• The UW wants $300 million for a Husky Stadium upgrade, half of that from pubilc sources.
• Clay Bennett’s people claim nobody would miss the Sonics.
• Mt. St. Helens: gathering a second wind or tiring out?
• Washington Mutual lost nearly $2 billion last quarter.
• Sensational media stories aside, crime in Seattle is its lowest in 39 years.
• What’s on the rise: The oceans, and therefore Puget Sound.
• What’s on the swift decline: Those silly stock prices.
• Did a Fed. Way judge try to cover up her affair with a defense attorney whose cases she was trying?
• My ol’ hometown of Marysville might get its very own UW branch campus.
• The feds’ great idea for preserving Columbia River salmon stocks: Kill the sea lions who gather at the dams for all-you-can-eat fish dinners.

…before WashState’s Presidential caucuses, but Tim Egan’s already got one Seattleite’s perspective on the election: How does Obama sell himself as an Historic Moment in American History without mentioning race?

AS A HYPER-HUSTLING SOCIETY pressures folk to be smiling and assertive 24/7, one Eric G. Wilson dares to praise good old-fashioned melancholy.

And these are among the stories you might discuss at work, on the bus, or in chatrooms:

• A “person of interest” is in custody in the New Year’s Eve stabbing on Capitol Hill.
• A stage musical based on the Shrek movies premieres in Seattle this fall. As you all remember, the plot of the first Shrek film involved an egomaniacal feudal lord who wanted to banish from his realm anything funky, funny, strange, or otherwise less than upscale. Seattle will be a perfect place to retell this. Speaking of which…
• Will any arts groups be left at the Capitol Hill Odd Fellows hall after the new landlord’s done raising the rents?
• Bush decreed the Navy doesn’t have to follow environmental regulations; allowing sonar transmissions no matter what they do to whales. Remember: The military is here to protect.
• The SeaTimes points with pride to a volunteer patrol that’s helping drive the hookers away from Aurora Avenue. Of course, without the hookers, all Aurora has to offer is the Beth’s Cafe 12-egg omelet.
• Reversing past trends, the developers of a partially-built condo project in Lower Queen Anne will instead convert the building to rentals.
• The Seattle Monorail Project will soon settle its affairs and shut down; while vague plans for an Eastside commuter rail line begin to take shape.
• The revised date on a city hearing to discuss preserving the endangered Manning’s/Denny’s building in Ballard: Feb. 20.
• State Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, would like the Legislature to go on record supporting Bush’s impeachment.
• Not so painless: The anesthesiology staff at Northwest Hospital asked for a pay raise. Instead, the hospital’s CEO fired them all.

…GOP presidential frontrunners as of this morning, and none of them are Fred Thompson. In other news:

• Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner may face still more delays. How smart does globally-outsourced component construction sound now?
• Raw milk— its proponents claim it’s really good for you. Except when it isn’t.
• An appeals court ordered the Belltown-based Mars Hill Graduate School (not connected with Mars Hill Church) to pay $300,000 to its first female faculty member, in a long-standing discrimination suit.
• REI’s building an eco-friendly store in Texas. Now the weekend warriors who drive 75 miles or more to their wide-open spaces can feel a little less guilty.
• A state legislator would like to ban plastic grocery bags. Yeah, but then how will our children learn the pleasures of self-asphyxiation?
• There was a cable TV outage in Kent Tuesday, due to pranksters shooting at utility lines.
• Richard McIver’s charges were dropped, one day before his domestic-abuse trial was to have started.
• Tully’s Coffee underwent another executive purge. Make your own “grounds for concern” joke here.

…before pay-per-view cable channels, championship boxing matches used to be telecast exclusively on “closed-circuit” feeds to movie theaters and arenas. For home audiences, the promoters would license one TV or radio network to broadcast a studio-based show, in which an announcer would read round-by-round descriptions of the action transmitted by teletype from the fight venue.

This is the closest precedent I can think of for “live blogging.”

One of the chief live-blogged events every year is Steve Jobs’s keynote address at the Macworld Expo, Apple’s chief vehicle for announcing new products.

Yes: An event that’s all about the latest, greatest, and shiniest electronic media devices gets its first communication to the outside world by the modern equivalent of telegraph-era technology. Guys with WiFi-equipped laptops sit in the audience and type out brief descriptions of what they hear and see.

(Apple used to try live online video streams of the Jobs speeches. But they never mastered the bandwidth issues. Online video is better suited for recorded content and niche audiences than for a lot of people watching the same live thing.)

