The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.

• King County Exec Dow Constantine was caught with an email revealing he’d had an affair with a co-worker. At a press conference, “No Drama Dow” (who has an unmarried live-in partner) quietly admitted the indiscretion.
• The city and county could announce they’re signing off on the Sodo arena plan as early as today.
• KOMO’s Ken Schram insists that the poor (and everybody else) should still get to buy things with cash.
• A community activist group says light rail has accelerated the gentrification of the Rainier Valley, making the mixed-race neighborhood a lot paler.
• Video footage helps a May Day protester escape prosecution.
• The wages of not supporting the iPhone: T-Mobile USA‘s laying off another 900 workers.
• First it was nuns. Now the right-wing Catholic bishops are harassing the Girl Scouts. (Make your own joke about how everybody knows they prefer boys.)
• ‘Future of News’ Dept.: A spokescritter for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad news app The Daily (no relation to the infinitely more distinguished UW Daily) insists the online newspaper is on the road to profitability.
• Even with health insurance, medical care is getting prohibitively expensive.
• America’s real first gay president? Buchanan.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks, “Why do conservatives hate freedom?”…
• …while “MinistryOfTruth” at Daily Kos makes brutal accusations toward your sterotypical teabag conservative:

I don’t think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn’t exactly like you.

• Here are some lovely pix of a Kansas City amusement arcade circa 1968. Not a single video monitor in sight.

sobadsogood.com

This is from Sunday’s “Color Run” downtown, a 5K benefitting Ronald McDonald House. Runners were splashed with “color dust” at points along the route. (Note: This is not at all to be confused with the 2005 teen novel The Rainbow Party, or with the false rumor that that novel depicted a real-life fad.)

• Forbes calls Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer the “worst CEO” of a major U.S. company.
• Is the time right again for huge, dense residential mega-projects? The Seattle Housing Authority thinks so. It wants to rebuild Yesler Terrace (a WWII-era low-income apartment site) with a whopping 3,000 privately developed “market rate” units plus office space. That would help subsidize at least as many low-income units as are there now. It would also create a huge new upscale neighborhood just uphill from the International District, and would sop up perhaps 20 percent of new housing construction activity in the whole city.
• Item: A Seattle restaurant’s basement was one huge pot growing operation. Comment: Once again, life imitates the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Guess what? The hedge fund tycoon who wants to own a Seattle basketball team might use the team and the arena deal as hedge fund opportunities!
• Tragic news: Tacoma’s selling two closed library buildings in low income neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ acquaintance Trimpin has another mechanical music/art installation. And it’s even more haunting than his previous works.
• Lit-blogger Nicole Cushing has a beautiful interview with a Seattle treasure, horror author and punk/goth scene vet Willum Pugmire.
• Dept. of Forgotten American History: Author/activist/songwriter Julia Ward Howe created Mother’s Day as an antiwar statement.
• Here’s a concise explanation of just why “business people are terrible at governing.”
• From Cleveland to Pittsburgh and even Detroit, the young and hip (but not rich) are flocking to the Rust Belt cities!
• There’s a new iPad-only online satire magazine called “Punch!”. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the legendary UK satire magazine Punch (published from 1841 to 1992!). Instead, its makers are inspired by the 1980s-1990s U.S. snark mag Spy.
• Publishers of e-books have determined that the best way to keep their authors’ names in the public eye is to have new stuff by them two or more times a year. This means established “name” authors are busier than ever churnin’ out the product.
• Do you, like these e-book authors, desperately need writing inspiration? Take random gibberish letters. Run them through a spell checker. Boom! Random words and phrases to trigger your imagination.

meowonline.org

• Music/performance-art goddess and ex-Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer explains the secret to her astounding success at raising a recording budget thru Kickstarter. It’s all about the long work of gathering and nurturing as many online supporters as you can:

Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that I curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on… all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY.… And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.

