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Seattle Weekly’s had two strong cover stories in a row.
This week’s piece by Tim Appelo wondering why Ken Kesey ceased to be a great writer expressed (and, thankfully, didn’t try to fully answer) all the questions I had when Kesey died and all the obits ran paragraph after paragraph about his drugging and drinking and only a couple of sentences about his writing.
Appelo’s piece followed Philip Dawdy’s long, haunting pontification about last summer’s suicide by beloved KUOW personality Cynthia Doyon. We’re just a couple of months away from what will probably be a string of media hype pieces marking ten years since Kurt Cobain’s death. We seem not to have learned a damned thing since then about taking care of ourselves or one another.
Turns out local police have, for some years now, had a word for car dealers who force buyers into usurious loan terms after the sale: “bushing!”
Treating protesters as criminals, or even as “terrorists.”
…feel a lot as if I was a townsperson in It’s A Good Life, the Jerome Bixby story made famous in a Twilight Zone episode starring future comic-book writer and Barnes & Barnes novelty singer Bill Mumy.
Our whole society (local, national, global) is being ruined by the collective equivalent to that story’s boy villain–a pre-adolescent mindset of greed and vengeance. Not only must we obey fully, we must obey cheerfully. We must always think good thoughts, even as everything we love is torn asunder. In “lifestyle” journalism, that means the writer must, MUST, MUST absolutely, gushingly adore whatever the upscale demographic target market’s expected to like. Huge ugly vehicles? Snooty restaurants? Fantastic! Development schemes devised to give the waterfront to Paul Allen? Gotta love ’em! Gutting health-care and education funding to support subsidies to Boeing and Amgen? It was good that the politicians did that!
AFTER SEEING a Red Green Show skit about customizing an ordinary modern car with a cut-up fiberglass canoe, I found a webpage about concept and prototype cars from the fifties and sixties. Damn, I wish some of those things had been really made.
…only cheaper and reusable: Dirkon, the Paper Camera!
…offers great deals on those two great tastes that taste great together–candy bars and diabetes test machines.
…behind Wonder Woman. Really.
…and mom-n’-pop operators take over, they’re “Not Fooling Anybody.”
SEATTLE RANKS #8 on somebody’s list of America’s “best-mannered” cities. NYC was #7.
…glass artist!
Some readers have told me they’ve only read the first chapter of my online novel, because they couldn’t locate any links to the subsequent scenes. I’ve now redesigned the whole thing, so you should now have no trouble navigatin’ your whole way through. (This revision is also about 15 percent shorter, and hence tighter and funnier.)
So start readin’ it already!
JUST SOME RANDOM shots today. Have a nice weekend.
THE FIRSTÂ Cartoon Law of Physics: “Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.”
…here’s a CBC news report about that wacky new fad, “A network called ‘Internet.'”