So, like thousands of the Mac faithful, I went to Mac news-and-rumor Web sites to read about what Jobs was saying while he was saying it, accompanied by the occasional still digi-pic.

I’ll let other sites explain what Jobs said and showed. As many sites predicted, there’s a new really thin laptop computer, online movie rentals (some in hi-def!), and software updates to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV. There’s also a new wireless external hard drive. All the live bloggers gushed in insta-print over all the stuff.

But they disagreed with the show’s closing entertainment. Jobs trotted out one of his celeb pals, Randy Newman. He performed “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” his return to his old snide singer-songwriter act after several years of toiling in the family business of soundtrack composing.

One live-blogger, Jason Snell, was apparently only used to Newman’s movie songs. Here’s Snell’s comments, reconfigured into chronological order:

“Randy’s singing a song about America, the president, and comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. USA! USA! USA!!!!!“’It pisses me off a little that the Supreme Court is going to outlive me.’” What the crap is he singing about? We have no idea. We think he’s gone nuts.

‘The first song’s over, but now Randy Newman’s just riffing about random stuff. The next song is from Toy Story. Randy says he wrote another song to go with the love scene between Buzz and Woody, but the scene was cut. This guy is blowing our minds right now.

“Holy crap. Who knew Randy Newman, the guy who makes the songs your kids play over and over and over again, would sing such crazy crap about our government?”

My question is different: Who knew such impolite but lucid talk about the end of the American empire would find an outlet at a Fortune 500 company’s PR show?

• Marshall Alternative School will finally close this year, its remaining programs scattered around the city.
• A Tukwila hotel manager turned himself in to face accusations that he stole $1.4 million from hotel guests’ corporate accounts.
• Gregoire’s next big idea for the 520 corridor: A mediation team.
• Makah tribal leaders want to go whaling again.
• How to keep school bus riders pacified: Use satellite music, specially curated to be squeaky clean.
• And the Mac universe impatiently awaits whatever Steve Jobs is going to announce this morning.

That’s Marie Phillips, author of the novel Gods Behaving Badly, when she writes about wanting to be “a pop novelist”: “Maybe I can be like Ray Davies or Peter Blake. They’re no lesser because they aren’t Mozart or Michelangelo. They are doing something else.”

…in which we can tell you of the following recent events:

• With all the talk about the new Legislative session being all about “safety and security,” and fiscal restraint, you’d think we didn’t have a bunch of Democrats running the joint.
• First came the highly publicized, potentially legally shady sting operation at Seattle nightclubs. Now, the bar employees charged as a result of the sting claim the city’s trying to throw the proverbial book at ’em, for no good reason.
• Different cops are being assigned to different patrol districts these days. In other public-safety news, the city promises to finally do something about the infamous Pine Street “zigzag,” in which pedestrians heading downtown have to cross Pine twice, due to only-one-side sidewalks that suddenly switch sides.
• You can now become a registered voter online.
• Tacoma’s Point Defiance Zoo claims it now has a safer tiger enclosure. You can test it if you want to; I think I have to wash my hair today.
• An Eastern Washington couple has been accused of running an Internet diploma mill, selling some 6,000 bogus degrees.
• Only in Alaska: “Most of the 30 bald eagles who survived a disastrous dive into a truck full of fish guts are close to recovery.”

…a fountain of snowflakes descend upon the frozen tundra of Green Bay, I knew the gods would be with the other team, not with ours.

In other Sunday nooze:

• I’m briefly quoted in a SeaTimes obit for Gunther Woerne, who ran Woerne’s European Pastry Shop in the U District for several decades.
• How’s historic preservation going here these days? Eh, so-so.
• Could “social networking” dot-commers save the Crocodile?
• Damn, there was more gunfire outside a Belltown bar; this time the Spitfire Sports Bar.
• So-what’s-new dept.: A state ferry’s been drydocked for some needed fixing.

…to the 27 people who attended my li’l book event at the Form/Space Atelier gallery. If I’d known I’d have had a mike and a stage and a desk, I’d have scripted something.

