This is from Sunday’s “Color Run” downtown, a 5K benefitting Ronald McDonald House. Runners were splashed with “color dust” at points along the route. (Note: This is not at all to be confused with the 2005 teen novel The Rainbow Party, or with the false rumor that that novel depicted a real-life fad.)

• Forbes calls Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer the “worst CEO” of a major U.S. company.
• Is the time right again for huge, dense residential mega-projects? The Seattle Housing Authority thinks so. It wants to rebuild Yesler Terrace (a WWII-era low-income apartment site) with a whopping 3,000 privately developed “market rate” units plus office space. That would help subsidize at least as many low-income units as are there now. It would also create a huge new upscale neighborhood just uphill from the International District, and would sop up perhaps 20 percent of new housing construction activity in the whole city.
• Item: A Seattle restaurant’s basement was one huge pot growing operation. Comment: Once again, life imitates the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Guess what? The hedge fund tycoon who wants to own a Seattle basketball team might use the team and the arena deal as hedge fund opportunities!
• Tragic news: Tacoma’s selling two closed library buildings in low income neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ acquaintance Trimpin has another mechanical music/art installation. And it’s even more haunting than his previous works.
• Lit-blogger Nicole Cushing has a beautiful interview with a Seattle treasure, horror author and punk/goth scene vet Willum Pugmire.
• Dept. of Forgotten American History: Author/activist/songwriter Julia Ward Howe created Mother’s Day as an antiwar statement.
• Here’s a concise explanation of just why “business people are terrible at governing.”
• From Cleveland to Pittsburgh and even Detroit, the young and hip (but not rich) are flocking to the Rust Belt cities!
• There’s a new iPad-only online satire magazine called “Punch!”. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the legendary UK satire magazine Punch (published from 1841 to 1992!). Instead, its makers are inspired by the 1980s-1990s U.S. snark mag Spy.
• Publishers of e-books have determined that the best way to keep their authors’ names in the public eye is to have new stuff by them two or more times a year. This means established “name” authors are busier than ever churnin’ out the product.
• Do you, like these e-book authors, desperately need writing inspiration? Take random gibberish letters. Run them through a spell checker. Boom! Random words and phrases to trigger your imagination.

designboom.com

• The resurgent micro-car movement has a new achievement, the micro RV!
• Lightning, mudslides. Just another mid-spring day in Seattle.
• Gov. Gregoire takes the bold step of insisting Wash. state needs new tax revenue, now that she’s no longer running for anything.
• A (female) anti-choice activist was invited to speak at the UW by campus Catholics. The lecture’s deliberately provocative title: “Do Women Have Too Many Rights?”. Pro-choice women, naturally, showed up to protest and to put the truth to the speaker’s lies. Things did not go smoothly.
• Roger Valdez at the Seattle Transit Blog suggests citizens take control of preserving neighborhood landmarks by getting together to buy them.
• Developers of the big (175-foot) waterfront ferris wheel are making sure it’ll attract riders year round. Riders will be in “enclosed gondolas, equipped with heating and air conditioning.”
• Darn, those proposed new Amazon office towers would be mighty big n’ slick.
• Boeing’s Wash. state employment may peak this year at about 83,000, then dwindle.
• Health Scare of the Day: Wazzu researchers believe exposure to toxic chemicals might lead to a risk of ovarian cancer, a risk that could be passed on to your great-granddaughters.
• It’s the end of an era for non-NY/LA/SF based national media. Playboy is moving its last Chicago-based operations to LA. The Chicago Tribune even published an editorial about it.
• I don’t always follow ’em, but you might try blogger Barb Sawyers’ “15 Ways to Write Tight.”
• The Starz series Magic City is having a hard time finding actresses and extras in Miami who could pass for women living in 1959 (i.e., without implants).
• I was at the Prole Drift art gallery this past First Thursday. Saw a big painting of what looked a lot like a dead mall. A desolate exurban landscape. A big, nearly empty parking lot. Long, lo-rise buildings with neither windows nor signs. A main entrance at the center. I told the gallery owners I was in a Facebook group of dead mall enthusiasts. They quickly told me the painting was really of a modern prison.

buddy bunting, via prole drift gallery

Our ol’ acquaintance Timothy Egan has a nice piece about the book and reading scenes here in Seattle.

