npr.org

• NPR’s Lam Thuy Vo has made a lovely infographic about the billions in earnings resulting from America’s “exports of ideas.” Movies and TV shows bring in $13 billion in overseas revenue. Software: $35 billion. Trademark licenses: $14 billion. “Industrial processes” (patents): almost $36 billion. Now you know why the “intellectual property” industries are so extremely adamant about sealing any potential leak in their legal privileges.
• Elsewhere in infographic-land, here’s a visual essay delineating how marketers, and those who sell services to marketers, have always gamed the system in both “old” and “new” media.
• Obama came to Seattle right after outing himself as a gay-marriage supporter. Yes, there was a lot of cheering for a calculated, Clinton-esque “triangulation” move, carefully strategized to gain more votes than it would cost. And I’m fine with that (the announcement and the local rave reactions to it).
• Tim Eyman: Complete tool of Big Oil and the 1 percent.
• A non-native redwood tree was planted in Tacoma more than 100 years ago. It was recently cut down, executed for the crime of having roots undermining nearby sewers and house foundations.
• Note to news sites: Editing stuff before you post it is a good idea. Especially with headlines involving the name “Dicks.”
• I’ve defended Amazon about other things, but they really oughta keep the HVAC in their warehouses in working order.
• Couldn’t happen to un-nicer guys: Chase loses a cool $2 billion on a single hedge fund.
• A Seventeen reader is petitioning the not-as-classy-as-it-used-to-be magazine. She wants it to depict models more realistically, without excessive Photoshopping.
• The singer for the band Against Me! says he’s going to become a woman. I can just imagine the package tour with Jayne County, Genesis P. Orridge, and Wendy Carlos.
• Public-sector unions in the UK (a place where such institutions still have a big measure of clout) have staged massive protests against government “austerity”…
• …while here at home, two TruthOut.org contributors claim U.S. conservatism has “hit rock bottom,” having devolved into “an unappealing philosophy of political exclusion, environmental degradation, and economic hopelessness.”

liem bahneman, via komo-tv

• There’s a moon! It’s in the sky! It’s called the supermoon!
• From the Sunday Seattle Times: The Smith Tower is on the rebound; there are sympathetic words toward Occupy Seattle sympathizers; the ex-Kleenex factory in Everett is a toxic waste site; and local students are learning to compose soundtracks for movies and video games.
• We knew it was coming. Now the original QFC supermarket on Roosevelt Way closes on Saturday.
• What the heck does Jay Inslee gotta do to get some press?
• Silicon Valley analyst Farhad Manjoo can’t figure out Amazon’s long-term business strategy, and ponders whether the company even has one. Hey, I don’t fully understand gravity, but I still know it’s there. Of course Amazon has a strategy. Several of them. It aims to be the world leader in online sales of tangible physical stuff, plus intangible digital stuff; to be the go-to company for online retail back-end functions and fulfillment; to rule “cloud computing” and outsourced computer services; and to remain the 500-lb. gorilla of the book biz. There now, wasn’t that simple?
• At the same site, Trevor Gilbert believes he’s figured out why Seattle has so many leading video-game companies.
• The voters of France, like the protestors of Greece, have utterly and thoroughly rejected recession-extending “austerity” regimes. They’ve elected their first Socialist government in 16 years and sending Nicolas Sarkozy packing. Will this send Sarkozy’s wife, ex-supermodel Carla Bruni, back on the runways?

