…a certain ex-Seattleite you know, is living the not-so-high life in London, eating a macrobiotic diet (but still smoking Marlboros), hiring Orlando Bloom’s Buddhist chanting instructor, and hanging out with the Stings.

…who attended our intimate soiree and book signing Thursday evening at M. Coy Books, celebrating the release of Seattle’s Belltown. I even got to meet longtime local arts patron Polly Friedlander.

• You won’t love it at Levitz anymore. The discount furniture chain, which has teetered in and out of insolvency for several years, is finally throwing in the seat cushion.
• Safeco Insurance has fulfilled its duty to propping up the downtown real-estate biz by moving into two existing downtown Seattle office towers.
• I-5 in southwest Washington is slowly reopening in stages. Meanwhile, receding floodwaters leave what P-I headline writers call a “Deluge of sewage.” Say that five times fast.
• A Federal Way sixth grader has invented a device using kitchen gloves and semi-porous plastic bubbles, which can inject medicines into the body without needles. Just the thing for squeamish junkies everywhere.
• Yep, King County’s fully, officially, joined the housing-price bubble “pop.”
• And there’s a fun story about professional horse’s ass Tim Eyman getting into a hissyfit at a Yakima city council meeting and getting forcibly removed.

(Via Steve Mandich):

“Nice update on the Mercer Arena from Wednesday’s Nooze, though according to Jeff Obermeyer’s cool Arcadia book Hockey in Seattle, the Mets actually played at the Ice Arena at Fifth and University from 1915 to 1924. The Mercer Arena (nee Civic Arena) didn’t open ’til 1927. Here’s more from Obermeyer’s site.”

• The LGBT Community Center, which just got its own Capitol Hill building a couple years back, is now in fiscal trouble. It may close by month’s end. Does cultural acceptance of other sexual preferences necessarily lead to assimilation, and in turn to the death of niche-subculture institutions?
• Is Paul Allen getting a “sweetheart deal” from the City in regards to his South Lake Union development projects? Many have rumored such allegations, and now City Councilmember Peter Steinbrueck is vocalizing ’em.
• No, Snohomish cops, UW profs taking industrial-art photographs are not terrotists.
• Microsoft’s shut down a holiday greetings Web page that featured a sometimes foul-mouthed Santa.
• In decades past, private, for-profit lending libraries offered books for rent, sometimes in genres or to audience niches public libraries wouldn’t or couldn’t fully serve. Now, some web entrepreneurs want to bring back the concept, in the form of “a Netflix for books.”
• And, yep, there’s still lotsa flood damage and closed roads and highways throughout Western Washington.

…another blame target for the Floods of ’07: excessive logging.

• As the floodwaters from Rainstorm 2007 still linger, the blame game commences. Was the state laggardly in building Chehalis River flood control systems after allocating money to do so? Does Seattle have an insufficient drainage infrastructure? And, of course, does climate change/global warming have anything to do with all this unseasonably warm rain coming here via the “pineapple express?”
• Jones Soda’s CEO, whose surname (naturally) is Van Stolk, will leave the company at the end of the month. Jones’s massive growth in recent years has come with allegations of financial irregularities at the Seattle-based “boutique soda” marketer.
• Seattle was named #6 on a Brookings Institution list of America’s “most walkable cities.” Portland was #5. Washington DC (Brookings’ home town) made the top spot.
• Seattle Center’s future fate is still undecided, but one legacy building has a new, at least temporary, use. Seattle Opera will stick some staff members and scene storage into Mercer Arena, the former Seattle Ice Arena (home of the 1917 Stanley Cup champions!). The structure, which has also housed rock concerts, the old Seattle Reign women’s basketball team, and many other events, has been idle the past four years.
• The Lake Union streetcar finally has an official opening day. It opens for pubilc rides on Wednesday, Dec. 12. Yes, the clever folks who promoted the unofficial nickname of South Lake Union Trolley, or “SLUT,” promise to be on hand, proudly sporting “Ride the SLUT” T-shirts.
• Amateur film-based photography’s rapid decline hits home. PhotoWorks, formerly Seattle FilmWorks, is selling itself to American Greetings Corp. Seattle FilmWorks was originally a piece of American Passage Marketing, which posted gazillions of ad posters on college campus bulletin boards hawking everything from magazine subscriptions to term paper “research guides.” It originally bought Kodak 35mm movie film, repackaged it for still cameras, and sold it by mail in film-and-processing joint deals.

Yr. online correspondent was sheltered from Rainstorm 2007 Monday, mostly. I was called back to King County Elections, to tabulate recount votes on a single obscure race for a suburban public-hospital commission.

Of course, I had to get from my place to the bus, and from the bus to the Temporary Elections Annex on Boeing Field property. As I stood and strode amid the heavy precip and the solid gray skies, I though to myself that this was the sort of day that separated us true Nor’Westers from the SoCal weather wimps.

There was one TV in the coat-check room, emanating continuing reports of nature’s sodden fury. But I didn’t hear the full extent of the spectacle until I could get home and get online.

• PCC groceries ban all products containing high fructose corn syrup. Remember: When mainstream soda pop is outlawed, only outlaws will Do the Dew.
• The biggest class action lawsuit in Wash. state history’s underway. The class of plaintiffs: Every Washingtonian who’s ever worked for Wal-Mart.
• Those Kansas “Christians” harassing the families of dead gay soldiers at funerals showed up in Port Orchard, along with the expected counter-protesters.
• The state Dept. of Ecology claims stormwater drainage from parking lots, driveways, and roads sends more than six million gallons of petroleum into Puget Sound every year. That’s about half the output of the Exxon Valdez disaster, a drop at a time.
• Today’s dentist-caught-abusing-sedated-female-patients story comes to you from Shoreline.
• Beware of “sham recyclers,” outfits that charge you to take your stuff away and then just dump it in landfills.

• Seattle’s first snow scare of the season was, as I’d expected, a bust, but here comes another.
• What the P-I calls “affordable-housing developers” (what, you didn’t know there were any of those?) rant that the City of Seattle doesn’t provide enough zoning and other incentives to let ’em profitably build more units for folks closer to “median” income levels. Of course, with the few megarich driving “median” income levels ever higher, the definition of for-profit “affordable” housing inches further away from what working families can afford.
• Meanwhile, Bellevue officials ponder regulations to deal with suburban “megahomes” that flaunt their materialistic corpulence over their neighbors.
• The last of the four Pine-and-Belmont bars has closed prior to condos taking over the half-block. Manray’s demise ends a tradition that goes back nearly 20 years, when Squid Row took over what had been a dive-bar space called Glynn’s Cove. Squid Row begat Tugs Belmont, which begat Kincora. Then came Bimbo’s/Cha Cha, Manray, and the Bus Stop (which begat Pony). The strip’s demise got the expected long mega-coverage in The Stranger; the Cha Cha had been the longtime favorite watering hole of several Stranger staffers.
• The P-I catches on to a story first iterated a year or more, I believe, by the Weekly, that Costco treats its workers nicer than the Wall St. investment community thinks it should, resulting in greater sales and profits. Why, if word of this leaks out, the whole economic excuse for screwing the masses could collapse!
• You don’t have to go to Wash. DC to see Democrats cowering in submission. They’re right here, ramrodding an emergency session of the State Legislature to appease Tim Eyman.

The Seattle radio legend and “voice of KOMO Country” from 1967 to 1997 was a soothing aural balm for thousands of non-morning people, helping them survive thousands of way-too-early alarms and dark, rainy commutes. His was one of those talents that was so professional it seemed easy. He’s already missed.

• Two suburban high school teachers took part in an antiwar protest. The administration wants to punish ’em. Students are rallying around ’em in support.
• It’s the first, probably exaggerated, snow scare of the season.
• How not to hide pot in your car: Package it as a Christmas present.
• The tragedy surrounding the failed UW-devised AIDS vaccine moves further from “noble failed experiment” toward “real scandal.” A UW researcher allegedly faked test data and altered lab images. (The researcher in question was conducting AIDS-related research not directly related to the vaccine trials.)
• Reverse-sprawl dept.: Ski maker K2’s moving its head offices from Vashon Island to south Seattle. The products will still all be made in China.
• The SeaTimes posits two Eastside transportation solutions: Add passenger rail, cancel plans to widen I-405.

As you might have perceived from the new image added to the top of the left-hand column, we’ve got another amazing, stupendous, enticing tome for your perusing pleasure.

Seattle’s Belltown is about exactly what you think it’s about. It covers 1.5 centuries of falling hills, rising buildings, homes, bars, theaters, hotels, P-Patches, streets, shops, and life. Get your copy now.

Our OFFICIAL PREMIERE is Thursday, December 6, 5-7 p.m., at M. COY BOOKS, 121 Pine Street. Be there or be trapezoidal.

• The giant bowling-pin sign from Leilani Lanes will be saved and put on display, out in rural Snohomish County.
• MS Windows Vista made Cnet.co.uk’s list of the worst tech products ever. Number one on the list: The Sinclair C5, a three-wheeled electric scooter from the creator of the SInclair computer. (I think it looks rather charming myself.)
• The feds won’t demand the names of thousands of Amazon.com book customers after all.
• Mayor Nickels’s office has declared a temporary lull on harassing the homeless.
• How long will it take to get full ferry service to Pt. Townsend again? Maybe a year.
• Seattle no longer has America’s fastest-inflating home prices, losing that dubious spot to Charlotte, NC.
• Keeping one person in prison in Wash. State costs $30,000 to $50,000 a year.

…longingly wishes, “I’m only sorry Kurt Cobain left us before he could give the world his Christmas album.”

(Actually, Cobain did a solo guitar track on a William Burroughs holiday-related spoken word EP.)