One statement is particularly important.

Egan notes that even while e-books have boomed, print book sales in the U.S. have remained steady or declined just a little.

This means the book biz has weathered the simultaneous trends of the Great Recession and the Internet convergence a helluva lot better than other media genres—theatrical movies, DVDs, radio, broadcast and cable TV, magazines, and especially newspapers and recorded music.

This totally contradicts the incessant whines of those “book people” who insist that they are a disappearing elite.

escapistmagazine.com

• The Star Wars universe is explained in handy infographic form.
• Rob McKenna is given an opportunity to prove he’s not part of the War on Women. Result: Epic Fail.
• More details about the big waterfront renovation plan have been released. They show a great improvement over the original concept (which, as you may recall, was essentially just a bunch more “world class” windswept plazas, a commodity greater downtown already has in abundance). These proposals actually include stuff people can recreate with. Like a climbing wall, and a swimming pool on a barge in the water.
• The Real Change-sponsored protest against homeless-camp removals went off without a hitch. Now let’s get our officials to do more for the homeless instead of merely against them.
• Wash. state now has over 700 wineries. Twice the number in ’07.
• The first Boeing 787s you’ll be able to get on from Sea-Tac will go from here to Tokyo starting later this year.
• How does DC Comics’ plan for a Watchmen prequel series gibe with the original graphic novel’s creator Alan Moore? If you know anything about Moore, you’ll know he doesn’t much care for the idea.
• Obama is picking his fights carefully, choosing for whom he’s going to strongly fight. Pot users: it’s still not your turn.
• Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune announces the “Death of Facts,” following one too many tea bagger fabrication.
• The newest thing to be paranoid about: what employers think about your Klout score. (Yes, the hereby linked article explains just what a “Klout score” is. It has something to do with how active you are on Twitter, or something like that.)

sonics first-year pennant, available at gasoline alley antiques

• As various machinations occur here and elsewhere that just might bring a new men’s pro basketball team to Seattle, national audiences can see the authoritative document of how the team we had got stolen. The Sonicsgate documentary airs this Friday at 7 p.m. PT on CNBC. There’s a viewing party at the Sport bar.
• All sorts of companies are trying to get away with hiring undocumented workers. Even an organic herb farm.
• Seattle’s next P-Patch community garden site: the roof of the Mercer Street parking garage.
• Item: “Seattle company unveils plan to mine asteroids for riches.” Comment: If this works out, the whole scarcity premise behind metals commodity prices could one day disappear. And with it would go the fortunes of certain Third World countries.
• Short sales and foreclosures still account for more than half of all home sales in Snohomish and Pierce counties, and a third of all home sales in King County.
• No, Social Security isn’t going broke any time soon. And there are simple ways to make sure it never does.
• America’s first mad cow is in California, naturally.
• Why didn’t Forbes run articles about male porn stars when ol’ Malcolm Forbes was alive?
• Ex-Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham has a long essay about the future of language in the Internet age, among other things. Lapham rightfully calls for more and better reasoned thinking online. And he echoes my own belief that the web is not primarily made of code but words. But he also casually engages in tiresome elitist stereotyping about a “postliterate sensibility” that’s supposedly “offended by anything that isn’t television.” Any guy who claims to oppose one-dimensional banalities shouldn’t repeat them himself.
• Found: Someone who misses the glory days of MySpace.

