• 1-4-99
  A few more great cable TV shows I can get but you might not/naughty pictures and stock-market quotations, the two great tastes that taste great together/Starbucks, the magazine
• 1-11-99
  NBA's resucitation comes the morning after the ABL Seattle Reign's wake--coincidence, or...?/dog-food ads at a human restaurant?/business doesn't have ENOUGH political power?/fewer kids watching kidvid?/Layne Staley and the connection between The Faculty and an older evil-teachers film/will Seattleites finally get to hear the supposedly-great suburban public-radio station KSER?/Dinosaur Creamy Coolers/A new north-end community paper/game shows, global media titans, and a proposed new foreign-language Honeymooners series
• 1-18-99
  Remembering the Monastery and the dawn of the anti-all-ages crackdown/lo-tech 'punk rock' typefaces for your computer/Olympics scandal proves Utahans have human temptations too/a local columnist's wrong to denounce cable access/the Portland connection to The PJs/J.K. Gill R.I.P./America's worst newspaper and its former local connection/when e-mail lists turn 'Nazi'/maybe the impeachment plotters want you to turn away in disgust
• 1-25-99
  My idea of the ultimate Super Bowl viewing experience/why really young kids are getting way too much homework/a rockzine denounces the 'New Punk Order'/a 'McLaughlin Group' panelist claims American discourse has gotten too mean and spiteful--and blames the liberals!/a new search for Seattle's most beautiful 'ugly' building/plus Jerry Springer, a cautionary word to public-art applicants, Space Needle bottled water, and a call to 'Celebrate Redmond'

• 2-1-99
  Our final nominees for a virtual Northwest Women's Walk of Fame/A week without Web access/Ford and Volvo, sitting in a tree...
• 2-8-99
  Things our locality's losing at this pre-thaw season (including Red and Black Books, the Speakeasy Cafe storefront, the Bathhouse Theater, and the evening Seattle Times/an online pharmacy knows its Aldous Huxley
• 2-15-99
  Why the Rainier brewery's closing (and how it might be saved)/why Clinton and his advisers handled the just-over crisis the way they did/the arts are good business/sports (especially baseball) are a troubled business/Net porn might be a leveling-off business
• 2-22-99
  Some good news (my next book's coming along, low-power radio might become legal, Scarecrow Video and the Elliott Bay Book Co. are being saved, and bulimia may have non-psychiatric causes)/some scary news (Martha Stewart may move here, Sound Transit insists on surface-level light rail in the south end)/some good AND scary news (how researchers are using virtual-reality technology to treat people's phobias, and how I might one day have to try it)

• 3-1-99
  The Winter of My Discontent/if it's so safe to walk in Bellevue, howcum nobody ever does?/Vashon Island poets and Y2K-apocalypse dreams/a (last?) visit to the Rainier brewery/will TV soap operas go the way of old-time radio?/the Vogue dance club leaves Belltown after almost 20 years
• 3-8-99
  Harper's discovers Loompanics Unlimited/does SAM's new private-collection show have the Wright stuff?/Levi Strauss fades and shrinks
• 3-15-99
  Indie-film cliches are vilified, while the Oscars' "Year of the Foreign Film" is shown to be just more hype, and an old Seattle-set teen karate film is remembered/another plug for my March 21 live event/which Seattle bands of recent vintage are most worthy of note?/Kool and the Gang return/After the after-impeachment aftermath, now what?/a sad day for all Clark Bar lovers
• 3-22-99
  Your (and my) favorite beautiful-ugly buildings are recalled/the Speakeasy may keep its cafe without live music (while another performance venue's rumored on the way out)/fetish fans plan their own community center/Star Wars trailer/if you'd rather strip naked in public or jump out of a plane without a chute than go without a Bud Light, shouldn't you seek help?
• 3-29-99
  The ARO.Space dance club turns one year old, and proves it's not really as "un-Seattle style" as originally billed/why the U.S. military intervened in Kosovo and not in other secession wars

