from bellevuebusinessjournal.com

• One of Bellevue’s truly worthy cultural institutions is closing, alas. It’s the doll museum.
• Organized flea markets and craft/vintage-wear group sales have been the rage this summer on Capitol Hill. One such enterprise took up shop on city sidewalks, which led City officials to crack down. Without a permit, that market (cleverly named “BadWill”) won’t be back.
• Certain Everett School Board members seem to need a time out period in the corner.
• Is it an attack on the poor to get rid of Metro’s ride free area? Or to drop one of the south end’s major artery bus routes?
• Forbes calls Melinda Gates the world’s sixth most powerful woman. Eight slots above Oprah, in case you’re counting.
• Some pundits predict that with Libya’s revolution down to the final mopping up, it’s time to look toward Syria for the next sequel.
• Remember when Iceland was going broke, having gotten too affected by the global banking kablooey? They’re poised for a big recovery/comeback. And without the enforced austerity or corporate welfare the global economic czars demanded.

Steve Jobs had essentially retired from Apple Inc.’s day to day management back in January. On Wednesday he simply made this move official.

Thus ends the second (third, if you count the NExT/early Pixar years) era of Jobs’s involvement in, and leadership of, the digital gizmo industry.

I will leave it to others more laser-focused on that industry to give the big picture of Jobs’s work and legacy. But here are a few notes on it.

Jobs and Steve Wozniac did not, by themselves, “invent the personal computer.” Many individuals and companies had seen what the early mainframes could potentially do in the hands of smaller-than-corporate users. The early “hacker culture” was a tribe of programmers who worked in corporate, institutional, and particularly collegiate computing centers, who snuck in personal projects whenever and wherever they could get processor time.

As the first microprocessor chips came on the market, several outfits came up with primitive programmable computer-like devices built around them, initially offering them in kit form. One of those kit computers was Jobs and Wozniak’s Apple (posthumously renamed the Apple I).

That begat the pre-assembled (but still user-expandable) Apple II. It came out around the same time as Commodore and Radio Shack’s similar offerings. But unlike those two companies, the two Steves had nerd street cred. This carefully crafted brand image, that Apple was the microcomputer made by and for “real” computer enthusiasts, helped the company outlast the Eagles, Osbornes, Kaypros, Colecos, and Tandons.

Then the IBM PC came along—and with it MS-DOS, and the PC clones, and eventually Windows.

In response, Jobs and co. made the Apple III (a failure).

Then the Lisa (a failure, but with that vital Xerox-borrowed graphic interface).

Then came the original Macintosh.

A heavily stripped-down scion of the Lisa, it was originally capable of not much besides enthralling and inspiring tens of thousands into seeing “computers” for potential beyond the mere manipulation of text and data.

The Mac slowly began to fulfill this potential as it gained more memory, more software, and more peripherals, particularly the Apple laser printer that made “desktop publishing” a thing.

But Jobs would be gone by then. Driven out by his own associates, he left behind a company neither he nor anyone else could effectively run.

Jobs created the NExT computer (a failure, but the machine on which Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web), and bought Pixar (where my ol’ high school pal Brad Bird would direct The Incredibles and Ratatouille).

The Mac lived, but didn’t thrive, in the niche markets of schools and graphic design. But even there, the Windows platform, with its multiple hardware vendors under Microsoft’s OS control, threatened to finally smother its only remaining rival.

Back came Jobs, in a sequence of maneuvers even more complicated than those that had gotten him out of the company.

Out went the Newton, the Pippin, the rainbow logo hues. In came the candy colored iMac and OS X.

And in came a new business model, that of “digital media.”

There had been a number of computer audio and video formats; many of them Windows-only. For the Mac to survive, Apple had to have its own audio and video formats, and they had to become “industry standards” by being ported to Windows.

Thus, iTunes.

And, from there, the iTunes Store, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and an Apple that was less a computer company and more a media-player-making and media-selling company. The world’s “biggest” company, by stock value, for a few moments last week.

Jobs turned a strategy to survive into a means to thrive.

Along the way he helped to “disrupt” (to use a favorite Wired magazine cliche) the music, video, TV,  cell-phone, casual gaming, book publishing, and other industries.

We have all been affected by Jobs, his products, and the design and business creations devised under his helm.

He’s backing away for health reasons. But we’ve all been the subjects of his own experiments, his treatments for “conditions” the world didn’t know it had.