• Brendan Kiley tries to parse out what exactly we should call the busters up of stuff on May Day. How about “testosteronic dorks”?
• Joel Connelly, meanwhile, calls the window-breakers “the worst enemies of worthy change.”
• Seattle Times business writer Jon Talton proclaims that “what we have witnessed in recent years in America is not capitalism,” but rather destructive cronyism.
• Ex-Microsoftie turned political activist Jeff Reifman has launched an initiative campaign called I-103. It would establish a “community bill of rights” and a set of workers’ rights, take a symbolic stand against “corporate personhood,” and restrict corporate campaign contributions for city elections. We’ll see how far it gets in a town that likes to be “progressive” only as long as business interests don’t feel threatened.
• Could Microsoft’s investment in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division finally give MS a toehold in the tablet market?
• The thing about Amazon Kindle e-book readers is that people really need to see them in person in order to understand/appreciate/want them. That’s the one thing Amazon’s not built to provide. So it sells Kindles through chain stores. Only these chains are getting tired of folks looking at stuff in their stores then going to buy it online. One of ‘em, Target, will stop selling Kindles in retaliation.
• There’s a new intercity bus line in town. BoltBus will take you straight to Portland in 3.25 hours. Buses leave four times a day from 5th Avenue South near the transit tunnel station. Fares are $27 but with discounts for early reservations and low-demand runs. It’s not really a competitor to Greyhound, because the latter is operating the route under contract.
• Another female teacher, another teenage male student, another sex scandal. This is getting beyond the cliché stage.
• In today’s China, HuffPost blogger Tom Doctoroff writes, many forms of non-marital sex are still illegal; but more and more people engage in them anyway, often openly. Doctoroff says this illustrates China’s current vacillation between “prudence and prurience,” between “‘comfortable’ domesticity and extra-curricular indulgence.” What Doctoroff doesn’t mention: sexual behavior is like that everywhere, in all eras.
• A creative-writing prof claims he’s isolated the 12 winning ingredients of successful bestselling novels. Only thing is, those same ingredients also appear in a lot of works that don’t sell.

The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures are in for the six months ending in March.

They show the Seattle Times‘ circulation continuing a steady decline, to 237,000 daily and 300,000 on Sunday. That’s 6.6 percent lower than one year ago.

What’s more, each figure includes about 30,000 paid subscribers to the Times‘ print-replica .pdf edition (the only paid online product the Times offers so far).

So the daily print Times is now beneath 206,000 buyers. That’s just a few thousand more than it had in 2009, when it added the P-I‘s former subscribers. (Back in 2000, the Times and P-I had a combined circulation of 400,000.)

Elsewhere in the report, the NY Times now has more paid online readers than print readers.

irwin allen's 'the time tunnel' (1966), via scaryfilm.blogspot.com

• If a Seattle attorney was really involved in government time travel experiments when he was a boy, like he claims, why couldn’t he have brought back the lost episodes of the original Doctor Who?
• Zillow.com predicts local housing prices will continue to fall for another year before they “hit bottom.”
• The Seattle Times has a where-are-they-now piece about the former 619 Western studio artists.
• Spokane would really like to keep its biggest employer, Fairchild AFB.
• Marketing-trends analyst Faith Popcorn insists the economy would be a lot better off today if the big Wall Street firms had more women in power roles.
• Koo Stark update: Prince Andrew’s actress ex-girlfriend is using the Rupert Murdoch organization in a U.S. court over phone tapping. (Her complaint is still about Murdoch’s U.K. papers, not his stateside operations.)
• Kashi cereal eaters were shocked to learn (1) the soy in Kashi’s products uses Monsanto seeds, and (2) Kashi’s really owned by Kellogg’s.
• The Great Vinyl Comeback isn’t just for indie pop anymore. Classical artists are now getting in on it.
• Nick Harkaway at the Guardian sees Amazon and the other big e-book sellers as “the new gatekeepers,” steering consumers toward select choices rising from the “rabble.”
• In terms of paying as little in taxes as legally possible, Apple turns out to be just like any other big company.
• Longtime online analyst Dave Winer suggests there’s another Internet bubble going on, involving social-media and content-based sites. Winer says those sites’ funders are…

…building businesses whose only way of making money will be through advertising. Are there as many different ways to slice things as all the startups, collectively, would have you believe? And when they’re done, what will happen to them?