• 4-5-99
  On the fifth anniversary of Cobain's death, economic boom times cause even more alternative-artist-types to want to get the hell outta Seattle; while the 'rest of the west' absorbs Calif.'s white flight/more gas mergers/big cereal companies discover "organics"/billboards with rebus-like picture equations
• 4-12-99
  More on boomtown Seattle, as the Ace Hotel, the new Cyclops restaurant, and a gay interior-decorating magazine serve up hipness without any old-timey "alternative" cachet/what's the bigger eyesore, graffiti tagging or big bland public sculpture?
• 4-19-99
  The replacement of Pat Cashman by one more dumb "guy talk" radio show reveals the corporate-marketing strategies behind today's media celebrations of male stupidity/two more G-Word-era Seattle clubs close/our favorite prognosticator's predicted end-O-the-world date's coming up, far sooner than Y2K
• 4-26-99
  Paul Allen's spiffed-up Cinerama Theater brings memories of wide-screen flicks past and present/Scott McCaughey's picture gets in USA Today but not his name/Seattle magazine sold/an ad jingle that became a regular song becomes an ad jingle again/why more college students aren't anarchists/Internet grocery shopping shouldn't just be for well-to-do soccer moms

• 5-3-99
  The Littleton slaughter inspires more media stoopidity/a strip club goes "private"/a big-chain bookstore actually likes the movie You've Got Mail
• 5-10-99
  The whys and wherefores of "heterosexual pride" T-shirts/gays for Bud Light/Allied Arts' bold scheme to save the Seattle arts scene/just why was Mark Murphy fired from On the Boards?/the Speakeasy Cafe (or most of it) stays open/is a $50 DJ club what Seattle really needs to become cosmopolitan?
• 5-17-99
  Another World heads toward soap-opera oblivion/once despised, Helvetica's the new typeface sensation/an insurance company (heart symbol)s whales/perhaps those ex-teen-nerd newspaper writers should empathize a little less with the Littleton killers
• 5-24-99
  Musings on the death of softcore, as Penthouse sneaks in an apparently-real sex scene/Denny's new "diner" look probably won't solve the chain's image problems/the Velvet Elvis and Colourbox clubs fall victim to gentrification/seeing the "Big Picture" at an HDTV-projection-video theater and bar
• 5-31-99
  Wedgwood residents fuss about saving a small supermarket that doesn't even have 17 kinds of cilantro/Robert Hughes vs. the new Star Wars/The Big Book of MISC. goes to press/the one place Taco Bell goes bilingual/pesky telemarketing calls selling devices to avoid pesky telemarketing calls/legal action against an apartment-redevelopment company called "No Boundaries"/caps, gowns, and implants/a more intelligent new-age tabloid/herbal upper and downer drinks

• 6-7-99
  On the column's 13th anniversary, a look back at how society's and critics' attitudes toward "popular culture" have evolved/"After-Dinner Nipples"/not getting what the Seattle Film Festival's really about/Mark Murphy update/The Big Book of MISC. almost ready to ship

June 1999

• Real Journalists Do It Daily (but it costs more on Sundays): A hearty welcome to the new daily MISC. World; plus The Big Book of MISC. is now shipping!
• Survey Says: Book pre-release party highlights--the 1999 MISC.-O-Rama questionnaire.
• Insta-Poems: More book pre-release party highlights.
• Postmodern Maturity: Comparing two documentaries about mature Americans' fun and games, Bingo and The Lifestyle.
• Troubletown: Why Seattle loves being depicted as the fictional headquarters of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers sequel.
• Too-safe sex?: A U.K. social critic looks at "sexual liberation" and sees only individualistic hedonism, masking a fear of intimacy.
• Too-safe sex? (Addenda): More thoughts on the fear of love, including PC women, guilt-crippled men, and the unthreatening joy of the Fremont parade's male exhibitionists.
• The Romantic and the Ethereal: Record reviews of Rusty Willoughby, Marc Olsen, and Anisa Romero/Jeff Greinke.
• Words About Pictures: A visual-art zine with no pictures; plus Starbucks' predictably middlebrow in-store mag Joe.
• Taking Measures: Some important lengths and times.
• End of the World: More on the demise of the 35-year-old soap Another World.
• Blunted 'Edge': Seattle Center books a Focus on the Family convention right next to the ArtsEdge festival.
• It's a Poke-World: More on the surprising success of Pokemon.

