LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the continuing blight of suburban sprawl and what might possibly be done in upcoming years to make those Nowheresvilles more eco- and people-friendly.

What drives the sprawl, of course, is a growing population that needs to live, work, and go to school somewhere. But what if there won’t be as many additional folk in coming decades as folk today expect there to be?

An Atlantic Monthly article claims not only won’t there be a Soylent Green-style overpopulation catastrophe, but the world’s supply of living humans might actually decline in the long run.

Author Max Singer expects world-pop numbers to grow at ever slower and slower rates; so “within fifty years or so world population will peak at about eight billion”–still a way-scary two billion more than we have now–“before starting a fairly rapid decline.” Indeed, “unless people’s values change greatly, several centuries from now there could be fewer people living in the entire world than live in the United States today.”

Singer claims the real reason for this reversal wouldn’t be AIDS in Africa or economic collapse in Russia or girl-abortions in China or eco-disasters or wars or declining sperm counts, but the spread of modern attitudes about work and family. If this transpires, our grandchildren (however many we have) might not have to eat one another, but they’ll have other issues to face. The North American economic system’s pretty much always been premised on growth–more people, and more wealth for some of these people to spend on consumer goods. What would a more-deaths-than-births world mean to one’s career or personal ambitions?

It should be mentioned, though the Atlantic doesn’t fully mention it, that Singer’s a leader in the near-right Hudson Institute, a prolific producer of reports and policy papers asking citizens and governments to ignore those loudmouth environmentalists about pollution, tainted food, nuclear waste, and assorted other issues in which the insitute believes big business should be given the benefit of all doubts. Singer’s Atlantic article just might be considered to be possibly part of a larger scheme of attempting to rebuff enviro-doom-warners at any opportunity.

But the U.N. figures Singer cites seem plausible. And he’s not calling for the developed countries to breed away, but simply reporting what he claims is an almost-inevitable trend (albeit one that won’t prove true or false for a long time).

Who knows? Maybe that radical-green “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” just might find its dreams nearly fulfilled–after everybody in the group today will have died.

(For another viewpoint, check out Zero Population Growth’s Y6B site.)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be equilateral.

TOMORROW: Less need-to-breed might increase the number of single men, America’s socio-sexual outcasts since way back.

UPDATE: We’ve already told you of the totally separate, and apparently feuding, sites Seattlemusic.com and Seattlemusic.org. I’ve since learned of a third name-game player–Seattlemusic.net!

ELSEWHERE: The same Atlantic issue mentioned above has a somewhat amusing “Periodic Table of Rejected Elements,” including Imodium, Xena, Hydrox, and Fahrfergnuven… Everybody loves wacky inventions, especially when the inventors are (apparently) totally sincere in their intentions…

FOR THE THIRD YEAR, we’ve gathered a veritable barrage of quality tomeage for your edification and enjoyment at the beach, the airport, the RV waste-disposal station, or wherever else you might find yourself wanting or needing to kill some quality time, and assembled it as the Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.

(Some of these titles may be subjected to longer reviews in the coming weeks.)

• Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, eds. Show yourself off as the most erudite person on the beach with this long, way-detailed account of experimental techniques in forming new structures for prose and poetry, by a mostly-French group of deep-thinkers, mathematicians, and game-theorists. If you like alternately-scaled music or

  intermediate-to-advanced word puzzles, you’ll like this.

• Great Plains, Ian Frazier. Histories, travelogues, and memoirs of one of America’s most fascinating, least documented places.
• The New Life, Orham Pamuk. A fascinating travelogue (mostly by bus) across modern-day Turkey, wrapped around a young man’s obsessive quest for his dream woman and for a mysterious Utopian land described in an old children’s adventure story.
• Truck Stop Rainbows, Iva Pekarkova. Social-realist novel of quiet desperation, set in Prague during the socialist regime’s dying years. Our young heroine takes clandestine photos of environmental catastrophes, in between sessions sleeping with truck drivers to buy a black-market wheelchair for a dying friend. A poignant, erotic, account of a not-long-ago social-engineering mistake.
• Within the Context of No Context, George W.S. Trow. Reprint of a years-old rant against the usual things a New Yorker essayist might be expected to rant against, particularly every intellectual-type’s favorite all-purpose bogeyman TV. As you may know, I’m just as skeptical of paeans to a supposed golden age of live before TV as I am of paeans to a supposed golden age of life before desegregation. I disagree with Trow’s videophobia as much as I disagree with the videophobia of Mark Crispin Miller or Jerry Mander; but at least Trow writes well and tries to support his statements instead of simply throwing out a bunch of a priori arguments like most TV-haters.
• In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones, eds. The back-cover blurb and the introduction claim “the Short” or “creative nonfiction” to be some whole new writing genre. It’s not, of course; newspaper columns, radio spot-commentaries, single-page magazine articles, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul inspirational books have been making (factual) long stories short for a long, long time. But the ones compiled in this volume are still damned cool. There’s also a sequel collection, In Brief, specializing in authors’ personal reminiscences; but I prefer this one, wherein the contributors observe the world beyond themselves.
• Why I Am Not A Christian, Bertrand Russell. A good sampling of the great freedom-thinker’s thinking. Only beef: The volume’s religion emphasis means it doesn’t include some of Russell’s best pieces, such as the account of his falling-out with D.H. Lawrence (whom, Russell claimed, saw women “only as something soft and fat to rest the hero when he returns from his labors”).
• Why We Buy, Paco Underhill. As if North Americans aren’t already being systemattically marketed to at darn near every opportunity, here comes a corporate consultant who (as part of a whole treatise on “branding” and retail/advertising psychology) thinks there are remaining spaces of human existence which haven’t, and ought to be, turned into spots for sales pitches. I could try to think up some really exaggerated example (product placements in operas; Pampers ads tacked onto delivery-room ceilings) going beyond Underhill’s own suggestions, but I’m afraid they’d come true.
• The Geography of Nowhere, James H. Kunstler. From 1993, an attempt “to consider in some detail why the automobile suburb is such a terrible pattern for human ecology,” resulting in “the loss of community.” Too bad its lessons (and those of its sequel, Home From Nowhere) hadn’t been widely learned a few years before. We might not be stuck with so much excess paved-over countryside turned into lookalike Sprawlsvilles–or with so many bored, affluent children of the Sprawlsvilles taking over the cities in upscaled “downtown revival” schemes, driving all the longtime residents out.
• Nonconformity, Nelson Algren. A posthumously-discovered long essay written in the ’50s by the Man With the Golden Arm novelist; subtitled “Writing On Writing” but really about the need for outspoken free-thinkers in an America subsumed by Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, and the start of suburban numbness. “Do American faces so often look so lost because they are the most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?”

AND SOME OF YOUR SUGGESTIONS:

• Anne Silberman: “Don’t know if this book was mentioned last year or not: Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger. I’ve passed this one along to so many friends I’ve lost track of it. It’s a small book, written in correspondence form. The story takes place in the early to mid 1940’s. A fatherless boy from Brooklyn starts writing fan letters to a big league baseball player. These two are real, salty characters who are cut from the same cloth. The baseball player becomes the boy’s surrogate dad. It’s all about baseball and being Jewish and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is one of my favorites… and I hate baseball!”
• Bruce Long: “The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. Reflections on impermanence by a German on a walking tour of East Anglia, accompanied by the likes of Conrad and Borges.”
• Ed Harper: “I’d recommend anything by Carl Hiaasen for warm weather reading (I couldn’t imagine reading any of his stuff in the winter), but my favorites are Native Tongue and Tourist Season.”
• Nick Bauroth: “How about the Bible?”

MONDAY: I try to get a DSL line.

IT’S MISC. WORLD’S end-of-the-month clearance. Get the following Famous Maker commentary items now at big savings! (I’ve wanted to have a clothing company called “Famous Maker” even longer than I’ve wanted to have a band called “Special Guest.”)

A SLOW HAND, AND EVERYTHING ELSE: Saw a beautiful poster on Capitol Hill announcing, in neo-mod lettering, what from a far distance looked like “Butoh Erotica.” A closer reading, however, revealed the poster was actually advertising a performance-art evening of “Butch Erotica.”

While I strongly support tuff-gal lesbians’ empowered expressions of their sexual selves, I can’t stop imagining the possibilities of making specifically-sexually-themed works from the slow, deliberate, Japanese-born genre of Butoh dance, which already is often exquisitely sensuous (and occasionally flesh-revealing).

What would be the bad part about Butoh sex? Getting that white makeup on (or off of) the delicate areas.

What would be the good parts about Butoh sex? Flexibility, variety of positions, and never worrying about it ending in mere minutes (or even in mere hours).

DOMAIN THING: There are now separate Websites called seattlemusic.org and seattlemusic.com.

The latter site promotes a company that employs Seattle Symphony musicians to record background music for Hollywood movies (yes, Virginia, there are still a few movies being made that utilize real “soundtrack music” rather than cobbling together a bunch of would-be pop hits).

The former site’s one of several that offer promo and publicity for up-‘n’-coming rock-pop-jazz-whatever bands (others include Seattlesounds.com, The Tentacle, and Turmoil’s Seattle Music Web).

Last I heard, attorneys were in the process of sorting out whether seattlemusic.com will get to order seattlemusic.org to find a different URL.

THE NEXT ITEM UP FOR BIDS: For odd fetishists and home-decorators of particular tastes, Bonnie Burton of grrl.com offers Shop Til You Drop, a mailing list devoted to the weirdest items on eBay auctions.

“I’m not joking about weird either,” Burton promises. “We’re talking taxidermy reptiles and old medical tools here!” I’m still waiting to see steel ingots and decorative crankshafts. But I’m sure they’ll show up eventually…

CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: The complaints about Microsoft never stop! Besides the ongoing federal suits, there’s legal action taken by AOL against MS’s new ripoff of/competitor to AOL Instant Messenger, and rumored threats of action about Windows supposedly messing with files created for Adobe Acrobat Reader, leaving ’em unreadable.

But now here’s a flaw in MS software that just might be the weirdest yet. The company’s own MSNBC site reports, “Microsoft Word 97 for Windows may crash or you may receive an error message when you are typing a long sentence that includes several conjunctions (such as ‘and’ or ‘or’) along with at least one preposition (such as ‘to,’ ‘from,’ ‘of’ or ‘by’).”

I’ve heard of “grammar check” features trying to discourage all would-be Faulknerisms in the name of no-nonsense businesslike clarity, but this goes far beyond…

TOMORROW: The third annual Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.

A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.

I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.

In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”

The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.

This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:

“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).

“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.

“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”

Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:

“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’

“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.

“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.

“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.

“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”

When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:

“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”

Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.

ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.

TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.

YESTERDAY, we went out in search of odd stuff across the Net.

Today, some odd stuff that’s brought people across the net to come here.

