via fastcompany.com

• Dean of indie animators Bill Plympton offers a handy “Guide to Telling Animated Stories.” Lesson #1: “Having a great idea is more important than being a great artist.”
• The New York Post doesn’t like Dina Martina. Of course, they’ve been so wrong about so much so often….
• One reason the Republicans are running so scared this election: it could be the last election cycle to be dominated by TV ads, and hence by the megabucks they cost. Local news ratings around the country are teetering, especially among young adults. (And don’t expect 3D TV to save the business.)
• Buried in this story about Fender Guitars’ fiscal trouble in the techno era is the info that Fender’s biggest wholesale customer, Guitar Center (the 500 lb. gorilla of music-store chains) is controlled by Mitt Romney’s ol’ pals at Bain Capital.
• George W. Bush was kept far away from the GOP convention but is front n’ center at an “alternative investment summit” in the Cayman Islands.
• Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster looks back at his creation, now under semi-new ownership again. Brewster still seems not to understand why the Weekly had become vulnerable to the Stranger’s early-1990s rise. For 15 years, the Weekly had operated under the unbending assumption that its original target audience, the (formerly) young urban professionals of the Sixties Generation, were the absolute only people who mattered in this town or ever would matter. By ignoring the wants (or even the existence) of people born after 1952, Brewster left a huge hole for some underfunded entrepreneurs from the Midwest to fill.
• Jeremy M. Barker would like to remind you that, even when its performers appear nude on stage, “Contemporary Dance Is Not Stripping.” I agree. It’s infinitely sexier.

We continue now to reminisce about the last Puyallup Fair (or the first “Washington State Fair,” since the new name was phased in during this year’s advertising). Of course, if you’re reading this in standard blog order, you’re seeing this second part first. Ah, the Web’s particular slant on the time-space continuum…

Some performers, such as these young fiddlers, were there for the purpose of preserving cultural traditions.

Some tried to turn old traditions into new audience-pleasers.

And some were just for fun.

Of course, all the familiar food stuffs could be had. Some of the same concessionaires have been at the fair for decades; some have no other business activities but this.

Kitchen-gadget demonstrations were everywhere and nonstop; as were booths selling stuff (below).

As were people selling ideas, including the idea of a better future.

As mentioned in our prior installment, fair officials are trying to strengthen its roots as a celebration of agriculture. Part of the plan includes year-round community and demonstration gardens, that would display produce in its “living” form.

The new plan would also replace many of the venerable livestock barns.

Veterinary regulations meant sheep and cattle could not be on the premises the same day. Instead, there was a milking demonstration with a plastic cow. (This, I believe, is where non-dairy creamer comes from.)

No such restriction was needed for the horses, or the young horsemen and horsewomen competing in the equestrian finals. The sign on the fence: NO PARENTS OR COACHING ALLOWED.

No months of training and grooming are required to ride the plastic Wally Gator vehicles in the fair’s massive amusement-park area. Damn, I still want this kind of fun within the Seattle city limits again.

These clean-cut young gents had won a huge-ass plush bear at the carny games. But they didn’t have room (or just didn’t want) to drive it home. So they tried to sell it off to passersby outside the grounds. They even proclaimed the bear was really a magic genie that would grant the purchaser’s every wish.

Sound Transit has a bus from downtown Seattle to downtown Puyallup (via Federal Way, Auburn, and Sumner). It ends at the Puyallup Sounder commuter-rail station, right by a classic small-town downtown garnished with street-corner public art works.

Civic authorities have restored this brick-wall painted sign advertising the company that created both the Puyallup fair scone and KOMO-TV.

A brisk ten-block walk took me to the fairgrounds entrance, guarded over as always by the noble cow heads.

While marketed since 1978 as “The Puyallup Fair,” the event’s official title has always been the Western Washington Fair. A new name, “Washington State Fair,” was phased in starting this year. This will surely lead to confusion with the smaller Evergreen State Fair in Monroe.

But I, along with almost every local old-timer, will always think of the fair as “The Puyallup,” thanks to a TV/radio jingle that has been embedded in our minds for more than three decades.

Along with the revised name, fair officials showed off a plan for a revised fairgrounds. The master plan would rein in the commercial exhibits that have sprawled over more of the grounds, and install outdoor agricultural demonstration areas. The idea is to re-emphasize the fair’s roots as a showcase for people of “the land.”

Other exhibits included a mini “factory tour” honoring the 100th anniversary of a Tacoma legend, the Brown & Haley candy company. Booth ladies outside were selling special commemorative Almond Roca tins. I asked if any of them contained Bjork’s life savings. They didn’t get my reference to the film Dancer in the Dark, alas.

In the fair’s Hobby Building, someone installed a private collection of memorabilia relating to another Tacoma institution, Nalley’s Fine Foods. The diversified processed-foods giant had made everything from pickles to potato chips; it closed last year, after decades of mismanagement by various out-of-state owners.

As a pop-culture compulsive, you know I always adore the collection showcases at the Hobby Building. This year folks showed off their stuff relating to the Girl Scouts (above), Lego, Dr Pepper, Sailor Moon, the Seattle World’s Fair’s 50th anniversary, Starbucks gift cards, and the Happy Face symbol.

I’ll have some more of this lovely stuff in a future post; so stay tuned.

from the book 'mail order mysteries' via laughingsquid.com

• Oh we so wanted to believe the miracle products advertised in comic books really worked as advertised (or at least were as cool as the ads claimed).
• I might be in the minority even among local fans, but I believe the replacement refs made the right call in awarding Monday night’s final play (and hence the game) to the Seahawks.
• No, the Edmonton Oilers hockey team isn’t ever going to move to Seattle. The local visit by Oilers execs is only an exercise in “arena blackmail” toward Edmonton politicos.
• David Goldstein puts the blame for Washington’s regressive tax structure on a state Supreme Court ruling back in 1933.
• Pundits look at Washington state’s political “Cascade curtain.” Micah Cohen at the NYT‘s FiveThirtyEight sees the west/east divide in terms of women’s rights issues…
• …while Eli Sanders dissects how, in the last State Supreme Court race, an unqualified white candidate beat a highly qualified Hispanic candidate in Eastern Washington, even in 40-percent-Hispanic areas.
• Speaking of Eastern Washington, those bigass, electricity-hungry “server farm” computer installations there might not employ very many people once they’re built, but they still demand political clout.
• A judge refused to throw out a class-action suit by female Costco employees, alleging discrimination in promotions.
• TV ads for the gay marriage referendum don’t show any actual gay people. I’m reminded of the 1998 initiative to end affirmative action in the state. The anti-initiative ads showed, as their examples of affirmative action’s needy beneficiaries, only white little girls. The tactic didn’t work.
• The good folks at Seattle Indian Health Services claim the city, led by councilmember Nick Licata, is trying to take over their agency so it can sell the land on which their offices sit to a private developer.
• A national church mag calls Seattle’s own Mars Hill Church (home of “hip” misogyny/homophobia) America’s third fastest-growing church.
• The Northwest’s oil refining capital could also host the nation’s biggest bottled-water plant. What could possibly go wrong?
• The airline now calling itself United (a shotgun marriage of the original UAL with Continental) has posted a nice time lapse video of a Boeing 787 being put together. It’s enough to warm this Snohomish County guy’s heart.
• Andy Williams, 1928-2012: The seemingly ageless singer/TV host began as a child in a singing-brothers act, then jump-started the career of a similar act (the Osmonds). He was a quintessential icon of the square side of the 1960s, smooth and slick and pleasant and never ruffled. He was one of those personalities who seemed to inhabit a world of serenity that flowed all around him; which made his latter-day emergence as a right wingnut even stranger.
• Ben Adler at the Nation says the truly crazy wingnut conspiracy theories and insult “jokes” don’t start on radio or Fox “News”, but at obscure blogs and e-mail lists.
• Today’s Romney/Ryan bashings: Richard Eskow believes Ryan still believes his former Ayn Randian denunciations of Medicare and Social Security. Florida Republicans are up to their old voter-suppression tricks. Greg Palast claims Karl Rove’s ol’ election-stealing dirty tricks operations are still up and running. And Jonathan Chiat visits some extremely rich people who imagine themselves to be America’s most “persecuted” and overtaxed sector.
• Economic philosopher Angus Sibley has a highly lucid, step-by-step breakdown of what’s wrong with libertarian economics.
• If outsource manufacturers like Foxconn in China keep up their reputation for workplace horridness, western tech-hardware companies just might have to return production in-house just to avoid the bad PR.
• Victoria’s Secret has quietly discontinued its “Sexy Little Geisha” ensemble. Anti-racist bloggers claim credit.

