Dry your smog-affected eyes long enough to read a Friday MISCmedia MAIL containing info about the nasty air and the big fires that caused it; what will or won’t be at the Hanford national historic park; more primary-election results; and Boeing test pilots’ elaborate stunt.

Memorial Day weekend came close to home, as we remember two people who gave their lives defending America’s highest values—here in the Northwest, at the weekend’s start. Tuesday’s MISCmedia MAIL also has words on B.C.’s new (and much less oil-industry-friendly) government; another dead whale washed ashore; and an “aurora” in Seattle that’s not an old U.S. highway.

In Tuesday’s e-missive: A new low in fashion silliness; a local landmark razed two years after its closure; a GOP state senator who wants to force the city and county to divorce; more hipster “Native inspired” culture-theft; and fake “No Parking” signs.

On the anniversaries of its birth and death, we recall the Kingdome, that building of the future that’s now long passed. Other topics include Seattle standing tall against DC’s “sanctuary city” threats; Olympia Democrats’ budget plan; the differences between Seattle’s and Vancouver’s real-estate booms; and fun with out-of-context stage dialogue.

Should we form an indie nation of western states? Join up with Canada? Do you know how darn-near impossible it’d be? In more real-world coverage, we view a settlement in the coal-train suit; EMP becoming “MoPOP” (no relation to KEXP’s show “WoPop”); King County’s aging homeowner population; and a wood-fueled jet plane!

Café Racer, a longtime friend of MISCmedia and a pivotal aspect of multiple local communities, needs help to survive right now. The rest of our work this day concerns the centennial of the Northwest’s bloodiest worker-rights event; the overheated Vancouver real-estate market’s crash; the usual scads of weekend stuff-2-do; and a non-religious college finally sheds its “Missionaries” team name.

We at #MISCmediaMAIL believe the Northwest autumn isn’t to be endured or survived but savored. We additionally sort out alleged conservative local-media bias; changes at SIFF; not-really-recyclable bags; ethnic emoticons; and a candle that supposedly smells like a “new Mac.”

Before the weekend is done, our splendiferous “LOSER” book reissue party (Sunday evening at Vermillion, 11th between Pike and Pine) will occur. But before then you can read about a highly deserving arts-award winner; the case against the “youth jail”; the still-deepening morass that is the municipal homelessness response; the World Trade Organization (remember them?) siding with Boeing; and an idea for a vastly scaled-down walkway aside I-5.

Drone-car proponents want those to eventually be the only vehicles allowed on I-5 from here to the border. (There aren’t enough of the things in existence now to even fill one lane of it, but who’s counting?) More practical topics this day include the predicted “secure scheduling” victory; lessons (un)learned from the last opiate crisis; an upscale bicycle “clubhouse” for the ex-Bauhaus corner; a defense of “transitional” housing; and childhood memories of America’s last logging camp.

What to do about homelessness? I know, let’s hire a high-priced consultant who’ll ignore encampments, addictions, and mental illness issues, and who’ll just call for lots of subsidies to private developers! Other topics today include the world’s largest ice cube (that doesn’t star in any Friday movies), how one South Lake Union legacy business survives; a odd-couple marriage in the art world; and very little about the 9/11 anniversary.

In the major “open seat” this primary election, Pramila Jayapal looks promising for Jim McDermott’s spot in Congress; Jay Inslee will have to do better in the general; and Seattle’s housing levy wins big. And as for other stuff: Starbucks straws can be dangerous; so can McNeil Island drinking water; the City Council agrees to amend HALA; people who left the Ms game early missed a lot.

On Canada Day, our favorite adjacent nation’s been thru some hard times but will persevere. Plus: The remaining ruins of the Longacres horse track; Montlake could lose its only (close enough to a) supermarket; a court orders Wash. cities to create bike-safe streets; Boeing hints of more local employment; and robots n’ drones down on the farm.

Would you believe, this is the thirtieth MISCmedia In/Out List? Well, it is.

As we prepare to begin the pearl-anniversary year of this adventure in punditry, we present yet another edition of the most trusted (and only accurate) list of its kind in this and all other known media.

As always, this list compiles what will become sizzling and soggy in the coming year, not necessarily what’s sizzling and soggy now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some Sears stock to sell you.

fastcoexist.com

• The Fast Company folks seem to love Northgate’s Thornton Creek mixed use megaproject.
• A Seattle architect has re-devoted his career toward aiding the homeless and the recently homeless.
• One-fourth of Amazon’s Kindle ebook sales in 2012 were for books by indie and self-publishers.
• Amazon’s warehouses, sometimes infamous for pushing workers hard, are getting robotized.
• Meanwhile, some guy at the Atlantic’s biz-news site Quartz claims that 3D printing and robotized manufacturing, and the one-of-a-kind manufacturing they can enable, could eventually mean “the end of Walmart and mass-market retail as you know it.”
• Students at Eastside Catholic High School will keep protesting the firing of a beloved, now gay-married, vice principal.
• Seattle author David Shields is acting in a movie directed by James Franco.
• City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, and the Stranger writers who relentlessly pushed her candidacy, were named to the Nation‘s “2013 Progressive Honor Roll.”
• The gang down at Three Imaginary Girls has a roundup of their favorite (mostly) local music of ’13.
• Ani DiFranco scheduled a women’s songwriting retreat at a former slave plantation. (The place is now a museum, offering a highly sanitized account of America’s slave-owning heritage.) Some Af-Am women protested online. A smart person would have used this hubbub as a positive “teaching moment.” DiFranco and her associates essentially failed at that.
• Where They Are Now Dept.: NY punk and underground-film bad girl Lydia Lunch now teaches women’s yoga and “empowerment” workshops in Calif.
• Right-wing front groups, pretending to be “journalists,” have tried to obstruct investigations into right-wing financial misdealings in Wisconsin.
• Prostitution is fully legal in Canada (including brothel-keeping and solicitation), sez their Supreme Court. It could be the start of a new (or upgraded) tourism shtick. But I’d like it to mean more respect and personal safety for sex workers, there and here.

• There’s now a soccer federation for “Cascadia” (i.e., B.C./Wash./Ore.). And it’s gotten provisional recognition from a global confederation of soccer interests representing other not-really-nations (Basque country, Kurdistan, etc.).
• Cracked.com tells you some reasons “why you can’t believe anything you read online.” One reason: A lot of click-whoring sites, including click-whoring “news” sites, try to make you feel angry and outraged at something, then to share your outrage via social-media links. (Maybe that’s why this site hasn’t taken off like Drudge or Kos. I’m not ordering you to go ballistic X times a day.)
• A week or two back, we remarked how Saks department stores had become, for a time, owned by an Alabama firm. No more. Saks will now be part of the Hudson’s Bay Co. (aka “The Bay”), the Canadian retail giant whose fur-trading heritage helped shape the initial settlement of this part of the world.
• Al-Jazeera America, the cable news channel replacing the low-rated Current TV, will have a Seattle news bureau. Allen Schauffler, who just quit KING after more than two decades, will run the outpost.
• Today’s local history lesson, brought to you by the Seattle Star: The time when the feds tried to arrest local Black Panthers because of a supposedly stolen typewriter.
• Dumb Criminal Report #1: When you’re wanted by the cops, it’s unwise to shoplift beef jerky.
• Dumb Criminal Report #2: Don’t set fire to the Aurora Sears. We love that store. It’s possibly the only truly beautiful suburban big-box store ever built around here.
• Are ebook sales peaking?
• Alex Seitz-Wald at Salon claims Amazon personifies “everything wrong with our new economy.” Apple, Walmart, Nike: You can rest easy now; you’re no longer the company everyone most dearly loves to hate.
• Yes, “existential depression in gifted children” is a real thing. Trust me on this.
• “Naked Juice” no longer claims to be “all natural,” and also is owned by Pepsi.
• Fox tries to create a clone of Adult Swim, only even cruder and dumber. The results are now here, and they’re immensely dreadful.
• The vinyl music comeback may be here to stay. Yeah, but does anybody actually, you know, play any of those records?
• David Byrne, meanwhile, details six modern business models for the modern musical artist.
• Unfortunately, there are still too many awful big-budget action movies. And, unfortunately, there are still economic incentives for the studios to make more.