The new year draws nigh. Around here, that predominantly means one thing. It means we seek your nominations for MISCmedia’s 25th Annual In/Out List, North America’s most accurate predictor of future trends (in a vast array of categories). Tell us your forecasts of what will become hot and not-so-hot within the next 12 months. (Not merely what’s hot and not-so-hot right now.)

Now, in random-linkland:

• Knute Berger has kind words for Lorraine McConaghy’s new Wash. state history tome New Land, North of the Columbia. McConaghy bases her tales on verbatim documents of the periods she explores. This gives her book a real “you are there” feeling, and brings to life events and historical figures which have often been laden with Edwardian creakiness (an image promoted, in many cases, by the historical figures themselves).
• Someone’s put together a list of every all ages show ever held at the long-since demolished RKCNDY club on Yale Avenue from 1996 to 1999. (RKCNDY had previously been a 21-and-over venue since 1991; its site now holds the SpringHill Suites hotel.)
• Charles P. Pierce at Esquire looks at one of this election cycle’s wannabe Third Parties and asks what’s the whole point, if it just gives us yet another champion of the billionaires? (Note that even Esquire, one of those magazines that always points with pride to its advertiser-friendly “upscale” readership, now finds the need to jump on the class-struggle bandwagon. This is actually a sign that the message is getting through.)
• On a similar note, George Monbiot explains better than I can how corporate “libertarian” ideology extols the name of “freedom” as it seeks to make almost all of us much less free. (“Freedom Is Slavery,” indeed.)
• For your listening pleasure, here’s Teutonic punk priestess Nina Hagen in her early years, when she was expected to conform to East German aesthetic as well as ideological strictures.
• If you still yearn for the holiday spirit that never was, relive the fantasy in old Christmas catalogs.

My full time (with overtime some weeks) contract position with Amazon.com is now ended. A gig that was originally set to have lasted 7.5 weeks instead got stretched to 13, so I’m more than grateful.

I was not stationed at the massive new Amazon campus at south Lake Union. Rather, I was in the company’s highly obscure back office in back of the Rainier Valley Lowe’s.

(For local old timers or baseball nerds, my desk was where the left field bleachers had been at the old Sick’s Seattle Stadium, home of the old Rainiers and Pilots.)

I was in an office area previously occupied by Amazon’s accounts payable department, for which we occasionally got phone calls, to which we had no forwarding info.

The building also houses:

• the company’s central mailroom,
• its photo studio (where tall blonde models would occasionally assemble),
• a large conference room (sometimes rented out to the guys from the Pepsi plant across the street),
• office-equipment storage, and
• the workshop where they custom-make the legendary Amazon “door desks.”

I got to eat lunch at the fine fast-food outlets of the Rainier Valley; as well as two local indie treasures, The Original Philly’s and Remo Borracchini’s bakery-deli.

I worked as part of a team that varied between 12 and 32 people; at least two-thirds female. Some were otherwise stay-home moms. Some were recent college grads. Some were middle-age cranks like myself. All were damn smart and able to think their way through sometimes obtuse situations.

•

What we did all this time is a bit harder to explain.

On the Wednesday of our first week at the task, Amazon announced a line of new Kindle e-book machines.

At the same time, it announced a new, exclusive feature in its e-book files, “Xray.”

Reviewers have called Xray “an index on steroids.” It’s a hyperlinked list of a book’s references to people (real and fictional), places, ideas, topics, etc. It gives Amazon something other sellers of the same e-book titles don’t have.

The company’s crack coders created a software algorithm to generate the Xray files. But it had trouble parsing the infinite possibilities of what is and isn’t a person’s name (it regularly believed “Jesus H. Christ” and “Jack Daniel’s” to be characters in a story), and what is and isn’t a relevant phrase (publishers’ addresses don’t really belong in an index).

So every Xray file needed human tweaking.

That’s what we did, on the “Xray Quality Assurance Team.”

We used specially-programmed data tools to delete and add names and phrases in the Xray files. (To explain the process any further would risk violating my non-disclosure agreement.)

