If any of you have last Sunday’s final edition of the King County Journal (nee the Bellevue Journal-American), I’d love to see it.

Meanwhile, some of the usual anonymous speculators are guessing that David Black, who bought and closed the KCJ while keeping its printing plant and its community weeklies, might have done so as the first step toward buying and preserving the Seattle P-I. My take: Possible, I suppose…

…of indie espresso stands, drive-thru division, gets a little colder (this time of year, at least) as baristas don lingerie and retro-burlesque attire. This is apparently a suburban-only phenomenon, at least so far. I won’t pass judgment on them vis-a-vis “empowerment” issues. But I will note that (1) the gimmick goes back at least to the thonged hot-dog vendors of Miami (if not to the serving wenches of old English country inns), and (2) back in the ’90s, a porno mag created a fictional pictorial about nude baristas at a supposed Seattle “Big Cups Coffeehouse.”

…the past two weeks, instead of writing here:

• Selling Vanishing Seattle books. (It’s only been out less than six weeks, and the third printing is already scheduled.)
• Working temp gigs. Most recently, I was at the Convention Center during the American Library Association’s huge confab. Sorry to report, I don’t have any dirt to report about raucous librarian nights on the town. I was mostly stuck at a desk, fielding questions from exhibiting companies about their “lead retrieval” machines. (They’re magnetic-stripe readers that collect demographic info about any convention attendee who stops by a company’s display booth.)This is one of those meta business-to-business-to-business enterprises that should have been rendered obsolete long ago. But then again, the whole convention biz is something online communication should have rendered obsolete by now. Yet it’s still more-or-less going strong, propping up all sorts of industries (display designers/builders, staging crews, airlines, hotels, restaurants, hookers, cab drivers, caterers, truckers, Pike Place fish throwers, the makers of promotional swag of all sorts (backpacks, brochures, candies, water bottles, pens, golf balls)), all so dispersed people with one professional or social link can all gather F2F (that’s “face to face” in geekspeak), be collectively bored by PowerPoint slide presentations, and dine on overpriced trout almondine.

  My next such gig’s at the Boat Show. It’ll be nine straight days of, well, I never know what.

• Neglecting work on my next book, a history of bodacious Belltown, and on another update to my ebook about digital TV.
• Planning a long-way-overdue reworking of this here blog site thang. I’m not yet ready to say much about it, only that it’ll be a group endeavor with several other bloggers and journalists, and just might be the Next Big (Online) Thing.
• Putting the February Belltown Messenger together. It’ll have the first of two consecutive installments about the new Olympic Sculpture Park. One reason why: The “park” part of the park, the landscaping and the plantings, still aren’t done yet, and even those flora aspects that have been installed will look nicer the closer we get toward spring.

…(besides the beautiful, beautiful snow, of course): “GE buys aerospace division of Smiths Group.” I needed a buyout, and then I got a buyout, and heaven knows I’m miserable now….

…the highly appropriate question, whether anything Bush has ever done I/R/T Iraq has ever not been a total disaster.

…Turns out the whole Iraq misadventure may have really been about the oil. At least, that’s a conclusion one might be tempted to make after reading about the proposed sweetheart deal that would allocate windfall profits to the big oil companies while giving ’em vast control over the future of that country’s oil industry.

Seattlest.com has posted an email interview with yr. humble author, with a gushing introductory commentary about the book.

A few local shops have the book back in stock this week. But your best bet is still to buy direct, from the link near the top left corner of this page.

Some time last year, I had a discussion with a Pacific Publishing bigwig, over whether Capitol Hill is or isn’t a real “neighborhood” or was just a jumble of subcultures and “tribes” sharing the same patch of real estate.

This New Year’s Eve I was at a potluck party on the Hill. At events like this, Capitol Hill IS a neighborhood. Painters and schoolteachers and real estate agents and former City Peoples Mercantile clerks and musicians and small business owners and Microsofties and families and singles and gays and assorted races and generations, all coming together. Some no longer live on the Hill, but still identify with it. At occasions like this dinner party, the Hill really is a neighborhood.

Perhaps no one at the event was ever next-door neighbors to anyone else at the event. But they’re still a community.

Capitol Hill is a real community. It’s also a “virtual” community, a state of mind.

Until this past Nov. 7, many people in both the physical and virtual Capitol Hills thought of these places as backwaters, sites of exile from the rampant corporate conservatism that seemed to be overtaking the rest of the nation. In this mindset, the Hill was a retreat, a preserve where the old values of progress and free thought could be kept barely alive.

But the popular repudiation of the far right in the national midterm elections shows the country moving in a new direction, a new mindset. A mindset that values self-expression, inclusion, and real caring about people. A mindset closer to that of the Hill, and of Seattle in general.

