On this day we commemorate baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Chevrolet, and, oh yeah, the brave actions of our forefathers n’ foremothers lo those 23 decades ago. They didn’t get it all right, not right away (slaves, women not voting, etc.). But they got us started on the path toward equality under the law. They stood their ground against the greatest global military power of their day. They sought not just autonomy from the monarchy, but a better way to run a country. They fought to replace the rule of monarchs with the rule of law. They got out from under the thumb of a capricious, incompetent, power-mad ruler, a king named, well, you know.

Among other people, Keith Olbermann suggests we desperately now need to get out from under our current mad monarch’s thumb–not to overthrow our current system of governance but to renew and reclaim it, to take it back from the despotic elite who would destroy it from within. I can’t think of a better wish for this day.

If the Democratic Congressional leaders are too bureaucratic (i.e., chicken) to act toward Bush/Cheney’s immediate removal, we all will have to put out the ol’ screws of public opinion to get ’em movin’. If they still won’t, we’ll have to “route around” the blockage, as they say in Internet jargon.

By this I don’t mean overthrowing the whole US government. That wouldn’t succeed; and even if it did, something even more brutal might emerge.

No, our task is both more subtle and more obscure. We have to make the current federal executive occupants irrelevant even if they remain for the duration of their term.

…of iPhone hype stories this past week, Steve Jobs is quoted as calling “the human finger the most sophisticated navigation device known to mankind.” I’m sure the Babeland ladies would agree.

…at Crosscut has a brilliant idea—let’s save the Ballard Denny’s! The classic 1964 coffee-shop building was originally the last of the once-coast-wide, Seattle-founded Manning’s chain. But just like nearly everything else on or near Market Street these days, it’s threatened with demolition for a condo project. Berger seems to think any preservation move is doomed. I’m less cynical. It can be done! It should be done!

…wants you to think of new Net-assisted video distro technology,not as another outlet for the big media corps., but as a means toward democratizing the medium.

As anyone who’s been reading the entertainment pages knows, Darrington-born Bob Barker hosts his last Price Is Right episode this Friday.

And you may compare-n’-contrast this piece of video history with the first episode from 1972, excerpts of which have been posted to YouTube by fans. (The person who posted the clip edited out the very first prize plug, for that future Barker bugbear, a fur coat.)

I don’t remember having watched that premiere at the time, but I have seen the series since its first year (I was 15). It’s remained one seldom-changing constant in an ever-changing world.

Back then, America was under the thumb of a paranoid, dictatorial President and his brutal, power-mad minions; mired in a meaningless and futile war; torn by dissentions over race, gender, human rights, and the planet’s survival; and battered by its dependence on foreign oil. Gawd, I’m glad those days are past us.

TPIR was a product of the old three-network system; the first “new channel” since TV’s dawning years, PBS, had just gotten underway. CBS hadn’t aired any game shows for the previous four years, when the network convinced the Goodson-Todman team to bring back a Bill Cullen 1956-65 oldie with a new host and a revamped concept (at least partly “inspired” by Let’s Make a Deal).

How has this ultimate piece of junk-food TV, this craven homage to the gods of merchandise, this orgy of noise and flashing lights, outlasted all the other network daytime game shows to become the stuff of Internet discussion boards and manic fandom?

Part of its appeal has to do with its very status as a national institution. Part of it has to do with its odd combination of mindlessness and nerdiness. Part of it has to do with the fact that it has more variety and visual punch than most game shows have had. But I’d say a huge part of the show’s survival is due to its evocation of a classic circus-sideshow environment (where the MCs coincidentally were known as “barkers”).

Author James Twitchell, in his 1992 book Carnival Culture, noted that the “vulgar” elements of mass culture, so vehemently denounced by the paragons of good taste, have always been with us. The vulgar is just as much a part of human heritage as the sacred. It enlivens us. It unites us. It invigorates us. It’s among our eternal needs.

CBS promises TPIR will return from reruns once a new host has been found. If and when it does, it won’t be the same.

…Pioneer Square building that suddenly started to get dismantled this past winter? Turns out that all might not have quite been legal.

…might not have an answer for the future of the Viaduct or for unaffordable housing, but it’s ready to take one really serious move–banning microwave popcorn from municipal offices.

BAD NEWS: Of the four currently-being-debated plans for renovating Seattle Center, three of them (all except the “do nothing” plan) call for razing the Fun Forest. The slightly seedy but still functional Forest is Washington state’s last permanent, year-round (more or less), pre-Disney-style amusement park. It’s as close as you can get here to old-time “carny” culture. It shouldn’t be scrapped for an undefined “family activity area.” It should be preserved, even upgraded to compete with the likes of Wild Waves.

Don’t drive nude. You could break your foot making a sudden stop; at least wear shoes.

Flicks candies, listed in this space years ago as one of the few San Franciscan things I unconditionally liked (back before my anti-elitist Frisco-bashing was superceded by Bill O’Reilly’s anti-gay Frisco-bashing) have been bought by an indie manufacturer and are back in production. Locally, they’re at Cost Plus World Market.

Thanks to the 50-plus people who partied with me last Friday as I became 50-plus. (No, I don’t have any pix. I’m not that self-centered.)

I don’t think of myself as an oldster. Some generous people have said I don’t look like one, either. Except for a strange craving for afternoon naps I started having last year, I still see myself as the frustrated ex-college student trying to get his life started already. (I was going to write that I still feel like a 25-year-old, but that didn’t mean I was going to get one.)

It turns out there’s one celebrity born on my day in my year: Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. He even made a circuitous reference to his birthday in the strip published that day.

Other folks sharing the great six/eight include Frank Lloyd Wright, Jerry Stiller, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Kanye West, Nancy Sinatra, Sonia Braga (herself still fabulous), Griffin Dunne, Supreme Court Justice Byron White, Joan Rivers, Mariner Kenji Johjima, Picket Fences costar Kathy Baker, James Darren, Bernie Casey, Colin Baker, DNA researcher Francis Crick, and some obscure Brit named Tim Berners-Lee who thought up something called the World Wide Web.

(Alas, I also share my special day with My Lai killer William Calley and Satan-spawner Barbara Bush.)

A birthday, especially one that’s a nice round number, traditionally represents a good time to look back at things.

I remember a few things about my early years–watching that primitive, five-channel television (one of my lifelong loves); teaching myself to read newspapers at around age three-and-a-half (another of my lifelong loves); getting bullied by the older kids; leaving the bucolic outskirts of Olympia (long before That College was ever built) for the comparatively sterile foothills east of Marysville (long before its casino- and sprawl-driven boom); being bored to tears by school and household chores; repeatedly discovering that a jock town held no particular fondness for smart but un-athletic boys; finding little to no interest in most bad-boy style recreations (drinking, smoking, drugging, cussing, driving, fighting); feeling imprisoned out in the (then) countryside; wishing as hell that I was among real streets and sidewalks; sitting and squirming in the back seat of a ’57 Chevy station wagon (we eventually became a “Ford family”); finding and losing religion; seeing my first live rock concert (a promo gig at the opening of a new housing development with The New Yorkers, later known as the Hudson Brothers); and discovering sex at the exact same time that the mass media did (hence failing to learn the valuable lesson that my culture had been lying to me all this time).

And I remember the day we all went to the Seattle World’s Fair. I basked in a real city experience. I stared in awe at the attractions. I calculated I’d be in my forties when all these wonderful techno-utopian predictions would come to pass. (I don’t miss not having a flying car; but the peace, prosperity, and progress they promised would still be nice.)

I might have more on this later, but I don’t guarantee it.

…has a birthday this Friday. And this time, it’s a nice round number.

I’ll post thoughts about the occasion on Sunday or Monday. But for now, anybody who wants to get me a Mac mini, a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, a black fedora (large), a Braun shaver, or a set of half-decent computer speakers is more than free to do so.

The vastly larger and more comprehensive second edition of my “e-book” Take Control of Digital TV is now available.

As some of you know, television as we know it ends in 2/09, when the analog broadcast transmitters shut down and everything goes digital. Before then, you’ve got a lot to learn about the new digital TV system and all the software and hardware that goes with it. I humbly believe my e’book’s the best way for you to get up to speed about HDTV, LCD, plasma, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, Apple TV, DVRs, and all the other myriad aspects of the new video universe. Get it now.

I’ll explain this further, in handy online-audio form, on the streaming Net-radio show Tech Night Owl this Thursday evening.

Some of you know I used to work in the bucolic Maple Leaf neighborhood. One of that area’s greatest attractions has been the regional Camp Fire USA headquarters, originally built in 1924 as Waldo General Hospital. It’s a stately two-story structure hidden behind an “urban forest” of some 100 second-growth trees. It’s a sanctuary for eagles, squirrels, and oxygen.

And, as you might expect, it’s endangered.

Late last year, with little warning, Camp Fire sold the property to a developer, who plans to put up 40 townhomes and 48 parking spaces.

And, as you might expect, neighbors would like to keep the site closer to what it is now. You can reach them at Save Historic Waldo Hospital.

…appeared on The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart, that belovedly shameless punster, just had to open with a wisecrack (that fell flat with the studio audience) about the candidate’s “lovely wife and her delicious fishsticks.”

While Rep. Paul is not related to Mrs. Paul’s (which was founded by two guys, natch), our own state does have an ex-politician from the frozen-seafood biz.