• Lindy West’s recent putdown of “hipster racism” reminded Channing Kennedy at the Colorlines site of a similar rant, given in 1979 by the late great rock critic Lester Bangs.
• Alas, we’re not really going to be rid of Newt Gingrich; only of his Presidential campaign.
• Noted author E.L. Doctorow traces how 12 years of right-wing power grabbing has left America an “unexceptional” nation.

one of rob vasquez's many out-of-print 45s, via aarongilbreath.wordpress. com

(No snickering jokes from this corner about a certain three-digit number.)

• A pair of my ol’ punk era acquaintances have nice write ups. You may have already seen the Seattle Times profile of former Showbox impresario and current ACT Theatre honcho (and all around nice guy) Carlo Scandiuzzi. You may not have seen Aaron Gilbreath’s loving tribute to one of the scene’s greatest unsung guitarists, Rob Vasquez.
• And here’s one of Seattle’s smartest writers, Neal Stephenson, on the need for science fiction to relate to readers’ present-day real lives. (Update: Link now fixed.)
• For such a small, efficiently laid out building, could the legendary 5 Point bar/cafe really have a heretofore undiscovered secret room?
• There are several other lying memoirists out there. What makes Greg (Three Cups of Tea) Mortenson different? He used his allegedly partly-made-up book to raise $62 million for his own charity, money he’s accused of mismanaging and misspending.
• Starbucks is removing crushed-bug-based red dye from its strawberry-flavored cold drinks. (But that contributed half the nutritional value!)
• John Urquhart, who’s running for King County Sheriff, used to be the department’s PR guy. As such, he issued several interesting press releases.
• The city’s apparently afraid of another Occupy situation. It won’t let Real Change put up tents in Westlake Park to protest insufficient help for the homeless. Not even unoccupied “prop” tents.
• Greenpeace has a point about Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple opening server farms fed by coal and nuclear power. This “clean tech” takes an awful lot of electricity.

• Seattle voters will have the chance to bring library service back from several years’ worth of drastic cuts. You know where I stand on this.
• Meanwhile, in the land of Jorge Juis Borges’ surreal library stories, the Argentine government has banned all book imports. The lame excuse is that they could contain dangerous levels of lead. Ebooks and their reading machines, and domestic reprints of foreign books, aren’t affected.
• The local Catholic Archdiocese, once a liberal “social gospel” bastion, has turned hard homophobic.
• Northwest fishermen worry about Japanese tsunami debris showing up in their waters. Talk about your deadliest catch.
• An activist group called Seattle’s greatest family-owned bakery an unfair employer, and staged a protest. Loyal customers staged a counter-protest. Cookies were tossed. Literally.
• The two African Americans who publicly claimed Seattle Police had stopped them for no good reason, got stopped by Seattle Police again.
• A dead orca in Washington waters has caused some to sing “Blame Canada.”
• The UW invented kidney dialysis. Now it’s working on what might replace it.
• The rise in cable-TV subscribers becoming former cable-TV subscribers has attracted even the financial community. One analyst hints there’d be even more cord-cutting, except that many folks are keeping cable subscriptions for Internet access.
• The alleged “liberal media” in a “liberal state” sure don’t seem to like Jay Inslee.
• We’d earlier mentioned that print newspaper ad revenues had sunk to 1984 levels. Someone took those figures, adjusted ‘em for inflation, and concluded newsprint ad money is actually at its lowest level since 1950. (The U.S. population then was about half what it is now.)
• Young adults aren’t just not reading print newspapers. They’re also driving a lot less and biking a lot more.
• I’m pretty sure the only people who read the Seattle Times editorials anymore are the bloggers who righteously trash them.
• “In Russia, a lack of men forces women to settle for less.”
• How can something that barely has 10 employees and has not apparently made a cent in profits be worth a billion dollars?

artist's rendering; via kiro-tv

• Millions in the making, the big Seattle waterfront roller coaster is finally on the way! Estimated opening: July 4th.
• You all need to read Judy Lightfoot’s piece at Crosscut about people forced to live in their vehicles at highway rest stops—even people with full time jobs.
• On a related note, the state’s (official) jobless rate has dropped just enough to disqualify the state’s unemployed from 26 weeks’ worth of extended benefits.
• The state’s finances, services, and basic sense of humanity are swirling down the drain. Tim Eyman, of course, doesn’t give a shit.
• Dept. of Correction: It turns out public breastfeeding is already legal in Wash. state. Yesterday’s “Random Links” piece implied otherwise.
• Queen Anne Books has got itself a lucky new owner.
• It’s official: there’s a whooping cough epidemic in our state.
• Seattle Center asked the public for input on new public-space designs for the place. Only they announced it on Tuesday with a deadline of Wednesday. And we’re asked to choose between three plans, all designed by out-of-state firms, and all reeking of “world class” emotional coldness.
• Three deserving local theatre troupes will get to share the performance space at the bottom of a new mixed-use development on Capitol Hill.
• Who doesn’t look at a bizarre press release issued on April 1 with at least a little skepticism? The Puget Sound Business Journal, that’s who. (The hoax was from Ivar’s, announcing a 100-flavor chowder dispenser to rival the Coca-Cola Freestyle pop machine.)
• The Mariners are acting all NIMBY-y about getting a basketball/hockey arena next door.
• As the Seattle Times finishes up its recounting of every complaint anyone’s got against Amazon (including some pretty serious allegations), labor advocacy group Working Washington is inviting people to register their own snark on the etailer’s sales page for a “Fair Share Pie Cutter.”
• Despite the plethora of comic book-based movies and related merch, actual comic book sales have collapsed in recent years (even more than newspapers). But one reviewer sees a ray of hope emerging amidst the pall of gloom. It’s the new higher-res iPad.
• Just declassified and in hot demand, it’s all the data from the 1940 Census.
• Celebrity-snark writer Dustin Rowles depicts sitcom has-been Kirk Cameron as a complete douchebag, albeit one of the pseudo-Christian rather than the regular Hollywood variety.
• Morley Safer snarks at the bigtime art world. New York mag’s Jerry Saltz snarks back.
• Your daily dose of political outrage: Paul Buchheit at Buzzflash lists some “preposterous but persistent conservative myths;” Stephen D. Foster Jr. at Addicting Info lists 40 particularly disgusting quotes by GOP politicos demonstrating the “values Republicans want to destroy America with;” and Laura Clawson at Daily Kos recounts the utter failure of a particularly dorky would be right-wing sting operation against a commuity organizing group.
• And let’s all get ready for Easter with (direct from the Betty Crocker Kitchens) the original “Bunny Butt Cake.”

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.)

The Seattle Times‘ series about Amazon.com’s corporate culture continued on Monday with a long recounting of the company’s often prickly relations with book publishers large and small; especially small.

I’ve written in the past that the six U.S. mega-publishers could sure use a “creative disruption” (to use a hoary techno-Libertarian cliché), to sweep away their hidebound old ways and become more nimble, more competitive, and more profitable.

These same new rules, once everybody’s figured out what they are, could also help out smaller imprints.

But in the meantime (which could seem like an eternity in dot-com years but the blink of an eye in book-biz years), Amazon should not push too far against the “long tail” publishers and distributors who make its “World’s Largest Selection” slogan possible.

It’s bad for the publishers and their authors.

It’s bad for the industry as a whole.

And it’s bad for Amazon.

The e-tail giant had better realize, and soon, that it doesn’t have the market muscle to push its suppliers around like Walmart does.

Except to owners of Kindle machines (which are hardwired to only download commercial ebooks if they’re from Amazon), everything its core media business sells can be bought from other sources, just a mouse click or a search-engine hunt away.

Also, many of these smaller publishers have loyal niche clienteles.

All they have to do is offer lower prices or “customer loyalty” incentives to folks buying books on the publishers’ own sites.

Or, the small pubishers could offer all sorts of “customer loyalty” incentives to their direct buyers.

It’s to Amazon’s own fiscal interest to not appear like a bully here.

Today’s lesson in why traditional websites can’t support professional local news begins at a blog called Seattle Media Maven.

It’s run as a moonlighting project by Maureen Jeude, who’s got a day job in the Seattle Times’ “strategic marketing research” department. While the blog is her own endeavor, Jeude often uses it to tout the Times and its online ventures.

Thusly, Jeude ran a piece last month plugging the Times‘ website as one of the top local media sites in the nation. She posts stats and a graph showing the site garnering about 1 million page views per day (twice that of the local runner-up, KING5.com), and 1 million unique visitors per month.

This means each Times online reader reads an average of just one article a day.

Further, if each of the 240,000 Times print buyers (not counting “pass along” readership) read only the average four stories on each edition’s front page, that alone would essentially match the Times’ online readership.

And that online readership is the 16th biggest of any U.S. newspaper.

•

Elsewhere in medialand, three research studies in the past year (by A.C. Nielsen, the FCC, and Pew Research) each purport that news sites comprise only a small percentage of total Web traffic, and that local news sites comprise only a small percentage of that.

One industry analyst, Tom Grubisich, says the studies fatally discount the role of links and summaries of news sites’ stories on other sites such as Facebook.

Another analyst, Joshua Benton, insists that news sites’ readerships make up in community influence what they lack in sheer numbers.

• The local progressive organizing group Fuse Washington has put up The Slanted Times,  a spot-on jibe at our local really-conservative-but-pretending-to-be-centrist monopoly daily. Why bother? Because, as the anonymous authors put it…

The Seattle Times editorial board advocates for the rich and powerful in Washington state every day. They have used their editorial page to attack any proposal that would lay a finger on the 1% or their expansive stock portfolios. At the same time, they do their best to ensure kids, seniors, and low-income families absorb billions in budget cuts year after year.

• Meanwhile, Hugo Kugiya at Crosscut explores territories we’ve traipsed through lately—the steady decline of SeattlePI.com, in terms of staffing and quantity of compelling content. A newsroom that needs to get bigger is instead getting smaller. And the site’s whole premise of “anything for page views” is dumb and unproductive. It needs new blood at the top, to reorganize it into a full service local news source—or as close to one as chintzy web advertisers will support. In the long term, it needs to become a strong enough “brand” that it could eventually command a subscription price, at least in web-app and tablet form. In the short term, that will require investing in the site’s content beyond what web ads, alone and in their current form, can pay for. If Hearst won’t do it, they should turn the brand over to local operators who will.
• Seattle Central Community College administrators tried to craft new campus-use policies, specifically to ban Occupy Seattle from coming back. The college brass tried to rush the new rules through while the college was on spring break, and fewer students (and pro-Occupy faculty) would be around to speak out. That tactic has failed. A full schedule of hearings will be held.
• It turns out the right-wing sleaze machine does have one use for African American voters—as a tactical “wedge” in anti-gay-marriage campaigns.
• Libertarian Wet Dreams Dept.: BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay says it’s looking into ways to operate outside the reach of the copyright police, even by running server computers inside unpiloted drone airplanes. All this impractical tech, just so doodz can keep downloading free video games and porn?

esquire.com

Welcome to daylight savings time. Welcome to the “light” half of the year. Welcome to the little piece of manmade trickery that tells us the worst of the cold, dark time is over. Even though it sure didn’t look or feel like it today.

