Today, go out and celebrate Pi Day (3/14). Tomorrow, learn about pies of the past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on cantilevered Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• We now know what’s going in where the parking garage on Second north of Stewart had been until last weekend. It’s (wait for it) a beyond-upscale luxury apartment tower, the “Viktoria” (yes, with a K). The developers are employing all the usual buzzwords (including their vow that this will be “the signature residential building in Belltown”). Construction starts within a month.
• Next threatened landmark that needs saving: The Funhouse, that delightfully seedy and decidedly downscale rock club, situated within easy jeering distance of EMP and Ride the Ducks. Yep, it’s due to yet another “mixed use” project.
• Wash. state’s next big contribution to the music world is a Korean American “pop lothario.”
• Public-school advocates calling themselves “Occupy Education” show up at Gates Foundation HQ to pick a verbal fight, about what the activists call the foundation’s “corporate brand of education reform.” Hilarity ensues.
• SeattlePI.com’s list of “most hated Seattle sports figures” relegates Clay Bennett to the #2 slot behind Howard Schultz, the man who made Bennett’s team-theft possible.
• Co-ops, locavores, Kickstarter, Etsy—Sara Horowitz at the Atlantic calls it all a revival of 1890s “mutualism.”
• Mike Lux attempts to explain why so many professed Christians behave so not-Christlike. (Lux mainly blames the Apostle Paul.)
• William K. Black at AlterNet would like to see the same kind of attention paid toward Wall Street’s corporate crimes that’s paid toward blue-collar street crime.
• Village Voice Media continues to defend its Backpage.com sex ad operation, even within an article about a group of accused child abusers who are charged with using the site to pimp out their underage victim.
• Encyclopedia Britannica, having sold only 8,000 print encyclopedia sets in the past two years, announced it won’t print any more after 244 years.
• We know junkies were stealing copper wire, but liquid Tide?
• Charlie Jane Anders at i09.com offers advice on how to be a better sci-fi/fantasy writer by being less annoyingly “clever” about it:

Try writing the same line of dialogue three different ways: 1) the quippy version, 2) the version that simply conveys the meaning of the line, and 3) the emotional subtext of the line. And then try to find the version that combines 2) and 3) as much as possible. You might find you end up with a line that’s more quotable than the witty version you originally had.