slate.com

• The images used to sell prog-rock LPs are often more intriguing than the noodle-y music itself.
• Jonah Keri at the ESPN/McSweeney’s site Grantland lists 27 notable things about Felix Hernandez’s perfect game. That’s one item for each out.
• And here are some clips and GIFs of Hernandez’s feat, and a video compiling all his 27 consecutive outs.
• When Metro Transit dumps the downtown “ride free area” next month, ride times and congestion could get significantly longer/worse. That’s in addition to the impact on people of all economic castes getting around in the city’s center.
• Tuition at Washington’s major colleges and universities more than doubled over the past 20 years, while average incomes stayed flat.…
• …while state-government employment dropped by more than 15,000 people this past year.
• Bill Maher says outright that “voter ID laws are racist;” while a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri suggests repealing the Voter Rights Act.
• Unknown artists spent a lot of time creating a big installation piece using stuff found inside an abandoned Detroit church.
• Tony Scott, 1944-2012: The director of Top Gun died from a depression-inspired suicide, just like too many of our real-life troops.

amnesty international via pickadolla.wordpress.com

By now you’ve heard and/or read about the Russian protest/music/performance-art collective Pussy Riot.

About the group’s carefully staged protest at a Russian Orthodox church against Vladmir Putin, the political boss of Russia’s current crony-driven, corrupt regime.

About the regime’s rote reaction against the protest.

About the two-year labor-camp sentences dutifully dished out to three Pussy Riot members; following five months of imprisonment and a farcical show trial tainted by allegations that the women were beaten, denied food, and weren’t allowed witnesses to speak in their defense.

About the protests throughout western Europe and elsewhere in support of the group.

I found it all to be an extremely well thought out piece of real-life theater.

The group’s English language name and song titles were clearly intended to generate a global support network.

Their act was inspired both by 1990s U.S. “riot grrrl” bands and the recent Ukranian activist group Femen (who’ve staged topless protests against “sex tourism” in their country).

The concept was to put human faces (albeit sometimes masked faces) on what had been a year of mass protests, in Moscow and elsewhere, against Russia’s increasingly oppressive and even neo-Stalinist system.

This face is young, dynamic, colorful, defiant, female, and (even when fully dressed and masked) openly sexual.

It was crafted as a deliberate contrast to a regime that willingly depicted itself as old, staid, grim, mechanical, humorless, and, yes, patriarchal. A machine as repressed as it is repressive; appealing to fear and bigotry to maintain support among older citizens nostalgic for the days of Soviet predictability.

Anti-Putin and anti-Putinism protests are not confined to Pussy Riot. Mass marches have been held in major cities for more than a year. Putin’s somber bureaucrats have issued increasingly suppressive laws to stop them.

Russia’s opposition is broad and deep, cutting across ethnic and class as well as gender lines.

Pussy Riot gives this opposition a face and a voice the outside world can see and hear.

craig hill, tacoma news tribune

• A Tacoma News Tribune writer finds a retreating glacier on Mt. Rainier looking, from one angle, like the Nike logo. Snark ensues.
• The new Blue Scholars music video combines Sonics nostalgia with good ol’ Seattle diversity, visually expressed in the form of working-class food joints.
• Shell’s building an oil-containment barge in Bellingham. But the thing’s leaking oil. (This is the kind of “oops!” moment anti-corporate performance artists can’t fake.)
• The University Bridge has to be closed to cars and sprayed with water once an hour when it gets this hot.
• Remember, boats shouldn’t get too close to whales.
• Apple has finally responded to the federal lawsuit claiming it and five of the top six U.S. book publishers conspired to fix e-book prices. Apple alleges Amazon was the real “driving force” behind the suit, not any government concern for the book buying public.
• Heidi Kelly at Crosscut believes “suburban women” will go for Romney/Ryan, or at least the “Generation X” women of the “Seinfeld generation” will, for reasoning I am unable to interpret/comprehend.
• Paul Ryan loves Rage Against the Machine. The bands’ members see Ryan as embodying the machine they’re raging against.
• Joshua D. Foster and Ilan Shrira at Psychology Today try to explain why people can be so easily seduced by conspiracy theories, no matter how far fetched those theories can be.
• An Oregon couple is charged with a multi-state murder and crime spree, done with the intention of racially “purifying” America.
• Meanwhile, Juan Cole insists that terrorists are terrorists even when they’re white.
• Mississippi’s scheme to outlaw abortion turns out to be remarkably similar to tactics the state used to use to prevent blacks from voting.
• Lost in the “vinyl revival”: nostalgia for the first mass-market recorded sound medium, the Edison cylinder.
• ESPN’s sports talk show Pardon the Interruption posted this mashup illo of Felix Hernandez’s perfect-game victory dance. (Wild Thing, I think I love you….)

