Most of you know about the horrors inflicted on May 30, 2012.

About the crazed disgruntled customer who strode into Café Racer and shot five people, four of them fatally.

Who then got on a bus to downtown, where he killed a woman to steal her car.

Who then drove to West Seattle, where he killed himself as police closed in on him.

For a lot of people around the Seattle music, art, and nightlife scenes, it was a day of shock and devastation.

For me, it was just the start of the worst two weeks of my life.

•

While all the mourning was going on around me, I had a little birthday, gave one of my semiannual Costco Vanishing Seattle book signings, and visited the Georgetown Carnival. Racer owner Kurt Geissel was at the latter, essentially showing concerned friends that he was surviving.

It was there that I got the cell call from my brother.

My mother had gone into the hospital, for what would be the last time.

Two buses and two hours later, I was in Everett.

She had stayed un-sedated long enough for me to arrive and pay my respects, along with seven or eight of her closest friends.

An hour after that, she agreed to take the morphine.

She passed on 54 hours later.

She had always been there for me.

Now I was truly on my own.

It was, and continues to be, a struggle.

Only now am I beginning to get something of a life back together, thanks to the help of many of the same people who kept one another together after the Racer tragedy.

wu ming, via daily kos

• Let’s put credit where credit is due, to the right-wing initiative maestro who hates all non-private-car transportation, but whose schemes leave even that mode vastly underfunded in this nation’s-most-regressive-tax-system state.
• Today in clothing named after people famous for not wearing any, a fashion chain called “Bettie Page” is opening its first local branch on Capitol Hill.
• A Walla Walla high-school principal is convinced that severe discipline against problem students only makes things worse. By taking more pro-active approaches, suspensions at his school have plummeted.
• One of the lesser publicized YouTube memes involves video gamers posting clips of their gameplay prowess. Now, Nintendo is claiming copyright on all these clips.
• A guy in Ballard’s got a Kickstarter to fund a small but free performance space for theatrical and musical performers.
• There are supposedly more high tech jobs available in the Puget Sound country than there are people to fill them. Now if we could only get jobs for a couple of non-coders….
• Have Catholic bishops quietly taken control of all health care decision making in Wash. state?
• David J. Ley at Psychology Today claims that sexual violence has gone down wherever “societies have increased their access to porn.”
• The just-ended TV season has been, viewership-wise, “one of the worst years ever in the history of network TV.”
• Meanwhile, brick-n’-mortar bookstores saw a huge jump in foot traffic this past quarter.
• Some 56 more-or-less “adult” comix titles have been excised from Apple’s App Store. Again.
• Will someone just kill the thin sheet calling itself the Village Voice already (or at least turn it into a bohemian-radical nostalgia rag)?
• A Simpsons street opens later this year at the Universal Orlando theme park. It’ll be the Violentest Place on Earth! (Sorry, no Itchy and Scratchy Money accepted.)

via cartoonbrew.com

• Maureen Johnson asks for an end to stereotypical “For Women” book covers. Huff Post readers have added Photoshopped gender-bender cover versions for famous novels.
• Is Wash. state really the least-cussing, cleanest-speaking place in the nation? And who the stinkin’ heck cares?
• Cheers to the 400-ish people who showed up and spoke out in favor of preserving transit in King County. For some reason I thought we should have been past this need by now.
• Rebecca Mead at the New Yorker wrote a bizarre essay sorta based on Amanda Knox’s memoir. Matt Briggs gives it a cut-up pastiche alteration, only slightly less comprehensible than the original. (As for me, my news diet is still like the old Gulf gasoline brand—No-Nox.)
• The leading producer of Cinemax’s “skinemax” softcore shows was denied a mortgage on “moral reasons.” By one of the top housing-bubble and foreclosure-mania perpetrators. Yeah, like they know anything about morals.…
• As the female/male ratio in China continues to decline, Chinese women factory workers are gaining more workplace clout.
• In the grand tradition of the fake postmodernist essay generator, there are now “SEO text generators” that automatically create awful self-help and how-to Web pages, crafted to appear high on Google’s search results. Only the perpetrators of these textbots are completely serious about it. Which makes their output even funnier.
• Item: Paul Allen just sold a 1953 abstract painting by Barnett Newman for $43.8 million. Comment: Did the buyers think they were getting the original negative to the film The Thin Blue Line?