My hit-counter service keeps a running list of search-engine keywords that bring viewers to my site. Some typical search-word listings from the past month or so follow here. Some really do relate to topics mentioned somewhere on the site, however briefly. As for the others, I don’t know why the engines took the poor unsuspecting users here.

biggest dick

blank tv screen

“work out music”

pokemon secrets

free 10 year old lolitas

dr dreadful

tan nude women

preggers sex fiction

sex stories – free

future pokemon episodes

fred goehner

doomed world book

you’re a loser

glow in the dark frosting

horse & movie

“popcorn diet”

“laurie roth”

dildonics

+krusteaz +scones

nude in the swimming pool

movie with ava gardner

“dan cowan”

“sober dance club”

“organic cat food”

Airframe

andy

“naked yoga”

dildonics

naked women playing volleyball

“fuckable kids”

nutra+loaf

words to the pokerap

tasteful, high-class erotica

“incinerator toilet”

franklin mint chess set

thick+lipstick

matriarchy future

sex and seattle

female cannibals

naked women on motorcycles

“lillian helman” movies

gameworks

family nudists photos

“viagra t shirts”

“marlboro gear”

baby sex free lolitas

Sonnenkinder

“tiger commercials”

duchovny porn

junk food

“tucker martine”

“sex”

“Jeff Gomez”

nude gymnastics

teen lesbian stories

lolitas world

women nude in tanning bed

ice cub pop gun

Clip Art Movie Theater

“childhood sex”

Amy Denio

“Roger ramjet”

sex stories, fiction

fuckable kids

who is stan boreson

+gretchen +actress

tomata_du_plenty

horseback near bikini

playgirl men

“duds n’ suds”

fuckable kids

naked rollerskating

hibrow music

“older sister” brother

Penthouse Forum

sitars

“hare krishna recruiting”

bodybuilders

pokemon secrets

Elliot Gould

rossi helmet pictures

+”bug eyed monsters” +game

cigarette holders

new world music conference

Creedence Last Exit

Christian nightclubs

chritin

mtv and sexism

+”Stephen Bayley” +”Taste”

capitol critters

asphyxia – erotica

patrow gwyneth

fake identities

webster dictionary

+”henry mancini”

entertainment fellatio

Kingdome Implosion

stadium sex

naked workouts

KMart+stocks

“anime sex”

play scrabble online

goth and “Las Vegas”

+cookies +hotplate

fake social security card

Steven Goad

World Laughter

“tummy exercises”

klown sex

“velvet ghetto”

cd rom fake

“catholic schoolgirls”

back masking christian music

windows 2000 cracked

Of course, having these keywords up on this page means I’ll get even more lost cybersouls coming here by mistake. (There are no 10-year-old Lolitas here, “free” or otherwise, and there won’t be any in the future.)

To all of you who came here in search of something else, I say: Welcome. Whatever you were looking for before, forget about it. This is much more fun. Trust me.

TOMORROW: A yuppie pool-hall chain wants to build Seattle’s first new bowling alley in decades.

LAST FRIDAY, we mentioned the recent explosion in “Weblogs,” sites that contain little or no original content but instead provide highly selective links to articles and stories on other sites.

MISC. World isn’t turning into a pure Weblog. Don’t worry; there’ll still be all-new stuff here all the time.

But, from time to time, we like to mention some fun and/or serious stuff being written elsewhere in Netland. Such as these pieces:

For everybody who loves/hates the inanity of misspellings on huge public signage, it’s the Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks. A recent item: “A billboard for a bank in Idaho Falls reads: ‘We believe that “PEOPLE” should answer our phones.’ ‘PEOPLE’ are about the same things as ‘robots with Gap clothing,’ right?” Speaking of inanities…

Rocket writer Jason Josephes has a hilarious listing of “The Top 20 LPs Among People Who Hate Music,” as determined by what he sees most in thrift-store record bins. (I personally disagree with Josephes’ #1 choice, Abba’s Gold. I recently listened to a cassette somebody in Belgium had made, collecting every known cover version of “Dancing Queen,” from elevator to punk, and was blown away by the tune’s sheer endurance capability.) Speaking of hatreds…

Now that press coverage of the delayed Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale’s allowed journalists to revisit their post-Littleton pontifications, Philip Michaels has something called “Your Guide to High School Hate,” showing once again that the pontificators had it all wrong and Buffy has it metaphorically right–high school, too often, really is a Hellmouth. Speaking of teen insecurities…

Understanding Comics author-illustrator Scott McCloud is back with a wistful, beautiful reminiscence of his adolescent retreat from peer pressure into the ordered, rational universe of gaming, in “My Obsession With Chess.” It’s a comic strip meant to be read online, with panels arranged in the sequence of chess moves along a “board” that would be about 16 feet long in real life. Simply gorgeous.

TOMORROW: Continuing in this vein, some wacky search-engine keywords that brought people, perhaps mistakenly, to this site.

UPDATE #1: “Oh oh, must have been another Bite of Seattle riot!” That’s what certain Belltown bystanders muttered when they saw throngs of teens, about half of them Af-Am teens, streaming out of Seattle Center toward the surrounding sidewalks around 9:30 p.m. last Saturday night. But it wasn’t a riot. Center authorities had simply brought in cops to empty the grounds, including the Fun Forest amusement area, after the Bite’s scheduled 9 p.m. closing time. (The incident last year wasn’t really a “riot” either. Somebody made a noise in a crowded Fun Forest that sounded like gunfire but might have just been a leftover fireworks noisemaker, and a few dozen kids started running in panic.) Ah, the “enlightened, liberal, diversity-celebrating” city that still can’t grasp that dark-skinned teenagers are not necessarily gangstas… (sigh)…

UPDATE #2: In happier news, the Washington State Liquor Control Board, which previously was stripped of much of its entertainment-licensing authority by a federal judge, is now proposing rules that would allow afternoon or early-evening all-ages music shows in the dining areas of restaurant-lounge spots. The proposed rules would still be stricter than those in Oregon, but it’s a step.

IN THE SIX YEARS since the World Wide Web became an honest-to-gosh phenom with the first NSCA Mosaic browser, a helluva lotta buzzwords and hype schemes have vied to become the next Big Online Thing, with all the resultant news articles and magazine covers and venture capital and stock offerings.

