…to our last update to our piece about the Amazon Kindle: That NEA study that claimed (or was interpreted by some pundits as claiming) Americans don’t read anymore? Probably not.

• The Seahawks pulled off a come-from behind miracle victory in St. Louis, cemented when the other team couldn’t score from First and Goal in the last minutes.
• The Seattle Marathon: More profitable and less charitable than you may have thought.
• Do state citizens really suffer from “tax fatigue”? Perhaps not.
• That surplus ferry boat that was gonna be sold on eBay? Not surplus no more.
• Critics accuse software titans of being too mercenary toward little guys caught using file-shared warez.
• Nationally, old-line Southern retro-segregationist Trent Lott will resign from the U.S. Senate; perhaps so he can more quickly join the lobbying biz.
• Despite attempts by an online-retail trade association to promote “Cyber Monday,” the first office day after Thanksgiving’s not yet replacing “Black Friday” in the shopper’s lexicon.
• Besides, Bill Clinton’s treasury sec’y sez recession’s a-headin’ our way.

• It’s the end of the line, sad to say, for onetime Northwest timber giant Pope & Talbot. A court has approved a plan to auction off all of P&T’s remaining assets.
• A Bremerton area woman was arrested for gambling with counterfeit money at the Clearwater Casino. Authorities say she had meth in her purse at the time. Trust me: When you’re sober, those Hell Bank Notes from Chinatown gift shops don’t look a thing like U.S. currency.
• Some of Dino Rossi’s major donors in the 2004 gubernatorial election are backing incumbent Christine Gregoire this time around.
• The Everett Elks Club, the old Mill Town’s predominant social club and nightlife institution for pretty much ever, is being demolished for condos. Once boasting 5,000 members (about a third of the town’s adult male population), it peaked in the ’30s and ’40s, when private clubs in Washington were allowed to have slot machines and were the only places allowed to serve liquor by the drink. I was only in the current Everett Elks building (built in 1962) once, on a father-and-son night. I remember it as a vast, labyrinthine place, with a huge meeting room on the top floor, a male-only “Stag Room” bar and a showroom on the ground floor, and athletic facilities in a series of basements and sub-basements (swimming pool, gym, handball courts). Everything exuded an air of genteel masculunity, albeit toned town to fit the more prole tates of the local community. By that time, though, the Elks had begun their national decline; younger adults were far less interested in joining a group with an official pro-war stance and a white-males-only membership policy.
• And, oh yeah, the Cougs won the 2007 Apple Cup against the Huskies, with a spectacular last-minute touchdown run by the highly appropriately named Alex Brink.

With a high “five” from John Curley to the big ‘KING Mike’ balloon/float, the downtown holiday shopping season is among us.

I know I’m not the only one who saw something subliminally S/M-like about the real woman locked up inside a giant snow globe.

Then, at the Black Friday parade’s conclusion, always comes the fake snow shot out from TSFKATBM (that’s “the store formerly known as The Bon Marche”).

• The housing-market slowdown, which some commentators blissfully predicted wouldn’t hit Seattle, has. First market category to feel the pinch: Townhomes.
• Cold weather means your local rats want an indoor home.
• ETA on the emergency carless ferries to Pt Townsend? Monday.
• That guy who was beaten and kicked by cops outside the War Room might get a $185,000 settlement.
• Will someone buy and save the giant bowling-pin sign from the late Leilani Lanes?
• Now we know why the U VIllage Apple store was closed for remodeling the day OS X Leopard came out. Turns out they’ve got a whole new customer-service through-line system thingy going on.
• And an Everett high-school teacher claims his wedding ring saved his life, by preventing him from getting electrocuted during a home improvement project.

…goes out today to TV producer Verity Lambert, one of the first women with that career in the UK. She shepherded everything from Quatermass to Jonathan Creek, including the original Doctor Who, for which she stretched a Saturday-afternoon kids’ show budget to astounding, if now dated-looking, extents.

• PORTAND LEADERS WANTED to score PR points with local Latinos by renaming a city street after labor leader Cesar Chavez. Unfortunately, the street they chose is the main street of Portland’s small but fabulous Chinatown, whose supporters didn’t like the idea too much.
• Should drivers on SR520 help pay for a new bridge via tolls? Some state officials are looking into it. But complications have already arisen: Wouldn’t more drivers just switch to the I-90 bridge? And if you charge tolls on both Lake Washington spans, how do you convince the regular I-90 commuters that they’re getting something out of it?
• Remember when the Lou Dobbs crowd worried as all get-out about Japanese companies buying up American companies? It’s not happening anymore, at least not so much. And, yes, a different gang of pundits calls it cause for alarm.
• While the Fun Forest is still apparently doomed, there’s cause for hope that a city-run skate park might, at long last, have found a home.
• A man in Michigan “ays he shot and killed a neighbor’s cow after mistaking it for a coyote.” The trouble came when he saw the cow opening up a large wooden crate labeled “One (1) ACME Barbed-Wire Fence Disintegrator.”

This is what happens to local celebs who move to LA intending to enjoy the A-list lifestyle. An author who’s either Bill Nye’s ex-wife or ex-fiancee vandalized his backyard garden with an OD of weed killer. He charges she was trying to poison him; she says it was just a psycho-moment’s prank, and that she’d only wanted to destroy his flowers.

• How not to fly: A 31-year-old doctor from Nashville missed his flight from Sea-Tac. His clever solution (as he’s admitted to authorities): He phoned in a phony bomb threat to get the plane back to the airport.
• Forget bears: The newest critters to fear are “hybrid wolves,” on the prowl for our delicious house pets.
• Comedian Stan Freberg once made a scathing comedy record, “Green Christma$,” attacking the holiday’s rampant commercialization. This year, the phrase takes on a new meaning as merchants hawk allegedly eco-friendly gifts.
• Downbeat news for all local popcult fans: Larry Nelson, KOMO Radio’s morning host for some 30 years, has stage four lung cancer. You can send him your well-wishes at larrybnelson.com, a Web site created by Nelson’s longtime colleague Stan Orchard.

Danny Westneat’s rave review with reservations and my pal Paul Andrews’s more scathing piece about Amazon’s new e-book device (the latter admittedly written without having seen the machine in person) both refer to the old, tired meme of “The Book.”

This meme, which I’ve bashed before, can be divided into two arguments; both of them, I believe, are specious.

First, Andrews reiterates that chestnut argument I’ve been hearing my entire adult life, that nobody reads anymore (particularly those vidiot kids guilty of not being From The Sixties); thus, The Book, and with it all capacity for rational intelligence, has become the refuge of a small literate elite just like in pre-Renaissance days.

Second, both Andrews and Westneat trot out the notion that there’s something sacred about The Book, something that will never, can never, be equalled by any electronic device imaginable; and even if it could, hardcore “people of the book” (especially the older male ones) are, by nature, proud Luddites, who’d rather be living in some imagined pre-20th-century pastoral Eden.

Andrews cites a recent National Endowment for the Arts study claiming that “reading for pleasure” among adults has dropped bigtime since the mid-’90s. Actually, all “legacy media” have dropped bigtime in popularity, from broadcast TV/radio to newspapers and magazines to movies in theaters. The culprits: DVDs, video/computer games, them danged Interwebs, and more active leisure pursuits such as gyms.

And if book buyers really were such technophobes, Amazon wouldn’t have made its first market niche from them.

Folks “read for pleasure” on screens all the time these days. You’re probably doing so right now.

The catch is that Internet-based reading has, to date, emphasized short-form content, such as that featured in this splendiferous web-column thingy.

The trick has been to devise an environment that facilitates/encourages long-form reading; i.e. single book-length texts.

That’s what all the developers of specialized e-book reader machines have strived for this past decade or so. From what I’ve read about Kindle (I haven’t seen one in person either), they’re still not there yet.

But that doesn’t mean it’ll never happen.

I can foresee something a little bigger than the iPhone or a little smaller than a Tablet PC, running open source software or at least non-encrypted file formats, that’s pleasant enough on the eyes for extended reading times, and which enables the total immersive feel of burying oneself in a good tale.

Further updates still: According to the SeaTimes’s Brier Dudley, Amazon didn’t develop the Kindle hardware here but in Silicon Valley. And Amazon indeed ignored the Seattle media at Kindle’s launch, not even inviting anybody from here to its big debut presentation in NYC.

• Remember how the Bellevue Art Museum had this big cash crunch that led to a drastic restructuring? Turns out part of its problem was its former chief financial officer. She’s charged with embezzling $300,000 from the organization, because, police say she said, a recent divorce had left her “financially compromised.”
• We won’t have the Sugar nightclub to kick around anymore.
• In the “you call this higher education?” dept., unnamed members of a UW frat house allegedly shouted racial and anti-immigrant slurs at a random Asian-looking guy walking outside, and threw a water balloon out at him from their window. Police are investigating it as a “malicious harassment” case.
• A couple tried to have bathroom sex on a Southwest Airlines flight from Seattle to Vegas. The plane made an unscheduled stop in Portland, where the forbidden lovers were kicked off.
• Today’s best dumb criminal, as Keith Olbermann would say: A 42-year-old metal thief. Cops found an electric sign had gone out along I-90 near Snoqualmie Pass, discovered wiring was missing from the sign’s control box, and found the stolen wires in the bed of a pickup parked nearby. The driver was in the truck’s cab, sleeping.

• The end of the ride may finally be in sight for the delightfully seedy/carny Seattle Center Fun Forest. The amusement park’s lessee/operators never recovered from losing a big chunk of their space to the Experience Music Project. They’re way behind on their rent to the City. Everybody in city and county officialdom wants the arcades and rides outta there. They’d like to replace it all with something more befitting of New Seattle world-class-osity, such as a big lawn peppered with public art, or a miniature “real” forest. Will nobody step forward in defense of this business-for-pleasure, this bastion of pre-Space Mountain carnivality?
• Glammie-gate’s repercussions continue. Gay Bingo’s new boss told its beloved host, the foul-mouthed drag performer Glamazonia, to clean up her act or be gone. As you might expect, she didn’t go away quietly.And again this year, the Sheraton’s got a huge display of gingerbread structures to benefit, of all causes, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

In the early 1990s, “grownup toy” and gift shops sold a faux-Chia novelty product called “Barbara’s Bush.” Above, a less genteel product for a more X-treme time.

Here’s some more info about the Amazon Kindle e-book reader from my own e-book publishers.

Apparently, I was wrong about a couple of points: Kindle does play MP3 audio files and includes a rudimentary Web browser.

…of nature poets and whale paintings, comes some disrespect toward some vulnerable human lives. A nursing home in Port Townsend wants to kick out old people just because they’re on Medicaid.