(Just a little dose of random-osity for you all today.)

• Everyday household chemicals (antihistamines, cleaners, flame retardants) become toxins when they get into our rivers.
• Flu and whooping cough have closed an entire high school.
• My colleague/compatriot/rival in the local history trade, Paul Dorpat, got named a “Living Landmark” by the preservation group Historic Seattle.
• The next waterfront traffic reroute begins today.
• The (Ron) Paulines may make procedural trouble at the state GOP convention.
• Noam Chomsky warns the Occupiers they’d better prepare to be in it for the long haul.

meowonline.org

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

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

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

designboom.com

• The resurgent micro-car movement has a new achievement, the micro RV!
• Lightning, mudslides. Just another mid-spring day in Seattle.
• Gov. Gregoire takes the bold step of insisting Wash. state needs new tax revenue, now that she’s no longer running for anything.
• A (female) anti-choice activist was invited to speak at the UW by campus Catholics. The lecture’s deliberately provocative title: “Do Women Have Too Many Rights?”. Pro-choice women, naturally, showed up to protest and to put the truth to the speaker’s lies. Things did not go smoothly.
• Roger Valdez at the Seattle Transit Blog suggests citizens take control of preserving neighborhood landmarks by getting together to buy them.
• Developers of the big (175-foot) waterfront ferris wheel are making sure it’ll attract riders year round. Riders will be in “enclosed gondolas, equipped with heating and air conditioning.”
• Darn, those proposed new Amazon office towers would be mighty big n’ slick.
• Boeing’s Wash. state employment may peak this year at about 83,000, then dwindle.
• Health Scare of the Day: Wazzu researchers believe exposure to toxic chemicals might lead to a risk of ovarian cancer, a risk that could be passed on to your great-granddaughters.
• It’s the end of an era for non-NY/LA/SF based national media. Playboy is moving its last Chicago-based operations to LA. The Chicago Tribune even published an editorial about it.
• I don’t always follow ‘em, but you might try blogger Barb Sawyers’ “15 Ways to Write Tight.”
• The Starz series Magic City is having a hard time finding actresses and extras in Miami who could pass for women living in 1959 (i.e., without implants).
• I was at the Prole Drift art gallery this past First Thursday. Saw a big painting of what looked a lot like a dead mall. A desolate exurban landscape. A big, nearly empty parking lot. Long, lo-rise buildings with neither windows nor signs. A main entrance at the center. I told the gallery owners I was in a Facebook group of dead mall enthusiasts. They quickly told me the painting was really of a modern prison.

buddy bunting, via prole drift gallery

• 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.

• “Black Sun,” Isamu Noguchi’s donut shaped sculpture at Volunteer Park, hasn’t just inspired a Soundgarden song. Now it’s also getting its own postage stamp! (UPDATE: Turns out the stamp was issued way back in ’05. I’m even less astute about philately than I am about other topics.)
• Funhouse update: Yes, the defiantly un-cleaned-up punk club in Lower Queen Anne will be evicted, and the building razed for redevelopment, effective this Halloween. Th Funhouse owners are looking for a new location.
• When last we looked, Microsoft was suing Barnes & Noble, claiming its Nook e-book machine violated MS-owned patents. Now, MS is buying a piece of the Nook operation.
• What’s harder to find around these parts than a Thunders fan? A non-geezer-age Republican who liked Romney more than Ron Paul during this primary/caucus season.
• The rainy winter = plenty of hydro power in the coming months.
• As we remember the Seattle World’s Fair and its vision for a World of Tomorrow, a real-life “City of the Future” is being built from scratch in Portugal. Intended to house 150,000 residents, it’s planned to be a “techno-paradise of energy conservation.” Thousands of sensors will monitor and regulate everything from traffic on the streets to faults in the water supply.
• Courtney Love can’t get “completion insurance” for film roles, and the music business is in freefall. With only fashion modeling left to actively maintain her celebrity presence, she’s added a new line, that of visual artist. Samples of her debut exhibition could invite comparisons to the crayon drawings of a child-psychiatry patient.
• Delta Airlines hopes to cushion itself against high fuel prices by buying its own oil refinery.
• Last month was the 60th anniversary of the first toy ad on U.S. television. It was for the original version of Mr. Potato Head (kids had to supply their own potatoes).
• The latest print mag in fiscal rough seas: The American Prospect, for two decades one of progressive America’s top sources of news n’ analysis.
• Anti-dumping tariffs work. They’re causing Chinese companies to open factories in the U.S.
• A London department store’s offering a “luxury champagne lollipop” covered with real gold flakes. Of all the one-percenty things in the world, could this be the one-percentiest?
• Amazingly, I still have to explain to people that I hate existing in freelance-writing hell and I want to get out of it by any means necessary. Perhaps this item, by a guy who got out of the racket, will help these folks get it.