•

The post-Jobs Apple is led by operations chief Tim Cook, whom Gawker is already calling “the most powerful gay man in America.” That’s based on speculation and rumor. Cook hasn’t actually outed himself, keeping his private life private.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.

The Puget Sound Business Journal has been running a reader poll to name “Seattle’s most respected brand.”

The finalists are Windermere Real Estate and Chateau Ste. Michelle.

Other contenders included Nordstrom, Canlis, Columbia Bank, the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Starbucks, the Perkins Coie law firm, and Northwest Harvest.

But where were Dick’s Drive-Ins, Pyramid Ales, Fantagraphics, Big John’s PFI, Sub Pop, or Tim’s Cascade Chips?

Oh right. They’re not freakin’ upscale enough.

Then forget it.

• Juan Cole does something that a lot of pundits do, to my dismay. He posts a list of the “Top Ten Myths About the Libya War.” But he never quotes or cites these memes he’s denouncing. Who actually claimed Gaddafi was a “progressive,” or that he would not have massacred more of his own people given the chance? Cole only sources one of the assertions he puts down, quoting Alexander Cockburn as saying the war would end badly and Libya could get broken up at its end.
• Here’s the full text of Dennis Kucinich’s Hempfest speech calling for “a new activism in the United States.”
• Is it culturally insensitive to call a young boys’ sports league “midget football?”
• Much of Capitol Hill, including big swaths of Broadway and Pike/Pine, were rendered powerless by an electrical blackout Monday afternoon/evening. It lasted just long enough to mess up the commute home and close bars during happy hour.
• A Seattle U. report claims the South Lake Union developments have generated all the jobs they were predicted to generate back in the early 2000s, and a little more.
• The state’s now making the sellers of toys, cosmetics, and baby products reveal when their products contain any harmful chemicals.
• Mercer Island (sort of) street theater, part 2: Lefties put up a huge bare-butt balloon near Seward Park, with the caption SHARED SACRIFICE MY ASS. It was hoisted within view of Paul Allen’s M.I. compound.
• In case you wondered, the Elwha Dam will be dismantled, not imploded.
• Is this what we’ve descended to, a guy (author-essayist Sam Harris) pleading with America’s rich to put their money behind something, anything, more noble than their own selves?
• Hollywood scholar Matthias Stork has a name for loud, frenetic, disjointed action movies. He calls them “chaos cinema.” And he doesn’t like it:

It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits.… It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.

• R.I.P. Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, who’d led his left-of-center bloc’s recent push to become that country’s Official Opposition (i.e., #2 in number of Parliament seats). That was in May. In July he stepped down from the NDP, announcing he had cancer. Layton was a fighter for workers, for the homeless, for the environment, and for preserving Canada’s superior health care system.

The cowriter (with Mike Stoller) of countless hits for Elvis, Peggy Lee, Ben E. King, Shirley Bassey, Big Mama Thornton, Bill Haley, the Drifters, the Coasters etc. died 34 years to the week after Presley’s own death.

While Leiber and Stoller hadn’t many new hits after their ’50s-’60s heyday, their older songs remained alive in the oldies canon, as well as in the general culture.

Alice Walker wrote an oft-reprinted 1983 essay lauding Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog” as superior to Presley’s (an opinion with which Leiber agreed).

Twenty years ago, the Broadway revue Smokey Joe’s Cafe mixed slick-sanitized renditions of 40 Leiber/Stoller oldies within a fab-’50s nostalgia theme.

In the early 2000s, Leiber was an outspoken co-plaintiff in the record industry’s lawsuits to shut down online file sharing.

And, of course, there was the Leiber/Stoller tribute episode of American Idol this past May with guest star Lady Gaga.

1. Saw rePRODUCTION, a one-night-only burlesque revue at Theatre Off Jackson, a benefit for NARAL Pro-Choice Washington. The dozen or so acts were even more whimsical and comedy-based than most neo burlesque routines. This only made them more, not less, sexy. The sequence of stripping-to-pasties performances was broken up with a male stripper, a male puppeteer, a female acrobat (doing an aerial suspension routine from TOJ’s lowish ceiling), a drag king MC, and M/F and F/F duets. The acts’ themes included sex ed, contraception, female ejaculation (yes, there was prop-activated “squirting” into the audience), breast self examination, unicorn-on-woman fantasy sex, menstruation, STDs (with a dancer who strips off her bottom garment to reveal plastic toy “crabs” on her G string), and an anti-abortion protestor who winds up needing the procedure herself (performed un-preachy). It was a lovely time, ecstatically pro-sexuality and pro-empowerment. Because I sat in the front row, I had the following tossed at me from the stage: A stripper’s silk glove; a baby doll; condoms; a (thankfully fake) used tampon.
2. Attended, and briefly participated in, E Meets West, the Elvis karaoke spectacular at the Feedback Lounge, down in West Seattle’s fabulous Fauntleroy. The magnificent Helen Anne Gately was there, large & in charge. The thing about Presley “tribute artists” is the amount of creativity and individualism available, within (and perhaps because of) the discipline of a fixed repertoire of songs and the range of the Presley stage personae (from 1954 leather to 1977 glitter).

