zgf architects via seattle times

• If you’re gonna build a condo tower that’s utterly, totally out of scale with the historic district immediately adjacent to it, it might as well be a real PoMo monolith.
• UW researchers say they may be able to prove the existence of “gaydar.”
• With a little over two weeks to go before the state liquor stores go away forever, some of the auction sales of the outlets fell through. Eighteen stores will be re-bid.
• Now we know why they call it Bitter Lake. It’s had raw sewage flowing into it for at least a decade.
• The dream is over: Dennis Kucinich won’t run for Congress from Wash. state.
• Amazon’s first non-Bezos-family investor gave a hot speech about income inequality in America, and how rich folks like himself really just aren’t “job creators.” (It was given at a TED conference, but isn’t one of the videos posted on that organization’s site. But you can read it; which I prefer doing anyway.) (And to be fair, here’s a different economic-inequality speech that was posted on TED’s site.)
• Is this the beginning of the end for soft drink sales in America? If the fizz really does die out, remember: Those who forget New Coke are doomed to repeat it.

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?

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

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.

j.r. simplot co./idaho dept. of environmental quality, via kplu

• Lots of good stuff at KPLU today. First, they’ve got some “mutant two-headed trout” found in an Idaho stream (the result of pollution from a nearby mine). Then there’s the list of potential “things you’ll find from the Japanese tsunami on Northwest beaches.” Finally, they report on the construction of the new 520 bridge’s pontoons. (I just love to say the word “pontoon.”)
• Nintendo lost a whoppin’ half billion bucks on all worldwide operations last fiscal year. That’s a heckuva lot of yellow coins.
• The UW is letting in a few more computer science majors next school year. They must have finally noticed that virtually every job advertised in Seattle requires programming knowledge.
• Get inspired! Next week there’s a “liberal Christian revival” convention in town.
• You know how the Costco-funded liquor privatization initiative promised convenience stores wouldn’t get to sell the hard stuff? Some of the winning bids for the state liquor stores were won by C-store operators, who might just turn those stores into C-stores that sell the hard stuff.
• KIRO-TV has uncovered further shocking evidence that men traveling on business will sometimes visit strippers and/or prostitutes.
• R.I.P. Ernest Callenbach, 83. The enviro-author was best known for Ecotopia, a 1975 utopian novel in which Washington and Oregon would be the outlying provinces of a San Francisco city-state. (I.e., more like a dystopia to me.)
• Flavorwire lists the “10 Grumpiest Living Writers.” Yes, Harlan Ellison is there. But, and this might surprise you, so is Garrison Keillor.
• Elsewhere in the book biz, Macmillan’s scifi division will issue e-books without copy protection. And author Warren Adler believes any talk about an Amazon e-book monopoly is just scare-tactic hype foisted by the conglomerate-owned big publishers.
• Ex-Seattleite Lindy West reminds you that talking like a total racist, then when you’re caught at it claiming it was all an ironic “joke,” is still talking like a total racist.

escapistmagazine.com

• The Star Wars universe is explained in handy infographic form.
• Rob McKenna is given an opportunity to prove he’s not part of the War on Women. Result: Epic Fail.
• More details about the big waterfront renovation plan have been released. They show a great improvement over the original concept (which, as you may recall, was essentially just a bunch more “world class” windswept plazas, a commodity greater downtown already has in abundance). These proposals actually include stuff people can recreate with. Like a climbing wall, and a swimming pool on a barge in the water.
• The Real Change-sponsored protest against homeless-camp removals went off without a hitch. Now let’s get our officials to do more for the homeless instead of merely against them.
• Wash. state now has over 700 wineries. Twice the number in ’07.
• The first Boeing 787s you’ll be able to get on from Sea-Tac will go from here to Tokyo starting later this year.
• How does DC Comics’ plan for a Watchmen prequel series gibe with the original graphic novel’s creator Alan Moore? If you know anything about Moore, you’ll know he doesn’t much care for the idea.
• Obama is picking his fights carefully, choosing for whom he’s going to strongly fight. Pot users: it’s still not your turn.
• Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune announces the “Death of Facts,” following one too many tea bagger fabrication.
• The newest thing to be paranoid about: what employers think about your Klout score. (Yes, the hereby linked article explains just what a “Klout score” is. It has something to do with how active you are on Twitter, or something like that.)

