sonics first-year pennant, available at gasoline alley antiques

• As various machinations occur here and elsewhere that just might bring a new men’s pro basketball team to Seattle, national audiences can see the authoritative document of how the team we had got stolen. The Sonicsgate documentary airs this Friday at 7 p.m. PT on CNBC. There’s a viewing party at the Sport bar.
• All sorts of companies are trying to get away with hiring undocumented workers. Even an organic herb farm.
• Seattle’s next P-Patch community garden site: the roof of the Mercer Street parking garage.
• Item: “Seattle company unveils plan to mine asteroids for riches.” Comment: If this works out, the whole scarcity premise behind metals commodity prices could one day disappear. And with it would go the fortunes of certain Third World countries.
• Short sales and foreclosures still account for more than half of all home sales in Snohomish and Pierce counties, and a third of all home sales in King County.
• No, Social Security isn’t going broke any time soon. And there are simple ways to make sure it never does.
• America’s first mad cow is in California, naturally.
• Why didn’t Forbes run articles about male porn stars when ol’ Malcolm Forbes was alive?
• Ex-Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham has a long essay about the future of language in the Internet age, among other things. Lapham rightfully calls for more and better reasoned thinking online. And he echoes my own belief that the web is not primarily made of code but words. But he also casually engages in tiresome elitist stereotyping about a “postliterate sensibility” that’s supposedly “offended by anything that isn’t television.” Any guy who claims to oppose one-dimensional banalities shouldn’t repeat them himself.
• Found: Someone who misses the glory days of MySpace.

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

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

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

reramble.wordpress.com

• Even I, in my near-encyclopedic knowledge of classic TV, could only guess nine out of a group of 15 modern and vintage series represented by three iconic images each.
• My ol’ UW Daily staffmate Pete Callaghan has a zinger accusing the Mariners of calculated hyprocisy about the basketball/hockey arena scheme. Callaghan says M’s bosses “seek to hog the pubic arena trough.”
• Lisa Arnold at Crosscut believes nonprofits that serve poor people ought to more actively pressure local governments to do more for these folks.
• In the whiter but not safer suburbs, there’s a new robbery shtick going down: (1) Break into a car in a movie-theater parking lot. (2) Fish out the car’s registration papers. (3) Go to the listed (and probably unoccupied) house and rob it.
• The scheme to essentially stifle the use of Seattle Community College campuses as protest sites? Scuttled, at least for now.
• All this Internet data you’re getting these days is stored on and fed from mighty “server farm” installations. The ones around here run on clean, nonpolluting hydro power. Except when they don’t.
• The big book publishers and Amazon are at less than palsy-walsy terms again.
• Meanwhile, various parties have tried to set up indie e-book sites that would sell the big publishers’ titles as well as indie product. But the big publishers insist on using restrictive copy-protection codes, which require costly technical resources on the server end, which these small e-tail operations can’t afford.
• The Republican Presidential nominating race is over. The sincerely bigoted demagogue is gone, leaving the out-of-touch smarmy zillionaire who’s pretended to be a bigoted demagogue. Get ready for the Super PAC-driven, ultra-negative attack ads and the whispered “dog whistle” scare tactics to begin in 5, 4, 3….
• Elsewhere in politics-of-hate-land, one of the authors of the “Defense of Marriage (a.k.a. anti-gay-marriage) Act” has come out as a lesbian and has renounced her past public stance.
• Economist Jonathan Schlefler claims the “invisible hand,” 18th century writer Adam’s Smith’s concept of a natural equilibrium that settles in when free markets are free to do as they will, does not exist. In macroeconomic circles, this is akin to Copernicus saying the sun doesn’t orbit the earth.
• Some folks imagine themselves to be so close to the celebrities they follow in the media, that they see nothing untoward about asking them to be prom dates.
• The City of Vancouver Engineering Department, which apparently has jurisdiction on all street and sidewalk use there, has banned bagpipe buskers (Say that five times fast!). The excuse: they’re too noisy. The Scottish-descended mayor, who got sworn into office in a kilt, vows to overturn the rule.

oldtime (print) proofreading marks; via nisus.se

It’s a couple months old but still a worthy topic of debate. It’s ex-Microsoftie Michael Kinsley bitching about how the Web has brought forth an explosion in written content—much of which is tons of total dreck.

