Update #1: The Komen Foundation backed down from its previous blackballing of Planned Parenthood cancer screening services—or did it?

Update #2: In yesterday’s rant about the Komen fiasco, I mentioned how the organization had attracted negative comments even before this. But I failed to provide a good link to those previous criticisms.

Here’s such a link. It goes to the trailer for Pink Ribbons, Inc., a National Film Board of Canada documentary investigating the group. It opened today in Canadian theaters; a Stateside run starts in March.

Director Lea Pool’s film (based on Samantha King’s 2006 book) had, of course, been shot, edited, and scheduled long before this week’s right-wing cave-in by Komen management.

The film’s gist: Komen management allegedly cares a lot more about promoting itself, attracting corporate partners, selling branded merchandise, and, of course, raising money than it is about detection, treatment, or “the cure.”

All-new item: A Seattle gun merchant announced a Komen-authorized pink handgun. Komen management now denies any authorization, involvement, or even pre-knowledge of this.

• You know what else women do differently than men? Utilize public transit.
• Metro’s route #42 may be a goner, alas. Next on the chopping block for drastic cutting: the #2 route, one of Metro’s most heavily used and the only direct route from Queen Anne to First Hill and Madrona.
• Republicans in the state Legislature have a new plan to “reform” K-12 education: dump all that distracting stuff about civil rights and combatting gay-bashing.
• Goldy asks if the state legislature can pass gay marriage, why can’t it fix our regressive tax system? Here’s one potential answer: because the Seattle civic establishment (root of most “progressive” moves in this state) loves gays (“minorities” who can still be upscale and white!) and hates anything that might inconvenience big business.
• The newest e-commerce craze: selling breast milk online. (Make your own pun based on old dairy ad slogans if you like.)
• Mitt Romney’s dad was famous for two things: (1) running American Motors during most of its formative years, and (2) being in Nixon’s cabinet, where he helped devise the “mortgage backed securities” that helped bring down the nation’s economy in recent years.
• Another day, another plea for sympathy toward the (hidebound, ultra-inefficient, conglomerate-ruled) traditional book industry. This time it’s from the Authors Guild. They insist it takes tangible books, tangible bookstores, and old-style publishers to “break” new authors. Which would be an interesting argument if the (major) old-style publishers were still truly interested in “breaking” new authors (you know, with actual promotional budgets and marketing support).
• Graham Joyce at the Guardian scoffs at novelist Jeanette Winterston, who seems to want more novels with “daunting” and daring use of language for its own sake. Joyce insists that profound works can be deceptively “readable.”
• A guy’s going around the book-publicity circuit claiming to have “hooked up” (but didn’t always have sex) with 120 women over a year and a half; despite being bald, overweight, and non-wealthy. In other words, women exist who aren’t obsessed with superficial appearance. (This is news?)
• One more Don Cornelius tribute: Ryuichi Sakamoto on Soul Train!

More sordid details keep emerging about the Komen Foundation cave-in to the right wing sleaze campaign against Planned Parenthood.

At least one top Komen official had resigned in protest over the scheme. Other insiders report Komen bosses had been maneuvering behind the scenes to rewrite its bylaws, to explicitly allow defunding PP’s cancer-screening programs.

Komen’s leaders, who appear to be the sort of folk who only listen to conservative-only “news” media, actually thought this would settle down.

Then again, people who’ve followed the Komen organization before all this have described an outfit that spends relatively little on screenings, treatments, or research, and a lot on marketing and corporate promo tie-ins and forging ties with conservative power players.

seattle times, nov. 24, 2001; 8 wide sections for 25 cents

The Seattle Times suddenly raised its cover price to $1 today. Retailers had been notified in advance, but readers hadn’t. Not even a bottom-front-page “To Our Readers” notice. The paper’s corporate website still lists a single copy price of $.75.

What does the extra quarter get you? Not more content. Tuesday’s paper was a recent record-low 24 pages. It had been this thin a few times in the past couple of years, but only on Mondays or post-holiday Tuesdays (i.e., days without stock listings). When you factor in today’s narrower page sizes, the SeaTimes hasn’t been this small since the days of WWII paper rationing.