foodbeast.com

• Margarita flavored Bud Light: sign of the apocalypse #6 or #7?
• Winning bids for the state liquor stores (or rather, for the right to apply for licenses, negotiate leases, and take over inventory at the stores) are now in. Individual winners have apparently not yet been posted anywhere, but the store at 12th Avenue and East Pine Street went for a cool half million. The state’s total take (should all the sales go through): over $30 million, more than four times estimates reported just last Friday.
• Yesterday, we mentioned how Deluxe Junk, the lovely vintage everything store that’s one of the last remnants of “Fremont funk.” faced a sudden eviction by the Masonic lodge that owns its building. Apparently there’s a settlement; alas, Deluxe Junk will still leave the premises, at the end of June.
• The Real Change folks will get their protest camp in Westlake Park after all.
• One little-publicized event at the big Space Needle anniversary gala: a protest by Needle restaurant workers.
• The Canucks have made sure there won’t be riots in the Vancouver streets this June.
• Here’s a long, loving profile of ex-Seattleite and comix genius Lynda Barry.
• Google and Facebook: They’re hot now, but could they stumble as computing goes mobile?
• Author Michael J. Sandel places blame for the market-ization of almost all of western society. He says the economists did it.
• Paul Krugman blasts Romney, assuredly not for the last time.
• A Georgetown prof really dislikes the Facebook-spawned overuse of the verb “Like.”
• Toby Litt in Granta wonders whether long-form literature can hold an audience, or even be considered relevant, in an age of multitasking and incessant distraction. I say bah. Folks who can finish umpteen-level video games or watch entire TV-show seasons in one weekend can enjoy a story of a few hundred pages.
• Sorry, but I can’t trust any list of the “ten most harmful novels for aspiring writers” that excludes Bukowski.
• The top black women’s magazine hired a white guy as managing editor. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, that he turned out to be a not-so-secret racist wingnut.
• Steven Pearlstein reminds you that some politicians actually want you to be turned off from politics. Remember: Not voting = voting a straight right-wing ticket.
• Making stuff in China will cease being cheap sooner or later. China’s other outsourcing advantages might remain (lax environmental enforcement, autocratic government, brutal suppression of dissent).
• TV ratings, both broadcast and cable, are way down, especially among younger viewers, and especially in terms of “real time” viewing (i.e., without DVRs; i.e., with the commercials). The hardcore TV haters will naturally ignore this, and will continue to insist that Everyone Except Them is a vidiot sheeple.

via 'what makes the pie shops tick' at flickr.com

• Today’s the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair’s opening day. It’s time to celebrate, especially for those of us who, way back then, fully expected the world to still be here now, and who hoped and dreamed for a glorious future. (And I for one am glad there aren’t flying cars now. You want drunk or out-of-gas amateur drivers plummeting from the sky?)
• The original QFC supermarket on Roosevelt Way will not live to see the chain’s 50th anniversary next year. It closes May 12, doomed by the light-rail expansion. (The store itself began in 1955 as a Thriftway franchise; in 1963 it merged with five other area stores to form QFC.)
• The fungus among us is dangerous to whales.
• Why did the Catholic hierarchy order the (virulently anti-gay) Seattle archbishop to “overhaul” (i.e., censure and punish and perhaps even disband) an association of U.S. nuns? Because these sisters are doing it for themselves. They’re speaking out against the church’s sexism and homophobia, and against its role in the right-wing war on women.
• Petitioners promise they’ll get enough signatures to put gay marriage repeal on Washington’s November ballot.
• Desmond Tutu used the power of faith to help end one of the most brutal regimes in the “civilized” world. Yet some wingnuts say that doesn’t qualify him to speak at Gonzaga’s commencement.
• Here’s more proof of how one-percenty Wash. state’s tax structure really is.
• From Afghanistan to Seattle: Here come the law-enforcement unmanned drone airplanes.
• From the Tenants’ Union of Washington State, Jonathan Grant claims 27,000 people in Seattle live in below-code, substandard rental units, constituting Seattle’s own “second city.”
• Ex-Sasquatch Books publisher Chad Haight, like many publishers, is bitchin’ about Amazon. But even before the days of “E-tail,” he recalls, publishers were already getting squeezed by the big bookstore chains, with their abusive return policies and their promotional-consideration demands. As we mentioned yesterday, corporations in any industry will do whatever seems best for their immediate bottom lines. One of the problems of this is myopic short-term thinking. In any long-term view, big book and e-book sellers need to help keep their suppliers alive and well.
• Joshua Holland at AlterNet avers that the real defenders of freedom and liberty are those who fight against the far right.

anti-riaa ad from the electronic frontier foundation; via university of texas

Two reasons why Hilary Rosen, Ann Romney’s recent verbal sparring partner, should not be considered a spokesperson for the Obama campaign or for any “progressive” thing:

(1) She became a PR shill for BP, post-gulf-spill.