At the potluck, I informally asked people their biggest hope for the new year. One woman said she hoped she’d be strong enough to pass the firefighter’s exam. One man said he hoped to finally get his big break in NYC. One guy said he couldn’t think of anything to hope for politically. But others did express a generalized wish that things would get better, that the jokers running things in DC these days would become irrelevant/outplaced, and that people would start to do something, anything, to repair the planet.

The respondents invariably asked the question back at me. I said I hoped people, particularly Capitol Hill people, would start to imagine even the possibility of hope, that the whole world does not necessarily totally suck, that change is indeed possible.

This is my request for you this year: Think of your neighborhood, your community, not as a relic of America’s progressive past but as a vanguard for America’s progressive future.

Yeah, I put out a photo book late last year about Seattle’s yesterdays, including some of Capitol Hill’s yesterdays.

I want readers to see the book as more than a trip down memory lane, a wistful look back at A Simpler Time. It’s meant to be a celebration of the old Seattle, and a call to recapture at least some of its spirit.

Hard to believe, but there was a time when almost every Seattle restaurant printed the prices of every item on its menu for all to see–and did so in dollars and cents, not simply two digits and a dot. Locally-owned (or at least locally-managed) stores set fashion trends that sometimes defied those dictated by the national magazines. Local DJs promoted local rock bands on commercial top-40 radio. Local TV newscasts dared to devote whole minutes to “talking heads” discussing politics and other nonviolent topics.

Other personality traits of Seattle’s past self are more subtle. There was a spirit, a feeling that Things Could Be Done. A real city, with all bells and whistles, could be carved out of recently-conquered wilderness. We could build our own businesses, make our own art, think up our own ideas. Later, the feminist and civil-rights movements added new dimensions to this can-do attitude.

This stance went hand-in-hand with a self-effacing sense of humor. The old Seattle had writers (Betty Anderson, Emmett Watson), cartoonists (Bob Cram, Lynda Barry), and broadcasters (Bob Hardwick, Stan Boreson) who blended unpretentious whimsey and clever wit.

The old Seattle was a place more interested in living a good life than in amassing ever-bigger piles of Stuff. It was a place with a working waterfront, not a “Harbour Pointe.”

It’s that spirit I want to help bring back. And, in the old Seattle mindset, I believe we can.

So think of your immediate surroundings as The Future.

And think of your self as having a Future, beyond grunt survival.

This will be quite difficult for some of you, who’ve spent the past two decades or more bemoaning the supposed creeping fascism of everybody in America outside of yourselves and your immediate friends.

But try it.

You just might be surprised at what happens.

As a year begins, our new book remains sold out at many area stores. Some were out of copies even before last Wednesday’s rave Seattle Times review. You can still order it online; and you can email me about getting a personally autographed copy ($20 plus postage). Retail outlets ought to resume having it next week.

It’s the madcap return of the MISCmedia In/Out List.

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 Skykomish River waterfront cabins to sell you.

Peter Donahue has written a positively gushing review of Vanishing Seattle in the Seattle Times today. It’s just too lovely.

…with probably the best Christmas cartoon from the Golden Age of the movies, Hugh Harman’s Peace on Earth. (This is the one where the last battle that destroys the human race is the war between the vegetarians and the meat eaters.)

…report selling out of Vanishing Seattle. Thanks to you all, it’s become the surprise local bestseller of the season. Epilogue Books in Ballard will have approximately three dozen copies at 10 a.m. Saturday, if you need yours before the big holiday.

…Vanishing Seattle signing party was even more spectacular and better-attended than the first. Epilogue Books had one copy at the end of Monday’s event. It got 40 more copies by Tuesday evening. Only seven remained at Tuesday’s closing time. The store expects to get more copies in by Friday.

Other outlets report having sold out of their initial stock in one or two days. The following other places are, or were, known to have had it in stock, or to be ordering/reordering:

• Virginia Mason Hospital Gift Shop
• FriendShop (Seattle Public Library gift store)
• Ye Olde Curiosity Shop
• Exclusively Washington (next to Ivar’s at Pier 54)
• Broadway News
• Le Frock Ltd, 317 E. Pine St.
• Ballard Home Comforts
• Portage Bay Gifts, Fremont
• Walgreens (various) in Seattle
• Bailey-Coy Books
• M. Coy Books
• Museum of History and Industry
• Fremont Place Book Co.
• Culpepper Books, Tacoma
• NW Museum store, Tacoma

And it can be attained online, from the link near the top left corner of this page.

After the holidays, I hope to offer autographed copies to site readers.

Wednesday’s Seattle Times devotes its entire above-the-fold front page to a warning announcement, in six languages, pleading with people in de-electrified homes not to generate carbon-monoxide fumes indoors.