maisonceleste.wordpress.com

• Did Mexico’s Huichol people create what we now know as “psychedelic” art?
• Central Washington’s bad, no-good week was caused by human carelessness. (Remember what Smokey says, everybody.)
• Soon, you’ll be able to go to an Arco station and not be supporting BP—but only if you’re in southern California, Nevada, or Arizona. BP’s holding on to the Arco stations in the Northwest, and to the Cherry Point, WA refinery that feeds them.
• Save the Silver Fork! It’s an indie diner! A real one, not a hip-retro pastiche! It’s the Rainier Valley’s favorite “third place,” a site of community-gathering and conviving. It’s threatened with demolition, for nothing more than a gas station.
• As you might know, the cover model for Herb Alpert’s classic LP Whipped Cream and Other Delights is an ex-Seattleite now living in southwest Washington. And she’s still a charmer.
• The Young Fresh Fellows, deans of Seattle power pop, have a new album coming out! And you can access an online stream if you follow the band’s clever little marketing gimmick.
• Rep. Jim McDermott, for most of his political career, has been a man only a Republican could dislike. Until his wife became his ex-wife, that is.
• Just as I figured would happen, a compromise with the Port of Seattle may enable the Sonics arena scheme to go forward.
• Getty Images, Seattle’s king of stock photos, is being bought by the Carlyle Group. That’s the D.C.-based private-equity outfit with strong ties to the Bush family and to the Saudi royals.
• During the Olympics, Nike put out a T-shirt with the slogan GOLD DIGGING. A sexist slap or just good clean fun?
• Maria Konnikova at the Atlantic explains just how famous quotations get mixed up, rearranged, or misattributed.
• Among the publishing old-timers trying to make sense of the Internet age: onetime Sassy editor and “perpetual teenager” Jane Pratt.
• Angela Neustatter at the Guardian would really like married people to be a lot more accepting/forgiving of cheatin’ spouses. It’s only natural, she says. (There goes half the subject matter of classic lit and country songs….)
• Americans are having fewer babies, too few to maintain the population size. This has been happening in Japan for a while, to the point that kids’ manga and related media are in financial freefall. But what’s bad news for the makers of baby clothes could be good news for an overextended planet.
• PBS’s Frontline goes Jesus-freaky. In the process, a lot’s revealed about cultural cross-pollination. Long before hip white kids pretended to be Buddhists, Romans disgusted by their corrupt society embraced the simple love-and-respect teachings of a tiny Jewish splinter sect.
• Whites are still far more likely than minorities to have home broadband connections. But Hispanics, Asian Americans, and African Americans are more likely than whites to have smartphones. This is what could be known as burrowing under the Digital Divide.
• Cheating at tournament-level Scrabble! Is nothing pure anymore? (On the other hand, it allows me to revive the tagline from the Scrabble game show: “It’s the crossword game you’ve played all your life, but never quite like this!”)
• When the teen offspring of the One Percent post Tweets® and photos of their obscenely opulent lifestyles, it’s all fun and snark. Until somebody figures out that potential burglars/kidnappers could be reading them.
• As I keep telling you, if you don’t vote, you’re doing exactly what the extreme right wing wants you to do.
• Political spending this season has been swamped by Karl Rove’s and the Koch brothers’ Super PACs, and their oh-so-anonymous donors.
• Paul Constant describes Paul Ryan as:

A wealthy young white man who refuses to, for one second, consider what it must be like to be a woman, or a minority, or a member of the lower class, or old. A man whose words mean less than nothing.

