…the Cascadia Corridor doesn’t seem like such an island surrounded by hostile waters, as the inland West learns Democrats are cool.

• Another nightclub shooting. This one was at Sugar, near the Comet Tavern on Capitol Hill. Three patrons were injured. Apparently the shooter was celebrating “National Ammo Day” one or two days early.
• Mars Hill Church hasn’t opened its new Belltown branch yet, but the SeaTimes sez its five current locations, with 5,000 average total weekly attendance, make it “Seattle’s largest congregation.” And with growth has come the controversial firings of two pastors.
• Reps. Norm Dicks and Adam Smith say we’ve still really got to get the heck outta Iraq.
• Today’s online scare story comes to you from the state Attorney General, who wants us all to be deathly afraid of strangers offering Wi-Fi connections.
• Dino Rossi apparently was raising campaign funds before he officially announced he was running for Governor again.
• The bigot billboard near I-5 in Lewis County is still out there, with “Uncle Sam” spouting one cruel “joke” after another.
• Did ya know Washington State Ferries still actively uses 80-year-old boats? They are, and yeah, they’re showing their age.
• Caffe Vita is making documentary videos about the lives of coffee growers in various countries.

The passing parade witnesses the demolition of the former Frederick Cadillac showroom, used more recently as the Teatro ZinZanni dinner theater, for a mega-high-rise condo project…

…and the arrival of what’s officially called the Seattle Streetcar, but is already unofficially known as the South Lake Union Trolley (for the acronymic possibilities), on a test run up Westlake Avenue. Passenger service is still tentatively scheduled to commence some time in December.

‘What was e-mail, mommy?’

A new DVD release of the first few Sesame Street episodes from 1969 includes this disclaimer: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

I was already a preteen when the show debuted, so don’t blame the Street for how I turned out. But I certainly remember the show’s original, pre-Elmo incarnation.

I remember identifying with Oscar (whose lucid if negative zeitgeist was treated with patronizing laughs by the human stars) and Bert (whose intelligence and earnestness only made him an easy target for Ernie’s “friendly” harassments).

I remember a creeping sense of regimentation behind all the committee-written, consultant-contrived, lesson-planned “fun.”

And, of course, my quickly dirtifying pubescent mind could think of new and innovative ways to play “Which of These Things Belong Together?”

In recent years, I’ve rediscovered the now un-PC Muppet song “I Want a Monster to Be My Friend.”

Heck, for that matter, a lot of Sesame Street moments took on a whole new understanding the day I learned the Canadian slang meaning of the word “cookie.”

Amazon.com’s first in-house hardware product, the “Kindle” e-book device, isn’t to be officially announced until tomorrow (Monday).

But already, pundits and bloggers are placing virtual bets on the machine’s commercial viability.

Some, including Newsweek’s Steven Levy in a long puff piece, are calling it the future of reading, or at least a stepping stone toward the future of reading.

Others, such as Information Week’s Thomas Claburn, have already proclaimed Kindle a “debacle.” These skeptics note that specialized e-book reading devices have been out in one form or another, from one company or another, for almost a decade now, and nobody’s made turned them into must-have lifestyle accessories.

My take, without having seen the thing (and, as something sold only online, how’s anybody going to see it before buying it?): It’s a $399 tablet that pretty much just plays back texts and limited graphics, in a copy-protected file format. It does have Wi-Fi built in plus a little keyboard, so it can be used for email and for the digital editions of daily newspapers (by paid subscription, natch). But it probably won’t be capable of games or audio-video files or serious computing applications.

For the same price you can get the highly successful iPhone, which has Wi-Fi, displays texts, provides the free online versions of every newspaper that offers one, plays music and movies, runs (or soon will run) third-party Web-based applications, and also makes and receives phone calls.

Or if you want a larger text surface to peruse, there are tablet PCs and laptops.

And while proprietary e-book reader formats have come and gone, e-books themselves have become a real business.

I have the great fortune of contributing to a strong, growing e-book publisher. (Buy my e-book title now and get the next update free!)