• After nearly a decade of study and planning, Seattle’s finally giving up on the idea of a city-owned broadband network. Pathetic.
• Time is running out for any hope of saving the historic streamlined ferry Kalakala. Estimated cost of a full restoration: $50 million.
• Ah, if only the Mariners still had some of the players they’d let slip away. If only….
• A Long Island, NY woman is accused of using her hot-dog truck as a cover for arranging “compensated dates” (to use a recent Japanese euphemism). No “sausage” or “buns” puns here, at least not today.
• A Utah woman claims to have found cocaine packed in a box of tampons. Just think of it as an extra measure of pain relief that also leaves you feeling fresh.
• Bill Maher says what everyone except Fox News viewers already knows—that many of the most fervent Obama haters are racist, with different degrees of denial.
• Meanwhile, a Washington Monthly writer believes the Presidential election will be decided by Hispanic voters (i.e., one of the groups the Rabid Right is most virulently bigoted against).
• There’s an anonymous novel out of Portland (originally self published by the author, who only calls himself “The Author”). It’s getting a lot of attention. It’s about a young man’s doomed relationship with “someone who considers Courtney Love to be her role model.” What makes it extra-special is it’s formatted like one of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” kids’ books. Only every choice “you” make leads to the same miserable ending. I also like the title: Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life.
• Not only are grad students getting buried in piles of student-loan debt, they might not even get into the careers for which they’re studying (cf. the rising number of Ph.Ds on food stamps).
• A marketing analyst calls 2012 “the year of inverse retro-futurism.” Whatever the heck that is.

art chantry-designed poster for coca (1991), available at gigposters.com

The Center on Contemporary Art (COCA) was Seattle’s premier venue for avant exhibitions and performances in the 1980s and 1990s.

Then COCA lost its last downtown space to development. Its visibility and funding slowed down.

In recent years COCA has existed in semi-exile, on the ground floor of the Elks lodge in Shilsole. (It’s also had a Belltown “gallery,” a glass display case outside a condo building on a little-walked stretch of Broad Street, and occasional temporary spaces elsewhere around town.)

But now COCA’s roaring back with a full-time space in what’s become a major art neighborhood, Georgetown. Specifically, it’s at the Seattle Design Center. (The huge showroom building for furnishings consultants and interior decorators has had its own troubles during the housing crash. It has a lot of spare square footage these days.)

The big opening party is Friday after next (5/18; also the 32nd anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens kablooey).

Let’s welcome COCA back into Seattle’s “outside the mainstream” mainstream.

udhcmh.tumblr.com

• The above vintage paperback cover comes from a blog located in a college town—Columbus OH, not Spokane WA. (Found via Pulp International.)
• The Seattle Police have an on-staff graffiti interpreter. And he says only 3 percent of Seattle’s graffiti has anything to do with street gangs.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna may have found his most potent nemesis—not election rival Jay Inslee but 90 women who are suing McKenna for participating (in the name of the people of Washington) in the right wing’s anti-Obamacare crusade.
• Scott North at the Everett Herald looks back to Wash. state’s own U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his role in making forest conservation a real thing.
• Amazon, continuing in its quest to become kings of all media, is starting its own movie production company. And it’s soliciting concepts for “TV style” web shows—sitcoms and kids’ shows, live-action and animated. And unlike some online “screenwriting contest” scam sites, they don’t keep the rights to works they don’t use.
• “He who controls the Spice controls the universe.”
• As the Seattle arena proposal moves forward quickly, ex-City Council member Richard McIver suggests putting it instead in the Rainier Valley, near the Mt. Baker light rail station and I-90. (It would also be near the former site of Sicks’ Stadium, home of minor league baseball for 30 years and Major League Baseball for oen year.)
• Meanwhile, a member of the ownership team that stole the Sonics has lost his chairman role at Chesapeake Energy, due to alleged conflicts of interest. Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy.
• From the verdant town of Corvallis (where I spent two formative years of my life) comes the tale of a bright young woman who became a hit with a sports-gambling blog, then became a top contributor to ESPN.com, and then allegedly used this fame to scam would-be business colleagues.
• Ashton Kutcher sure can get all high-horse righteous when he’s denouncing the sex industry. But perpetuating racist stereotypes in commercials—that’s something he apparently doesn’t mind at all.
• Some people don’t want to be Americans anymore. They’re one-percenters trying to flee tax evasion charges.
• Former Wall Street operative Alexis Goldstein describes the milieu of Big Finance as a place where people strive…

to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.…

Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.

last.fm

Pere Ubu founder, noise-rock legend, and great Clevelander David Thomas is, by his own admission, a middle class boy.