Our goal was to have 6,500 titles ready by the time the new Kindle models came out or shortly thereafter. By this past midweek, we’d exceeded 8,000. I worked, in whole or in part, on almost 1,500 of those.

•

Since “books” are a widely diverse lot, each Xray editing job was different.

Some titles (self-help guides or tech instructionals) contained lots of phrases but few to no names. Others (short stories sold as stand-alone products) had names but no significant phrases.

Some had compact casts of characters and limited place names. Others, such as epic historical tomes, contained literal “casts of thousands.”

The absolute toughest e-books to figure out were the umpteen-volume fantasy sagas, such as The Wheel of Time and the Game of Thrones sequels. They’ve got hundreds of made-up people names, plus hundreds of equally made-up names for places, tribes, deities, swords, etc.

But no matter how tricky any particular job was, our goal was accuracy above speed.

We picked the titles to work on from a database of Amazon’s most popular e-books, both “paid” and “free.” The latter include sample chapters of forthcoming books as well as public-domain classics. (I helped edit the Xray for The Idiot, and sure felt like one afterwards.)

•

I’ve long ranted in this space and elsewhere that, despite four decades’ worth of pseudo-intellectual hype about “The Death of The Book,” the written word remains a vital medium, commercially as well as in other aspects.

My thirteen weeks with Xray helped to confirm this belief.

The job also gave me an insight into what’s selling in the e-book sphere.

You’ve got all your regular NY Times and USA Today bestsellers, present and past.

You’ve got your expected genre items:

• Thrillers.
• Whodunits.
• Regency romances.
• Sword n’ sorcery.
• Space operas.
• Twilight knockoffs.
• Bridge to Terabithia knockoffs. (In the knockoffs, the fantasy worlds the kids travel to are real.)
• Inspirational lessons.
• Celebrity tell-alls.
• Cookbooks and diet guides.
• Political sermons of all stripes. (Yes, my fellow lefties, right-wingnuts do read books. They read wingnut books.)
• And, oh yeah, “serious literature,” or whatever that’s called these days.

•

And there’s one genre that I, and the rest of the Xray Quality team, were surprised to find so prevalent among the top selling e-books.

Sometimes, it’s euphemistically billed as “erotic romance.”

What is is, is women’s smut.

You might already know that your regular formula romance novels, the Harlequins and the Silhouettes and such, include explicit sex scenes these days. (Only “Christian” romances don’t.)

But lately—and specifically in the e-book realm, where no one else can see what you’re reading—stories primarily or totally about sex, written for and by women (or at least under women’s pseudonyms), have become a major cottage industry.

I’d say they made up a good 5 percent of the database of Kindle bestsellers, at least.

They range in length from full size novels to short-short stories.

Some are self-published. Others come under the logos of established romance imprints, or their subsidiary lines. Still others are issued by professional, e-book-only companies. The latter have authors’ guidelines as strictly detailed as those of print romance publishers.

And formulaic they are.

For one thing, the traditional romance happy ending is a must. No matter how wild the sexual adventures, the heroines have to end up in committed relationships by the end.

The prose styling is also strictly regulated. No Anias Nin poetic flourishes; just simple declarative sentences and an established vocabulary of descriptions. Breasts are never fondled or groped but always “cupped.”

The plots are equally formulaic.

Several of them star mousy, modern-day women who travel back in time and into the arms of shirtless Scottish Highlanders.

In other formula plots, the male lust objects are equally studly—young corporate tycoons, Navy SEALs, cowboys, police detectives, firefighters, zombie hunters.

Or they’re vampires. Or shape-shifters of assorted types. There are werewolves, were-leopards, were-foxes, were-rats, and were-ravens.

And, quite often, the heroine has simultaneous sex with two, three, or four men. Sometimes these men are brothers. Other times they have sex with one another as well as with the heroine. But they always end up in permanent polyandrous households.

The self-published smut stories often have more traditionally “smutty” formulae. Amazon won’t deal in sex stories involving underage characters or blood relatives (except for the aforementioned groups of brothers sharing the same woman). But there are plenty of just-over-18 tarts seducing stepdads and stepbrothers.

E-books don’t really have covers, only promotional images on their respective Web pages. For many low-budget e-book-only smut titles, these images are amateurishly Photoshopped from licensed stock photos, or from unlicensed “found” online pictures. The effect is, of course, extra cheesy goodness!

An anonymous member of our team (not me, I swear) collected some of these images, along with blurbs and excerpts from the cheesiest of these smut stories, and put them on a blog called Wet & Wilde.

This, my friends, is what massive technological investments by companies here and overseas have led up to.

And even if most of it doesn’t arouse me, I’m glad it’s out there.

I hereby promise to post more of these in the near future.

• Update: Looks like B&O Espresso will stay open, perhaps through the bulk of next year.
• The City Council’s trying, again, to ban plastic grocery bags. I say it’s none too soon, particularly for those awkward, flimsy Safeway bags that routinely break or spill their contents. It’s impossible to take them home on a bus and expect to get home with all one’s purchases intact.
• SeattlePI.com’s most famous employee, political cartoonist David Horsey, is going to work for the LA Times. He’ll draw and write commentaries about the 2012 election cycle. PI.com will most likely still get to run Horsey’s work on its site. Since the demise of the print Post-Intelligencer, Horsey has seldom addressed local issues anyway, preferring to cover national topics for syndication. The upside of this move is that, just maybe, the Hearst bosses who’ve kept a tight rein on PI.com’s purse strings might reassign Horsey’s salary to beef up the site’s news staff. The site desperately needs more staff-created content to be a first-stop local news destination.
• AT&T to T-Mobile: Let’s call the whole thing off.
• Scientific American claims there’s evidence for the long standing portrayal of creative people as eccentric. I can assure you, however, that eccentric people are not necessarily creative.
• Simon Mainwaring at Forbes.com claims anti-corporate fervor actually provides an opportunity for corporations to enhance their brand images, by hyping themselves as socially responsible.
• Katha Pollitt has her own take on the late Christopher Hitchens. Among other things, she found him way short of acceptability on women’s-rights issues; even though he invoked those among his excuses for supporting Bush’s wars.

There’s a book coming out called 100 Cult Films.

Its authors count mainstream, major-studio products such as It’s a Wonderful Life and The Wizard of Oz among their pantheon of “cult” classics.

And, aside from treating all six Star Wars films as one work, the two authors list nothing made since 2003 (represented by The Room, Tommy Wiseau’s failed domestic drama later re-issued with a “so bad it’s good” angle).

Has nothing of late gained an avid-enough niche audience to be considered “cult”? And if not, why?

One might suggest a few potential reasons:

• Quentin Tarantino’s distillation of the low-budget action film into the now moribund formula of ironic “hip violence.”
• The big studios’ usurption of what had been cult-film subject matter, in search of multiplex- and sequel-friendly “franchises.”
• The proliferation of direct-to-video product marketed AS wink-nudge camp (see The Room as mentioned above; or better yet, don’t see it).

But I would suggest a deeper reason: the collapse of showmanship, of sincere, high-energy entertainment delivered with gusto. That’s all been replaced by rote formulae intended to appeal to demographic targets.

It will take the true independent filmmakers to bring real showmanship back.

To them I advise: Put your heart and soul into your works. And really mean what you say and do. Even, nay especially, when you’re making light comedy.

This weekend, three major figures from world affairs left us.

• Christopher Hitchens was an erudite and outspoken essayist/commentator on world affairs, peace/war, justice, and religion and all he felt was wrong with it (which was just about everything). But, like several of his ’60s radical-intellectual forebearers, he became seduced by the siren song of right-wing righteousness; specifically, the Bushies’ meme that there was one big “Islamofascist” conspiracy to overthrow Western society, and that the war in Iraq was a valiant counter-crusade rather than an imperial power-grab. But then, his chain-smoking and chain-drinking already proved there were limits to his wisdom.
• Vaclav Havel was one radical-intellectual who never changed his ways, even when it was might inconvenient not to do so. The herein-linked BBC obit lauds him as having brought “free markets” to what was still Czechoslovakia, following the collapse of the Soviet empire. But that wasn’t even among Havel’s chief priorities. He was foremost a thinker and writer. He began by writing satirical plays, which were promptly banned once Soviet forces crushed the “Prague Spring” of 1968. Arrested several times, he never gave up striving for freedom, democracy, and independent culture. When the Slovaks split off into their own nation, Havel oversaw an amicable civic divorce. May we all remember his life’s motto: “Truth and love will prevail over lies and hatred.”
• Kim Jong-Il, with his tinhorn self aggrandizement and his obsession for military ultra-precision in all public spectacles, was regularly depicted as a living joke—at least among those who didn’t have to live under North Korea’s abject poverty and repression. The best hope for the failed state he left behind is that his heirs sell it to the south, in exchange for a cushy Kim family compound in some equatorial land.

If you tried to access this site on Tuesday, you would have found an ugly, undesigned mess.

That’s because my site (and email) server company disconnected me for nonpayment, without previously bothering to tell me in any way, shape, or form that a payment was due.

The texts on the site remained up, but the WordPress-based formatting and most of the images were locked away. It took about three hours to get everything back and properly configured again.

In other news, my current contract job might finally end Friday. More regular postings should follow.

But for now, a few random linx:

• Seattle’s about to honor the now really-really retired J.P. Patches by naming a city dump transfer station after the beloved TV clown.
• The on-again, off-again plan to save Capitol Hill’s beloved B&O Espresso is off again, and the joint will close for good by New Year’s. It had been open during the entire time I’ve lived in Seattle.
• The latest alleged threat to the spoken word? “Vocal fry.”
• Conspiracy theory of the minute: Could former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens have been one of the supposedly, mysteriously ill fated BP whistleblowers?
• Joseph Stiglitz sees bigger long-term trends at work behind the economic blech. It’s a shift away from industry as the basis of commerce, not just in the U.S. but globally.
• Studies show that users of tablet computers and ebook machines are using them quite a bit for long-form texts, causing The Economist to proclaim “the rebirth of reading.” I’ll have more to say (tangentally) about this next week.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times)

Starting in June, liquor sales in this state move to private retailers.

But only at establishments of at least 10,000 square feet, as per terms of the Costco-written and -sponsored initiative.

This means most of the new liquor outlets will be run by big retail chains, not by independent merchants.

Washingtonians will continue to be spared the garish storefronts and signage associated with commercial liquor stores in other states.

But, for the most part, we also won’t get the careful selection and knowledgeable advice an independent merchant can provide.

In and near the Capitol Hill Times‘ distribution area, three independently owned food-beverage outlets have enough square footage to qualify as liquor sellers. They’re the Montlake Deli Market, the Madison Market Co-op, and the Jackson Street Red Apple Market.

The Madison Park Red Apple and Pete’s Wines on Fairview aren’t big enough. To get booze, they’d have to convince the state that their respective neighborhoods qualify as “trade areas.” You see, there’s a provision in the new law that says the state can license smaller stores to sell the hard stuff if there aren’t other liquor sellers in their respective “trade areas.” The initiative’s text doesn’t define those areas.

However, Area 51 Furniture on East Pine and City People’s Garden in Madison Valley ARE big enough to sell liquor. And the new law doesn’t say a store has to make most of its income from food/beverage sales, since Costco doesn’t.

Most of the new places for the hard stuff on the Hill will be the chains. Two Safeways, two Walgreens, one Trader Joe’s, and three QFCs (but not the too-small Broadway and Madison Rite Aid stores). All of these companies, including QFC’s parent Kroger, sell liquor at their stores in other states.

The Washington-only Bartell Drug chain (with large stores on Madison and in the Harvard Market complex) hasn’t said if it will add liquor. Bartell just added beer and wine to its stores last year.

