(Other than the NH primary, in which candidates won who hadn’t won in Iowa, leaving everything still pretty much wide open):

• Port of Seattle bosses told a citizen hearing they’ve got a surefire reform agenda in place. Citizens responded with a rousing chorus of “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
• It’s cheaper to get homeless folks off the streets than to just let ’em wind up in emergency rooms and prisons.
• Larry Craig’s new line of defense: I only did it once. Try and prove I didn’t.
• Ex-Gov. Booth Gardner supports an assisted-suicide initiative. Current Gov. Gregoire doesn’t support it.
• Everybody loves Children’s Hospital, unless they’re Laurelhurst residents and the hospital wants to totally ruin their views with new tall buildings.

Jim Demetre has a response to Charles Mudede’s review of Seattle’s Belltown.

• The easy half of the equation has been solved, as Clay Bennett agrees to sell the Storm to owners who’ll keep the WNBA team here. The hard part, wresting the Sonics from his reverse-Midas-touch hands, now begins in earnest.
• Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess in the first place by selling the teams to Bennett is making new moves at his day job. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz has fired his CEO, retaking the reins himself. Can he return the coffee chain to its former fast-growin’ ways, in spite of all the obstacles? (Among the latter: espresso drinks coming to McDonald’s.)
• Some folks got pretty snow this morning; the heart of Seattle, again, didn’t. Damn.
• The Port of Seattle’s fiscal shenanigans will be investigated by the Feds.
• House prices finally begin to go down in the area. (Insert your own “going down” joke here.) Still, local biz leaders insist it’s not that drastic really. Meanwhile, developers who’d planned to condo-convert Seattle’s historic Smith Tower are scaling back their plans; now only the top 12 stories will be converted.
• My second-ever adult job (such as it was), the student newspaper Polaris at North Seattle Community College, is a goner.
• Blacks are more likely than whites to get busted for having or smoking pot, even though that’s now the city’s official lowest law enforcement priority.
• In more positive law-related news, “serious crime” (as the FBI defines it) is way down in western Washington’s cities these days. That, alone, won’t stop the media from exploiting the occasional random shooting, or stop the talk-radio nebbishes from preaching the city=danger, suburbs=serenity meme.
• An election year’s underway. You can tell because a politician, in this case Gov. Gregoire, is trying to generate headlines on the get-tougher-on-drunk-drivers line, the encroaching-surveillance-state issue on which no one dares to disagree.
• Woodland Park Zoo tries again to make its own cute li’l baby elephant.
• The men’s fashion headline of the year is “Return to Elegance.” Just as it’s been every year since at least 1978.
• 12,000 people in Idaho lost electricity due to a stray cat wandering through a substation. Brian Setzer remains at large.
• Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their cablecasts, just in time to give writerless jokes about the New Hampshire primary.

• There’s been another Saturday-night Belltown shooting, this time near Fourth and Stewart.
• Trees: We all love ’em. Let’s keep more of ’em around. After all, a city without trees isn’t fit for a dog.
• Pit bulls: There are more of ’em around than ever, even though they’re less universally loved than, say, trees.
• Seattle’s Chinatown is getting a brand new “historic gate.”
• The University of Washington: One of your best higher-education values, even with a sucky football program.

…we must say goodbye to one of the legends of “outsider” music, risque cabaret singer-songwriter Ruth Wallis. The creator of “Davy’s Dinghy,” “Drill ‘Em All,” and “A Pizza Every Night” had finally been (re) discovered in recent years with an off-Broadway revue of her compositions, Boobs! The Musical.

As always, this, the most accurate In/Out list published anywhere, compiles what will become hot and less-hot in the upcoming year, not necessarily what’s hot and less-hot at this current point in time. If you believe everything that’s hot now will just keep getting hotter in the future, we’ve got some subprime mortgage hedge funds to sell you.

M. Coy Books is indeed shuttering, after 18 years on Pine Street. The last non-chain, general-topics bookstore in the downtown retail district has indeed lost its lease, and the two Michaels who run it have decided the business is too marginal to relocate. The Michaels have always supported my work, even when I was reduced to self-publishing.

THE VIRGINIA INN’S current incarnation closes Jan. 13. It will reopen in an expanded “double wide” format, including a full kitchen, in March.

AND CRANIUM, the local board-game enterprise that got big with a deal to sell games at Starbucks, is selling out to toy mega-monster Hasbro. The latter’s brands include Monopoly, Scrabble, Candy Land, and the locally-invented Magic: The Gathering.

• The first rule of casinos has been “The house always wins.” Turns out it ain’t necessarily so.
• Flood victims don’t give a damn for FEMA’s non-responses.
• Did a Kirkland 12-year-old get a digi-cam image of the Virgin Mary?
• Windstorm 2008 is here, and it’s nasty.
• New-agey sounding day spas: Fronts for more traditional forms of “touch”? And even if it’s so, why all the law-enforcement hassling of them, when the police have more important matters such as catching (insert your favorite nemesis here)?
• If fewer people are trying to rob banks, does it mean they know where the money isn’t?

…disappearing city-wise: Ballard’s Sunset Bowl, the last remaining bowling center north of the Ship Canal and one of Seattle’s last 24-hour eateries, has lost its real estate and is closing, probably by April.

And things aren’t looking that rosy for the lease of my fave new-book store, M Coy (the last non-chain general-book outlet in the downtown retail core). Details to follow.

…as you may know. But I like sometime NPR contributor John Hockenberry’s account of how he never quite fit in at Dateline NBC. He alleges the show’s producers (1) wanted only stories with an “emotional center,” but only if those emotions were the ones the producers wanted to exploit, (2) didn’t get that the Internet age was irreversably fragmenting the former mass audience, and (3) were too caught up in corporate-culture nonsense that actively discouraged creative thinking.

• Obama won the Dem side of the Iowa caucuses, with Edwards and Clinton the runners-up. Biden and Dodd are outta here; Richardson and Kucinich stay for now. (So is Gravel, despite what this site repeated from MSNBC Thursday night.)Among the Repo Men, Iowans heart Huckabee— hypocritical stances, pro-torture policies, and all.
• Gov. Gregoire vows to raze the Alaskan Way Viaduct, no matter what Seattle voters think.
• The state Supreme Court’s ruled the Seattle Housing Authority can’t stop tenants from decorating their apartment doors.
• A speeding driver tried to hide from State Patrol officers by burying himself alive.
• Allegations have resurfaced that the Seahawks’ fan-noise “12th man” might be artificially augmented.
• King County’s move to all-mail elections might not happen, at least not this year.
• A court’s told the Navy to make its sonar more whale-friendly.
• Copper thieves stole underground wiring on the Evergreen St. Coll. campus. The Greeners are already working on a hemp-based substitute.

…to love one of my alma mamas: Oregon State U. researchers have found beer can fight cancer!

• Letterman, and his writers, staged a gala comeback Wednesday night. Could this be the turning point in the election?
• Seattle’s Landmarks Preservation Board agrees with us that the Ballard Denny’s building is potentially worth keeping. Meanwhile, Robert Jamieson quotes the manager of Seattle’s last extant Denny’s as being mad as hell about Saturday night ruffians. And he’s not even on upper First Avenue.
• What with shrinking ice caps and endangered polar bears, what do the Bushies want for Alaska? More offshore oil drilling!
• Child Protective Services could use a lot more social workers. Gov. Gregoire wants to help, at least a little.
• Could Wash. state voters really have a pivotal role in the Presidential nominating process this time ’round?
• A coyote was seen in the general vicinity of Magnolia Bluff. Insert your own joke here.
• Tim Eyman hates transit, loves roads.

…in I don’t know how long, my work is the subject of serious criticism. My erstwhile Stranger colleague Charles Mudede has written a nuanced, lucid review of Seattle’s Belltown.

Essentially, Mudede seems to like the book for what it is, but wishes it had more. That, I’ve learned, is a common response to Arcadia Publishing’s slim photo-history tomes. Arcadia’s formula of many pictures and few words has proven very commercially successful, here and around the country. But many aspects of any place’s story will necessarily get left out by this broad-strokes approach. Some readers would like more oral-history material. Some would like more human-interest anecdotes. Some would like longer passages about specific people and places of interest to them.

Mudede specifically wishes Seattle’s Belltown included more emotional, human history. He’d have liked more of “a sense of horror or sadness or wonder at the great and rapid sequence of events that shaped Belltown.”

And he’d like the book to have a stronger sense of advocacy. After all, he notes, the neighborhood’s an “explosive battleground of competing land use and architectural ideas, of private and cultural capital, and a variety of class issues. Even in a book as small as this, one wants the writer to take a stronger position on these pressing matters, presenting not only conclusions but also solutions.”

These are all good things to yearn for, and not just in books.

It’s a level of discourse beyond Arcadia’s format. (They are trying to move units through Costco and Walgreen’s.)

But it’s certainly something I can work harder at in my other forums, including the Belltown Messenger and this site.

Have I got answers to the ongoing disappearance of living-wage jobs, affordable housing, artist spaces, and the Crocodile? No, at least not any good ones, at least not tonight.

But let’s keep talking about it.

• Clark County’s been experimenting with biodeisel transit buses. Biggest glitch so far: The eco-fuel jells in cold weather.
• Some folks apparently got a little carried away on New Year’s, shooting guns into the air and engaging in questionable driving.
• Oh-Seven’s weather? Crazy, man.
• Seattle’s last homicide of the old year, the slaying of a Sierra Club organizer outside a Capitol Hill condo, might have been the work of a stalker.