Even a lot of professionally written online stuff, Kinsley gripes, is poorly thought out, poorly constructed, and sloppily assembled.

I say that’s just what happens with an explosion of activity in any “creative” field, from neo-punk bands to televised singing contests to self-published horror novels.

The trick is to (1) have a way to find the good stuff, and (2) encourage folks to strive for better work.

As for the first part, there are tons of aggregation sites and blogs (including this one) that link to what some editor thinks is “the good stuff.”

The second part still needs work.

One problem is that so much of the Web is run by techies. Dudes who know the value of tight, accurate, effective code, but who might never have learned to appreciate the same values in words.

A bigger problem is that, even at sites run by “content” people, there’s intense pressure to put everything online the second it’s written, and to slavishly avoid taking the time or staff money to edit anything.

It would help if more sites felt an incentive to put out better stuff. (A big incentive would be to maybe, just maybe, even pay writers and editors a living wage).

Don’t think of the ol’ WWW as code and wires.

The Web is words (and pictures and sounds), distributed via code and wires.

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.

t.j. mullinax, yakima herald-republic

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

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

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

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

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

It’s bad for the publishers and their authors.

It’s bad for the industry as a whole.

And it’s bad for Amazon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

via shelligator.tumblr.com

You will note we posted nothing on 4/1. We’ve had enough trouble over the years with people thinking the stuff posted here’s just made up.

• SyFy premiered a set-in-Seattle, filmed-in-LA cheesy horror flick at the local Comicon, somehow expecting folks here would love it. They were wrong.
• (By the way, from my brief visit to the Comicon, the most popular costume inspiration this year is Cartoon Network’s playful series Adventure Time.)
• We must say goodbye to local landscape painter Christopher Martin Hoff, known for setting up his easel around town and painting street scenes on and at the spot.
• Also gone this week is Georgia/Florida novelist Harry Crews, who deftly made the most improbable scenarios seem as normal as everyday life in those states (which, admittedly, already includes some mighty improbable stuff).
• On the one hand, Amazon continues to put down roots in the Heart-O-Seattle; while most U.S. tech and dot-com outfits headquarter themselves in far-flung exurban office parks. On the other hand, the company gives damn little to local arts and charitable groups, and maintains a lower-than-low-key civic presence  (even regarding its own real estate moves).
• The Arizona-founded company now calling itself Village Voice Media turns out (thanks to an investigative campaign by another wannabe anti-Backpage.com crusader) to be half owned by its top two execs. The rest of the stock is also privately held, with a fund managed by Goldman Sachs having a 16 percent share.
• A Zoroastrian sect in England has gotten preliminary approval to build a 300-foot funeral tower, to be called the “Tower of Silence,” next to a popular seaside beach. More than just a memorial, it will actually have believers’ remains hoisted atop it, in keeping with the group’s belief that dead bodies “pollute the earth.” The local authorities say they hope to revive the town’s sagging fortunes via “funeral tourism.”
• It’s been 50 years since Michael Harrington’s book The Other America spread the idea that poor people were some “Other,” a different tribe than you and me, trapped in a “culture of poverty” rather than simply not making enough money to go around. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, Harrington helped perpetuate the dangerous meme that poor people were lazy and ignorant, when they really often work their asses off just to barely get by.
• Finally, here’s local pastor Catherine Foote with a Palm Sunday address against what she calls the “divisive fear” threatening to tear U.S. society apart.

existing blue tree in vancouver bc; konstantin dimopoulos via kplu.org

• Get ready to see some blue trees next month, in Westlake Park and along the Burke-Gilman Trail. The tree-painting art project is part of a public awareness campaign about global deforestation.
• The first big tunnel digging machine finally broke through at the Capitol Hill light-rail station site, hours too late to make the late TV news.
• Microsoft tries the self-deprecating “we’ve learned from our past mistakes” funny commercial schtick, and it doesn’t even seem awkward or forced at all.
• At least 40 percent of all post-traumatic stress disorder patients at Joint Base Lewis-McChord found their diagnoses later “reversed.” That means they were declared not PTSD-stricken after all, and therefore eligible to be sent right back into combat duty.
• Couldn’t happen to nicer guys: A Goldman Sachs affiliate may be about to default on 11 Seattle and Bellevue office buildings, which the firm bought for nearly $1 billion five years ago.
• Sara Robinson at AlterNet blames “conservative bullying” for making America into “a broken, dysfunctional family.”
• Sixty years ago this week, the first live event billed as a “rock n’ roll concert” ended in riots on the streets of Cleveland. The reason: The ticket printers accidentally printed tickets to two different shows as if they were the same show on the same date.
• A handy rule-O-thumb: Any previously unheard-of singer performing mechanical rote versions of black musical styles from 20 years or more ago is probably white.
• As Danny Westneat insists “art is no excuse” for Mike Daisey to make stuff up about Chinese tech-gadget factories, blogger “La Bohrer” concludes that the late beloved fiction author David Foster Wallace also stretched the facts in at least a couple of his “nonfiction” essays.

Harper’s Magazine publisher/subsidizer John R. MacArthur has always kept his mag’s online version behind a paywall.

In a recent speech at Columbia University, transcribed at the Providence Journal’s site, MacArthur insists that Harper’s is making more money this way than it would if all the content were free and management scratched n’ scrambled to somehow sell enough web ads.

But he doesn’t stop there.

In the speech, he accuses “Internet con men” (i.e., the dot-com and Web 2.0 propagandists and evangelists) of “ravaging” publishing.

He denounces “Internet huckster/philosophers” as “first cousins—in both their ideology and their sales tactics—to the present-day promoters of “free trade.” Just as unfettered imports destroy working-class communities through low-wage outsourcing, MacArthur avows, so has the Internet driven writers, artists, and editors “into penury by Internet wages—in most cases, no wages.”

With web ads incapable of supporting living wages for content makers, MacArthur insists online readers will have to learn to pay “if they want to see anything more complex than a blog, a classified ad or a sex act.”

•

Immediately, defenders of online business-as-usual stepped up to denounce MacArthur’s remarks.

Some, like Mike Masnick at TechDirt, settled for simplistic name-calling. MacArthur, Masnick insists, represents the “Platonic ideal specimen of the ‘I’m an old fogey elitist Internet Luddite.'” Masnick’s “rebuttal” piece goes on to call MacArthur at least 20 more varieties of out-of-it, while not bothering to actually rebut any of his points.

(OK, Mesnick does counter MacArthur’s claim that freelancers are being forced into poverty by online freebie sites, by citing a single example of one writer who says he’s offered more work than he can take.)

A more lucid response comes from Alexis Madrigal at Harper’s age-old arch rival The Atlantic (which not only has a free website but posts a lot of web-only material). Madrigal insists his mag’s “doing just fine thank you,” with equal amounts of print and web ad revenue.

Madrigal and Mensick both assert infinite, if intangible, benefits to having one’s writing part of the “open web” where it can be linked to, commented upon, and become part of the big meta-conversation.

But does that have to come at the expense of adequate research, thorough editing, and living wages for writers/editors?

And does everything really have to be on the open web?

If MacArthur wants to keep his paywall up, and if he believes his little nonprofit highbrow mag can support itself better that way, let him.

The old fogey might actually be on to something.

Today, go out and celebrate Pi Day (3/14). Tomorrow, learn about pies of the past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on cantilevered Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• We now know what’s going in where the parking garage on Second north of Stewart had been until last weekend. It’s (wait for it) a beyond-upscale luxury apartment tower, the “Viktoria” (yes, with a K). The developers are employing all the usual buzzwords (including their vow that this will be “the signature residential building in Belltown”). Construction starts within a month.
• Next threatened landmark that needs saving: The Funhouse, that delightfully seedy and decidedly downscale rock club, situated within easy jeering distance of EMP and Ride the Ducks. Yep, it’s due to yet another “mixed use” project.
• Wash. state’s next big contribution to the music world is a Korean American “pop lothario.”
• Public-school advocates calling themselves “Occupy Education” show up at Gates Foundation HQ to pick a verbal fight, about what the activists call the foundation’s “corporate brand of education reform.” Hilarity ensues.
• SeattlePI.com’s list of “most hated Seattle sports figures” relegates Clay Bennett to the #2 slot behind Howard Schultz, the man who made Bennett’s team-theft possible.
• Co-ops, locavores, Kickstarter, Etsy—Sara Horowitz at the Atlantic calls it all a revival of 1890s “mutualism.”
• Mike Lux attempts to explain why so many professed Christians behave so not-Christlike. (Lux mainly blames the Apostle Paul.)
• William K. Black at AlterNet would like to see the same kind of attention paid toward Wall Street’s corporate crimes that’s paid toward blue-collar street crime.
• Village Voice Media continues to defend its Backpage.com sex ad operation, even within an article about a group of accused child abusers who are charged with using the site to pimp out their underage victim.
• Encyclopedia Britannica, having sold only 8,000 print encyclopedia sets in the past two years, announced it won’t print any more after 244 years.
• We know junkies were stealing copper wire, but liquid Tide?
• Charlie Jane Anders at i09.com offers advice on how to be a better sci-fi/fantasy writer by being less annoyingly “clever” about it:

Try writing the same line of dialogue three different ways: 1) the quippy version, 2) the version that simply conveys the meaning of the line, and 3) the emotional subtext of the line. And then try to find the version that combines 2) and 3) as much as possible. You might find you end up with a line that’s more quotable than the witty version you originally had.

american institute of architects—seattle

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

uw archives via businessinsider.com

All of you who are going to be outside in Seattle tomorrow (Sat. 3/3) should attend my nice little chat about Vanishing Seattle. It starts at 2 p.m. at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. Be there or be fool’s gold.

• Here’s a lovely interview with my fellow Stranger refugee S.P. Miskowski. Her play Emerald City, about (among other things) Seattle’s love/hate relationship with itself, opens next Friday (3/9) at the West of Lenin space in Fremont. In the interview, she mentions that the Stranger was, indeed, a totally commercial operation from the start:

The owners were business smart. Very smart. You will never go broke in Seattle making people think they’re in a special, exclusive club that is cooler than everyone else. That is money in the bank. The fear of being provincial and dull is so powerful, there.

• Republican legislative dirty tricks: they’re not just for other states anymore.
• Norm Dicks, a stalwart of Wash. state’s Congressional delegation, is retiring.
• It’s one thing for Amazon to coax favorable pricing terms from the mega corporate publishers. But when it got into an ebook pricing impasse with a small indie distributor, it attracted the ire of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, an outfit with which one shouldn’t mess if one knows what’s good for one.
• Who else is refusing links to Amazon ebook sales pages? Apple iBooks, that’s who.
• Meanwhile, is Amazon ridiculously inflating the “before” prices of on-sale food products?
• As we’ve mentioned before, Shepard Fairey steals from street-level artists as well as corporate art. Here’s one artist who sued Fairey and won.
• Matt Taibbi notes that the late right-wing sleazeblogger Andrew Breitbart used to post private info about his ideological opponents online and threaten violence against them. In response for mentioning this, Breitbart fans posted private info about Taibbi online and threatened violence against him.
• Meanwhile, Jen Doll proclaims, “If Rush Limbaugh slut-shames you, you’re doing something right.”
• Truthout pundit Henry A. Giroux and Nation writer Dana Goldstein claim the “religious” right is against public education because it’s against people thinking for themselves.
• Robert Reich would like to remind you that increased “productivity,” per se, doesn’t necessarily add jobs. It often means cutting jobs.
• “More U.S. soldiers killed themselves than died in combat in 2010.”
• I just found out last year that there are serious grownup My Little Pony fans. I’m not sure if the Amazon customer-reviewers of this spinoff DVD are among them.

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.