OK, so Seattle is one of America’s most predominantly caucasian big cities.

But it’s not nearly as totally white as some people seem to think it is.

Enter Sarah Lippek, who offers “a few words on the purported whiteness of my hometown:”

If you do not see people of color on your block, at your job, or in your schools, it is decidedly NOT because Seattle’s population is too white. It’s because your block, your job, and your school are actively maintaining racial segregation.

Lippek then explains our town’s history of restrictive “racial covenants” in real estate contracts. From there, she relates that while minorities aren’t legally forbidden from owning homes in large parts of the city any more, the legacy continues:

These boundaries were drawn by racist law, and are enforced by income inequity, imprisonment and disenfranchisement, the property-tax based education system, the drug war, repressive police strategies – and by white peoples’ continued willful blindness to the very existence of people of color in the city.

from stouttraveladventure.blogspot.com

• Tim Egan advises all weekend adventurers: When you go to the wilderness, expect conditions to be, well, wild.
• In today’s “fun with land use signs” news, somebody put up a fake sign on the fence outside one of the city’s several hole-in-the-ground lots where development got stopped three years ago. The new sign fictionally claims the hole will remain a hole, to be used as a “ground level ball pit pond containing 1,200,000 cu. ft. of rainbow plastic balls.”
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: For the second week in a row, its cover story is faxed in from another Village Voice Media paper, with some local-angle paragraphs inserted.
• Wazzu to in-state students: “The UW doesn’t love you; we do.”
• Starbucks boss Howard Schultz might not be giving money to politicians, but his company sure still is.
• Neighbours, the legendary Capitol Hill gay disco, threatens to sue the state over those suddenly imposed “opportunity to dance” taxes.
• Clarification: Even if Hewlett-Packard spins off or sells of its personal computer line (the company only says it’s “exploring” such moves), it’s keeping HP’s printers and their way profitable ink cartridges.
• Netscape (the first dot-com stock bubble company) founder Mark Andreessen sees HP’s move away from selling tangible physical products as more proof of how “software is eating the world.”
• The NY Times has discovered “the dollar store economy.” Naturally, the NYT sees it from the point of view of corporate management, not desperate customers.
• Could green tech be the next recession-killing boom industry (and/or the next investment bubble)?
• As another long-thought-invincible dictator fades into invisibility (at this writing), one domestic financial analyst is quoting Karl Marx to describe the U.S. economic (and hence political) unraveling. (He’s neither predicting nor calling for any revolutionary uprising here.)
• But enough of the gloom. Let’s close this installment on a happy, fun-filled note. The laugh track machine, a pioneering landmark of tape-loop technology whose canned guffaws peppered countless sitcoms, variety shows, and even cartoons from the 1950s through the 1980s, was found earlier this year, by PBS’s Antiques Roadshow.

from pulpcovers.com

• Teenage boys don’t read “young adult” fiction. Publishing industry people and school administrators want to change that, by supplying printed-word versions of video-game-esque adventures and sports-heroism sagas. It’s apparently not working. The answer, if you’re not a school administrator, is simple—pulp!
• OKCupid.com claims Portland and Seattle top the nation in personal ads from people “seeking casual sex.” It doesn’t say whether any of the advertisers actually attain their goal.
• From where you wouldn’t expect street theater, some 200 people dressed in Great Depression character costumes held a “soup line” vigil outside Rep. Dave Reichert’s Mercer Island office.
• Local directing wonderkind Lynn Shelton says she won’t be able to make any more movies in Washington until the state brings back filmmakers’ tax incentives.
• As new gambling opportunities have sprouted around the country, horse racing’s taken a nosedive. Fewer races are being staged, and fewer horses are being bred to run in them. One bright spot in the biz: Emerald Downs.
• Are Seafair and Daffodil Festival queens really insufficiently qualified to run for Miss America? And is this another example of our state falling behind in preparing its youth?
• As the Mitt Romney Presidential campaign ramps up, it’s time for a look back to the roots of anti-Mormon fervor. According to authors David Bigler and Will Bagley, it dates back to the initial spread of the LDS “tribe” across the inland west, back in the frontier days.
• Lame excuse dept: Hershey’s made money by having foreign students come to the U.S. for what the students thought would be an educational adventure but turned out to be sub-minimum-wage factory work. Hershey’s now tries to get away with it by saying it was really a subcontractor that did it.
• The latest fad in online fraud? “Review mills” churning out fake accolades for restaurants, books, or anything else you want accoladed.
• Financial analysts examined Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s cell phone division. Their conclusion: Google “bought a patent portfolio and got a mobile phone business thrown in for free.”
• And few seem to have noticed, but this month is the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC. And of the operating software running it, a little something called MS-DOS from a little company on the Eastside.

1983 ad from vintagecomputing.com

• Hewlett Packard’s spinning off or selling its PC hardware business, and shutting down its smartphone and tablet lines altogether. The hereby linked article doesn’t mention HP’s printers, or their worth-their-weight-in-gold ink cartridges.
• Krist Novoselic’s staging an all-star Nevermind tribute show on Sept. 20, during the breakthrough Nirvana album’s 20th anniversary week. It’ll be a fundraiser for Susie Tennant, a longtime local music industry fixture who’s going through some nasty cancer treatments.
• Sarah Ann Lloyd at Seattlest’s take on the state’s drive to make bars pay thousands in back “opportunity to dance” taxes, which the bars had never heard of before: It’s a vague ordinance, open to too-wide interpretation.
• As we’ve already reported, the County Council’s compromise to save Metro Transit includes dumping the downtown Ride Free Area, starting in Oct. 2012. Real Change’s Timothy Harris alleges Metro management was in on “this opportunistic attack on the poor,” in order to “get the visible poor off the bus.”
• Stephen H. Dunphy at Crosscut claims there are “two economies” in the Seattle area, (1) high-tech and (2) everything else. Guess which one’s actually working?
• If you’re in that stagnant second economy, you might consider retraining in a new field. If so, you might think of this as absolutely the wrong time to slash community college funding.
• Casino losses have funded something important. It’s the Tulalip Tribes’ new $19 million cultural heritage center.
• In non-tunnel road news, construction of the new 520 bridge is set to start next year, even though the state doesn’t have the money to build anything on the bridge’s Seattle end.
• There are (relatively) little guys in the gasoline business. They’re the station owners, trapped in unequal marriages with their franchisor/suppliers. One such case has resulted in 17 ex-Arco stations in Tacoma and environs and a bitter legal dispute between a multi-station franchisee and BP.
• Can ex-UW president Mark Emmert, now running the NCAA, actually do anything to stem big-money corruption in college sports?
• Bill Clinton now claims to be a vegan. Does that mean he’s going to become as annoyingly sanctimonious as the rest of ’em?
• Someone’s found a use for print newspapers! It involves stealing them in bulk for the purpose of “extreme couponing.”
• Here comes the backlash against Standard & Poor’s, about three years late.
• According to the “hacktivists” at Anonymous, a defense contractor and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got together to infiltrate and sabotage progressives in online social networks. One scheme involved fake a Facebook profile using the real name of a Maxim model.
• R.I.P. Gualtiero Jacopetti, creator of the original Mondo Cane and many of the “shockumentary” films that followed it.
• Elsewhere in filmland, here’s an essay praising Chinese underground cinema as real independent cinema. No official support. No submissions to state censorship committees. No theatrical or above-ground video releases. No commercial potential. No careerist ambition. No bosses except Art herself.
• Here’s a Vegas hotel implosion story with a difference—the 27-story tower has never been opened.