And in a recent interview he claims that…

…all adventurous art is done by middle-class people. Because middle-class people don’t care. Because middle-class people don’t care. “I’m going to do what I want, because I can do something else better and make more money than this.”

At the Collapse Board site (started by ex-Seattleite Everett True), blogger Wallace Wylie begs to disagree:

It surely does not need pointing out that almost every adventurous musical innovation of the 20th Century came from working-class origins. The blues, jazz, country, rock’n’roll, soul, reggae, disco, r&b, hip-hop, techno, house; the list goes on. It would take a mixture of ignorance and arrogance on a monumental scale to appropriate all of these innovations for the middle-classes.

You can probably think of your own exceptions, in music and other artistic fields as well.

Then the Scottish-born Wylie goes on to repeat the longtime meme that most American middle-class teens didn’t know about large swaths of American blues and R&B, until they heard them from British rockers:

…While British bands were playing Chuck Berry, embryonic American garage bands were cutting their chops on ‘Gloria’ by Them. In other words, rock music is a British creation that Americans subsequently copied. Bob Dylan named his fifth album Bringing It All Back Home in reference to the fact that British bands had shown Americans music from their own country that they didn’t know existed and now it was time for an American to take these influences back.

That familiar tale neglects the role American “hip” whites (including Cleveland’s own DJ legend Alan Freed) played in bringing R&B across the color line, leading to the commercial teenybopper variant Freed billed as “rock n’ roll.”

It neglects the white garage bands (such as Tacoma’s own Fabulous Wailers) who studiously covered and imitated their favorite R&B sides, especially during the pre-Beatles years.

Methinks Wylie has his own cultural blinders with which to deal.

may1stseattle.org

The whole Occupy movement is staging a nationwide spring “season premiere” Tuesday.

Mayor McGinn has personally warned the local protests just might turn violent, deliberately invoking memories of the WTO riots. (Yes, those really were 12 and a half years ago!) That’s an odd thing for a self styled progressive to do.

Local organizers, in contrast, are billing their events as a “Day of Solidarity, Wonderment, and Merrymaking.”

They’ve got a whole day of speakers, rappers, and musicians at Westlake Park, and a march to the Wells Fargo tower.

And they’re calling for folks to leave work and school, refrain from shopping and banking, to think of Tuesday as a one-day general strike.

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May Day has been principally a Euro-radical thing for so long, it’s hard to remember it started with the American labor movement, in its first courageous drives for basic workers’ rights (and the corporate/governmental violent reactions to same).

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Meanwhile, BBC economics commentator Paul Mason takes a gander at the new wave of protest-related visual art (a movement accelerated, but not started, by the Occupy protests). Mason believes this populist underground work could be the start of a new art movement, one that could render obsolete “contemporary art” as we know it (i.e., something made within a rarified bohemian elite for sale to “the multimillionaire-oriented art market”).

painting the needle for its big b-day party

Keith Seinfeld at KPLU recently asked, “Why does Seattle still care about the world’s fair?”

That’s an excellent question.

As international expos go, Seattle’s was relatively small.

And it took place a full half century ago.

Until Mad Men came along, that era was widely considered to have been a dullsville time, a time wtih nothing much worth remembering.

The “Space Age” predicted at the fair would seem would seem ridiculous just a few years later. It predicted domed cities and cheap nuclear power. It predicted computers in the home (in the form of fridge-sized consoles) and video conferencing (with a special “picturephone”), but it didn’t predict the Internet.

It sure didn’t predict the racial, sexual, musical, and social upheavals collectively known as “The Sixties.”

And a lot of the fair’s attractions were so utterly corny, you can wonder why they were taken seriously even then. Attractions such as the world’s largest fruitcake. Or the Bubbleator (essentially just a domed platform on a hydraulic lift). Or the adults-only risqué puppet show (by the future producers of H.R. Pufnstuf).

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Yet a lot of us do care about all that. And not just us old-timers either.

And not just for the physical structures the fair left behind (the Space Needle, the Science Center, etc.).

The fair was the single most important thing that happened in Seattle between World War II and the rise of Microsoft. (The launch of the Boeing 707 was the next most important.)

The fair revved up the whole Northwest tourism industry, just as jet aircraft and Interstate highways were getting more Americans to explore other parts of their nation. This once-remote corner of the country became a top destination.

The fair was a coming-out party for a new Seattle.

A Seattle dominated not by timber and fishing but by tech. Specifically, by aerospace.  Boeing had only a secondary role in equipping the U.S. space program, but its planes were already making Earth a seemingly smaller place.

The fair didn’t start the Seattle arts and performance scenes, but it gave them a new oomph.

Seattle Opera and the Seattle Repertory Theatre were immediately established in the fair’s wake.

ACT Theatre came soon after. Visual art here was already becoming famous, thanks to the “Northwest School” painters; the fair’s legacy led to increased local exposure to both local and national artists.

The fair established a foothold for modern architecture here.

Before the fair, there hadn’t been a major change to Seattle’s skyline since the Smith Tower in 1914. (The few new downtown buildings were relatively short, such as the 19-story Norton Building.)

The Space Needle became the city’s defining icon, instantly and forever.

The U.S. Science Pavilion (now Pacific Science Center) established the career of Seattle-born architect Minoru Uamasaki, who later designed the former World Trade Center.

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Speaking of tragedy and turmoil, some commentators have described the fair’s era as “a simpler time.”

It wasn’t.

The Cuban missile crisis, revealed just after the fair ended, threatened to turn the cold war hot.

The whole Vietnam debacle was getting underway.

The civil rights and black power movements were quickly gaining traction.

The birth control pill was just entering widespread use.

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which helped launch the U.S. environmental movement, came out while the fair was on.

So yes, there were big issues and conflicts in 1962.

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But there was also something else.

There was optimism.

In every exhibit and display at the fair, there was the notion that humans could work together to solve things.

And, at least at the fair, most everything was considered solveable.

I wrote in 1997, at the fair’s 35th anniversary, that its creators sincerely felt Americas would strive “to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.”

It’s that forward-looking confidence that got lost along the road from the Century 21 Exposition to the 21st century.

It’s something many of us would like to see more of these days.

And that, more than Belgian waffles or an Elvis movie, is why Seattle still cares about the World’s Fair.

And why you should too.

(Cross posted with City Living.)

souvenir display at the world's fair anniversary exhibition

via 'what makes the pie shops tick' at flickr.com

• Today’s the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair’s opening day. It’s time to celebrate, especially for those of us who, way back then, fully expected the world to still be here now, and who hoped and dreamed for a glorious future. (And I for one am glad there aren’t flying cars now. You want drunk or out-of-gas amateur drivers plummeting from the sky?)
• The original QFC supermarket on Roosevelt Way will not live to see the chain’s 50th anniversary next year. It closes May 12, doomed by the light-rail expansion. (The store itself began in 1955 as a Thriftway franchise; in 1963 it merged with five other area stores to form QFC.)
• The fungus among us is dangerous to whales.
• Why did the Catholic hierarchy order the (virulently anti-gay) Seattle archbishop to “overhaul” (i.e., censure and punish and perhaps even disband) an association of U.S. nuns? Because these sisters are doing it for themselves. They’re speaking out against the church’s sexism and homophobia, and against its role in the right-wing war on women.
• Petitioners promise they’ll get enough signatures to put gay marriage repeal on Washington’s November ballot.
• Desmond Tutu used the power of faith to help end one of the most brutal regimes in the “civilized” world. Yet some wingnuts say that doesn’t qualify him to speak at Gonzaga’s commencement.
• Here’s more proof of how one-percenty Wash. state’s tax structure really is.
• From Afghanistan to Seattle: Here come the law-enforcement unmanned drone airplanes.
• From the Tenants’ Union of Washington State, Jonathan Grant claims 27,000 people in Seattle live in below-code, substandard rental units, constituting Seattle’s own “second city.”
• Ex-Sasquatch Books publisher Chad Haight, like many publishers, is bitchin’ about Amazon. But even before the days of “E-tail,” he recalls, publishers were already getting squeezed by the big bookstore chains, with their abusive return policies and their promotional-consideration demands. As we mentioned yesterday, corporations in any industry will do whatever seems best for their immediate bottom lines. One of the problems of this is myopic short-term thinking. In any long-term view, big book and e-book sellers need to help keep their suppliers alive and well.
• Joshua Holland at AlterNet avers that the real defenders of freedom and liberty are those who fight against the far right.

