lynn emmert via fantagraphics.com

I swear I’m gonna have thoughts about the end of the Egyptian Theater and other things soon. But there’s only one story for me for today.

Kim Thompson, co-owner and co-publisher of Fantagraphics Books and The Comics Journal, died Wednesday morning, less than four months after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

The Danish-born Thompson grew up loving both European and American comics, from crude superhero fare to slick French graphic albums. He came to the U.S. at age 21 and immediately became friends with Gary Groth, who’d started The Comics Journal with Mike Catron as a teenager. When Catron moved on to DC Comics, Thompson became Groth’s partner at the Journal. By the early 1980s, they’d branched out from reviewing comics into publishing their own.

By 1989 they moved their already substantial operation from the L.A. suburbs to Seattle.

I came to know, and work for, them soon after that.

In the office, Thompson played the “good cop” role. Where Groth was a demanding taskmaster and a hard-nosed boss (at least back then), Thompson was more easygoing and soft-spoken. He still had the same painstaking care as Groth for putting out the best comics and books possible, and for getting the most production value out of an in-house design shop run (at that time) on bobby pins and baling wire (and top talent, such as the late graphics ace Dale Yarger).

Thompson could also hold his own in making deals with comics creators, distributors, and retailers, and with the mainstream media. He famously told the Village Voice, “[L]et’s face it. If you’re a shop that has any claim to carrying alternative comics and you’re not carrying [Daniel Clowes’s] Eightball or [Chris Ware’s] Acme Novelty Library, that’s stupid.”

Eventually, Thompson got to make his books’ physical aspects as slick and professional as the content of the art within them, expanding from magazines and trade paperbacks into hardcovers and slipcase box sets.

Groth and Thompson’s books won awards in and out of the comics/graphic-novel niche. With recognition came clout, the kind of clout that got them the reprint rights to Peanuts, Donald Duck, and many other classics.

Their original publications, from Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World to Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, continually redefined the range of stories and moods the medium could convey. Comics were more than (as the tired cliché went) “not just for kids anymore.” They were a true art form; and, thanks partly to Fantagraphics and its stable of creators, the “mainstream” audience began to recognize this.

As the book trade roiled at the “disrupting” influence of e-books and chain bookstores’ rise and fall, Fantagraphics continued to grow. Its beautiful hardcover packaging helped readers to see its titles as art works in themselves, things people wanted to own as physical, tangible objects.

Thompson’s legacy, besides the many great cartoonists whose work he helped assemble, promote, and nurture, could be this packaging.

In it, he showed the rest of the (print) book industry how to stay in demand.

• The only thing more improbable than the idea that the average human 100,000 years from now will have Margaret Keane painting-size eyes is the idea that the average human 100,000 years from now will be white.
• Novelist David Guterson gave a commencement speech at his alma mater,Roosevelt High. Some parents booed the speech, apparently believing it was too “negative” for their precious children. The speech itself turns out to be skeptical about the pursuit-O’-happiness thang but still relatively upbeat at its conclusion.
• So soon after getting our collective hearts broken over the NBA (again), Seattle sports fans have a new thing about which to blindly hope against hope. It’s the National Hockey League’s Phoenix Coyotes. They’ve been floundering down in the desert. The league supposedly has a plan to move the team here, perhaps as early as next season.
• KING-TV and its sister operations (KONG, NW Cable News) are being bought out by Gannett, along with the rest of the A.H. Belo Corp. Like Belo (which began as the publisher of the Dallas Morning News) had done when it bought KING, Gannett’s strategy here is to add profitable (for now) broadcast properties to help shore up its more troubled newsprint assets. (Update: Gannett only bought Belo’s broadcast properties, not its newspapers.)
• Tacoma really doesn’t like citizens painting “rogue crosswalks.”
• CBS News’s smartypants explain “why geniuses don’t have jobs.”
• Time quotes some security-establishment defenders who really, really want to see the whole anti-domestic-surveillance crusade crushed.
• An Australian ad agency asked feminist writers to write about the meaning of artificial sweeteners in women’s lives, and to do it for free. Here come the brutally snarky retorts.
• This list of words remembered today only as parts of hoary catch phrases leaves out such personal favorites of mine as “petard,” “Gangbusters” (originally a radio show), and “poke” (as something you shouldn’t buy a pig in).
• You remember how Facebook first started as a “hot or not” listing of Harvard women? There’s a new “hot or not” application on the site. It’s just for women. It uses male FB users’ profiles without their permission.
• It’s the 50th birthday of one of my favorite forgotten childhood icons: Mr. ZIP!

plastic corn usb memory stick, available from made-in-china.com

This is one of those times when I run afoul of certain acquaintances who extol everybody to “think for yourself.”