July 1999

• Looking Gamey: The Mariners' latest money-grubbing scheme may be one of the last big acts of stadium-subsidy blackmail.
• Recession Nostalgia: A 1973 book asks, "Is America Used Up?"
• Mark Down?: The end of Seattle city attorney Mark Sidran's reign of 'civil society' terror?
• Driving Desires: If we can't have fewer cars let's at least have smaller ones; plus hi-def TV news that really isn't.
• Webbed Words of Worth: Cool webzines that are not Salon or (thank heavens) Slate.
• 'Hideous' Is In the Eye of the Beholder: David Foster Wallace's new story collection.
• Soggy: The Rainforest Cafe is the world's easiest satirical target ever!
• Industrial Luxury: Safeco Field, compared to the plain industriousness of the Kingdome.
• The Giant Sucking Sound?: Does Seattle suck as an artist's live-work space?
• Go West?: Bremerton, the potential new art town.
• Stuck In The Middle: Is the alternative-rock generation already passe?
• Log! It's Better Than Bad, It's Good!: Weblogs, the latest cyber-fad.
• Netty and Nutty: Fun/poignant stuff found on the Net lately.
• Nettier and Nuttier: More search-engine mistakes bringing unsuspecting users to this site.
• A Striking Proposal: Bowling's comeback?
• Southern Exposures: The end of Seafirst Bank as we know it?
• '90s Nostalgia, Part 1: Another potentially-icky Cobain exploitation film; plus the first of my interview for an Italian magazine about the Seattle music scene today.
• '90s Nostalgia, Part 2: More of the aforementioned interview.
• Irony Deficiency: Is irony dead, and are we sick of it yet?
• Feeling De-Pressed?: The Net might kill newspapers as we know them--which might be the best thing to happen to papers in decades.
• Even Misc.-er Than Usual: What "Butoh erotica" might be like; plus an email list for odd Ebay merchandise, feuding "Seattle Music" Websites, and the oddest MS software bug to date.
• Booking Your Vacation: The 1999 Midsummer Reading List.

• The Road to DSL Land: Getting some speed after all these years.
• Life in DSL Land: How DSL's all different from the modem world.
• Art vs. Leisure: Is culture too important to be left to newspapers' recreation sections?
• Room to Spare in Spare Rooms: The Wallpaper magazine interior look is spreading. Is there a cure?
• Less Sub, More Urb?: A potential big civic task for the '00s, humanizing the suburbs.
• There Goes the Neighborhood?: Could the Population Bomb slow down and even reverse by mid-next-century? By then, will there already be way too many folks?
• You Yang?: Single men have been treated as America's social pariahs long before Maxim magazine wallowed in the image.
• Journal-ism: Web journals, the evil twin of weblongs.
• Anything Can Happen Day: 'Social phobia' redefined as a medical condition; plus a new 'urban lifestyle' mag and an odd choice for a pop-song-turned-ad-jingle.
• What, Me Bigoted?: How prejudiced are YOU?
• Exit, Stage Right?: If the Religious Right really is fading away, as some pundits claim, who will the mainstream Democrats complain about?
• Body Talk: A self-described 'breast man' faces a loved one's breast cancer.
• Consuming Passions: E-commerce tries to go hip.
• Game Over (and Over and Over): Is two years already too old for a video-game history book?
• Words to Live By: Original quips and aphorisms.
• No (More) Alternative: The new hipness doesn't rebel against capitalist aggression; it supercharges it.
• Mamas of Invention: Fun stuff--icky food, retro furnishings, and video on vinyl records.
• How Limp Was My Bizkit: The 'Funky Monkey' radio station and the return of bad-boy rock.
• Don't Be Limp, Read 'The Imp!': Chris Ware's elegant comics get an elegant profile-tribute from the zine 'The Imp.'
• We Just Talked. Really: Meeting three 'amateur' adult-site mistresses.
• An Amateur Speaks: The 'amateurs,' part 2.
• Scare and Scare Alike: Your three-month Halloween preview.

