• Jezebel and Gawker each snark away at the absurdist extremes of commercial “sexy” Halloween garb.
• The Olympian has some cogent reasons (as opposed to the TV ads’ scare-tactic reasons) why Washington state’s liquor business shouldn’t be turned over to Costco.
• Jerry Large is the first local mainstream reporter to note the connection between Occupy _______ and the Vancouver mag Adbusters.
• Buried within a statement of support for Occupy Seattle, city councilmember Nick Licata floats the idea of a municipal income tax.
• There’s a whole site of writers expressing support for Occupy ______. One of its best entries, as you might expect, is from Lemony Snicket.
• Matt Honan claims to speak on behalf of millions of grownup children of prior recessions when he proclaims, “Generation X is sick of your bullshit.”
• Is Target really better than Walmart? Allegedly, not when it comes to working conditions.
• Microsoft’s opened a retail outlet in U Village, right across a parking lot from the Apple Store.

satirical ad by leah l. burton, godsownparty.com

• To CNN, it’s apparently news that conservative preachers denounce gay marriage and birth control, but can’t get themselves to preach against greed.
• Filmmakers are getting ideas from the oddest sources these days. A feature’s being shot in Seattle, based on a classified ad. (A joke classified ad, to be more precise.)
• A bigger North Cascades National Park: why not?
• Highway 520 construction crews have taken down the trees that let wealthy Eastside households imagine they were in “the country,” not next to the freeway they were actually next to.
• Whatever happened to Seattle’s neighborhood activists?
• Seattle, now with one-third more transit users per capita than Portland.
• Local scifi author Neal Stephenson asks whatever happened to America’s (and Seattle’s) hope for the future. His answer: an obsession with “certainty” at the expense of daring.
• In the online music world, Seattle-based Rhapsody has bought the subscription rosters and other assets of Napster. In other news, Napster still existed as of last week.
• It’s official. The Kress Building on Third Avenue will hold a J.C. Penney store. But they’d better let the Kress IGA supermarket stay on the lower level.
• Our ol’ pal Ronald Holden sings the praises of a better industrial food thickener.
• The head of the U.N.’s World Intellectual Property Organization predicts print newspapers will disappear in the U.S. by 2017. In other lands, they could last as long as 2040. Believe it or don’t.
• One mainstream media outlet has finally found a way to cover Occupy Wall Street—as “New York’s newest tourist attraction.”
• The Koch Brothers are secretive, wealthy backers of all sorts of anti-democracy and anti-middle class projects on the federal and state levels. Now we learn they’ve made part of their fortune through illegal, secret chemical sales to Iran. Whooda thunkit?
• And, though I’ve not been following this at all, there apparently was a verdict in a legal appeal out in Europe somewhere.

linda thomas, kiro-fm

• If only more real-world buildings could be more like the ones displayed at BrickCon, the gathering of Lego maniacs.
• If you still measure companies by the Almighty Stock Price (and you really shouldn’t), the once mighty IBM is bigger than Microsoft for the first time in 15 years.
• An Internet photo of a Sharpie-penned list of bookstore employee pet peeves, supposedly from a now-closed Borders branch, has been going around lately.
• So, apparently, has whooping cough.
• The next big idea for Seattle bike lanes—site them on side streets instead of major arterials.
• Open Circle Theater has produced what it called “fantastical theater for a daring audience” since 1992. In recent years, it moved into the old Aha! Theater space on Second Avenue, bring live theater back to Belltown. Now, it’s apparently defunct. No word yet about the other troupes that have been sharing OCT’s Belltown space.
• Danny Westneat claims that, despite the hype, Seattle Public Schools are actually pretty good these days.
• State schools superintendent Randy Dorn is refusing to offer Gov. Gregoire a list of programs that could be sacrificed in the next round of budget cuts. Dorn claims to do so would violate the state constitution’s requirement for basic education support.
• The “voter fraud epidemic” so loudly hyped by the right-wing media despite its complete nonexistence? KIRO-TV hyped it too. Even though the state gave the station the facts that negated the station’s claims.
• The Occupy Wall Street protests continue. And they’ve now got a Seattle branch operation, which also continues.
• Mark Sumner argues that the old Dutch tulip mania makes a better metaphor for the Wall Street speculation bubble than it did for the late-1990s dot-com bubble.
• Despite what the religious right and its right-wing-media hucksters claim, America’s actually becoming a more secular nation.
• Mike Dillon, who first got me doing the occasional essays I do for the Capitol Hill Times, has some nice things to say about my book Walking Seattle. Thanks.

Mark your calendars.

I’ve got another live book event on Thursday, Oct. 13, 7:30 p.m., at The Couth Buzzard Books and Espresso Buono Cafe, 8310 Greenwood Ave. N.

And there will be another new book by me debuting at this event.

More details shortly.

from inmagine.com

There seems to be a growing book genre, about Seattle white women telling their life stories via their yoga experiences.

First was Presidential sister Claire Dederer’s Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses.

Now we’ve got Suzanne Morrison’s Yoga Bitch: One Woman’s Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment.

In which, I presume, Morrison attempts to conquer skepticism, cynicism, and cigarettes, and achieve some form of enlightenment.

Is there room for more than one self-reflective yoga queen in this town?

And if not, how will they duke it out?

Perhaps they could stage a stand-off (or pose-off) on the stage at Hugo House. A series of increasingly difficult poses, to be maintained for at least two minutes each.

By the time they get to the upward-facing two-foot staff pose, we should have our winner.

1931 model bookmobile, from historylink.org

• If you believe the rumor sites, Amazon’s working on a for-profit, by-mail lending library program. For a monthly or annual fee, you’d get all the (physical and/or “e”) books you can handle; but you’ll have to return ’em before you can get more. The company’s already announced “Kindle Library Lending,” a scheme for borrowing Kindle-format e-books from libraries (which can already offer book files in other ebook formats). (UPDATE: Some rumor sources say Amazon’s lending-library program would only involve e-books.)
• Could, would, should ex-county exec Ron Sims run for Seattle mayor in ’13? And could he count on an endorsement from non-relative Dave Sims? Or the video game creatures The Sims?
• Update: Capitol Hill’s B&O Espresso will stay in business at its current location for at least another year.
• Another fiscal year in Washington state, another attempt to kill the Basic Health program.
• Bank of America announced at least 30,000 layoffs. But the business media doesn’t want to talk about the firings, just the Almighty Stock Price.
• Remember, freedom lovers: When SpongeBob is outlawed, only outlaws will eat Crabby Patties.
• Procter & Gamble and other companies respond to the collapsing middle class by repositioning their product lines into distinct “luxury” and “bargain” tiers.
• Daily Kos readers have submitted more than a hundred ideas for how Obama could boost U.S. jobs without the approval of congressional Republicans.
• Is today’s Republican party a doctrinaire religion (as Andrew Sullivan claims), or “sadism, pure and simple” (as Alan Grayson alleges)?
• There’s a big “Seattle Design Festival” coming next week. One of the guests is architect-writer August de los Reyes. His presentation is “A 21st Century Design Manifesto.” The festival’s site says, “Topics include vampires, werewolves, starfish, bamboo shoots, video games, and natural user interface.” Dunno ’bout you, but I’ve never heard vampires described as having a natural interface before.