IN SATURDAY’S NOOZE:

• Declared too damaged to be preserved, the City’s allowed developer David Sabey to demolish the Stock House at theold Georgetown brewery complex on Airport Way, the pre-Prohibition home of Rainier Beer.
• A marriage made in heck: Wife runs a street ministry to drug addicts in Tacoma, hubby sells crack in Seattle.
• Sonic Boom Records is leaving Fremont, in another instance of the arty and funky disappearing from neighborhoods that have been sold to home buyers on the basis of their artiness and funkiness.
• BankAmericrap is bailing out Countrywide Financial, onetime big blowers of the housing bubble.
• Wash. state challenges the Bushies on draconian anti-privacy regulations.
• The ferry system doesn’t know where to put all its out-of-commission boats.
• What? You mean to tell me old pier pilings are bad for the water?
• Pat Cashman has a 30-year-old son, who won some online joke-telling contest. In other passage-of-time news, Madonna will be eligible to join AARP this year.
• And in case you haven’t heard, the Seahawks play an extremely important playoff game this afternoon.

…(other than the spendorifical live book event occurrin’ tonight at 2407 First Avenue (note corrected address)):

• Another Gregoire big idea: Start charging tolls on the current 520 bridge, to help save up for a replacement span.
• After what seems like an eternity, the Northwest African American Museum will finally open in March at the old Coleman School building.
• The City’s new plan to deal more “humanely” with the homeless: Give ’em 48 hours’ notice before confiscating all their stuff.
• December retail sales: up at Costco, down at Nordstrom.
• SW Wash. floodwater makes livestock a little less live.
• Many more state residents are living in poverty compared to 2001.
• Laurelhurstians: So rich they can hire their own cops.
• Hanford’s got some nuclear waste that could possibly spontaneously combust if exposed to air. Officials say they’ve got a plan to deal with it.

…a nice hearty recommendation for my book event tomorrow (Friday) at Form/Space Atelier, 2407 First Ave.

However, I must disagree with the blurb writer, one Brian Miller, when he characterizes me as “a condo-hating anti-growthnik with strongly nostalgic feelings towards his home turf.”

I don’t hate condos. I lived in one (a high-rise, even!) for nearly five years. I like urbanity. I like excitement. I like density. I like walkable neighborhoods full of attractions. I like prosperity.

It’s just that I also like small businesses, DIY arts, indie music, affordable homes, all-nite diners, and public displays of whimsey.

I say we can grow WITH all these things intact, not as preserved memories but as living, breathing parts of our daily life.

Does anybody really enjoy the lifestyle of stolid, joyless “luxury” touted in all the condo ads as late as last year? Anybody at all? I’d like to meet ’em if they exist.

Otherwise, let’s instead have buildings that look good, are well built, and offer value (even “added value”) for their prices.

Let’s have more living-wage jobs and homes, here and in the nation at large.

Let’s have more fun, dammit.

And, in the immortal words of L. Barry, Keep It Funky God.

• Some Washingtonians got beautiful, beautiful snow this morning. We don’t. Oh well.
• A small-town mayor in Oregon was caught posting underwear pix on her MySpace page. Some humorless citizens want her to resign. I say to these citizens: Don’t you believe in open government?
• Big UW donor (and ex-Everett mayor) to UW execs: If you fire the football coach, I’ll donate a hundred grand.
• The “passenger” dolls used by carpool-lane cheaters are getting quite artistic.
• A state senator wants to repeal the Port of Seattle’s taxing authority. As if that would solve anything; they’d just waste the money they get from airlines and shipping lines.
• Gov. Gregoire has a new plan for a new 520 bridge, with “road deck narrower than some earlier designs” above “smaller pontoons.” There’s no joke here; I just like typing the word “pontoons.”
• Seattle Center can go ahead and regulate street performers. Remember: When clowns are outlawed, only outlaws will throw pies.
• The state Legislature will debate whether to force school districts to buy more locally-grown lunch ingredients, presumably not including pot.
• There’s another lawsuit over alleged Catholic boy-abuse, this time involving O’Dea High School.
• Apparel chain H&M (not to be confused with K&G) will open three area stores this year.
• And Bill Richardson may quit the Presidential race, while John Kerry hearts Obama.

(Other than the NH primary, in which candidates won who hadn’t won in Iowa, leaving everything still pretty much wide open):

• Port of Seattle bosses told a citizen hearing they’ve got a surefire reform agenda in place. Citizens responded with a rousing chorus of “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
• It’s cheaper to get homeless folks off the streets than to just let ’em wind up in emergency rooms and prisons.
• Larry Craig’s new line of defense: I only did it once. Try and prove I didn’t.
• Ex-Gov. Booth Gardner supports an assisted-suicide initiative. Current Gov. Gregoire doesn’t support it.
• Everybody loves Children’s Hospital, unless they’re Laurelhurst residents and the hospital wants to totally ruin their views with new tall buildings.

Jim Demetre has a response to Charles Mudede’s review of Seattle’s Belltown.