• Ex-Seattleite Tom Spurgeon wrote for The Comics Journal after I left there, then wrote for the Stranger after I left there. More recently, he’s had a debilitating medical condition, which he doesn’t fully explain in his hereby-linked essay. What he does discuss are his thoughts during his enforced bedrest, about comics, film, and being human.
• At least five enlisted personnel at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have committed suicide in less than two months. More needless casualties of the two needless wars.
• State officials found what they apparently thought was a simple “tax loophole” whose “closing” would generate much-needed revenue. It involves imposing “dance taxes” on bars and nightclubs—retroactively—based on a decades-old ordinance intended to regulate exercise studios. Some clubs say it could put them out of business.
• Unemployment in our state is still icky big.
• Amazon boss Jeff Bezos just gave $10 million to the Museum of History and Industry’s new complex at Lake Union Park, set to open late next year.
• If you don’t have enough to be scared of, just think about the “brain-eating amoeba.”
• Headline of the day: “Social Security Declares 14,000 Living People Dead Every Year.”
• The amorphous tangle of billionaire-funded “populist uprisings” collectively known as the “tea party” is massively unpopular. I mean massively.
• PBS’s Judy Woodruff tries to explain the consequences of extreme wealth inequality on a show underwritten by corporate funders out for a nearly-exclusively upscale audience…
• …while Amanda Marcotte (no, I don’t expect you to know all these web-pundit names) looks at right-wingers’ replies to the Verizon strike and declares we’re living in a new feudalism. So where are all the Renaissance Faire costumes?
• Among the top-grossing movies so far this year, you have to go down to position #8 to find a live-action, non-sequel, non-superhero film (Bridesmaids).

from thepoisonforest.com

• Gov. Gregoire wants the feds to consider declaring all of Wash. state a farm disaster area, due to this year’s long, cold, wet weather.
• The Seattle waterfront tunnel referendum, in which a “no” vote meant disapproval of the deeply boring tunnel scheme, got a seemingly unassailable 60-percent “yes” vote.
• In the City Council primaries, Jean Godden got under 50 percent of the vote; her general election challenger will likely be Bobby Forch. All other incumbents are sailing through into the general election.
• Earlier Tuesday, the City Council put a $60 car tab surcharge on the November ballot. It would fund assorted “transportation improvements,” i.e. transit and roads. (This is different from the $20 car tab surcharge approved by King County in order to save Metro Transit from the massive sales-tax collapse.)
• Today (Wednesday) marks the 25th anniversary of Rachel, the fundraising pig statue at the Pike Place Market. Yes, there will be a public event at noon. Yes, it will involve fundraising, for the Market Foundation.
• The Twin Teepees, Chubby & Tubby, the Playland Amusement Park—they all live again on the new Aurora Avenue commemorative mural. It’s at the east side of Aurora at N. 105th St.
• We’ve just one more month until Ballard’s legendary Totem House fish n’ chips shop reopens as a branch of Red Mill Burgers. The signature totem pole has been refurbished and re-installed.
• Could our region have another “La Nina” winter? Who the heck knows?
• The state Liquor Board will let sidewalk cafes serving booze go up in more places.
• So where are all the “green jobs” promised when the city got a big federal grant to help weatherize homes and businesses? The city says they’re coming, maybe later this year.
• Author Larry Sabato believes we’re in an age of “junkyard journalism” and have been since approx. 1979—well before Fox, even before Limbaugh.
• Verizon’s got big profits, but still wants workers to take big pay and benefit cuts. The response: 45,000 of said workers have walked out.
• Where do people think the economy these days is actually doing fine? In Washington DC, of course.
• You can’t even get into the same room with some Republican candidates unless you pay them.
• Psychiatry prof Nassir Ghaemi thinks when it comes to our leaders, sanity is way-overrated.
• The Mariners no longer have the baseball player named Milton Bradley, but the Seahawks just signed a football player named Atari Bigby. His highlight tapes should be accompanied by the “Pole Position” song, with hits denoted by the spaceship-explosion sound from “Berzerk.” The team’s defensive formations should look like the attack formations from “Space Invaders.”

One of the Seattle attorneys suing Apple and five big book publishers for e-book “price fixing” explains why he did it (without saying whether or not Amazon’s involved in his move):

The new system was clearly not helpful to consumers, as it meant that they could no longer shop for a bargain amongst retailers. Instead, prices at each retailer would be identical. Alongside the elimination of competition between retailers over price, the agency model allowed, we believe, a 30 to 50 percent increase in the price of the ebooks.

Each publisher’s decision to sign an agreement with Apple was not illegal by itself. What would be illegal, however, would be the coordination of five of the largest publishers joining forces to thwart price competition. Given the nearly simultaneous timing of the actions of these five publishers, and the fact that their actions coincided with the launch of the iPad, we believe there was coordination.

• The rules of cricket.
• The real names of the Residents.
• Who the characters “really were” in any ’50s-’60s novel set in New York City.
• What’s under a kilt.
• What’s under a Utilikilt.
• What heroin use feels like.
• What (insert name of debilitating disease here) feels like.