widescreenmuseum.com

The next big thing in cultural preservation: indie and art-house cinemas, and their need to buy (and maintain) costly new digital projectors.

As with many adapt-or-die technology transitions, it’s partly propelled by money. In this case, it’s the money of the big Hollywood studios.

They now spend more than a billion dollars each year making and shipping film prints. They’d rather spend that on supporting artistically ambitious but less commercial filmmakers cocaine and whores.

The studios want all theaters to convert to digital, as quickly as possible. They’re offering financial incentives to theaters who accept movies on hard drives instead of 35mm reels.

(As I briefly explained a few years back, the digital formats for theaters are called “2K” and “4K.” The latter offers about four times as many pixels as Blu-ray discs, or about 10 times the detail of DVDs. Theaters receive “digital prints” on hard drives, inserted into specially made projectors. The exhibition side of digital cinema is called “DCP” (for “Digital Cinema Package”.))

Already, the studios are refusing to rent out 35mm prints of many classics. Within three years, they might not send out any films on, you know, film.

Even with the studio incentives (which come with significant restrictions and which smaller distributors can have trouble matching), the transition’s tough enough for the big chain cinemas (where attendance is the lowest it’s been since the mid 1990s).

For the smaller operators and the nonprofit exhibitors, the cost could be fatal. But if they stick with only analog equipment, they might have nothing available to show on it.

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And if film factories and labs lose the business of theatrical prints, it might not be financially feasible to make and process 35mm film for movie cameras.

Which brings us to the other end of the process.

Many directors (not just the George Lucases and James Camerons) now prefer to shoot their movies digitally.

It’s more versatile than film. It reduces the time needed to set up a shot. It makes 3D and other special effects a lot easier. It allows more and longer shots (including the single continuous take that is Russian Ark). The equipment’s smaller, less delicate, and easier to learn. Outtakes don’t waste costly film. Directors can shoot more “alternate takes,” then decide during editing which ones best fit a film’s overall pacing.

Digital shooting has also been a godsend for documentaries and indies. The whole Seattle independent filmmaking scene of the past decade has relied almost entirely on digital shooting.

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But the technology that’s a boon to people who make indie movies is a burden to people who show them.

Nationally, about two thirds of all theaters have DCP gear. The two SIFF Cinemas are already digitally equipped, as are the chain-owned theaters SIFF uses during the festival. (Though the process has had its hiccups.)

As for the rest, they could settle for showing digital movies (from non-major distributors) on lower-res Blu-ray or even-lower-res DVD discs. (This is what the Northwest Film Forum’s apparently doing, at least for now.) For smaller rooms with smaller screens, Blu-ray output might be good enough. It displays almost as many pixels as the 2K digital-cinema standard (but doesn’t have the extra-tuff copy protection and other Big Brother features the big studios demand). And because Blu-ray uses mass-market gear, it’s a lot cheaper for both exhibitors and distributors.

Or they could combine hi-res projectors with hi-bandwidth Internet connections or satellite dishes, to get programming direct from the distributor. (That’s what those cinema airings of live Metropolitan Opera shows use.)

Or they could spring for DCP, even with its cost and its studio-decreed operational restrictions. Some nonprofit art houses might need special fund drives for the gear, which starts at around $60,000 without 3D capability.

