The Public Safety Building block will remain a hole in the ground for now; various year-end thoughts about the city, state, and nation; should/could public transit be free?

Protesting the Big A’s ties to ICE; the homeless crisis sparks violent incidents; a Yakama tribal leader’s not allowed at the US Supreme Court; will HQ2 end the local housing mega-boom?

Wannabe Seattle NHL team owners show off their planned practice rink complex; ‘Lid I-5’ folks show show off their proposals to ‘reclaim’ downtown lands; Susan Hutchison shows she’s a dittohead.

Ballard’s beautiful, doomed railway bridge; more Amazon pay-raise fallout; county to change deadly-force inquests; are flying cars on the way at last?

Russell Wilson gets US sports’ highest honor; local theater company tackles ableism; the Storm gets back to the WNBA finals; is it Seattle’s best or worst of times (or both)?

Court bans Canada pipeline plan over orcas; teachers’ strike closer; will voters decide Safeco Field cash?; dreams of a post-corporate Bumbershoot.

We’ve again got the most noxious air in the world; King County settles teen solitary-confinement lawsuit; Seattle’s mega-growth may finally be slowing; did Metro order buses that can’t go up our steep hills?

The Showbox is saved! (for now, pending possible litigation); more Sea-Tac hijack fallout; Carmen Best confirmed as police chief; an update on my next book.

Virtual reality’s next wowie/scary advance; a local arts mag’s new chapter; why the state Supreme Court backs second chances; could coal exports really be eco-friendly?

The temperature cooled significantly. The outdoor light looked like a movie “day for night” shot. And people glimpsed the realms beyond our own world. Now it’s back to the dog daze o’ summer, when MISCmedia MAIL mentions a call for a “centrist” political movement (as if we don’t already have one); a national media article claiming some Seattleites like to live in their cars (?); prison time for a local Ponzi-schemer; and a big trans convention coming to town.

Apparently very few Seattle voters have sent in their primary-election ballots. If any of you are among those, get to it, darn it! We also mention an attempt to trash the Northwest’s public-power heritage; the ever-hotter Eastside state-senate race; the vanishing sword ferns; and “Why I Don’t Hate Seafair” part XXVII.

Do you really have to be told not to drill into a new iPhone? Other topics this day include the wrong place to paint a mural with breasts; the SPD’s CIA-derived software tool for tracking your social-media posts; the “most Republican block in Seattle”; a potential future where Seattle survives while the rest of the nation goes dystopian; and the creepy threat to local goats.

Greenwood has been through disasters, natural and other, and will survive this one. We also mention what is and isn’t still alive in the Legislature; more LGBTQ folk gathering in smaller cities; Jeff Bezos’s vision of a future post-industrial planet; a beloved plant store’s potential end; and another loss to the NW music world.

• I’ll have my own comments about the big Sub Pop anniversary shindig in a bit. But here’s Charles Peterson’s definitive pic of the event.
• The next local funky institution to fall victim to overdevelopment: the venerable downtown music club Noc Noc.
• We already told you of the development scheme that would erase Wallingford’s beloved Chinese restaurant and dive bar Moon Temple. Now it turns out CVS, a pharmacy chain with little presence in this region heretofore, is anchoring the project. A petition has been started.
• One of those Forbes.com “contributors” describes today’s Pearl Jam as a “mature lifestyle business.”
• How do artists make it fiscally in today’s Seattle? With great difficulty.
• The Pike Place Market’s “gum wall” is bigger than it’s supposed to be.
• At Microsoft today, “radical” reorganizations are almost as frequent as they used to be at Apple. (By the way, here’s what Jean-Louis Gassée, who led Apple during some of that firm’s reorgs, had to say last year about MS’s callous way of picking people to fire.)
• UW students are planting anti-human-trafficking messages with feminine napkins. The story doesn’t say how the students plan to get the products to the intended recipients.
• Alaska Airlines doesn’t want the City of SeaTac to impose “living wage” requirements on airport-based workers.
• Still need a tourist destination for the rest of this summer? Check out Pocatello ID’s “Museum of Clean.”
• Some extremist nutjob tried to pass off footage of the 2011 Vancouver Canucks fan riot as if it were Miamians protesting the Zimmerman verdict, instead of depicting the peaceful, anti-violence protests here and elsewhere.
• Mark Sumner at Daily Kos ponders whether humankind’s strive toward a greater future could just putter out.
• Bob Moser at The American Prospect sees the south turning solidly progressive, but perhaps not for another decade.
• Some YouTuber has edited all of Terry Gilliam’s animations from Monty Python’s Flying Circus together into four complilations.

via theatlantic.com

• The Atlantic has unearthed a 1999 Microsoft ad, touting the e-book future that was supposed to be jump started by the soon-to-be-released Microsoft Reader software package. It’s taken a bit longer than that for events in this “Future of Reading” timeline to come about. But one thing has happened already: the luddites who’ve long dominated the book community are loudly touting the benefits of “Real Books From Real Trees for Real People.”
• Once again, I insist that Windows 8 is not the cause of the PC sales slump. Rather, it’s the fact that everybody’s agog about phones and tablets instead. And the fact that so much PC functionality these days is based on online and “cloud”-based activity, so home users feel no need to buy new hardware.
• Traffic on Wash. state roadways is at a 10-year low. Yet Republicans keep pushing a cars-only transportation budget.
• Meanwhile, Knute Berger remembers the people who fought the R.H. Thompson Expressway, a freeway which would have eradicated the Central Area and ruined the Arboretum.
• David Schoenfeld at ESPN.com says it’s time to sacrifice M’s manager Eric Wedge.
• There’s a public school tucked away in Seattle’s residential north end. In recent years, the Indian Heritage School program was housed there. More recently, the school district’s talked about replacing the buildings on the site. That would mean destroying murals depicting local indigenous heroes. Activists have fought to keep the murals. They may succeed.
• A cold-calling “charity” campaign, which recently phone-bombed Seattle households, may be a pure scam with little or no proceeds going to its stated cause.
• Collector speculation pricing in music has affected the price of new vinyl editions.
• “Mothers Now Top Breadwinners in 4 of 10 U.S. Homes.”
• Today in what you never hear about in the right-wing media, the Bush-era IRS gleefully persecuted liberal groups.
• The Russian-owned news/opinion channel RT has hired Larry King.
• Facebook vows to crack down on user-posted rape “jokes.”
• Philip G. Ryken at the Gospel Coalition site has a snarky list of “How to Discourage Artists in the Church.” Some of its bullet points also apply to discouraging creative work in the larger world, such as “Treat the arts as a window dressing for the truth rather than a window into reality.”
• PolitiFact rates at least half the things Republicans say as “false,” and employs exaggeration tricks to find at least some Democrats lying.
• Tired of folks my age griping about how things used to be? Make up your own “meme” slogan for the face of “Old Economy Steven”!

quickmeme.com