johncage.tonspur.at

• It’s ex-Seattleite composer’s John Cage’s 100th birthday. Hope your pianos are all suitably “prepared.”
• Free downtown public transit is not only dying in Seattle but in Portland too.
• Pleasure-boaters have turned Andrews Bay, near Seward Park, into a party zone gone wild. It’s like the Seafair log boom every day.
• The sellout of Yesler Terrace to “market rate” development is official.
• Seattle’s budget situation: not nearly as dreadful as previously feared.
• The UW has been named one of the country’s “ten greenest colleges.”
• Catholic schools are neither as popular nor as affordable as they used to be, back when they were staffed by armies of low-paid nuns.
• Organic food: really better for you, or just costlier and uglier?
• American Airlines got what it wanted out of its trumped-up “bankruptcy” ploy, getting officially out of its union pilots’ contract.
• Here’s the Michele Obama speech so many are talking about, the Deval Patrick speech almost as many are talking about, and the Craig Robinson speech I had a personal reason to like (Go Beavers!).
• Nielsen ratings for the Republican convention are in. They’re down 23 percent from the GOP’s viewership in 2008 (which, in turn, had had more viewers than 2004). Of those who did watch, two-thirds were 55 or older.
• CNN’s pre-convention Romney documentary tried to portray the young Willard as having somehow been “courageous” as a ’60s pro-war draft dodger.
• Vanity Fair writer Kurt Eichenwald writes on his own blog that the rabid right’s lying demagogues must be stopped for the sake of all of us (conservatives included):

Lying has become so ingrained into the conservatives’ national dialogue that they are now dangerously demagogic or, worse, severely unhinged. Blind rage at the election of Barack Obama has wrecked a once great political party. Its leaders have made so many deals with the devil in their almost pathological obsession with unseating Obama that they have pushed the GOP into its own version of political hell – unable to speak truths to their now-rabid and conspiracy-addled base and unable to right the party back onto a path of responsibility. Only through the disinfectant of defeat can the Republicans, and the two party system, be preserved.

• The Hugo Awards, science fiction’s highest cross-medium honors, were to have been webcast live. But the streaming-video service company cut off the live feed. Automated software detected the presence of copyrighted film clips and pulled the plug, even though all the clips had been fully licensed for use.