• Playing With Our Food: More junk-food links.
• More Balls, Please: Another way to save baseball--more teams.
• Prose and Cons: Some of the worst influences on young writers.
• More Than Words: What we should teach English students instead of PC-lit--Great Kickass Writing.
• Cash From (Predicted) Chaos: Y2K scaremongers go from collectivist to entrepreneurial.
• More Futures Past: A visit to a beautiful (and, natch, doomed) art-studio complex; plus another retro-futuristic bar.
• Built With Passion: The lost seductive powers of architecture.
• Making Traks: The Amtrak Cascades, the only way to travel.
• A Mess in a 'Clean City': Political-economic crisis in British Columbia, where governments have the lifespan of fruitflies.
• Northern Lights (and Lites): Some of the many things B.C. still has going for it.
• Words About Music: Fun and wacky music links.
• The Myrtle of Venus: A revisionist view of Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner."
• No More Filmy Residue: Who's afraid of digital moviemaking?
• Trees Are Dying For This?: Newspapers try to stem circulation declines by getting even duller.
• Surviving Relics: Old buildings and the stories they have to tell.
• The Cyberkids Are Alright: Author Douglas Rushkoff thinks young Netheads bode well for the future, as long as it's a future where you've gotta be a Nethead.
• Dishing It Out: Home satellite dishes--still worth it?
• What They (And We) Don't Know: A midwest college's list of cultural references teachers know but students might not.
• More of What They (And We) Don't Know: Our own list of what kids don't know.
• Still More of What They (And We) Don't Know: Our own list of what grownups don't know.
• A Tale Of Two Movies: Net hype might have helped The Blair Witch Project, but could its real (sorta) success story really be The Iron Giant?
• That's Rather Odd, By Jove: Mike Dash's book Borderlands covers odd phenomena from UFOs to Bigfoot, all with droll Brit wit.

• Another Year Older: Celebrating one year as an all-netzine operation.
• Food, Not Cuisine: Diner food's back in, but was it ever really out?
• Good Buy, Goodbye: Stick a fork in the thrift-store lifestyle. It's done.
• Art Trouble: "Bad art" and "fun art" links.
• Faster, James Gleick! Write, write!: Life's getting ever-faster, or maybe it's not.
• Times That Try Men's Souls: Susan Faludi's Stiffed fails to attract a reverse-reverse-reverse-sexist backlash. (Part 1 of 2)
• Yang Me: Essayist/artist Douglas Davis on the idea that men are equal to women. (Part 2 of 2)
• Retails from the Crypt: Mini-photo essays on recycled retail real estate.
• Women of Vision: There are a lot of female public artists. What, if anything, does that mean?
• Static: 'Alternative' college radio KCMU--can it be saved? Should it?
• 'Nostalghia': Recalling the halcyon days of foreign film.
• Almost Dead: The end of Almost Live and TV's role in the decline and possible revival of regional culture and humor.
• Look at the Size of Our Cups: That great alternative-art patron, Procter & Gamble.
• Don't Be Late; Consolidate!: One way to make contemporary arts a more pivotal part of urban life.
• Grumpy Sounds: The music everybody but me likes.
• Cyber-Libertarians and Cyber-Libertines: The Patrick Naughton case, the cyber-mogul ego, and how the Net biz is "about relationships and doing deals."
• The 0-0 Squad: Does it really matter when the millennium starts?
• Anime-ia: An exhibit honoring anime pioneer Osamu Tezuka.
• Dandy Candy: Top candy picks for Halloween.
• The Tooth Is Out There: The comforts and discomforts of modern oral surgery.
• The Dogme 95 Project: Could The Blair Witch Project qualify as a Dogme 95 film?