A lot of these would-be cyber-smashes have failed to live up to their advance publicity. (Remember “push media”? Virtual communities? Sidewalk.com and the Microsoft Network “shows” concept? WebTV?)

About nine months ago, the catchword was “Portal.” Big commercially-run websites were going to gather banner-ad-viewin’ eyeballs (and demographic-database stats about those sets of eyeballs) by virtually being everything to everyone. Not by having all the content any Web user’d wanna look at, but by having organized directories of links to all that stuff.

The “portal” sites were going to be the new gatekeepers, collecting indirect “tolls” in the form of ad revenues from anybody who wanted to find anything on the Web, even directly charging big corporate Websites for prominent mentions on the portal pages. Netscape was going to use its browser as a loss leader, to make dough from its portal site.

Advocates of an open-access Web even issued dire fears that the more corporately-minded portals, such as MSN and AOL, might abuse the massive control over searchin’ and browsin’ everybody thought they were bound to attain.

Hasn’t quite happened that way.

The Disney/Infoseek/Starwave consortium, f’rinstance, was going to have promoted its Go Network as the one-and-only place users had to go to to find anything (and whose own in-house sites would be the prime recommended source for most of that “anything”). Now, it’s redirecting its promotion toward the individual sites beneath the Go flag (ESPN.com, Mr. Showbiz, et al.).

Yahoo! has found the portal biz insufficient to keep the ol’ stock price up, and has been rapidly trying to expand into almost every conceivable Web-based operation other than porn or gambling.

The one-size-fits-all portals aren’t going away (at least not the better-funded ones). But they’re not gonna become the all-powerful “netcenters” either.

Indeed, reports last week claim they can’t even keep their search engines up to speed with the ever-expanding explosion of Web content out there.

Exit the portal as the big cyber-hype.

Enter the Weblog.

Small (often one-person or volunteer operations), specialized (either by topic or by the operator’s personal tastes), convenient (usually just one page per site), Weblogs are neither webzines (which emphasize original content), nor automated search engines, nor all-purpose portals.

They’re collections of hand-picked links to pages on other sites, curated to either service afficianados of a particular topic (movies, the Microsoft lawsuit, health care, etc.) or to express the curator’s personality via insights into the curator’s current obsessions.

Weblogs differ from the older style of link pages because, instead of merely listing ongoing links to whole sites, Weblogs link to specific articles, essays, or sections on those other sites. Many Weblog operators update their links every damn day (in some cases, even on the weekends).

Think of it as the Net equivalent of musical sampling. Only there’s no copyright-infringement issues, ’cause the Weblog operators quote no more than “fair use” excerpts from the linked-to pages.

Also think of it as one more stage in the ever-increasing bifurcation and “tribalization” of the Web, and of society at large.

A few Weblogs to start your exploration:

• Offhand Remarks (Net-centric and terse).
• Camworld by Cameron Barrett (a few well-chosen links per day and a standing list of over 60 other Weblogs and Newslogs (Weblogs linking primarily to news articles)).
• Rebecca’s Pocket by Seattle-based Rebecca Blood (notes and comment on everything from animal testing to bras with built-in electronic alarms).
• Eatonweb by Brigitte Eaton (slow-loading, small-font listings, emphasizing web-design topics; plus nearly 100 links to other Weblogs).
• Obscure Store and Reading Room by Jim Romenesko (one of the best Newslogs, from a print-zine veteran; includes general links to some 20 Weblogs and dozens of news sites).
• Have Browser, Will Travel by Jim Roepcke of Victoria (specialties include Macintosh and hockey).
• Saturn.org by Jack Saturn (well-written condensations of the articles being linked to, if you can read on the dark burnt-orange background).
• The Stuffed Dog by David Adams (long, thorough condensations of the articles being linked to, mostly Net-business-oriented).
• Windowseat Weblog by Lauren Krahn (TV/entertainment links).
• Robot Wisdom by Jorn Barger (extensive links on Web programming, music, world affairs, and the infamous JenniCam).
• Cardhouse by Scott Berk and friends (links on odd chewing gums, game shows, dorky politicians, cool conceptual art, and other really important things).
• Scripting News by Dave Winer, whose Frontier scripting software is used by many weblog programmers. Includes a handy article attempting to answer the question, “What Is A Weblog?”

MONDAY: This site isn’t a Weblog, at least not yet, but the next installment will explore more wackiness from across the Net.

A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.

Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.

But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.

(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)

Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.

And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.

But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.

As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.

As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.

(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)

This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.

Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.

Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.

Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.

Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).

So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.

(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)

TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?

ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”

AS WE’VE MENTIONED, there’s a whole counter-revolution in male depictions going on these days. While indirectly due to a post-feminist generation of American college boys taught that their only proper gender-role was to wallow in universal guilt, its direct origin comes from Britain and a slew of “laddie” magazines, many of which have now established successful U.S. editions.

It’s spread to two cable shows, FX’s The X Show (a daily hour of Maxim-like lifestyle features on beer tasting, rowdy football-fan behavior, strip-club etiquette, et al.) and Comedy Central’s The Man Show (a weekly half-hour of Almost Live-like comedy spiels built around the same topics).

These shows and magazines don’t rebut the neo-sexist image of Man As Slime. They revel in it.

More reveling, albeit with more tragic consequences, gets portrayed in current novels (Richard Ford’s Women With Men) and movies (Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men).

When Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace started spewing forth stories into assorted magazines last year under the common title “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” I was prepared for more of the same. More male-as-intrinsically-evil-predator, female-as-innocent-prey-or-righteous-avenger.

Thankfully, Wallace is too smart for such one-dimensionalities.

