capitolhillseattle.com

• Initial designs are now out for the mixed-use megaproject that will replace (while preserving the facades of) the Bauhaus coffeehouse block on East Pine Street. Damn, that looks ugly.
• Dominic Holden thoroughly skewers the regional political meme that roads-only transportation advocates, corporate-welfare boosters, and blockers of affordable housing somehow constitute “the adults in the room.”
• Last Sunday’s Seattle Times depicted south King County as the region’s new nexus of “diversity.” Monday’s Times depicted the same spot as the region’s new nexus of poverty. (Note: This post originally, incorrectly, said both articles had run in Sunday’s paper.)
• SeattlePI.com Shrinkage Watch: The thin gruel of the ex-newspaper site just got thinner with the disappearance of Casey McNerthney, who just got poached by KIRO-TV.
• Whatever happened to the great Seattle tradition of quasi-illegal “guerrilla art”? Terror paranoia, among other things.
• Seattle’s next best hope for a neo-Sonics basketball team: the notion that the NBA might consider an expansion team, once commissioner and not-so-covert Seattle enemy David Stern is finally gone.
• You know the mini-scandal that Disney marketeers were transforming the heroine from Brave into the sexy princess type that, in the film, she overtly refused to be? They’re backing off from that now.
• In The Office (US version), Staples was often name-dropped as Dunder Mifflin Paper’s biggest Goliath-esque rival. Turns out that was paid product placement. And a Staples subsidiary is now selling official Dunder Mifflin branded office products.
• If you’ve followed the Silvio Berlusconi sex and corruption scandals, you can expect there’s a lot of colorful Italian political slang.
• Timothy Noah insists economic inequality is as much a matter of a “skills-based gap” (i.e., the “educated class” pulling away from the traditional working class) as it is a matter of 1-percenters’ greed.
• Earl Ofari Hutchinson invites you to continue to “yawn” at the newest batch of trumped-up pseudo-scandals attacking Obama.
• In this digital era, one analog institution has curiously survived. I speak of shortwave radio stations broadcasting coded messages interspersed with strange musical “signature” sounds, a.k.a. “numbers stations.”
• Creepy, kitschy Japanese pop culture continues to forge new ground with “human doll cloning,” dolls with 3-D printed scans of real people’s faces.
• Data analysis meets film nerd-dom in a 2-D chart of which film sequels outperformed their predecessors, in terms of Rotten Tomatoes fan approval.

boxofficequant.com

No.

And that’s an official, final no, for the next year at least.

factmag.com

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

upwardspiral.blogs.com

No.

And from the looks of it, it’s one big no for next season and the indefinite future.

Yep, NBA commissioner David Stern played all of us for fools.

Again.

We had been what Los Angeles has been to the NFL brass, nothing but a bargaining ploy.

Drat.

And double drat.

capitol records via wikipedia

• Among the stories I missed by waiting a week to post Random Links: Heart’s well-deserved induction into the Rock n’ Roll Hall o’ Fame.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 108): No. But at least we have a date when we might (repeat, might) find out one way or the other: May 13.
• Seattle’s on-and-off-again Fourth of July festivities are on again.
• Seattle’s interim police chief says he’s really, really, really sorry for the video he made mocking the homeless back in the ’80s, using police training-video production gear.
• Is “alternative” music too female-unfriendly? Or is it just corporate “alternative” music festivals that leave the women out?
• The SunBreak explains just why privatized liquor costs more than state-liquor-store liquor did.
• Starbucks is among the companies asking for expanded U.S. tax breaks on overseas revenues.
• Washington’s attorney general wants you to know that T-Mobile’s “no-contract” cell phone plans can still cost you as much as traditional ones.
• Paul Krugman asks whether no one in power even gives a damn about the long term unemployed; while Jared Bernstein at Salon says rising income inequality can’t be fixed unless the campaign-finance system is fixed first.
• The Boston bombing media circus was a pathetic spectacle that continues to spread misinformation.
• Bad news everyone: Futurama is canceled, again, perhaps this time forever (but that’s what they said the last time).
• Speaking of shows (and characters) which have come back from the dead, the once-dead online revivals of All My Children and One Life to Live have miraculously re-revived like Lazarus Dixie. Episodes stream on Hulu.com starting Monday.
• The film itself has gone on to the big Netflix stream in the sky cloud, but the original website advertising Space Jam lives on!
• One or more of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors had been taking female writers out of a page about “American novelists” and into a page about “American women novelists.” But people complained, and the sex-segregation has stopped. This isn’t much different from indie bookstores (like Seattle’s Left Bank Books) separating “women’s fiction” from “general fiction.”
• Can we really blame the whole ’08 economic kablooey on a few coked-up financiers in London?
• AlterNet reminds you that, yes, your bad memories of George W. Bush are fully justified.

