General Electric’s gonna slash 700 jobs at NBC and Universal Studios. More importantly, but buried in this linked story, is that NBC will drop all dramas and comedies from the 8-9 PM prime-time hour, presumably starting either next season or this next midseason, presumably filling the hour with more cheap “reality” shows.

The former UW football star and early NFL great was best known locally for the namesake diner-bar he ran on Broadway for some 50 years. Generations of hipsters fondly recall Steele’s lovable but gruff presence behind the bar, ready at a moment’s notice to snipe at any young whippersnapper who dared to rest an elbow on a table.

When, over the past how-many years, I’ve bitched about San Franciscan attitudes, I was talking about:

• Professional counterculture celebrities who are merely famous for being infamous, who’ve never really written/painted/recorded anything of value but who are adored for their (carefully contrived) outlaw images;
• Loudmouth entertainment/restaurant/fashion hustlers who come up here as cultural colonists, forever whining that this hick town will always suck unless it gets a _____ exactly like the _____s in San Francisco;
• Unimaginative Seattleites who think the only path to true cultural creativity is to copy something already done down there.

I do not, and never have, dissed Frisco (and, yes, I still insist on calling it that) for having gays or liberals within its overpriced midst.

Therefore, I hereby renounce the right wing sleaze machine’s attempt to scare citizens out of voting for Democrats because the Dems would place
a known San Franciscan as Speaker of the House.

No longer will McDonald’s offer Disney movie character toys. The company’s theme parks will turn off all burger grills and French-fry cookers. Even Incredibles Pop-Tarts will go away (merch collectors: that’s your cue to start hoarding).

In other words, a big, fiscally troubled American company’s decreed that three of its biggest divisions (theme parks, feature films, and character licensing) will choose to forego some proven revenue generators for the sake of polishing the company’s brand image. Sounds like a noble gesture, or at least a sharp PR ploy.

But going to an amusement park without cheese fries, cotton candy, or vomitous amounts of imitation lemonade? That sounds as much fun, kid-wise, as a WASL-training sleepover camp.

…to avoid succumbing to the munchies while playing video games–a 360-degree view screen helmet.

…do on the air, if you’re a playoffs baseball announcer: #3. Hurl an ethnic slur at Lou Piniella.

…explains “Why I Don’t Believe in First Grade.” Essentially, he believes real learning (as opposed to rote memorization) is a habit that’s gotta be nurtured from birth.

For the past eight years or so, the Airport Way strip in Georgetown has held a growing reputation as Seattle’s last low-rent artsy-funky neighborhood.

The quarter-mile of old lo-rise buildings, across from the Georgetown Steam Plant, has been the awkward but loveable commercial core for an awkward but loveable population of metal sculptors, musicians, and painters. The strip’s storefronts came to house hip bars, coffee shops, a pizza place, a record store, a video store, and a Vespa scooter dealership.

Meanwhile, the bulky, sprawling brick buildings of the plant (also known as Rainier Cold Storage and Ice; originally the biggest of Rainier Beer’s three pre-Prohibition sites) housed art studios, band-practice and party spaces, and even another brewery (Georgetown Brewing, makers of Manny’s Ale).

But Airport Way’s status as a pocket of cheap thrills, unsullied by commercial megabucks, changed this week. The steam plant, plus a few peripheral lots, were bought by hotshot real estate tycoon David Sabey. (He’s also infamous as the final owner of the Frederick & Nelson department store.)

Sabey told the P-I he plans to turn the complex into “a mix of stores, light industry, offices and homes.” He says some of the current tenants, including Georgetown Brewing, might be invited to stick around.

But his staff also released a drawing of how the site might look when it’s done. The drawing’s full of “tasteful” landscaping and quaint flourishes, just like you see at every Ye Olde Factory, Ye Olde Cannery, Ye Olde Firehall, Ye Olde Flour Mill, Ye Olde Freight Yard, and Ye Olde Whorehouse in America that’s ever been “restored” for townhomes and gift shops.

Maybe it’s time for us all to hie it to Everett or Bremerton after all.

