tom banse via kplu

• Could fewer pesticides mean more bees in Wash. state’s future?
• You know I love old Seattle, and old postcards, and old Seattle postcards.
• “Second-hand pot smoke” exists, and can potentially be grounds for getting fired.
• Against stereotype, Washington ranks among the “most stressed-out states.”
• Affordable housing in these parts is like the weather, as per the old phrase “everybody talks about it but….”
• The decimation of Metro Transit can only be averted in the special session of the Legislature. Which, as you recall, is controlled by turncoat ex-Democrat Rodney Tom (who doesn’t seem to give a damn about anything but appeasing right-wing Big Money, which is anti-transit as a matter of principle).
• Local economics pundit John Burbank says Washington should, and more importantly can, prepare for a post-Boeing future.
• George Jones, 1932-2013: He stopped loving her today.
• Okay, we’re getting a full component of air traffic controllers again. Now can we please work out sequester repeals that would benefit, you know, non-rich people?
• A bestselling author wants the federal government (which, as you recall, can’t even support public broadcasting or arts education sufficiently) to subsidize the big book publishers.
• Anybody remember Blockbuster Video? This will stoke your memories. (Incidentally, there’s supposed to be two still-extant Blockbusters in Kent and one in Edmonds.)
• Let’s close up for today with some video documentaries about women in punk.

networkawesome.com

• I was at the last day of the Alki Tavern, that venerable unrepentant dive bar. So was videographer Nick Adams.
• “Pot tourism” still has a few snags before it can become big business here.
• The Boeing engineers’ union approved the contract proposal they’d previously rejected.
• Post-dam Elwha River: I’m getting sedimental over you.
• Providence’s drive toward near-monopoly status in the hospital biz of much of Wash. state hits a snag, as Olympia hospital employees go on strike. Among the issues: cuts to the employees’ own health benefits, while the CEO rakes in millions.
• The Rev. Rich Lang, writing for Real Change, compares modern society to that once bemoaned by the Bible’s “apocalyptic” writers.
• Apparently, indie-folk oldie act Michelle Shocked (who’d once sort-of claimed to be lesbian 22 years ago) now says she was just kidding when she made virulently anti-gay remarks on stage in San Francisco.
• In brighter women-in-music news, meet “Laura the Luthier,” the collective name for the women who kept Gibson Guitars in production during WWII.
• By now you’ve heard about the Steubenville OH teen-rape verdict, and about certain cable-news commentators who went all over in sympathy with the young convicted criminals while downplaying or making excuses for their crime. Mia McKenzie at the blog Black Girl Dangerous has a slightly different view. McKenzie acknowledges it’s sad that the convicts will go into the “prison industrial complex” like so many kids who aren’t white or football stars. But she still expresses more sympathy to the rape victim.
• That widely disseminated “meme graphic” of a Swedish department store with “realistic” mannequins? The picture’s real. But it wasn’t taken in an H&M but in another store, and it was photographed three years ago.

• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 65): No. But the would-be team buyers and arena developers have posted conceptual art of the proposed arena’s interior. It’s got a steep seating bowl and three “Sonics Rings” around the upper levels. Yes, it’s intended to be loud.
• Damning With Faint Praise Dept.: The Financial Times claims Boeing investors are not as “narrow-minded” as the company itself “(mostly) is.”
• I won’t be the new Seattle Weekly editor. (They didn’t even email me back.) Instead, they’re poaching Mark Baumgarten from CityArts.
• Meanwhile, John Roderick’s Weekly manifesto, “Punk Rock Is Bullshit,” has drawn national attention. Blogger Marianne Spellman calls Roderick’s piece an example of “how to get everything spectacularly wrong.”
• The latest gravestone in the print-media cemetery belongs to an “alt-weekly” pioneer, the venerable Boston Phoenix.
• You know the new Pope is just as anti-gay and anti-contraception as his predecessors. You might not know he was a serious collaborator with Argentina’s ruthlessly homicidal former junta.
• Today’s lesson in the folly of marketing products “For Women” is brought to you by a Dubai computer company. It’s selling a tablet device called the Femme, pre-loaded with shopping and dieting apps.
• 3D printing, that latest tech craze, isn’t quite up to the hype. Yet.
• Hostess snacks may again be made soon. Probably not in Seattle, though. That property’s just too developer-lucrative now.
• Three devoted fans have a dream, to rebuild the bridge set from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Even though they don’t have a place to put it.
• Bob Woodward’s John Belushi bio, according to a guy who re-tracked-down its sources, got most of its facts right but still got the bigger picture all wrong.
• In the Japanese tsunami of 2011, an historic forest on the country’s coastline fell—except for a single tall, thin tree. That tree eventually succumbed a year later, because its ground water had become too saline. But it’s remembered in a monumental plastic-and-metal sculpture, “Miracle Pine.” (The scaffolding in this image will be removed before the official unveiling.)

architizer.com

via vintageseattle.org and capitolhillseattle.com

• The old Club Broadway disco on Capitol Hill, previously a Masonic Scottish Rite Cathedral, was torn down ages ago, leaving only a “stairway to nowhere.” Surprisingly, given all the other re-development activity nearby, the lot’s going to stay vacant for the foreseeable future.
• How do you honestly talk about the humanities in high school, when one parent’s complaint means you can’t say anything about “racism and social justice”?
• Meanwhile, Knute Berger has a great piece at Seattle magazine about our fair city’s unfair past; specifically, explicit racial discrimination in housing. It existed openly and legally (with contractual “covenants” binding home buyers to never resell to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or even Jews) as late as 1968. Berger notes that…

In 1964, Seattle voters soundly defeated an “open housing” ordinance that would have let anyone live anywhere. It lost by more than 2-to-1.

• You know how Amazon’s now building three 50-story towers on the Toyota of Seattle, King Theater, and Sixth Avenue Motor Inn blocks. But word just got out that the e-tail giant has options to buy three nearby blocks from the Clise family, who’ve owned the lots since the 1930s. One of these houses the Hurricane Cafe, which for 19 years has carried on the 24-hour dining tradition of the legendary Dog House that preceded it (without, alas, the previous joint’s class).
• Jon Talton wishes Boeing execs would go on an “apology tour” to their workers, the Puget Sound area, and their shareholders, expressing their sorriness over pretty much everything they’ve done this past decade.
• In where-are-they-now? news, ex-Nirvana drummer Chad Channing is back with a new band, Before Cars.
• Gonzaga men’s basketball: #1 in the nation. UW men’s basketball: don’t ask.
• A Republican apologizes for something! It’s for claiming that bicycles pollute just like cars.
• Pot as a business model goes over well in Yakima.
• There are two pending death-penalty cases in King County. They’re both now on hold.
• Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon asks, “Did the Internet kill Girls Gone Wild?” The answer, for good or ill, is no. Joe Francis, founder of the public-nudity video label, is simply going into bankruptcy protection to weasel out of money he owes to a Vegas casino magnate. It’s a personal matter, not directly related to the company.
• Morrissey is still a self-righteous egomaniac, but at least he’s a morally consistent self-righteous egomaniac.
• An LA record-store chain is selling its own digitized versions of out-of-print LPs for download. The company claims it’s legal (it sets aside a portion of each sale into an escrow account, to be sent to copyright claimants if they ask). But is it right?