via yowpyowp.blogspot.com

Having finally gotten the Boomerang cable channel, I’ve become re-acquainted with the early Hanna-Barbera cartoon shows (Huck, Yogi, Quick Draw, ‘Stones, Top Cat, Jetsons, Jonny Quest). They didn’t have fluid movement but they had great visual composition. They had pleasing character designs and cool semi-abstract backgrounds. They had funny dialogue. Then the company got too big and everything went downhill. This B.C.-based blogger explains it all thoroughly, including the links between the Jetsons look and the Space Needle (hint: ours came first).

• Chris Ballew’s jaunty li’l song from the J.P. Patches memorial celebration is now a video.
• Seattle’s Capitol Hill was rated America’s eighth “hippest” neighborhood in one of those questionable magazine surveys.
• Good (media) news, for once: the Village Voice Media chain of papers, including Seattle Weekly, was “taken private” in a management-led buyout. This might mean actual newspaper people in charge again. And Backpage.com, VVM’s oft-criticized sex ad website, will not be part of the new Voice Media Group.
• We’ve long snarked at TV shows that were set in Seattle but made in L.A. or Vancouver. Now, though, it turns out it’s the L.A. production community that’s worried about “runaway” shows. Of all the new hour-long dramas on the five broadcast networks, all but two are being shot somewhere else. Even one show about young actors trying to make it in Hollywood is filmed in Toronto.
• Take out the highly GOP-biased Rasmussen poll, and Obama’s currently ahead (at least slightly) in every so-called swing state.
• The Obama campaign released a fun little online commercial showing how campaigns take opponents’ statements out of context—using real sliced-and-diced Romney quites.
• Romney’s son admits his dad cheats and laughs about it, then says “that’s what we need in the White House.”
• What happens when a Koch Bros.-funded super PAC tries to stage a pro-Wall St. rally? It gets infiltrated by “satirical” anti-Wall St. activists in suits and dresses.

xkcd.com

Randall Munroe’s hilarious online comic strip xkcd (“a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language”) is usually a minimalistic enterprise, populated by faceless stick figures individualized only by their hairstyles.

But Munroe, suddenly and perhaps for one time only, has gone maximalist with the entry “Click and Drag.”

He’s created an immense silhouette landscape that starts in the middle. You then drag the image inside a relatively small window.

There are ocean waters (with boats large and small), islands, hills, cliffs, trees, aircraft, a skyscraper, radio/TV towers, and a labyrinth of underground tunnels.

Munroe’s stick-people show up all along the way, offering gag lines and little playlets. There are references to Star Wars, Super Mario Bros., Pokémon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Icarus legend, previous xkcd strips, our ol’ pal Sean Nelson, and even Elizabeth Warren’s Senate campaign.

Glenn Hauman at Comicmix.com claims Munroe’s tableau is probably “the biggest comics panel ever.”

How big, you ask?

Some online reviews estimate it at 165,888 pixels by 79,872 pixels. The whole thing, if printed out at an average screen-resolution rate, would be about 150 feet wide.

Folks have made screen shots of the different segments and stitched them together into a single zoomable image. Yes, viewing it this way reveals even more “Easter egg” gags you might have otherwise missed.