(2) and most important: She infamously headed the Recording Industry Association of America during the start of that outfit’s notorious “anti-piracy” extremism.

Rosen didn’t just shut down Napster and Audiogalaxy. She fostered the music-industry lobby group’s policy of punitive aggression in the name of the Almighty Intellectual Property.

After she left the RIAA, the staff she’d hired served all those ridiculous suits for ridiculous sums against lowly individual file-sharers—and against some individuals who’d never shared a file in their lives.

Elsewhere in randomland:

• Talk about going dangerously mainstream: The Stranger won a Pulitzer Prize. (It’s actually for a good piece, the one about the survivor of the South Park killer.) (Oh, the Seattle Times won one of those Pulitzer things too.)
• Financial-software giant Intuit is celebrating Tax Day by closing part of Second Avenue downtown and (as per GeekWire) “inviting people to drive golf balls down the middle of the street.”
• Neither gubernatorial candidate has so far dared to even mention this state’s #1 need: to reform our ultra-regressive revenue system.
• There’s a new local news site in town. The nonprofit Seattle Globalist is all about the intersections between here at home and the whole wide world. The ethnic communities; the local impact of world events; world culture (film, food, anime, etc.). The site’s got a launch party on the 28th at Washington Hall.
• A sports analyst says the Mariners are “ripe to be sold,” should the team’s current owners decide to sell (which they haven’t).
• Here’s one more thing some folks are bitching at Amazon about: its membership (along with many other big corps) in ALEC, the notorious right-wing pressure group that supplies GOP state legislators with pre-written, megabuck-lobbyist-dictated bills. (It also files “friend of the court” briefs in U.S. Supreme Court cases.)
• Just Plain Gross Dept.: The next stage in crash dieting is women who voluntarily live on feeding tubes for up to 10 days.
• Margaret Atwood claims “our faith is fraying in the god of money.”
• Alex Henderson at AlterNet believes America would be much better off, in several quantifiable ways, if the country could just shake off its “sexual prudery.” Some of these ways, he claims, would include lowered rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, and HIV infections.

david eskenazi collection via sportspressnw.com

And a happy Friday the 13th (first of the year) and Mariners home opening day to all of you!

• Richard Beyer, 1925-2002: The Waiting for the Interurban sculptor didn’t invent Fremont’s image as a funky/artsy neighborhood. But his work publicized this image as much as anything.
• Something You Might Not Have Known Dept.: Seattle gets a small but impressive portion of its electricity from methane at an Oregon landfill.
• You’ve got two more chances to have your say about Metro’s plan to ax the downtown Ride Free Area, at County Council meetings on the 16th and the 25th. Let ‘em know you want/need/demand robust free downtown transit service.
• Third Avenue in Belltown now has those “daylight-like” street lights. Next step in resurrecting Third: making the street and its buildings look cleaner.
• With the legislative session finally over, Rob McKenna can legally raise campaign money. Thus, Washington’s gubernatorial campaign is now truly underway. Watch for McKenna to simultaneously run with and against the national Republican agenda—something Jay Inslee will try to stick onto McKenna at every opportunity.
• St. James Cathedral is among the churches that won’t take part in the Catholic archdiocese’s initiative petition campaign to overturn gay marriage.
• When can you start getting a legal drink in Wash. state after 2 a.m.? Perhaps in November (just perhaps).
• Bizarre Patent Application of the Day: GeekWire says Microsoft wants to patent “monetizing buttons on TV remotes:”

It’s called “Control-based Content Pricing,” and the basic idea is dynamic pricing of video content, based on the preferences of the user at any given moment—essentially setting different prices for different functions of the TV remote.

• Frances Cobain still can’t get away from her mom’s meddling.
• A Spokane nursery put up a billboard reading “Pot Dealer Ahead.” The ad was complete with an image of some flower pots, in case people didn’t get the joke (it being Spokane and all). Some people are vocally not amused (it being Spokane and all).
• The U.S. Border Patrol in this state continues to behave like a gang of racist tools.
• North Korea just can’t keep it up.
• Reversible male contraception is finally in the domestic testing stage, despite Big Pharma’s longtime disinterest.
• Jed Lewison at Daily Kos parses the anatomy of a Mitt Romney lie, that over 90 percent of U.S. job losses have gone against women. In reality (instead of Fox News Fantasyland), most folks laid off in the Great Recession were men. But new or revived jobs the past two years have also gone mostly to men (56 percent).
• The Murdoch media empire’s phone and email tapping scandal is reaching the U.S. But Murdoch’s domestic properties are not implicated, at least not yet. This is still about Murdoch’s U.K. papers, tapping into Hollywood celebrities’ phones and emails.
• Ari Rabin-Havt at HuffPost claims right wing racism no longer bothers with coded “dog whistle” messages, but now spews its hate openly and proudly.
• What Omar Willey says about seeking good web comics applies to just about all web “content”: “How do you find all this stuff?” (The stuff worth reading, that is.)

gjenvick-gjonvik archives

Three of the Big Six book publishers (Hachette, News Corp.’s HarperCollins, and CBS’s Simon & Schuster) have settled with the U.S. Justice Dept. in the dispute over alleged e-book price fixing.

The publishers still insist they’re innocent; but they agreed in the settlement to not interfere with, or retaliate against, discounted e-book retail prices.

Apple, Pearson’s Penguin, and Holtzbrinck’s Macmillan have not yet settled; they also insist they did not collude to keep e-book prices up. Bertlesmann’s Random House was not sued.

This is, of course, all really about Amazon, and its ongoing drives to keep e-book retail prices down and its share of those revenues up. The big publishers, and some smaller ones too, claim that’s bad for them and for the book biz as a whole.

In other randomosity:

• Thanks in no part whatsoever to regressive cuts-only Republicans and their pseudo-Democrat enablers, Wash. state has a budget, and not nearly as horrid a one as we could have had. The real issue, fixing the state’s ultra-regressive revenue system, was again kicked down the road.
• The Legislature also failed to approve new means to pay for transit. However, it turns out Seattle still has the transit-funding mechanism approved a decade ago for the scuttled monorail campaign. That’s what the group called “Seattle Subway” hopes to use to fund more in-city rail miles (which, despite the group’s name, wouldn’t necessarily be below ground).
• Emily Pothast has unkind, not-nice, really un-positive things to say about the Kirkland developers who want to gut Pike/Pine’s anchor block.
• At the formerly Microsoft-owned Slate, Tom Scocca explains, in detail, just why today’s iteration of Microsoft Word so greatly sucks.
• Matt Groening reveals, 22 years later, that yes, The Simpsons‘ Springfield is based on Springfield, Ore. (also known as Eugene’s evil twin).
• Another crack in the edifice of Homophobia Inc.: The guy who first promoted the idea of “curing” gay people through “therapy” says he now believes it’s a crock of shit.
• Meanwhile in the world of Incarceration Inc., two Penna. judges admitted they took bribes from a private prison operator to sentence juvenile suspects to terms at said private prisons.
• A 25-year-old bride got herself a lavish wedding for free by pretending to have terminal cancer. The marriage has already crumbled; jail might be next.
• Someone’s posted to Facebook a cartoon chart-graphic about “How to Focus in the Age of Distraction.” Rule #1: Get the heck off of Facebook.
• Sometime in the mid 1990s I made a throwaway music-scene prediction, as part of a larger rant that the future is seldom linear. I said, “There could be a big hammered dulcimer revival in the 2010s, causing teens in the 2020s to yearn for the good old days of techno.” Speed up the timeline, substitute the recent “beard bands” for the dulcimers, and we seem to have gotten there.

• 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?

Seventy degrees on Easter. It felt like the whole outdoors had come back to life.

• Amazon’s PR image within the book biz has gotten to the point where even when it does demonstrably good things, like giving back to literary groups and small presses, its motives get suspected. That’s never a good sign.
• What greater downtown Seattle doesn’t need is a ____ restaurant just like the ____ restaurants of San Francisco. What it does need, and just might get in 2019, is a public school.
• There just might be a deal to settle the Lake City bike rack ruckus.
• More females in the military has come to mean, alas, more female homeless vets.
• Two Washington Monthly pundits hace compiled a list of the “Top 50 Things Accomplished by President Barack Obama.” Yeah, he’s not done everything he said he wanted to do, and even less of what lefties wanted him to do. But what he has done is still a lot.
• We told you State Sen. Val Stevens has been a part of ALEC, the notorious megabucks lobbying group that gives GOP state legislators handmade corporate-written legislation. Now, here’s a list of all the legislators in all the states with shameful ALEC ties.
• RIP Don Foster, who helped run the Seattle World’s Fair and the Seattle Rep, then built the Foster/White Gallery into the city’s premiere commercial art house.
• I thought the indie film scene was about spurning the hype n’ nonsense of Hollywood, such as the obsession with weekend box office numbers. Apparently I was wrong.

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.