Because I don’t always “think for myself” the way these guys n’ gals want me to.

The topic in question: “genetically modified organism” (aka “GMO” or simply “GM”) food seeds.

I’m not completely against them.

This shouldn’t surprise longtime readers of this venture. I’ve never been an organic vegan purist. I don’t believe in the innate goodness of all things “alternative” or the innate badness of all things “mainstream.”

As “ObamaLover20122” writes at Daily Kos, modern varieties of staple foodstuffs can add nutrients, reduce the need for pesticides, and help alleviate hunger and malnutrition in wide swaths of the world. Anti-GMO campaigns, this blogger insists, are full of conspiracy theory-esque pseudo-science.

And, as Meagan Hatcher-Mays writes at Jezebel, plants and animals have been selectively bred by humans for just about ever. (Corn/maize was so thoroughly domesticated by the Western Hemisphere’s pre-Euro humans that it can’t even reproduce in the wild.)

•

It doesn’t help that the outfit most closely associated with GMOs is Monsanto, the “radical” left’s current #1 corporate bogeyman (replacing Wal-Mart, which replaced Nike).

Monsanto was originally a chemical company, involved in everything from plastics and synthetic carpet fibers to the infamous herbicide Agent Orange. In the 1980s it started to make commercial crop seeds that would be especially receptive to its pesticides. Today, agribusiness is its only business.

It’s pursued this business with a “biotech” business model, something known to anyone who’s followed the doing of local drug-development companies. This model is big on patents and other “intellectual property” as the big assets, the big prizes.

Many of the boardroom-based brutalities Monsanto’s been (often rightly) accused of stem from this obsession with Profit Through Patent (such as litigating against small farmers who didn’t even deliberately put Monsanto-owned genes into their crops).

Other Monsanto corporate sins (industrial-waste dumping, f’r instance) are the product of similar them-that’s-got-the-gold-makes-the-rules corporate groupthink.

In short, Monsanto makes it really easy to hate ’em.

•

And that’s just what folks are doing, across the to-the-left-of-Obama end of the political spectrum.

One part of that crusade has been the dissemination of boycott lists online.

This documents and “meme graphics” purport to list, without documentation, “Monsanto-owned” food products you shouldn’t buy. Various versions of the lists include dozens and dozens of famous supermarket-shelf names.

The only thing is, Monsanto owns NO consumer food-product brands.

None.

Nada.

They’re not in that end of the business.

Many big food processors have probably bought grains and other crops from big agribusiness farms that have bought Monsanto seeds and/or pesticides.

But there’s no real telling who, or for which products.

And even the “GMO labeling” bills now going through several state and national legislative bodies won’t make it certain, thanks to the same natural processes whereby the aforementioned small farmers ended up with GMO genes in their crops.

So go ahead and hate Monsanto for its documented bullying tactics.

But don’t blindly hate all GMO projects.

And don’t blindly hate the entire non-PCC food universe.

via musicruinedmylife.blogspot.ca

The Fastbacks, the “Seattle Scene’s” most enduring band (and one of its most loveable), recorded lots of great cover songs (originally by the Raspberries, the Sweet, and even Sesame Street!) in addition to their many originals. Some of these were buried on “tribute” compilation CDs. Here’s a list of 17 such tunes, and a slightly longer but still incomplete list.