The men who narrate their life stories to an unheard female interviewer, in segments scattered through Wallace’s new story collection of the same name, are less hideous than merely pathetic. The sins they either boast or whimper about consist of little more than wanting to have sex with women and achieving that goal via somewhat-obvious come-on routines. The men never stop to consider the extent to which their “conquests” might have seen through, and chosen to play along with, these stupid seduction tricks.

If anything, these elequent, rambling narratives show not how bad the men are but how deeply PC-self-consciousness has hurt women and men.

That Wallace’s low-level Lotharios can so readily proclaim and/or bemoan their own self-perceived hideousness, based on nothing more than fulfilling (or wishing to fulfill) their casual-sex desires, shows how ready the characters are to accept the new sexism’s double standard, that a man can only choose to be either male-but-not-human or human-but-not male.

Some of the collection’s other stories don’t quite carry the same emotional heft. “Octet” is little more than a longwinded postmodern writing exercise in the limitations of postmodern writing exercises. He does better with “Adult World” and “The Depressed Person,” in which two young women are psychologically trapped deep within the private hells of their own recursive thought patterns–until sudden, unexpected realizations let than have moments outside their own heads, brief moments that still show them ways out.

These heroines’ obsessive-compulsive thought patters are ideally mated to Wallace’s obsessive-compulsive prose style, which, as always, is the real star of the book. Alternately concise and expansive, it leads you in with acres of rambling asides and aburd levels of detail that appear more like rough-draft notes than exited text–then zings you with a morsel of verbal perfection.

SIDEBAR: One of the collection’s pieces is in the first issue of the new quarterly journal Tin House, which, like Starbucks’ in-store magazine Joe, is a would-be middlebrow litmag with Northwest money behind it (Portland, in this case) but N.Y.C.-based editors.

A dumb hype piece in the Village Voice raved on and on about how Tin House represented something all new and daring and cuttin’-edge. Don’t believe it. Aside from the Wallace piece and Richard McCann’s downbeat liver-transplant memoir, all of it’s competent and none of it’s really good. Would be avant-gardists love to quote something Picasso’s supposed to have said about the chief enemy of creativity being good taste. Tin House has good taste up to its armpits, and that’s about the worst insult I could give it right now.

TOMORROW: The Rainforest Cafe is the world’s easiest satirical target–EVER!

SIX MONTHS AGO, you couldn’t see a string of TV commercials without at least one website address flashing on-screen.

Today, you’d be hard-pressed to see a string of TV commercials (except maybe on Pax TV) without at least one ad that’s all about a website.

Yet despite the hype over e-commerce and the dubya-dubya-dubya as a marketing tool, the Web remains what I hoped it would become five years ago–an all-accessible repository for great, immediate writing.

Herewith, a few examples of fine online verbiage that are not Salon and heavens-not Slate:

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Accompaniment to the print somewhat-less-than-quarterly McSweeney’s alterna-lit journal, but sharing no content with the paper version–just the same sense of literate whimsy and post-postmodern graciousness.

Rat Bastard. Washington, DC-based Don Bruns doin’ the personal-net-diary thang, with self-effacing wit to spare.

Exquisite Corpse. Andrei Codrescu’s little paper litmag is now indeed a corpse, but he continues to present brash-yet-thoughtful voices online.

My current fave: James Nolan on American doublespeak in the age of spin-control (a topic that gets beaten to death every election cycle, but he manages to bring it back to life).

Bittersweets. Each day, a one-paragraph narrative or observation about the wistfully-regretful side of life.

The Napkin. Like Bittersweets, but shorter, usually less bitter, and sometimes even cosmic (in a nice way).

Word. Besides the fun contemporary-art pages, the pages of found-objects pix, and the “Junk Radio” section full of moldy-oldies in streaming audio, the words on Word are themselves darned interesting and lively. Current best example: Philip Dray’s probably-fictional yet realistic reminiscence of being “a Jewish caddy at a WASP country club.”

You can tell the folks running Word have the right attitude if you hit “View Source” on your browser when you reach its homepage. There, amid all the HTML codin’, is this hidden (until now, anyway) treat:

“META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Forget about whatever you were searching for. It’s not important. You may not be aware of it consciously, but you really want to read Word instead. So go on — click here. You’ll be glad you did! Satisfaction guaranteed!”.”

Random Story Generator. I know it’s just an automated version of Mad Libs, but damned if it’s not a total laff-riot each and every time.

ELSEWHERE: There’s a big convention of ethnic-minority journalists in my town this week. The Seattle Times has been dutifully covering and previewing the event, but its big Sunday feature story tie-in was strictly about the “minority” the Times, and Seattle, are most comfortable with–upscale, white women (preferably blond and blue-eyed); in this case, TV anchorwomen.

TOMORROW: David Foster Wallace’s new fiction collection is anything but ‘hideous.’

FOR A RELATIVELY-SHORT but seemingly-endless time, the innocent citizenry of a once-remote place were under seige.

A would-be dictator, operating under the barest semblance of lip-service to democracy, fought with every means available to impose his personally-defined concept of civil order upon the populace. In motion after motion, he declared one specific segment of the population to be the only true and deserving citizens, and classified all the others to second-class status, to be harassed and “persuaded” to get out.

But then, a glimmer of hope appeared. The long-trod-upon people began to cautiously rejoice.

Mark Sidran’s reign might finally be ending.

Yeah, so this joke-comparison between overseas horrors and the machinations of Seattle’s city attorney are grossly distasteful.

But that’s the best way to describe what happened last Tuesday.

Here’s what happened. Essentially, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a state law dating back to the post-Prohibition years, directing the Washington State Liquor Control Board to regulate “Added Activities” such as live entertainment at bars and nightclubs, was unconstitutional.

