Aw shucks, guys n’ gals.

You gave me most of what I wanted for Election Day.

Obama won both the Electoral College and pop-vote. He won the EC by a margin that was both Ohio- and Florida-proof. He won every so-called “battleground” state except North Carolina, some by substantial margins.

The Dems kept the Senate, and added some nice new faces to it (hi, Elizabeth Warren!).

The House stayed Republican, alas; ensuring a continuing forum for obstruction by John Boehner and the other galley slaves to the One Percent.

Here at home, same-sex marriage and recreational pot are both leading, as is Jay Inslee’s bid for governor.

They ought to be leading bigger.  The “Cascade curtain” needs some shoring up. Dems need to strengthen their traditional labor-based holds in Pierce and Clark counties.

And, alas, Tim Eyman’s latest “initiative that sounds hot on talk radio but is disastrous in real life,” to prevent any real reform of the state’s regressive tax system, is also ahead.

All the hard work continues tomorrow.

But for the most part, life on the day after is cool.

Keep up the good work.

ward sutton

‘Tis election day. The most infuriatingly nervous day of the year, or in this case of the quadrennium. (I believe that’s a word.)

The polls, even the progressive leaning polls, predict a tighter race than I want. I want Obama across the board over Mr. Lying One-Percenter Tax Cheat Hypocrite in previously “red” states, and all victorious long before the Pacific Time Zone results show up. If I can’t get that, I at least want an Obama victory big enough that even the partisan-hack dirty tricks in Ohio and Florida (and even here) can’t threaten it.

Back to randomosity:

• Lynn Stuart Parramore at AlterNet insists that liberals need to expand their potential base, to reach out to the whole of America. Yes, even to stop stereotyping white male Southerners.
• Postcard collector Lisa Hix has some lovely examples of cartoony “attack ads” from the women’s suffragist era.
• Bob Quinn, who started a one-man needle exchange program in the U District in the 1990s, has apparently died. I have no further information on this, however. (UPDATE: Here’s more.)
• Microsoft staged a real-life fake “invasion” theater piece to launch the newest version of its Halo video-game series. The mock battle essentially involved all of the European micro-state of Lichtenstein. Cue references to the Bloom County version of Bill Gates trying to get a date by boasting about owning Norway.
• UPDATE: The Cobain-Love stage musical, threatened last month, is now an official no-go.
• The state Dept. of Transportation is holding a naming contest about the big machine that will dig the tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. All entry names must be female, presumably to avoid the obvious phallic jokes.
• Boeing’s next jetliner model might have folding wings, to fit in better at crowded airports.
• Thirty-six percent of the cigarettes sold in Wash. state may be “contraband” (i.e., sold without state taxes). These will, of course, kill you just as dead.
• John Naughton at UK weekly The Observer says the big book publishers have played into Amazon’s hands in the past decade or so. Actually, they’ve played into the hands of their own conglomerate owners who cared only about the short-term Almighty Stock Price, to the long-term detriment of the business itself.
• If Disney buys Hasbro, as has been rumored, they’d not only get the rights to Battleship remakes, but also to the role-playing game franchise Dungeons & Dragons. You’ll recall Hasbro bought Renton game company Wizards of the Coast, which had bought D&D during its peak years.
• R.I.P. Mac Ahlberg. The famed Hollywood cinematographer had directed a few of his own films while still in his native Sweden. One of these was the erotic classic I, A Woman and its two sequels.
• Occupy Wall Street protesters had rigged together some bicycle-powered generators during their marathon protest. These devices proved handy for neighbors during the Hurricane Sandy blackout.
• Today’s lesson in the folly of marketing products “For Women” is brought to you by Honda.