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• According to Richard Metzger, the greatest document of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles musical career is a concert doc filmed in Seattle—in the acoustically notorious Kingdome, even.
• David Meinert’s growing restaurant empire will include the successor to Capitol Hill’s legendary dive bar the Canterbury.
• Time to restart the neo-Sonics rumor mill again. Now, Chris Hansen and co. are reportedly negotiating for an expansion franchise.
• The state’s thinking of authorizing private pot smoking clubs. I only ask that they be ventilated in such a way as to keep that weed stink off the streets.
• The Republican-stalled Legislature still hasn’t saved King County Metro Transit. But, on the Seattle-only transit front, Mayor McGinn still plans to invest in a new downtown streetcar line. This probably means the mourned Waterfront Streetcar will remain dead for the foreseeable future.
• Meanwhile, the second Monorail Initiative tell-all book is out. It’s called Rise Above It All. It’s written and self-published by Dick Falkenbury, the ultimate political outsider and co-instigator of the plan that would have had trains on grade-separated tracks, roughly where the RapidRide C/D bus goes now.
• MTV’s playing music videos (remember them?) again. But just for half a day, on the Fourth of July.
• A woman at the big video-game industry confab Tweeted® a complaint about the lack of female starring characters in new video games. Cue the bigoted trollbots in 5, 4, 3….
• R.I.P. Arturo Vega, associate of the Ramones for their entire band-career and designer of the group’s “All American” logo (still worn on T shirts by people who weren’t alive when the band was together).
• Steven Spielberg sez the reign of action mega-blockbusters (and of the big Hollywood studios!) is only a few box-office flops away from being over. Then he says audiences can expect really high prices for the privilege of seeing a movie in a theater (yes, even higher than they are now).
• Robert Reich sez we could have full employment, even in an age of robotized manufacturing and other techno-“innovations,” if we only had the political will to make it so.
• A UK pundit with the appropriate name of Tom Chatfield agrees with me that society, far from becoming “post literate,” is actually more dependent upon written language than ever. And he ponders whether it’s a good thing:

There is no such thing as a private language. We speak in order to be heard, we write in order to be read. But words also speak through us and, sometimes, are as much a dissolution as an assertion of our identity.

• Turns out the heroine from Brave isn’t the only female character in cartoons (and toys) to have been “tarted up” in recent years. Just look what they’ve done to Strawberry Shortcake!

ebay photos, via thestir.cafemom.com

jordan stead, seattlepi.com

• The J.P. Patches memorial street sign is a thing. A wonderful thing.
• Was an area teen denied entrance to her high school prom because she had large breasts, or because her gown had revealed too much of them?
• The guy who took highly unauthorized pictures of himself atop the Space Needle (and not in an approved way) has been found out.
• The living members of Alice in Chains were in a web chat, where they offered the following (facetious) advice to young bands:  “Just quit now. Save yourself before it’s too late.”
• A local musician gave an informal poll of his colleagues to determine the best and worst places to play in Seattle.
• A moment of silence, if you will, for the career of disgraced now-ex Snohomish County executive Aaron Reardon.
• One of those regional speech variants surveys lists, among other differentiating words, the ways people in different parts of the country pronounce “crayon.” The article didn’t list the way everyone in my school said it: “color-cren.”
• Ex-Seattleite Lindy West, as some of you know, appeared on a cable talk show to debate the issue of whether rape “jokes” were, by their nature, unfunny. (She essentially said they were.) The usual way-stoopid web trolls showed up on comment boards, claiming that both (1) they’re not tools of “rape culture,” and (2) they wished someone would rape West. What?
• Big Pharma has been looking for years for a “Viagra for women.” Now a company supposedly has a “female libido booster.” And (male) scientific observers and pundits are expressing worry that it might work too well, unleashing that long-feared chaotic force that would enflame the planet in unabashed… (Better stop before I start talking like a semiotician.)
• Elsewhere, Swiffer thought it would be cool to depict the WWII icon “Rosie the Riveter” as a cleaning-obsessed housewife. Uh, nope.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks if Libertarianism is so great, how come no country on Earth has ever tried it? (Of course, the same thing could be said about “real” Socialism, etc.)
• CollegeHumor.com offers sample home pages answering what would happen “if all news sites worked like BuzzFeed.” (Or Huff Post, or any of a score of click-whoring aggregation sites.)

