I’m on “special assignment” the rest of this week. That’s right, another marathon temp gig. I’ll report when I can.

UPDATE: Karen Hansen has some newer info about the late local rock singer Ian Fisher:

“Earlier this evening, I got a call from Jack Hanan, long-time friend and former bass player of the Cowboys. Jack had spoken with Ian’s brother and relayed the following:Ian Fisher had a heart attack in his beach hut in Thailand, in the company of friends (not on a bus)

.

His body has been cremated, per Ian’s wishes, and we’re not sure if he is in Seattle yet or not. His ashes will be scattered in San Diego and Aberdeen.

A memorial event, complete with a big jam session, is in the planning and we’ll keep you posted on the date.”

…word’s gotten out that former local rock singer Ian Fisher of the Cowboys has died in Thailand. Further details are scarce at this time.

Fisher and his band were anomalies in the pre-“Seattle Scene” Seattle scene. Back in the early 1980s, local rock bands that sought commercial success played covers of big hits in big bars. Bands that insisted on writing their own material were stuck with far fewer, far smaller venues, and catered to the more specialized tastes of the “alternative” crowd. The Cowboys created their own image and their own music (albeit heavily influenced by the likes of the Knack and the reggae-era Clash). They aspired to, and got into, the big clubs. They didn’t tour much, and never got a national record contract. But Fisher got to live the rock star image, and flamboyantly did so for nearly a decade.

IN MUCH MORE PREDICTABLE NEWS, Clay Bennett did what everybody said he would do from day one, despite his claims that he wouldn’t. He said he intends to move the Sonics to Oklahoma City.

But it’s not a sure thing, despite the fatalistic mumblings of some local fair-weather fans.

There will be legal wrangling.

There will be local potential buyers.

There already are save-the-team booster groups.

There are the hearts and souls of everyone who remembers the Sonics in their ’70s and ’90s primes, who knows the Storm’s more recent triumphs, who knows what a team can do to bring families and communities together.

And we have people who see the sport’s changing economics.

The NBA’s business model, as we’ve said before, is way broken.

The influx of cable TV rights money has peaked or will peak soon, as total viewership declines and fractures among ever-more viewing choices.

As the upward centralization of wealth in America continues, there will be only so many zillionaires to buy luxury boxes and corporate suites.

What’s left for teams to pay superstar salaries from? Shoe endorsements? Team-logo mouse pads?

Pro b-ball needs to stabilize, around its home towns.

It needs to again be a sport of fan loyalty, of community outreach, of human-scale, street-level attention. In this sense, the NBA needs to become more like the WNBA.

And for that to work, the league has to give up on the short-term fixes of subsidized arenas and threats to move. It needs, as Ross Perot or someone said, to “dance with the one that brung ya,” the fans and cities who grew up with the sport.

…still hasn’t flown yet, and company executives are already hinting at another round of job-blackmail demands for whatever plane will follow it.

Sound Transit wants to extend its yet-unfinished light rail line all the way from Seattle to Tacoma. King County exec Ron Sims doesn’t like the idea.

This is an example of political turf-holding at its most basic. I disagree with Sims’s position, but respect him for taking it.

Part of Sims’s job is to promote King County as a place to live and work. Enabling easier commuting to/from Pierce County doesn’t aid that mission. It might even potentially harm that mission.

But in the big-big picture, we’re an economically integrated metroplex and had better start acting like one.

As Seattle becomes ever more haughty and costly, Tacoma’s more affordable housing is more vital. So is Tacoma’s status as a funky, unpretentious, working-class anchor.

Besides, I’d love easier car-free access to the Java Jive and the Fife Poodle Dog.

…that were supposedly too lenient got labeled as “diploma mills”? The new reverse term is “dropout factories,” and it’s applied to schools that let too many students slip through the proverbial cracks. Federal researchers have applied the label to about 10 percent of U.S. public high schools, including 22 schools in our state (but none in Seattle).

SEATTLE OFFICIALS point with pride today to stats claiming the city’s one of the few in America meeting anti-global-warming goals. Naturally, some local eco-activists say it doesn’t mean all that much really.

THE SAVE-THE-SONICS CROWD won a minor skirmish in court.

…some less than flattering words about the church that’s moving into Belltown’s Tabella nightclub space. Essentially, Lanham accuses the church and its leader of preaching hatred, homophobia, and misogyny under the guise of a youth-understanding hipster.

John Edwards vows, if elected, to crack down on those annoying prescription drug commercials.