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The state’s budding “microdistillery” movement, including Capitol Hill’s Sun Liquor, will also be affected by I-1138. How it will be affected isn’t certain yet.

Hard liquor had not been commercially made in Washington since Prohibition, until a few years ago. That’s when a few entrepreneurs, with some regulatory easings from the state, started producing and releasing artisanal vodkas and gins. Whiskey, with its longer lead time, took longer to show up.

With the State Liquor Board as their only retail/wholesale customer, these fledgling producers could make one sales pitch and have their product in every liquor store in Washington, and available to every cocktail lounge in Washington.

The new system will be more complex.

Restaurants and bars will have multiple, competing distributors from which to get their spirits.

The big chains (mostly based out of state) that will dominate retail liquor sales will get to buy direct from producers, with no wholesale middlemen. And their offerings may be much more limited than the variety in today’s state stores. (They might even take shelf space away from local wine brands, and give it to national spirits brands.)

Will a Kroger corporate booze buyer in Cincinatti, or a Trader Joe’s booze buyer in suburban L.A., bother to even receive a proposal from a small Seattle distillery (or a small Yakima winery)?

Already, the Liquor Board has stopped adding new products to its inventory, as it prepares to shut down its stores. That’s put a crimp in local distillers’ new-product launches.

•

The changes to the booze biz in Washington are vast and complex. And various business interests will immediately ask the Legislature to make changes to the changes.

It will take a sober head to figure it all out.

Besides my current contract job deep within the belly of the publishing beast (now on week 12 of what was to have been 7.5 weeks), I’m coming off of a horrid and still undiagnosed chest thang that had me coughing and hacking like hell.

So I’ve been spending most of my non-working hours resting, not preparing blog posts.

Here are some random links I’ve been saving up.

• “Metronatural,” Seattle’s second dumbest tourism slogan (after “The Emerald City”), may be on the way out.
• The 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair approaches. The Seattle Channel’s ready with a handy video retrospective.
• Eric Scigliano goes to the once lily white suburbs of south King County to check out the ethnic variety that’s settled in there, as well as the recessionary troubles.
• Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a constitutional amendment to get corporate megabucks out of American politics. Nobody expects the proposal to move an inch in the megabucks-owned Congress. The alternate route would be a new “constitutional convention,” which could put up such an amendment for passage by state legislatures (which are also more or less megabucks-owned).
• The Wall Street banksters own so many politicians that nobody dares to officially investigate all their funny-money nonsense.
• Local music mainstay Jesse Sykes complains there’s too much music out these days. Jake Uitti responds by accusing Sykes of having a “fold city” mentality. Uitti defines that as…

A state of being defined by lack, self-oppression and ultimately the judgment of others.

I’m still on the highly time-consuming contract job I’ve been at for a while. This Monday starts week 11 of what was to have been a 7.5-week gig. But it looks like it’s finally on the closing stretch. I’ll have a full report when it’s done.

Meanwhile, I’ve continued to collect wacky n’ weird links fer y’all. They include the following:

• KPLU revisits out that ol’ regional quandary, do Nor’westerners have an accent or not? And if there is a Northwest accent, how should it be defined?
• Umberto Eco sez, “People are tired of simple things. They want to be challenged.” I’d trust what he says. I like Eco. Even if he’s no longer playing with the Bunnymen.
• Barry Ritholtz insists it wasn’t the poor people getting mortgages that caused the housing bust, no matter what the right-wing-media blowhards now bluster. It was a collapse of private corporate policies that were doomed to fail in the long term; policies instituted here and globally.
• Naomi Wolf claimed online last week that the crackdowns on Occupy encampments in cities around the nation had help and coordination from the Feds. This accusation turns out to be an unsubstantiated rumor. The brutality of those individual crackdowns, though, is all too sadly real.
• William M. Chase at The American Scholar says there was a golden age for college English departments in this country. It lasted for less than 30 years, about as long as the golden age of radio. It’s been over for almost 40 years, with no reincarnation in sight. Chase claims only one thing could bring back student and administration interest in lit studies. That’s if appreciation of great literature is hyped as a worthy pursuit in and of itself; not as a route to a cushy faculty career, nor as a mere sidebar to ethnic/gender studies.
• Meanwhile, the NY Times ponders whether a college degree, as a purely careerist strategy, is worth the cost anymore.
• Katie Roiphe finds lessons in how to live from a man who decided not to live any longer, the maximalist author David Foster Wallace (he’s also one of my own all-time faves).
• Turns out folks other metro areas have had the same idea that Seattle’s viaduct-replacement-tunnel opponents had—the idea that cities need fewer freeways, not more.

Horror author and Seattle music-scene legend Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire is out of the hospital and back home, tired but apparently on the mend.

Lisa Faye Beatty, 47, the third and last guitarist in legendary Seattle punk band Seven Year Bitch, died Friday. She had a motorcycle accident in Mentone, CA, near where she’d grown up.

Beatty had been 7WB’s live sound engineer before she replaced guitarist Roisin Dunne in 1997. Dunne, in turn, had replaced founding member Stefanie Sergant, who’d died under drug-related circumstances in 1992.

The band broke up shortly after Beatty joined it, with its members moving to different parts of California. Beatty played on tracks for a planned fourth 7YB album, which was never finished.

Filmmaker Ken Russell, who passed away over the weekend in England, was an “art film” director who also made (relative) box office hits, an bad boy whose works still stand up long after their shock value has faded away.

A couple of his most important films (Lair of the White Worm, The Rainbow) were executive-produced by SIFF cofounder Dan Ireland at the long defunct Vestron Pictures company. Too bad so many of the Russell Vestron product has never been on DVD. Perhaps this tragedy will spur Lionsgate, which now owns their rights, to get a move on.

Many other Russell works were made for, and are now controlled by, the Hollywood major studios. Those firms have also been slow on getting these modern classics onto disc.

a teenage pugmire as 'count pugsley'

Before he gained national cult fame as “the world’s greatest living Lovecraftian writer,” Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire already had several other claims to fame.

He’d played the costumed mad scientist “Count Pugsly” at the Jones Fantastic Museum in Seattle Center.

He’d published Punk Lust, a literate and intimately personal zine chronicling his life as a queer Mormon, doing restaurant work to support his obsessions with punk rock, horror fiction, and Barbra Streisand.

He’d been a constant figure on the local music scene, sometimes appearing at events in goth-white face paint with ruby red lipstick.

Finally, in recent years Pugmire’s horror fiction has risen in stature, from a few short stories in scattered anthologies to full-length, limited edition books.

He hasn’t been very visible lately. He was stuck at home, taking care of a dying mother.

Now he’s the patient. He’s reportedly now in a Seattle hospital, dealing with a worsening heart condition.

Several days ago he wrote a blog post announcing his retirement from writing. In it, he described his condition as follows:

I have been extremely ill for over a month, and it doesn’t seem like I’m gonna get better any time soon.  Tonight has been one of the worst nights.  I think my ailments are a combination of heart disease and lingering bronchitis.  One of my ailments is coranary arterial spasms, which happens usually when I recline in bed and try to sleep–they jerk my body and produce a little yelp, making sleep impossible so that I am a zombie moft of ye time.

I know no more about Pugmire’s condition at this time. Will Hart, at the horror blog CthuluWho1, is keeping track.

I haven’t been posting lately because I’ve been working overtime at a contract job. It was originally to have lasted 7.5 weeks. I’m now on week 9, with perhaps two more to go.

I’ve also been fighting off a persistent bug. It’s not bad enough to lay me up, but enough that I’m staying home this holiday (rather than risk exposing my 81-year-old mother).

But back to this temp gig I’ve been doing. I’ll tell the whole story (well, that which I’m allowed to tell) at a later date. But for now, I will just say that what I’m doing involves books. They include some of the best, worst, and weirdest books available to U.S. readers.

How weird, you ask?

One of my co-workers is chronicling some of the weirdest at the blog Wet & Wilde. (It’s severely not safe for work, if your work isn’t mine.)