• Esquire’s “Eat Like a Man” department ran a survey asking readers’ “most life changing burger joint.” The winner: our own Dick’s, by a mile. (Also note the beautiful Dennis Hopper-esque photo topping the story.)
• Danny Westneat notes that the Republican state senate coup-mongers’ state budget cuts essential services even more brutally than the competing Democratic house budget. Westneat concludes that this totally destroys the longstanding Republican meme that all you need for a balanced budget is to get rid of some vaguely defined “waste.”
• KOMO headline: “Car slams into dentist office, driver extricated.” It may take you a second to realize that’s not “extracted.”
• The Huskies, despite their regular season prowess, are not in the NCAA men’s basketball tourney. The only NW team in it is Gonzaga.
• More and more advertisers desert right-wing hate radio. Not just Limbaugh but the whole bigoted, bullying gaggle. Will the whole genre collapse under the weight of its own need for continued extremeness? (And remember, this is the only audience today’s Republican Party gives a damn about.)
• The next time some techno-pundit tells you that every organization (from the news media to local government) must become more like whatever’s the social media darling of the week, just remember the example of Twitter. A very famous name. A very popular site. A very pathetic business.
• Jean “Mobius” Giraud R.I.P.: The king of “clear line” Euro comix art seamlessly blended slick, sophisticated senses of draftsmanship and composition with classic fanboy adventure genre subjects (Sergio Leone-esque cowboys, space opera, sword and sorcery, erotica, even proto-steampunk). He also cofounded Metal Hurlant, the way-influential magazine known here as Heavy Metal. Too bad most U.S. media obits of Giraud only wanted to discuss the Hollywood movies he’d consulted on or which were “inspired” by his work (typical myopia).

supervillain.wordpress.com

american institute of architects—seattle

• If we must get rid of High School Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, it ought to be replaced by a municipal “back yard,” not yet another municipal “front lawn.” Consider this while perusing some architects’ proposal to turn the site into a “Seattle Jelly Bean.”
• Back from the dead like a James Bond villain, it’s the Wash. state film tax-break program! Resurrected by the Legislature, just before the end of the regular session. Will this mean at least a few “set in Seattle” movies might actually, you know, be made here?
• We’ve said that one possible fiscal end game for the Seattle Times could involve it becoming subsidized by local business bigwigs, either directly or via vanity ads. Here’s an example of the latter: Boeing’s in-house magazine Frontiers, which will now be a monthly ad insert in the Times.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #1: Mr. Bellevue Square just lost another anti-public-transit crusade.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #2: Professional faux-populist power monger Tim Eyman just lost another anti-common-sense crusade.
• “Tukwila now has the most diverse school district in the nation.”
• Here’s another tribute to art director extraordinaire Dale Yarger, by my fellow Fantagraphics refugee Robert Boyd.
• Elaine Blair at the NY Review of Books compares single-male characters in novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women) to the male authors of these novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women readers).
• Arts activist Scott Walters takes aim at the so-called “progressive” nonprofit arts community, in which a few big institutions grab most of the funding and expect the rest of us to wait for the wealth to “trickle down.”
• Here’s a wake-up call to all the defeatist lefties I know who still believe, as one friend once wrote, that “Fox News is the most popular TV channel.” In reality, “Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News in the 2011 Ratings.” (Yet still, this aging, shrinking audience is the only audience today’s Republican Party bothers with!)
• A long, cute infographic compares Apples® to apples.

storebrandsdecisions.com

• The Capitol Hill Seattle blog has a handy dandy map showing the retailers who’ve applied to sell hard liquor as soon as the state liquor stores close. They include Safeway, Kroger’s QFC and Fred Meyer, Walgreens, Target, Albertsons, and of course Costco. Indie stores that have applied include Pete’s Wines on Fairview, Full Throttle Bottles in Georgetown, Ralph’s in Belltown, Pioneer Square Market, Madison Market Co-op, Wine World in Wallingford, and Viet Wah in the International District. Bartell’s, PCC, Whole Foods, Rite Aid, and Trader Joe’s have not applied, at least not yet.
• We must say goodbye to David Ishii, who owned a leading Pioneer Square bookstore for some 30 years.
• Finally! Some Dems in the state Legislature are suing to overturn the “supermajority” requirement for any tax reform bills.
• Higher parking rates in greater downtown: could they actually be increasing business at local merchants?
• A wholesale donut bakery in Georgetown was found with flies, rat poop, and snail near the food products. (Doubles the nutritional value.)
• Andrew Breitbart RIP: The far-right blogger, speaker, and all around bully died of an apparent sudden heart attack. How does one humanely grieve a man who did the exact opposite to others?
• Playboy wants to run a nightclub on Richard Branson’s proposed private tourist space station. Because nothing says gentlemanly posh quite like being stuck in a steel tube which may or may not feature artificial gravity.