Or they could just close up shop.

One industry analyst guesses maybe 5 percent of the country’s current 5,700 cinemas could close due to the digital transition. Many of those could be small-town theaters and drive-ins, whose big-studio fare will become available only via DCP.

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Then there’s the little matter of storage and presentation.

Digital editing and retouching have done wonders for film restoration.

But nobody knows yet how long the physical media on which the digits are stored will last.

Or whether the machines to play them will still exist in future centuries.

For foolproof long-term keeping of movies, there’s still nothing like real film.

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P.S.: I’ve linked to this before, but this post is the perfect excuse to re-link to it. It’s my favorite work of “technical writing,” a pinnacle of depth and clarity. It’s a 1930 RCA instruction manual for movie theater operators, teaching them how to properly present those newfangled talking pictures.

P.P.S.: Even with digital’s cost advantage, many filmmakers defiantly still film and edit on actual film. And now, for the first time in 50 years, a film is being made in original three-strip Cinerama!

vintage seattle bus on 'ride free day,' available at allposters.com

Bad idea: King County Metro still plans to axe the downtown Seattle Ride Free Area in September.

Worse idea: The county and the city plan to replace this valuable service, not with a full equivalent service but just with an infrequent “short bus” circulator route, intended strictly to help poor residents get to social-service offices and medical appointments.

Not nearly enough.

Not even nearly nearly enough.

Free downtown bus service has been used here since the 1970s by all economic castes.

Before that, Metro and predecessor Seattle Transit ran a “dime shuttle” looping around downtown.

This kind of service can and should return.

First, the current #99 route, looping Alaskan Way and First Avenue, should become a more frequent, all-day, free (or lower-fare) service.

Second, another free (or lower-fare) route should go up and down Third Avenue, from Seattle Center to Pioneer Square and doglegging to the International District.

(Alternately, this could be two routes; one looping north on Fourth and south on Third, the other looping north on Third and south on Second. That would so help people avoid downtown’s steep slopes.)

If the county and the city can’t fund this service themselves, bring in the Downtown Seattle Association and the Downtown Metropolitan Improvement District to pitch in.

Because this is a service to the shoppers, diners, workers, and residents of greater downtown (and also to human-service-agency clients).

It reduces auto traffic, and helps people avoid costly parking.

It makes downtown a better place to be in and to live in.

If it can’t be in place when the Ride Free area ends in September, it could at least get instigated by the Xmas shopping season.

Let’s get this vehicle on the road.

wallace in a philip morris cigarette ad, circa 1957

The master of the “gotcha!’ interview had been a journeyman broadcaster since the days of old time radio. He’d been an announcer, a game show host (he hosted the unaired original pilot for To Tell the Truth), an actor in live TV dramas (and the film A Face in the Crowd), and a commercial pitchman for cigarettes and other assorted products.

Then in 1955, he started a New York local interview show called Nightbeat, renamed The Mike Wallace Interview when it moved to ABC. It established Wallace’s persona as a sensationalistic opportunist, more a tabloidy hothead than a newsman.

This rough edge was sanded down a bit when he became one of the original co-hosts (with Harry Reasoner) of 60 Minutes, putting a real news organization’s resources (including its lawyers) behind his shtick.

The rest is broadcast history.

Including his admission to long bouts of severe depression. The last on-air bit he did was a “CBS Cares” public-service spot about the illness.

Yet through it all he survived.

Now there are even fewer people left from TV’s early years, and fewer still (most notably Betty White) still working.