wikipedia via king5.com

factmag.com

• Somebody thought it would be cool to try to laser-etch a phonograph record onto wood. The result sounds a bit like the early, dial-up-connection versions of RealAudio.
• Item: Indoor pot growing uses lotsa electricity. Comment: You mean stoners aren’t the purest-O-the-pure eco-saints? Next thing, you’ll be saying electric cars and wood stoves aren’t pure-green either.
• Oh, Those Kids Today! #1: Monica Guzman insists today’s under-30 folks aren’t entitlement-obsessed narcissists, but rather are “people waking up to their own power and not being willing to compromise it.”
• Oh, Those Kids Today! #2: Young adults are even driving less than prior generations. How un-American can ya get?
• The Legislature’s special session could see a Dem-controlled State Senate again. Maybe.
• Seattle teachers who refused to administer standardized tests have achieved a partial victory.
• Just last week, we bemoaned the idiotic prose and strained “corporate hip” attitude of KOMO’s “young skewing” local website Seattle Pulp. Now the whole site’s dead, without even leaving its old posts alive.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 126): No. But we should have the final, final answer (for this year at least) on Wednesday. Don’t get your hopes back up. But hold on to the love.
• Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Plunder thought it would just be keen n’ dandy to play tracks by Sonics-purist and Seattle’s-honor-defender Macklemore in their arena. Nope, no way, uh-uh, no siree bub.
• Might Microsoft buy Barnes & Noble’s Nook ebook hardware operation just to kill it?
• Amazon’s fledgling in-house book publishing operations might expand to include “literary fiction,” whatever the heck that means anymore.
• Disappeared local institution we neglected to mention earlier: the Green Lake Baskin-Robbins.
• Weird crime story of the week: “Woman who killed ex with insecticide-laced Jågermeister pleads guilty.”
• It’s illegal but it happens anyway: denying employment to people for the sin of being in debt due to being unemployed.
• Katy Evans at the Tacoma group blog Post Defiance notes how indie live music has become a more complicated, bureaucratic, and problematic biz, especially in towns like hers in the shadow of bigger towns.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s own reporters have to pay for website subscriptions to their own work. Except they can “opt out” of it if they insist.
• You remember how the New Orleans Times-Picayune went to only three print issues a week? No more. They’re now putting out newsstand-only editions on the four non-home-delivery days, just like the Detroit papers are.
• Talking into computers and expecting them to understand you has always been, and apparently will continue to be, little more than a screenwriters’ conceit.
• Anthony Galluzzo at Salon wants you to stop the hipster-bashing already. He says it’s old, tired, and becoming classist.
• Jim Tews, who describes himself as “a decent white male comic,” insists that most white guys performing standup are not sexist boors.
• No, Rolling Stone readers, Nirvana is not the fifth worst band of the ’90s. That would actually be Sugar Ray.

via theverge.com

This did not have to happen.

In a more epathetic world it would not happen.

In a world that was less overrun by sociopaths and their media/political enablers, it would not happen.

via seattle bike blog

• Enterprising citizens calling themselves “Reasonably Polite Seattleites” took it upon themselves to install unauthorized “bicycle lane protectors” (reflective plastic pylons) along Cherry Street uphill from downtown. The city vows to remove them.
• Seattle police chief John Diaz will retire, allowing Mike McGinn (or perhaps a successor mayor next year) to put in another figurehead for uncontrolled street-cop brutality.
• In a Belltown where anything non-one-percenty is increasingly out of place (more about that in a day or so), Roq La Rue has been kicked out of its longtime space in the old Film Row RKO distribution offices. Fortunately, Seattle’s premier “pop surrealist” art gallery has found new quarters in Pioneer Square, effective some time this summer.
• Meanwhile, a Crosscut contributor named Andy Fife asks whether there is a “Seattle arts aesthetic.” Actually, there are several. There’s the “world class or bust” desperate slickness of most of SAM’s big permanent displays. There’s the “rich ex-hippie” mellow slickness of Chihuly and company. There’s the “modern monumentalist” big stuff seen at the G. Gibson and William Traver galleries. There are the house styles of Cornish and Gage and their recent alums. And there’s the “let’s put on a show” urban folk/pop styling of most of my personal faves.
• New Orleans city bosses apparently want to simultaneously (1) shut down music venues, and (2) promote their city as a live-music tourist destination.
• NBCNews.com blogger Wilson Rothman claims Apple’s iTunes is “out of date and out of touch.” Specifically, Rothman dislikes the whole idea of having to pay for song recordings. He seems to prefer the Spotify model, in which artists make fractions of fractions of pennies. That’s supposed to be the modern way?
• Here’s one author who hates the new economics of the book biz—Scott Turow, one of the few writers who’d thrived under the old system.
• Joshua Macht at the Atlantic claims Time magazine has perhaps three years to live.
• Hacked computer data shows the global one-percenters are hoarding trillions in secret overseas tax-haven accounts. Leaders of nations other than ours claim to be aghast.
• The newspaper industry has started measuring revenue from online paywalls and ancillary products/services. The resulting figures show papers are now losing a little less money than previously thought.
• The death last week of Spanish exploitation-film giant Jess Franco has been followed by the loss of another of that country’s great directors of sex and/or violence, Bigas Luna.
• Annette Funicello, 1943-2013: The only original Mickey Mouse Club cast member to have a real adult showbiz career was the wholesome sex symbol in the Beach Party movies, and a pop singer of unusual clarity and panache. During her cameo in the Monkees’ film Head, she proved not afraid to parody (without breaking) her squeaky-clean image. She remained gracious and classy, even during her long slow illness.
• We’ve also lost Les Blank, who directed 42 documentaries of varying lengths and topics (all shot on film). He’s probably best known for Burden of Dreams, the “making-of” film about Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. Many critics considered Blank’s behind-the-scenes story to be more compelling than Herzog’s feature.
• And another goodbye, this one to Hilly Krystal, influential owner of NYC punk club CBGB. While he opened it as a hippie spot dedicated to “country, blue grass, and blues,” he quickly adjusted to welcome the burgeoning Bowery underground scene. The result was what the New Yorker called “the ultimate garage—the place garage bands everywhere want to play.” (Update: This hereby-linked story is from 2007. Krystal’s still worth remembering nowadays, though.)
• Femen and associated groups held an “international topless jihad day” across European capitals, though the slogans painted upon themselves seemed to almost all be in English.
• Ending the drug war was never one of Obama’s top priorities. I suspect it’s because the whole bohemian-relaxation vibe clashed with the striving-for-progress zeitgeist that informed Obama’s worldview. But, as with gay marriage, he may be soon forced to act by a groundswell of popular opinion.
• The Nielsen ratings now claim there are 5 million “zero television” households in the U.S., up from a mere 2 million in ’07. (The “kill your television” “radicals” will, naturally, completely ignore this information.)
• Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s minions threaten to pull the Fox broadcast network off of over-the-air stations (including affiliates tied up in long-term contracts) and go cable-only, unless the courts outlaw a service to stream local over-the-air stations to local viewers via Internet connections.

