…housing prices haven’t deflated yet? Aw, you figured it out already.

As I mentioned a few days back, I’m working to make my music history book Loser fully available again. This time, I’m dealing with a print-on-demand outfit whose largest standard page size is smaller than the one used for the last Loser print run.

That’s little problem for the original 1995 pages; Art Chantry had designed them for a 10-inch-tall page, rather than the 11-inch-tall size the original publisher used.

But I subsequently designed the 1999 addenda (Chantry was living out of state at the time) for a full 11-inch page. I’ve been adapting those 45 pages to the smaller dimensions without cuting anything.

Now for the big question: How much updating should I make to the 1999-edition text?

…who still read printed newspapers for the daily ritual, and were perturbed whenever one aspect of that ritual goes missing, here’s today’s Tank McNamara strip. (If you’re reading this after Oct. 1, set the “Current” box on the linked page to Oct. 1.)

The P-I has made no explanation for the strip’s Monday absence. In the past, the P-I has run comic strip episodes from which other papers around the country have demurred (in such series as Non Sequitur and the late, lamented Boondocks). So I wouldn’t expect the paper to shy away from a Tank episode that compares athletes who don’t give a darn about other athletes’ health problems to “neo-cons.”

…just how “progressive” a left-of-center web site can be if said site is turning a profit but not paying its writers.

Got the October Belltown Messenger done. It’ll be out (and online) next week, and it’s a smash if I do say so myself (and I do).

Been working on a deal to get my old local music book Loser more available.

Been trying to teach myself at least enough programming to bring this site into the 21st century, tech-wise.

Here are some beautiful, haunting photos of toy factories in China. The series oscillates between three extremes: The official “fun” expressed in the products themselves, the regimented factory atmosphere, and the close-up portraits of individual humans (mostly female) on the production lines.

Seattle artist Chris Jordan, whom I’ve mentioned here before, is now displaying his work in L.A. His politically-charged, computer-assisted photo murals really need to be seen life-size, but this link shows successive close-ups to show his creative expression of (usually negative) factoids about American life.

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s become fascinated by old blank signs.

…rhetorically ponders whether the construction of ultra-luxury residences and offices behind the facades of old buildings is really historic preservation:

“Market capitalism has a special way of producing an illusion of adaptation when a community senses something lacking in a world filled with alleged choices. You want a piece of history? Fine, tell us how we can fettishize it and sell it back to you for a profit, and you can have all of the rustic brick you want. We’ve got truckloads.”

…and gloom in past few posts, here’s something upbeat–quaint film footage of Seattle in the 1930s, shot by amateur filmmaker Iwao Matsushita. Too bad he couldn’t stay in town past 12/7/41.

…today’s overall downbeat theme, Belltown’s own legendary rock venue the Crocodile Cafe is going through a fiscal rough spot. Apparently it’s been, at best, only marginally profitable the past seven years, as newer and bigger venues compete for the top touring bands. But since founder Stephanie Dorgan’s divorce earlier this year from R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, there’s no longer rock-star zillions to plow into the place. Managers say business has rebounded a bit the past few months, but the Croc’s long-term future remains to be seen.

…Joe Martin (not to be confused with the All My Children patriarch) delivers a terrific speech to a “Building the Political Will to End Homelessness” conference. Martin’s topics include America’s need for a “theology of hope” that would combine compassion with effective action.

Meanwhile, Real Change has run “A Seattle Manifesto,” Tim Harris’s call for more social justice and less demographic cleansing.

As you might have heard, longtime Seattle historian/activist/political operative Walt Crowley passed away Friday at age 59.

I’d known he was going in for a second round of cancer surgery this week, after having already lost his larynx in February. He suffered a massive stroke while recovering from this latest operation. Despite already being in Virginia Mason Medical Center at the time of the stroke, physicians could do nothing for him.

The last time I’d seen him was three or four weeks ago. He’d shown up at the Two Bells with some longtime friends. He conversed with me by writing on an Etch-A-Sketch-like children’s erasable screen he carried on a necklace. I agreed to consider producing a book for his HistoryInk, the print arm of HistoryLink, the massive nonprofit local-history web site he’d cofounded. (I’d already written a couple of small essays for the site.)

I’d also been to some of Crowley’s legendary Christmas Eve house parties. I remember at one of them insistantly telling a woman Crowley’s age that no, people like myself who were too young to be “From The Late Sixties” were people too. Crowley himself, bless him, had no problem with that novel concept.

I’d first met Crowley in the late 1980s, around the same time he was serving as a dueling commentator on KIRO-TV with another former acquaintance of mine, John Carlson. Around this time, Crowley boasted of having personally saved the Bill of Rights in his Belltown apartment, by forming a committee to stop the Washington State Legislature from going along with a Reagan-era right-wing drive for a new Constitutional convention.

A scion of the Crowley Maritime tugboat family (though he didn’t like to mention it), Walt first gained citywide attention as a hippie-era activist, spokesperson, journalist, and cofounder of the underground paper Helix. He remained socially and politically active all his life. He worked in various capacities for various local Democrats, and once lost his own race for a City Council seat. He served on countless boards and committees. He was big in the drives to save the Paramount and Moore theaters, the Eagles Auditorium (now A Contemporary Theater), and the Blue Moon Tavern.

But like all too many of his and subsequent “rebel” generations, his antagonisms against conservatives never quite extended to that quintessential conservative big business, the tobacco business. In recent years his powerful, fun-loving voice became a raspy whisper, before it disappeared altogether.

Crowley will be remembered by many people, online and in print, over the coming days and weeks. Let me simply remember him as one of Seattle’s most important keepers of history, as well as an historic figure himself.

Here are further thoughts by two Crowley friends, Michael Hood and (in the comments) Patrick McRoberts.

And here’s Crowley’s official bio on HistoryLink.

From here to the bigtime mainstream media, everybody loves the South Lake Union Streetcar’s new unofficial nickname, South Lake Union Trolley. Or rather, they love its juicy acronym.

And who wouldn’t love the SLUT?

Particularly since the acronym’s just so darned appropriate for a mini-transit system “railroaded” into existence by Paul Allen’s lobbying, whilst plans that would move more people thru more populous places (can you say Mo-no-rail?) get slowly hacked to death?

I expect all of you to be wearing your official unofficial SLUT T-shirts on the line’s opening day in December. Heck, you could even wear ’em at this coming Monday’s reopening of the downtown bus tunnel, another of Seattle’s under-two-miles transportation non-solutions.

I haven’t mentioned it much here, but I’ve been admiring the online scribblings of HorsesAss.org’s David “Goldy” Goldstein. Most recently, he’s lucidly compared the totally-made-up faux-controversy over a newspaper advertisement with the classic play/movie Betrayal.