collegehumor.com

joshua trujillo, seattlepi.com

• There was a remembrance in Cowen Park marking one year since the Cafe Racer tragedy.
• Unlike some of the “radicals” fighting against low wages at fast-food joints, I actually patronize fast-food joints. And I want the fine people who prepare my meals to be properly compensated for the fine work they do.
• The FBI investigated the song “Louie Louie” for two whole years, only to find a simple love lyric made unintelligible.
• Will legal pot in our society lead, invariably, to corporate pot?
• To Microsoft’s regret, it just can’t get people to say “Let’s Bing it.”
• Our ol’ pal Gillian Gaar reports the “Welcome to Aberdeen: Come As You Are” sign might come down.
• Who, besides “out o’ sight, out o’ mind” NIMBYs, benefits from the suburbanization of poverty?
• A Cheerios commercial features a nice interracial family. The usual dorks and trolls respond as you’d predict.
• Lawrence Lessig would like a Democratic Party that’s less beholden to corporate funders.
• Texas: future Democratic stronghold?
• Some people will miss making fun of Michelle Bachmann. I won’t.
• The Chicago Sun-Times, once billed as “Chicago’s Picture Newspaper,” is firing all its photographers.
• No, Ms. magazine, the 10 most important things American women could not do before the 1970s wold probably really include more important things than “read Ms. magazine.”
• Istanbul was Constantinople. Now it’s a battleground of democracy vs. shady dealmaking.
• WikiLeaks dude Julian Assange sees today’s Google as an increasingly reactionary gang of government-butt kissers.
• Let’s close with a haunting look at a run down (but still open!) tourist site, the Flintstones theme park in Arizona.

messynessychic.com

Most of you know about the horrors inflicted on May 30, 2012.

About the crazed disgruntled customer who strode into Café Racer and shot five people, four of them fatally.

Who then got on a bus to downtown, where he killed a woman to steal her car.

Who then drove to West Seattle, where he killed himself as police closed in on him.

For a lot of people around the Seattle music, art, and nightlife scenes, it was a day of shock and devastation.

For me, it was just the start of the worst two weeks of my life.

•

While all the mourning was going on around me, I had a little birthday, gave one of my semiannual Costco Vanishing Seattle book signings, and visited the Georgetown Carnival. Racer owner Kurt Geissel was at the latter, essentially showing concerned friends that he was surviving.

It was there that I got the cell call from my brother.

My mother had gone into the hospital, for what would be the last time.

Two buses and two hours later, I was in Everett.

She had stayed un-sedated long enough for me to arrive and pay my respects, along with seven or eight of her closest friends.

An hour after that, she agreed to take the morphine.

She passed on 54 hours later.

She had always been there for me.

Now I was truly on my own.

It was, and continues to be, a struggle.

Only now am I beginning to get something of a life back together, thanks to the help of many of the same people who kept one another together after the Racer tragedy.

via theatlantic.com

• The Atlantic has unearthed a 1999 Microsoft ad, touting the e-book future that was supposed to be jump started by the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Reader software package. It’s taken a bit longer than that for events in this “Future of Reading” timeline to come about. But one thing has happened already: the luddites who’ve long dominated the book community are loudly touting the benefits of “Real Books From Real Trees for Real People.”
• Once again, I insist that Windows 8 is not the cause of the PC sales slump. Rather, it’s the fact that everybody’s agog about phones and tablets instead. And the fact that so much PC functionality these days is based on online and “cloud”-based activity, so home users feel no need to buy new hardware.
• Traffic on Wash. state roadways is at a 10-year low. Yet Republicans keep pushing a cars-only transportation budget.
• Meanwhile, Knute Berger remembers the people who fought the R.H. Thompson Expressway, a freeway which would have eradicated the Central Area and ruined the Arboretum.
• David Schoenfeld at ESPN.com says it’s time to sacrifice M’s manager Eric Wedge.
• There’s a public school tucked away in Seattle’s residential north end. In recent years, the Indian Heritage School program was housed there. More recently, the school district’s talked about replacing the buildings on the site. That would mean destroying murals depicting local indigenous heroes. Activists have fought to keep the murals. They may succeed.
• A cold-calling “charity” campaign, which recently phone-bombed Seattle households, may be a pure scam with little or no proceeds going to its stated cause.
• Collector speculation pricing in music has affected the price of new vinyl editions.
• “Mothers Now Top Breadwinners in 4 of 10 U.S. Homes.”
• Today in what you never hear about in the right-wing media, the Bush-era IRS gleefully persecuted liberal groups.
• The Russian-owned news/opinion channel RT has hired Larry King.
• Facebook vows to crack down on user-posted rape “jokes.”
• Philip G. Ryken at the Gospel Coalition site has a snarky list of “How to Discourage Artists in the Church.” Some of its bullet points also apply to discouraging creative work in the larger world, such as “Treat the arts as a window dressing for the truth rather than a window into reality.”
• PolitiFact rates at least half the things Republicans say as “false,” and employs exaggeration tricks to find at least some Democrats lying.
• Tired of folks my age griping about how things used to be? Make up your own “meme” slogan for the face of “Old Economy Steven”!

quickmeme.com

kuow

• KUOW has a handy guide to Seattle’s “public spaces that appear private.”
• There’s a downside to making big popular parks out of former U.S. Navy installations. Magnuson Park turns out to have lots of radioactive, contaminated soil.
• Wash. state ranks #49 in supporting public colleges and universities. This is not like being a Mariner fan, where being even ahead of one other team is a call to point with pride.
• Some website I’d never heard of before says Seattle’s “most photographed attraction” is the Elephant Car Wash sign. (Gee, even more than the toothache-man gargoyle?)
• The Illinois company calling itself Boeing used to have big battery design skills in-house. Then outsourcing mania took over. Result: the 787 disasters.
• You know how I disdain the marketing company calling itself Pabst Brewing, due to its role in closing the Rainier and Olympia breweries while keeping their brands alive in zombie form. Cracked.com also hates Pabst, but for a different reason: for virtually inventing that commonly despised character type known as the “hipster.”
• South Carolina Republicans, faced with popular legislation promoting renewable energy sources, rigged a faked “voice vote” to defeat the measure.
• Daily Kos diarist “markthshark” claims the real IRS scandal is how all those blatantly partisan Tea Party groups got to file as nonpolitical nonprofits in the first place.
• Are angst and misery really due to a single “great glitch” built into human nature?
• Paul Krugman sez, “being a good liberal doesn’t require that you believe, or pretend to believe, lots of things that almost certainly aren’t true; being a good conservative does.”
• The police backlash against protesting garment workers in Cambodia wasn’t at a “Nike factory,” which the hereby-linked headline claims. It was at a locally owned company taking outsourcing work from several Western clothing firms, all of whom can thus take “plausible deniability” about conditions and worker abuse.
• Some of the outdoor sets from the original Star Wars are still standing, and decaying, in Tunisia.

lostateminor.com

ap via nbc news

While I’ve been busy doing whatever (looking for a new home, etc.), I missed a few big birthdays here in online-land.

•

Tim Berners-Lee opened the first public World Wide Web site on 4/30/93 at the CERN particle-physics lab in Switzerland. For the occasion, that site has been put back up at its original URL.

Berners-Lee was, and still is, an idealist. In the original CERN site’s documents, he described the WWW as something that could open up information to the masses.

Instead of “walled garden” online networks such as CompuServe, Prodigy, and the original AOL, the Web would be open to all comers and contributors. Anybody could put anything on, or receive anything from, it.

This ultimate “disruptive technology,” creator of LOLcat memes and destroyer of newspapers, record labels, and middle-class livelihoods, got its start with the most noble of intentions.

(Just like many a mad-scientist-movie experiment.)

•

By pure coincidence, the first issue of Wired magazine was out that same month.

From the start, it was intended to be a lot more important than a mere buying guide to PC gear. It was to chronicle tech as the biggest economic, societal, and even ideological movement of our time.

It posited loudmouth, alpha-male San Franciscan Libertarians as the Voice of the Future. It sneered at governments, residents of “Tired” locales (France, Manhattan, Seattle), and people who dared to think about the well-being of others as backward-thinking parasites.

In the world according to the early Wired, CEOs were the new rock stars, even the new royalty. No social or environmental issue could be discussed in its pages, unless there was a potential solution that would also enrich (or at least never inconvenience) big business.

In the end, the bosses and bosses’ lackeys Wired worshipped got most of their way.

And as cyber-critic Jason Lanier notes, the 99 Percent are still trying to pick up the pieces.

