…five years away from the end of printed daily newspapers? The NY Times’ publisher thinks maybe.

…to the opening-night schmoozefest at the Twist bar for Friends of Seattle, a political group devoted to all the progressive things all good progressive Seattleites like myself tend to like–parks, public transit, affordable middle-class housing, good schools, fewer cars, livable-wage jobs, environmental sustainability.

(Side note: In keeping with longstanding progressive Seattle priorities, the group’s manifestos mention nothing about ethnic minorities or poverty.)

The group’s concept seems simple enough: Declare an agenda. Round up perky, fun-lovin’ grownups. Get ’em to ring doorbells, make phone calls, and show up at meetings. Make everything lively, entertaining, and engaging.

As a good li’l Seattle progressive, I’m easily in FoS’s target market.

As a stubborn skeptic, I want to wait to see how it develops before I go all gaga about it all.

FoS’s first prime issue is that nearly-decade-long impasse of a passageway, the dreaded Alaskan Way Viaduct.

As I’ve written at the start of this whole long, slow dispute, I happen to like the Viaduct.

However, I’m ready to admit it may not be cost-effective to make the thing more earthquake-resistant.

And if the thing must go, let’s not spend another near-decade and umpteen billions on a tunnel road or another raised road. Instead, let’s spend those bucks on more transit, and give an EZ-access surface road to the truckers who need one.

A former supermarket tabloid stringer finds solace in berating his youngers for finally getting old.

Sheesh.

Yeah, Cobain’s image has been showing up on tacky nostalgia-kitsch merchandise. But it has been almost since his death.

Elsewhere in the no-shit-Sherlock realm, David Bowie just turned 60. Debbie Harry already passed that milestone. Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone didn’t get the chance to do so. Macauley Culkin’s been married and divorced. And the Earth revolves around the sun approximately once per calendar year.

“Gen X” never vowed to die before it got old. Rather, it (or some of its more vocal members) vowed not to look ridiculous while doing so.

“Thank You Lt. Watada”

“Bush Proposes Steep Cut to PBS Funding”

…is launching an experiment to create the first “wiki” novel. Anyone can sign up to contribute to it. It will be online and open for contributions for six weeks. The resulting work may or may not be issued in print form.

I’m sure the final piece couldn’t be any more disjointed than the worst committee-written Hollywood movies.

…in the ol’ reality-based commuity, folks. Columnist Molly Ivins has succumbed to cancer at 62. The Texas tornado was among Bush’s earliest and strongest observers/opponents, and never veered from her well-spoken progressive populist stance. She’s already missed.

…from the Cascade-foothills country of my Snohomish County youth, there’s a modern-day plague of “rampaging cattle.” Who do they call to solve it? The local butcher, of course.

…Here’s a ’40s-era abridged and illustrated version of Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The original book was an American “free market” economist’s thesis on how “centralized planning” would always lead to one or another flavor of fascism. Hayek (no relation to Salma) clearly intended an anti-liberal (specifically anti-New Deal), pro-libertarian statement. But, at least in this condensed version, it’s eerily prescient about modern pseudo-“conservative” ideology.

…you’d seen it all, Bush-authoritarian-hubris-wise, here comes a “directive” putting domestic regulatory agencies under the thumbs of White House-appointed “advisers,” who’ll ensure nothing is ever enacted that would ever inconvenience a big campaign contributor.

…points out exactly where the American left made its big wrong turn, in learning “to love ‘identity’ and ignore inequality.”

I’ve watched three of the four discs in the box set Harveytoons, The Complete Series. These 1950-1962 cartoons have proven to be just as perverse, violent and corny as I remember from my childhood.

In my adult years, I’ve learned these films were originally made by Famous Studios, which had been formed in 1942 after Paramount foreclosed on the more prestigious Max Fleischer studio. I also learned that, despite at least two of the films depicting the studio as situated in sunny Hollywood, it was really one of two animation factories in New York. (The other was the even less-respected Terrytoons.)

When Paramount parceled out its old theatrical shorts to TV distributors, it told those buyers to remove the Paramount name and logo from all distributed prints. Thus, when Harvey Comics bought one of the Paramount cartoon packages (plus the rights to all the starring characters therein), Paramount’s “Noveltoons” jack-in-the-box logo became “Harveytoons.”

These retitled films were first televised Sunday afternoons on ABC in 1959. I first saw them three or four years later, when they were syndicated onto local weekday kids’ shows. (As I recall, they aired locally with Brakeman Bill on KTNT, later KSTW.)

I’m surprised at how many moments from the films have been part of my brain’s hard-wiring, after all these decades:

• Casper drinking lemonade and turning pink.
• Herman the mouse turning Katnip into a Christmas tree, then sticking the cat’s tail in a power outlet to light him up.
• In another film, Herman (disguised as a mouse St. Peter) threatening Katnip with a toss into “the fiery furnace” (really a coal-fired home furnace).
• Baby Huey mistaking lab chemicals for “sody pop” and burping fireballs.
• A one-shot musical set in a “candy town” nightclub, with a gun-toting sourball cutting in on a dancing lollypop: “All right Lolly, drop that gum!”
• The “Crazytown Manufacturing Co.” factory, where an entire log is mechanically whittled away to create a single toothpick.

Some aspects of the films which I hadn’t remembered:

• The drawing, animation, backgrounds, and music are all of a much higher quality than I realized as a kid–at least in the package’s earlier films. Starting with the shorts bearing 1956 copyright dates, the budgets started going down. Full character movement gave way to simpler “cycle” animation.
• And Casper, the dominant character in the Harvey package (Popeye was Famous Studios’ biggest star, but those films were sold to a different syndicator) seemed overly infantile to me when I was six, but it resonates more strongly now.

Casper, as first created by Seymour Reit and Joe Oriolo in 1945, was a cloying object lesson in “fair play, overcoming peer pressure and being accepted for who you are (not by how you appear),” to quote a reviewer at imdb.com. As the Famous crew over the years turned the premise into a repetitive gag formula, its life lessons seemed a bit shallow–particularly when juxtaposed against the brutal hijinx of Herman and Katnip.

But in today’s sociocultural context, it makes more sense.

Casper is a sensitive, intellectual (the films often open on him reading a hardcover book), optimistic kid, who wants to spread amity, love, and cooperation in the world–in short, a progressive Democrat.

The other ghosts (later standardized in the comic books as the Ghostly Trio) are snotty schoolyard bullies who thrive on propagating fear, misunderstanding, and discord–in short, conservative Republicans.

Most of the “living” humans and animals in the Casper films have been indoctrinated by anti-ghost propaganda into fleeing at first sight of Casper, even though Casper has only the best of intentions. Heck, the other ghosts are never seen performing anything more harmful than frat-boy pranks.

But those pranks are what the other ghosts “live” for. The other ghosts not only want Casper to be perceived as scary, they want Casper to become scary. By refusing the ghost agenda, Casper is a rebel against, and a threat to, the dominant (ghost) culture.

Ironically, Casper usually gets out of trouble when the predators threatening his new-found friends see Casper and flee in fright. Casper’s curse is also one of his gifts.

But Casper’s bigger gift is perseverance. One new friend at a time, he effectively spreads his message of togetherness. For a non-corporeal being who’d apparently “died” at a presexual age (an aspect of his story that wasn’t discussed until the 1995 feature film), he’s got a lot of interest in helping corporeal humans live better lives together.

I could think of worse role models.

The longtime P-I consumer-action and trivia columnist really was the total embodiment of the trenchcoat-and-fedora newspaperman, and a perfect gentleman to boot.

…Vanishing Seattle review out now, this one by Artdish.com’s Jim Demetre. Aw shucks, ya make me blush.

Megatrends author John Naisbitt, quoted at Poynter Online (a great media-news site), repeats the old baby-boomer canard that them kids these days aren’t reading anything. To illustrate this, the Poynter editors used a stock photo of wristbands–all festooned with words.

I’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating until the boomer bigots finally listen: People younger than you or me are not necessarily a subhuman species. Yes, they can read.

Indeed, words are more pervasive than ever. All these millions of blogs, MySpace sites, and online forums–they’re all about words. (They’re certainly not about the graphic design.) Text messaging, IRC chats, email–all about words. Talk radio, podcasts–all about spoken words.

What media companies have to ask themselves is whether the words they’re generating are worth reading.