ap via nwcn.com

• Just like at the Ballard Locks, Oregon’s Willamette Falls is plagued by salmon-hungry sea lions. Local officials’ answer? “A boat crew armed with seal bombs and shotguns loaded with firecrackers.”
• A Seattle Times headline labels “art” as a waste of state taxpayer money, right up there with legislators’ dry-cleaning bills. This is not the sort of objective reporting of which the Times claims to be a last bastion.
• You want real spending waste, in a project about, well, waste? Then look no further than Seattle Public Utilities’ new south end transfer station, still not ready months after its ribbon cutting.
• Another stupid shooting in another local nightspot. How utterly gross. (Here’s news of the benefit for the bar bouncer’s recovery.)
• I seem to have found out about this story in progress, but the UW’s Women’s Action Commission has created its own theater piece in the tradition of The Vagina Monologues. Only this all-new work is called The ___ Monologues. The title is apparently an attempt to make the work “more trans-friendly.”
• The Yankees don’t like A-Rod anymore.
• Marijuana industry trade associations are now a thing.
• The Wall St. Journal says Microsoft wouldn’t have to take a majority stake in Dell in order to have  a pivotal degree of influence in the beleagured PC maker.
• The newest version of MS Office comes in a “cloud based” subscription version, which seems to essentially require you to have a never-interrupted Net connection (and, of course, to keep paying).
• Boeing’s global-outsourcing craze is now, more or less officially, a “disaster.”
• We must say goodbye to Regretsy, the site that pokes gentle fun at kooky craft products. Its operator April Winchell (yes, Dick Dastardly’s daughter) said the site’s concept had run its course (“now we’re just Bedazzling a dead horse”).
• Last week, Twitter launched a new streaming-video site called Vine. The premise is people posting six-second, repeating GIF videos. Yes, it’s already been used for porn, and for people taping themselves taking bong hits.
• Barnes & Noble plans to close perhaps 20 percent of its stores over the next decade. So much for the guys who were supposed to be taking over the industry and driving all the indie quirkiness out of the book biz.
• Someone’s written a long, detailed critique of the cinematography in Les Miserables—in the character of the Incredible Hulk.
• “Rei” at Daily Kos wants you to reconsider the Fox News story from last week about Iceland’s official baby-names list.
• Speaking of which, while my masses-bashing “radical” leftist friends like to imagine Fox News as “the most popular TV channel,” its ratings among adults under 55 are the lowest they’ve been in more than a decade.
• Jeb Boniakowski at The Awl would like a mega-McDonald’s in NYC’s Times Square, that would serve everything the chain serves everywhere else but not in this country.
• Public radio’s idea of “humor,” at once bland and cloying, reaches a new nadir in a Chicago station’s make-believe plea for its listeners to breed more public-radio-listening babies.
• Headline: “Ex-NFL player charged with beating boyfriend.” Comment: Yes, this is still what it takes to acknowledge the existence of gay athletes.
• Jim Nabors had been rumored to be gay ever since his days of sitcom stardom. Now he’s finally publicly proclaimed it, by getting married in Seattle.
• The NY Times has discovered something that’s been going on around here for some time—the “permanent temp” economy.
• One of the last of its kind in the region, the Valley 6 Drive-In Theater in Auburn, will not reopen after its most recent seasonal shutdown. Even sadder, its longtime manager Kieth Kiehl passed on shortly after the decision to close was made. Both will be missed.

beth dorenkamp via grindhouse theater tacoma

the aurora kmart in 2002

• Seattle’s last Kmart store, at 130th and Aurora, has lost its lease and is closing. It first opened in 1968 as a branch of White Front, the long-defunct California chain that begat Toys “R” Us.
• Daniel B. Wood at the Christian Science Monitor asks whether Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is “too high-tech for its own good.”
• Do we want the Arboretum’s “ramps to nowhere,” the only surviving legacy of the rightfully-halted R.H. Thompson Expressway project of the early 1970s, to be removed? I say no.
• Could legal “pirate” (quasi-unlicensed) radio be coming to Seattle?
• How to guarantee a huge turnout at a city hearing: make it about making the rules for legal pot sales.
• R.I.P. Mary Shirley, who with her ex- Microsoft exec hubby was a major art collector and Seattle Art Museum donor.
• Local blue-eyed-rap star Macklemore has one devout anti-fan in Brandon Sodenberg (“safe-as-fuck, liberal meme-rap”).
• In case you’d forgotten, the Chihuly Museum people promised a kids’ playground and a gallery space for other Northwest artists, in exchange for taking up a huge chunk of Seattle Center land. Neither is anywhere in sight.
• In “boring” news, the big waterfront tunnel digging machine got some small but significant damage during testing in Japan.
• Janie Stilgoe at The Guardian says the days of “content” web sites scrambling to game Google’s search results through “search engine optimization” are over. Google’s revamped its algorithms specifically to discourage it. Instead, Stilgoe says web sites (including news sites) should embrace “content marketing,” whatever that is.
• And let’s end it for today with a scenic tour past some “Faded Motels of the Rust Belt.”

via huffington post

kentaro lemoto @tokyo, via daily kos

• Hey McDonnell Douglas Boeing, how’s that whole foreign outsourcing thing working for ya?
• Add to the endlessly growing list of cool places disappearing: the Alki Tavern, where bikers once held drunken brawls in front of a spectacular Elliott Bay view. Yep, the real estate’s going for luxury condos. Damn.
• Already gone before we could say goodbye: Costa’s Opa, Fremont’s anchor Greek eatery for 32 years. The villain in this story is the same as the one in the Queen Anne Easy Street Records disappearance: unChaste Bank.
• The NY Times has officially “discovered” Pike/Pine. Does that mean the place is, you know, “over”?
• City bureaucrats still don’t want meals for the homeless to be served, you know, where the homeless are.
• There might be nothing sicker, and sadder, than allegations of sexual harassment at King County’s sex crimes unit.
• Not every Catholic priest does horrible things to boys. At least one’s been caught dealing meth and having sex with (adult) cross-dressers.
• Atari has faced “Game Over” before. But this time, its fate is in the hands of obscure holding companies and hedge funds.
• Last week’s Saturday Night Live tribute to the tropes of (clothed dialogue scenes in) ’70s softcore movies definitely qualifies as a “10 to 1″ sketch, the edgier or just odd stuff often snuck in at the show’s end.

igor keller at hideousbelltown.blogspot.com

• The Sixth Avenue Motor Inn and the King Cat (née King) Theater are coming down, in preparation for the three Amazon high rises (each of which will be as tall as the ex-Seafirst tower).
• I’d rather be on a non smoking flight, thank you. (But in all seriousness, would the pre-McDonnell-Douglas Boeing have let planes go into service with untested battery technologies?)
• The Queen Anne branch of Easy Street Records is still closing on Friday. But in happier news, Queen Anne Books is reopening under new management.
• Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely quits just as new, perhaps more competent, owners take over.
• An Everett woman “is accused of smothering her boyfriend by lying on his face.” With her chest.
• One reason to get an iPhone instead of something else: Facebook’s free-voice-calls app.
• Nagisa Oshima, R.I.P.: Japan’s government should honor the filmmaker’s memory by finally allowing his masterwork, In the Realm of the Senses, to be screened uncut in his country.
• Abigail Van Buren, R.I.P.: Pauline Phillips, one of the advice-column twins (Eppie Lederer, a.ka. “Ann Landers,” was her sister), carved out a niche in daily newspapers back when such institutions still had many such niches to be filled. Her common-sense, yet witty, responses to readers’ personal issues kept readers enthralled, and subscribed, for more than three decades. Speaking of deceased twins…
• Conrad Bain, R.I.P.: My favorite of his performances was when Maude ran a “twins” episode, a common sitcom shtick. In the big closing reveal, both characters walked out, in front of the studio audience in an obviously unfaked shot. Turned out Bain really had a twin, Bonar Bain, who still lives. (Bonar later appeared as himself, albeit renamed “Fred Bain,” on SCTV.)
• No, Washington Post: People’s Twitter pictures are not free for the (unpaid) republishing.
• Markos Moulitsas claims today’s Democrats, popularity-wise, “may now be on the right side of every single relevant issue.”
• Punch, the late beloved UK humor mag, knew the addictive power of mobile electronic-media devices before they even existed:

via kip w on flickr

spoon-tamago.com via buzzfeed.com

• Newest fun invention from Japan: the “3D photo booth.” Stand very still for 15 minutes, and a few days later a figurine that looks like you shows up in the mail.
• Wash. state is Number One! As, er, a “net importer of out-of-state parolees.”
• Question: “Is Amazon.com Taking Over the World?” Answer: No. Only the world’s potential profit centers.
• The remaining Tully’s coffee houses may have a buyer.
• Did the Bellevue City Council not really know that light rail tracks have to have a rail yard (train car parking lot) with them?
• Gender-neutral marriage licenses are on the way. Will they show up in time for the first rush of gay nuptials?
• Walden Three, Greg Lundgren’s ambitious attempt to set up a multimedia arts center in the old Lusty Lady building (and to partly pay for it all as a years-long “documentary film shoot”), now has a blog. In it, Lundgren spins completely fictional stories about fabulous exhibits and shows that would be occurring there if it were operating now.
• The Illinois company calling itself Boeing is still stonewalling in talks with the engineers’ union.
• After 11 years, the final edition of KING-TV’s Up Front With Robert Mak airs this Sunday. It’s ending for no good reason. A studio interview show doesn’t cost that much to make, particularly if any good bits can be reused on your regular newscasts.
• Yes, the Florida Republicans really were trying to stop people in Dem-leaning districts from voting.
• Speaking of state-level GOPpers, they’re now in full control of 24 state houses. Expect more Wisconsin-like extremist legislation and dirty tricks, just on the other side of the holidays (if not sooner).
• I still meet left wingers who imagine that in some utopian pre-television age, all newspapers were local mini versions of the NY Times, noble progressive institutions exposing social ills. In real life, even the NY Times mostly wasn’t like that. A lot of them were pugnacious right-wing rags that supported, or even contributed to, climates of fear and hate. Case in point: The Hollywood Reporter. The venerable showbiz trade paper recently ran a big essay describing, and apologizing for, its role in promoting the 1950s “blacklist” against film people even suspected of “communist” beliefs.
• The “Black Friday boycott” at Walmart stores, thankfully, turned out to be more than just self-serving online rants by lefties who never go there anyway. There were actual pickets and other actions at the stores, in favor of fairer labor practices. And now, fast food workers in NYC are also demanding a living wage.
• Something lost in all the copyright-police suppression drives against “file sharing”: the “obscure music” blogs, which unearthed and shared long-out-of-print LPs, 45s, and 78s in all kinds of non-hit categories.
• Larry Hagman, 1931-2012: The Dallas/I Dream of Jeannie star was as kind hearted and generous off screen as he could be villainous on screen. I once got to know his daughter Kristina, a local painter who had a space in the old 619 Western building. She is also a kind and generous soul.

ward sutton

‘Tis election day. The most infuriatingly nervous day of the year, or in this case of the quadrennium. (I believe that’s a word.)

The polls, even the progressive leaning polls, predict a tighter race than I want. I want Obama across the board over Mr. Lying One-Percenter Tax Cheat Hypocrite in previously “red” states, and all victorious long before the Pacific Time Zone results show up. If I can’t get that, I at least want an Obama victory big enough that even the partisan-hack dirty tricks in Ohio and Florida (and even here) can’t threaten it.

Back to randomosity:

• Lynn Stuart Parramore at AlterNet insists that liberals need to expand their potential base, to reach out to the whole of America. Yes, even to stop stereotyping white male Southerners.
• Postcard collector Lisa Hix has some lovely examples of cartoony “attack ads” from the women’s suffragist era.
• Bob Quinn, who started a one-man needle exchange program in the U District in the 1990s, has apparently died. I have no further information on this, however. (UPDATE: Here’s more.)
• Microsoft staged a real-life fake “invasion” theater piece to launch the newest version of its Halo video-game series. The mock battle essentially involved all of the European micro-state of Lichtenstein. Cue references to the Bloom County version of Bill Gates trying to get a date by boasting about owning Norway.
• UPDATE: The Cobain-Love stage musical, threatened last month, is now an official no-go.
• The state Dept. of Transportation is holding a naming contest about the big machine that will dig the tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. All entry names must be female, presumably to avoid the obvious phallic jokes.
• Boeing’s next jetliner model might have folding wings, to fit in better at crowded airports.
• Thirty-six percent of the cigarettes sold in Wash. state may be “contraband” (i.e., sold without state taxes). These will, of course, kill you just as dead.
• John Naughton at UK weekly The Observer says the big book publishers have played into Amazon’s hands in the past decade or so. Actually, they’ve played into the hands of their own conglomerate owners who cared only about the short-term Almighty Stock Price, to the long-term detriment of the business itself.
• If Disney buys Hasbro, as has been rumored, they’d not only get the rights to Battleship remakes, but also to the role-playing game franchise Dungeons & Dragons. You’ll recall Hasbro bought Renton game company Wizards of the Coast, which had bought D&D during its peak years.
• R.I.P. Mac Ahlberg. The famed Hollywood cinematographer had directed a few of his own films while still in his native Sweden. One of these was the erotic classic I, A Woman and its two sequels.
• Occupy Wall Street protesters had rigged together some bicycle-powered generators during their marathon protest. These devices proved handy for neighbors during the Hurricane Sandy blackout.
• Today’s lesson in the folly of marketing products “For Women” is brought to you by Honda.

from the book 'mail order mysteries' via laughingsquid.com

• Oh we so wanted to believe the miracle products advertised in comic books really worked as advertised (or at least were as cool as the ads claimed).
• I might be in the minority even among local fans, but I believe the replacement refs made the right call in awarding Monday night’s final play (and hence the game) to the Seahawks.
• No, the Edmonton Oilers hockey team isn’t ever going to move to Seattle. The local visit by Oilers execs is only an exercise in “arena blackmail” toward Edmonton politicos.
• David Goldstein puts the blame for Washington’s regressive tax structure on a state Supreme Court ruling back in 1933.
• Pundits look at Washington state’s political “Cascade curtain.” Micah Cohen at the NYT‘s FiveThirtyEight sees the west/east divide in terms of women’s rights issues…
• …while Eli Sanders dissects how, in the last State Supreme Court race, an unqualified white candidate beat a highly qualified Hispanic candidate in Eastern Washington, even in 40-percent-Hispanic areas.
• Speaking of Eastern Washington, those bigass, electricity-hungry “server farm” computer installations there might not employ very many people once they’re built, but they still demand political clout.
• A judge refused to throw out a class-action suit by female Costco employees, alleging discrimination in promotions.
• TV ads for the gay marriage referendum don’t show any actual gay people. I’m reminded of the 1998 initiative to end affirmative action in the state. The anti-initiative ads showed, as their examples of affirmative action’s needy beneficiaries, only white little girls. The tactic didn’t work.
• The good folks at Seattle Indian Health Services claim the city, led by councilmember Nick Licata, is trying to take over their agency so it can sell the land on which their offices sit to a private developer.
• A national church mag calls Seattle’s own Mars Hill Church (home of “hip” misogyny/homophobia) America’s third fastest-growing church.
• The Northwest’s oil refining capital could also host the nation’s biggest bottled-water plant. What could possibly go wrong?
• The airline now calling itself United (a shotgun marriage of the original UAL with Continental) has posted a nice time lapse video of a Boeing 787 being put together. It’s enough to warm this Snohomish County guy’s heart.
• Andy Williams, 1928-2012: The seemingly ageless singer/TV host began as a child in a singing-brothers act, then jump-started the career of a similar act (the Osmonds). He was a quintessential icon of the square side of the 1960s, smooth and slick and pleasant and never ruffled. He was one of those personalities who seemed to inhabit a world of serenity that flowed all around him; which made his latter-day emergence as a right wingnut even stranger.
• Ben Adler at the Nation says the truly crazy wingnut conspiracy theories and insult “jokes” don’t start on radio or Fox “News”, but at obscure blogs and e-mail lists.
• Today’s Romney/Ryan bashings: Richard Eskow believes Ryan still believes his former Ayn Randian denunciations of Medicare and Social Security. Florida Republicans are up to their old voter-suppression tricks. Greg Palast claims Karl Rove’s ol’ election-stealing dirty tricks operations are still up and running. And Jonathan Chiat visits some extremely rich people who imagine themselves to be America’s most “persecuted” and overtaxed sector.
• Economic philosopher Angus Sibley has a highly lucid, step-by-step breakdown of what’s wrong with libertarian economics.
• If outsource manufacturers like Foxconn in China keep up their reputation for workplace horridness, western tech-hardware companies just might have to return production in-house just to avoid the bad PR.
• Victoria’s Secret has quietly discontinued its “Sexy Little Geisha” ensemble. Anti-racist bloggers claim credit.

