…discover the shocking fact that skiers like snow in the mountains. In other nooze:

• The UW’s latest big fundraising campaign hit its goal five months early. No word whether they’ll just keep going to fund that new stadium remodel.
• Capitol Hill activists hope to prevent another spate of gay-bashing crimes this next summer.
• Driving in snowy mountain passes is tough. Attacking a snowplow driver sure doesn’t help.

…we remain snowless yet another day (and for the whole season?).

In other nooze:

• The city’s program of forcibly clearing homeless camps is inhumane, according to community advocates who spoke at a public hearing.
• The bureaucratic process of investigating the Seattle Police Dept.’s internal investigations might have conclusions soon.
• Rumors say Boeing just might shift some 787 assembly to San Antonio.
• And that Bush guy apparently said something Monday night, but nobody seems to remember what it was.

The TV this morn has lots of lovely snow footage from Tacoma, Lynnwood, and Issaquah. But here in the heart-O-Seattle, we’ve got some white-dusted rooftops and icy roads but little more. Alas.

…anxiously awaits the long-threatened but still nonexistent Snowstorm ’08, here’s what else has been going on:

• That plan to restore the boarded-up, aluminum-clad windows at the King County Courthouse? Not gonna happen.
• That plan to channel state money for a Husky Stadium remodel? Not dead yet.
• Seattle’s finally getting a new strip club; sure enough, it’s situated right alongside the unofficially-named South Lake Union Trolley.
• The many human services groups based at First United Methodist Church are packin’ up and movin’ out. The last church service at the classic sanctuary: Easter, 3/23. That building’s being saved for commercial use, but the ’50s-era annex building’s going away.
• There’s good news for music lovers: Capitol Music, the city’s top vendor of orchestral instruments and sheet music for more than 90 years, has reopened in Roosevelt, a year after development consumed its last downtown location.
• Caucus or primary? Wash. state’s got both.

• Marshall Alternative School will finally close this year, its remaining programs scattered around the city.
• A Tukwila hotel manager turned himself in to face accusations that he stole $1.4 million from hotel guests’ corporate accounts.
• Gregoire’s next big idea for the 520 corridor: A mediation team.
• Makah tribal leaders want to go whaling again.
• How to keep school bus riders pacified: Use satellite music, specially curated to be squeaky clean.
• And the Mac universe impatiently awaits whatever Steve Jobs is going to announce this morning.

…(other than the spendorifical live book event occurrin’ tonight at 2407 First Avenue (note corrected address)):

• Another Gregoire big idea: Start charging tolls on the current 520 bridge, to help save up for a replacement span.
• After what seems like an eternity, the Northwest African American Museum will finally open in March at the old Coleman School building.
• The City’s new plan to deal more “humanely” with the homeless: Give ’em 48 hours’ notice before confiscating all their stuff.
• December retail sales: up at Costco, down at Nordstrom.
• SW Wash. floodwater makes livestock a little less live.
• Many more state residents are living in poverty compared to 2001.
• Laurelhurstians: So rich they can hire their own cops.
• Hanford’s got some nuclear waste that could possibly spontaneously combust if exposed to air. Officials say they’ve got a plan to deal with it.

• Some Washingtonians got beautiful, beautiful snow this morning. We don’t. Oh well.
• A small-town mayor in Oregon was caught posting underwear pix on her MySpace page. Some humorless citizens want her to resign. I say to these citizens: Don’t you believe in open government?
• Big UW donor (and ex-Everett mayor) to UW execs: If you fire the football coach, I’ll donate a hundred grand.
• The “passenger” dolls used by carpool-lane cheaters are getting quite artistic.
• A state senator wants to repeal the Port of Seattle’s taxing authority. As if that would solve anything; they’d just waste the money they get from airlines and shipping lines.
• Gov. Gregoire has a new plan for a new 520 bridge, with “road deck narrower than some earlier designs” above “smaller pontoons.” There’s no joke here; I just like typing the word “pontoons.”
• Seattle Center can go ahead and regulate street performers. Remember: When clowns are outlawed, only outlaws will throw pies.
• The state Legislature will debate whether to force school districts to buy more locally-grown lunch ingredients, presumably not including pot.
• There’s another lawsuit over alleged Catholic boy-abuse, this time involving O’Dea High School.
• Apparel chain H&M (not to be confused with K&G) will open three area stores this year.
• And Bill Richardson may quit the Presidential race, while John Kerry hearts Obama.

• 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.