I can imagine only two practical ways to turn “Click and Drag” into a real-world thing. It could be published as a folding-scroll “accordion book” (like old Chinese “scroll paintings“). Or it could be installed as a mural in a contemporary art museum somewhere.

Either way, I can imagine someone in charge trying to persuade Munroe to condense some of the long stretches of grassy plains and ocean waves between gags.

chris lehman, npr via kplu

• In my onetime stompin’ grounds of Corvallis OR, an Asian American businessman sponsored a downtown mural depicting tranquil nature scenes in Taiwan contrasted with police brutalizing protesters in Tibet. China’s government would like the mural gone.
• On the 20th anniversary of the film Singles, Spin imagines the film with a modern-day soundtrack (available as a Spotify playlist). No current Seattle acts are on it (though ex-local Mark Lanegan is).
• Most of the hereby-linked article is behind a paywall, but the gist is this: ESPN blogger Craig Custance believes Seattle’s got a great shot at a National Hockey League team, but as an expansion rather than a moved franchise. Custance agrees with similar remarks earlier this year by CBC hockey commentator Elliotte Friedman. (Nobody might have NHL hockey for perhaps a whole year, if the league continues to lock out its players.)
• My ol’ pal James Winchell has a neat piece in the Jewish mag Tablet (no relation to the defunct local hipster rag of the same name), philosophizing on the Hebrew roots and symbolism in the works of Franz Kafka.
• How artificial intelligence is turning out: expect more stuff like Siri, but no human-esque robots any time soon.
• As big chain retailers abandon more and more sites around the country, some of those sites are being taken over by big chain restaurants.
• Danny Westneat asks if Romney’s so down on those who don’t pay taxes, when’s he gonna go after the likes of Boeing? (Or, for that matter, Microsoft?)
• Poll-analyst extraordinaire Nate Silver sees Obama doing better in polls that include real-live pollsters (instead of robocalls) and that include cell-phone-only households.
• Today’s scathinger-than-scathing Romney rants come to you courtesy of Nicholas Kristof and Lawrence O’Donnell…
• …while Jon Stewart tears yet another righteous hole in the blatantly hypocritical Faux News partisans.
• As for me, for now, I’ll just say Romney’s appearance on Univision should have been accompanied by one of that channel’s biggest personalities. I speak, of course, of “El Chacal de la Trompeta,” the masked trumpeter from the Gong Show-like talent segment of Sabado Gigante.

watch el chacal de la trompeta, via youtube

nfl via cbs news

The highly creative leader of NFL Films did as much as any single person to turn pro football into America’s most popular team sport.

His father Ed had founded the film production company, then sold it to the league’s team owners, in the early 1960s. But it was Steve who ran it, almost from the start.

He built a mythology on top of the league’s original hard, working-class image with grainy 16mm photography, Sam Spence’s bold-as-brass music cues, and John Facenda’s booming narration.

He put cameras down below players’ eye level and zoomed them in tight. He miked players, coaches, and refs. He constructed storylines that were often more thrilling than the games his crews documented.

As I wrote in 1997, Sabol turned what was essentially a game of coaching, of the execution and interruption of pre-planned plays, into a morality play, a spectacle of noble action heroes valiantly vanquishing their foes.

Along the way, he turned the lowly highlight reel, that early staple of TV-station filler moments, into a true art form.

seattle chapter, american institute of architects via kplu.org

• What to do with the soon-to-be former 520 floating bridge’s surplus pontoons? Several folks have ideas. One of them, above, is to build a walkway just below Lake Washington’s surface, for the ever-popular “walking on water” illusion.
• Seattle’s own alt-country rising star Brandi Carlile has officially come out.
• Fast Company seems to find it odd that Microsoft’s new hardware products have embraced a newly enriched design aesthetic without CEO Steve Ballmer being in hands-on charge of the initiative. A good boss knows when (and to whom) to delegate authority.
• Amazon’s proposed three new towers won’t just be big, they’ll also be bold.
• Earlier this year we mentioned how the Swedish Hospital system said it was losing loads of money. Similar news has now come from Group Health.
• Private housing developers are getting tax breaks for building “affordable” housing units, without enough proof that they’re actually building ’em.
• Meanwhile, City Councilmember Nick Licata wants you to know that more than of Seattle’s “renter” population, 20 percent spend more than half their income on rent.
• Starbucks now has its own branded home espresso machine.
• If there’s anybody with an apparent greater sense of L’etat, C’est Moi than Seattle police, it’s Bellevue police.
• More first-birthday greetings to the Occupy movement: Bainbridge Island-based Yes! magazine uses a tree graphic to show how the movement has “born fruit.”
• Who wants to keep simple majorities in the Legislature from deciding revenue bills? Big business, of course. Like duh.
• As of Wednesday evening, HuffPost’s Electoral College map lists only one tossup state, North Carolina. Obama has taken leads (at least small ones) in all the other previously “swing” states.
• Richard Eskow of the Campaign for America’s Future claims Romney’s “47 percent” speech reveals the combination of privilege, selfishness, and rage that defines “the radical rich.” (A certain megahome-building couple in Leschi might be considered among these.)
• Those print-on-demand book machines are coming to lots more locations. But will the new models allow color interior pages, or be even halfway decent with photographs?
• Jack Hitt at The New Yorker has a hi-larious “Conservative History of the United States,” based entirely on wingnut politicians’ and pundits’ actual untrue statements.

from an estee lauder skin cream ad

… is at the bottom of this image.

• There’s a protest wake for Metro Transit’s Ride Free Area (something that benefits everyone who ever goes downtown, as well as the destitute) on Friday the 28th.
• There already was an Occupy ___ one-year anniversary march in Seattle, in which protesters raised “Get Money Out of Politics” banners. Look: The only fields money is “out of” are fields that people with money consider to be unimportant (including, alas, online journalism).
• Knute Berger wants Seattle’s streets to stay “messy,” as in not completely grid-beholden. That kind of messy I like. The litter kind of messy, not so much.
• The hedge fund tycoon who hosted Romney’s now infamous “47 percent” masses-bashing speech also hosts stuff that’s way cooler—private mansion group-sex parties. So what’s a guy that hip doing in the Romney camp? Oh yeah, the whole protecting-power-n’-privilege thang.
• Also, there’s plenty of actual bad stuff about Romney. There’s absolutely no need to make up anti-Romney arguments out of misinformation, such as this piece that tries to connect him and his Mormon faith with the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints, an unaffiliated splinter sect. (The FLDS is the infamous polygamy cult where daughters were forced into harem marriages as kids.)
• Anti-anarchist crackdowns continue to stretch the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

seanmichaelhurley.blogspot.com

• My ol’ pal and fellow Stranger refugee, painter/illustrator Sean Michael Hurley, worked the “safety patrol” at the Downtown Emergency Service Center for the past two years, until earlier this month. Here are his poignant reminiscences of this tough job.
• Not since (or even including) Dukakis have I seen a Presidential campaign come apart at the rivets so thoroughly, so quickly. Having apparently abandoned even most of the remaining “swing states” (of which some polls say there are now only six), the Romneyites are retreating to their remaining hardcore base—their billionaire donors. That’s the reason for the masses-bashing speech Romney gave to some donors last week, which got leaked to Mother Jones.
• Next, the Romney cronies will try to double down on the “culture war” nonsense, to try to keep the wingnuts interested in propping up the GOP downticket races.
• Wall Street was re-occupied, with the expected police over-reaction.
• Timothy Harris at Real Change, meanwhile, insists there’s life yet in the Occupy shtick.
• Nanci Donnellan, KJR-AM’s former “Fabulous Sports Babe,” has had major health issues in recent years, but is still doing the brassy-mama act on the air in Tampa.
• Did a European magician try to copy one of Penn and Teller’s (well, Teller’s) signature bits? Or is it all just another of the team’s elaborate hoaxes?
• Today’s lesson in officially homophobic institutions covering up rampant child abuse comes from the Boy Scouts.
• So the organized anti-American attacks in the Mideast aren’t really due to an awful, no-budget American movie. But if they had been, so many more cringeworthy-bad films are out there. Where’s the rioting over Manos the Hands of Fate or The Wasp Woman?
• There are still vast places in America, nay in Wash. state, where there’s no cell phone service and previous little Internet service. Some people who don’t live in these places imagine them to be heaven. I do not.
• A Tacoma teacher says education reform has become like the unsolvable training exercise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I think it’s more like one of those Doctor Who season finales that require a millennium or two to resolve.
• Jen Doll at the Atlantic says the changing book biz means the end of the cloying back-cover blurb. (You’ll also enjoy the article’s stock photo of the old Elliott Bay Book Co. location.)
• Harvard researchers claim “a wandering mind is not a happy mind.” I’d tell you more about the story, but I had these 30 other browser tabs open at the time….

