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.

• Seattle’s first snow scare of the season was, as I’d expected, a bust, but here comes another.
• What the P-I calls “affordable-housing developers” (what, you didn’t know there were any of those?) rant that the City of Seattle doesn’t provide enough zoning and other incentives to let ’em profitably build more units for folks closer to “median” income levels. Of course, with the few megarich driving “median” income levels ever higher, the definition of for-profit “affordable” housing inches further away from what working families can afford.
• Meanwhile, Bellevue officials ponder regulations to deal with suburban “megahomes” that flaunt their materialistic corpulence over their neighbors.
• The last of the four Pine-and-Belmont bars has closed prior to condos taking over the half-block. Manray’s demise ends a tradition that goes back nearly 20 years, when Squid Row took over what had been a dive-bar space called Glynn’s Cove. Squid Row begat Tugs Belmont, which begat Kincora. Then came Bimbo’s/Cha Cha, Manray, and the Bus Stop (which begat Pony). The strip’s demise got the expected long mega-coverage in The Stranger; the Cha Cha had been the longtime favorite watering hole of several Stranger staffers.
• The P-I catches on to a story first iterated a year or more, I believe, by the Weekly, that Costco treats its workers nicer than the Wall St. investment community thinks it should, resulting in greater sales and profits. Why, if word of this leaks out, the whole economic excuse for screwing the masses could collapse!
• You don’t have to go to Wash. DC to see Democrats cowering in submission. They’re right here, ramrodding an emergency session of the State Legislature to appease Tim Eyman.

• The housing-market slowdown, which some commentators blissfully predicted wouldn’t hit Seattle, has. First market category to feel the pinch: Townhomes.
• Cold weather means your local rats want an indoor home.
• ETA on the emergency carless ferries to Pt Townsend? Monday.
• That guy who was beaten and kicked by cops outside the War Room might get a $185,000 settlement.
• Will someone buy and save the giant bowling-pin sign from the late Leilani Lanes?
• Now we know why the U VIllage Apple store was closed for remodeling the day OS X Leopard came out. Turns out they’ve got a whole new customer-service through-line system thingy going on.
• And an Everett high-school teacher claims his wedding ring saved his life, by preventing him from getting electrocuted during a home improvement project.

• Oklahoma City’s mayor, a pal of Sonics owner Clay Bennett, drops hints that Bennett and co. may already be planning the team’s move.
• You remember that ultra low-fare airline offering super-cheap seats from Bellingham to Columbus, OH? It’s not anymore.
• Canadian transportation experts voice concern that B.C. Ferry crews may be enjoying too much “B.C.bud” on the job.
• For an off-off-year election, some races are definitely heating up. Examples: Seattle City Councilmember David Della’s decreasingly rational rants about opponent Tim Burgess; the Seattle School Board battle between incumbent Darlene Flynn and centralized-curriculum advocate Sherry Carr; the skirmish for King County Prosecutor between business-as-usual Dan Satterberg and dynamic challenger Bill Sherman; and something I don’t quite understand in Renton.
• And everybody’s supposed to be afraid, very afraid, of Windstorm 2007, coming Thursday, or not.

Without making a big PR fuss about it, KIRO-TV’s quietly moved into high-definition local production. Last night’s prime-time documentary special, Cold Facts About Our Warm Planet, was particularly notable.

With lush HD videography and few commercial interruptions, it showed the local effects of global warming. We saw shrinking glaciers, prematurely melting mountain snowpacks, tinder-dry forest lands, declining salmon runs, potential sea-level rises, and more.

It was all narrated by a low-key Steve Raible. (How’d he grow up so smart, when his fellow early Seahawks star Steve Largent went wingutty?) Raible calmly took us through the evidence and the arguments about our current warming trend. He explained the background science, with the help of UW scientists and experts.

Raible stayed away from casting blame or judgmentalism, and rightly so. If global warming really is influenced by human activity, and I believe it is, it’s taken the entirety of human civilization to get us there. Anti-SUV sanctimony won’t save the planet. That can only occur with a lot of big and small steps by a lot of people, including people whose current lifestyles are different from yours.

Kudos to Cold Facts’ writer-director Ben Saboonchian and videographer Peter Frerichs.

I don’t know if or when the station will repeat the special. It should, and it should put the whole doc up online.