seattle dept. of transportation

• King Street Station, one of Seattle’s two historic railway passenger terminals (and the one still in use by Amtrak) has looked so drab and awful for so long. In the pre-Amtrak desperate last years of private passenger rail, the Great Northern had “modernized” the main lobby with an acoustic-tile drop ceiling and other ill-informed touches. Now, after a half-decade of planning and reconstruction, the city and private partners have finally restored the room to its full grandeur. You can read all about it here. There’s a grand opening on Wed. 4/24, 11 a.m.
• In other grand-opening news, the “Old School Pinups” photo studio has one this Fri. 4/19, 5 p.m.-on, at 1922 Post Alley.
• Something I’ve learned first hand lately: Seattle’s current boom (glut?) of apartment construction hasn’t led to lower rents, but to ever-higher rents.
• In addition to the dilemmas of cabs. vs. “for hire” vehicles and Zipcar vs. Car2Go, now a new alternative appears in town. It’s semi-pro “ride sharing.”
• No, Seattle Times guest commenter Grace Gedye, online sexist trolls existed long before Facebook. But can the rising force of “Geek Girls” conquer and defeat ‘em once n’ for all?
• Another classic bowling alley bites the dust. It’s Robin Hood Lanes, in Edmonds since 1960.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet (Day 100)?: No. And we were supposed to have found out this weekend whether they’re coming back, at the NBA team owners’ annual hobnob session. But that vote’s been indefinitely delayed.
• We do know that any neo-Sonics would have to negotiate cable-TV carriage of their games with the Mariners, who just bought a controlling interest in Root Sports Northwest.
• The Oregon Ducks, aka “Nike U.,” have been slapped with NCAA penalties for football recruiting violations.
• Some Net-pundits are crowing about the simple but apparently devastating “spreadsheet error” at the heart of a 2010 think-tank study promoting “austerity economics” to attack government debt. If not for the faulty math, the study’s critics claim, the study’s claims would be seen as the nonsense they are. Yeah, but facts have seldom gotten in the way of “shock doctrine” partisans, before or since.
• Eco-Scare of the Week (non-fertilizer edition): Even before rising sea levels submerge many small Pacific islands, they’ll fatally disrupt those places’ fresh-water tables, making them uninhabitable.
• Scott Miller, R.I.P.: The Loud Family/Game Theory musician was a leading light in the ’80s power pop revival, as well as a top scholar/historian about the pop/rock sphere. For a limited time, his heirs are making six of his out-of-print albums available as free downloads.
• Blogger Nadine Friedman hates, hates, hates the latest Dove “real beauty” ad campaign. She claims it actually reinforces the standard corporate standards of female ideals.
• Aaron Steven Miller at Medium.com wants book publishers to take the lead in tech-ifying and social-media-ifying their operations, before Amazon completely crushes them. Of course, that would require book publishers to cease being, as Miller puts it…

…historically the stingiest, most fiscally conservative, most technologically resistant and investment-averse people ever, with the highest percentage of luddites per capita.

seatacmedia.org

Earlier this year, KUOW and MOHAI came up with a list of 25 “objects that tell Seattle’s story.”

They range from the obvious (a Boeing B-17, a poster announcing the Japanese-American internment, a Starbucks coffee cup) to the more obscure (an ancient, giant ground sloth).

A little more recently, SeattlePI.com ran a list of “25 things we miss in Seattle.”

These also ranged from the truly famous (the Lusty Lady sign, Frederick & Nelson’s window displays) to the lesser known (the Woodland Park Zoo’s nocturnal-creatures exhibit).

I’ve got my own list of Seattle pop culture icons. All of them are things I’ve personally seen or owned.

And yes, there are 25 of them. (Why break a routine that works?)

In no particular order, they are:

1. A Frederick & Nelson shopping bag.
2. A Dog House place mat.
3. A J.P. Patches plush doll.
4. A floppy disc of MS-DOS 1.0.
5. A P-I vending box.
6. Dr. Belding Scribner’s first artificial kidney machine.
7. The Kalakala.
8. Bud Tutmarc’s pioneering electrified pedal-steel guitar.
9. A Neptune repertory-cinema calendar.
10. A KJR “Fab 50″ newsletter/record chart.
11. A mascot costume for “Nordy,” the old Nordstrom children’s shoe department spokescritter.
12. A first pressing of Nirvana’s Bleach on vinyl.
13. A work of Northwest Coast native art; or, one of artist Preston Singletary‘s upscale “tributes” to Northwest Coast native art.
14. A Space Needle ball-point pen.
15. A set of Peter Bagge-designed “grunge rock pencils.”
16. A first-edition hardcover of Sophie Frye Bass’s book Pig-Tail Days in Old Seattle.
17. A Seattle Pilots pennant.
18. The Pike Place Market mural honoring pre-WWII Japanese-American farmers.
19. An Amazon.com shipping box with one of the company’s five early logos.
20. A piece of Kingdome debris.
21. An Ivar’s Acres of Clams kids’ menu.
22. A Smith Tower elevator car.
23. A Washington Mutual savings passbook.
24. The prototype 747.
25. A wooden miniature hydroplane.

via jerry beck at indiewire.com

• Jonathan Winters, 1925-2013: The groundbreaking comic actor was a made-it-look-easy genius at everything from improv to scripted character roles, from pathos-touched bits to pure zaniness. And his first and last film credits are both in cartoons.
• BuzzFeed lists 35 “Truths About Seattle.” Not all of them actually are true. Not everyone, for instance, works at Microsoft.
• If we really are witnessing the “Death of the PC,” it’s neither Microsoft’s nor Apple’s fault. It’s just that with so much PC use and even functionality centered on Web-based stuff, home users have fewer reasons to upgrade their hardware. (OK, maybe Windows 8 isn’t helping.)
• Seattle will have two teams this summer in the Women’s Premier Soccer League, which claims to be the “largest women’s league in the world” based on the number of teams (70, coast-to-coast). It will also field teams this season in Issaquah, Spokane, Eugene, and something called “Oregon Rush.” (The league’s more exclusive “Elite” division will also have a Seattle team this year, name to be announced.)
• Those forever out-of-order escalators in the Seattle Transit Tunnel have logged their first fatality.
• Bruch Nourish at the Seattle Transit Blog has an idea for improved transit across the Ship Canal: make the Fremont Bridge for transit (and bikes and walkers) only.
• Seattle and New York are vying to be the capital of “Big Data.” I’m still not clear just what “Big Data” is.
• Sports blogger Chuck Culpepper has a lovely remembrance of the late local college basketball coach Frosty Westering.
• Would anybody want to go to a hospital where nurses have to take unpaid overtime and no breaks?
• A British author claims “news is bad for you, and giving up reading it will make you happier.” I know this becuase I read it on a newspaper’s site.
• Reader’s Digest in bankruptcy: But does it still pay to increase your word power?
• Candy doesn’t make you fat. Or so a major candy-industry PR campaign would have you believe.
• The scandal isn’t that Mitch McConnell was caught talking like a scumbag. The problem is that McConnell is a scumbag.
• Having apparently grown tired of waging the War on Women, the Rabid Right is now waging a full-on War on Sex.
• Porn industry revenues have fallen by almost two thirds in the past eight years. The usual suspect: free online content. A less usual suspect: could audiences finally be tiring of formulaic, loveless mating exhibitions?
• Besides books (yes, really), the other legacy-media segment that’s best survived the digital-age “disruption” (a term I’ve already said I hate) is cable TV programming. But with more and more “cord cutters” among the populace, can the cable channels’ owners still demand their lucrative “bundling” deals with service providers?
• America’s most implausible entertainment export these days might be the popularity of subtitled Jon Stewart clips in China.
• Let’s close today with a guy who’s painstakingly made miniature models of iconic TV show settings.

david rosen, west seattle herald

• All the local mainstream media today believed you all were really really interested in the slow seaborne arrival of Bertha the boring machine.
• As you know, I normally loathe the term “world class,” particularly when used to describe something someone wants to impose on Seattle. But this might be the exception: Stunning Seattle, a project to festoon the city with “world class murals.”
• In my last Random Links post I neglected to mention the deaths of two longtime local politicos, campaign operative extraordinaire Blair Butterworth and former Seattle City Councilmember Cheryl Chow. Both, in their own ways, helped the cause of progress in the state and the city.
• Newspaper Shrinkage Watch: Starting June 1, the Aberdeen Daily World will now only print three days a week (Tue/Thu/Sat). Publishers promise they won’t fire any more reporters when they make this move.
• Art Thiel’s got a great piece in Seattle Business about the new Husky Stadium, and how the UW managed to get it built without state tax dollars. Among the tricks: The U sent out the construction bids at the nadir of the late 2000s real-estate slump, and got a cash windfall from the new Pac-12 Network.
• Paul Rosenberg at Alternet ponders whether “rational decision making” has become too unpopular in this country—not among the faux-populist teabaggers but among “the elites.”
• Every week, more ultra-rare film and TV material shows up online and within the film/video trading circuit. And for almost 10 years now, Film Threat‘s Phil Hall has kept track of it at his column “The Bootleg Files.”
• Fujifilm won’t make motion picture film any more.
• Intel’s supposedly working on an online-based alternative to cable TV. It probably won’t cost any less, though, because the big cable channels will want to collect the same “carriage fees” per subscriber.
• Meanwhile, Variety lists Microsoft and Amazon among the other companies “that pose the biggest threat to pay TV.”
• I’ll believe Leno is really being shown the door this time when I see it, and perhaps not even then. Supposedly it’ll be next February.
• Good news for everybody who hates those horrible, deliberately badly-written, how-to and self-help articles clogging up the top of various Google search results. Web-pundit Steve Floyd now proclaims that “search engine optimization” or “SEO,” that mystical pseudo-science of crafting useless web pages in order to game the search engines, “is dead.”
• The “Harlem Shake,” that 15-seconds-of-fame online video “meme,” was largely crafted and publicized by corporations.
• Allen Clifton at ForwardProgressives.com has assembled a handy series of compelling arguments you can use on your right-wing relatives.
• Finally, some beautiful, haunting images of Greek prostitutes by photojournalist Myrto Papadopoulos. They’re shown as regular (albeit beautiful) folks just trying to make it in a lousy economy.

• My ol’ colleague Art Chantry’s got a poster design listed as “object of the day” by the Smithsonian’s design museum. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
• One Reel wasn’t making an April Fool’s joke when it said it hadn’t rounded up enough sponsorship for a Fourth of July fireworks show.
• Metro Transit is in deep fiscal muck, again. It needs the Legislature’s help. Only the Legislature’s been taken held hostage by deliberate gridlockers.
• It’s that time of the year again, the time when we get to say the Mariners are 1.000.
• SeattlePI.com Shrinkage Watch: Four years after the death of the Post-Intelligencer, Ernie Smith at Medium.com looks at the paper’s online-only successor and sees “a shell of its former self” heavy with “ad-covered wire copy”:

Here’s a company that had a four-year head start to reinvent its model, its journalism, and its overall mission. And here’s what the business side has apparently been doing the whole time — figuring out new ways to run advertising on top of advertising on top of advertising… It shows how bereft of ideas the business side is for making money from journalism on the Internet.

• Can video game heroine Lara Croft be revamped to look less, well, gratuitious?
• Jiffy Mix, a good cheap product from a good responsible company.
• Tim Goodman at the Hollywood Reporter believes “the TV industry needs its version of Steve Jobs.” If there really were another Jobs out there (a polymath genius who can grok tech hardware, software, design, marketing, and management simultaneously), he or she would likely be working on ways not to save the TV industry as we know it but to further “disrupt” it (I know, a horrid term for a horrid phenomenon).

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

• Garance Franke-Ruta at the Atlantic wishes U.S. feminist demonstrators had more dignified, less confrontational visual icons under which they could march. Symbols like “Columbia,” the historic female representation of the nation/continent/hemisphere. Of course, there’s this little matter about how this icon is now best known as a movie-studio logo—now owned by Sony….
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 63): No. But Chris Hansen is taking names for a “priority ticket” waiting list.
• Do you wanna believe Knute Berger, who mourns the pending loss of certain local architectural landmarks to developers and their megabucks lawyers? Or David Moser at Citytank, who believes higher-density urban neighborhoods are the only way to keep lower-income folk from being shoved out to costly, car-dependent suburbs?
• Richard McIver, 1942-2013: The 12-year Seattle City Council vet, who was the lone “token black” on the district-less council, was a regular champion for civil-rights issues and for neighborhoods the city often took for granted. And he made a great foil for Grant Cogswell.
• Military officials don’t like a proposal in the state legislature to let “payday loan” companies trot out even more predatory lending products (which are often, but not solely, aimed at troops and their families).
• Yep, police still don’t want police reforms. But they insist it’s a “labor issue.”
• The Center School can again teach its “Citizenship and Social Justice” class. But the school district has imposed vague, unspecified restrictions on how it can be taught.
• Meanwhile, Ta-Nehishi Coates wants to remind you that even “good people” can turn out to be racists.
• Fret not, Tiffany Willis claims: America is irreversably “becoming more liberal.”
• Cord Jefferson at Gawker believes when journalism is only open to people who don’t need a paycheck, only people who already have money will be journalists; and, possibly, only stories of interest to people who already have money will be reported.

editorandpublisher.com

Former Seattle Times staffer Glenn Nelson has thoughts of his own about the paper’s pending online paywall (or, as he calls it, its “digital tin cup”).

Nelson mentions how, following his Times years, he served in several “subscription-model Internet startups.”

At those places, Nelson kept fretting that the Times would suddenly wake up and smell the digital coffee, then trot out online products based on the vast manpower the paper had (at the time) in sports, entertainment, food, and business coverage, and in photojournalism. (Nelson doesn’t think a better Times local-news site would have mattered, because “general news already was being rendered a commodity on the Internet.”)

These sites, had they been created, would have blown away any indie-startup competition.

But they never showed up.

•

Meanwhile, news-biz pundit Alan D. Mutter dissects why many people under the age of 45 don’t like print newspapers. It’s because they’re just too inconvenient to have around.

Mutter quotes venture-capital exec Mary Meeker as claiming…

…that young people don’t want to own CDs, haul around books, buy cars, carry cash, do their own chores, or be committed to a full-time job. Instead, they use their smartphones to buy, borrow, or steal media; rent shared cars at home and book shared rooms when they travel; hire people to buy groceries or cut the grass; and use apps from Starbucks and Target to pay for lattes and redeem coupons. Many of the digital natives even prefer short-term gigs that allow them to arrange their work around their life, rather than arrange their life around their work.

Actually, many younger (and older) adults would like full time jobs if there were any around to be gotten. But that’s beside the point here.

More important is Mutter’s observation that…

…The warmed-over digital fare offered by the typical newspaper falls well short of the expectations of two whole generations of consumers who are not only empowered by technology but also damn well sure of how to get what they want.

via vintageseattle.org and capitolhillseattle.com

• The old Club Broadway disco on Capitol Hill, previously a Masonic Scottish Rite Cathedral, was torn down ages ago, leaving only a “stairway to nowhere.” Surprisingly, given all the other re-development activity nearby, the lot’s going to stay vacant for the foreseeable future.
• How do you honestly talk about the humanities in high school, when one parent’s complaint means you can’t say anything about “racism and social justice”?
• Meanwhile, Knute Berger has a great piece at Seattle magazine about our fair city’s unfair past; specifically, explicit racial discrimination in housing. It existed openly and legally (with contractual “covenants” binding home buyers to never resell to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or even Jews) as late as 1968. Berger notes that…

In 1964, Seattle voters soundly defeated an “open housing” ordinance that would have let anyone live anywhere. It lost by more than 2-to-1.

• You know how Amazon’s now building three 50-story towers on the Toyota of Seattle, King Theater, and Sixth Avenue Motor Inn blocks. But word just got out that the e-tail giant has options to buy three nearby blocks from the Clise family, who’ve owned the lots since the 1930s. One of these houses the Hurricane Cafe, which for 19 years has carried on the 24-hour dining tradition of the legendary Dog House that preceded it (without, alas, the previous joint’s class).
• Jon Talton wishes Boeing execs would go on an “apology tour” to their workers, the Puget Sound area, and their shareholders, expressing their sorriness over pretty much everything they’ve done this past decade.
• In where-are-they-now? news, ex-Nirvana drummer Chad Channing is back with a new band, Before Cars.
• Gonzaga men’s basketball: #1 in the nation. UW men’s basketball: don’t ask.
• A Republican apologizes for something! It’s for claiming that bicycles pollute just like cars.
• Pot as a business model goes over well in Yakima.
• There are two pending death-penalty cases in King County. They’re both now on hold.
• Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon asks, “Did the Internet kill Girls Gone Wild?” The answer, for good or ill, is no. Joe Francis, founder of the public-nudity video label, is simply going into bankruptcy protection to weasel out of money he owes to a Vegas casino magnate. It’s a personal matter, not directly related to the company.
• Morrissey is still a self-righteous egomaniac, but at least he’s a morally consistent self-righteous egomaniac.
• An LA record-store chain is selling its own digitized versions of out-of-print LPs for download. The company claims it’s legal (it sets aside a portion of each sale into an escrow account, to be sent to copyright claimants if they ask). But is it right?

• Seattle artist Ellen Ziegler’s mom was a ballet dancer—and a onetime girlfriend of the great Mexican comic actor Cantinflas. Ziegler’s turning this story into a very-limited-edition art book.
• In other news about local women and art and books and images of hotness, Charlotte Austin and Ciolo Thompson have created The Better Bombshell. In it, a variety of writers and artists of both genders contemplate that age-old issue of female role models and what they should be now.
• Online “cyber-bullying” isn’t just for teens anymore. The disgraced now-former Snohomish County executive did it too.
• The Oatmeal explains why “How to Suck at Your Religion.” (Essentially: if you preach brotherhood but practice bigotry, etc….)
• The drive to preserve the Bauhaus coffeehouse’s building, by getting it named an official historic landmark: rejected.
• The lawsuit challenging the Sonics arena scheme: rejected.
• Even Republicans believe Tim Eyman’s “lying whore” comment against Gov. Inslee went too far.
• PONCHO, granddaddy of Seattle arts fundraising groups (and inventor of the “charity auction”), is no more.
• Can private tech colleges, charging $30,000 or more for degree programs, really solve Wash. state’s learning gap?
• Eastern Washington, now with more radioactive sludge.
• Life imitates Portlandia, at least 30 times.
• Chuck Thompson at the New Republic derides microbrews, and the brewpubs who sell them, as icons of silly urban gentrificaiton. But they’re really, really tasty icons of silly urban gentrification.)
• The sad tale of the “food critic on Food Stamps” finally has a happy ending. Ex-Tacoma News Tribune restaurant reviewer Ed Murrieta finally found a job, after spending years among the long-term unemployed. He now writes blurbs for Sacramento’s tourism board.
• In Virginia, a white mom wants white kids not to have to read books about past racial violence.
• I know I’m not the only one who still remembers LaserDiscs, those 12-inch analog video discs that were the best way to see movies at home in their day.
• Here’s an artistic vision of a future car-free Manhattan, funded by (who else?) a car company.