"rupert bear," ironically, was and is a comic in the non-murdoch owned london express.

The sometimes fiercely divided left and progressive factions in the U.S. are today united on one overriding desire.

They’d all like to see the phone-hacking and bribery scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers result in the collapse of Murdoch’s American media empire.

Especially of the (deservedly) fiercely-despised Fox News Channel.

Could it happen?

Lefty pundits are pondering possible scenarios that could potentially lead to the sell-off and /or dismemberment of Murdoch’s stateside properties.

Such a move, these pundits guess, could be triggered by shareholders deathly afraid of the Murdochs’ sullied reputations ruining News Corp.’s American brands. Even if no direct link surfaces between the U.S. properties and the Murdoch U.K. papers’ scandals.

I’m not so sure.

If forced to do so, the Murdoch family could sell off its stock in, and retire from leadership of, the Fox broadcast network and its 27 network-owned stations. That move could avert any challenges to those local stations’ FCC licenses.

(Most Fox broadcast affiliates are owned by other companies. Here, KCPQ is owned by the Tribune Co.)

Such a spinoff could leave the Murdochs still in charge of the 20th Century-Fox film studio, along with its TV-production and home-video divisions. Rupert and his offspring could still own The Simpsons, even if they no longer owned the network on which it airs.

The family could also sell what’s left of the once mighty Wall Street Journal and Barron’s; perhaps to Bloomberg.

The assorted Fox cable channels are another potential matter altogether.

For one thing, the FCC doesn’t oversee the ownership of or content on cable channels.

And when Viacom spun off its former subsidiary CBS into a separate company again, some of Viacom’s cable properties (MTV, CMT) stayed with Viacom, while others (Showtime, The Movie Channel) became part of the new CBS Corp.

The Murdochs could sell off FX, Fox Movie Channel, Fox Soccer Channel, Speed, Fuel TV, Fox’s distribution/marketing contract with the National Geographic Channel, and its partnerships in the remaining regional FSN sports channels.

And they could keep Fox News Channel and Fox Business Channel.

Just to spite us liberals.

And with the money they get from selling their shares of all those other properties, the family could even keep subsidizing the New York Post for a few more years.

illo from macgazette.net

Be restful this evening, fellow Mac users.

The newest version of Mac OS X, version 10.7 (code named Lion) isn’t out yet, despite rumor sites that claimed it would be out by now. You don’t need to clog Apple’s servers to download it yet.

And don’t wait in line outside an Apple Store. This OS update will be sold exclusively as a download.

Why are you supposed to want it? For the “250+ New Features,” of course. Documents that auto-save themselves. Instant full-screen mode. Updated apps for mail, web browsing, address-book, networking, chatting, video calling/conferencing, security, backups and more. A “Launchpad” interface that looks like the iOS (iPhone/iPod/iPad) menu screen. A Mac App Store, just as convenient (and as censored) as the iOS app store.

But take this waiting time to prepare yourself.

Back up everything, just in case.

And check your applications folder. Thoroughly.

You see, Lion not only runs only on Macs with Intel chips, but it only runs applications written to be run on Macs with Intel chips.

It won’t run apps written for the previous, PowerPC-based Macs.

If you’re still using any Mac software that you haven’t updated since 2005-2006, you’ve got something to fret about.

Christina Warren from Mashable has a handy guide for checking if you’ve got soon-to-be orphaned apps on your Mac. It involves the System Profile utility, found at the “About This Mac” menu item.

If you don’t replace those apps with fresher versions (or substitutes) before you dump the current Mac OS from your ‘puter, you’ll still have your documents. But if those documents are written in the proprietary formats of orphaned apps, you won’t be able to read or revise them.

Unless, of course you set aside a bootable external hard drive, or a partition on your Mac’s internal hard drive, with the current OS X on it.