foodbeast.com

• Margarita flavored Bud Light: sign of the apocalypse #6 or #7?
• Winning bids for the state liquor stores (or rather, for the right to apply for licenses, negotiate leases, and take over inventory at the stores) are now in. Individual winners have apparently not yet been posted anywhere, but the store at 12th Avenue and East Pine Street went for a cool half million. The state’s total take (should all the sales go through): over $30 million, more than four times estimates reported just last Friday.
• Yesterday, we mentioned how Deluxe Junk, the lovely vintage everything store that’s one of the last remnants of “Fremont funk.” faced a sudden eviction by the Masonic lodge that owns its building. Apparently there’s a settlement; alas, Deluxe Junk will still leave the premises, at the end of June.
• The Real Change folks will get their protest camp in Westlake Park after all.
• One little-publicized event at the big Space Needle anniversary gala: a protest by Needle restaurant workers.
• The Canucks have made sure there won’t be riots in the Vancouver streets this June.
• Here’s a long, loving profile of ex-Seattleite and comix genius Lynda Barry.
• Google and Facebook: They’re hot now, but could they stumble as computing goes mobile?
• Author Michael J. Sandel places blame for the market-ization of almost all of western society. He says the economists did it.
• Paul Krugman blasts Romney, assuredly not for the last time.
• A Georgetown prof really dislikes the Facebook-spawned overuse of the verb “Like.”
• Toby Litt in Granta wonders whether long-form literature can hold an audience, or even be considered relevant, in an age of multitasking and incessant distraction. I say bah. Folks who can finish umpteen-level video games or watch entire TV-show seasons in one weekend can enjoy a story of a few hundred pages.
• Sorry, but I can’t trust any list of the “ten most harmful novels for aspiring writers” that excludes Bukowski.
• The top black women’s magazine hired a white guy as managing editor. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, that he turned out to be a not-so-secret racist wingnut.
• Steven Pearlstein reminds you that some politicians actually want you to be turned off from politics. Remember: Not voting = voting a straight right-wing ticket.
• Making stuff in China will cease being cheap sooner or later. China’s other outsourcing advantages might remain (lax environmental enforcement, autocratic government, brutal suppression of dissent).
• TV ratings, both broadcast and cable, are way down, especially among younger viewers, and especially in terms of “real time” viewing (i.e., without DVRs; i.e., with the commercials). The hardcore TV haters will naturally ignore this, and will continue to insist that Everyone Except Them is a vidiot sheeple.

reramble.wordpress.com

• Even I, in my near-encyclopedic knowledge of classic TV, could only guess nine out of a group of 15 modern and vintage series represented by three iconic images each.
• My ol’ UW Daily staffmate Pete Callaghan has a zinger accusing the Mariners of calculated hyprocisy about the basketball/hockey arena scheme. Callaghan says M’s bosses “seek to hog the pubic arena trough.”
• Lisa Arnold at Crosscut believes nonprofits that serve poor people ought to more actively pressure local governments to do more for these folks.
• In the whiter but not safer suburbs, there’s a new robbery shtick going down: (1) Break into a car in a movie-theater parking lot. (2) Fish out the car’s registration papers. (3) Go to the listed (and probably unoccupied) house and rob it.
• The scheme to essentially stifle the use of Seattle Community College campuses as protest sites? Scuttled, at least for now.
• All this Internet data you’re getting these days is stored on and fed from mighty “server farm” installations. The ones around here run on clean, nonpolluting hydro power. Except when they don’t.
• The big book publishers and Amazon are at less than palsy-walsy terms again.
• Meanwhile, various parties have tried to set up indie e-book sites that would sell the big publishers’ titles as well as indie product. But the big publishers insist on using restrictive copy-protection codes, which require costly technical resources on the server end, which these small e-tail operations can’t afford.
• The Republican Presidential nominating race is over. The sincerely bigoted demagogue is gone, leaving the out-of-touch smarmy zillionaire who’s pretended to be a bigoted demagogue. Get ready for the Super PAC-driven, ultra-negative attack ads and the whispered “dog whistle” scare tactics to begin in 5, 4, 3….
• Elsewhere in politics-of-hate-land, one of the authors of the “Defense of Marriage (a.k.a. anti-gay-marriage) Act” has come out as a lesbian and has renounced her past public stance.
• Economist Jonathan Schlefler claims the “invisible hand,” 18th century writer Adam’s Smith’s concept of a natural equilibrium that settles in when free markets are free to do as they will, does not exist. In macroeconomic circles, this is akin to Copernicus saying the sun doesn’t orbit the earth.
• Some folks imagine themselves to be so close to the celebrities they follow in the media, that they see nothing untoward about asking them to be prom dates.
• The City of Vancouver Engineering Department, which apparently has jurisdiction on all street and sidewalk use there, has banned bagpipe buskers (Say that five times fast!). The excuse: they’re too noisy. The Scottish-descended mayor, who got sworn into office in a kilt, vows to overturn the rule.

