The Burke Museum has posted a lovely You Tube video showing how the Pioneer Square area was not only settled by Seattle’s founders but altered, filled in, and transformed from a little isthmus into the historic district it is today.

• A B.C.-based blogger about classic cartoons offers his own tribute to J.P. Patches, on whose show he first saw many of those shorts.
• Meanwhile, sometime Seattle musician (and this year’s Seafair grand marshal) Duff McKagan cites the Patches show as exemplifying/promoting a quirky, particularly “Seattle” sense of humor.
• Paul Constant believes the Seattle library levy would stand a better chance of passage if its promoters expressed more appreciation toward librarians, not just toward buildings and acquisitions.
• The Dept. of Justice deal with the Seattle Police includes a court appointed monitor and strict reporting of “uses of force.”
• You’ve got about a month to get your needles together for the big quilters’ convention.
• A Florida renegade Republican claims his state party has deliberately tried to suppress the black vote.
• Paul Krugman suggests Mitt Romney’s wealth, and the insularity that goes with it, is his potential undoing.
• If you don’t have health insurance, today’s Republican Party officially doesn’t give a flying frack about you.
• The number of “swing states” in this Presidential election: 8. That’s it.
• Pat Buchanan really needn’t worry about the Republicans facing long-term oblivion as America becomes steadily less white. Some future generation of GOP operatives could easily dump the racism (disguised and otherwise), and instead proclaim that passive-aggressive fealty to Big Money is for everyone.
• Roger Rosenblatt wants writers to “write great;” that is, to go beyond the merely personal and embrace reality’s greater issues.
• In the opposite direction from “writing great,” there’s now an online Fifty Shades of Grey-esque cliché generator.
• And finally, this day’s most incisive, most informative piece of Seattle Times reportage: