designsbuzz.com

• The Seattlest gang’s putting out, in installments, a revised and updated “guide to Seattle stereotypes.”
• Neighborhood activists are starting a tiny but intelligently stocked mini-grocery in the Lost Valley of Delridge, an area bereft of places selling anything more nutritious than Budweiser.
• What’s the biggest fear of people buying into a 33-story condo tower? That somebody will block their view with a 40-story condo tower a block away.
• Let’s try to get this straight. A candidate for King County Council has a brother who administers an arts program for at-risk youth. Said arts program puts out, for the first time in its history, a “student made” newspaper. Said paper includes several mentions praising the administrator’s sis and several other mentions disparaging her election opponent. Oh, and the thing was partly made with City funds.
• Microsoft’s immensely profitable. Its stock price has essentially been “flat” for some time. One more reason for America’s socio-economic nabobs to stop believing in the Almighty Stock Price as the all-determining value of everything.
• Progressive economist Remy Trupin looks at Wash. state’s no-end-in-sight budget hole and insists that from this point on, “further cuts are not an option.”
• A hundred years ago, eight destitute young women were killed in an accident at a Chehalis explosives factory. Their joint grave has finally been rediscovered.
• The Illinois company now calling itself Boeing has friends among the House Republicans. That body just approved, in a symbolic gesture certain to sink in the Senate, a bill to strip Federal protection for workers whose jobs were outsourced as punishment for union organizing.
• If we must say goodbye to Cyndy’s House of Pancakes on Aurora (closed as of July after 53 years), at least we can be consoled that housing for the formerly-homeless will go up on the site.
• There was a hearing about a plan for a homeless shelter in Lake City. The senior-housing developer SHAG bused in residents to speak against the plan. One of these speakers called the homeless “garbage.” Brutal insensitivity: It’s not just for Republican campaign events any more.
• Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy: There’s an FBI corruption probe of figures surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and cronies.
• The 3-D movie craze? Dead already. Again.
• How will the record labels survive? Some are diversifying into other businesses. Such as, according to a Federal indictment, international cocaine smuggling. (I know what you’re thinking. Drugs in the music industry? Never!)
• We go out on a snarky note with some books Borders can’t even give away.

• Lake City’s legendary, recently-closed Rimrock Steak House is saved! Well, maybe.

• Starbucks gave away download codes for a “free” ebook. The document turned out to exclude the novel’s ending, telling readers they had to get the paid version to learn what happens.

• Get ready for Sleepless in Seattle, the Musical. In preparation for years, it’s set to open in L.A. next summer.

• The Longview longshoremen’s strike might be ending.

• J.P. Patches, who announced his retirement from public appearances earlier this summer, will make his last one this Saturday at Fishermen’s Terminal.

• Darn. Just when we were getting used to Dennis Kucinich, turns out he’s probably not coming to stay.

• The Republicans have a master plan for winning the White House. It has little to do with actually fielding a mass-appeal candidate (or even a sane candidate), and everything to do with voter suppression and making the Electoral College even more unfair.

• Earlier this week, we discussed an LA Times essay asking where today’s great recession documentarians were. Well, here are two more places to find them—Facing Change and In Our Own Backyard.

seattle times announces the new team's name (1975), from historylink.org

• The always-alert local sports historian David Eskenazi looks back to the first regular-season Seahawks game, held 35 years ago this week.
• There’s more sports-related nonsense from Oklahoma. Both of that state’s big college sports programs are thinking of dumping the Big 12 practice and hooking up with the Pac 12. Comment one: Only if they return a certain non-college basketball team to its rightful home. Comment two: How “Pacific” would that be? Not much. Isn’t the whole idea of college conferences supposed to be regional rivalries?
• If we do get our rightfully deserved men’s pro basketball team back, they could always play in the Tacoma Dome.
• Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 was put on display at a developers’ conference in L.A. It sure looks different.
• State Republicans are drawing up Congressional-district redistricting maps that would create a “majority minority” district, and incidentally decrease Seattle’s voting power.
• U.S. News & World Report doesn’t exist as a print periodical anymore, but it’s still putting out its annual college rankings. The UW ranked #10 among public universities, #42 overall. At least before the next round of state budget cuts.
• Mark your calendars: There’s a “Rally for Good Jobs Now,” 11:30 a.m. Thursday (Sept. 15) in front of the Seattle Westin Hotel. It’s organized by the union-affiliated group Working Washington, protesting the Port of Seattle’s current practices, and coinciding with a convention of port administrators.
• We recently ran a link to an essay on the rise of recession literature. Now, Jaime O’Neill at the L.A. Times wants similar realism and advocacy in the visual arts by asking, “Where’s Today’s Dorothea Lange?” Apparently O’Neill doesn’t know the work of local photog Rex Hohlbein and his ongoing “Homeless in Seattle” series.
• Beware the killer cantaloupes.
• Has the online daily coupon craze passed its peak?
• Poverty in the U.S.: highest since 1933, says the Census Bureau.
• Apparently, the corporate-libertarian attitude toward health insurance extends even to their own staffs. At least that appears to be the case with a Ron Paul campaign aide, who died from pneumonia, was uninsured, and left his family with $400,000 in bills.
• As the rich get richer, so do their “toys,” such as 220- to 500-foot long “gigayachts.”
• Dave Niose at Psychology Today believes some people are simply hardwired to be disbelievers.
• Michael C. Jones debunks the anti-SpongeBob story, in which the cartoon supposedly harmed young kids’ mental development. Jones notes the researchers covered only 60 upscale, white, four-year-old tots:

The effect of the Nickelodeon series “SpongeBob SquarePants” on little kids’ attention spans was tested on, well, almost nobody.

• Let’s close with some stunning Kodachrome images of NYC in 1941-42.

1931 model bookmobile, from historylink.org

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

Back to the present day, thankfully….

• Is food bought at farmers’ markets really not so safe to eat? Or is this just a scare-tactic excuse for King County to massively raise permit fees?
• Here’s a long, sad look at the post-traumatic stress cases at Lewis-McChord, and the resulting suicides, child-killings, and child-tortures.
• The “Say Something Nice” meme has hit Seattle.
• Paul Constant asks whether Nor’westerners (at least in the lit realm) lack ambition, and answers with a qualified no.
• There’ll be a memorial march for the suddenly deceased Broadway barista Brian Fairbrother on Tuesday morning.
• Some modern day college students made a student paper the old fashioned way; the way I did it back then. Manual typewriters. Photos made and processed on film (the school seems not to have a working darkroom anymore). Actual cutting and pasting. X-Acto knives and pasteup boards.

The place to be on a perfect mid-September day was the NEPO 5k Don’t Run. It was a series of art exhibits, installations, performances, and conceptual pieces strung along a three-mile route from Pioneer Square to the top of Beacon Hill.

The name came from the fact that the organizers couldn’t get a permit for a running event, which would have required a lot of street closures.

Besides, if you ran you’d miss the smaller, more intimate art along the way, such as Ollie Glatzer’s four Thread and Nail pieces installed on telephone poles.

Some of the art walked along with the walkin’ audience.

And some of the art involved the audience in little games, such as Encounters at the End of Hing Hay Park.

Unfortunately, the event’s official program did not list all the performers, including this dancer who worked with a twenty-foot train in the back of her costume.

(Update: Carrie Clogston’s blog Gingham and Gold identifies her as Keely Isaak Meehan.)

Once the walkers crossed the Jose Rizal (12th Avenue) Bridge, it was a sharp left turn onto the I-90 Trail. That’s where Amy Ellen Trefsger (also known as “Flatchestedmama”) performed A Good Reminder to Sign Your Work, a series of poems delivered via semaphore.

Erin Shafkind turned parts of Equality, a permanent work in the park (co-designed by my ol’ pal Rolon Bert Garner), into mini versions of the Mad Homes installation seen previously this summer on Capitol Hill.

Laura Dean and Ryan Worsley’s Flock of Disproven Theories Written as Facts comprised original black and white drawings pasted into hardcover books, which dangled from trees with plaques describing these theories dangling from the books. This work also included the Don’t Run’s only overtly political statement, as seen above.

Josh Peterson’s Tree-Map re-used audio chips from novelty greeting cards, which played sounds as triggered by the breeze.

As the trail turned left, walkers were instructed to take a soft right onto 18th Avenue South. This longest stretch of the Don’t Run was on a normally quiet residential street, where old and abandoned-looking houses sit next to ultramodern designer homes. Sarah Galvin read narrative poems in front of an unoccupied house. Behind her in the front yard, anonymous performers portrayed a dissolute man (drinking from a gasoline can), his quietly crying wife, and their grass-eating daughter.

Ken Turner’s Red Dot Genuflection Station invited the non-runners to place red dot stickers (the mark of a successful gallery sale) on an obelisk entitled Little i. It symbolized money as today’s only standard of success.

Mike Pham, clad in gold lame tights, smoked and drank and pranced on the roof of a ’50s Chrysler in L’apres-midi d’un Pham.

Another re-imagined vehicle was this pedal car, adapted from a 1982 Toyota pickup. By the 18th Avenue stretch, the pedalers needed a little help.

In another unannounced attraction, don’t-runners honked a series of old fashioned horns installed along a pipe at a child’s eye level.

Finally at the foot of 18th, one block actually was closed off, and don’t-runners were asked to run to the finish line—in slow motion.

Jessie Wilson’s You Are Here invited the gathering throng to place badges on a wires labeled with the spectrum of human emotion.

The end of the line was NEPO House (“open” spelled backwards). It’s the actual home of artist Karla Glosova and her family. Glosova has staged exhibits and events in and outside the house for more than a year now. This time, it held music acts and little performance shticks well into the night.

A splendid time was had by all.

And if it turned anyone on to the idea of urban walking adventures, well I’ve got a little something that can help in that regard….

scene from antiwar protest downtown, march 2003

After all the recycled bluster about the police and the firefighters and especially the troops, about the valiant politicians and the flag waving celebrities, about the need to never forget the horrible day which begat the horrible decade of the endless wars and the mass intimidation and the institutionalized fear mongering and the ugly racism and the corruption of democracy, what more is to be said?

Quite a bit.

We can remember the World Trade Center’s Seattle architect, Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986). His local works include Puget Sound Plaza, Rainier Square, the Pacific Science Center, and the IBM Building (based on his early WTC design work).

Yamasaki didn’t live to see the towers attacked. But he knew the consequences of war-inspired fear and prejudice.

It was only the intercession of an early employer, and the fact that he was working in the northeast at the time, that got him exempted from the WWII internment of western Americans of Japanese ancestry.

We can remember the opportunities for international cooperation to build a safer world. And how those opportunities were deliberately quashed by the Bush-Cheney regime.

We can remember the Patriot Act, the TSA, the “total information awareness” domestic eavesdropping scheme, the media’s ignoring of an initially strong antiwar movement, and all the big and little ways the regime waged war on its own citizens.

We can remember the Americans troops still in harm’s way in Afghanistan and, yes, in Iraq. And those who didn’t make it back. And those who are back home but seriously harmed physically and psychologically, and who have received insufficient care.

We can remember the thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who had nothing to do with the original attacks but died in the ensuing wars and occupations.

We can remember we still need exit strategies from both occupations, strategies that will protect Iraqis and Afghanis of all sexes and ethnicities.

We can remember the terrible damage wrought on the U.S. budget by war spending, combined with the millionaires’ tax cuts and the rest of the neocon economic misadventure.

And remembering all that, we can say, yes, “never again.”

Never again will we be manipulated by fear, either by foreign civilians or by our own leaders.

Never again will we let peace and reason be treated as dirty words.

Never again will we invade first and ask questions later.

Never again will we strike against entire nations over the horrendous crimes of a few dozen individuals (most of whom had never lived in either invaded nation).

Never again will we allow fear of “Islamic” fundamentalist repression to become an excuse for “Christian” fundamentalist repression.

Never again will we sacrifice our freedoms under the excuse of protecting them.

1979 ad from vintagepaperads.com

• This list of (mostly dreadful) declining beer brands by the Big Two and a Half (that’s AB InBev, MillerCoors, and the Miller-produced Pabst brands) would seem like a ray of hope for true beer lovers—except that their place on the shelves has been usurped by other brands from the same companies.
• Microsoft is putting out a tablet computer next year. And this time, they hope to get it (and its marketing) right.
• A former Sea Gal (the Seahawks’ cheerleaders/dancers), who became a Price Is Right model, was named in a lawsuit by another Price Is Right model against that show’s producers.
• What’s behind the disembodied feet washing up in B.C. and Washington? As Spike Lee once famously asked, is it the shoes?
• The state Dept. of Employment Security is laying off almost 400 of its 2,500 employees. Alas, it’s not due to a lack of work.
• There’s going to be a graphic novel about the Green River killer. Or rather, about a detective who’d spent many years on the case, written by said detective’s son.
• Teamsters leader James Hoffa came to town. He reiterated what he’d said in Detroit about defeating the right wing. That is, he reiterated what he’d really said, not the right-wing media’s deliberate distortion of it.
• As I’ve written before, one of Seattle’s favorite activities is to proclaim “what this town needs.” Now there’s a whole site where you can leave your own ideas in that regard. It’s Changeby.us.
• SeattlePI.com has an intriguing list of local ’90s celebrities and where they are now. No, Rev. Bruce Howard isn’t mentioned. No, I don’t know what happened to him.
• French women don’t get fat, so the book says. But they do get sexually frustrated. And they sue over it.
• Update: A few days ago we linked to a guy who wished Apple would get around to charitable giving at last. It’s getting around to charitable giving at last.
• Half of Americans ages 16-24 are now unemployed.

from thestand.org

• The Longview longshoremen’s labor action has spread to the Port of Seattle, which is what it took to get the Seattle media to notice it. While few were looking, Wash. state became one of the few places where labor is directly striking back.
• Ready for another cold, rainy and/or snowy winter?
• So much for the great biotech job boom hope: Dendreon is laying off at least a quarter of its staff.
• Who’s replacing C.R. Douglas as a public affairs host at the Seattle Channel? The same guy Douglas replaced on KCPQ.
• Update: Here are some remembrances of the tragically gone-from-us Espresso Vivace favorite Brian Fairbrother.
• Seattle-based activists have filed suit to block the State Route 520 replacement project.
• I like the Tiger Bar in Georgetown. It’s sad to hear about one of its owners allegedly going off-hinge.
• Pete Jackson has vivid memories of Everett’s last pulp-and-paper mill.
• The combined offices and server farms of Google are responsible, in the company’s own estimates, for 1.5 million tons of CO2 sent into the atmosphere annually. But Google insists it’s still more energy-stingy than the average dot-com.
• I won’t link to very many 9/11 anniversary hype pieces, but here’s Janine Jackson wondering if we can ever get our civil liberties back.
• There have long been people who’ve whined about the imminent death of “the word” in a culture cluttered up with images. But now here’s a voice from the other side as it were. At the Columbia Journalism Review, Dave Marash proclaims that “for the first time in history, mankind is developing a universal language: video.” In particular, he cites the amazing news footage generated by world broadcasters and by amateurs in this year’s Mideast uprisings. But then Marash bashes U.S. TV news for not showing enough of these pictures, instead filling time with pontificatin’ pundits.

• Radical activists associated with Adbusters magazine want to organize a long-term “occupation” of Wall Street, with the aim to force an end to the “politics of greed.” Paul B. Farrell isn’t so sure it’ll work.
• Bad news of the day: Espresso Vivace general manager Brian Fairbrother was badly injured in a cycling accident. (Yes, he wore a helmet.) On Wednesday, loved ones decided, in accordance with his previously stated wishes, to remove life support.
• Good news of the day: The INSCAPE arts center in the former immigration building got a $10 million grant for needed structural upgrades and interior refits.
• Eh? news of the day: Wash. state’s slashing of higher-ed support was only tied for worst in the nation, with three other states.
• Update #1: The Belltown substance-abuse center boss accused of trying to rape a boy? He wasn’t the psychologist he’d claimed to be.
• Update #2: That Snohomish County stink mentioned here yesterday? It’s chicken byproduct.
• The long-delayed development at Ballard’s former Sunset Bowl site is finally underway.
• Turns out that creepy plastic faced “king” mascot wasn’t the only scary thing about Burger King.
• Tacoma: The city that knows when to say no.
• The City’s got this “Only in Seattle” program, promoting local businesses in various neighborhoods. The program’s Belltown edition was unveiled Wednesday. The four honored outfits were two upscale restaurant-bars, one upscale furniture emporium, and Federal Army & Navy Surplus.
• Coming to a 7-Eleven near you (depending on where you are): A locker where you can pick up your Amazon purchases. 7-Eleven in Japan has had this for years. It’s great for people who work during the day and live alone (or with other people who also work during the day).
• The Wall St. Journal discovers grunge nostalgia.
• The Seattle Weekly/Village Voice Media/Backpage.com sex ad mess just gets messier, as politicians of more stripes use it for cheap grandstanding.
• Cartoonist Ruben Bolling seems to wish George Lucas could digitally alter the past 10 years.
• The St. Petersburg Times fact checked Wednesday’s GOP Presidential debate and came up with at least two statements deserving the ultimate “Pants On Fire” rating.
• Our ol’ pal Tim Harris appeared with C.R. Douglas in a great segment on KCPQ on the topic of “Homeless in Seattle.” If you’re wondering how something this insightful got on a program entitled Q13 Fox News, let me repeat (for what seems like the umpteenth time): KCPQ has no connection to the Fox News Channel (except for airing the latter’s Fox News Sunday “spinterview” show). KCPQ is an affiliate of the Fox Broadcast network. KCPQ is really owned by the (Chicago) Tribune Co. I wish the station itself would make this clearer.