geneticist.tumblr.com

• Artist Lisa Nillson creates elaborate human-body cross sections using “only pieces of rolled paper.”
• Here are links to the musical numbers left out of NBC’s Olympic closing-ceremony telecast, including Ray Davies.
• Magazine single-copy sales in the U.S. are down 10 percent from a year ago. Expect more stupid “stunt” covers as the desperation sinks in.
• Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin really dislikes voter suppression drives.
• Last Picture Show writer Larry McMurtry has become one of America’s biggest used-book superstore operators. Until now.
• Joe Kubert, 1927-2012: The master of gritty realistic comics and illustration was best known for war comics such as Sgt. Rock. He was equally adept at superhero titles (Hawkman), personal and autobiographical works, graphic journalism, and art-instruction courses. His impact on the art cannot be underestimated.

wikimedia commons

• The warm weather’s speeding up the life cycle of the aphids spreading “zebra chip” disease to Washington’s potato crops, making the spuds unsalable.
• Let’s raise a thousand guitar picks to the 10th anniversary of Seattle’s All Ages Dance Ordinance, and the repeal of the infamously restrictive “Teen Dance Ordinance” (which had banned almost all all-ages live music shows for nearly two decades). A lot of people worked a lot of years to make that happen. They can tell you that change doesn’t really happen any other way.
• It began in ’10, took last year off due to funding problems, but is back this weekend. It’s Seattle Founders Days in Belltown, a weekend celebration of one of America’s liveliest neighborhoods, its spectacular past and its portentious future.
• When truly affordable housing remains in short supply anywhere in Seattle, should the Seattle Housing Authority sell off huge chunks of Yesler Terrace to “market rate” developers?
• RealNetworks, after many losses, turned a profit this past quarter. But it’s only because they sold a bunch of patents to Intel.
• Now that the reservoirs are all lidded, your best chance for a peek at Seattle’s water supply comes with a “Tap Tour” to the Cedar River Watershed.
• Romney outrage of the day (this will probably be a regular department for the next 90 days): Bain Capital’s original investors included figures tied to El Salvador’s murderous right-wing death squads.
• One more reason why no state can afford a Republican one-party government: Louisiana’s set to dole out public education bucks to anti-science fundamentalist private schools.
• The Susan G. Komen Foundation announced new national bosses, who might (just might, mind you) end the homophobia and Planned Parenthood-bashing of the group’s recent past. But it’ll probably remain an outfit less interested in health care than in big-bucks corporate sponsorships.
• We here in BlueStateLand like to scoff at slimy voter suppression tactics elsewhere. But why aren’t Washington’s own majority-Hispanic pockets seeing more majority-Hispanic voting profiles?
• You could live directly above the future U District light rail station, as soon as 2021.

pitchfork media via cartoonbrew.com

The third most famous band from Aberdeen, the Melvins, talk about their “disastrous” first tour, accompanied by appropriately simple Flash animation. (The second most famous band from Aberdeen, of course, is Metal Church.)

• When an apartment tower goes up on the Lung Association site in Belltown, across from the existing Seattle Heights condo tower, that will be Seattle’s densest residential block (for the time being).
• It’s a sad day for local radio listeners. KMCQ of Covington, the freeform oldies station that had been one of the last commercial music stations worth listening to whatsoever, has switched to a strict-playlist, ’70s-’80s “classic rock” format. Damn.
• Bartell Drugs’ HQ is moving to the West Seattle Corporate Center in Delridge. That building was originally the HQ of Bartells’ onetime arch rival Pay n’ Save, which disappeared several mergers ago. (Some former Pay n’ Save locations survive as Rite Aid outlets.)
• A stock photo of the UW campus is being used in a creepy poster for a potentially creepy romantic comedy movie. (The movie in question was neither filmed, nor apparently set, in Seattle.)
• More state education money without raising taxes, as both gubernatorial candidates promise? Not bloody likely.
• Marvin Hamlisch, 1945-2012: So it’s the laughter that we remember, whenever we remember the way he was.
• Robert Hughes, 1938-2012: I’ll always remember the Australian-born art critic for a scene from the BBC series The Shock of the New. He pointed to an abstract-art chair and noted that “no human bottom” could fit in it comfortably. (Little known fact: He co-hosted the first episode of ABC’s news magazine 20/20, with ex-Esquire editor Robert Hayes.)
• Happy eighth birthday to one of my fave sources of cool and strange music clips, PCL LinkDump (née Pop Culture Links).
• Charles Mudede quotes three other pundits who suggest the only way out of today’s global economic blecch is to revive the ancient Hebrew concept of a “debt jubilee” (or something like it).

As the eyes of the Earth turn again to Mars, let us look back at one of the most surreal and modern-arty “educational” films ever made, the Disney studio’s animated docudrama Mars and Beyond. Made in luscious color, it premiered in black and white on the Disneyland anthology TV show in 1957, just months after the Soviet satellite Sputnik launched the “space race.”

• The beautiful 1906 former home of the progressive Seattle First United Methodist Church will become the next home of the homophobic, reactionary Mars Hill Church.
• Ezell’s Fried Chicken isn’t Ezell’s fried chicken anymore. Ezell Stephens was kicked out of the operation by now-former business partners. He’s now got a new chicken chain, Heaven Sent.
• Gibson Guitar now admits it did, indeed, illegally import endangered “exotic woods.”
• Companies who treat customers rudely can’t hide in the age of social media. Today’s example: Horizon Air.
• Local singer-songwriter and lush-soundscape creator Erik Blood has a new concept album, all about nostalgia for the days of “porno chic.” Title: Touch Screen.
• Another creative indie music maker, “geek rock” troubadour Jonathan Coulton, wonders out loud what’ll happen when home 3D printers can produce fully functional substitutes for manufactured consumer goods.
• And Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan decries the Pitchfork festival circuit as the ruination of any real “alternative” music.

google earth via rhizome.org

• Clement Valla at Rhizome.org finds beauty and “the universal texture” within the mistakes of Google Earth’s 3D geographical simulations.
• The musicians’ union would like to create “sustainable” opportunities for local club bands (i.e., gigs with decent pay). Considering how fiscally precarious so many bars and clubs are, this may be a challenge.
• Amy Rolph at SeattlePI.com, trolling for weird items on Amazon to laff at, found a CD of “lullaby renditions of Nirvana songs.” Rolph calls the electronically-rendered music “creepy.” I call it more like a failed attempt to update the shtick of Raymond Scott’s old Soothing Sounds for Baby LPs.
• It’s not that “oldies” music is selling more these days. It’s that present-day music is selling less.
• When classic films meet know-nothing online reviewers, magic happens.
• Apple has again become the world’s #1 personal-computer maker, if you count iPads as computers.
• At last, a new job in this town that doesn’t require programming experience. It’s the making of fake poop, to demonstrate new third-world toilet designs for the Gates Foundation.
• Steven Rosenfeld at AlterNet believes today’s Republicans are “a truly toxic aberration,” an outfit that can only win elections by voter-suppression and other dirty tricks.
• The “future of news” gurus have long claimed that media companies only needed to hustle for all the web hits they could get, and ad revenue would naturally follow. That’s turning out to not be the case; especially with tablet and smartphone users.
• Here’s one Russian guy’s idea of how humans could live forever, for just $50 billion in startup costs:

1. First, invent remote-controlled, humanoid robots.
2. The next generation of the robots would contain transplanted human brains.
3. By the year 2045, people’s memories and personalities would be transferred as software into robotic brains. (As we always say with stories like this, “Nothing can possibly go wrong….”)

perfect sound forever, via furious.com

• It was my first real lesson in how to make a print periodical that was neither a corporate “slick” nor an amateur “zine.” It was my entree into several musical worlds, most importantly that of U.S. indie pop/rock. Let us remember the brief, glorious life of New York Rocker.
• Can Washington’s state parks really survive if they have to become self supporting?
• Correction of the day (NY Times):

An earlier version misstated the term Mr. Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. in a debate. It was crypto-Nazi, not crypto-fascist.

• In the Matrix movies, identity is easily transmutable and fluid. Think about that when you learn that director Larry Wachowski now wants to be known as Lana.
• How do all those “rugged individualist,” “rebel” Tea Party operatives act and sound so much alike? They get special training in exactly what to say, do, and believe.
• Meanwhile, “Conservative Movement” operatives are finally starting to turn against one another, using the same tactics of loud lies they’ve always used against progressives and centrists.
• The latest winner of one of those dumb magazine declarations about “America’s coolest city”? Houston.
• If a Waterworld dystopia ever comes to be, expect the One Percenters to hole themselves up in fancy-as-all-heck “floating cities of the future.”
• Human waste off the Northwest coast, now with extra caffeine.
• The anti-“social media” backlash is fully underway. One disgruntled Facebook advertiser says it was charged for “clicks” on its ads that turned out to have been mostly generated by “bot” programs. And Ewan Morrison at the Guardian implores self-publishing authors to spend less time incessantly hawking their “brands” on Twitter, Facebook, et al., and more time actually, you know, writing.