In a publication entitled City Living, you might expect words by and for people who love this city.

But there are also Seattle haters out there.

I know. I’ve seen them.

All the time I’ve been in Seattle (don’t ask), I’ve known two predominant kinds of Seattle haters:

1) White baby-boomers who rant that the city is too big, too loud, too tense, and too full of suspected “gang bangers” (i.e., nonwhite males younger than 40). These folk dream of having a McMansion-sized “cabin” on the Bainbridge shoreline, but would settle for a Skagit County farmhouse.

2) Men and women of prominent ego (of many races, though still usually white) who decree that this hick town doesn’t deserve their obvious greatness.

These denouncers almost always also rant that Seattle fails to sufficiently imitate New York, Los Angeles, and (especially) San Francisco, in criteria ranging from architecture to food.

These folk generally refuse the idea that people in cities other than NY/LA/SF can choose to run a city any differently. All which is not NY/LA/SF, by these folks’ definition, is automatically inferior.

Sometimes, these folk will expect me to casually agree with their putdowns. They’ll ask me what part of the East Coast I’m from. Then, before I can answer, they’ll tell me I obviously agree that this is just a cowtown full of hicks and don’t I want to get my butt back to the civilized world?

I tend to respond that the only thing “eastern” I’m from is the eastern shore of Puget Sound; that Seattle is a fascinating place brimming with ideas and personalities; and that we can do things our own way.

If these folk are still listening, they usually tell me that I’m obviously just kidding. (Which I’m not.)

This is the combination of hubris and willful ignorance depicted in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, the highly publicized new novel by local transplant (and former Hollywood sitcom writer) Maria Semple.

The title character is a tried and true Seattle hater. She’s also a former elite Los Angeles architect, with a Microsoftie hubby and an above-average teenage daughter (and an outsourced “virtual assistant” in India). She lives a life of wealth and privilege; the daughter goes to an elite private school. The family’s even planning a vacation getaway to Antarctica.

But even with everything money can by, Bernadette’s not happy. And, like many unhappy people, she blames her unhappiness on the world around her.

When Bernadette disappears, as the novel’s title implies, the daughter tries to figure out what happened by reading the mom’s old diaries, letters, and emails.

It’s in these documents that Bernadette says what she might have been too polite to say in public. Particularly among Seattle’s well documented cult of niceness.

Among her complaints: Too many Craftsman bulgalows. Too many Canadians. Too many slow drivers. Too many wild blackberry bushes. Too many neurotic moms. Too many self-congratulatory “progressives.” And way too much politeness.

Or for the short version, this is a city unfit for the presence of someone as obviously superior as Bernadette.

But, to Semple, this attitude is merely a symptom of a larger disorder. It’s a stage in the character becoming estranged from the world in general, then dropping out of sight from even her family.

But in a missive revealed at the novel’s end, she announces a change of heart. Bernadette really loves Seattle after all. She loves the gray-wash winter skies, which “felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us.”

Semple herself, according to interviews, had also been a Seattle hater. But, like Bernadette, she’s since changed her mind.

Semple says she wouldn’t write Bernadette’s vitriolic Seattle putdowns these days. Semple now loves the place.

Or at least that’s what she says in public.

You know, to be polite.

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

andraste.com via the smoking gun

• A Seattle fetish photographer puts up some shots taken inside a cemetery. Legal rancor ensues. Trust me on this: The dead people don’t give a darn.
• Heather Artena Hughes, 1967-2012: The longtime local actress/singer/dancer/comedienne did everything from torch songs and burlesque bits to parody wrestling matches. She was a regular in the Match Game Belltown shows. Everyone who knew and/or worked with her called her a near-goddess of skill and verve.
• Nordstrom is expanding into Canada. (No “designer toque” jokes from this corner.)
• Why do the Mariners brass still oppose the Sonics arena scheme? Could it be because the M’s could conceivably want their own cable channel, and any neo-Sonics team could conceivably compete with that?
• The city of Auburn has a “wall of shame,” decrying banks that hold on to foreclosed homes and leave them to decay.
• A JPMorganChase analyst claims the iPhone 5 (just announced this week) “could prop up the entire U.S. economy.” Douglas Rushkoff at CNN is more than a little skeptical about this claim.
• AT&T wants the legal right to abandon the landline-phone biz, and with it all demands for “network neutrality” that keep it from manipulating what websites its customers get to see.
• The broadcast/cable/satellite TV industries, and their attorneys, continue to make the online streaming of “free” TV a near-impossibility.
• It’s a little too late for the chain’s Washington locations (the regional franchisee went under a year or two back), but Hooters is trying to be more female-friendly.
• It’s not much of a comic (just dialogue scenes), but there’s still novelty value to a lawyer making a five-page strip as a legal brief in the Apple/Amazon ebook pricing suit.
• USA Today just brought out a massive print/online redesign. Nice to see a print paper fighting for continued relevance, instead of just fading away.
• Amanda Palmer raised over a million bucks on Kickstarter for a new album. Not getting a slice of that: local pickup musicians on her tour stops.
• The Pussy Riot protesters might get out of jail next month. Just might.
• “Did the Republicans deliberately crash the U.S. economy?” Or was that merely collateral damage in the game of supplying as many favors as possible to its billionaire campaign donors?
• How do you get and keep more women in the tech industries? One way is to not require programming experience in filling non-programming jobs (such as middle management).
• What will it take to get more black ballet dancers?

the impossible project via engadget.com

• Now you can turn images on your smartphone into real Polaroid®-like instant film photos! (Or you could, if the Kickstarter money gets raised.)
• KIRO-TV has now posted the entire J.P. Patches/Chris Wedes memorial celebration, including the parts cut for time from the telecast version. And here’s the band Aaiiee’s song “Boris S. Wort,” as heard during the event.
• Good news, sports fans: Looks like the Seattle City Council has reached a revised pact to get the Sonics arena going, with some developer-contributed cash toward transportation improvements. Now all we need is a team or two to come up for sale.
• Meanwhile at Crosscut, longshoremen’s union leader John Persak reiterates the line that we can only have either a new arena or a working seaport. I’ve already called this BS, so I won’t do so again.
• Rain! Eureka! The Crops Are Saaaaved! (Oops, maybe not.)
• The Wall St. Journal has a major piece about the Hanford cleanup megaproject. The Dept. of Energy is slowing down construction, while it and various other parties argue whether the current design will work at keeping highly toxic radioactive gunk out of any potential contact with the ecosystem.
• The Slut Walk might not be “redefining feminism” (as the hereby linked Linda Thomas story suggests), but it and similar protests are helping redefine the range of “acceptable” looks/attitudes among those trying to persuade.
• Some parents don’t like the fact that the Seattle Public Schools are accepting advertising again. Their means of protest: an ad.
• NIMBY-ism gone tricky: A Montlake neighborhood group doesn’t want walking/bike lanes on any new 520 bridge.
• Digital media advertising grew in the first half of this year. But print media advertising fell more than digital grew. A lot more.
• Toys “R” Us will sell its own branded Android tablet.
• “We all live in a narco submarine….”
• Third-world forced prostitution is just as tragic when it involves men.