• 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?

casey mcnerthney, seattlepi.com

• Will the student-made, privately-financed, but oversize Lake City Way bike rack be allowed to stay?
• Happier real estate news for a change: El Centro de la Raza’s affordable-housing project on Beacon Hill is finally a go.
• Cornish College to Mike Daisey: No honorary degree for you!
• Sasha Pasulka at Geekwire says Seattle dot-coms really need to brush up on their marketing to users. I have an additional idea, for dot-coms here and elsewhere: Pay a living wage to the people who make the content (you know, the stuff people actually see when they log onto your site), not just the coders and the execs.
• Does anybody really want to live in “America’s #1 city for hipsters“?
• The U District’s Metro Cinemas tenplex has been sold to a Robert Redford-led consortium.
• One of the big Republicans in the State Senate wants to eliminate medical assistance to the poor, while he himself gets monthly disability payments. He sez, of course, that he really deserves the aid; while those pesky poor people are only sick because of “poor lifestyle choices” they’ve made.
• Martin H. Duke at the Seattle Transit Blog offers up one way how non-subsidized, affordable urban housing comes to exist…

…In the long term today’s affordable housing comes from yesterday’s luxury flats, and cutting off the supply of the latter will deny our children the former in the absence of massive, unsustainable public subsidy.

• The “Painter of Light” has now gone into the light.
• In what Jezebel.com claims to be a “revolutionary” business venture, three business students at a German college have placed ads for “the world’s first free sex brothel for women,” with themselves as the volunteer gigolos. They say they’ve had five “clients” thus far, out of 80 email inquiries. I wouldn’t call it a “business” per se, as no money’s involved. Rather, it’s a marketing operation, with these guys promising they’ll satisfy the women while making no demands of their own.
• Looks like it’s going to take court action to stop Michigan’s right-wing monopoly government from essentially turning that state into a dictatorship.
• Mobutu Sese Seko at Gawker decodes decades of right-wing racist-code-word politics, and sees them culminating in the backlash campaign to defame the Florida shooting victim.
• Lynn Parramore at Alternet insists big corps. are not “job creators” but rather instigators of layoffs, offshoring, and massive wage cuts; and will probably continue to be so.
• Rick Ungar at Forbes (yes, Forbes!) offers a simple answer to the health care crisis: Single-payer plans, established at the state level. He says this “dose of socialism” would be a boon to businesses in states that adopt it.
• The Economist has found at least one dead shopping center that’s being put to new use. It’s in San Antonio, and it’s become the HQ of a web hosting company. We already did this in Everett, where Fluke Manufacturing turned an old big-box strip mall into an electronic test-equipment factory. (Too bad they didn’t call the place “Ye Olde Mall.”)
• Neuroscientists claim stories “stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.” How to intrepret this: not as another excuse for the “eat your broccoli” definition of book reading; but as a lure, a promise that fiction gives you mental/emotional turn-ons of a kind you can’t get from games or movies.

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

t.j. mullinax, yakima herald-republic

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

sherriequilt.blogspot.com

• Arts consultant Colleen Dilenschneider believes museums need to stop depending on huge blockbuster shows and do more to build regular day-to-day audiences.
• Sorry to say, but the Village Green Nursery in West Seattle isn’t out of the underwater-mortgage woods yet.
• It took a year-long special investigation to determine that no, an instructional assistant at a Seattle elementary school did not kiss a student’s foot.
• Sometimes whole swaths of the universe can coalesce at a single moment, such as a meeting on whether to allow a McDonald’s at Sea-Tac Airport.
• Here are more pix of the new 520 bridge, images that are far prettier than the real thing will ever be.
• And here’s a pic of the new Capitol Hill mixed-use project with live-theater spaces on the ground floor, an image far prettier than that real thing will ever be.
• The bid to keep the NBA’s Kings in Sacramento (and hence out of Seattle) has hit a few snags; while a new developer has a new arena scheme, that would be built on land he doesn’t own and isn’t for sale.
• State Sen. Val Stevens, tireless opponent of gay rights and corporate-lobbyist suckup extraordinaire, is retiring. Fun fact: Stevens used to be a director of ALEC, the infamous megabucks lobby group that supplies right-wing state legislators across the country with pre-written extremist legislation.
• Syndrome of the day: Now you’re supposed to worry about yourself if you keep too many files on your computer.
• Jim Hightower has more details about the right wing war against the Post Office.
• James Silver at the Atlantic claims perhaps 1 in 10 Wall Street operatives is a “psychopath.”
• The story of a movie song, and the need to acquire the right to its use, is a tale that meanders through Iran, France, Portugal, Florida, Connecticut, a leaking boat, and the cast of As the World Turns, until it stops with a retired female airline pilot.
• We close with fun ’60s pop-star collage covers from 16 magazine.