This outfit, Take Control Books, uses Adobe’s darn-near-ubiquitous .PDF format. (Yes, I know the phrase “.PDF format” expands into “Portable Document Format format.”) It’s an open standard. It lets you read text at a size big enough for eyes my age or small enough for a small-screened device. (So far, refitting .PDFs for iPhone’s more intimate confines takes some ingenuity, but people are working on that.)

Yes, on-screen reading of long-form text documents (i.e., “books”) is here, and here to stay, no matter what’s Kindle’s market fate.

The Times of London has a longer version of the tale we tipped you off to a couple weeks ago, about the guy who sez his late brother was notorious skyjacker D.B. Cooper.

…of Snohomish County, one of the most populous counties in the U.S. without a four-year college, might finally get one. UW administrators are eyeing a corner of Mill Town’s downtown warehouse district, between the new transit station and the new minor-league hockey arena, for a new branch campus. Nothing’s official yet.

…many things. Not among them are cutesy-poo “dignified” new neighborhood names.

Unless, of course, we do it properly.

Herewith, some suggested new monikers for some micro-sections of our too-fair city:

• NorthSouth: The strip malls, office buildings, and Park n’ Ride lot south of Northgate Mall.
• Squares to Curves: The strip of Fairview Avenue between the Seattle Times and Hooters.
• Yo! Town: The stretch of upper First Avenue populated at night by clubgoing frat boys spouting outdated “street” talk.
• Forge Town: The blocks of the Industrial District and east Georgetown occupied by metal sculptors who only exhibit their work at Burning Man.
• Scent-ury Square: The blocks on Fourth and Fifth avenues downtown where the air’s corrupted by the clashing, overbearing aromas of designer perfumes.
• Bored Walk: The sidewalks between LInda’s and the new Cha Cha on Capitol Hill, where the young and prematurely jaded trudge along and moan about how everything sucks.
• Bel-Red West: The new condo towers stuffed with Microsofties.
• Soul Meets Body: The stretch of southern Broadway dividing Seattle U from the Swedish Hospital complex.
• Brownsville: The stretch of Mercer Street near the Pacific Northwest Ballet school, patrolled by girls with hair dyed the exact same shade of tan.
• Ditch-Me Land: The bar strip in west Fremont filled at night by newly jilted singles trawling for a little rebound sex.
• Sanctimonia: The south Wallingford enclaves of the organic, the progressive, the macrobiotic, the clog wearers, and the bicycle-repair collectives.
• 420 to 520: The northern U District and Ravenna homes formerly occupied by gaggles of stoner housemates, now occupied by reverse commuters from the Eastside.

With the Sonics’ continued slide of ineptitude (13 losses in a row, counting last season’s last five games), some observers are wondering whether management’s deliberately trying to lose, a la the movie Major League, to help smooth the road for a move out of town.

Of course, such a strategy would require Clay Bennett and co. to have some degree of intelligence and competence, neither of which they’ve evinced thus far.

• Protestors almost stopped an Army cargo shipment from the Olympia waterfront to Fort Lewis. You’d think the officials in charge would know better than to sneak anything even peripherally associated with the Iraq war past the turf of Evergreeners….
• An Eastern Washington political scandal that doesn’t involve closeted gays: A newly-elected Republican member of the Yakima city council has admitted his wife posted a bunch of anonymous blog posts bashing the guy’s Democratic opponent.
• Just a week after the Roads n’ Transit referendum’s crash n’ burn, King County’s getting into the foot-ferry business. It’s taking over the Vashon-Seattle passenger-only route from the state, and looking into adding cross-Lake Washington service.
• Meanwhile, the county also planned to raise bus fares a quarter. It’s the first such rise in six years, and it comes just as County Exec Ron Sims is trying harder to push folks onto buses.
• And Gov. Gregoire says she’s taking over responsibility for planning and funding a replacement for the 520 bridge. R n’ T would’ve only funded a piece of the megaproject’s cost anyway.
• In a stunning blow to pundits who’d claimed last week’s local votes showed an anti-tax fervor, the measure to allow future school-funding votes to pass by a simple majority seems to be passing.
• In biz nooze, Redhook Ale Brewery (Seattle’s first microbrewer, dating back to 1982) is fully merging with Portland’s WIdmer Brothers. The combined firm will be based in Portland and maintain both companies’ brands…. Starbucks prepares to issue its latest financial results Thursday, amid questions whether the chain’s lost its way while supermarkets and fast-food chains add better cups o’ Joe…. Amazon.com’s launching an exclusive line of gay and lesbian themed jewelry items; visual motifs weren’t mentioned, but let’s hope they don’t include those ugly saturated-color rainbows.

