…upon the Puget Sound basin. A few deciduous-tree leaves have already begun to turn color. A graceful, tasteful cloud cover has provided its natural sunscreen the past several mornings. Temperatures have become, well, more temperate. And sundown is again greeting us before 8 p.m. It’s a wonderful time to be alive in this, thankfully hurricane-free, segment of the globe.

And the perfect accessory for autumnal living has arrived. I speak, of course, of the fabulous new Belltown Messenger newspaper. It’s a small one, but packed with infotainment at its most infotaining, including three (count ’em) text pieces and seven glorious b/w photos by yrs. truly. Pick one up at a dropoff spot near you, or read online.

…has arrived in Seattle with force. Herewith, some of the sights under the sun downtown, on Broadway, and on University Way.

…they’re worried that the Northwest drought might lead to a beer and wine shortage.

The Organ, Portland’s greatest newsprint periodical since the Clinton Street Quarterly, has apparently published its last regular issue. (There’s a farewell editorial on page three, but a promo ad inside claims it will “be published on an irregular schedule” in 2005-2006.) In any event, editor Camela Raymond and staff have performed an admirable job these past two-plus years of covering the bi-state visual-arts scene, emphasizing the creative and the contemporary, and demanding that art be treated as a force for social progress. Raymond’s now taken a day job at the slick consumer-lifestyle mag Portland Monthly, so she can’t pour all her heart-n’-soul into The Organ for the time being.

The swan-song issue #13 (theme: “Resist”) includes several features of particular interest to Seattle readers:

• Raymond’s “Fragments from the Front” collects news clippings about the George Jackson Brigade, a sort of pre-WTO anti-corporate bombing and bank-robbing gang that operated in Seattle in the mid-’70s.
• Meagan Atiyeh’s “Artist in Residence” is an interview with Dutch-born painter Hank Pander, who’s got a career retrospective show at the Frye Art Museum until Jan. 16.
• Nadia Gregor’s “Signs and Wonders” is a lovely, haunting verbal travelogue along downtown Seattle’s abandoned storefronts (a topic I’ve also been quite interested in lately).
• And P-I arts writer Regina Hackett offers a review of local author Charles D’Ambrosio’s essay collection Orphans.

I’ll miss The Organ. I’d like to help make something new like it. Only this time, unlike the 2000-2003 print MISC, I don’t want to be the sole editor/publisher, and I don’t have any money to stick into it. Any ideas?

LOUSY NEWS OF THE DAY #2: Otis F. Odder aka Otis Fodder, Seattle’s own premier historian/collector/DJ of cool, strange, rate, and just plain odd recordings, is leaving town for the dreaded Frisco. (And yes, I call it “Frisco” deliberately, and the more you tell me not to, the more I’ll do it.)

LOUSY BUT EXPECTED NEWS OF THE DAY #3: “Snow Day” was pretty much over by 10 a.m., durn it.

The long-promised snow has arrived. Big, fluffy, delicious-looking flakes abound. As always with Seattle snow, get out and enjoy it now. It might not be there when your cartoons are over.

…offers tips for the aspiring journalist on how to televise yourself in a hurricane.

THE MIDWAY DRIVE-IN on Highway 99 north of Tacoma, more recently just used as a Swap & Shop site, is gonna be razed for a Lowe’s and a strip mall. Where’s Joe Bob Briggs when we need him? Oh yeah–he’s got religion now.

IN HONOR of the passing of the darkest 13 weeks of the pagan year, some random rain pix for Photo Phriday.

IT’S THE LAST INSTALLMENT of our snow pix. By now, five days have passed since Snow Day. It already feels like a million years ago. (Sigh.)

AS THE BIG SNOW rapidly becomes the Big Slurpee, here’s the second part of our look back at the wondrous simpler time that was this past Tuesday. At least one more batch-O-pix will follow.

For really-really-real! After a week and a half of promises, and more than two years without one, we finally got it! Accumulation, sticking, in the daytime and everything!

So, all week on this site, you’ll see a few of the 300-or-so images I took on Flaky Tuesday.

Get outside at the first sign of flake-fall (in this case, shortly after 9 p.m.). Feel it on your face. Stick your tongue out. Document everything. Make snowmen and snow graffiti. Make and throw snowballs. Stay out as long as you can physically stand it, into the wee hours. Don’t feel disappointed when it all melts away by mid-morning.

…in freakin’ Hawai’i this week. But still none in Seattle. Drat.

WE’VE BASHED The SeaTimes a bit this year, but we love the paper’s first (annual?) winter solstice contemplation.

…to that tireless provider of warmth and light, the coffeehouse.

…at 7:45 to see if that miracle of miracles, Snow Day in Seattle, had occurred. It hadn’t. But out my window this hour I have seen a few scattered moments of white flakes drifting slowly down, followed by the return of quickly-descending ordinary ol’ rain.

Will true snowfall, or even further furtive teases of this type, occur today, or during the remainder of the calendar year? Gawd I hope so.

I’ve always been in a minority of Seattleites about this, I’m oh-so-well aware. At a coffeehouse last night, I told the barista dude (in a K2 ski T-shirt) I was praying for snow. He mumbled, “But just in the moutains, right?” He couldn’t believe me when I said I wanted snow right here. He mumbled about icy roads and school closures and all that. I said that’s part of what I love about Seattle’s rare snow days–the bright, friendly anarchy everywhere.