via boingboing.net

• As a treat for those of you who actually read these things (and I know there are at least a few of you out there), here’s the original version of the song that was at the center of last night’s Mad Men season premiere. It’s “Zou Bisou Bisou.” It was originally recorded in 1960 by Gillian Hills. One of the stars of the French “ye ye” genre, she also appeared in the landmark British films Beat Girl, Blow Up, and A Clockwork Orange.
• Questionable medical study of the day: Somebody says regularly eating chocolate can make you thinner.
• Here’s the site for the folks who want to bring the Seattle monorail project back from the dead. (By sticking with the previous monorail proponents’ planned Ballard to West Seattle route, they’re also inheriting its high cost, requiring two major all-new bridges.)
• Here’s WashDOT’s CGI video of how the new 520 bridge will look. Without, you know, the highway noise or smell.
• And here’s what Amazon’s proposed three new high rises would look like.
• “Unemployed Nation” is a series of “hearings,” in which the mayor, city council, and others will “listen to the men and women who have lost their livelihoods and more.” The sessions are Friday afternoon at the UW’s Kane Hall and Saturday afternoon at City Hall.
• There’s a new site up helping locals find affordable rental housing.
• The fired transgender Miss Universe Canada contestant from Vancouver would like you to think of her as “a woman—with a history.” (The protest petition is now online.)
• How to make money despite being in the news business: A Houston Chronicle society reporter was outed for moonlighting as a stripper. Apparently at least as much for the money as for any undercover writing gig (though she has made a pseudonymous blog about her stripping life).
• Under the British common-law heritage, prostitution per se has been quasi-legal in Canada. But businesses facilitating prostitution have been banned. Now, the province of Ontario’s highest court has approved legalizing brothels. The common-sense reason: it’s better for a sex worker “to work indoors, in a location under her control.”
• Another country where hooking is legal, but making money from other people’s hooking isn’t: France. That’s where the ex-Intl. Monetary Fund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, already disgraced from sexual assault charges, has been accused of involvement in a pimping ring based at luxury hotels. (I know people who believe those IMF/World Bank guys have always been pimps for the corporate elite, but this is something different.)
• Big Brother Dept.: A public school district in Brazil is issuing school-uniform T shirts with computer chips sewn in, capable of tracking every student’s every move.
• If you believe the New Yorker, the most influential and sleaziest newspaper in Britain isn’t owned by Murdoch.
• Even before the Legislature revived state tax breaks for filmmakers, one feature project (from a local writer-director) was already underway. And it’s got such great stars—Lee Majors! Gary Busey! Margot Kidder! Edward Furlong! Seahawks player Marshawn Lynch! I tell you, I sense a date with Oscar!

• We’ve got the indie alcohol entrepreneurs. We’ve got the apples (though perhaps not the right kinds). So let’s get a bigtime hard cider industry going in Wash. state already!
• The Central Cinema, which insists it needs to serve beer and wine to adult patrons at screenings, to survive, will apparently get to keep doing so. Even during all-ages screenings.
• Dept. of Just Sayin’: In three years, it will be a novelty to find a new hiphop artist who’s not white. Like with jazz after 1965, or with soul after 1985.
• Death Cab for Cutie (you know, the quasi-local band whose singer now lives in L.A. (until recently with Zoey Deschanel)) has entitled its spring 2012 tour “Return to Bellingham.” The tour does not actually include a show in Bellingham.
• Does current Seattle zoning need to be revised, to require more off-street parking in new developments? The Seattle Transit Blog apparently doesn’t think so, at least in one instance.
• Knute Berger looks at Seattle Center development schemes and would really like someone to explain them in non-buzzword-talk.
• If you know them, you love them, and you just can’t get enough of George Tsutakawa’s fountain sculptures. Seattle gallery owner John Braseth tracked one down in Indiana, and is arranging to have it fixed up and placed somewhere in town.
• There are a few non-Deja Vu strip clubs left in the region. Just not many.
• Oliver Willis wants more real progressives running for office, and wants them to actually “stand for something“…
• …while Chris Mooney at AlterNet thinks he’s figured a way progs could successfully appeal to “the right-wing brain.”
• The Economist notes that divorce, abortion, unwed pregnancy, and violent crime are all way down in the U.S. these days. So, the essay asks, why are Republicans still exhorting about “moral decline“? Perhaps because U.S. church attendance is also way down.
• Naomi Wolf insists elite private K-12 schools are bad for America and even bad for the kids who get sent there…
• …while Adam Levin at HuffPost suggests the Feds consider ordering a cap on public-college tuition, so taxpayer-supported universities don’t become only for the 1 percenters.
• Blogger “Angry Black Lady” really doesn’t like the Republican woman who claims the Democrats are just making up the whole “Republican war on women” meme.
• It wasn’t just Marx. Keynesians and other macroeconomists are also often guilty of forgetting the human factor in their systems constructs.

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.

As promised, here are the pix of my Sunday Amtrak-trek to the not so naughty border town of Bellingham.

The journey is beautiful. You should take it early and often. WiFi, a snack car, legroom, scenery galore, and all with no driving.

The trestle over Chuckanut Bay just might be one of the great rail experiences of this continent. It really looks like as if train is running straight across the water’s surface.

The Bellingham Amtrak/Greyhound station is just a brief stroll from Fairhaven, the famous town-within-a-town of stately old commercial buildings, and a few new buildings made to sort of look like the old ones.

My destination was in one of the pseudo-vintage buildings. It’s Village Books, a three-story repository of all things bookish.

Why I was there: to give a slide presentation about my book Walking Seattle.

Why people 80 miles away wanted to hear somebody talk about the street views down here? I did not ask. I simply gave ‘em what they wanted.

Some two dozen Bellinghamsters braved the sunbreaks punctuated with snow showers to attend.

Afterwards, some kind audience members showed me some of B’ham’s best walking routes. Among these is the Taylor Dock, a historic pedestrian trestle along the waterfront.

Yes, there had been an Occupy Bellingham protest. Some of the protesters made and donated this statue on a rock near Taylor Dock.

Apparently there had been windy weather the previous day.

After that I took a shuttle bus downtown, where I was promptly greeted by a feed and seed store with this lovely signage.

The Horseshoe Cafe comes as close as any place I’ve been to my platonic ideal of a restaurant. Good honest grub at honest prices. Great signage. Great well-kept original interior decor.

(Of course, I had to take advantage of sitting in a cafe in Bellingham to trot out the ol’ iPod and play the Young Fresh Fellows’ “Searchin’ USA.”)

Used the remaining daylight to wander the downtown of the ex-mill town. (Its local economy is now heavily reliant on Western Washington U., another victim of year after year of state higher-ed cuts.)

But I stopped at one place that was so perfect, inside and out. It proudly shouted its all-American American-ness.

Alas, 20th Century Bowling/Cafe/Pub will not last long into the 21st century.

filmfanatic.org

• Forget the movie and the two bios, all full of fiction. In reality, Frances Farmer was not lobotomized. Her story’s still mighty tragic, though.
• Architect Matt Roewe suggests a new, novel public transportation solution—a passenger gondola from the waterfront to Capitol Hill, ending atop a 16- to 40-story tower above Broadway.
• Even some longtime Seattle citizens don’t realize the Army has held on to pieces of Fort Lawton, now surrounded by former fort land that’s now Discovery Park. That ends Saturday.
• The last iPhone-incompatible cell service operator, Bellevue-based T-Mobile, won’t be such anymore. They’re not going to sell the iPhone any time soon, but their data plans will at least work on it once the upgrades are done.
• Yep, looks like another stupid all-cuts budget in the Legislature, kicking the can of our regressive revenue system down the road again. However, at least Basic Health (or what’s left of it) is preserved in one of the competing budget proposals.
• The memorial totem pole to slain carver John T. Williams will be unveiled this weekend at Seattle Center.
• The Seattle Times wants to sell its now ex-headquarters buildings for $80 million, twice their appraised value. That would help the company to meet its pension obligations, and perhaps even help subsidize the paper.
• Artists’ rights outrage of the week: “…A Florida judge ruled last month that iconic funk king George Clinton doesn’t own the rights to any music he created from 1976 to 1983.” That pretty much includes anything you remember from the P-Funk heyday.
• Sponsor tie-ins and product placement, those savior/banes of modern bigtime movies, just get more ridiculous every year. Now The Lorax, that story-sermon against runaway consumerism and “stuff”-ism, is being used to sell SUVs.
• Google’s latest potential new hardware product is something out of a modern dystopian novel. It’s “augmented reality” eyeglasses that display informative texts, social media updates, and, yes, ads.