Sixties antiwar organizer Mark Rudd insists in his essay “Beyond Magical Thinking” that…

Successful political movements do not spring fully formed. They require long-term, nuts-and-bolts organizing.

In other words, protesting, no matter how big and splashy, isn’t enough.

Carl Franzen at the Atlantic compiles other sites’ “Odd, Overreaching ‘Decade’ Lists.” Among them is Billboard’s list of “One Hit Wonders of the 2000s.” This one’s a particularly odd list, mainly because the pop charts have become so meaningless. Back when commercial music radio meant something, the Top 100 chart meant what you’d be allowed to listen to on the ol’ AM/FM. But now, the likes of Gnarles Barkley and Macy Gray can carve out decent careers for themselves without returning to the top of singles-sales.

I will admit to having uttered statements #4 and #5 on Troubletown cartoonist Lloyd Dangle’s list of “Blind and Unquestioning Ways to Love Obama.” Only I don’t think they’re so blind or unquestioning:

#4: “In case you weren’t paying attention—Obama ran as a centrist—which is exactly what he’s being.”

He certainly was never as far to the left as I am, which is still not as far to the left as many people I know are. And he’s filled his administration with Carter/Clinton vets, Beltway insiders, and lite-right “new Democrats.” I knew he’d do this and still supported him.

#5: “He’s so smart he’s using a secret fake-out strategy. We can’t see it yet.”

Well, I can see what I think his strategy is. It’s to render the Republicans utterly irrelevant, leaving centrist Dems such as himself as the natural “party of business.” This would leave the “conservadems” as America’s conservative party, and allow room for a real liberal party or parties, at least in non-Presidential races.

From that addicted-to-verbiage NYTimes, here’s graphic designer Phillip Niemeyer with a handy chart illustrating and categorizing the past 10 years in logos and buzzwords.

As self-help author Eckhart Tolle proclaims the beneficial Power of Now, essayist Pico Iyer grumbles about “the tyranny of the moment .”

Someone placed simple holiday trappings on the unofficial Cobain memorial bench in Viretta Park.

Knute Berger at Crosscut mourns the decline of soap operas (evinced by As the World Turns’ cancellation) with a tribute to his late aunt, one of the show’s, and the genre’s, most enduring performers. Berger rightly notes that “the soaps are the daily newspapers of daytime TV, once everyday staples that are now dying off like dinosaurs in a meteor-induced dust cloud.”

Owner Marita Holdaway on Wednesday’s closing night party for the Benham Gallery on First Avenue. After 22 years of operating Seattle’s premier art-photography gallery (partly supporting it by taking custom portraits of downtown business bigwigs), she’s fleeing to the San Juans. Follow her continuing career at BenhamFineArt.com.

My ol’ pal Thomas Frank recalls the Oughts as a “Low, Dishonest Decade.” He’s specifically talking about the economy, more specifically about the assorted inter-related scams, bubbles, and funny-money charades of the speculator caste. Dot-coms, Enron, subprime mortgages, the massive re-concentration of wealth, you know the drill.

Reader’s Digest might have been the first “aggregation site.” Its original concept was to take existing articles from other magazines and rewrite them into a unified, compact package.

Then it became a near-right, squarer-than-square money machine.

Now, the NYTimes reports, both the magazine and the company that bears its name are hollowed-out shells of their former selves. A leveraged buyout led to millions in debts, massive layoffs, and the installation of new execs spouting acronym-heavy motivational schticks.

They’re even abandoning their mammoth quasi-colonial suburban offices. Which, despite the mag’s mailing address, are not in Pleasantville NY, but in another town a dozen miles away.

The NYTimes has a handy list of the top buzzwords of 2009. You know, and probably look forward to forgetting, many of them (”birther,” “tea party,” “cash for clunkers,” “sexting,” “public option”). Now if we can only get rid of “jobless recovery.”

From the lesser Washington, the Wash. Post opinion section lists the “Worst Ideas of the Decade.” Among them: The battle of Bora Bora (you know, where Bin Laden escaped), TV dancing competitions, anti-vaccination conspiracy scares, Bush’s crony capitalism disguised as “compassionate conservatism,” and “world-is-flat movies” (Crash, Babel).

The Metacritic gang has compiled a list of the decade’s best-reviewed movies. My ol’ high school classmate Brad Bird gets numbers 3 and 26.

Our ol’ pal Tim Egan chortles at the New Yorkers who’ve just discovered Costco, now that the big Seattle-founded retailer finally set up shop in Manhattan. Then Egan wanders, like a shopper through oversized aisles, into a more generalized rant about ignorant East Coasters.

I want my next career to be creating and designing paperless papers and ebooks for tablet computers, and authoring platforms to help others do likewise.

I don’t have any appreciable coding experience, but that shouldn’t matter. I should just align myself with people who do.

Besides, the skills I do have are a lot rarer.

I’m a combo writer/editor/designer/media historian/social media pioneer/big-picture seer.

And I love books without hating tech.

So let’s get started.