So now, the Liquor Board and local governments can’t tell bars what entertainments they can or can’t offer their customers.

Immediately, it means no more telling bars to stop playing music that might attract black people.

Sidran, who can’t stand the existence within the city limits of anybody who’s not an upscale, lily-white, professional-caste baby boomer such as himself, won’t get to use “Added Activities” to shut down black clubs or “persuade” them to move to white-oriented fare.

This also means no more liquor-board crackdowns on nudie art-pix at the Virginia Inn, no more worries about bad-word censorship at comedy clubs (as if anybody still goes to those places), and maybe, just maybe, looser dress codes at fetish nights and leather bars.

It doesn’t mean bars can start regular stripper formats, however; that’s still covered under those increasingly-draconian “adult entertainment” laws in Seattle and other localities. See the current issue of the journal Gauntlet for many tales of anti-strip-joint crackdowns across the country.

What will happen next? The Liquor Board apparently isn’t interested in promoting new legislation to replace the overturned “Added Activities” rules.

Sidran’s own, even-more-draconian “Added Activities” proposal (which, in its current draft, had depended upon regulatory precedents in the now-overturned state law) will probably die in the Seattle City Council; though he might still try other means to enforce Mandatory Mellowness via stricter noise and public-nuisance ordinances.

So the Sidran menace ain’t really over yet. But, between the end of “Added Activities” and a council increasingly fed up with his continuing attempts to be a de facto municipal head of state, he might find himself stuck in the uncomfortable position of having to work for the city rather than trying to run it.

The city attorney’s job is an elected position. Nobody ran against Sidran last time. Let’s get someone to run against him next year. Someone who’ll be a good government lawyer, and not some strong-arm enforcer of “civil society.”

TOMORROW: If we can’t have fewer cars, let’s at least have more smaller ones.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: A visual-art zine with no pictures should come as no surprise to anyone who’s followed art criticism, which in its more perverse forms has become ever more long-winded and ideological, to the point where any discussion of the nominal topic’s artworks is buried beneath incomprehensible presentations of the critic’s sociopolitical beliefs (which may have absolutely nothing to do with the artist’s beliefs, if the artist has any).

Thankfully, ‘tho, no such theorizin’s to be found in the tightly-written pages of RedHeaded StepChild (email link here), whose first issue came out three weeks ago.

Instead, you get some to-the-point statements about current “alternative space” exhibitions, and an obit for the closed-due-to-gentrification Project 416 (formerly Wonderful World of Art) studio/gallery. It’s all tight, lively, and concerned with art as a creative endeavor, not as room decor or investment.

(The second issue will be free at alterna-spaces around town starting July 1; subscriptions are promised “to follow.”)

ELSEWHERE IN PRINT-LAND: What’s it with all these corporate magazines with first-name titles? First there was Marie Claire, then George, Jane, Milton, and at least two or three different Frank magazines.

Now there’s Joe, the new Starbucks Coffee in-store mag published under contract by Time Warner in NYC. As you might expect from a Starbucks-branded product, it’s handsome in an overstatedly “understated” way. And as you might expect, it’s “tasteful” to the point of upscale-suburban blandness, even when discussing such topics as the Unabomber and the bereavement of AIDS victims’ loved ones.

The mag’s apparent concept, besides to define Starbucks customers as a demographically ideal target for Cadillac and Eddie Bauer ads, is to establish an image for Starbucks stores as what a current sociological buzzword calls “third places,” neither-work-nor-home sites where folks can gather and discuss issues of the day in a “civil society” way. I doubt many lingering chats will form around the contents of Joe, which looks less like a food-for-thought stimulant and more like a more marketing-savvy version of the late-’80s mag Wigwag or one of the duller installments of Utne Reader.

Tomorrow: Some important lengths and times for the pop-culture scholar.

YESTERDAY, WE BRIEFLY MENTIONED potential musical role models for sensitive hetero males. My idea of such might start with the current crop of romantic troubadors, many of them from around here.

We’ve already talked about one of my faves, Green Pajamas frontman Jeff Kelly. Much like the now-discovered ex-Portlander Elliott Smith, Kelly makes hauntingly beautiful ballads of desire and loss. He uses intelligence to express beauty, makes pain sound pleasurable, and conveys the risks and losses of love and of the search for love as being troublesome but also important and necessary for the fully-lived life.

A similar tack is taken from a most unlikely source, former Pure Joy/Flop power-popper Rusty Willoughby. On his self-titled, self-released solo debut, Willoughby proves himself as perfectly capable of the wistful remembrance and the tender glance as he is of the peppy cynicism for which he’s better known. This short, nine-song disc probably won’t bring Willoughby the renown he’s long deserved, but it’s still a gorgeous little suite of some of the best rainy-afternoon music you could ever hope to hear on a too-hot summer evening.

Marc Olsen, long ago in the combo Sage, has been known for several years now as a solo ballad-rocker of uncommon depth and insight. His newest release, Didn’t Ever… Hasn’t Since, shows him re-integrating some of his former band’s careful sense of strength-in-reserve. His new disc rocks louder than his last one, but that doesn’t make the work any less “sensitive.” Rather, the counterpointing of passionate parts and delicate parts enhances the beauty and delicacy of the whole. Olsen’s clearly a man who knows you can love women without hating yourself (indeed, you can only truly love another if you at least like yourself).

On another level, and in spite of (or rather enhanced by) its rockin’-er moments, Olsen’s disc is also an achingly-gorgeous work of what was known a few years ago as “ambient” listening, before that term became exclusively applied to big-beat electronica.

One of Seattle’s longtime champions of ambientness, multi-instrumentalist Jeff Greinke, has now teamed up with Sky Cries Mary frontwoman Anisa Romero on Hana. While Greinke plays most of the instruments, Romero’s a lot more than a studio singer here. Her compositional influence lifts Greinke from the skilled spaciness of much of his work, into something closer to the ethereal lilts of the early 4AD Records gang (while maintaining his own trademark of seemingly structureless structure). There are no “songs” here, unlike SCM’s own works. Think of Hana as a single 50-minute work in eight seamlessly-connected parts. Also think of it as perfect soundtrack music to a black-and-white, expressionistic heaven-and-hell movie playing exclusively in your head.

IN OTHER LOCAL MUSIC NEWS: Management at the 3rd & Pine downtown McDonald’s has started piping old-country music tapes outside. The idea, like the years-old idea of loudly playing easy-listening music outside convenience stores, is to make the joint’s outside less attractive as a hangout for aimless youth.

UPDATE: The Dutch magazine writer I mentioned in Tuesday’s report emailed the following addition on Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”

Tomorrow: A visual-art zine with no pictures; plus Starbucks’ in-store mag Joe.

CONTINUING WITH HIGHLIGHTS from last week’s fantabulous Big Book of MISC. pre-release party, here are some of the best entries in our little “Insta-Poem” game, anonymous and in no particular order.

The game’s only rule: “Write within these lines, with these words.” For our purposes here, the words given on the Insta-Poem form are capitalized; the words entered by individual Insta-Poets are uncapitalized.

“Despite THE DECLINE OF nonspecific generalities AFFECTED by the entire CAKE of Bill Gates III IN A WORLD of Nazis THE POLITICS OF Holland, Sweden, and Germany bring EXCELLENCE IN marijuana consumption in a MALE-ORIENTED society with a PRIORITY in the overzealous beliefs of THE FEMININE agenda against the rest OF THE WORD especially if it’s heterosexual males FROM America and Canada TO Great Britain and Portugal. JUST ONE MORE lustful, intoxicated DESIRE could MAYBE bring peace to this land WHEN it SHOULD always NEVER and ALWAYS because it CAN’T we MUST and COULD the WANTS puke LOVE.”

“With THE DECLINE OF western civ., the AFFECTED morons will ear CAKE and like it! Because, IN A WORLD of morons, THE POLITICS OF L. Ron Hubbard will suffer EXCELLENCE IN Internet access when MALE-ORIENTED sports attain PRIORITY on television and THE FEMININE side of men will revolt and rage OF THE WORD www.(blank).com FROM here TO eternity. JUST ONE MORE drink, baby! You and I DESIRE sex MAYBE later or tonight WHEN you SHOULD sleep NEVER long ALWAYS wanting CAN’T settle MUST try COULD not WANTS more LOVE.”

“I felt that THE DECLINE OF all that AFFECTED a glorious coconut CAKE fluffy and white–completely eaten up IN A WORLD doomed to languish in THE POLITICS OF pie. Oh why, but where can EXCELLENCE IN popery be turned into a pit of MALE-ORIENTED lesbianism, settling the PRIORITY of unavailability–claiming THE FEMININE majority. Only a whisper OF THE WORD and all of our managed senses to be FROM time shocked TO time forgotten in the auspices of JUST ONE MORE time. Forfeit DESIRE, forfeit pain, and MAYBE, only maybe, that coconut will fall WHEN it SHOULD and NEVER be eaten, ALWAYS beaten. CAN’T wait, MUST I COULD I–only WANTS, wants LOVE.”

“After the industrial revolution, THE DECLINE OF mankind AFFECTED my future drastically! CAKE, formerly homemade, is now mass-produced IN A WORLD which doesn’t care. THE POLITICS OF mass production has caused the death of individuality. EXCELLENCE IN honeing one’s individuality was tossed out with MALE-ORIENTED aplomb. PRIORITies have changed. Money is #1. THE FEMININE mystic now consists of a nice car and a good plastic surgeon. OF THE WORD `individuality,’ no one speaks. FROM shore TO shore, one man’s voice is JUST ONE MORE agreement to the never-ending array of capitalist DESIRE and propaganda. MAYBE all of us are biologically sick WHEN we say we SHOULD NEVER complain. ALWAYS complain! CAN’T you see you MUST! Freedom COULD happen, WANTS of individual LOVE, could come to be!”

“Lipstick, THE DECLINE OF ciders, dancing AFFECTED fast CAKE from drunks IN A WORLD of opium smoking, THE POLITICians and pansies for un-requited EXCELLENCE IN benevolent forms of MALE-ORIENTED tse-tse flies. But the first PRIORITY should be baby marmosets or THE FEMININE mystique. Adapted out OF THE WORD `supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,’ derived FROM horse pucky TO cave paintings. JUST ONE MORE thing, baby. Just remember DESIRE is for the weak. MAYBE the strong should try it. WHEN sleeping, SHOULD is a silly word. NEVER is lost; ALWAYS can wait; CAN’T is useless; MUST is urgent; COULD is subjective; WANTS lead to LOVE.”

“Regarding THE DECLINE OF morals, the AFFECTED population can’t have its CAKE and eat it while living IN A WORLD subjected to THE POLITICS OF the profit motive. There is no EXCELLENCE IN shuffling through piles of MALE-ORIENTED corporate conformity with its only PRIORITY being apathetic advancement. THE FEMININE aspects of our subconscience reveal the limitation OF THE WORDs `competition,’ `advancement,’ and `pragmatism.’ To go FROM capitalism TO complementary holism means JUST ONE MORE person(s) acquiring an insatiable DESIRE for truth. MAYBE even you with your beer will cry WHEN you know you SHOULD have, but NEVER acted on the `ALWAYS-true, but CAN’T quite fit, but MUST if only I COULD prove, everyone WANTS only true LOVE’ theory.”