…a brief lexicon of the Bush era’s new, redefined, and degraded words.

…to almost nobody, Google’s buying the popular, unprofitable YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Question 1: How are they ever going to make money from it?

Question 2: Will YouTube’s in-house intellectual-property police now take even more aggressive steps to take down the music videos, TV clips, and old cartoons users have posted there?

Question 3, if they do, will anyone bother to use the site anymore?

…the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” includes two celebrities but only one Seattleite.

Longtime corporate-privilege apologist and recent Seattleite George Gilder starts out his latest Wired essay by mentioning the big “server farms” Google and Microsoft are putting up in the hydroelectrified rural Northwest. It’s nice to see some of the NW’s tech-boom giving employment to parts of Wash. and Ore. that had previously been left out of it, even if those jobs are largely confined to construction and hardware maintenance.

But buried in the story’s midsection, Gilder notes the resource cost of all these data centers that supply our online applications, search-engine results, YouTube videos, blogs, podcasts, massively-multiplayer online games, and junk emails. Gilder estimates that the combined electricity consumption of all U.S. server complexes equals the electricity needed to supply Las Vegas on a really hot day.

As more and more networked apps and media files and other Internet “stuff” gets put up and transmitted about, where’s the energy going to come from to do it all? Gilder suggests nukes. I disagree, but don’t have a more feasible alternative other than newer, less-power-hoggin’ processors and routers, which will only slow down these plants’ thirst for juice.

Maybe we could take the content from some of the more salacious conservative blogs and attach them to wind-power generators.

…tried to appeaal to the sleaze-talk radio audience with a promotional tie-in to Sean Hannity, it’s now trying to appease progressives. A new TV commercial tries to extend Chevy’s “all-American” brand image by featuring images of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Nixon’s resignation, 9/11, and Katrina; all done to an original jingle performed by John Mellencamp (who, when he was more popular, publicly scoffed at oldies-rock stars selling their songs for commercials).

The current Congressional-page sex scandal, and the popular reactions to it, remind me of Tippi Hedren’s climactic tirade in Marnie: “I certainly am decent. Of course I’m a cheat, and a liar and a thief, but I am decent.”

Like Hedren’s character, the right-wing sleaze machine’s goons and power-whores had convinced a large number of people, including themselves, that the only standard of decency was adherence to a draconian standard of sexual discipline. With that in place, all other sins, high crimes and misdemeanors were all fine-n’-dandy, from simple lying and graft to murder, torture, the launching of a bloody, needless war and the trashing of the Constitution.

As “Shamanic” writes at Shakespeare’s Sister, conservative voters “have narrowed the categories of actual [moral] failure to just one: sexual impropriety. You can lie to them about budgets, wars, murder, mayhem, and any other thing and they will find it in themselves to forgive you on election day; but if you lie to them about sex, especially if you’re gay, your fate is sealed. There is no redemption to sexual impropriety.

“This narrowing of sin to just one thing is not an advantage for conservativism. It allows all manner of sin and shenanigan to be ignored. It is a willful moral blindness that gives the bulk of believers cover. They can say ‘I am not an adulterer. I am not a pedophile. I do not buy pornography. I am good.’ This is such a limited view of goodness that it is merely a form of vanity, nothing more.”

Thus, it’s only natural that six years of political, social, economic, and ethical de-evolution, greeted with gleeful smirks and exhortive shouts from the right’s official media/religious cheerleaders, would finally reach the boiling point of public awareness with the discovery that one Congressman had been hitting on boys, and that his higher-ups had covered up for him.

So now we get Time discussing “The End of a Revolution:” “Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left.”

Time still won’t say that power always was the neocons’ only idea.

To this gang, ethics always was a slogan and nothing more. Morality was simply a ruse for engendering a passive-aggressively obedient electorate. Family values, personal responsibility, small government, “protecting marriage,” and, yes, even homeland security–all were sham cover stories for the gang’s real agenda, furthering the concentration of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands.

…the latest reports of local housing prices “slowing down”: “The slowing market means buyers may decide not to buy at all. If someone is telling you not to panic, that generally means it is time to panic.”