• When bad covers happen to good novels….
• The (beautiful) wooden Elvis statue outside Mama’s Mexican Kitchen was stolen. We who all adore it need it back.
• Every now and then, civic boosters talk about bringing the Olympic Games to Seattle. Such efforts have traditionally been quashed quickly by locals worried about traffic and local-government subsidies. But this time (for the 2024 Summer Games), could the boosters have the upper hand over the NIMBYs?
• City Councilmember Richard Conlin says housing for poor people should be kept in the south end, away from all the nice-upscale people.
• (Meanwhile, it’s good to remember that America’s urban ghettos were the historic result of specific policy/planning decisions. Do an online search for “redlining” and “blockbusting” to learn more.)
• “Tiny houses” are all the rage in certain circles. But wanting to plop one down inside a city, well that’s news.
• At least one ESPN pundit predicts the Seattle Mariners will be “this year’s surprise team.” In recent years, as you know, the M’s have provided too many of the wrong kind of surprises.
• Wash. state is Number One! (In making higher education unaffordable, that is.)
• Seattle teachers’ protest against standardized testing has reached the eyes and ears of the New Yorker, which notes that this particular test is not used so much to evaluate students as it is to evaluate the teachers themselves.
• The Catholic Northwest Progress, the regional archdiocese newspaper, is the latest grave in the print-media cemetery. The paper’s incessantly anti-gay-marriage stance probably didn’t help.
• The years-in-the-promising Bell Street “boulevard park” project is finally starting construction. When it’s done, Bell will have one lane of traffic and one lane of parallel parking; the rest of the right-of-way will be extended sidewalks and planters.
• The thing about the Vancouver BC company’s inadvertently see-thru yoga slacks: The women who attend these classes and wear these clothes are often trying to show off their figures, not to men but to other women, not to attract desire but admiration/envy. But that doesn’t work if the “exposure” is too blatant.
• In the ten years since the Iraq War, the buildup to same, and the almost unquestioned media cheerleading for same, have we learned anything (except to distrust the media)?
• In the Internet era, news readers have umpteen sources for big national/global stories, but far fewer people reporting local events or investigating local dirt.
• Montana may make roadkill legal to eat: On tonight’s dessert menu, chocolate moose.
• After testing the waters in commercial book genres (romance, mystery, etc.), Amazon’s getting into the “literary” book racket.
• While the “people of the book” were making their usual noisy gripes that everything was going to hell, independent bookstores have staged a quiet comeback.
• Speaking of naysaying the naysayers, Bono would like you to know that many worldwide trends (poverty, AIDS, etc.) are actually on a positive swing these days.
• Is Jay Leno finally being pushed into retirement? For real this time?
• Urban-planning pundit Richard Florida made big bucks from instructing cities how to pursue “the creative class.” Now he says (sort of) that that doesn’t work.
• Following Chris Ware’s acclaimed Building Stories, local art-book press Marquand Books is putting out another “box set” graphic novel, containing objects of different sizes and shapes telling one meta-narrative. It’s The Magician, by onetime Dallas arts promoter Chris Byrne. It’s an ultra-limited-edition product. Its artistic ambitions, if anything, are greater than those of Ware’s work.

• 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 silver platters and queenanneview.com

• First went Borders; then Swerve at First and Pine; then Easy Street Records on Mercer and Queen Anne Avenue. Now, the Silver Platters music superstore in the east lower Queen Anne district is going away. This leaves the shrunken CD selection at Barnes & Noble as the last music store in greater downtown. Silver Platters will move in June to 2930 1st Ave. S., across from Sears and near the future basketball arena.
• It’s the end of another no-nonsense neighborhood eatery, Claire’s Pantry in Lake City.
• Erica Barnett at Publicola believes Mercer Islanders don’t deserve endless privilege, such as the privilege of not paying future I-90 tolls.
• Downtown merchants believe adding a kiddie play area to Westlake Park will make the retail core seem friendlier to (white upscale) families.
• Dikla Tuchman at local site Jew-Ish offers a loving tribute to the pioneer comics artist Will Eisner, best known as the creator of The Spirit (he wasn’t responsible for the lousy movie version).
• MOHAI has many boxes of Sonics memorabilia, including championship banners, just waiting to be transferred to a new Seattle NBA team.
• There are huge cost overruns and design flaws on the new 520 bridge’s pontoons. Yes, I included that because I love to say the word “pontoons.”
• There’s a newly revised waterfront park scheme. It’s better than the one originally devised by the hi-priced NYC architects. But to me it’s still too devoted to world-classness, not enough to being useful to people who live here.
• Matt Hale, beaten a year ago by still-unidentified thugs after his shift as a Belltown condo doorman, is “still struggling.”
• Hanford nuke-waste leaks could be as high as 1,000 gallons a year.
• Could the making of new pinball game machines finally be on the rise?
• Lost among all the gripes about host Seth McFarlane’s rude unfunniness, there was another controversy at the Oscars (née the Academy Awards, a name totally unuttered at this last ceremony). Rhythm & Hues, which produced the computer animation seen in the multi-award-winning Life of Pi, is bankrupt and laid off  over 200 staffers. It couldn’t compete against subsidized overseas studios. When Pi visual-effects director Bill Westenhofer gave his acceptance speech he tried to mention this, but his mic was promptly cut off when he did.
• In less prestigious protest campaigns, some people are really upset that McDonald’s has phased out Chicken Selects, perhaps the only truly food-like thing on its regular menu.
• James Howard Kuntsler says the “era of the giant chain stores” is over. He thinks it will lead to a resurgence of mom n’ pop retail. I see it as more like the ultimate triumph of Internet “e-tail.”

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

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

chris pirillo via google plus

In sociology, the controversial and oft-disputed “broken windows theory” claims that crime in an urban neighborhood can go up or down depending on how the locals perceive the place as a “nice” (orderly, civil) place or a “scary” (anything-goes) place.

This post is about an entirely different “broken Windows” theory.

It’s the perception, in some of the tech and business press, that Microsoft Windows is “broken.”

They’re not talking about the software itself being broken (as in inoperable), but the business model behind it.

Especially in regards to “upgrade” sales of the new Windows 8 for multi-desktop businesses.

The naysayers say Windows 8 does so many things so differently than previous versions that there’s a steep “learning curve,” and that businesses may not want that sort of disruption in their day to day operations if they don’t have to take it.

Another alleged issue: Windows 8 is supposed to provide one seamless operating environment among PCs, tablets, and smartphones. Only the tablets and the smartphones still aren’t selling all that well, compared with Apple and Android products.

What’s worse, PCs themselves (almost all of which still come with Windows preloaded) themselves aren’t selling like they used to, and might not ever do so again.

You sure don’t need me to tell you how important MS has become to the Wash. state economy, and that no number of XBox 360 Live subscriptions can make up for the value of all the new and upgraded Windows installations out there.

Oh well. There’s always the Plan B strategy of suing Android phone makers.

priscilla long, via the american scholar

• Priscilla Long takes you on a geological tour of North America without leaving downtown Seattle, simply by exploring the marble and other stone claddings on our office buildings.
• John Koster, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Washington’s revamped First District, says he’d oppose abortions even in cases of “the rape thing.”
• An out-of-state right-wing “SuperPAC” is sinking millions into sleazy attack ads on behalf of Reagan Dunn’s campaign for state attorney general. The Politico site seems to approve.
• When I first heard about this issue, I said I understood. I told the guy I preferred Thelonius Monk myself. Then he told me he was really criticizing a “coal train.”
• When is a nude woman in public not cool? When she punches and strikes a chair at a (clothed) elderly woman in the same apartment building.
• Thankfully, Puyallup’s organized diaper theft ring has been caught.
• As the World’s Fair anniversary winds to a close, Jon Talton wonders whether Seattle can hold its own economically in a 2062 world that could be dominated by global “alpha cities.”
• A self-proclaimed conservative Christian from Tacoma pretended to be gay for a year. Insights on humanity and understanding ensued.
• Did all those hours upon hours of “parka boy” standups by cable TV news reporters help anyone understand Hurricane Sandy’s impact? Probably not.
• David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon’s Monday night shows, performed without studio audiences, may be the greatest non-election, non-hurricane TV events of the year.
• Yes, the polling companies are still under-sampling people who only have cell phones, not landlines. The probable result: a supposedly “close race” that may really be more Obama-leaning than it appears.
• Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson reminds you that Mitt Romney really is as awful and amoral as they say he is; while HuffPost’s Michelangelo Signorile’s dug up some video of Romney spewing the most hateful anti-gay bigotry. And Christina D’Angelo claims the GOP’s devolution into a home for virulent racists is like “lynching Lincoln.”
• New Yorker book critic Arthur Krystal attempts to claim the superiority of “literary fiction” above so-called “genre fiction.” As if highbrow weren’t really just another genre.
• Chris Wade at Slate wants you to learn to appreciate the Speed Racer movie.
• Disney, having already digested ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, and the Muppets, is now taking over LucasFilm and the Star Wars properties. Immediately, a new Star Wars feature film is being planned. What I want to see is a mashup concept involving all these “universes.” Bonus points if you write this as a story for a Lifetime TV movie (half-owned by Disney).