•

That same week 10 years later, Apple launched the first version of the iTunes Store.

The iTunes application had been around since 2001, when Apple bought and revamped a third-party program called SoundJam MP.

Steve Jobs had identified music (and eventually general media) playback as a technology in which Apple had to lead, for the sake of the company’s survival. Otherwise, Windows-only applications and file formats (remember WinAmp?) would shut out Mac users, threatening Apple’s presence in home environments. By making iTunes, and making a Windows version of it, Jobs and co. stayed in the home-computer game.

Two years later, Windows Media-only file protection schemes were threatening to put a lock on “legal” (commercial) music downloads. Again, the Mac and its users would be shut out. Apple’s response not only had to be Windows-compatible, it had to dominate the market on both platforms.

The iTunes Store did that, and more.

Its stand-alone hardware adjuct, the iPod, quickly dominated the new market of portable digital music machines.

And along the way, iTunes allegedly “killed the old music industry.”

(Of course, many of us felt the old music industry had deserved to die, but that’s not the point here.)

But now, the notion of music downloads seems as archaic as the notion of buying music on little compact discs.

The big hype these days is for streaming music subscriptions, a field which Apple has yet to enter.

Yet through all these industry changes, one thing remains constant.

Most recording artists themselves still get the fiscal shaft.

wu ming, via daily kos

• Let’s put credit where credit is due, to the right-wing initiative maestro who hates all non-private-car transportation, but whose schemes leave even that mode vastly underfunded in this nation’s-most-regressive-tax-system state.
• Today in clothing named after people famous for not wearing any, a fashion chain called “Bettie Page” is opening its first local branch on Capitol Hill.
• A Walla Walla high-school principal is convinced that severe discipline against problem students only makes things worse. By taking more pro-active approaches, suspensions at his school have plummeted.
• One of the lesser publicized YouTube memes involves video gamers posting clips of their gameplay prowess. Now, Nintendo is claiming copyright on all these clips.
• A guy in Ballard’s got a Kickstarter to fund a small but free performance space for theatrical and musical performers.
• There are supposedly more high tech jobs available in the Puget Sound country than there are people to fill them. Now if we could only get jobs for a couple of non-coders….
• Have Catholic bishops quietly taken control of all health care decision making in Wash. state?
• David J. Ley at Psychology Today claims that sexual violence has gone down wherever “societies have increased their access to porn.”
• The just-ended TV season has been, viewership-wise, “one of the worst years ever in the history of network TV.”
• Meanwhile, brick-n’-mortar bookstores saw a huge jump in foot traffic this past quarter.
• Some 56 more-or-less “adult” comix titles have been excised from Apple’s App Store. Again.
• Will someone just kill the thin sheet calling itself the Village Voice already (or at least turn it into a bohemian-radical nostalgia rag)?
• A Simpsons street opens later this year at the Universal Orlando theme park. It’ll be the Violentest Place on Earth! (Sorry, no Itchy and Scratchy Money accepted.)

via cartoonbrew.com

via geekwire.com

• A female and a male employee at a local gaming company didn’t like the kickass-warrior bikini babe poster put up prominently in the company’s office. So they made a similar poster depicting one of the company’s male characters in a beefcake pose. The company’s boss left it up.
• The Punk Singer, a biopic about Bikini Kill rad-feminist singer and zinester Kathleen Hanna, is playing SIFF this year. You may have already heard about the Odd-Couple-with-guitars romance of Hanna and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, as depicted in the film. You might not have heard about something else mentioned in the film, a serious health scare she had a while back. It’s hard to imagine someone of Hanna’s carefully crafted public image ever admitting to any vulnerability, but she does so here.
• Meanwhile, Hanna’s onetime protege Carrie Brownstein is not the first alt-music vet to “shill for American Express.” Laurie Anderson did the same gig back in the ’80s (though her ad for the card doesn’t seem to be posted online).
• Melinda Gates is the world’s third most powerful woman, according to one of those magazine list-icles. Numbers 1 and 2 are the heads of state of Germany and Brazil.