…autumn unofficially arrived last night, in the form of a spectacular thunderstorm.

This morning, the skies over Seattle have returned to their diffuse, impressionistic low-light pattern. It’s refreshing, it’s cool, it’s beautiful. Really.

…during what’s essentially the first springtime afternoon of the year. Ah, the smell of freshly mulched grass, the sight of Pike Place tourist hordes, the sound of road-repair jackhammers, the taste of premature California strawberries, the touch of temperate air on the skin. It’s the sort of day that lets one forget the entire S.A.D. season.

WHAT I’VE BEEN UP TO LATELY: Still working with a team starting an exciting new online venture, which I hope to officially announce soon. One delaying factor: The difficulty of coming up with a good web-site name that hasn’t been taken.

LOSS-O-INNOCENCE MOMENT OF THE MONTH: Heard poorly-excerpted beats from The Jam’s 1980 power-pop anthem “Start” in an awful Cadillac SUV commercial last month. It was merely weeks after viewing the DVD set The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave, which contained a rousing performance of the song on Tom Snyder’s late-late-night talkfest. The set also includes a 1977 interview segment with Jam frontman Paul Weller and Joan Jett, both looking achingly young and vulnerable. Of all the fates that could have befallen that fresh-faced, 19-year-old Weller, I can think of few worse than to have become a shill for luxury sport-utes.

Following Thursday night’s local weather madness, those of us here in bodacious Belltown have gotten to enjoy the miracle that is underground wiring on this ides-of-December weekend, while the unfortunates in Wallingford, Seward Park, Bellevue, and more remote points froze in the dark for one or more nights due to the proclivities of several inconsiderate trees to get themselves strewn across power lines. It just goes to show you: There are distinct advantages to living in the middle of civilization.

THIS ISN’T TO SAY there weren’t any impacts of Windstorm 2006 in our little corner o’ the world. Downtown retailers were blessed/cursed on Dec. 15 with shoppers who couldn’t get their gifts at, say, Bellevue Square. Seattle Center, the Aquarium, etc. were stuffed with parents escorting young’uns whose schools had shut down for the day. Hotel lobbies were stuffed with stranded travelers and ordinary folk with no place else to go. Workplaces and holiday parties in town included many women who (needlessly) apologized for the inability to apply their makeup or style their hair in their de-electrified homes. Many who lived in places with power but worked in places without it got an involuntary day off. Restaurants, coffee houses, and bars serviced many customers whose fridges, coffee makers, stoves, etc. had gone phhhfft.

And, perhaps most significantly, Friday was A Day Without Newspapers. The Seattle Times Co.’s suburban plant was blacked out. No Friday P-Is were finished or distributed. A few thousand Times copies made their way to a relative few downtown stores and vending boxes.

Folks who still had the juice at home had to settle for Web sites (including those of the knocked-out newspapers), TV and radio. The disempowered had to be informed by battery radios, car radios, and hand-cranked radios, or by laptops brought to WiFi-enabled coffee houses.

(Sidebar: Apparently, the phone lines at KUOW were swamped all weekend by angry callers, justifiably miffed at the station’s on-air interviews with folks who offered power-outage survival tips but then rattled off the URLs of Web sites for more information. What, you mean everybody doesn’t have a stack of fully-charged backup laptop batteries and a satellite broadband connection?)

On Saturday, the local papers came back, but in truncated 36-page editions. That page count would have been enough to provide the regular Saturday Times and P-I “news holes,” except that the Times Co. decided to make up some of the money it had lost on Friday, and stuffed both Saturday papers full of ads. In the remaining 12 and a half or so pages, both papers’ editors crammed as much storm coverage as they could, leaving little or no space for sports, business news, editorials, comics, TV listings, puzzles, or (oddly enough) the weather.

By Sunday, the Times plant and product were back to normal. But was the civic discourse fatally disrupted? Would more folks start buying the NY Times just to get assured access to the NYT crossword? Would more readers migrate online and dump the dead-tree editions? Would that aggravate the Times Co.’s drive to kill the P-I? Will mass-market newsprint be more quickly relegated to the great recycle bin of media history? Stay tuned.

BRIEFLY IN OTHER NEWS: We must say goodbye this month to Bud Tutmarc, one of the unsung heroes of Northwest music. He’d spent most of his career as a church musical director, but in the ’50s he’d invented an improved Hawaiian-style pedal steel guitar, one of the key steps toward the electric guitars we know and love today.… Apparently the Nintendo Wii, the new video game console with handheld wireless remote controls, can be dangerous in the wrong hands. A Dec. 14 AP dispatch from Seattle reported how local player Janna Baker, during an energetic round of a Wii bowling game, flung her “Wiimote” until it “glanced off her coffee table, snapped its wrist strap, and hurtled into her flat-screen TV.” The company’s coming out with stronger wrist straps.

The crops are saved!

…since a post to this site. What can I say except (1) I’m sorry, (2) I’ll try to do better, and (3) I’ve got some great print work I’ve been workin’ on that’s comin’ at ya real soon?

Meanwhile, our Capitol Hill Times friends have a full list of all the beer and wine products you can’t buy downtown anymore. Yet that abominable California product sold under the once-respectable Pabst name still remains freely available.

Autumnal conditions gracefully settled into the greater Seattle area on Tuesday, Sept. 12. We’re cloudy and cool once again, and will probably stay this way, more or less, for the next six months. I like it. If you don’t like it, here’s the URL for Florida real estate.

How high are fans’ expectations for the Seahawks? Let’s just say they’re undefeated, but not undefeated by enough.

And the UW Husky footballers are doing better than expected, having won two squeakers.

Roq La Rue’s Tiki Art Now 3 exhibit is still up. If you go this week, you’ll probably have a more pleasant viewing experience than was had by we who attended the packed-to-overflowing opening night.

I’m sending off the page proofs of my next book, Vanishing Seattle, to the publisher today. There’s only a slight chance copies will be available prior to Xmas; but you’ll still be able to preorder. If you do so through MISCmedia.com, you’ll get a truly lovely gift card to let your lucky recipient know of the memorable reading experience awaiting when their copy does arrive.

Excuse us if we’re not yet really impressed by the newly corporate-approved legal movie download hype. Even if one (1) of the services is Mac-friendly. At this point in time, those physical artifacts known as DVDs still provide greater selection, higher image quality, (usually) lower consumer costs, and fewer pesky rights-management shackles.

It looks like Seattle First United Methoidist Church may move to Belltown after all, even as its previously announced deal with developer Martin Selig goes pffft. Under the new deal, rival developer Nitze-Stagen will take over the church’s historic sanctuary for commercial uses, put an office tower on the rest of the church’s existing land, and help the church buy the Third and Battery site Selig was going to give away to it.

Tomorrow’s primary day here in WashState. I beg of you to all get out and defeat the far right’s highly funded drive to pack the state Supreme Court with anti-environmentalists.

Windstorm 2006 has died down. The PacNW, or at least those parts of it that didn’t lose electricity this morning, rests impatiently awaiting the big game tomorrow afternoon.

As our gift of hope to you, enjoy these pictures from this past week’s Seahawks rallies, last Sunday at Qwest Field and Friday at Westlake Center.

Go Hawks.

…but unmistakable snow flakes briefly appeared, among the more typical precipitation, at 11:09 a.m. The world is a better, more beautiful place already.

…when the local TV anchordrones insist there’ll be snow this-time-for-sure, it doesn’t happen, at least not in town.

…has fingered the real culprit in the music industry’s steady downturn—DVDs. The arrival of film as a home-library product, Norman Lebrecht claims, means “it has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms…. The DVD won’t replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture.”

THE NOVEMBER BELLTOWN MESSENGER is out at last, and may be our best yet. Read it online or seek it at more than 100 dropoff spots.

RAIN HAS ARRIVED SERIOUSLY in greater Puget Sound this morning, meaning the fourth category of autumnal transition has also arrived. (The prior three stages of fall: Labor Day weekend, the equinox, and the “fall back” to Standard Time.)

The grey has settled in. The washed-out watercolor look will be with us, with occasional sunbreaks, for the next three and a half months or so. This is what breaks the spirits of Californians and proves the mettle of real Nor’Westers. Can you take it?

The latest hurricane from Hell hit landfall at Sabine Pass, TX. (For the mythologically ignorant, here’s my Roman reference.)