oldtime (print) proofreading marks; via nisus.se

It’s a couple months old but still a worthy topic of debate. It’s ex-Microsoftie Michael Kinsley bitching about how the Web has brought forth an explosion in written content—much of which is tons of total dreck.

Even a lot of professionally written online stuff, Kinsley gripes, is poorly thought out, poorly constructed, and sloppily assembled.

I say that’s just what happens with an explosion of activity in any “creative” field, from neo-punk bands to televised singing contests to self-published horror novels.

The trick is to (1) have a way to find the good stuff, and (2) encourage folks to strive for better work.

As for the first part, there are tons of aggregation sites and blogs (including this one) that link to what some editor thinks is “the good stuff.”

The second part still needs work.

One problem is that so much of the Web is run by techies. Dudes who know the value of tight, accurate, effective code, but who might never have learned to appreciate the same values in words.

A bigger problem is that, even at sites run by “content” people, there’s intense pressure to put everything online the second it’s written, and to slavishly avoid taking the time or staff money to edit anything.

It would help if more sites felt an incentive to put out better stuff. (A big incentive would be to maybe, just maybe, even pay writers and editors a living wage).

Don’t think of the ol’ WWW as code and wires.

The Web is words (and pictures and sounds), distributed via code and wires.

Harper’s Magazine publisher/subsidizer John R. MacArthur has always kept his mag’s online version behind a paywall.

In a recent speech at Columbia University, transcribed at the Providence Journal’s site, MacArthur insists that Harper’s is making more money this way than it would if all the content were free and management scratched n’ scrambled to somehow sell enough web ads.

But he doesn’t stop there.

In the speech, he accuses “Internet con men” (i.e., the dot-com and Web 2.0 propagandists and evangelists) of “ravaging” publishing.

He denounces “Internet huckster/philosophers” as “first cousins—in both their ideology and their sales tactics—to the present-day promoters of “free trade.” Just as unfettered imports destroy working-class communities through low-wage outsourcing, MacArthur avows, so has the Internet driven writers, artists, and editors “into penury by Internet wages—in most cases, no wages.”

With web ads incapable of supporting living wages for content makers, MacArthur insists online readers will have to learn to pay “if they want to see anything more complex than a blog, a classified ad or a sex act.”

•

Immediately, defenders of online business-as-usual stepped up to denounce MacArthur’s remarks.

Some, like Mike Masnick at TechDirt, settled for simplistic name-calling. MacArthur, Masnick insists, represents the “Platonic ideal specimen of the ‘I’m an old fogey elitist Internet Luddite.'” Masnick’s “rebuttal” piece goes on to call MacArthur at least 20 more varieties of out-of-it, while not bothering to actually rebut any of his points.

(OK, Mesnick does counter MacArthur’s claim that freelancers are being forced into poverty by online freebie sites, by citing a single example of one writer who says he’s offered more work than he can take.)

A more lucid response comes from Alexis Madrigal at Harper’s age-old arch rival The Atlantic (which not only has a free website but posts a lot of web-only material). Madrigal insists his mag’s “doing just fine thank you,” with equal amounts of print and web ad revenue.

Madrigal and Mensick both assert infinite, if intangible, benefits to having one’s writing part of the “open web” where it can be linked to, commented upon, and become part of the big meta-conversation.

But does that have to come at the expense of adequate research, thorough editing, and living wages for writers/editors?

And does everything really have to be on the open web?

If MacArthur wants to keep his paywall up, and if he believes his little nonprofit highbrow mag can support itself better that way, let him.

The old fogey might actually be on to something.

After you’ve had your Caesar salad to celebrate the Ides of March, join me in celebrating the ghosts of meals past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on crunchy Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• Good News Dept.: It looks like the Volunteer Park Conservatory is a lot closer to being fiscally preserved than was implied in previous reports.
• The Husky men’s basketball team had to settle for playing in the NIT, despite winning its conference’s regular season title. But that wasn’t as demeaning as the team’s ultra-lousy attendance at its first round NIT game.
• Whatever patina of respectability the megabanks had is peeling off in the late-winter rains. There’s the blistering breakup letter by the ex Goldman Sachs exec. And there’s Matt Taibbi’s even more blistering exposé of BankAmericrap as “a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time.” And yet Megan McArdle at the Atlantic insists what we really need is a “massive deregulation” of banking. What?
• Meanwhile, here’s another good-riddance letter by a techie who left Google for Microsoft, claiming the former had devolved from “an innovation factory” into just another “advertising company.”
• The copyright police have convinced U.K. authorities to ship a Brit college kid to the U.S. for prosecution, all for the supposedly heinous crime of running a TV-episodes linking site.
• Some Catholic bishops in Missouri have decided the best way to respond to continued exposés of child-abusing priests is to mount vicious legal attacks against the exposers.
• To end this batch on an upbeat note, here are four illustration books and a comic-strip collection based on classic literature.

stephen crowe via brainpickings.org

• My book Walking Seattle (you do all have your own copy by now, right?) just happens to take readers past five historic Christian Science church buildings in different parts of town. All are now occupied by others; two as other churches and three re-purposed to new uses. The last of these, a townhome redevelopment on 15th Avenue East on Capitol Hill, is finally done. Lawrence Cheek explores both the architectural and usage ironies in turning a house of worship into homes for the upscale.
• (By the way, Walking Seattle has its own online companion now, as an add-on virtual tour guide within the iOS/Android app ViewRanger!)
• (By the other way, North Sound readers who want to learn more about traipsing through the Jet City can attend a Walking Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Sunday Feb. 26 at Village Books in Bellingham.)
• Damn: J.C. Penney won’t be coming back to downtown Seattle after all. So let’s get Kohl’s in the old Borders space, and a full branch of the University Book Store upstairs in the Kress building (where Penney’s was supposed to have gone).
• In today’s wacky city survey of the day, Seattle ranks last in average pay raises last year. (Note to bosses, particularly in the tech biz: People can’t eat break-room foosball tables. Wanna hold on to those people you insist are so vital to your continued growth n’ success n’ stuff? Treat ’em better.)
• In a related story, the labor union UNITE/HERE is fighting to get a better deal for workers at the Space Needle, who’ve been offered the usual raw deal of takebacks and job insecurity.
• Megan Seling asks the musical question, if Seattle does get NHL hockey, what local standard should be the team’s “goal song“? I’m more interested in the team name. If we do get the currently league-owned Phoenix Coyotes, we wouldn’t really need to change that moniker. After all, this state is the birthplace of the creator of Wile E. Coyote.
• Somebody who claims to have done his research has come up with an online, annotated Seattle gang map.
• How to end police brutality? Studies? Consultants? “Process”? No?
• Sadly, there are still some pathetic, deluded dudes who want to turn the inland Northwest into a white supremacist “homeland.”
• You want to know how completely unpopular the far right’s social agenda is? Consumer marketing and advertising have completely ignored/rejected it. (Yes, many of you reject marketing and advertising. But advertisers want to sell by appealing to common contemporary values. And those are not the values either held, or paid lip-service to, by today’s rabid right.)
• I didn’t notice this when it came out, but New York magazine noted a couple months ago that e-books have become “a whole new literary form.” Specifically, the mag cited the fact that e-books can be any length, thus creating a market for long “short nonfiction” and short “long nonfiction.”
• Rampant, pathetic homophobia can pop up anywhere, even among the people you’d think were least likely to absorb it. Such as female tennis stars.
• The LA Times thinks it’s tracked down the world’s most unromantic tourist destinations. I dunno. I can certainly imagine the erotic symbolism of Australia’s giant earthworm museum.
• Our ol’ pal Jim Romenesko’s got a growing list of “words journalists use that people never say.” My own favorites include pontiff, solon, stumping, embattled, succumb, cohort, loggerheads, cagers, and, of course, moniker.