If you’re going art-crawling this next First Thursday, be sure to see a mini version of the digging machine that will create the Viaduct-replacement tunnel. Go see it even if you normally find such things to be, er, boring.

• Geoff Tate and the other members of local hard-rock legends Queensryche aren’t making up any time soon.
• The City Council thinks it might be a good idea to use part of any new-basketball-arena revenues to help fix traffic in the area; thereby agreeing with what I wrote here weeks ago. Would-be arena developer Chris Hansen doesn’t wanna pay for road-building himself, though. And I agree with that too; the Port of Seattle’s traffic woes in the area already exist, and would continue to exist with an arena or not. The trick is to channel some of the revenue the arena will earn to the city and state (via sales and admissions taxes mostly) into road improvements.
• There’s a “Support the Sisters” march here on Aug. 12, backing activist nuns who’ve run afoul of Vatican dictates.
• Today’s headline-O-the-day, from the Oregonian: “Car thief who was high on drugs and masturbating when he plowed into Portland crime scene will not have to register as a sex offender.” (I’m sure the headline was shorter in the print version.)
• Conor Kilpatrick basts modern libertarianism as being, in part, an effort to make rapacious corporate greed seem “hip” and “cool.”
• If your call to a U.S. company’s call center didn’t go through today, it could be due to the severe power outage in India.
• Seattle law firm Perkins Coie’s major corporate clients include the officially nonprofit Craigslist, which sends lawyers regularly to crack down on “add-on” sites.
• Chris Marker, 1921-2012: The great French maker of philosophical films did a lot more than just “influence” Anglophone productions such as 12 Monkeys. His works are worthy in and of themselves, using sci-fi memes not as a premise for action-adventure but to meditate on the human condition.
• Gore Vidal, 1925-2012: The prolific novelist, essayist, playwright/screenwriter, film/TV cameo actor, Al Gore cousin, sometime failed political candidate, and ever-lucid critic of the American political-industrial complex (“a society that bores and appalls me”) always seemed to glide from highbrow to low; from serious historical works (Burr, 1876, Lincoln) to utter farce (Myra Breckenridge); from major cultural contributions (The City and the Pillar, one of the first U.S. mainstream novels with gay-male protagonists) to for-the-money tripe (co-writing the Caligula screenplay). To the end he remained “complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

ioffer.com

The first Spider-Man cartoon series (ABC, 1967-70) is fondly remembered by the geekerati, not only for its low-budget thrills but for its bold, saucy, spooky music.

You know the theme song, perhaps from its many remakes and cover versions. (It’s the only song the Ramones slowed down when they covered it!)

The background music has been a lot harder to track down.

Among the reasons why:

• No soundtrack album was made at the time of the original series run.
• The series had two different production companies, one of which folded after the first season.
• The animation was produced in New York, but the soundtracks were produced in Toronto (for budget reasons).
• Nobody held onto any detailed production notes.

Fans eventually figured out that most of the music cue for seasons 2 and 3 came from KPM, a “library music” provider based in London (and now owned by the about-to-be-dismembered EMI).

Once KPM put up a website with samples of its library, these fans sorted out which tracks had been used on Spider-Man, and began to post some of them online.

But that left the season 1 background cues, composed expressly for the show by Ray Ellis and Bob Harris.

As this 2007 story on WFMU’s blog goes, some longtime fans of the show tracked down Ellis in L.A. He told them he’d left the original tapes behind when he moved from New York, but would track them down the next time he went there. Ellis died in 2000, before ever making that trip.

Other fans later reached Harris’s widow, who said she had no idea about the Spider-Man music tapes’ existence.

Not only were the original recordings a dead-end, no M&E tracks (music-and-sound-effects soundtracks, which some studios keep for foreign-language redubbing) were around either. Only the dialogue-heavy final episodes.

Dan O’Shannon, a writer-producer who’s worked on Cheers, Frasier, and Modern Family, is another of the ’60s Spider-Man‘s lifelong obsessive fans. O’Shannon’s taken it upon himself to reassemble the first-season cues.