The summer doldrums in news-type postings seem to have ended. Enjoy.

• The hugely hyped fiscal crisis at the U.S. Postal Service might simply be the result of a Bush-era manufactured scheme to bust the postal unions and sell off the whole operation to privateers; a scheme that can be reversed. We need a delivery system that literally works for us, not for hedge funds. And we need first class mail (you know, letters) and second class mail (magazines). Those services, traditionally, have been marginally profitable at best. FedEx can’t do these. It’s simply not built to do them.
• CoCA commissioned a whole outdoor art group exhibit for Carkeek Park. A parks employee decided on his own that one of the pieces, hung up by wires, might hurt a tree. On his own volution, the parks employee cut down the wires. The delicate art piece fell and was “heavily damaged.”
• If you weren’t sure about Howard Schultz’s political crusade, we now know he’s in league with NoLabels.org. That’s NY mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “bipartisan” (read: near-right) PR drive to sell a national political agenda. Said agenda is heavy on deficit slashing and “entitlement” abandoning and corporate tax cutting, and way-light on directly assisting the jobless and the non-zillionaires.
• The “transit improvement” component in the Viaduct replacement tunnel plan? It’ll run out of money even before the tunnel opens.
• The Brightwater sewage treatment plant near the King-Snohomish county line isn’t even running yet, but SnoCo residents are already complaining about the stink. Officials insist the plant’s not to blame.
• The Seattle Public Library’s third annual budget-cutting closure week made the NY Times.
• Today’s on-the-one-hand story: While the city’s trying to squeeze every potential nickel out of every metered street parking space, it continues to subsidize under-market-rate parking at Pacific Place.
• What happens when a multimedia art program in NYC devoted to confronting “notions of individual and collective comfort and the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility” is fully funded by a global automaker? You get some devout anti-corporate pontification against the whole concept, natch.
• Amnesty International’s got a handy, if incomplete, checklist of lies in Dick Cheney’s memoir.…
• …while here’s the oft-linked-to “Goodbye to All That,” ex-GOP operative Mike Lofgren’s indictment of today’s Republican party as an unholy alliance of corporatists, fundamentalists, and war-machinists.
• Not specifically political, at least overtly, is business consultant Ron Ashkenas’s guidance on how to deal with irrational people:

Don’t try to fight irrationality with rationality. It will only make you more frustrated and the other person more defensive. No matter how many well-constructed arguments you offer, you won’t make headway until you understand the underlying motivation that is driving the other person.

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

The Muscular Dystrophy Association parted ways with Jerry Lewis, and cut its annual telethon this year down from 21.5 hours to six.

The two moves are inter-related, of course.

Abandoning the real overnight marthon format for simply a long special meant a lot of the broadcast’s elements had to be cut down.

The MDA show traditionally consists of four basic elements:

1. On-stage entertainment,
2. documentary segments depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as cute crippled waifs,
3. local cut-ins, and
4. plugs for the association’s big corporate and institutional donors.

When the show’s running time was hacked down this year, three of those parts could be reduced in both frequency and duration.

But the corporate plugs still had to all go in.

Thus, the entertainment segments had to be further hacked down.

No more time for Lewis to cut it up with his classic movie-star and song-and-dance pals. Just quick intros to songs and standup comedy routines, delivered by perky and efficient cue-card readers.

So, the 85-year-old Lewis was unceremoniously dumped, for the sake of speed and modernity.

The organization’s next step: dump the demeaning “Jerry’s Kids” typing, and depict its beneficiaries as complete, respect-deserving humans (most of whom are adults), who simply have a medical condition.

Can the outfit take this leap?

Tune in same time next year.

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

College football season is among us. This means I need to remind some of you:

The University of Oregon is the Ducks and is in Eugene. (It is also known sometimes as “Nike U.”)

Oregon State University is the Beavers and is in Corvallis.

I attended (briefly), and am still fiercely loyal to, the latter. Once a Beaver, always a Beaver.