…and you know where this is going to lead. I want to read or hear something, anything, about Norman Mailer the writer.

Not Norman Mailer the celebrity. Not Norman Mailer the drunken macho blowhard. Not Norman Mailer the political “radical” with Neanderthal attitudes about women. Not Norman Mailer the antiwar activist who was quick to elevate cocktail-party disagreements into calls for fistfights. I’ve read more than enough about all those Norman Mailers.

My experiences with Mailer’s writing have been mixed to poor. I cringed at his Marilyn Monroe tribute book. Tough Guys Don’t Dance was a slop of a book that became a bigger slop of a movie.

Then there was the 1957 essay “The White Negro,” which I first read sometime in 1982 or 1983. Yes, it accurately predicted the Sixties culture wars. But it was also a piece of self-promoting nonsense. But then again, I already believed, apparently unlike Mailer, that black culture had purposes other than giving white hipsters something to copy, and that women had purposes other than facilitating male orgasms.

So: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to recommend something Mailer wrote that justifies his hype. I’m afraid you’ll have to do it via email again; I’ve still not figured out how to turn comment threads on.

Drew Carey was at the George & Dragon pub in Fremont on Monday afternoon.

During a typically packed UK soccer day (there was a satellite TV match showing between Arsenal and Reading), Carey showed up in a chauffeured minivan with a small entourage. He plugged his recent status as a goodwill ambassador for U.S. pro soccer (you know, that game where nothing’s made up and the points do matter). Specifically, Paul Allen and partners have recruited Carey as a minority investor in their Major League Soccer expansion team, to launch at Qwest Field in 2009. (Rumor has it that somebody else sought the franchise, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

Carey’s big promo point during the speech (which he repeated that night as a Monday Night Football booth guest): The team will offer “club memberships.” For a projected $100/year, hardcore fans will (1) get an exclusive package of merch, and (2) get to vote every few years or so about the team’s future, even getting to fire the general manager.

He also got in a well-received dig about how such a fan-empowerment schtick might have helped with “that basketball team you used to have.”

…at 5 a.m. for the past week, ever since I had to last Tuesday.

That was Election Day around here, as you may recall. I was temping for King County Elections as a ballot tabulator.

I felt like a real big-city commuter, descending into the Bus Tunnel hours before dawn, clutching my traveling coffee mug like a security blanket. And this would be the day voters decided whether to become more of a big community, by moving further from the drudgery of the solitary commute toward the shared experience of public transit.

At least that’s how I interpreted the Roads-n’-Transit referendum. Yeah, it would add a lot of expensive, wasteful highway lanes. But it would also extend the fledgling light-rail line, perhaps from Lynnwood all the way to Tacoma. (I’d really like it to go from Tulalip to Olympia, plus branch lines along the 405 and 520 corridors. But the civic planning bureaucrats thought voters might prefer the healthy-but-unfamiliar taste of transit when mixed with the fatty-but-indulgent taste of roads. Who was I to argue?)

I was soon on bus route 174, the local to Sea-Tac, through the tunnel and the Sodo Busway, doglegging to Fourth Avenue South, then down the East Marginal Way industrial strip. It’s always been one of my favorite Metro runs. Especially during commuting hours. It’s a vehicle for working-class heroes and heroines on their way to Boeing, Jorgenson Steel, Associated Grocers, Costco, the Seattle Design Center, and assorted other living-wage employers. Along the way it passes such landmarks as Andy’s Diner, the born-again Christian vacuum cleaner store, the Western Bridge Gallery, the possibly soon-to-be-last Seattle Denny’s, and several surviving mom-and-pop motels.