• The first rule of casinos has been “The house always wins.” Turns out it ain’t necessarily so.
• Flood victims don’t give a damn for FEMA’s non-responses.
• Did a Kirkland 12-year-old get a digi-cam image of the Virgin Mary?
• Windstorm 2008 is here, and it’s nasty.
• New-agey sounding day spas: Fronts for more traditional forms of “touch”? And even if it’s so, why all the law-enforcement hassling of them, when the police have more important matters such as catching (insert your favorite nemesis here)?
• If fewer people are trying to rob banks, does it mean they know where the money isn’t?

• Clark County’s been experimenting with biodeisel transit buses. Biggest glitch so far: The eco-fuel jells in cold weather.
• Some folks apparently got a little carried away on New Year’s, shooting guns into the air and engaging in questionable driving.
• Oh-Seven’s weather? Crazy, man.
• Seattle’s last homicide of the old year, the slaying of a Sierra Club organizer outside a Capitol Hill condo, might have been the work of a stalker.

• That temporary passenger ferry between Seattle and Pt. Townsend? Some folks would like it to be a little less temporary.
• Meanwhile, some guy’s hoping to start a commercial passenger train between Bellevue and Snohomish—just the thing for bringing new customers to my mom’s antique-mall spaces there!
• One way to annoy the sandals-and-wool-socks voting block: Propose mandatory licensing for bicyclists.
• The bus tunnel: Still shut.
• The American Stasi is on the watch for peculiar behavior at airports. Insert your own joke here.
• The White Christmas thang sure looked damn great yesterday afternoon, whilst I was returning to Seattle from northern realms. Could we get an encore?
• The local holiday ended in typical fashion, with the ceremonial State Patrol officer shooting a naked guy who was walking across I-5.
• Idaho police academy students got to choose their own graduating-class slogan: “Don’t suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], go out and cause it.”

• You won’t love it at Levitz anymore. The discount furniture chain, which has teetered in and out of insolvency for several years, is finally throwing in the seat cushion.
• Safeco Insurance has fulfilled its duty to propping up the downtown real-estate biz by moving into two existing downtown Seattle office towers.
• I-5 in southwest Washington is slowly reopening in stages. Meanwhile, receding floodwaters leave what P-I headline writers call a “Deluge of sewage.” Say that five times fast.
• A Federal Way sixth grader has invented a device using kitchen gloves and semi-porous plastic bubbles, which can inject medicines into the body without needles. Just the thing for squeamish junkies everywhere.
• Yep, King County’s fully, officially, joined the housing-price bubble “pop.”
• And there’s a fun story about professional horse’s ass Tim Eyman getting into a hissyfit at a Yakima city council meeting and getting forcibly removed.

• 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.

…another blame target for the Floods of ’07: excessive logging.

• As the floodwaters from Rainstorm 2007 still linger, the blame game commences. Was the state laggardly in building Chehalis River flood control systems after allocating money to do so? Does Seattle have an insufficient drainage infrastructure? And, of course, does climate change/global warming have anything to do with all this unseasonably warm rain coming here via the “pineapple express?”
• Jones Soda’s CEO, whose surname (naturally) is Van Stolk, will leave the company at the end of the month. Jones’s massive growth in recent years has come with allegations of financial irregularities at the Seattle-based “boutique soda” marketer.
• Seattle was named #6 on a Brookings Institution list of America’s “most walkable cities.” Portland was #5. Washington DC (Brookings’ home town) made the top spot.
• Seattle Center’s future fate is still undecided, but one legacy building has a new, at least temporary, use. Seattle Opera will stick some staff members and scene storage into Mercer Arena, the former Seattle Ice Arena (home of the 1917 Stanley Cup champions!). The structure, which has also housed rock concerts, the old Seattle Reign women’s basketball team, and many other events, has been idle the past four years.
• The Lake Union streetcar finally has an official opening day. It opens for pubilc rides on Wednesday, Dec. 12. Yes, the clever folks who promoted the unofficial nickname of South Lake Union Trolley, or “SLUT,” promise to be on hand, proudly sporting “Ride the SLUT” T-shirts.
• Amateur film-based photography’s rapid decline hits home. PhotoWorks, formerly Seattle FilmWorks, is selling itself to American Greetings Corp. Seattle FilmWorks was originally a piece of American Passage Marketing, which posted gazillions of ad posters on college campus bulletin boards hawking everything from magazine subscriptions to term paper “research guides.” It originally bought Kodak 35mm movie film, repackaged it for still cameras, and sold it by mail in film-and-processing joint deals.