• One of the ex-News of the World editors allegedly being investigated in the phone-hacking scandal—CNN star Piers Morgan.
• Why film industry incentives in Wash. state should be brought back—not just for Hollywood location shoots but for home-grown productions, like the Spokane production co. trying to sell a network sitcom.
• What we miss with Sonics basketball gone—$100 million dollars in economic activity per year.
• A West Seattle nursery owner faces foreclosure, due largely to Bank of America bureaucracy.
• A gay activist infiltrated Michelle Bachmann’s hubby’s “therapy” operation and now claims, yes, the outfit does attempt to make people “ex-gay.”
• The Scott Walker junta in Wisconsin has gotten lotsa money and advice from a right wing foundation once led by a John Birch Society boss.
• Lori Gottlieb avers that “the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods.”
• A Microsoft mobile-software architect foresees a future universal operating system from MS, or a “single ecosystem,” encompassing PCs, tablets, phones, TVs, etc. But it might not carry the “Windows” brand.
• Good news! According to GQ, Seattle is only America’s 34th worst dressed city!

(Answer to yesterday’s riddle: The $25,000 Pyramid.)

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

It’s a shame so many modern-day folk only know Roald Dahl as a “children’s writer.” He was more of a gruesome fabulist, some of whose stories were marketed as children’s fare.

Even the most famous screen version of his darker side, the once ubiquitously-rerun UK TV series Tales of the Unexpected, isn’t widely associated with Dahl. He hosted the show’s first two seasons, which mostly were adapted from his prose. After he quit the show, it continued another seven seasons without him. The show became noticeably lighter in tone as it evolved further away from Dahl’s conceptions.

But for straight-no-chaser Dahl misanthropy, though, there’s no better visual source than ‘Way Out. (Yes, it was spelled that way.)

It was one of the last prime time anthology shows made in New York. It was produced by David Susskind. Dahl introduced the episodes and wrote only the first, an adaptation of his own story William and Mary. But they all display a devilish cruelty.

Of the 14 episodes produced in 1961, five have made it onto the collectors’ circuit, and from there to YouTube. Those can all be found at this link.

Most of them have no sympathetic or even likable characters. There are no Rod Serling moral lessons, and no Alfred Hitchcock ironic twists. It’s all morbid and deadly.

Which, of course, made it a commercial flop.

And so much fun.

You can tell you’re not in Serling-land right at the opening logo sequence. It’s a series of human hands, reaching up in futility from the ground (buried alive?).

street food vendor, 1930s, singapore; from the-inncrowd.com

• More kinds of yummy street food could soon come to Seattle, as a deregulation proposal makes its way to the full city council.
• Also, the city’s asking the state Liquor Board for the authority to let some Seattle bars stay open after 2 a.m.
• Those toll-happy state bureaucrats are thinking about charging for the I-5 express lanes.
• Playboy has a natty profile of fast rising music/comedy/performance-art star Reggie Watts. Unlike New York mag’s Watts profile from last year, this piece gives full credit to his long formative years in the Seattle music scene.
• Lynnwood motorist sees ducks crossing the freeway, slows down. Semi driver behind said motorist doesn’t see ducks, doesn’t slow down.
• Hanford could become America’s newest, glow-in-the-darkiest national park.
• In nanny-state news, some doctor in Boston said obese children should be taken away from their parents.
• Clever Brit engineers have devised a $25 computer (basically a memory stick with a cheap little CPU attached; no screen or keyboard included) that schools could just give out to kids.
• Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell does turn out to have a larger agenda behind his offer to say “uncle” for now on the debt ceiling nonsense. He wants to bring back the “balanced budget amendment,” one of those recurring ideas that sounds hot on right-wing talk radio but doesn’t work in real life. The amendment McConnell wants would impose the same budgetary rules on the federal government that have already made California ungovernable.
• Those right-wing governors and state legislators around the country—how, you may wonder, do they simultaneously introduce the same brutal anti-labor, anti-women, anti-middle-class, anti-voter legislation? A lot of it comes from the same right wing think tank. And yep, the Koch brothers are in on it, big.
• American progressive pundits still seek a connection between the News of the World phone hacking scandal and Rupert Murdoch’s US media operations. Until they find one, let’s remember that the London-based NOTW aggressively spied on plenty of Hollywood movie stars. Its targets included actors working for Murdoch’s 20th Century-Fox—and even the Murdoch family’s celebrity friends.
• As he has a few times in the past, Jean-Luc Godard has again declared that “film is over.”

• Where the state fails, the city steps up, today’s edition: With no more govt.-sponsored tourism promotion in Washington, Seattle might tax hotels for its own tourist ads.
• Tuesday’s County Council hearing on the scheme to impose a car-tab surtax to save Metro Transit: Stuffed to overflowing with citizens, sparse on County Council members.
• You know that deal for Electronic Arts to buy Seattle’s PopCap Games, the deal PopCap management emphatically denied? It’s real, and it’s on.
• Rupert Murdoch will stop trying to buy all of the satellite TV company BSkyB after all.
• So far, the Murdoch newspaper scandals in Britain haven’t been directly tied to his U.S. properties. Well, here’s a fresh, all-American scandal for you: Murdoch’s Stateside businesses not only pay no income taxes, but clever exploitation of every tax dodge on the books has let Murdoch get $1 billion or more in tax refunds each of the past four years.
• Re/Search Books cofounder V. Vale, seeing his industry falter against the winds of tech-induced change, proclaims “If I were an alien from Outer Space wanting to ruin life on Planet Earth, I think I’d invent the Internet.”
• RIP Sherwood Schwartz, 94, the radio and TV comedy writer who became the creator-producer of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Fun fact: Schwartz later admitted he’d named the S.S. Minnow after Newton Minow, the FCC commissioner who’d denounced most of primetime TV as “a vast wasteland.”
• Speaking of which, Joe Berkowitz has handy tips for those of us who refuse to live in televisual abstinence and who continually take gruff for it.
• While on the big screen, Carina Chocano sees all these “strong women” movie characters and hates ’em. She says they’re not identifiable as women, but just as a different set of stereotypes.
• New Lake City strip club owner: We’re really an “adult cabaret,” and a respectable business too.
• And there are many other stories out there, important stuff about the fate of humanity and all. But there’s only one topic on all online users’ minds this day. How dare Netflix raise its rates?

vintage 1940 trolley bus from seattletransitblog.com

• Today is the day. Speak now or forever lose your ability to get anywhere in King County, with or without a car. That’s how big this is. Get thee to the King County Council Chambers, 516 Third Ave., 6-8 p.m. Speak out to save transit.
• Is local weather really getting “wetter and warmer”? Cliff Mass says not necessarily.
• After the state failed earlier this year, the city may strike out on its own to license and regulate medical marijuana establishments. The first regulations I’d want: no pot-leaf neon signs, no tie dyed scrubs, and no public display of the phrase “da kine.”
• City Councilmember Tim Burgess wants the big public todo about child prostitution to become a little less about the rival grandstandings of celebs, politicians, and publishers, and a little more about the children themselves. At least that’s what I hope Burgess wants.
• The Thunderbird Motel that became the Fremont Inn, one of the notorious drug-dealer-infused motels on Aurora shut down a year or two back? It could become Catholic-run low income housing.
• The state’s sending up helicopters to test local radiation levels. But don’t panic, officials insist.
• The old idea to put up a surplus 60 foot Lava Lamp in the tiny Eastern Wash. burg of Soap Lake? It’s on again.
• You might not have heard of it yet, but there’s a longshoremen’s protest at a new grain terminal in Longview, where management has hired nonunion workers. A recent protest got 100 union dock workers and supporters arrested.
• A Daily Kos diarist compares the continuing nonsense over the federal deficit to “worrying about the water bill when the house is on fire.”
• Time claims Americans “distinguish toiler paper brands better than banks.” Insert snarky comments here.
• What are the chances that l’affaire Murdoch could cause the decline and fall of the Fox “News” Channel? Not much, I believe; at least not directly or right away. Murdoch’s UK papers used grody methods to amass information about politicians, celebrities, the royal family, and even violent-crime victims. Fox “News” doesn’t give a damn about information; it just makes crap up.

all my children newspaper ad 1986

Just when we had programmed the ol’ DVR to record the final two months of All My Children, came word that it (and sister show One Life to Live) might just come back from the dead like Lazarus Tad.

ABC announced it had licensed both long-running daytime soaps to something called Prospect Park, a production company run by ex-execs of Disney (ABC’s parent company). The venture would continue production of new episodes, to be shown online only (not on broadcast or cable TV).

Given that online advertising draws far fewer bucks per viewer/reader than broadcast or print advertising, and given that no five-day-a-week scripted TV drama has succeeded anywhere but on the traditional big three networks (except the noble experiment that was Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), many commentators on soap-themed online message boards have doubted the viability of such a venture.

Now comes word that there might be a government subsidy involved.

Really.

The unconfirmed rumor is that Prospect Park was waiting for, and received, money from some grant program intended to help jump start “new media ventures.”

That’s just one of the many still unanswered questions about this supposed reprieve for two of entertainment’s most venerable brands, for stories that have unfolded for more than four decades.

When will they be revealed?

Apparently very slowly.

Seattlest has just lauded this here MISC project’s recent 25 year anniversary (counting its assorted print and online incarnations):

…Humphrey’s voice (avuncular, humorously and gently caustic, with occasional touches of Harvey Pekar’s cynicism and observation, while remaining entirely his own) is rooted in that time and place. It generally reflects the thoughts of those who were embroiled in the DIY fervor of those early days before the dot-com boom took Seattle by storm and altered its DNA for good or ill.

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”

• Gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee made a bold move when he suggested that the state’s Investments Board could put more pension fund money into Washington businesses. Now, Inslee’s backed off that a little.
• Remember suburban sprawl? Now, at least in apartment construction, almost all the region’s new development is in Seattle.
• Meanwhile in the suburbs, local small businesses are among the enterprises learning what they can do with abandoned big-box retail spaces.
• The now-shuttered Columbia City Cinema is a mess. The building, and the finances behind it.
• Nationally, Mark Sumner insists there is no federal fiscal crisis, only a trumped-up right wing power play.
• The group United for a Fair Economy has a chart of 11 different “Things the Wealthiest Americans Can Buy for the U.S. (that most families can’t afford for themselves!).” For instance, the nation’s richest 400 households could pay off the whole country’s credit card debts.
• The Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal continues to obsess pundits everywhere. At The Observer (the Sunday-only sister paper to The Guardian, the left-leaning U.K. daily that broke much of the scandal’s details), Henry Porter claims that, at least in Brit domestic politics, “the door has shut on Murdoch.”
• And an unsigned piece in The Times of India sums up the standard operating procedure at Murdoch’s UK tabloids, even without their ickiest invasions of privacy, as “exploiting the pornography of sorrow.” A lot of U.S. media could be similarly accused.
• We close for today with Roger Ebert righteously snarking against rewritten “easy reading” versions of The Great Gatsby (possibly created for adult ESL classes):

There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process.

As mentioned previously here, Rupert Murdoch’s UK Sunday-only tabloid News of the World has printed its final edition. This final wraparound cover says it all. It calls itself “the world’s greatest newspaper” (a title also self-imposed in the past by the Chicago Tribune), while a background montage depicts dozens of screaming scandal headlines that have, and had, nothing to do with news.

And guess what? The last issue just happens to include a (stereotype-heavy) Seattle travel story.

There sure were a lot of people at the West Seattle Street Fair on an early Friday evening.

The ol’ Junction particularly teemed with kids. At times you couldn’t make your way down California Ave. without scrambling between traffic jams of double-wide plastic strollers.

Chris Ballew’s “Casper Babypants” act had a perfect captive audience.

On the main stage, Leslie Beattie, Kurt Bloch, and Mike Musburger (with the unseen-here Jim Sangster) in Thee Sgt. Major III warmed up an already warm audience with a rousing set. But the highlight of the night was yet to come.

Yes. For the first time in more than a decade, Bloch, Kim Warnick, Lulu Gargiulo, and Musburger were to perform a full set of their intense, brutally joyous (or is it joyously brutal?) power pop.

The street and the adjoining fenced-off beer garden were crammed with geezers like me who remembered the Fastbacks’ 1979-2001 reign. The street also had dozens who had not been yet born during that time. All were treated to one of the most electrifying, frenetic, and all-out rockin’ hours seen anywhere, at any time, by anyone.

If you ever saw the Fastbacks before, you know what I’m talking about. Even if you only heard them on record, you can imagine how great they were this night. All the great Bloch riffs. All the tomboyish Warnick/Gargiulo vocals, singing with gleeful passion about stuff you might not imagine could be portrayed that way (loneliness, depression, frustration).

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?