Leno got it all wrong. The line should be, “It’s MONDAY, time for NON-HEADLINES!” Monday morning newspapers’ “top” stories tend to be feature-y or analytical or, in the case of the Venus Velasquez DUI arrest, more than a week old.

Still, there are a few actual items of interest out there.

Turns out, for one thing, that the Coolest Adult any Seattleite of a certain age ever knew, J.P. Patches, has cancer, but still keeps up a rigorous schedule of personal appearances. The Times’s picture showed the legendary local TV funnyman looking more ilke one of Red Skelton’s sad-clown paintings. Alas.

Let’s figure this one out: The Bellinghamsters at Western Washington U. told a male ex-student he couldn’t sell Women of Western swimsuit calendars on campus, because they were allegedly “demeaning to women.” Four years before, the same administration allowed a student organization to screen erotic art movies under the series title Pornfest.

A good student of semiotics would parse her/his way to a consistent line straddling both decisions–we want to encourage students to do it, not just sit around and look in the manner of passive consumers; or, perhaps, a swimsuit calendar represents an awkward intersection of sexuality and fashion, while porn offers a more directly visceral experience and is therefore more subversive of the dominant paradigm.

We must bid a fond adieu this morning to Porter Wagoner, your quintessential Nashville pop star. Besides his own dozens of hits (my favorite: “The Rubber Room”), he had a modest little syndicated TV series for 21 years. The Porter Wagoner Show was a deceptively plain affair, designed to mimic Wagoner’s touring show. Some patter, a baggy-pants comedian, some solo songs, one instrumental number, and a couple numbers by the band’s current “girl singer.” The second woman to fill the latter role was Dolly Parton, with whom Wagoner co-wrote and co-recorded many tracks between 1967 and 1975, when she went solo.

Puget Sound Energy is being sold to Australian and Canadian investors, who will take the state’s largest private utility “private.” That is, no more stock trading; and therefore no pesky SEC reports to file about the company’s finances.

The Puget Sound Light, Traction and Power Company was Seattle’s original electric company, and also its first operator of electrified streetcars. Even after the formation of the municipally-owned Seattle City Light, Puget Power still ran its parallel, competitive electric lines until the 1950s. (The last vestige of Puget Power’s in-city operation is now the independent Seattle Steam, providing competitive electric service to a wide swath of downtown.)

Further public-power initiatives in Tacoma and Snohomish County left Puget Power with a diminished operating turf that happened to be in the path of suburban sprawl. That territory included Snoqualmie, where the company had already dammed Snoqualmie Falls and built what’s now the Salish Lodge.

In the 1990s Puget Power merged with Washington Energy, formerly Washington Natural Gas, formerly Washington Gas Company (or “GASCO”). That company had run a huge smoke-belching coal-fired gasification plant for almost half a century. The plant was rendered obsolete when natural gas pipelines reached here; it eventually became Gas Works Park. For decades after that, the gas company’s most famous landmark was the giant revolving neon sign on its office roof, the Blue Flame (or, in later street jargon, the “blue vagina”).

In recent years, Puget Sound Energy has become under fire for not getting the power back on after windstorms as quickly as Seattle City Light and Tacoma Public Utilities. It’s not all the company’s operating fault. Its service area includes a lot of rural and exurban territories, still serviced by overhead wiring. Still, the company promised last week that the new owners would pour cash in to help modernize its network. Weezell see.

And, oh yeah, the Boston Red Sox effortlessly swept the World Series.

…of these already, but there’s a need for another benefit concert for a musician who doesn’t have health insurance. This time, it’s our ol’ pal and Fastbacks/Visqueen legend Kim Warnick. She’s come down with something that landed her in a hospital, and we’ve gotta help her out. The usual parade of local music all stars and major raffle prizes will occur Tuesday, Oct. 30 at the new Cha Cha Lounge, 1013 E. Pike.

As more new-music pioneers like Warnick enter the golden years, we’ll have to hold more and more of these benefits. Unless we get our politicians off their collective posteriors and establish a sane health-care system in this land.

…Seattle’s last un-gentrified neighborhood? You might already be too late.

THE URBAN REST STOP, a hygeine center for the homeless situated at 1924 9th Ave. along downtown’s edge, is holding a grand re-opening Thursday morning to celebrate a remodeling and expansion. The new facility is already busy to capacity.

WEIRD CRIME UPDATE: A guy claims he’s the brother of “D.B. Cooper,” the pseudonymous skyjacker who parachuted from a plane in 1971, carrying a suitcase full of cash, and was never seen again. The alleged brother claims “Cooper” survived the jump, settled down quietly in Bonney Lake, WA, and lived until 1994. Believe what you will.

Danish engineers have been in town, researching the feasability of replacing the Montlake section of Highway 520 with a tunnel. Traffic, with its noise and unsightly bulk, would magically disappear under the ground, leaving upscale real estate in the area even more valuable.

I actually like the idea. If we must have more highway lanes from/to the burbs, might as well put ’em where we don’t have to see ’em.

Of course, there’s always the little bugger of what it would cost…

…Microsoft/Facebook minority-stake acquisition thang? Paul Andrews sez you shouldn’t estimate Facebook’s total value based on what MS paid for a piece of it.

As some of you know, I don’t dress up for Halloween, but I admire and honor those who do. As part of this annual celebration, I’m searching for this year’s raddest costume ideas.

Here’s one list of dress-up ideas, most of which are quite commercial and lame.

But what would be better?

This year’s most lampoonable real-life figures (Paris, Britney, Lindsay, and Larry “Wide Stance” Craig) are more walking tragedies than icons of joy.

This year’s scariest real-life figures (the Bushies and their wholly-owned media advocates) are blustery and certainly larger than life, but have a rigidly anti-fun, soulless undertone to their personalities. They’re not the funnest people to pretend to be.

So what else is out there?

If you want to be really tasteless, you could go as a smoke-inhalation-vicitm Malibu Barbie and Ken, complete with charred-out surfboards.

You can prove your up-to-date popcult awareness by being Hannah Montana, Ugly Betty, Stephen Colbert, the horny healers of Gray’s Anatomy, diet-book hawker Dr. Oz, Hiro from Heroes, an iPhone, a flat screen TV, an unemployed mortgage broker, Dennis Kucinich and his tall uber-bride, the I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER cat, a YouTube video clip of somebody doing something stupid, or a fat-n’-sassy Al Gore.

Or, of course, you could band together with fellow partiers and go as the most monstrous, most frightening sight imaginable.

I speak, of course, of the High School Musical cast.

As always, please send in your pix and scene reports from costume events over the next week.

…per capita than almost anywhere else in America, says an A.C. Nielsen survey. Only Salt Lake City and Boise (which this survey counts as a single region) consume more of the sugary stuff. So much for our healthy/fit rep.

…Tabella is selling its space to Ballard’s Mars Hill Church. So, instead of drunken gay-bashers on Saturday nights, Western Avenue will have sober gay-denouncers on Sunday mornings. Yes, that’s an improvement.

IF ANYONE WAS AT the big and costly Hillary Clinton to-do in town Monday night, I’d love to hear about it. I do know the rightist protest scene outside Benaroya Hall wasn’t so big as it had been at her prior visits.

PARKING-LOT CZAR Joe Diamond may be dead, but he’s still a stern taskmaster. Diamond company officials earlier this month said they’d forbid tailgating parties before Seahawks football games on Diamond-owned lots. Now comes a revised edict: Go ahead and party, but don’t be seen with any booze.

SEATTLE’S MOST FAMOUS “We Never Close” restaurant is closed today. A chimney fire has shut down 13 Coins since about 4:30 a.m. Tuesday; it may reopen for tonight’s dinner shift.

IN VANISHING SEATTLE NEWS, the famous Wonder Bread neon sign will rise again, on the apartment building that’s replacing the former Central Area bakery site. Once again, the mark of wholesome blandness will draw motorists to what has traditionally been Seattle’s least whitebread neighborhood.

KUDOS TO 13-year-old Aaron Furrer of Monroe and his Guernsey heifer Dot for winning a big juniors-division prize at the World Dairy Expo in Madison, WI. Buried deep in the hereby-linked article: Furrer’s family can no longer turn a profit on their 46-acre dairy farm; his dad now works as an electrical contractor just to hold on to the land.

OVERHYPED TRAGEDY OF THE DAY: “A jury Monday convicted a former stripper turned Olympia, Wash. soccer mom in the decade-old murder of her fiance. Mechele Linehan, 35, was convicted of first-degree murder for conspiring with another fiance to kill Kent Leppink, who was shot three times in 1996 near Hope, AK. Prosecutors say Linehan wanted Leppink’s $1 million insurance policy.”

IF YOU BELIEVE what you read in the papers (or on the papers’ web sites), Shirley McLaine says Dennis Kucinich once saw a UFO outside Graham, WA. Make up your own comment here.