I hadn’t noticed when it happened, but the Sunday Pacific Northwest Magazine section now appears to be printed on cheaper paper, the same kind of stock used by the Varsity Theater film calendar.

Meanwhile, the paper’s editorial staff has completed moving into the former furniture warehouse next to the 13 Coins restaurant. Other departments (ad sales, circulation, management) will move in as their new, smaller office spaces get installed. For now, the John Street front office and mailing address remain.

•

To try to quantify the paper’s shrinkage, I’ve been looking up its past online staff-directory pages, as maintained at the Wayback Machine site (web.archive.org).

But first, let’s review the page’s current incarnation. It lists 134 editorial employees (not counting a few executives listed twice). These include 35 local news reporters and columnists (including two listed as “on leave” (unpaid)), 35 reporters and writers in the paper’s other sections, and 12 photographers.

This is the same as the final Post-Intelligencer staff list from early 2009. (The P-I had a couple more people in some sections, a couple fewer in others; but the total’s alike.)

Remember, the print P-I didn’t put out a Sunday paper, and hadn’t since 1983. The same staffing level at today’s Times is thus spread more thinly. Especially since the Times continues to support long, research-heavy, Sunday “cover stories.”

On Jan. 15, 2009, near the time of the print P-I‘s end, the Times staff page listed 150 editorial staffers. These included 37 local news reporters/columnists, 45 writers in the other sections, and 15 photographers. The Times was about to decimate its weekday “living” section, a move planned before the P-I closure was announced.

In contrast, the Times staff page for Dec. 4, 2001 boasts a whopping 281 names.

But this difference seems even more drastic than it is.

That’s because the 2001 staff page lists several job categories that got dropped from the page in later years. They include 10 “news artists” (map makers and illustrators), plus a total of 80 copy editors, wire editors, page-layout designers, researchers, and other assistants.

The P-I‘s 2009 staff page listed four artists and 36 of these other assorted personnel. Today’s Times probably employs at least that many or more, what with all the Sunday and Sunday-preview pages to fill with wire and syndicated matter.

In an apples-to-apples comparison, the 2001 Times employed 53 local news reporters and columnists, 66 writers in the other sections, and 15 photographers.

Those included separate Eastside and Snohomish County bureaus.

They also included such now exotic sounding job titles as “home economist” (recipes editor), “assistant metro editor, metro growth,” and “director, brand and content development.”

Also remember that in a 2006 lawsuit, the P-I (which was then trying to stay in business, despite its unfortunate position in a Times-controlled Joint Operating Agreement) alleged that Times management employed more people than it had to, so the Times could claim it was losing money and thus legally kill the JOA (and with it, the P-I).

During the JOA, the Times had to share profits with the P-I.

Now the Times gets to shoulder its losses alone. (Be careful what you etc. etc.)

webpronews.com

The premise of Soul Train was elevator-pitch simple: an American Bandstand for soul music. A hip but authoritative producer/host. Kids, dressed in the latest teen fashions, dancing in a studio to the latest hits. Two or more in-person guests each show, performing live or lip-syncing.

Anybody in the industry, including Bandstand impresario Dick Clark, could have launched such a show.

But nobody had (on a national level) until Cornelius came along.

Cornelius had been a news reader and backup DJ on Chicago radio, and had hosted teen “record hops” in the area. He started Soul Train on a local Chicago TV station in 1970. The following year, it moved to syndication (and to Hollywood). Within a year from that, it was on in 25 cities.

By 1974, when its theme song “TSOP” became a top 10 hit, it was an institution. It easily buried the rival show Soul Unlimited (Dick Clark’s imitation of Cornelius’s imitation of Bandstand).

For two more decades, the show was the showcase for soul, R&B, and the emerging hiphop and breakdance scenes.

By 1993, rap and its related dance moves had steadily gotten more “hardcore,” far from Cornelius’s personal tastes. He hired a series of replacement hosts while continuing to own and run the show, which aired on fewer stations in more obscure time slots.