“As I recall, THE DECLINE OF Seattle poetry AFFECTED the scent of fresh Hostess CAKE drifting south from Lake Union. IN A WORLD shimmering with THE POLITICS OF hydrofoil turbulence, the muses huddled to consider EXCELLENCE IN the wooden skeletons of whale-songs. How could a MALE-ORIENTED economy of engines and high-PRIORITY jetcraft surrender at night to THE FEMININE welding of cadence and verse? A memory OF THE WORD repeated often, like a lingering after-effect FROM symptomatic nerve gas, TO remind the soul that there was JUST ONE MORE movie, just one more song, just one more glance of DESIRE, one moment when MAYBE, perhaps, the film-row houses and ghosts of sailors knew WHEN to shout! SHOULD I forget, NEVER to whisper, ALWAYS to desire what I CAN’T have again? I MUST know I COULD forever know who WANTS my sky-red LOVE.”

Tomorrow: The recently-completed Seattle International Film Festival had two high-profile documentaries about mature Americans’ fun and games. We compare and contrast.

AS PROMISED YESTERDAY, here are selected, anonymous responses to this year’s MISC.-O-Rama questionnaire, as handed out at the Big Book of MISC. prerelease party last Tuesday.

Favorite food/drink:

• “Pesto tortallini/Alabama slammer”

• “Spinach/Fat Tire beer”

• “Guinness”

• “Lately, Ethiopian food”

• “Black Butte Porter”

• “Lasagna/Guinness”

• “Beer/beer/pot”

• “Pizza/chai and caffeine/coffee”

• “Lay’s potato chips”

• “Manchego cheese/Fino sherry”

• “2nd Ave. Pizza; Puerco Liozon tamales”

Favorite store, if any:

• “Cinema Books”

• “Safeway”

• “Ola Wyola”

• “Le Frock”

• “Pike Place Market”

• “Seattle Micro”

• “Larry’s Deli”

• “Nelson’s on Queen Anne”

• “Left Bank Books”

• “Spy-PI”

Favorite website, if any:

• “disinfo.com”

• “Z magazine”

• “www.nasa.gov”

• “suck.com”

• “persiankitty.com”

• “belltunes.com”

• “Ebay (God help me)”

Favorite Pokemon character:

• “Golem”

• “Psyduck”

• “Golduck”

• “Charmander”

• “Any evil Pokemon”

• “Depends on my moods”

• “Huh?”

Favorite catch phrase:

• “Fucko”

• “Fuck it”

• “Vote”

• “Can I get a whoop whoop?”

• “Bite me!”

• “So?”

• “Gotcha”

• “Guh!”

What I’d like on the MISC. Media website:

• “Online gambling”

• “Opinions on current movies and TV happenings”

• “Page #s”

• “Free money”

• “More Korn”

• “Porn-free”

• “`Things I Like’ and `Misc.’ columns”

• “Truthful, relevant info”

• “Clark rules!!”

How I feel about Y2K:

• “Yeah!”

• “What about Y3K?”

• “Hello!”

• “Y?”

• “Y care”

• “We were all alive before computers. Fuck ’em”

• “Y1K”

• “Cool but nervous”

• “We’ll be OK–too much scare-mongering”

• “Excuse to party”

• “001101101011001101”

My prediction for the new century:

• “Mexico’s century”

• “Isn’t going to be any end of the world”

• “Greed will be the end of us”

• “More millionaires”

• “We’ll continue evolving”

• “Non-violent complementary holist revolution”

• “Total economic and social breakdown”

• “Technology will rage”

• “Plastic guns, TVs that come with cameras so people can have their 15 minutes of fame”

• “Cool stuff”

• “It will happen”

How I’d fix the Mariners:

• “Too late”

• “Show everyone that they don’t actually mean anything”

• “Sell them out of state”

• “Bring back Randy”

• “Greg Maddux”

• “Less superstar status on players”

• “Put the Braves and the Yankees into a temporal vortex for 30 years or so”

• “Fix the Sonics instead. Fire Vin Baker and Polynice”

Does Seattle suck? Why/why not?

• “It’s trying hard to”

• “Seattle is still an insecure deb, an easy mark for the carpetbaggers. But that’s sort of endearing in a tries-too-hard sort of way.”

• “Greed, greed, greed will be the end of us”

• “Sometimes–too much encroaching gentrification”

• “No–some of the best people on Earth live here”

• “No”

• “No. Someday we may be a Vancouver, B.C.”

• “No–not yet”

• “Yes–the invation of ugly commercial L.A. architecture”

• “No fucking way”

• “Seattle is a place. People and their actions universally suck.”

• “People–no. Politics–yes.”

What this town needs (other than construction projects)

• “More books like yours”

• “More Charlie Chong/Emmett Watson type activists/characters”

• “Noam Chomsky shoved down their throats”

• “A committee to fight for the rights of the homeless”

• “Street parking; or an innovative way to bring people in”

• “A decent Mexican restaurant”

• “Outdoor seating at bars/restaurants”

• “A whole new life–less Starbucks; less stuff. Less is more.”

• “Cheap rent”

• “More surf instrumental bands”

• “Less people; less money”

• “Fewer buildings; less people; more beer!”

All the world’s problems can be blamed on:

• “My parents”

• “Bill Gates!”

• “Bill Gates, greed, sexism, and Starbucks”

• “Bill Clinton, Saddam Hussein, and Michael Jackson”

• “Greedy, greedy, greedy little pigs”

• “Big business”

• “Attorneys”

• “Republicans and religious right-wingers”

• “Morality legislation”

• “Ignorance”

• “Questionnaires”

TOMORROW: The party highlights continue with the best entries in our Insta-Poem game.