So far he’s posted 34 tracks. He’s mixed and matched sections of the same tunes from different episodes (or different parts of the same episode) to avoid the dialogue.

O’Shannon hasn’t, however, been able (or wanted) to edit out the frequent THWIP! sound effect of Spidey’s web shooters.

Let’s face it, my fellow futurists.

Outer space is boring. Or rather, being out there would be boring.

No air, no water, nothing to do for light-years.

This is the expression held by German music hall star Marika Rökk (1913-2004) in her big production number “Mir Ist So Langweilig” (“I Am SOOO Bored”). It’s from the 1958 revue film Bühne Frei für Marika (“Stage Free for Marika”).

She portrays an ice princess on some desolate planet, surrounded by a family of male toadies. She langorously sings of yearning for something to do that’s not the same old same old.

She peers out her space telescope, sees happy Earthlings dancing, and immediately sets forth in an amazing gyroscope/spaceship (!).

The ship takes her to a quasi-racist German depiction of an African jungle.

She picks up a (real) snake and dances with it, lying down and spreading her legs (!).

She cavorts for a while with some “natives” and a (real) elephant. (She rubs the bare chest of one of “native” males to see “if the dirt comes off.”)

But even that’s not enough to slake her boredom for long.

(Thanx and a hat tip to Mr. Dante Fontana’s Visual Guidance Ltd.)

The Seafair Torchlight Parade is more than a relic of “a simpler time,” or an opportunity for Seattle merchants and restaurants to make money from visiting suburbanites and exurbanites.

It’s an opportunity for all of us to get back in touch with the values and aesthetics that helped make this city great.

At a time and place where these values are often scoffed at, Seafair proclaims there’s still plenty to admire in squareness.

Squares gave us the Space Needle. Squares gave us Boeing (and, hence, the “international jet set”). Squares gave us computers and software.

Towns at at least a little removed from the metro core still understand the positive aspects of squareness, and revel in them. I come from one of these.

Remember: Square DOES NOT necessarily equal boring or white. Values of family, tradition, and togetherness cut across all ethnic and subcultural lines.

There are three special things to mention about this year’s parade. The first is the Seafair Clowns’ heartfelt tribute to Chris Wedes/J.P. Patches.

The second thing was something I’d previously noticed last month at the gay parade—spectators using cam-equipped iPads to get a better-than-the-naked eye view of the proceedings.

And finally, what was Grand Marshal (and Fastbacks drummer #2) Duff McKagan doing in a horse and buggy? Wouldn’t a bitchin’ vintage muscle car be more his flavor?

The Burke Museum has posted a lovely You Tube video showing how the Pioneer Square area was not only settled by Seattle’s founders but altered, filled in, and transformed from a little isthmus into the historic district it is today.

• A B.C.-based blogger about classic cartoons offers his own tribute to J.P. Patches, on whose show he first saw many of those shorts.
• Meanwhile, sometime Seattle musician (and this year’s Seafair grand marshal) Duff McKagan cites the Patches show as exemplifying/promoting a quirky, particularly “Seattle” sense of humor.
• Paul Constant believes the Seattle library levy would stand a better chance of passage if its promoters expressed more appreciation toward librarians, not just toward buildings and acquisitions.
• The Dept. of Justice deal with the Seattle Police includes a court appointed monitor and strict reporting of “uses of force.”
• You’ve got about a month to get your needles together for the big quilters’ convention.
• A Florida renegade Republican claims his state party has deliberately tried to suppress the black vote.
• Paul Krugman suggests Mitt Romney’s wealth, and the insularity that goes with it, is his potential undoing.
• If you don’t have health insurance, today’s Republican Party officially doesn’t give a flying frack about you.
• The number of “swing states” in this Presidential election: 8. That’s it.
• Pat Buchanan really needn’t worry about the Republicans facing long-term oblivion as America becomes steadily less white. Some future generation of GOP operatives could easily dump the racism (disguised and otherwise), and instead proclaim that passive-aggressive fealty to Big Money is for everyone.
• Roger Rosenblatt wants writers to “write great;” that is, to go beyond the merely personal and embrace reality’s greater issues.
• In the opposite direction from “writing great,” there’s now an online Fifty Shades of Grey-esque cliché generator.
• And finally, this day’s most incisive, most informative piece of Seattle Times reportage: