• First the bus tunnel, now the Space Needle fireworks show suffers from a software glitch.
• Music industry wants UW students to pay big bucks for alleged file sharing. UW administration runs interference.
• While the Sea. Times has added the NYT crossword, the P-I, thankfully, hasn’t had to drop it. Thank heavens for non-exclusive contracts.
• A McDonald’s customer in Vancouver, USA suddenly felt strange and had to sit down. No, it wasn’t from the food. Turns out she was giving premature birth without heretofore knowing she was preggers. The boy’s first words will probably not be “Supersize me.”

• Fret not about Bill Gates’s pending retirement from MS’s day-to-day operations. The whole joint’s hardwired around his mindset. MS will continue to produce and market just as it’s been doing.
• Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to read/solve the NY Times crossword in the Seattle Times. No word on whether it’ll continue in the P-I.
• One more reason to quit smoking: A guy asks two Belltown lowlifes if they’ve got a light, gets robbed.
• Wash. state will boldly go where Greyhound no longer bothers to go, bringing intercity bus service to the state’s small towns.

• “A 29-year-old Wenatchee man told police a pterodactyl caused him to drive his car into a light pole…”
• The film Dancer in the Dark notwithstanding, no woman has ever been sentenced to death in Wash. state. Sadly, this might change.
• Spokane Catholics have raised $8 million to help pay abusive-priest lawsuit settlements.
• Help a rural flood victim— donate a cow.
• Sonics fans (and, yes, there still are many of us) have a new mantra. During last night’s laugher against the even more pathetic Timberwolves (which the Sea. Times chose to cover on sports-section page D14), when fans were encouraged to make noise during an opposing-team free throw, the repetitive shout came loud and clear from the rafters on down: “Clay Bennett sucks! Clay Bennett sucks!” TV announcer (and all around good guy) Kevin Calabro responded with a brief giggle, before he returned to strictly commenting on the action on the floor.

• Even architects can’t afford to live in Seattle these days without special programs.
• The end of Netscape Navigator as a web-browser brand doesn’t mean all that much. The best of Netscape lives on in its open-source successor Firefox.
• One of the ex-Mariners named in the Mitchell Report has admitted to using steroids and uppers in 1999. His explanation: All the other kids were doing it. (Except catcher Dan Wilson.)
• It’s the law: If you’re stoned, don’t install other drivers’ tire chains.
• You can tell it’s a slow news day when every TV station reports the following: “Woman doesn’t want dog in bathroom during couple’s shower.”
• Betcha didn’t know there was anything historic in Tukwila. Except it’s not there anymore. It’s being barged to Seattle.

• Despite off-and-on cleanup efforts over the years, Seattle’s five biggest “urban streams” (formerly known as “creeks”) are in sorry shape, eco-wise.
• The lowly Sonics played three periods of valiant basketball against the mighty Celtics, before the NBA’s best team finally switched into high gear in the fourth.
• Atlas Clothing, Broadway’s biggest vintage store (and, very briefly last year, an all-ages music venue), is reportedly moving to a Fremont antique mall.
• Wash. state’s minimum wage goes up on the first. Don’t spend those extra 14 cents in one place.
• Can suburban sprawl be eco-friendly? A Spokane developer of “enviro-townhomes” claims it can.

Seattle’s no longer America’s “most literate city”— Minneapolis is, with St. Paul third and threatening. And you thought the only thing separating Mpls. and St. P was the Mississippi River. (No jokes about “it’s damp enough here today it feels like the Mississippi River,” please.)

• There goes the most-recent great hope for cooling down the heat of violence in Pakistan and vicinity.
• The bus tunnel’s open again. But the SLUT has been stalling intermittently.
• Do Wash. state Republicans stand a ghost of a chance of survival, let alone renewed relevance? The Seattle Times would like to think so. As for me, I think the local GOP will come back only when it can again field candidates of an Evans (or at least a John Spellman) level, and actively try to appeal to those of us who believe evolution is real and wrestling isn’t.
• It’s the law: Don’t text and drive.
• Starbucks is experimenting with sugar-free latte syrup.
• The good news about Puget Sound’s housing market? “Not as grim as rest of U.S.”

• That temporary passenger ferry between Seattle and Pt. Townsend? Some folks would like it to be a little less temporary.
• Meanwhile, some guy’s hoping to start a commercial passenger train between Bellevue and Snohomish—just the thing for bringing new customers to my mom’s antique-mall spaces there!
• One way to annoy the sandals-and-wool-socks voting block: Propose mandatory licensing for bicyclists.
• The bus tunnel: Still shut.
• The American Stasi is on the watch for peculiar behavior at airports. Insert your own joke here.
• The White Christmas thang sure looked damn great yesterday afternoon, whilst I was returning to Seattle from northern realms. Could we get an encore?
• The local holiday ended in typical fashion, with the ceremonial State Patrol officer shooting a naked guy who was walking across I-5.
• Idaho police academy students got to choose their own graduating-class slogan: “Don’t suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], go out and cause it.”

