This week we must say goodbye to the KFC restaurant at 1001 East Pine.

For decades, it was a welcome sight to nightclubbers seeking a pre-drinking meal, regular working folk seeking an affordable treat, and defiant carnivores who loved its wafting aromas signifying a Hill holdout for un-PC eating.

It was built in the mid-1950s as Gil’s Drive-In, part of a small regional chain started by Gill and Alma Centioli. When Kentucky Fried Chicken first rolled out as a franchise brand, Gil’s three locations offered it as a sideline to their burger-based menus.

By the mid-1960s, the Centolis remodeled Gil’s to conform to KFC’s chainwide branding. (They eventually owned more than 60 KFCs in the metro area.) But the Capitol Hill location remained listed as “Gil’s Drive-In” in industry directories. Restaurant-directory Web sites picked up this oddity, and continued to direct users toward this phantom burger stand.

(The Centiolis’ daughters were involved in the founding of Pagliacci’s Pizza and Merlino Fine Foods; their son owns the regional rights to Krispy Kreme.)

Jack in the Box, recently displaced from its own Broadway site, is said to be taking over the location. It’ll be a few months before the place is remodeled and reopened.

(Update: However, there’s a curious Craigslist posting claiming the site’s currently available, implying another chain doesn’t have it yet.)

One of Frank Zappa’s kids will edit Disney comics.

Now the Great Gazoo will never get back to his home planet.

Hydrox is coming back!

“Sun screen lotion threatens coral.”

…posting online, back in the (mem-O-ries!) daze of dial-up connections, I used to have this “back in my day, Sonny” routine. The premise was that I’d start becoming an old crank while I was still young and could enjoy it.

Well, time, as they say, munches on.

Now, people my age are supposed to be onthe “old” side of the alleged Clinton/Obama “age gap.”

We who “came of age before the Internet age,” according to a comment poster on Paul Krugman’s blog, are supposed to have a whole different mindset than Those Pesky Kids. We’re supposed to go in for understated “quality,” such as that expressed in Sen. Clinton, rather than flashy cleverness, such as that seen in Sen. Obama.

But then again, Sixties Generation smugness grossed me out at least as back as 1979.

I identified with my immediate youngers, not my immediate elders. I fantasized about Kate Pierson, not about Stevie Nicks.

When The Stranger and Nirvana’s Nevermind debuted in the same week of September 1991, I felt that my whole aesthetic worldview had finally achieve true recognition.

Now, I feel my sociopolitical world view is finally achieving true recognition.

To me, Obama is a helluva lot more than a guy with crisp suits and a strong speaking voice.

To me, he embodies what I’ve called “MISCosity.” Assorted different backgrounds, nationalities, and influences. Progressive populism. Optimism.

Yeah, Pres. Obama will likely disappoint me, more than once. Compromise is the nature of politics, after all. But I’d rather have a Prez who promises more than he can deliver, than one who will pretty obviously only work on behalf of the insiders and the too-oft-proven-wrong experts.

As one blogger has noted, the Clinton-era “politics of the possible” reeks too much, by now, of the worst selling-out to power combined with the worst self-aggrandizement. A lot of us want better. And we’re daring/foolish enough to believe we can get better.

…to the memory of J.R. Simplot, the only American to be a tycoon in both potato chips and computer chips. (He also dominated Boise’s economy, particularly in recent years, as Albertson’s and Boise Cascade got swallowed up by out-of-staters.)

…the first person to notice the similarities between the logo for this year’s Seattle International Film Festival and that of Mattel. You can tell it’s an Argentinian abstract-collage feature, it’s swell!

‘Seattle Jew’ has some requisite sad yet memorable words about Ted Kennedy.

A kind reader recently gave me a 1927 hardcover book, Who’s Who in Washington State. (I’ll show a scan of the handsome cover as soon as Blogger lets me.)

It was published in Seattle by one Arthur H. Allen. His preface calls the book “the story of human activity, the successes and failures of forward-looking individuals who have not only conceived projects but have had the courage either to successfully carry them through, or to lay a ground work which resulted in final completion.”

He also promises, “An effort will be made in the next edition of Who’s Who in Washington State to list the names of more women.” As far as I’ve been able to tell, there wasn’t another edition, at least not by Allen; later books by the same name were apparently published in 1949 and 1963 by others.

The tome’s 240 pages are crammed with tiny-type, one-paragraph bios. Most of the subjects are businessmen and lawyers, with a few doctors, government officials, and educators added into the mix.

The Fisher family (then of Fisher Flouring Mills, now of KOMO and related properties) is handily represented. William Boeing, however, is listed alone, with no relatives. Such pioneer family names as Yesler, Boren, and Denny are missing altogether. So are druggist George Bartell, banker Joshua Green, and the shoe-selling Nordstroms (though the families behind Frederick & Nelson and The Bon Marche are duly included).

Those who are in the book, and whom I’d heard of, include real-estate titan Henry Broderick, longtime P-I sportswriter Royal Brougham, nursery owner Charles Malmo, UW prof Edmond Meany, naturalist/writer Floyd Schmoe (whom I’d met in his old age), lumbermen Charles Stimson and John Weyerhaeuser, Seattle Times publisher Clarence Blethen, PACCAR cofounder William Pigott, and seed packager Charles Lilly (his firm later became Lilly-Miller).

But it’s the names I’d never heard of that particularly fascinate me.

Names like Alice Rollit Cole (“teacher of expression and dramatic reader”), Walton Lindsay Fulp (“supt. Carnation Milk Products Co., Kent”), O.H. Woody (“Mgr. and publisher, the Okanogan Independent”), and Anna Elisibit Green Grant (“owner S.O.S. Placement Bureau”).

These are some of the people who helped made this state great. They, and a few million others even more obscure. It’s fun to open the book to any random name (say, “Fleming, Howard Glenn, v-p. Snoboy Fruit Distributors”), and make up an imagined full life story for the person, complete with parents, spouse(s), children, likes/dislikes, triumphs/frustrations, hopes/fears, and ultimate life’s regret, if any.

There was once a time when the Seattle Times wouldn’t run ads such as the following, at least not in a quarter-page size in the middle of the A Section. (OK, sure, they ran those scary “bed wetting” therapy ads back in the day, and those all-text ads for “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.” But not this.)

…speak my mind about the “Belltown Crime” YouTube videos.

The clips in question, no longer publicly viewable, were placed by an anonymous 26-year-old white female who moved into an apartment here and was shocked to find poor people hanging out in the alleys.

That’s a snarky sentence, I know. It makes the videographer sound like one of those upscale couples who move into quaint country houses near picturesque cattle pastures, then complain about the wafting aromas.

Please note the videographer’s not claiming the persons in ehr video clips had directly threatened any crime against her own self. Nor was she overtly ranting about the poor or the homeless, but about what she calls “crackheads.” She’s not dissing them for existing but for existing while (allegedly) drugged up.

Yet, to the untrained (suburban) eye, the behavior of a disoriented, mentally ill, or simply out-of-sorts man or woman, particularly if the man or woman has an unkempt appearance, can be mistaken for the behavior of a frizzled-out drug user.

Downscale people have existed in Belltown long before upscale people did. There have been three traditional newcomer responses to the downscalers’ existence:

1. Ignore, shy away, close the curtains, cross the street, don’t talk to them, don’t look them in the eye, pretend you didn’t see anything.2. Harass, belittle, demonize, call for police crackdowns, alert the media, evict social-service agencies, demand Someone Do Something Now.

3. Empathize, donate, seek positive solutions (no matter how incomplete).

You can probably discern which category I believe the videographer has chosen, and which I believe you should choose.

…we don’t have to do everything the way it’s been done in California? Well, here’s one exception.

Remember, an angel has no memory.

…is the new Oregon State men’s basketball coach. This means only one thing: We’re all Beaver Believers now.