priscilla long, via the american scholar

• Priscilla Long takes you on a geological tour of North America without leaving downtown Seattle, simply by exploring the marble and other stone claddings on our office buildings.
• John Koster, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Washington’s revamped First District, says he’d oppose abortions even in cases of “the rape thing.”
• An out-of-state right-wing “SuperPAC” is sinking millions into sleazy attack ads on behalf of Reagan Dunn’s campaign for state attorney general. The Politico site seems to approve.
• When I first heard about this issue, I said I understood. I told the guy I preferred Thelonius Monk myself. Then he told me he was really criticizing a “coal train.”
• When is a nude woman in public not cool? When she punches and strikes a chair at a (clothed) elderly woman in the same apartment building.
• Thankfully, Puyallup’s organized diaper theft ring has been caught.
• As the World’s Fair anniversary winds to a close, Jon Talton wonders whether Seattle can hold its own economically in a 2062 world that could be dominated by global “alpha cities.”
• A self-proclaimed conservative Christian from Tacoma pretended to be gay for a year. Insights on humanity and understanding ensued.
• Did all those hours upon hours of “parka boy” standups by cable TV news reporters help anyone understand Hurricane Sandy’s impact? Probably not.
• David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon’s Monday night shows, performed without studio audiences, may be the greatest non-election, non-hurricane TV events of the year.
• Yes, the polling companies are still under-sampling people who only have cell phones, not landlines. The probable result: a supposedly “close race” that may really be more Obama-leaning than it appears.
• Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson reminds you that Mitt Romney really is as awful and amoral as they say he is; while HuffPost’s Michelangelo Signorile’s dug up some video of Romney spewing the most hateful anti-gay bigotry. And Christina D’Angelo claims the GOP’s devolution into a home for virulent racists is like “lynching Lincoln.”
• New Yorker book critic Arthur Krystal attempts to claim the superiority of “literary fiction” above so-called “genre fiction.” As if highbrow weren’t really just another genre.
• Chris Wade at Slate wants you to learn to appreciate the Speed Racer movie.
• Disney, having already digested ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, and the Muppets, is now taking over LucasFilm and the Star Wars properties. Immediately, a new Star Wars feature film is being planned. What I want to see is a mashup concept involving all these “universes.” Bonus points if you write this as a story for a Lifetime TV movie (half-owned by Disney).

aaron tung, via digitalbookworld.com

There are many differences between the book world and the music world.

For one thing, music-world people have long held a healthy disrespect for the weasels, hucksters, and corporate wolves running their industry.

Book-world people, in contrast, are often willfully supplicant toward their industry, its masters, and its most crippling business-as-usual tactics.

Until, perhaps, now.

Germany’s Bertelsmann and Britain’s Pearson Group announced they’re merging their respective English-language book publishing units, Random House and Penguin. Those firms, two of the Big Six in the U.S. book biz, have each absorbed other imprints over the years—Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Doubleday, Knopf, Pantheon, and many others.

Bertelsmann will control the merged entity, once the Feds approve (perhaps one year from now).

The official excuse, this time, is that big publishers need to become even bigger so they can “stand up to Amazon.”

But we know the real reason. Monopolistic greed and dreams of global conquest, as always.

Now, the publishing biz is too consolidated for its own good already. It has been since at least the mid-1990s.

But “people of the book” (authors, reviewers, editors, etc.) said or did little to challenge the takeovers.

They’d often complain about book selling falling into fewer hands, especially in the heyday of the Borders/Barnes & Noble duopoly. But these folks didn’t complain as much about publishers becoming ever fewer and ever bigger.

Book fans cold have used some of the music fans’ cynicism about the companies who claim to have their interests at heart.

And now, they might finally be developing some of that wise-assery.

Publishers don’t, and never really have, acted in the best interests of either authors or readers. They, like other businesses, are in it for themselves.

And in this case, their actions may lead (as an LA Times business writer puts it) to “higher prices and less diversity of book titles.”

Yet that piece, and other commentaries summarized by UK trade blog TheBookseller, repeat the seldom questioned presumption of a “diminished interest in books.”

Even though total print and e-book sales are rising, even soaring in some categories.

And even though print book sales have held their own in this economy, better than a lot of other media sectors.

Instead of ever mega-er mega publishers saving the book biz, perhaps the biz is renewing itself in spite of them.

amidst-the-everyday.com

“Amidst the Everyday,” a project by photographers-artists Aaron Asis and Dan Hawkins, aims to reveal “elements of the unseen urban environment.” You go to places around town, scan QR codes (etched in wood!) at various buildings, and receive images of their hidden treasures. (Above, one of the unoccupied-for-decades upper floors of the Eitel Building at Second and Pike.)

• I’m not disillusioned by the news of a potential sitcom that would carry the title Smells Like Teen Spirit. (The show concept sounds more like a ripoff of Family Ties, which is also something we don’t need.) However, I am at least a little disillusioned by the news of a potential Kurt and Courtney stage musical, which would be licensed by Courtney Love via Britney Spears’ estranged ex-manager.
• Lester Smith, 1919-2012: The Mariners’ original principal owner had, in partnership with Hollywood star Danny Kaye, a number of business endeavors. They ranged from rock-concert promotion to direct-mail marketing. But Smith (or Kaye-Smith) will always be legendary for stewarding KJR-AM during its 1955-80 golden age as Seattle’s Top 40 (or “Fab 50”) powerhouse.
• The Seattle Times‘ free ads for Rob McKenna caught the LA Times‘ attention; not to mention a less-than-kind portrayal in the SeaTimes‘ own “Truth Needle” department.
• The next step up from bicycle lanes: physically separated “bike tracks.”
• Knute Berger reiterates what I’ve been saying about the waterfront development scheme. Let’s not let it be “sanitized by good intentions.”
• Dominic Holden would like you to know the biggest reason for legalizing pot. It isn’t for the stoners (and it sure ain’t to shut up the stoner evangelists, which had been my reason).
• Joe Copeland takes up the continuing legacy of Floyd Schmoe, one of the greatest people I ever met, leader of Seattle’s Quakers and hands-on advocate for peace and reconciliation.
• The next hurdle toward getting the NBA back in Seattle has been overcome. That hurdle is Commissioner David Stern, whose butt will be out of that particular chair by the end of next season.
• A major casual-games convention may be leaving Seattle.
• UK film blogger Petra Davis looks back admiringly at the still-underrated Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, 20 years old this year…
• …and, with the winding down of the World’s Fair semi-centennial, our pal Jim Demetre has some kind words for the (mostly justifiably) forgotten It Happened at the World’s Fair.
• In other film news, the Columbia City Cinema is being reopened (yay!). The new owner has repaired all the previous owner’s not-up-to-code “renovations.”
• Note to Amazon Kindle users: Buy all your e-books while you’re physically in the same country, lest you be targeted as a Terms of Service violator.
• Today’s dire-threat-to-America’s-youth story comes to you from a California high school where boys and girls alike are invited to join a “fantasy slut league.”
• Penguin and Random House are in merger talks. This is bad news, since book publishing is one of those industries that’s too consolidated already.
• Today’s lesson in the folly of products marketed as “For Women” is brought to you by Fujitsu and its “Floral Kiss” brand laptop PC.
• Among all the slimy, sociopathic, and bigoted things Republicans are saying and doing these days, add this overt racism by Sarah Palin.
• Pseudonymous Daily Kos diarist “bayushisan” wishes gamer culture had fewer macho jerks in it. (The same, of course, can be said about athiests and “skeptics,” online comment threads, U.S. politics, and even atheists and “skeptics”.)
• Paul Karr loathes the dot-commers’ worship of “disruption” as a sacred concept, and the Ayn Randian me-first-ism behind it.
• The BBC notes that “creativity is often intertwined with mental illness“…
• …and Simon Reynolds disses the “modern dismissal of genius” in today’s “age of the remix.”
• Earthquakes can’t be predicted. That hasn’t stopped a court in Italy from convicting seven scientists who failed to do so.
• Community organizer “B Loewe” believes you should not get into lefty causes to feel good about yourself, and you shouldn’t try to be your own, or your only, emotional “caregiver.” Instead, you’re to practice prosocial interdependence as both ideology and a way of life.
• Someone says something nice about so-called “hipsters!” They’re credited with helping bring back Detroit (the place, not the car companies).

shewalkssoftly.com

• Is there anything more ritualistically ridiculous than the standard commercial “sexy” Halloween costume? Speaking of which….
• Nancy Cohen at Playboy.com warns all aficionados of porn, erotic books, birth control, and non-procreative sex in general that the extreme right wing wants to shut all that down.
• And the neo-Riot Grrrl graffiti gang has mega-tagged one of the Aurora Ave. motels that was shut down as an alleged hooking site. Their message: Respect sex work and sex workers.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s management would really, really like you to continue (or resume) reading and even buying the paper, despite its owners’ giving away free ad space to GOP Gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna. (The Times has run “issue” advertising for gay marriage and against the estate tax, but this is the first time they’ve donated to a candidate.)
• The under-new-management (sorta) Seattle Weekly did something the Stranger might have done. It commented on the Times bosses’ McKenna ad by running their own “independent expenditure” ad praising Google as “the most totally fucking awesome company in the history of mankind.” Let’s see if that gets the Weekly listed any higher in the ol’ search rankings.
• Art Thiel believes the best chance of an NBA team in Seattle might not be moving an existing one, but getting a new expansion team.
• I know you can’t get enough of those extra-unique Mormon church doctrines.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic notes how only white people get to make “jokes” about wanting to “take a swing” at a dark skinned President.
• The BBC watches the supposedly alarming trend of “passive-aggressive Wi-Fi names.” Particularly network names aimed at other residents of the same apartment/condo complex, such as “Your Music Is Annoying” or “We Can Hear You Having Sex.”

via fuckyeahrollingstonemagazine at tumblr

The last great liberal atop a Presidential ticket (yes, including Nader) might have saved the nation, and the world, from Nixonism (a disease which still afflicts us yet).

And he might have had a chance if he’d only had enough procedural control over his own convention. He wound up not giving his acceptance speech until the wee hours; not a good selling point when you’re trying to show you’ve got the chops to be Commander in Chief.

Still, he remained a champion of the common folk and of a more just society to the end of his days. A populist, a humble crusader, a role model.

via movieline.com

The queen of Euro-softcore was no sexual “swinger” in real life. Instead, she preferred other earthly pleasures, such as the pleasures of cocaine, alcohol, and tobacco. The first destroyed her finances; the latter contributed to her final physical decline.

She appeared in dozens of films (including The Concorde: Airport ’79, Private Lessons, Madame Claude, Mata Hari, the 1981 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and particulalry Claude Charbol’s underrated Alice or the Last Escapade).

But she’ll be forever known for Emmanuelle. It played in Paris for 13 years. It still “inspires” in-name-only sequels and ripoffs.

There’s a key scene nobody remembers toward that film’s start. It’s when Emmanuelle is left alone in an idling car on the streets of Bangkok. Screaming child panhandlers surround the car and pound on the windows. Kristel looks like she wants to implode.

In this wordless throwaway scene, Kristel communicates that Emmanuelle is a creature of delicate tastes, with no patience for the harsh realities of the romantic places she visits.

first newsweek cover, 1933, via taylormarsh.com

So after 80 years, umpteen awards, hundreds of little insights and major scoops, and (particularly lately) a lot of dross, Newsweek magazine will fold in December. The name will live on as a section within the DailyBeast.com website; but we all know this is an ending, not a “transition.”

It’s a shame. But it’s been a while in coming.

The Washington Post Co. unloaded Newsweek a few years back, just to have one fewer money-losing journalistic enterprise on its books. It was propped up for a little while by audio-equipment tycoon Sidney Harman; but he died last year, and his family stopped subsidizing the mag.

That left Newsweek at the mercy of DailyBeast, the punditry and gossip site run by media mogul Barry Diller and serial failed magazine editor Tina Brown.

Circulation, at 3 million a decade ago, dropped by more than half. Brown imposed several sleaze cover stories this summer and autumn; these only led some former fans to wish it put out of its misery.

No one, except laid off employees and their kin, will mourn what Newsweek had become.

But many of us will mourn what it had been.

When News-Week: The Magazine of News Significance began in 1933, Henry Luce’s Time had been publishing for a decade. Many readers, particularly at the dawn of FDR’s New Deal era, had grown weary of Luce’s unabashed conservative slant. News-Week gave these readers a similar formula of digests and analysis, but with a nonpartisan, sometimes even pro-Dem POV.

The Washington Post Co. bought Newsweek in the 1950s, and beefed up its original reporting. It never overtook Time in circulation or revenue, but frequently outshone its rival in getting the biggest stories and the most insightful angles on the same stories.

These days, there are any dozens of websites and blogs and aggregator algorithms serving up customized, bubble-ized, non-threatening headlines and punditry and spin about the national political/economic sphere.

But there’s less and less original reporting for these sites to slice, dice, and interpret.

And there are fewer big places that serve a variety of points of view, challenging readers to think outside of their respective ideological boxes.

We need more of what Newsweek, at its peak, served up every seven days.

via interestingengineering.com

• Circa 1833, one W.D. Kellogg published a lithograph entitled A Map of the Open Country of Woman’s Heart. It goes, as the hereby-linked article states, “from the mole traps in the Province of Deception, to the city of Moi-meme in the Land of Selfishness, to the Plains of Susceptibility in the Region of Sentimentality.” There’s no Aorta of Righteous Disgust, though. Speaking of which….
• Yep, it’s the meme of the day: “Binders Full of Women.”
• You’ve heard of wanted criminals (and debtors) getting caught via phony contests and giveaways. But a chewing-gum survey?
• The debut of Microsoft’s “Surface” tablet computer mark’s the company’s biggest effort yet to take control of its own destiny, away from the desktop/laptop PC makers. However, it doesn’t mean they’re actually making the things themselves. Speaking of which….
• A Shanghai newspaper got a guy in to work as a Foxconn factory laborer. As it happened, he got onto the iPhone 5 assembly lines. Note: Most consumer electronics products today, no matter the brand, are made under similar conditions.
• Paul Buchheit at AlterNet lists “Five Ways Corporate Greed Is Bankrupting America.”
• The latest company to be bled to the point of death under Bain Capital (which Mitt Romney’s “officially” not part of anymore): Clear Channel, the owner of too many hundreds of radio stations and employer and/or syndicator of most of the worst right-wing talkers.
• A class action lawsuit accuses Morgan Stanley of deliberately targeting Af-Am households for junk mortgages, believing them to be less knowledgable or to have less access to legal recourse.
• An ex-American Apparel store clerk talks low pay, long hours, and being expected to laugh at non-skinny women.
• Today’s teenage scare story is brought to you by vodka-soaked tampons.
• The Arizona National Guard and its recruiters hunted homeless people in Phoenix with paint guns, and bribed/pressured some of them (and some of their own female members) to show their tits.
• A guy puts a song up on the digital music services. Some other guy “samples” the entire track, dubs a few bird-chirping sound effects onto it, puts it up on the same digital music services, and way outsells the original. The maker of the original gets perturbed.
• The ever-vigilant xkcd reminds you that every Presidential election has set one precedent or another (some more trivial than others).

• Of all the “Google doodles” over the years, this may be the search giant’s most beautiful. It’s an animated tribute to Winsor McCay’s classic comic Little Nemo in Slumberland.
• We must say goodbye, after eight fun-filled years, to the group blog PCL LinkDump (née Pop Culture Links). Its curators brought in fab music clips, kitschy old ads and book covers, nostalgic photos, film clips, comic book panels, and other doses of delight culled from around the world.
• The UW Daily explores the still new-n’-obscure genre of “Alt Lit,” fueled by young authors, small-press publishers, and online distro.
• Would you like some lead in that cheap imported Halloween costume? No? How about some dorky racial-stereotype imagery, then?
• British Columbia’s provincial government ran ads for its employment service. The ads depicted their young-adult target audience as layabouts, girls on the prowl for rich husbands, and, worst of all, as “hipsters.”
• The utterly misnamed American “Family” Association is soft on school bullies, just as you’d expect.
• Wal-Mart workers’ putting pressure on management just might be starting to work.
• Economic historian Chrystina Freeland sees parallels between today’s One Percenters and the rich n’ powerful of ancient Venice. They, too, pursued an insular agenda of more for themselves and the rest be damned. It was a long-term disaster.
• Meanwhile, the Koch Bros. (whom, by the way, you never hear about on Fox or right-wing radio, just as you never hear there about how the conservative movement really works) seem to believe themselves to be above the petty laws of puny humans.
• Perhaps it’s not quite in time to save the timber biz from the construction and newspaper industry crashes, but a guy in Israel has invented a cardboard bicycle.
• Some of the last images shot on Kodachrome film are still emerging into public view. Among them, Lise Sarfati’s images of would-be and former would-be actresses in L.A., now taking whatever work is to be had.

via dailymail.co.uk

via kathrynrathke.blogspot.com

All good tidings and shout-outs to my fellow Stranger refugee and prominent commercial illustrator Kathryn Rathke. She’s created the new official logo for Wendy’s restaurants. The deceptively simple mascot caricature took three years of client approval and market testing.

• I’ve now read ThoughtCatalog.com’s “23 Things To Know About Seattle.” Yep, it’s dumb.
• Did Paul Ryan “borrow” his story about naming his daughter “Bean” from Kurt Cobain?
• The anti-gay-marriage campaign: lying full-time, lying from the start.
• Note to “guerrilla marketers”: Spray-painting your logo on Seattle sidewalks is illegal.
• America’s fastest growing religion: none of the above.
• Once again, “For Women” product advertising proves to be an exercise in ridiculousness. (Today’s example: beef jerkey.)
• The late UK children’s entertainer (and original Top of the Pops host) Jimmy Savile has been posthumously outed as a serial assailant of underage girls. Some of his victims are hounding the BBC to learn what the broadcaster knew, and didn’t do, about his crimes.
• Despite what my ex-boss Mr. Savage might imply, a teenager doesn’t have to be gay to be bullied to the edge of sanity. This is what happened to a 15-year-old girl in the Vancouver suburbs, who took her own life after posting a YouTube video showing how she’d been harassed and bullied online.

It’s 10/11/12! The sort of date-progression that only happens 11 times in a century and is utterly, completely meaningless!

Elsewhere in randomness:

• Tully’s coffee shops try another fiscal maneuver to stay afloat, having been profitable only twice in 20 years.
• One of the three Pussy Riot martyrs is out of prison.
• Convicted serial child-rapist Jerry Sandusky blames his victims. And the media. How typical.
• Charles Mudede agrees with me that ending Metro’s Ride Free Area is a bad idea.
• That silly Korean dance-music video may have some social commentary nested within it.
• Turns out there’s a term for Romney’s debate tactic. It’s the “Gish Gallop.” It’s the spewing of so many fibs in so short a time that one’s opponent is left tongue-tied.
• Robert Reich debunks seven lies about the economy in two and a half minutes.
• And as a touch of visual spice on the first real week of autumn in the Charmed Land, here are some classic pin-up illustrations retouched with the face of Robert Downey Jr.

kurzweilai.net

• Did the U.S. Air Force really think up plans for a supersonic flying saucer in the 1950s? And would it have been practical (i.e., would it fly)?
• What does it mean to be “indie rock royalty” these days? It means you can play Radio City Music Hall and still have to share a studio apartment. Speaking of which….
• KEXP’s pledge-drive playlist of the most important records of the past 40 years is essentially a canon of “indie” music classics, plus a few “mainstream” mentors. Nevermind predictably tops the listener survey. The list is top-heavy with the Pixies, Pearl Jam, R.E.M., New Order, Arcade Fire, etc. etc. The list’s only surprise is its paucity of female artists. The top woman-fronted act, the Pretenders, appears at spot #51.
• A HuffPost blogger disparages Vancouver as “No Fun City,” a place where nightlife is essentially nonexistent. I can recall ages ago when I looked up to Van as having the bars and live-music venues Seattle could only dream of having. Since then, Seattle has vastly changed while Van has, if anything, become more moribund.
• The Olympic Peninsula’s northwest tip has no teen vampires, but it is an ideal spot to measure climate change with solid empirical data.
• Even “underground food market” dining operations (one-night-only food courts) have to have health permits.
• Nintendo’s next game machine will be a tablet. It will also stream video content to TVs. It could be big.
• Amazon’s paying a cool billion to buy the Paul Allen-owned buildings it occupies in South Lake Union.
• Stalking and harassing apartment residents is no way to sell cable TV.
• Seattle’s next would-be mega-developers? The Bill Pierre car-selling family.
• Can the waterfront tunnel be built without massive city subsidies (that the city really doesn’t want to pay)?
• Stranger staffer Kelly O tells a San Francisco website “12 Things You Should Know About Seattle.” These things include (too much) pot, (endangered) graffiti murals, and (yummy) street hot dogs.
• White cops shooting at nonwhite civilians with little or no true justification: it’s not just happening here.
• I had a boring and/or miserable time in the Boy Scouts. But, as we’re all learning, it could have been worse. Much, much worse.
• CNN contributor Simon Hooper asks if we can finally get over Beatles (and James Bond) nostalgia now.
• A self-described “middle aged punk” gives forth a back-in-my-day-sonny lament, nostalgizing about getting beaten up by jocks.
• Don’t look now, but Walmart workers are trying to organize.
• Having solved all of the world’s other problems, 60 Minutes sics its fangs on the designer-eyeglass-frame monopoly.
• Today in right-wing sleaze, two GOP senators are asking defense contractors to fire thousands of people just to make Obama look bad; while Arizona is suppressing the votes of up to 200,000 Latino-descent citizens in the name of “cracking down on illegals.” Also, a Legislative candidate in Arkansas says parents should be allowed to put “rebellious children” to death.
• The University of Idaho’s getting the world’s biggest collection of historic opium pipes. Hey, you gotta have something to do out there.
• Forbes contributor Steve Cooper believes content-based websites could make more money by directly selling stuff on their sites, instead of running low-profit ads for other companies selling stuff. That biz model might work for sites focused on entertainment or lifestyle topics (music, food, bridal, travel, etc.). For local newspapers’ sites, it’d be a tougher fit.
• Don’t look now, but rain (remember that?) might finally appear locally later this week.

via imdb

It’s 10/4, good buddy!

• T-Mobile merges with Metro PCS, avoids local layoffs, remains out of AT&T’s and Sprint’s clutches (for now).
• George Lakey explains how left-O-center folks have to get back on the offensive, and in the process get over “class tunnel vision.”
• The memoir of a former undercover teen booze buyer for the Liquor Board.
• The MTV website still discusses pop music, even though the MTV cable channels have abandoned it. And the site now proclaims that “Seattle Is the New Seattle.”
• The compact disc officially turns 30 this month. The first discs and players appeared in Japan in October 1982, but didn’t show up here until the next year. From that start, it took the CD only seven years to completely eradicate vinyl from mass-market music sales. Now the CD itself, and the whole industry of selling music recorded onto physical objects, is threatened with extinction. There’s a strong underground of vinyl-record advocates these days, but who will rise to defend the CD?
• We don’t have to cringe at the Mariners for another six months (not counting spring training games).