…archives aren’t posting on this site properly. I’ll have to look under the hood after the holidaze and see what’s (not) going on.

• Wash. state insists on giving kids “medically accurate” sex-ed info instead of the federally-mandated abstinence-only nonsense, loses federal funding.
• MS and Amazon decide they’d rather fund Democrats, at least for this cycle.
• Would you like the King County Courthouse to continue looking like a poorly “modernized” ’60s efficiency-architecture victim or have it restored into the stately authoritative edifice it once was?
• A UW frat member was arrested for shooting a gun at tin cans in the frat house’s basement. Hey, at least he wasn’t aiming outside.
• What??? Evergreen State Coll.’s actively soliciting students from in-state???
• Huckabee (hearts) regressive taxation, Wash. state-style.

…post-shopping-season Sunday. This means the Sunday paper’s a much more compact product, stuffed with far fewer flyers and far easier to carry. Still, there is some news today:

• Who wouldn’t love a fancy home holiday display, depicting a full-size Santa on a cross?
• The American Stasi wants to know everything about you.
• Another old ferry has potential problems.
• Capitol Hill’s delightfully delapidated “Undre Arms” Apartments might give way to yet another mixed-use whatever blah blah blah.
• And my Belltown Messenger colleague Mary Lou Sanelli has a nice li’l essay, summarizing some of her thoughts about the novelty of urban living.

• Downtown Bellevue’s getting a bowling alley again! The last one, Belle Lanes, closed 15 years ago; Barnes & Noble’s in the elegant arc-roofed building now. In a separate deal nearby, an 11-screen cinema megaplex is being turned into offices.
• To absolutely nobody’s surprise, Amazon.com announced it’s moving its HQ to south Lake Union. The dot-com may occupy parts of as many as 11 buildings sprawling over six blocks.
• A sports blogger insists KeyArena’s not so bad a joint, as long as you’re not a greedy team owner.
• The grocery biz is more efficient than ever. That means, among other things, fewer surplus products going to food banks.

…I hope, this evening (Friday), 6:30-8:30 p.m., for the fantabulous next book event starring yr. loyal web-author. It’s at Not A Number, an artistic and subversive gift and card shop on N. 45th in wondrous Wallingford.

IN OTHER, LESSER FRIDAY NOOZE:

• A shop after my own head, Bernie Utz Hats (sometimes inexplicably spelled “Byrnie” Utz), may or may not move next year. Seattle’s last downtown specialty hat store has been at Third and Union for 68 years.
• The next big thing, NW music-wise: That’s the current hype for Kimya Dawson, she of the K Records singer-songwriter stable, now featured on the Juno soundtrack.
• The bus tunnel is still shut.
• The Port of Seattle just got some worse news, in the form of a state audit questioning its spending and construction-project oversight.
• In the “DUH!” department, experts report that more commuters means worse traffic jams, drunk driving is a bad thing, the Bushies are stonewalling tougher fuel-economy standards, and the Okies want a pro basketball team.
• Willie Nelson’s giving $40,000 to charities in Vancouver USA, where he worked as an itinerant DJ back in the 1950s.
• Dumb criminal of the week: A guy who not only allegedly has sex with minors, but videotapes it, sometimes on public property.
• Feds are investigating whether Washington Mutual Bank deliberately used inflated property appraisals in selling mortgages.
• No Crocodile news, except for a benefit show for ex-employees on Sunday the 30th.
• The Neah Bay/Makah region along the Washington coast doesn’t just have rogue whalers. It’s also got ocean waves, which some believe can be used to make electricity.

• There’s finally enough funding to fully restore/rebuild the landmark Hat n’ Boots gas-station building in Georgetown. Yay!
• City officials now insist forcibly destroying homeless people’s camps is good for them.
• The bus tunnel was closed all day Wednesday and will remain closed Thursday. The culprit: The new computer system Metro installed to control all the tunnel’s systems. It’s not running MS Vista, is it?
• Is it really so bad for Port of Seattle cops to make a homemade music video showing off their anti-speeding radar guns? If it was made on public time with publicly funded equipment, maybe so.
• Nothing new on the “save the Crocodile” front.
• We DO know that the Comet has a new owner. We just don’t know who. (Let’s hope the new mgmt. hires less-unnecessarily-violent bouncers.)
• The Seattle School District wants to efficiently site a high school and middle school at the same location. Just think of all the ways the “tweens” could learn from the older kids: “You call that a beer bong? Let me show you how it’s really done.”

• What to do with the historic, shuttered Seattle INS building? How ’bout selling it at an online auction?
• Would a fence deter potential Aurora bridge suicides? And if so, why hasn’t it been proposed ’til now?
• Gov. Gregoire’s budget proposal would keep more than $1 billion stashed away in the state’s “rainy day fund.” Gee, didn’t we have a few really rainy days this past month?
• A double-hulled fuel barge ran aground near the central waterfront. No spills have been reported as of yet.
• Onetime gym-equipment king Nautilus Inc. is now losing wads of cash, and is the target of a takeover attempt. The company’s fate was to have been decided this week, but now won’t be.