• You know what else women do differently than men? Utilize public transit.
• Metro’s route #42 may be a goner, alas. Next on the chopping block for drastic cutting: the #2 route, one of Metro’s most heavily used and the only direct route from Queen Anne to First Hill and Madrona.
• Republicans in the state Legislature have a new plan to “reform” K-12 education: dump all that distracting stuff about civil rights and combatting gay-bashing.
• Goldy asks if the state legislature can pass gay marriage, why can’t it fix our regressive tax system? Here’s one potential answer: because the Seattle civic establishment (root of most “progressive” moves in this state) loves gays (“minorities” who can still be upscale and white!) and hates anything that might inconvenience big business.
• The newest e-commerce craze: selling breast milk online. (Make your own pun based on old dairy ad slogans if you like.)
• Mitt Romney’s dad was famous for two things: (1) running American Motors during most of its formative years, and (2) being in Nixon’s cabinet, where he helped devise the “mortgage backed securities” that helped bring down the nation’s economy in recent years.
• Another day, another plea for sympathy toward the (hidebound, ultra-inefficient, conglomerate-ruled) traditional book industry. This time it’s from the Authors Guild. They insist it takes tangible books, tangible bookstores, and old-style publishers to “break” new authors. Which would be an interesting argument if the (major) old-style publishers were still truly interested in “breaking” new authors (you know, with actual promotional budgets and marketing support).
• Graham Joyce at the Guardian scoffs at novelist Jeanette Winterston, who seems to want more novels with “daunting” and daring use of language for its own sake. Joyce insists that profound works can be deceptively “readable.”
• A guy’s going around the book-publicity circuit claiming to have “hooked up” (but didn’t always have sex) with 120 women over a year and a half; despite being bald, overweight, and non-wealthy. In other words, women exist who aren’t obsessed with superficial appearance. (This is news?)
• One more Don Cornelius tribute: Ryuichi Sakamoto on Soul Train!

Without any further ado, the big new product announcement promised here on Tuesday.

Actually, it’s an old product.

But a new way to buy and enjoy it!

It’s The Myrtle of Venus, my short, funny novel of “Sex, Art, and Real Estate.”

It’s now out in ultra handy e-book form, for the insanely low price of merely $2.99.

Yes, that link goes to the “Kindle Store.” But you don’t need a genuine Kindle machine to read it. They’ve got free apps for Macs, PCs, iPads, and lots of mobile platforms.

Why should all of this site’s loyal friends and true download it?

Because it’s alternately sexy, hilarious, and poignant.

Because it takes you back to those heady days of the real estate bubble.

Because it’s a rollicking tale of eleven lively characters who combine, clash, and re-combine.

The action all occurs amid the dying days of an artists’ studio cooperative. The artists’ new landlady, the World’s Blandest Woman, wants them out. But the artists have a plan. They’ll seduce her into becoming one of them.