My destination was a tired, sixties-era concrete office building on Boeing Field property, where King County had installed its Temporary Elections Annex (known internally as “The TEA”). I got off the bus one stop too far, requiring me to walk almost a quarter mile. They say it’s always darkest just before the dawn. This was an hour or two before the dawn and was plenty dark indeed, particularly with the low clouds and fog. Auto traffic was already getting heavy.

I entered the building, dropped my coat at the coat check, signed in on the sign-in sheets, picked up my temp ID necklace, and strolled into the Tabulation Room.

At 6:45 a.m., our supervisor (whom I’d previously met during a two-hour training session the previous week), gave us a short pep talk. Workers wheeled in steel carts bearing the courregated boxes containing vote-by-mail ballots. Promptly at 7, workers designated as “runners” handed some of the boxes to us.

In addition to the supervisor and four runners, there were political-party reps standing to one side, two computer operators (caged off from the rest of us behind outdoor chain-link fencing), and nearly 30 of us tabulators. This turned out to be far more than the job needed; I suspect administrators overhired because they wanted to test a ramping-up of the election procedures, in preparation for going to all-mail balloting.

Despite what you might have read on certain wingnut blogs in 2004, King County Elections runs a tight, efficient ship. Within one day of mailing out the ballots, they’d started to receive and process them. Every received ballot went through a series of steps in a series of rooms (opening, signature verification, checking for “overvote” errors, etc.) before it was boxed up and sent to tabulation. By law, tabulation could only occur on or after election day.

The tabulating process is a ritual in itself. First, I’d “break the seal” on the box (a plastic wristband-type device) with an envelope cutter. After double-checking various numbers written outside and on a slip inside the box, I ran the ballots (up to 300 per box) through the counting machine. (Yes, lefty conspiracy theorists, all the machines are from the dreaded Diebold Election Systems.)

It all output to a stack of server computers behind the fence. But the underlying technology is older than mainframes, going back to the punch cards that recorded the patterns for 19th century textile looms. King County’s machines now use optical scanning instead of punched “chads,” but the principle’s the same. A stack of cards gets run through a reading machine. The machine sees the proper marks in the proper places and sends word to add the proper digits to the proper tallies.

With such a major mechanical component to the process, there will, of course, be errant situations. Most of these involved faults with the mechanism that fed the ballots through the machine. These uncounted ballots were simply re-fed; the second run usually did the trick. Most boxes had one or two ballots with worse problems, including physical damage, that required them to be sent to the “dup” room (where staffers would duplicated their votes on fresh cards).

In 11 hours, as our supervisor told us the following day, my fellow tabulators and I processed more than 141,000 ballots. There was no real time to detect voting patterns; but I couldn’t help but notice that the ballots I got, which came from all over the county, expressed no great fondness for Roads-n’-Transit.

By the end of the work day, darkness had resumed outside. I had enough pep left to go drinking, at least briefly. That’s when I learned R n’ T was a goner, and with it immediate hopes for a comprehensive transport solution.

Then it was home, then to a quick bath and bed. Then it was a noise like the old Star Trek red alert sound. It was the new fire alarm in my building. Nothing threatening, just a kitchen fire on a lower floor; but it kept me outside in the cold for an hour.

Because of the relatively low voter turnout (do we still call it “turnout” after it does all absentee?) and the aforementioned overhiring of us temps, I had only 11 hours of further work over the rest of the week. The work I did get was calm, stress-free, rote procedural work, the sort of thing I tend to like.

Next year, the TEA will be replaced by an all-new ballot-processing facility in Renton. By next November, every ballot cast in the county will go through there, via the Postal Service (no more in-person polling places). Let’s hope it continues to go this smoothly.

And let’s hope I can learn to sleep in a little later.

P.S.: In case you were wondering, the more popular write-in candidate names I saw included Homer Simpson, Stephen Colbert, voters’ cats and dogs, and, in the Venus Velasquez race, “Ima Drunk.”

Maddeningly, MSNBC’s official transcript of Keith Olbermann’s latest “Special Comment,” on the silencing of a torture critic, is incomplete. The parts of the text that are up are righteously damning enough.

(Wait: Here’s the whole text now.)