• Appropriately enough for the former Amazon HQ building, the PacMed Tower on Beacon Hill will be sold this month via an online auction.
• How does Soap Lake (the town) like the idea of changing the name of Soap Lake (the lake)? Not much at all.
• State budget impasse? Still as impassed as ever.
• Working Washington, the advocacy group mentioned in this space on Wednesday, wanted to run bus and light-rail ads on behalf of Sea-Tac airport workers stuck at lifetime minimum wage. Sound Transit said no.
• A government/civilian panel studying the basketball/hockey arena scheme issued what appear on the surface some mealy-mouthed conclusions. However, the “many important issues to be worked out” about the plan mostly seem to involve transportation in the area, which will have to be dealt with anyway.
• Climate change, in the long term, could cost the Wash. state economy $10 billion a year.
• How’s a financially-squeezed Greece gonna keep supporting archeological digs?
• Lynn Stout at the Atlantic believes much of the whole “psychopathic” behavior in the corporate world can be traced to the idea that companies must aim only for shareholder value, at the cost of all other financial or social results.
• A consumer website asked its readers to pick the “Worst Company in America.” Runners-up: BankAmericrap and AT&T. Winner: Electronic Arts.
• Tech-biz analyst Rocky Agrawal claims Groupon is “not a coupon or marketing company” so much as it’s “essentially a sub-prime lender.” That, and his prediction that merchants who sign up for Groupons are those that are really desperate to drum up business, leads Agrawal to predict it’s “poised for collapse.”
• Forbes looks for the future of books and sees not mere e-books but full multimedia apps.
• Forty-eight years ago this week, IBM announced the System/360 mainframe computer line. Products compatible with it are apparently still being made.
• The new interpretation/visualization of Jesus: Not only white but hipster-esque.
• Applebee’s: Not a drive-thru restaurant.

t.j. mullinax, yakima herald-republic

• The Zillah, WA teapot gas station lives!
• Public breastfeeding may soon be officially legal in Seattle. (I’ve long believed the only good reason for anti-nudity laws is to help prosecute confrontational (male) flashers. Therefore, above-the-waist nudity should be legal; especially with Motherhood in its favor.)
• There’s a new custom made, locally made bicycle called the Kalakala. List price $2,375, depending on which custom features you ask for. If only that kind of money could be found to preserve the real Kalakala ferry boat.
• A new bio of ex-Sen. Slade Gorton has a part about the loss of the Sonics. The author’s chief point-O-blame lands on State House Speaker Frank Chopp.
• Land use attorney Charles Wolfe writes for the Atlantic explaining Seattle’s pro-density zoning schemes.
• The new King County sheriff used to be a Minnesota state legislator. That’s where he co-sponsored two particularly virulent bills to force “shaming” rituals on abortion patients.
• Thanks to inter-corporate wrangling over rights fees, DirecTV’s stopped carrying TV stations owned by the Tribune Co., including our own KCPQ and “JoeTV.”
• Congrats to local playwright Yussef El Guindi for winning a national “New Play Award” for his piece Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World. I’m equally intrigued by the title of the second place winner, something called Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them.
• I’ve apparently been name-dropped in an Alberta grad student’s MA thesis. The title: This is Not For You: The Rise and Fall of Music Milieux in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, 1950s -1990s. Haven’t read it yet.
• There’s a tender memorial to Seattle painter Christopher Martin Hoff, written by a former close friend.
• Couldn’t happen in a more deserving place: There’s now a major oil boom in Mozambique. (Of course, oil booms don’t always benefit the people who live in the countries that have them.)
• Which book cover cliché is more tiresome, “women’s” novels with the heroine’s head cropped off of the cover, or gay-male novels with their parade of (also headless) naked torso shots? (Note: The latter link is to a snark essay from a gay book-review blog whose logo contains, you guessed it, a headless naked torso.)

a&p store in wallingford, circa 1938; via pauldorpat.com

My former employers at the Stranger have come out with a new ad-heavy arts quarterly. Its title: Seattle A&P (for “Art and Performance”).

It gives me an excuse to discuss one of my personal obsessions, with the company known as A&P (its official name: The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company).

It was once the largest grocery chain in America. At its peak it essentially owned the food biz east of the Rockies, and also had outposts in Seattle and L.A.

It was even considered a dire threat to the existence of small business.

But after decades of mismanagement, the brand today only exists in the New York suburbs. (The company also owns five other Northeast regional chains acquired over the years.)

The last Seattle A&P stores were sold or closed in 1974. The largest single batch of these selloffs (five stores) went to QFC, forming a major jump in that chain’s drive toward local dominance.