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.

My book title Vanishing Seattle (actually thought up by my Arcadia Publishing editor, Julie Albright) is fast becoming a catch phrase for the accelerating corporatization of our once-modest burg. Witness this entry in the P-I’s real estate blog, mentioning the now-shuttered Central Pawn Shop on First Avenue in relation to the 1974 John Wayne action film McQ. I’d written some detailed notes a couple years back about the locations used in that film, as part of an aborted book project for Clear Cut Press. I agree with the blog post’s author, Marlow Harris (see a couple items below this one on this page), that McQ remains, if not a great movie, a great time capsule of the city as it once was.

…are apparently also worried about corporatization and gentrification running out everything that was funky and quirky about their town.

…the only prior time I’ve mentioned Paris Hilton. It was a brief aside, pondering whether Hilton would have grown up to be a classier person if Elizabeth Taylor had remained part of the family.

Now, it turns out, Hilton and I have read the same book! (Or at least we’ve both been seen in public with the same book.)

In a papparazi shot earlier this week, a pre-jail Hilton was photographed carrying (1) a Bible and (2) the self-help tome The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

Tolle, 59, was born in Germany under the name Ulrich Tolle, and now lives in Vancouver. He apparently changed his first name in honor of 13th-century German mystic Johannes “Meister” Echkhart.

Tolle has written four books and released dozens of audio books and lectures, all of which are narrated in a very calming, softly accented voice. He borrows ideas from a lot of Eastern and Western sources, but his central thesis is a simple one.

Many modern humans, Tolle asserts, are crippled by their own “mental noise,” or obsessive-compulsive thoughts. Regrets about the past, worries about the future, self-condemnations about one’s physical appearance or social status–they’re all symptoms of the mental noise. The noise, in turn, is tied into the “pain body,” a mental state in which all someone can feel is pain (physical, mental, emotional), and all someone wants to do is to spread that pain to others.

Tolle’s prescription: Become aware of the true self behind the false identity of your thinking mind. Become more acutely aware of your body and of the world surrounding you. Accept the present moment. Learn to live in the stillness. Develop an awareness that goes beyond the “egoic mind.”

Some of you are already scoffing that you never perceived Paris Hilton as much of a left-brain thinker.

But a mental-noise victim doesn’t have to be a tech nerd, a video-game geek, or even a language nut such as myself.

Let’s armchair-analyze our poor little rich girl here.

If she’s like some ultra-fashion-conscious women, she’d be prone to constant fretting about every minute aspect of the way she looks.

If she’s like some professional “celebrities,” she’d be constantly calculating how best to keep her name and image in the public eye, even if it’s in the form of a self-deprecating “dumb blonde” role on a staged reality show.

And if she’s like some Hollywood types, she’d search for an apparently simple short cut to spiritual growth, preferably one that didn’t expect her to renounce her material wealth.

But Tolle’s path isn’t as easy as he initially makes it out to be. It requires one to give up things more valuable to a celebrity than money. It requires one to give up one’s ego, one’s fully-constructed but false sense of self.

It’s giving up everything that makes someone a professional “celebrity.” And if Hilton’s ready to do that, more power to her.

…Marlow Harris n’ Jo David have a nice, pretty puff piece about ’em in Sunday’s Seattle Times.

Meanwhile, yr. ob’d’n’t Web-ster’s continued the crowd-control detail at the orthodontists’ convention. Fortunately, I didn’t have to do usherin’ duty at a Philips-Sonicare sponsored free concert at Benaroya Hall, starring the ultimate dentist’s-office musician.

• Worked the orthodontists’ convention. Long, tiring, dull, but at least I don’t have to look into strangers’ mouths all day.
• Found myself photographed in the current Seattle magazine, in a piece about the local Drinking Liberally meetups. (The pic’s on the mag’s Web site, and is one of the least dorky pics of me in a drinking situation in some time.)
• Felt indifferent about the end of Jerry Falwell, the mainstream media’s favorite pious bigot. As I do whenever a left-wing celeb of stature similar to Falwell’s dies, I asked myself just what Falwell had actually accomplished, beyond his media image.As a “televangelist” he was second-tier in viewership. His Moral Majority political organization never had the “millions” of dues-paying members that he claimed, and which too many liberals readily believed. As a religious-right mover-n’-shaker he was also somewhat less influential than he put himself up to be, compared to the likes of Ralph Reed and James Dobson.

  He did create one of the first big suburban megachurches, establishing a model that would be further developed by more mass-audience-acceptable successors around the country.

  And he successfully snookered the news media, and many of his ideological opponents, into believing that he, Falwell, personally led a mass groundswell of reactionary fervor out in the vast expanses beyond the U.S. media capitals. For nearly a quarter century, millions of non-right-wing Americans accepted this concept.

  Falwell was a man who made people believe.

…the link below, you’ll love Slate’s semi-comprehensive, “Illustrated Guide to Republican Scandals.”

…keeping track of all the DC corruption, graft, and assorted sleaze? Just consult the handy-dandy “Bush/Cheney Scandalist.”

…”reading is going to “go completely online.” I can imagine that fate for ephemeral and time-sensitive matter, for research and reference, and for community info sharing (aka “social networking”). But more artistic, entertainment-oriented, long-form, or “experience” reading (yeah, that includes porn) may always be more popular in nonvolatile formats that don’t require separate playback hardware, i.e. books.

…analog broadcast TV will end in the U.S. in February 2009. But what if nobody noticed? The way total viewership keeps slipping, could be…

…threatened by the current industry-wide newspaper fiscal crisis is the LA Times’s interminable Important Dammit National Feature Story, a genre apparently developed by the old LAT management to try and persuade NY/DC snobs that Angelenos could, indeed, read and write. (Time magazine infamously described the genre as “the newsprint equivalent of suburban sprawl.”)

Today’s example (free registration required, alas): A really, really long expose of the Gates Foundation’s investments in corporations that just may be hurting the very people, including third-world kids, the foundation’s promising to help.

(High up among the allegations: the charge that the foundation’s investments in big drug companies, with their high profit margins and their aggressive patent attorneys, contradicts its stated goal of eradicating AIDS in the developing world.)

The longtime “member owned” grocery wholesale co-op has sold itself to a California firm, having already sold the land under its massive Georgetown plant to developer David Sabey.

AG, born of a Depression-era cost squeeze among mom-n’-pop grocers, was Washington’s #2 supermarket “chain” at its peak. It owned the Thriftway franchise brand, from which QFC, Larry’s Markets, and Metropolitan Market were all spun off. For years it ran a full service operation; it not only stocked stores, but designed and built stores and ran advertising and data-processing for its members. (Here in Seattle, one of the last AG-designed stores was the now-shuttered Fremont Red Apple.)

AG’s beginning-O-the-end came when Cincinnati’s Kroger bought Fred Meyer, which had previously bought QFC. QFC pulled out of AG, setting up its own in-house distro operation. QFC also bought out many of the key AG-member indies; other single-store and small-chain operators, such as Larry’s, collapsed as the industry kept consolidating. Left to protect the investment of its remaining members, AG sold out. Chalk up another “vanished” Seattle institution.

…of this web-corner (well, most) should know that there are no depths of corruption to which the Bushbots will not stoop. Yet it still surprises when we learn, piece by piece, each depth to which they have stooped. Today’s lesson: The transformation of the Dept. of Justice’s voter-rights section into a branch of the right-wing goon squads.

…we must offer one last bourbon-and-soda for lounge pianist Howard Bulson.