for death by the rezoning scheme) remains as a protected landmark.
• Our climate is actually pretty good for solar power, it turns out. It’s just that hydro power is so cheap, solar can’t really compete without incentives.
• Local painter Scott Alberts says all artists need to do to cease “starving” so much is to have a product to sell and someone to potentially sell it to. (Of course, some artists’ most passionately inspired works don’t have mass market appeal.)
• I’ve reached a point of acceptance on a topic that used to enrage me. I have now come to terms with the fact that we will never be rid of the sixties nostalgia industry.
• Richard Charnin claims he can statistically prove the Wisconsin recall elections were stolen.
• Matt Stoller has a new thing for everybody to worry about. Global industrial consolidation means more and more vital things are made in fewer and fewer places, things ranging from broadcast-production quality videotape to flu vaccines. And when the places that make them get disrupted (such as by the Japan tsunami), you get instant worldwide shortages.
• Paul Krugman claims he’s got a surefire, if partial, solution to both the sluggish economy and the federal debt:

…It would involve more, not less, government spending… rebuilding our schools, our roads, our water systems and more. It would involve aggressive moves to reduce household debt via mortgage forgiveness and refinancing. And it would involve an all-out effort by the Federal Reserve to get the economy moving, with the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems.

vintage 1940 trolley bus from seattletransitblog.com

• Today is the day. Speak now or forever lose your ability to get anywhere in King County, with or without a car. That’s how big this is. Get thee to the King County Council Chambers, 516 Third Ave., 6-8 p.m. Speak out to save transit.
• Is local weather really getting “wetter and warmer”? Cliff Mass says not necessarily.
• After the state failed earlier this year, the city may strike out on its own to license and regulate medical marijuana establishments. The first regulations I’d want: no pot-leaf neon signs, no tie dyed scrubs, and no public display of the phrase “da kine.”
• City Councilmember Tim Burgess wants the big public todo about child prostitution to become a little less about the rival grandstandings of celebs, politicians, and publishers, and a little more about the children themselves. At least that’s what I hope Burgess wants.
• The Thunderbird Motel that became the Fremont Inn, one of the notorious drug-dealer-infused motels on Aurora shut down a year or two back? It could become Catholic-run low income housing.
• The state’s sending up helicopters to test local radiation levels. But don’t panic, officials insist.
• The old idea to put up a surplus 60 foot Lava Lamp in the tiny Eastern Wash. burg of Soap Lake? It’s on again.
• You might not have heard of it yet, but there’s a longshoremen’s protest at a new grain terminal in Longview, where management has hired nonunion workers. A recent protest got 100 union dock workers and supporters arrested.
• A Daily Kos diarist compares the continuing nonsense over the federal deficit to “worrying about the water bill when the house is on fire.”
• Time claims Americans “distinguish toiler paper brands better than banks.” Insert snarky comments here.
• What are the chances that l’affaire Murdoch could cause the decline and fall of the Fox “News” Channel? Not much, I believe; at least not directly or right away. Murdoch’s UK papers used grody methods to amass information about politicians, celebrities, the royal family, and even violent-crime victims. Fox “News” doesn’t give a damn about information; it just makes crap up.

• Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said he’d like to be involved in an effort to bring men’s pro basketball back to Seattle. But, he claims, there’s a “real estate problem.” This problem can only be solved with a new arena, which would cost $300-500 million. KeyArena, Ballmer asserts, is too small; though it’s actually well in the range of NBA arena capacities. What it lacks are more luxury boxes and an NHL-friendly hockey configuration. Ballmer also apparently didn’t mention that as long as the City of Seattle owns KeyArena, it won’t subsidize a new building that would compete for concerts and other bookings. Even if the city had the money, which it doesn’t. (Question: Could KeyArena be expanded again without knocking down the nearby Northwest Court complex?)
• For decades, University of Washington administrators have chafed at the presence of all those pesky college students walking around, diverting time and attention away from the world-class-research-institution stuff the administrators would much rather focus on. Now, the current UW bigwigs have come across a solution, in the form of a whoppin’ 20 percent in-state tuition hike. Students plan to protest.
• The federal government has indeed sold the former Rick’s strip club building. And yes, the new owner will probably open another strip club there.
• Howard S. Wright, the construction giant that built the Space Needle and Columbia Center, was sold off to a Texas company.
• Could it really rain more at airports?

I love snow in Seattle. Always have. Always will.

Yet I know many of you have had an ordeal these past two days. Remote power outages; all-night commutes home; lost retail traffic, etc.

So I will forego my annual essay about why I love city snow so much.

I will give only a little verbal image.

I overlook a shorter building next door. This morning its roof was covered with just a remaining dusting of snow. Etched into this were dozens of pigeon footprints, in random curving paths reminiscent of a dotted Sunday Family Circus townscape. Cute beyond cute.

So I will leave you with Seattle’s official song of winter.

Stan Boreson \”Winter Underwear\” on \”The Lawrence Welk Show,\” 1957

Ah, I remember it well.

The months and weeks and days of slow buildup. The steam plumes. The bulge.

Then the eruption of Mount St. Helens. The biggest thing that had happened in my part of the world during my short life.

It was all encompassing. It was thrilling.

There were many deaths, but not as many as if it had happened on a weekday with 300 loggers on duty nearby.

There was infrastructure destruction, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed.

There was eco destruction, but even that has brought forth new life.

No, the real devastation to this area, and to this country, began much later in 1980.

Every December or January, we sit and wait for the threat/promise of snow in Seattle.

Last year, it came in a bountiful supply; a rare occurrence here indeed.

This week, maybe. Just maybe. Which means probably not.

Just a couple days ahead of schedule, autumn has suddenly and decidedly settled upon the PacNW region. The outdoor color scheme is so impressionistic; the cloud cover is imposing yet comforting at the same time. I’m truly home.

…of Snowtopia ’08’s final flourish of flurries, we must say goodbye to Eartha Kitt, Ms. “Santa Baby” herself. I had the privilege of seeing her at Jazz Alley sometime in the mid-1990s. She was still as sultry and saucy as ever. I knew I was in the presence of a living goddess; and so did everyone else in the room.

…to see the snow-melting rains appear, even though we all knew they had to appear one day.

Snowtopia ’08 does leave me with one question: If Seattle refuses to put salt on its roads, how about Mrs. Dash instead?

…that snow in the city should be seen as an adventure rather than an ordeal, Eli Sanders chimes in with thoughts on how to embrace and extend isolated incidents of a “culture of street joy.”

So we’ve finally had it. The Big One. The Perfect Storm (Western Washington version). The utter catastrophe the TV stations breathlessly threatened/promised every fall and winter since at least 1991.

I won’t disparge the impact this has had on the homeless (who deserve a better lot in life year round).

And the big snow’s timing has left thousands unable to leave or enter the area for holiday reunions; not to mention leaving already-troubled retailers bereft of holiday shoppers.

And, no matter what week it occurs, a snow like this will be tough for car commuters and truck shippers. This time, it also hit bus and train travelers hard.

But damn if it isn’t the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

And the most joyous.

The first non-sticky flakes of Saturday the 13th were all the “white Christmas” miracle I’d come to expect here in the ol’ Puget Sound convergence zone. It was lite; it was white; it went away.

The local newscasts (which, like their counterparts on stations across the country, are built and budgeted exactly for these huge visual-crisis moments) promised/threatened an even huger blast the following Wednesday.

It didn’t happen.

Those of us who’d been through this in the past figured, “Ah, of course. They’ll always threaten but not deliver.”

Then, in the predawn hours of Thursday, the big snow came.

And came.

And came some more.

For four days.

Without getting into crude sexual puns, let me simply state how much I’ve loved it.

As I’ve written here in the past, snow in Seattle is a rare treat. It turns us all into children. Most of us can’t do our normal daily dreary work lives. All we can do is play, and coccoon, and enjoy the company of whoever’s closest to us, and reconnect with those in our most immediate vicinity.

And enjoy the blanket of pure precipitory wonder.

But by this point, even a Snow Miser like me feels a little melancholy while walking through the winter wonderland.

Can there be such a thing as too much beauty, too much joy?

When does it turn into, as the cliche goes, a “great and terrible beauty”?

Sooner for many other people than for me, that’s for sure.

But now, I’m starting to feel the ten-day itch.

At some point, any holiday from the ordinary must conclude.

Lovers who’ve ignored the world beyond one another’s arms must resume doing whatever they do to stay fed. Children must return to school. Trucks must be able to get stuff to and from us. The wheels of commerce must turn again.

But the visceral memories remain—of street sledding on flattened cardboard boxes, of mugs of cocoa or Irish coffee thawing frozen fingers, of strangers becoming instant allies inthe great adventure, of our normal wintery dim grey turned blinding white.

A final thought: It just so happened that this snowapalooza occurred around and on the solstice, the day after which everything becomes just a little brighter. This has been the last winter solstice of the Bush era; the economy’s in the undisputed dumps, the nation’s civic fabric is in tatters, but the hope of better times already beckons.

…a wonderful, wonderful day in Seattle. Work is kaput today, for grownups and schoolchildren alike. It’s a day for frolicking, for bundling up, for keeping warm with cocoa and rum and loved ones, for staying off those damned highways and getting to know your own neighborhood for perhaps the first time. Now if you’ll excuse me, a snowflake just knocked on my window inviting me out.

Longtime readers of this feature know I simply adore snow in the city. It makes everything beautiful. It makes everyone a wide-eyed child (except for those grumps who can only curse the driving conditions). This is a glorious day in Seatown.

…mighty blustery day, here’s what’s nooze:

• Obama, Clinton, and one of them Republicans: They’re all coming to town to cajole caucus goers.
• Local house prices somehow held their own.
• Boeing’s 787 flies in June—this time they’re sure.
• There’s one less indie dairy operation in Western Washington. Wilcox Farms plans to leave the biz.
• Delta and Northwest sitting in a tree…
• The all mail-in ballot? Not yet, in King County.
• Beyond every formerly-new computer, TV, and cell phone lies the wonderful world of potentially toxic e-waste.

…is over, and the party races are just as muddled as before. In other nooze:

• Seattle transportation planners have a desire named streetcar.
• We say goodbye today to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, TM founder, mantra seller, and guru to everyone from John Lennon to David Lynch; to Barry Morse, costar of the original The Fugitive and Space: 1999; and to Dr. Ernesto Illy, purveyor of canned espresso beans and a promoter of better coffee back when Howard Schultz was still playing college football.
• Starting this June: Nonstop flights from Sea-Tac to Beijing.
• Wall St. goes kablooey, recession’s probably already here.
• Meanwhile, the housing slump’s shut down 18 sawmills in the state.
• Issaquah bans panhandling, car washes, not cookie sales.
• Guy pretends to be a member of rock vets Queensryche, as part of a plan to steal people’s IDs.
• “Boy hit in the face with water bottle thrown from car.”
• A judge rules against BushCo, says the Navy still has to protect orcas from sonar.
• One more reason to visit my ol’ hometown: A museum full of vintage telephone gear.
• Tornados in the South kill at least 48. Could climate change be one reason for the storms’ severity?