But their best laid plans don’t get her laid the way they plan.

What happens next is as wild as it is unpredictable.

To find out, you’ll just have to get the thing and read it already.

revel body, via geekwire.com

• Seattle’s really got some high-tech hardware geniuses. Among them: the folks who’ve taken the same principles behind the Sonicare toothbrush and applied them to create advanced 21st century vibrators! (Really.)
• We’ve previously mentioned the strong presence of women’s erotica among Amazon’s e-book sales. Now come charges that some of the self-published smut books are stolen from stories posted for free viewing on erotica websites. (These allegations are against the small-time publishers, not Amazon.)
• Crazy Wall St. idea of the week (thus far): A local corporate-buyout analyst showed up on CNBC and said Microsoft should buy Barnes & Noble.
• Here’s one way to make money off of the walking renaissance. Make a big venture-funded software thing to help folks find homes to buy in walkable neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ pal Geov Parrish believes the state budget mega-crisis might, just might mind you, lead to talk, or even actual action, toward reforming Washington’s mighty regressive tax system—by far the principal failing of a local “progressive” politic that never dares challenge big business.
• On a related matter, state House Speaker Frank Chopp is floating the idea of Wash. State running its own bank, just like North Dakota. Or something as close to a bank as the state constitution now permits.
• The Mariners lose one really good pitcher, gain one maybe decent-hitting position player. What could possibly go wrong?
• Who knew the original Ladies’ Home Journal was so prescient? A 1911 list of “What Might Happen in the Next Hundred Years” predicts “telephones around the world,” airplanes used as “aerial war-ships,” automobiles “cheaper than horses,” “trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour,” grand opera “telephoned to private homes,” photographs “telegraphed to any distance,” “cameras electrically connected with screens at opposite ends of circuits,” ready-to-eat meals in stores, genetically modified foods, and even global warming. Writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr. did get a few things wrong, such as “hot and cold air from spigots,” the deliberate extinction of mosquitos, and the removal of C, Q, and X from the alphabet. Watkins also didn’t predict that his magazine would still be in business today, after many of its compatriots went to the great newsstand in the sky.
• Clever videomakers in Montana have released a thoroughly obliterating parody of a particularly dumb “rebel lifestyle” pickup truck commercial.
• And a great big thank you for those who attended the Seattle Invitationals Sat. nite, at which I performed what I hope was a respectful, straightforward rendition of the Presley classic “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care).” Since this is the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, I’d wanted to perform the best song from It Happened at the World’s Fair. But the live band didn’t know it. So here it is for all of you, in the original rendition.

smith tower construction, from seattle municipal archive

• The 1914-built Smith Tower is up for sale in a foreclosure auction. It comes four years after a condo-conversion scheme for Seattle’s first skyscraper was born, and three years after the scheme died. Let’s hope someone shows up who can bring the classy place back to glory.
• Could it be? Could it be? Could there really be snow in Seattle next week? I hope I hope I hope….
• One of those silly magazine surveys ranked Seattle as America’s fifth “gayest” city. Number one: Salt Lake City!
• Update: When we wrote last week about a scheme to bring the National Hockey League to Seattle, we noted a state legislator with a plan to help fund a new arena. The state rep’s name is Mike Hope (R-Lake Stevens). His plan: Have visiting teams pay a licensing fee to play there. No local taxpayer funds involved.
• David Goldstein again righteously picks apart the Seattle Times editorial board for its near-right-wing hypocrisies.
• The headline says it all: “New York Times Crossword Puzzlemaster Schooled on Definition of ‘Illin”.“
• Fun with reactionaries: “Rick Santorum Quotes as New Yorker Cartoons.” (Well, actually as new captions to pre-existing New Yorker cartoons.)
• You don’t have to be a gamer to get valuable schooling in non-linear narrative design from the original Legend of Zelda.