1. Kyle Hill at Scientific American lists the reasons why he believes “Portland is wrong about water flouridation.”
2. Chris Kresser says there’s no reason to fear bacon.
3. Erica at the blog Northwest Edible Life recounts the obsessive fears that comprise “the terrible tragedy of the healthy eater.”

'every driver every time it ever rains ever'

• I’m still trying to decide how I feel about When You Live In Seattle, a site of original GIF-animation “memes.”
• What follows the XBox 360? “XBox One.” This is not to be considered a comment on the gaming platform’s market share.
• Our ol’ pal Sean Nelson’s got his first solo CD out at long last. And, as you can here at the hereby-linked stream, it’s very much worth the wait.
• May Day protesters say they’re not spoiled children of privilege having a lark, but people with serious grievances against the government, particularly an increasingly militarized police.
• Amazon’s letting people sell fan-fiction ebooks for money on the Kindle platform. Just as long as the fan fictions take place in the “universes” for which Amazon’s got official licenses. And they can’t have any porn in ’em.
• In a rare victory for neighborhoods and small businesses, lower Queen Anne’s Tup Tim Thai restaurant won’t be rent-hiked out of existence after all.
• Threats against reproductive rights aren’t just for red states anymore.
• Pot: Good for pigs, bad for dogs?
• Apple has not “cheated” on its federal taxes. It simply took advantage of every legal tax dodge its lawyers could discover (or advocate for), just like so many other corporate titans.
• Despite what you might have read on inflammatory websites, PBS did not “kill” a documentary critical of the Koch brothers, the billionaire backers of many extreme-right-wing political endeavors (and of some major PBS affiliate stations). It was ITVS, a separate nonprofit program supplier, that declined to include Citizen Koch among the indie films it packages to the PBS network feed and to local public-TV stations. Citizen Koch still exists, and is still playing the festival circuit.
• Actually, there are real reasons why the IRS should investigate the Kochs’ “Tea Party Patriots” and similar nonpartisan-in-name-only outfits.
• When the Executive Branch started stalking Fox News and the AP (allegedly for those outfits’ investigations of CIA documents about North Korea), was it just a continuation of the sort of tactics played against WikiLeaks?
• Google boss Larry Page has a plan to fix what’s wrong with the world—more anti-government, corporate Libertarianism. Exactly the direction that got the world into these (economic, ecological) messes.
• Australian writer Elmo Keep believes free and cheap downloads are killing just about all professional media/arts endeavors.
• Henry Grabar at the Atlantic calls the anti-flouridation movement (recently victorious in Portland and several other cities) “history’s weirdest alliance of paranoiacs.”
• Meanwhile, NY Times essayist Maggie Koerth-Baker claims to know “why rational people buy into conspiracy theories.” Or so the Germans would have you believe….
• A famous author’s Wikipedia page got “edit trolled” by a rival author.
• In the countdown toward Arrested Development’s revival on Netflix streaming, NPR.org’s got a thorough chart chronicling the recurrence of more than 150 running gags through the original series.
• Some guy on YouTube edited together Hamlet quotations and references from 198 different movies and TV shows. Not included: Chewbacca’s “Alas, poor Yorick” pantomime with C3PO’s temporarily disconnected head.
• Yes, at one time people really wrote by hand, and did it this well. It took a lot of intense practice.

slate

via geekwire

Amazon wants to build a triple-globe shaped, five story thing, variously called a “biodome” and a “greenhouse,” as part of its three-block skyscraper project. It would be on Lenora Street east of Sixth Avenue.

First comment:

Any architectural thang with three segments, in which the two smaller segments are spherical, is bound to lead to a lifetime of snickering jokes.

Arrangements of one or more spherical objects at the bottom of a 50-story tower will engender the same responses.

Amazon’s either being brave, or clueless, or devil-may-care bombastic, or some combo of the above.

Second, slightly more serious, comment:

As gargantuan New Seattle monuments to world-class-osity go (and I wish a couple of them would go), this one looks at least somewhat friendlier than the planned central waterfront makeover, kitschier (in a good way) than the Sculpture Park, and not nearly as brutalistic as Chihuly Garden & Glass.

Depending on how it works out, and how tolerant its staff is toward civilian activity within, it could be a welcome addition to the cityscape. Or at least a place in which to hide out from the rain for a bit.