FROM A NATION that still has at least a semi-free press, comes a huge CBC investigation into all those 9/11 conspiracy theories. What the Canadian TV team was able to confirm as facts is a tiny piece of the theory pie, but even that’s full of scary stuff about the Bushes, the bin Ladens, the small-town cameraderie of the global oil-political elite, and geopolitical strategems that totally backfire.

…today to Rod Roddy, the mellifluous and illustrious announcer on Soap, Press Your Luck, and for 17 years on The Price is Right, now deceased at age 66 from cancer. Long may he orate from that great Plinko board in the sky.

…but here high atop MISC World HQ we’re sitting high-N-dry, watching the rain and flooding footage on cable, avoiding anything to do with the World Series, and pondering what kind of age we live in that finds both Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love popping the same drugs.

…has come and gone, alas, without a pennant, a division title, or even a lousy wild-card berth. And it’s all because of a half-dozen or so needless losses in August and September to teams we shoulda beat more often (Rangers, Orioles, Angels).

Now what? This might very well have been the final go-around for the current core M’s lineup. Edgar Martinez may very well be gone next year; so could Mike Cameron, Mark McLemore, Freddy Garcia, Carlos Guillen, and Joel Piniero. The ’04 Mariners could easily become a “rebuilding year” squad. The Supersonics have had seven rebuilding years in a row, so you know what that could mean.

On the other glove, the M’s just might acquire just the right just-before-their-peak young players and/or seasoned vets to finally get over the top. I hope for that, but expect otherwise.

A COUPLE OF DUDES with way too much time on their hands created a huge map of the Simpsons’ town of Springfield.

Paul Allen’s gonna spend $100 mill to fund a research study utilizing mice to explore the genetic development of brains. By this time next year, the lab space in Fremont just might become HQ of assorted plots to take over the world.

AS PROMISED, here are the last of my Bumbershoot Ought-Three pix, at the big R.E.M./Wilco gig in High School Memorial Stadium. (No, the stadium’s not named in honor of dead high schools, even though Seattle’s got two or three of those.)

This year’s stadium “stage sponsor” was Comcast, the local-monopoly cable company (formerly AT&T, formerly TCI, formerly Group W, formerly TelePrompTer). Several of these successive companies have had logos that matched their business models.

TCI, you might recall, had a symbol of a sun (or satellite) beaming a signal to the Earth, exemplifying the old-media premise of everybody getting their entertainment/news/culture from one central source.

AT&T’s ringed circle visualized the company’s post-Bell System dream of wiring the world, back in the days before wireless-mania.

And Comcast has a stylized version of the circle-C copyright symbol, that icon of reverence to an increasingly concentrated (and increasingly vilified) intellectual-property industry.

The two acts on stage Monday night bridged one or two generation gaps, and cut across subcultural niche-appeal.

Wilco’s act, if described literally, would read like the description of an early-’70s “country rock” band. Wilco’s not like that. It’s simply a great, intelligent, inventive pop and rock group, which doesn’t “cross over” between categories so much as it defies easy categorization. (No wonder their record label dropped them just as they made their best record to date, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, as depicted in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.)

Little new seems to be sayable about the livin’ legends of R.E.M., except that (1) they’re more or less a Seattle band these days, and (2) they still make beautiful-sad-upbeat-energetic-soft-hard-fast-slow-memorable music, even in the promlematic environment of a stadium show.

…below, some also-serious stuff.

I’m at this moment watching ABC’s Martin Luther King anniversary special. At last, a contemporary mainstream media source has depicted King as more than just the thinking-outside-the-box CEO’s role model he’s been depicted as in most January MLK Day billboards. He was a fighter, a tactician, and a truer American patriot than the Alabama government neanderthals who’d violently held on to segregation.

The subsequent two years’ worth of civil rights legislation broke the Democratic Party’s “solid South.” George Wallace’s third-party Presidential campaign in ’68 (the last such campaign to win any Electoral College votes) threw the White House to Nixon. Today, a more-or-less thinly disguised variant of Wallace’s old, cynical fear-mongering and race-baiting stands at the heart of Republican demagoguery.

King was no mere “dreamer.” His message is no mere relic from a long-gone era. We need to heed it more than ever.

…about a recent piece of cutesy-poo “news” coverage:

Sent in response to the showing of part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ad as a candidate for Governor on the KING news broadcast on August 19, 2003.Dear KING5,

Thanks for putting part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political commercial on (for free!) during your ‘news’ program last night. I’m sure that he appreciated the free plug, and it’s good to know that Arnold is the only one running, and, even though he’s not running for any office in Washington state, that this is a hip and trendy news story, and that we should all be paying attention. I’m also hoping that you will be airing the commercials, in whole or in part, from each and every one of the other 134 people running for Governor of California. I’d hate to think that just because Arnold is the press-appointed front runner that you wouldn’t be spending equal time on the other candidates.

I recognize that there is a certain amount of tabloid fodder necessary to entertain a significant portion of your audience, and that a famous actor running for office almost fits the bill. I only lament that the local news programs would pay so much attention to tabloid political movements in other states, while ignoring (or at least under-reporting) political developments in the state from which they broadcast.

I know that Arnold will pull in the viewers and hold them at least until the commercial runs, and that that’s your plan. But how about equal time for people actually running for Governor of this state? Or the problems that actually affect people that can receive your broadcast? I can think of a dozen stories of a political nature that are ever so much more important that who’s running for which office in some other state. And when you spend your precious air time resources on just one of the candidates, you implicitly declare him the winner, or at least the only candidate worth paying attention to. Arnold has already got what appears to be enough name recognition to win the race. He doesn’t need your help.

The press, and by extension television, even the tabloid type of television that you put on last night, has tremendous power to shape and define political races simply by focusing the attention on a particular candidate. The 24 hour news cycle demands that any contest for any office be reduced to a horse race where there must be a winner and a loser. ‘Reporters’ follow candidates around looking for ‘gotcha’ moments where a slip of the tongue can be turned into headline fodder in short order. Lazy shortcuts reduce people to clichés, painting a portrait of Al Gore, say, as a wooden policy wonk, or George Bush as a capable and decisive businessman. These portraits get reproduced in the echo chamber, reinforcing themselves until they begin to sound like truth. And we all know that truth is much harder to distribute in sound bytes between commercials, and that many viewers will change the channel if you try to engage them about something important.

I’ll continue to watch the three networks for my local news fix. I’m not even disappointed that you (in this case) have been caught in lowest common denominator ‘journalism.’ But I for one am capable of seeing commercials during the newscast for what they are, and I don’t have to be pleased about it.

Rich Webb

ENDING OUR RECENT VISIT to the formerly-scenic Kent Valley, we come across one recent attempt to create a public space in this heavily privatized stretch of suburbia, the Interurban and Green River trails.

These hiking-biking paths wander along disused railway corridors. One of them crosses the still-scenic Green River at a restored wooden bridge. Go far enough southward on the 15-mile Interurban Trail and you’ll eventually get to where it’s still the countryside.

The Great Wall Mall, south of Ikea in the greater Tukwila-Kent-Renton sprawl, is an undoubted godsend to the thousands of Asian-American families who’ve moved there in search of slightly-less-obscene housing prices. For a casual shopper from the city, however, it has little that you can’t find in greater variety/lower prices in Seattle’s International District.

An arrangement in black and white, courtesy of a black fridge on display at Albert Lee’s in the big-box superstore desertscape surrounding Southcenter.

Tukwila’s Family Fun Center, whilst not as expansive as the Wild Waves/Enchanted Village complex in Federal Way, is still prominent enough to get its own road signs. (As well as having go-karts, mini-golf, a climbing rock, a wooden-fence maze, water-cart racing, a video arcade, and the ever-familiar sights of screeching tots, sullen teens, and nerve-wracked parents.)

Question: What’s out of place in this picture of the franchised Bullwinkle’s restaurant at the Fun Center?

Answer: The Underdog Show wasn’t made by Rocky and Bullwinkle creators Jay Ward and Bill Scott. It simply had some of the same financial backers and merchandising contracts as the Ward shows.

THE HYDRO RACES went off flawlessly. Alas, so did the near-annual coronation of Miss Budweiser, the 5,000-lb. gorilla of the sport.

Still, it was a great afternoon of noise, sunburns, partying, and debauchery. And the power boats themselves still express the union of some eternal dichotomies: The sky and the sea, power and beauty, triumph and frustration.

WHILE WE ATTEMPT to get our lovely main digicam either fixed or replaced, we’ve got a backlog of dozens of cool pix taken on it. They’ll appear on this site at the usual erratic frequency.

A new Jack in the Box commercial begins with the guy in a plastic clown head (allegedly voiced by Matt Frewer) in a damp, dark forest setting, in front of a crew of dingy, ponytailed hackey-sack players. As the rain beads up on his plastic face, he announces the fast food chain’s new “Northwest chicken salad.” Halfway through the ad copy, the clown realizes a mistake. Cut to a cue-card holder who says “Sorry dude.” Cut to a hastily revised cue card now reading “Southwest chicken salad.” Instantly the scene changes to a bright, sunny playa. Instead of the hackey-sackers, there’s an energetic marimba band.

This is no way for the San Diego, CA-based chain to treat our region. First they kill some of us, then they insult us.

…to New Kids on the Block action figures, here’s a site with dozens of your fave ’80s commercials.

Oregon State U. prof Jon Lewis’s book Hollywood V. Hard Core, now out in paperback, claims the Hollywood studios aren’t and weren’t the free-speech crusaders they sometimes claimed to be. Lewis argues, according to the book’s back-cover blurb, that the studio-imposed ratings system and other industry manipulations served to crush the ’60s-’70s craze for sex films and art films, and thus “allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what movies got made and where they were shown.”

When the Independent Film Channel runs its salute next month to “renegade” type filmmakers of the ’70s, you can compare and contrast IFC’s take on the era with that of Lewis. IFC, I suspect, may describe ’70s cinema as a freewheeling revolutionary era, whose rule-breakin’ bad boys took over the biz and are still among today’s big movers-n’-shakers.

I’d give an interpretation closer to Lewis’s. That’s because I essentially came of age at the height of ’70s cinemania. My early college years (including one year at OSU) coincided with the likes of Cousin Cousine, Swept Away, The Story of O, All the President’s Men, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Dawn of the Dead, Days of Heaven, Manhattan, Being There, Rock n’ Roll High School, Emmanuelle 2, and countless other classics that forever shaped my worldview.

But that was, to quote a film of the era, “before the dark time. Before the Empire.”

Lucas and Spielberg, those clever studio-system players who let themselves be marketed as mavericks, re-taught the studios how to make commercial formula movies. Before long, they and their imitators became the new kings of the jungle. Francis Coppola, Alan Rudolph, Richard Rush, Terrence Malick, and other medium-expanders were shunted to the sidelines of the biz.

The sorry results can be surveyed on any episode of Entertainment Tonight.

In related news, an alliance of Net-radio entrepreneurs is planning to sue the record industry, claiming the major labels have set royalty rates so high only big corporate stations can afford to legally exist….

…And Jeff Chester of TomPaine.com interprets Comcast’s lastest cable-contract wrangling in Calif. as a scheme to kill public access channels. I don’t think Chester’s allegation’s fully supported by the evidence he gives, but the situation’s still one to watch with concern.

Unreachable Zone of Darkness, a particularly grim family-treachery soap opera from Hong Kong currently running weekday mornings on the International Channel. It’s in Cantonese only (no subtitles), but you don’t need to know what the characters are saying to understand the general mood of delicious backbiting and vengeance.