chris lehman, npr via kplu

• In my onetime stompin’ grounds of Corvallis OR, an Asian American businessman sponsored a downtown mural depicting tranquil nature scenes in Taiwan contrasted with police brutalizing protesters in Tibet. China’s government would like the mural gone.
• On the 20th anniversary of the film Singles, Spin imagines the film with a modern-day soundtrack (available as a Spotify playlist). No current Seattle acts are on it (though ex-local Mark Lanegan is).
• Most of the hereby-linked article is behind a paywall, but the gist is this: ESPN blogger Craig Custance believes Seattle’s got a great shot at a National Hockey League team, but as an expansion rather than a moved franchise. Custance agrees with similar remarks earlier this year by CBC hockey commentator Elliotte Friedman. (Nobody might have NHL hockey for perhaps a whole year, if the league continues to lock out its players.)
• My ol’ pal James Winchell has a neat piece in the Jewish mag Tablet (no relation to the defunct local hipster rag of the same name), philosophizing on the Hebrew roots and symbolism in the works of Franz Kafka.
• How artificial intelligence is turning out: expect more stuff like Siri, but no human-esque robots any time soon.
• As big chain retailers abandon more and more sites around the country, some of those sites are being taken over by big chain restaurants.
• Danny Westneat asks if Romney’s so down on those who don’t pay taxes, when’s he gonna go after the likes of Boeing? (Or, for that matter, Microsoft?)
• Poll-analyst extraordinaire Nate Silver sees Obama doing better in polls that include real-live pollsters (instead of robocalls) and that include cell-phone-only households.
• Today’s scathinger-than-scathing Romney rants come to you courtesy of Nicholas Kristof and Lawrence O’Donnell…
• …while Jon Stewart tears yet another righteous hole in the blatantly hypocritical Faux News partisans.
• As for me, for now, I’ll just say Romney’s appearance on Univision should have been accompanied by one of that channel’s biggest personalities. I speak, of course, of “El Chacal de la Trompeta,” the masked trumpeter from the Gong Show-like talent segment of Sabado Gigante.