• Pleasures, Not Necessarily Guilty: Some music I like that stuffier critics might not.
• Shot From Both Sides: Election '99 pitted the Talk-Radio Right and the Progressive Left against a common enemy, the Corporate Middle-of-the-Road.
• Freedom of 'Speak': A hipper-than-thou magazine complains that corporations won't let it sell out to them.
• Ben Is Dead, That's What I Said: Just because the venerable Ben Is Dead goes away, are all ground-level zines dead too?
• Designer Genes: Ron Harris's journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.
• No Mo PoMo No Mo?: Does postmodern fiction trash old hierarchies or just build new ones? (Part 1 of 3)
• No Mo PoMo No Mo? (Some Mo): Can we ever get to post-postmodern? (Part 2 of 3)
• The Post-Post Age: Trying to imagine a more proactive future. (Part 3 of 3)
• Escape To the Ordinary: Yi-Fu Tuan's book 'Escapism' tells how past generations tried to get away from what current generations try to get away to.
• Taking A 'Club'-bing: Kids who fight aren't necessarily imitating 'Fight Club.'
• Can You Tell Me How to Get to 'Coronation Street'?: Britain's 40-year-old 'kitchen-sink' TV drama depicts the kind of real community American 'new urbanism' advocates yearn for.
• Even MISC-er: Short bits about (real) Butoh erotica, Rolling Stone brand sunglasses, odd emails, and new kinds of condom advertising.
• Our Formerly-Fair City: I've previously complained about arrogant San Franciscans; but are Seattleites really any better anymore?
• The Less-Than-Fine Arts: Some ephemeral cultural forms for our time.
• Fixing the News: Imagining a newspaper for the Internet Age.
• Tomorrow's Not What It Used To Be: A look back at Edward Bellamy's 1897 novel 'Looking Backward,' which predicted that by 2000 we'd have total socio-economic equality but not computers. (Part 1 of 3)
• Tomorrow's Still Not What It Used To Be: More on 'Looking Backward,' (Part 2 of 3)
• Back to the (More Likely) Future: Why utopian fantasies would never work.(Part 3 of 3)
• Non-E Commerce: Bucking current trends, a catalog-and-website-based merchant opens a posh retail store.
• One-Stop Schlepping: A new Fred Meyer hypermarket, situated in a previously retail-free industrial area, tries to look like the steel mill it replaced.
• Take It Out In Trade: Will the World Trade Organization protesters overcome the limitations of the Lifestyle Left?
• If At First You Don't Secede...: Despite the WTO protesters' claims, some still believe government has too much power and business too little.

• Random Riot Ruminations: So much for 'Seattle Nice;' as globally-organized business is confronted by globally-organized (or at least continentally-organized) protesters of various flavors, plus a few thugs. (Part 1 of 4)
• More Random Riot Ruminations: The city doesn't go back to normal, as police over-reaction to WTO protests leads to anti-police protests (and further police over-reaction); plus speculation about the more violent WTO-protest figures. (Part 2 of 4)
• Apres WTO, Le Deluge: The protests' chief benefit: Trouncing the notion that Business's total control over humanity's course is inevitable. (Part 3 of 4)
• Other WTO Voices: First-hand reports from the tear-gas clouds. (Part 4 of 4)
• The Depressingest Place On Earth: Jamming on the concept of a proposed "Great Northwest" theme park (part 1 of 2); plus some last (?) WTO thoughts.
• The Animatronic Bill: Concluding our NW theme-park pontifications. (Part 2 of 2)
• Life After Microsoft: Those who imagine and/or fear a post-Bill computer world. (Part 1 of 2)
• MS S&M: The very local roots of the Microsoft corporate culture. (Part 2 of 2)
• Brave New Seattle: An architecture of huge new monuments, partly funded from fortunes made in software and similar ephemera.
• Beyond Bitter Beer Face: A half-rack of bad brews I have known.
• Bank Shots: What's happenned to some of the buildings left behind by bank mergers and consolidations.
• Christmas Presence: Gifts and cards that might not express the most hospitable thoughts.
• What's Wrong With This Picture: Why digital cable TV should have more than just movies.
• Reverse Gear?: What might really be behind transit bureaucrats' apparent supplication to budget-cutters.
• The Ghost of Christmas Presents: Weird and wacky last-minute gift ideas.
• The Reel Deal?: Entertainment Weekly sez this was "The Year That Changed Movies." Could they be right?
• Munchy Movies: What cinema-restaurant combo operations ought to serve.
• Klang Me A throwaway tabloid zine stuffed full of hibrow literature.
• Happy Holi-daze: I've been thinking about Christmas every day for the past two months. Here are some conclusions.
• The Retail Theater: Theatrically-minded stores, and theaters turned into stores.
• Punk After 25: The new generation gap--beer-guzzling old-style punk rockers vs. snowboarding new-style punk rockers.
• The Grinch Who Stole New Year's: One more reason to impeach Paul Schell.
• Whatever Happenned to the '90s?: Remembering the decade, because almost nobody else is.
• The Old Insville and Outski: The most reliable list anywhere of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the year of the double-oughts.