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IN THE FIRST NON-SLOW NOOZE DAY OF THE YEAR
January 8th, 2008 by Clark Humphrey

  • The easy half of the equation has been solved, as Clay Bennett agrees to sell the Storm to owners who’ll keep the WNBA team here. The hard part, wresting the Sonics from his reverse-Midas-touch hands, now begins in earnest.
  • Meanwhile, the guy who got us into this mess in the first place by selling the teams to Bennett is making new moves at his day job. Starbucks chairman Howard Schultz has fired his CEO, retaking the reins himself. Can he return the coffee chain to its former fast-growin’ ways, in spite of all the obstacles? (Among the latter: espresso drinks coming to McDonald’s.)
  • Some folks got pretty snow this morning; the heart of Seattle, again, didn’t. Damn.
  • The Port of Seattle’s fiscal shenanigans will be investigated by the Feds.
  • House prices finally begin to go down in the area. (Insert your own “going down” joke here.) Still, local biz leaders insist it’s not that drastic really. Meanwhile, developers who’d planned to condo-convert Seattle’s historic Smith Tower are scaling back their plans; now only the top 12 stories will be converted.
  • My second-ever adult job (such as it was), the student newspaper Polaris at North Seattle Community College, is a goner.
  • Blacks are more likely than whites to get busted for having or smoking pot, even though that’s now the city’s official lowest law enforcement priority.
  • In more positive law-related news, “serious crime” (as the FBI defines it) is way down in western Washington’s cities these days. That, alone, won’t stop the media from exploiting the occasional random shooting, or stop the talk-radio nebbishes from preaching the city=danger, suburbs=serenity meme.
  • An election year’s underway. You can tell because a politician, in this case Gov. Gregoire, is trying to generate headlines on the get-tougher-on-drunk-drivers line, the encroaching-surveillance-state issue on which no one dares to disagree.
  • Woodland Park Zoo tries again to make its own cute li’l baby elephant.
  • The men’s fashion headline of the year is “Return to Elegance.” Just as it’s been every year since at least 1978.
  • 12,000 people in Idaho lost electricity due to a stray cat wandering through a substation. Brian Setzer remains at large.
  • Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert returned to their cablecasts, just in time to give writerless jokes about the New Hampshire primary.

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