Of all the millions in Twilight tourism and merch sales to young vampire fans, the real-life native tribe depicted in the books essentially gets nothing.

From a 1933 issue of Fortune magazine, here’s an in-depth analysis (with full color illos) of the industry that was newspaper comic strips. Competitive big-city newspapers were at or just past their peak, and collectively supported over 230 daily strips.

No matter what you may think of Microsoft and its products, it remains one of the Seattle area’s still-thriving corporate giants. But for how long? Former MS VP Dick Brass (no puns about the name, please) believes it might not be for long, due to fatal bureaucratic stagnation:

Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers.

Corporate consultant Paula Krapf thinks the recent dustup over Macmillan Publishing demanding higher Kindle ebook profits represents a battle of “Amazon Vs. the World (the New York Publishing World)“.

The last time New York business titans took on a Seattle company, we ended up with a butchered and eviscerated WaMu.

My main question about the Apple iPad is apparently answered “yes.” Developers will be able to use custom fonts in iPad applications, including print-media publications sold as apps.

Seattle’s own branding and logo-design hotshot Tim Girvin offers his own historical thoughts about Apple, Steve Jobs, and the road to the iPad.

My own thoughts:

• I don’t yet know enough about it to know if it really is the gadget that will save the news media, let alone the book or TV industries. For instance, I don’t know if it will support full professional typography in publications distributed as iPad apps (it doesn’t support it in Apple’s own iBooks app). I strongly believe real fonts, chosen and tweaked and kerned by real designers (and not just the seven or eight “web-safe fonts,” either) are the key to making online-distributed reading matter seem professional enough to command a price.
• The hardware’s limitations don’t bother me. It doesn’t have a cell phone in it, but third party software will certainly being Internet-based phone calling to it. It doesn’t have a standard USB plug, but it will have an optional adapter for one (which means you can attach external storage devices, webcams, etc.).
• The software’s limitations concern me a bit more. A device meant to be, among other things, a full service Internet browser needs to be able to run Adobe Flash. A device meant to be an on-the-go field computer needs multitasking (more than one application running at one time), or at least a universal clipboard. With luck, these discrepancies should be fixed before long.
• What are the fine-print terms of the AT&T 3G data subscription, available as an option with the higher-end versions of the iPad? Could I use it with WiFi to run a Net connection into my regular computer?
• As UK comedy legend Stephen Fry notes, Jobs gives a helluva presentation. As others noted, Jobs and Obama, those two master sales-orators of our time, spoke on the same day. Obama’s speech was telecast and streamed live to millions. Jobs’s speech wasn’t, except for a few brief excerpts on CNBC. Most people who wanted to learn every detail as the announcement was happening had to settle for “liveblogging” text commentaries at various techie Web sites—which can actually be a more intimate, more involving medium than just watching somebody talk.
• I don’t care about the name, either way. And the jokes about it are already old; which is probably just how Apple predicted they’d be when the name was picked.
• Yes. I want one.

Onetime Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg, who was more recently one of Air America Radio’s revolving bosses, says the liberal talk radio distributor could have had a chance, had its organizers been willing to lose money and plea for donations.

America’s most famous recluse since Howard Hughes wanted to be known only for his writing. And not even for all his writing, but just the one novel and three story collections he allowed to remain in print. At a time when even literary artistes are expected to brand and market themselves as celebrities, Salinger took the royalties and ran. He refused to be the voice of a generation, or of anybody else.

I’d never bothered to read Catcher in the Rye until I was in my mid 20s. Yeah I was a loner and a book-nerd, but that still didn’t make me fully identify with that book’s troubled-rich-kid protagonist.

I did, however, enjoy the part where our antihero has to listen to two fast-talking square women gush about going to Radio City Music Hall, and how Salinger instantly described their unforgivable hickness by making them from Seattle.

Even before the Apple iPad announcement, organizations have been preparing to enter a new era of paid online content. One of them is On the Boards, Seattle’s own bastion of modern dance and performance art. It’s just launched OntheBoards.tv, with pay-per-view streams of live performances that just don’t get around to every town.

Twenty-four years after Expo 86, Vancouver BC is getting ready for another “world class” mega-event. This time, as Sports Illustrated reports, many “people in Vancouver are dreading Games.”

Add one more vanished institution, up north-way. Snohomish County’s last drive-in cinema, which closed for the season last September. won’t reopen. Instead, the site will become a Swedish Health Services emergency room.

At Paste magazine, Rachel Maddux asks the musical question, “Is Indie Dead?” Her answer: Yes. Deal with it and move on already:

Indie is, at once, a genre (of music first, and then of film, books, video games and anything else with a perceived arty sensibility, regardless of its relationship to a corporation), an ethos, a business model, a demographic and a marketing tool. It can signify everything, and it can signify nothing. It stands among the most important, potentially sustainable and meaningful movements in American popular culture—not just music, but for the whole cultural landscape. But because it was originally sculpted more in terms of what it opposed than what it stood for, the only universally held truth about “indie” is that nobody agrees on what it means.

I could spend the rest of my life researching old advertising and magazine art. Fortunately, Leif Peng at the blog Today’s Inspiration does it for me. (Thanks to Robert Newman Design for the link.)

The buxom star of the cult movies Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73 is alive and living in Florida, and talking about her childhood in the Jewish ghetto of Nazi occupied Warsaw.

I’m currently listening to the instructions on an out-of-print VHS yoga tape:

“Imagine water coming in through your nose, and all the way down into your stomach. And as you inhale, your stomach expands outward. The water comes in, stacks on top of itself, until it catches all the way up to the throat.”