• A victim of the war-on-terra hype some folks would like brought back: busking musicians on ferry boats.
• Here’s CNN’s take on the scandal of Border Patrol agents unfairly harassing Latino locals on the Olympic Peninsula. The headline: “Border agent says there’s nothing to do, says money being wasted.” In other words, if it weren’t for the war-on-terra hype, none of this would be happening.
• There’s a reason all the local media latched onto the aging Hall and Oates as this year’s big Bumbershoot stars. It’s because they were the only act this year both famous enough and old enough for media people to have heard of. (Apparently, the big name acts now want a cool half million per show. And you were wondering why you haven’t heard many recessionary protest songs by said big name acts.)
• The Neptune Theater’s official re-opening, later this month, will include a one-night nod to the U District house’s roots. I speak, of course, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which played midnight shows at the Neptune for more than a decade.
• Recession Sign #1: More parents are discovering public schools are just fine after all.
• Recession Sign #2: Realistic novels and stories about the socio-economically struggling are back in vogue.
• Adam Doree wants Steve Jobs to finally get around to donate a few buck to charity already.
• Sady Doyle really, really hates the Game of Thrones books. And Alyssa Rosenberg doesn’t particularly care for Doyle’s putdowns of the books. The point-O-contention: The novels depict women enduring some of the violent brutalities one might find in a violent, brutal fictional setting.
• Elsewhere in genderland, Hugo Schwyzer wants you to define the word “man” to mean not-boy, instead of not-woman.
• The Guardian, ever on the prowl for American weirdness with which to addle and astound its Brit readers, has discovered the “muscular Christianity” in evangelical-fringe books such as No More Christian Mr. Nice Guy. The writer seems to have never heard of the Church of the SubGenius and its “real FIGHTIN’ JESUS.”

• At Grist.org, Claire Thompson looks wistfully at south Seattle’s prized yet delicate ethnic/religious/class diversity, and wonders how it can survive.
• There was a big political science convention in town this past week. (An odd phrase, considering the number of politicians these days who officially hate regular ol’ science.) Anyhoo, Peter Steinbrueck spoke to the gathering about how this country needs more regional decision-making bodies to plan metro-wide futures.
• The head of Belltown’s Matt Talbot Center, a Christian alcohol/drug recovery center, was arrested and is on suicide watch, for “investigation of attempted rape” of a 10 year old boy. Let’s spare the snark and focus on the tragedy for now.
• The head of the Seattle police union apparently believes diversity, tolerance, and common human decency are somehow anti-American. This is not going to turn out well. In fact, it already hasn’t.
• Don’t look for a lot more living wage jobs any time soon. At least not from corporate America.
• Eric L. Wattree believes the nation’s #1 problem isn’t the economy (as putrid as it is), but “the Republican sabotage of America.”
• Finally, here’s a brief peek at Nicholson Baker’s novel House of Holes; specifically at the orgasm sound-effect words and phrases therein.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

My book Walking Seattle, which I told you about here some months back, is finally out.

The big coming out party is Sunday, Sept. 24, 5 p.m., at the Elliott Bay Book Co. This event will include a 30-minute mini walk around the Pike-Pike neighborhood.

When I came up with the idea of a mini-walk, the store’s staff initially asked what the theme of my mini walk would be. Would it be about the gay scene, or the hipster bar scene, or the music scene, or classic apartment buildings, or houses of worship, or old buildings put to new uses?

The answer: Yes. It will be about all of the above. And more.

The reason: Part of what makes Capitol Hill so special (and such a great place to take a walk) is all the different subcultures that coexist here.

A tourist from the Northeast this summer told me he was initially confused to find so many different groups (racial, religious, and otherwise self-identified) in just about every neighborhood in this town.

Back where he came from, people who grew up in one district of a city (or even on one street) stayed there, out of loyalty and identity. But in Seattle you’ve got gays and artists and African immigrant families and Catholics and professors and cops and working stiffs and doctors all living all over the place. People and families go wherever they get the best real-estate deal at the time, no matter where it is.

On the Hill, this juxtaposition is only more magnified.

In terms of religion alone, Pike/Pine and its immediate surroundings feature Seattle’s premier Jewish congregation, its oldest traditionally African American congregation, the region’s top Catholic university, a “welcoming” (that means they like gays) Baptist church, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, and a new age spiritual center. Former classic Methodist and Christian Science buildings are now repurposed to offices and condos respectively. And yet, in the eyes of many, the Hill is today better known for what happens on Saturday night than on Sunday morning.

A lot of Igor Keller’s Greater Seattle CD is a quaint look back at when this city’s neighborhoods could be easily typed, as they famously were on KING-TV’s old Almost Live!

Perhaps you might find a few more franchised vitamin sellers in Fremont, or a few more halal butchers near MLK and Othello.

But for the sheer variety of different groups and subgroups and sub-subgroups, there’s no place like this place anywhere near this place.

•

Though a lot of the time, these different “tribes” don’t live in harmony as much as in they silently tolerate one another’s presence.

To explain this, let’s look at another book.

British novelist China Mieville’s book The City and the City is a tale of two fictional eastern European city-states, “Bezsel” and “Ul Qoma.” These cities don’t merely border one another; they exist on the same real estate. The residents of each legally separate “city” are taught from birth to only interact with, or even recognize the existence of, the fellow citizens of their own “city.” If they, or ignorant tourists, try to cross over (even if it just means crossing a street), an efficient secret police force shows up and carts them away.

It’s easy to see that scenario as a metaphor for modern urban life in a lot of places, including the Hill. It’s not the oft talked about (and exaggerated) “Seattle freeze.” It’s people who consider themselves part of a “community” of shared interests more than a community of actual physical location.

The young immigrant learning a trade at Seattle Central Community College may feel little or no rapport with the aging rocker hanging out at a Pike/Pine bar. The high-tech commuter having a late dinner at a fashionable bistro may never talk to the single mom trying to hold on to her unit in an old apartment building.

Heck, even the gay men and the lesbians often live worlds apart.

It’s great to have all these different communities within the geographical community of the Hill.

But it would be greater to bring more of them together once in a while, to help form a tighter sense of us all belonging and working toward common goals.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.

• Juan Cole does something that a lot of pundits do, to my dismay. He posts a list of the “Top Ten Myths About the Libya War.” But he never quotes or cites these memes he’s denouncing. Who actually claimed Gaddafi was a “progressive,” or that he would not have massacred more of his own people given the chance? Cole only sources one of the assertions he puts down, quoting Alexander Cockburn as saying the war would end badly and Libya could get broken up at its end.
• Here’s the full text of Dennis Kucinich’s Hempfest speech calling for “a new activism in the United States.”
• Is it culturally insensitive to call a young boys’ sports league “midget football?”
• Much of Capitol Hill, including big swaths of Broadway and Pike/Pine, were rendered powerless by an electrical blackout Monday afternoon/evening. It lasted just long enough to mess up the commute home and close bars during happy hour.
• A Seattle U. report claims the South Lake Union developments have generated all the jobs they were predicted to generate back in the early 2000s, and a little more.
• The state’s now making the sellers of toys, cosmetics, and baby products reveal when their products contain any harmful chemicals.
• Mercer Island (sort of) street theater, part 2: Lefties put up a huge bare-butt balloon near Seward Park, with the caption SHARED SACRIFICE MY ASS. It was hoisted within view of Paul Allen’s M.I. compound.
• In case you wondered, the Elwha Dam will be dismantled, not imploded.
• Is this what we’ve descended to, a guy (author-essayist Sam Harris) pleading with America’s rich to put their money behind something, anything, more noble than their own selves?
• Hollywood scholar Matthias Stork has a name for loud, frenetic, disjointed action movies. He calls them “chaos cinema.” And he doesn’t like it:

It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits.… It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.

• R.I.P. Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, who’d led his left-of-center bloc’s recent push to become that country’s Official Opposition (i.e., #2 in number of Parliament seats). That was in May. In July he stepped down from the NDP, announcing he had cancer. Layton was a fighter for workers, for the homeless, for the environment, and for preserving Canada’s superior health care system.

• Ex-Seattleite Tom Spurgeon wrote for The Comics Journal after I left there, then wrote for the Stranger after I left there. More recently, he’s had a debilitating medical condition, which he doesn’t fully explain in his hereby-linked essay. What he does discuss are his thoughts during his enforced bedrest, about comics, film, and being human.
• At least five enlisted personnel at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have committed suicide in less than two months. More needless casualties of the two needless wars.
• State officials found what they apparently thought was a simple “tax loophole” whose “closing” would generate much-needed revenue. It involves imposing “dance taxes” on bars and nightclubs—retroactively—based on a decades-old ordinance intended to regulate exercise studios. Some clubs say it could put them out of business.
• Unemployment in our state is still icky big.
• Amazon boss Jeff Bezos just gave $10 million to the Museum of History and Industry’s new complex at Lake Union Park, set to open late next year.
• If you don’t have enough to be scared of, just think about the “brain-eating amoeba.”
• Headline of the day: “Social Security Declares 14,000 Living People Dead Every Year.”
• The amorphous tangle of billionaire-funded “populist uprisings” collectively known as the “tea party” is massively unpopular. I mean massively.
• PBS’s Judy Woodruff tries to explain the consequences of extreme wealth inequality on a show underwritten by corporate funders out for a nearly-exclusively upscale audience…
• …while Amanda Marcotte (no, I don’t expect you to know all these web-pundit names) looks at right-wingers’ replies to the Verizon strike and declares we’re living in a new feudalism. So where are all the Renaissance Faire costumes?
• Among the top-grossing movies so far this year, you have to go down to position #8 to find a live-action, non-sequel, non-superhero film (Bridesmaids).

• The rules of cricket.
• The real names of the Residents.
• Who the characters “really were” in any ’50s-’60s novel set in New York City.
• What’s under a kilt.
• What’s under a Utilikilt.
• What heroin use feels like.
• What (insert name of debilitating disease here) feels like.

original mac screen fonts, from folklore.org

There’s a battle going on in the e-book field, one of the few media businesses that’s truly booming these days.

At stake: what these non-thing purchases will cost you.

In one corner: Amazon. The Seattle e-commerce king and Kindle e-book machine seller wants to set its own e-book prices (with most mass-market titles at $9.99), no matter what publishers want.

(Amazon also wants to eliminate the “hardcover window,” the early months of publication in which only the high-priced deluxe version of a book can be bought. Specifically, Amazon wants to sell e-books of a title the same week as that title’s dead-tree version first comes out.)

In the other corner: Five of America’s six biggest publishers (HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster), plus Apple (in a third corner?). The publishers have publicly proposed a different pricing structure, which they call “the agency model.” Under this scheme, publishers would set e-book retail prices. The e-book selling sites (Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc.) would keep a 30 percent margin from this price.

Early last year, Macmillan threatened to withhold its titles from Amazon’s Kindle e-book platform until Amazon capitulated to the “agency model,” which it did; but only after Amazon threatened to withhold selling Macmillan’s physical books from the main Amazon site.

Now, a Seattle law firm has filed a class action suit in a California U.S. District Court. The suit alleges the five publishing giants and Apple have conspired to drive up e-book prices. The law firm names two individual consumers, in California and Mississippi, as the case’s official plaintiffs.

•

With all this going on, William Skidelsky at the Guardian asks what’s the “true price” of a book as a written and edited document, rather than as a physical object.

Skidelsky quotes ex-Billboard editor Robert Levine, who’s written a forthcoming tract entitled Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. Levine, as you’d guess, takes the side of the intellectual-property industry, including the book publishers.

Levine (as quoted by Skidelsky) states that it only costs $3.50 to “print and distribute” a hardcover book.

Thus, the argument goes, e-books should be just that much cheaper than physical books, no more.

However, it’s not that simple.

First of all, the whole pricing structure of physical books is about the design, manufacture, shipping, warehousing, and retailing of the object; including big margins to the retailers and wholesalers (who still sometimes have trouble keeping afloat). When all that’s reduced to the storage of some megabytes on a server, that whole pricing model goes away.

And much of the publisher’s share of a book’s price includes an allowance for the industry’s tremendous physical waste. If a copy shipped to a bookstore doesn’t sell, it gets sent back. All those copies are either re-shipped at clearance prices (more likely for coffee-table picture books) or destroyed. With e-books, none of that happens.

•

You will note that, aside from Levine, we haven’t mentioned authors.

What would an e-book pricing structure look like if it were based on the people who actually make what’s being bought?

Take the current royalties for a book’s authors and illustrators.

Then at least double them.

Not only do the creators deserve it, but such a step would acknowledge that, since e-books are cheaper to get out, there will be more titles out there scrambling for readers’ bucks, and hence each individual title might not sell as much.

Then add in a budget item for the work-for-hire participants in a book’s making—the editors and designers and cover artists and licensors of agency photographs. Again, they’d be higher than for traditional paper books, to make up for lower expected total sales.

There’s still a role in the e-book realm for what we call “publishers.” They put up the money. They arrange promotion and advertising. They put authors, artists, and editors together. In many cases, they organize the transmutation of a vague idea into a saleable product.

Once these parties all have their pieces of the pie set into a fixed wholesale price, e-book sellers could charge as much or as little as they think they can get away with.

•

That’s one potential e-book pricing model. There are others.

One is that of Take Control Books, for which I’ve worked in the past. They sell their e-books directly on their own site. Half the retail take, minus a cut for the company’s e-commerce provider, goes directly to the authors. (Take Control sells its e-books as .pdf files, which can be transferred with greater or lesser ease to all e-book reading devices.)

Another is self publishing, that past and present refuge of the artiste with no perceived commercial potential. Only in the e-book age, some authors are actually succeeding this way.

Earlier this year, bestselling thriller writer Barry Eisler said he was walking out of his “handshake deal” with St. Martin’s Press. For the time being, all books written by Eisler will be published by Eisler.

Of course, Eisler has an established “brand” for his works; much like Radiohead had when they released a download-only album. And Eisler has experience in the Silicon Valley startup world.

A more realistic role model would be that of Amanda Hocking. She’s young. She’s photogenic. She writes in a popular commercial-fiction genre. She’s sold a million e-books without a corporate backer (she’s got one now, though).

•

The business side of book publishing, as I’ve carped here for years, has been a moribund, tradition-obsessed infrastructure of waste and lost opportunity.

E-books represent the biggest chance in decades (since the rise of the big-book bookstore chains) to fix this.

Let’s not blow it.

(Thanx and a hat tip to Michael Jacobs for suggesting added angles to this story.)

2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue

• The Lenin statue in Fremont is privately owned, and is for sale. But nobody apparently wants to buy it.
• Minorities: Bellevue’s got a lot more of ’em these days, sez the Census. Seattle’s got a lot fewer.
• Art Thiel wants you to know the big Husky Stadium rebuild, to begin this winter, involves no taxpayer funds. Just private donations and bond issues to be repaid out of UW Athletics income.
• Ex-State Rep Brendan Williams wants Washington state’s progressives to “get some backbone” about preserving vital services in the state budget.
• Starbucks boss and Sonics seller Howard Schultz’s latest big idea: Big election-campaign donors like him should vow to boycott funding election campaigns. Of course, if Democratic donors like Schultz are the only ones doing the boycotting….
• There’s a plan to create a “Jimi Hendrix Park,” next to the African American Museum at the old Coleman School. It would be the fifth Hendrix memorial of one type or another (not counting the Experience Music Project, which parted ways with the Hendrix heirs during its development). Cobain still has just that one unofficial park bench in Viretta Park and a city-limits sign in Aberdeen.
• Rolling Stone put out a reader poll declaring the top punk acts of all time. The list put Green Day on top and included not a single female. FlavorWire has come to the side of justice with its own in-house listing of “15 Essential Women Punk Icons.” The NW’s own Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, and Sleater-Kinney are on it, as is onetime Seattleite Courtney Love.
• Many, many indie-label CDs were in a warehouse that burned during the London lootings. Some labels might not survive the blow.
• Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac sez Apple’s invented all the big things it’s going to invent for a while. We’ve heard this one before.
• And for those of you heading back into the working life (you lucky stiffs, you), take heed Peter Toohey’s thoughts (partly inspired by the late David Foster Wallace) on “the thrill of boredom:”

Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.