watch el chacal de la trompeta, via youtube

• The first Boeing 747, the plane that saved both its maker and the state’s economy from complete ruin, sits out in the outside elements, desperately needing restoration.
• One possible cause of the “West Seattle hum”: fish mating calls in the Stillaguamish.
• Hunger in Washington increased more during the recession than it did in most every other state.
• How’s private liquor sales turning out? Higher prices, smaller selections, more “moms” buying the hard stuff.
• Teamsters may strike against a wholesaler of organic produce.
• Washington’s most ethnically diverse place: Tukwila.
• Eric Scigliano claims local leaders push for “trophy rail” projects, even when plain ol’ buses would be more cost effective.
• Appropriately enough for what was founded as a railroad town, a “crazy person” and self-promoter named George Francis Train has a big role in Tacoma’s history.
• Professional right-wing initiative maestro Tim Eyman might have broken the rules by moving money around between two of his concurrent campaigns.
• Rachel Maddow believes Mitt Romney’s currently slim chances could be doomed by a far-right third-party candidate, who’s on the ballot only in Virginia.
• A 71-year-old man asked Romney about Social Security. Romney’s security squad forced him to the ground. Romney joked about hoping the man had taken his blood pressure meds.
• Laurence Lewis at Daily Kos warns that as the Republican base gets ever smaller and more X-treme, they’ll get ever more ugly and desperate:

Their last and only hope is that they can buy a last election or two, and encode into law, and legislate from the bench into the Constitution, an end to democracy itself.

• King Crimson legend (and a man sometimes billed as the “smartest person in music”) Robert Fripp says he’s retiring from the music biz.

via upworthy.com

• In this deck of cards, they’re all “jokers.” Presenting 52 Shades of Greed, a playing-card deck (dis)honoring some of the financial debacle’s greatest villains.
• Amazon’s new e-book hardware shtick: new readers and Android tablets. Amazon’s new e-book content shtick: fiction serials, just like Dickens used to make (well, sort-of).
• Jon Talton sees the Chicago company calling itself Boeing as engaging in a labor-relations “race to the bottom.” And as acting very one-percenty in the process.
• You may have heard about the mysterious, off-and-on, West Seattle Hum. Now at this link, you can hear the hum itself.
• The Seattle Channel and Norm Gregory remember the days when electric streetcars crossed Seattle.
• A study claims up to 30 percent of America’s total health-care spending is wasted, between unnecessary procedures and cumbersome bureaucracy.
• Here’s precisely how Bill Clinton’s Wednesday speech differed from the (shorter) draft approved by the Democratic Convention brass. And here’s how Clinton used specific rhetorical strategies to drive home his messages.
• Here are the Thursday DNC moments by the Foo Fighters, a fictional Gabrielle, a real Gabrielle, Kerry, the Veep, and the Prez himself.
• HuffPost blogger Nomiki Konst believes this might be the last election of the TV era, the last Presidential cycle to be dominated by campaign commercials—and the megabucks fundraising machines needed to pay for them.

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• Enjoy some understated, occasionally creepy photos by Ms. Rinko Kawauchi.
• Get ready for cool public art coming to a civic infrastructure project near you.
• Metro’s Ride Free Area is still set to end later this month, with no replacement service finalized. The transition’s probably gonna be rough.
• Contract talks between Boeing and the engineers’ union are going un-smoothly.
• There will be a 24-hour diner on Capitol Hill next spring, on 10th Ave. where the gay bathhouse Basic Plumbing used to be.
• The Stranger asked local artists to fantasize how they’d remake the waterfront. Their various suggestions, together or alone, are infinitely cooler than the official plans.
• Catholic bishops claim the existence of gay marriage would victimize them. Really?
• How does a young person get into a journalism career if she can’t afford to take a long-term, unpaid internship? She hopes for an inheritance.
• The owners of the New Orleans Times-Picayune won’t sell the paper, and they won’t back off their decision to cut it back to three days a week.
• Folks love them some sad songs these days.
• The company behind some of those infamous Facebook games (and their annoying ads and plugs) is fiscally stumbling.
• Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect says the Democrats recognize people’s “interdependence,” instead of the GOP’s Ayn Randian “noble selfishness.”
• Here’s the Bill Clinton barnburner speech. And here are the local-interest convention speeches by Patty Murray and ex-Costco boss Jim Sinegal.