Soul Train wound to a close in 2006. Reruns aired for another couple of years. After that, Cornelius sold the rights to an outside company, which has put out DVD sets and a YouTube clip channel. (Cornelius had tried to keep Soul Train performances off the Internet, employing staff to hunt down, and order the deletion of, any such clips.)

In his later years, the man who’d preached prosocial messages to his young audiences was accused of domestic violence by his estranged second wife.

But the legacy of his career shines on.

“And as always in parting, we wish you love, peace, and soul!”

crypt-orchid.blogspot.com

Today marks David Letterman’s 30th anniversary on late night TV.

Appropriately enough, his principal guest last night was Bill Murray, the first guest on both his NBC (1982) and CBS (1993) premieres.

When the NBC Late Night with David Letterman began, it was a breath of fresh air. It was knowing, it was snide, it respected its audience’s intelligence and its love of the bizarre.

The premiere opened with Calvert DeForrest (descendent of radio pioneer Lee DeForrest) reciting a “be very afraid” spiel in front of the Rainbow Room peacock dancers (yes, female “peacocks,” an actual attraction at the rooftop lounge in the RCA (now GE) Building).

Then came the first mini monologue and the first studio comedy bit (a backstage tour). The Murray segment ended with him and the host suddenly leaving the stage, and the screen switching to old film of the 1973 World Series.

That first episode ended with a comedian reciting the opening scene from an obscure Bela Lugosi movie. By the time I saw that bit, I knew I’d be a fan for life.

•

Letterman, the self-spoofing, genre-busting insurgent, is now the establishment, and has been for some time.

A persona that was once hip-to-be-square is now the grand old curmuddgeon. In this respect, he has become more like his onetime occasional foil Harvey Pekar (as seen above).

A collection of shticks that playfully (or awkwardly) toyed with the established celebrity-talk format has become a well-tuned programming machine, that regularly disseminates well-scrubbed guests plugging their films/shows/CDs.

Little comedy bits that had been cute and playful are now trotted out with slick animated openings and pompous fanfares. More of them these days are pre-taped or assembled from news footage, instead of acted out on stage.

The biggest flaw in Letterman’s current formula is the 12:15 a.m. commercial break, following the first guest spot. It runs between five and eight minutes, stopping the whole proceedings. It essentially begs viewers to shut ‘er down and hit the hay.

Still, there are worse fates to befall a creative performer than to become the sort of bigtime mainstream institution he had once scoffed.

Letterman could have grown old much less gracefully.

Like Leno.

•

PS: Here are some Letterman guest spots that one entertainment site considers classics. At least one actually is an all-time moment—a totally laugh-free, in-character Andy Kaufman spot from Letterman’s 1980 morning show.

PPS: Letterman began his career on Indianapolis TV in the early 1970s. The ill-fated, Seattle-born actress Frances Farmer ended her career in the same place and time. If I ever meet him, I’ll ask if he’d ever met her.

freecabinporn.com

• This site of nothing but pictures of countryside cabins (rustic to postmodern) reminds me of my young adult years, when all writers were supposed to want to live in cabins. I never did. To me, the countryside was something to escape from.
• On a similar thread, some of the same “writerly lifestyle” folks who’d demanded that I be a mellow back-to-nature lover also kept laundry lists of everything they hated about the modern world. Meet today’s incarnation of that trope, Jonathan Franzen.
• NHL hockey in Seattle: even more likely?
• Here’s something novel for ya: Scenes of women in superhero comics that female readers actually like!
• When a Google attorney goes on a Time Warner site to advocate for less draconian copyright laws, something’s going on. I don’t know exactly what, but something.
• A young Brit couple Tweeted® about their upcoming trip to the States. They said they were gonna “destroy America” by, among other hard-partyin’ things, “digging up Marilyn Monroe’s grave.” Agents arrested ‘em on their arrival at LAX, detained ‘em, and shipped ‘em back home. They insist they were just joking. Memo to Homeland Security: Anyone who actually wants to destroy America probably won’t Tweet® about it.
• If the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation wanted to keep selling itself as the voice of defiant courage, it shouldn’t have caved to the phony right wing smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.
• Don’t watch porn on your laptop in a public library where kids can see it. Make ‘em find the really good sites on their own.
• Just why do restaurant websites so consistently suck?

• Clever entrepreneurs in Philadelphia have a line of T-shirts and posters exhorting what I and many of my fellow writers and artists have been shrieking lo these many years to cheapskate dot-com and media execs: FREELANCE AIN’T FREE!
• Good idea in the legislature #1: Looking into the abundance of “special taxing districts” around the state, with an eye toward paring them down.
• Good idea in the legislature #2: Getting rid of a Cold War-era ordinance that authorized state government to persecute, blackball, and ban “subversive” people and groups.
• Let’s all welcome the Houston Astros to the American League West (the Mariners’ division), not this year but next year. Except they might not be called the Astros by then.
• Shepherd Fairey, that “radical chic” Obama and Andre the Giant portraitist, didn’t just steal from AP wire photos. He’s regularly “borrowed” even entire images from sincerely political artists around the world, completely uncredited and uncompensated.
• SeattlePI.com is even more short-staffed than before, but it’s still got some good stuff. Like Vanessa Ho and Joe Dyer’s excellent feature on homeless people sleeping under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, who are being kicked out of there by the state. As Anatole France wrote back in 1894,

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.

• All right, fans of glass buildings and obscure dangerous plants, you all have one year to figure out how to save the Volunteer Park Conservatory.
• Update: That 83 year old activist Tacoma priest, who was on a hunger strike while in federal detention? He’s still detained, but off the hunger strike.
• Another of those silly surveys claims Washington DC has surpassed Seattle as the nation’s “most literate” city.
• A Republican state legislator introduced a bill to scuttle any enforcement of the feds’ prescribed remedies concerning excessive force by Seattle police, and shunt the matter over to “a bipartisan taskforce.” Where, presumably, Republican politicians would hold veto power on any policy changes.
• In other legislative news, farmers and farm workers both back a bill to slow the local spread of “E-Verify,” the federal background-check program for immigrant workers.
• The new Businessweek’s cover story discusses Amazon’s latest move into publishing its own e-books—the opening of an NYC office intended to issue bigtime books by bigtime authors. The headline (“Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business”) and the cover image (yes, a burning book, straight outta Fahrenheit 451) depict the viewpoint of an NY publishing cartel both scared to pieces and smugly defensive of their old time business-as-usual, now threatened by this dot-com upstart. And just as you’d expect, the piece quotes the industry’s Big Six conglomerate-owned mega-publishers defending their wasteful, slow traditional practices by hyping their “role as nurturers of literary culture.” As if the commercial book biz had ever been about that.

boxx corp.

• A Portland company is about to bring out the “Boxx” scooter, an all-electric two wheel vehicle (30 mph top speed; 40 miles per charge). It’s got a lot of cool sounding features, but its main attribute is its shape. Yes, it looks like you’re driving a really big white smartphone or 4G-era Mac desktop unit. The design is not only spiffy but practical for the company, because it can ship the whole thing via UPS. But how will it look (let alone perform) on the road? You’ll have to guess that part. The company’s website appears to not include a single image of the thing being driven, or even in the same shot as a human. (The thing’s only 40 inches long. Calculate the other dimensions on your own and guess whether your particular rump would fit on it.)
• The “offshoring” of making stuff: Apple’s the current poster child for the practice and its related sins. Before that, Nike and Walmart were. But really, says Larry Dignan at ZDNet, it’s our fault for wanting so much cheap stuff. I disagree. Dignan might live in the upscale bubble of the techie caste, where consumers could choose higher-priced domestic products if more were available. But outside of those rarified circles, too many of us absolutely have to equip our households (and our home offices) as economically as possible (partly due to a lousy domestic economy, which is partly due to all that offshoring).
• Author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers explains why a white person (i.e. Jan Brewer) shoving a finger in the face of a black person (i.e. Obama) is a “teachable moment” in race understanding.
• Ta-Nehisi Coates looks at the latest revelations about Ron Paul’s old newsletter business and concludes Paul might not have actually been a racist, just a cynical exploitive suck-up to racists.
• Eric Boehlert claims at least one or two Republican operatives are dismayed at how the whole party has kowtowed to the Fox “News” Channel’s “radical, fear-based agenda.”
• Meanwhile, Richard Eskow compares the GOP debates to “bad 1950s style science fiction;” specifically as the candidates…

…play their parts in an implausible story of a world that could never exist, acting out nonexistent conflicts while delivering dialog that insults the intelligence. That’s not because they’re stupid. It’s because they think you are.

(from the Tacoma News Tribune):

An item on Page A2 of Wednesday’s paper incorrectly stated that it was singer Etta James’ 74th birthday. James died last week.

• Does David Horsey really believe Newt Gingrich stands a serious chance of becoming president (or rather, that America stands a serious chance of being saddled with such a corrupt egotist getting “the nuclear button”)? Or is he simply being provocative for its own sake?
• Ex-UW public affairs prof Hubert Locke, meanwhile, listens to Gingrich’s debate rants and hears plenty of “racial code words.”
• This is a fairly long and complex story, but the gist appears to be this: Current state GOP boss (and former KVI hate-talk host) Kirby Wilbur set up a Washington branch of the Koch Bros.’ astroturf lobbying group Americans for Prosperity. National AFP HQ helped Wilbur’s guys traipse through a loophole in state laws about partisan political committees, by claiming to instead be a “grassroots” lobbying group, a group that wasn’t really endorsing candidates or policy positions. Even though it ran cleverly-worded stealth attack ads against 13 Democratic legislators, just before the ’10 elections. By deftly skirting around state Public Disclosure Commission guidelines, Washington AFP didn’t have to reveal its money sources. What’s more, it might get to do so in the future, depending on how the state PDC decides to clarify its rules.
• State Attorney General (and GOP gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna tries to prove he’s hep with the digital generation by spearheading a crackdown against Facebook “clickjacking” scams.
• With private liquor sales coming to Washington (but only at large retail spaces), here come the out-of-state big-box liquor chains.
• Male and female co-CEOs of a world famous company battle in and out of the courts over full control, leading to a restraining order against one of them. It could be a plot for a potboiler novel or a made-for-TV movie, but probably not for an Archie Comic.
• RealNetworks, the local outfit that pioneered streaming online audio/video, just sold a bunch of patents to Intel for $120 million. In other news, RealNetworks still exists.

delamar apartments (built 1909); from queen anne historical society

• The Seattle Transit Blog would like you to know that, despite our politicians’ continuing paeans to the preservation of the sacred single family neighborhoods, the “majority of housing units in Seattle are multifamily” (apartments, condos, townhomes, et al.).
• In a related trend, more Americans are now single than ever before. Only 51 percent of U.S. adults are married (even with the slow expansion of the right to get married).
• Same sex marriages: At various past times and places, Christians loved ‘em.
• A note to all our transit usin’ friends. Check out Metro’s proposed 2012 route changes while you can still give feedback about ‘em.
• A cash-strapped state? Not if you listen to the construction lobby.
• Is Amazon out to compete head-on with Netflix?
• An 83-year-old peace-activist priest was sent to a Federal detention center in SeaTac, after he participated in a civil-disobedience action at a nuclear weapons plant site in Tennessee. He’s reportedly being held in solitary confinement, and has been on a hunger strike for two weeks.
• Amy Goodman talks to people who see an “Occupy” influence in Obama’s State of the Union speech.
• But then again, lotsa folk are trying to get a ride on the Occupy ____ bandwagon. Even anti-Semitic fringies, conspiracy-theory propagators, and radical libertarians. You know, the guys who believe business somehow doesn’t have enough power.
• During this age of the incredibly shrinking newspaper, the Washington Post Co.’s main profit center has been the Kaplan “educational publishing” operation. That company’s bought a chain of for-profit colleges, now collectively known as Kaplan University. The Post Co.’s CEO has admitted, in now-revealed documents, that Kaplan U. used federal student loan funds and “predatory accounting” to jack up tuition costs to poor students.