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.

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

fdin.org.uk

• Did you know Heinz had a soup factory in Kent? Emphasis on the “had.”
• Just when you thought you’d seen everything, something unexpected comes. Today’s edition: A poet who’s actually got people listening to him. Meet the Tacoma guy behind the viral video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”
• A Facebook ad said an Issaquah heavy-metal guitarist with the stage name Steve Thunderbolt was looking for bandmates, but insisted on “no blacks”. Not ’cause he was a racist or anything; it was just “a drug issue and a safety issue.”
• It’s not just Ron Paul. The national Republican Party as a whole seems to just luuuuuv them some white supremacists.
• The UW president, the state’s highest paid employee, claims finding answers to education funding in Wash. state is “above my pay grade.”
• Soul divas aren’t supposed to die this young.
• Let’s hear it for last week’s #1 selling musical star on Amazon’s CD and download charts: Leonard Cohen! (Really.)
• Let’s close, just for the heckuvit, with Mike Wallace in a shortening commercial.

I’d mentioned that the Capitol Hill Times, the weekly neighborhood paper for which I’d worked in a couple of stints, is now owned by a legal services entrepreneur as a vehicle for legal notice ads.

The new-look CHT has now appeared.

It looks clean and modern.

And it looks like the new management is truly interested in providing space (if not much money) toward neighborhood news coverage.

And it’s got a locally based editor, Stephen Miller, who seems to really want intelligent discussion of the issues of the day.

That’s certainly what he says in his column for the Feb. 8 issue.

It’s about Seattle University’s Search for Meaning Book Festival, held the previous Saturday. Besides book sales and signings, the festival included speeches and panels by authors representing myriad flavors of religion in America.

Miller talks about the need for good questions instead of easy answers.

And he talks briefly about some search-for-meaning related trends in the news, as discussed by speakers at the festival. Among them:

The threat of Sharia law. A Mormon nearing the White House. Federal funds paying for abortions. A redefinition of marriage.

Except that trends 1 and 3 do not really exist.

Nobody’s trying to impose Sharia law in any part of the U.S.

There is no federal funding for abortions, and nobody’s proposing to start any.

These are merely right-wing scare campaigns.

They’re just as fake as the right-wing-only cable channel’s annual hype over a nonexistent “war on Christmas.”

If Miller did not want to address this complicating factor in his limited print space, he could have described these “trends” more accurately as allegations, promoted by some of the festival’s speakers.

Miller’s column asks us to pursue “intelligent discussion.”

A big part of that is distinguishing what’s really going on in the world from the spin and the bluster.

• My book Walking Seattle (you do all have your own copy by now, right?) just happens to take readers past five historic Christian Science church buildings in different parts of town. All are now occupied by others; two as other churches and three re-purposed to new uses. The last of these, a townhome redevelopment on 15th Avenue East on Capitol Hill, is finally done. Lawrence Cheek explores both the architectural and usage ironies in turning a house of worship into homes for the upscale.
• (By the way, Walking Seattle has its own online companion now, as an add-on virtual tour guide within the iOS/Android app ViewRanger!)
• (By the other way, North Sound readers who want to learn more about traipsing through the Jet City can attend a Walking Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Sunday Feb. 26 at Village Books in Bellingham.)
• Damn: J.C. Penney won’t be coming back to downtown Seattle after all. So let’s get Kohl’s in the old Borders space, and a full branch of the University Book Store upstairs in the Kress building (where Penney’s was supposed to have gone).
• In today’s wacky city survey of the day, Seattle ranks last in average pay raises last year. (Note to bosses, particularly in the tech biz: People can’t eat break-room foosball tables. Wanna hold on to those people you insist are so vital to your continued growth n’ success n’ stuff? Treat ’em better.)
• In a related story, the labor union UNITE/HERE is fighting to get a better deal for workers at the Space Needle, who’ve been offered the usual raw deal of takebacks and job insecurity.
• Megan Seling asks the musical question, if Seattle does get NHL hockey, what local standard should be the team’s “goal song“? I’m more interested in the team name. If we do get the currently league-owned Phoenix Coyotes, we wouldn’t really need to change that moniker. After all, this state is the birthplace of the creator of Wile E. Coyote.
• Somebody who claims to have done his research has come up with an online, annotated Seattle gang map.
• How to end police brutality? Studies? Consultants? “Process”? No?
• Sadly, there are still some pathetic, deluded dudes who want to turn the inland Northwest into a white supremacist “homeland.”
• You want to know how completely unpopular the far right’s social agenda is? Consumer marketing and advertising have completely ignored/rejected it. (Yes, many of you reject marketing and advertising. But advertisers want to sell by appealing to common contemporary values. And those are not the values either held, or paid lip-service to, by today’s rabid right.)
• I didn’t notice this when it came out, but New York magazine noted a couple months ago that e-books have become “a whole new literary form.” Specifically, the mag cited the fact that e-books can be any length, thus creating a market for long “short nonfiction” and short “long nonfiction.”
• Rampant, pathetic homophobia can pop up anywhere, even among the people you’d think were least likely to absorb it. Such as female tennis stars.
• The LA Times thinks it’s tracked down the world’s most unromantic tourist destinations. I dunno. I can certainly imagine the erotic symbolism of Australia’s giant earthworm museum.
• Our ol’ pal Jim Romenesko’s got a growing list of “words journalists use that people never say.” My own favorites include pontiff, solon, stumping, embattled, succumb, cohort, loggerheads, cagers, and, of course, moniker.

• You know what else women do differently than men? Utilize public transit.
• Metro’s route #42 may be a goner, alas. Next on the chopping block for drastic cutting: the #2 route, one of Metro’s most heavily used and the only direct route from Queen Anne to First Hill and Madrona.
• Republicans in the state Legislature have a new plan to “reform” K-12 education: dump all that distracting stuff about civil rights and combatting gay-bashing.
• Goldy asks if the state legislature can pass gay marriage, why can’t it fix our regressive tax system? Here’s one potential answer: because the Seattle civic establishment (root of most “progressive” moves in this state) loves gays (“minorities” who can still be upscale and white!) and hates anything that might inconvenience big business.
• The newest e-commerce craze: selling breast milk online. (Make your own pun based on old dairy ad slogans if you like.)
• Mitt Romney’s dad was famous for two things: (1) running American Motors during most of its formative years, and (2) being in Nixon’s cabinet, where he helped devise the “mortgage backed securities” that helped bring down the nation’s economy in recent years.
• Another day, another plea for sympathy toward the (hidebound, ultra-inefficient, conglomerate-ruled) traditional book industry. This time it’s from the Authors Guild. They insist it takes tangible books, tangible bookstores, and old-style publishers to “break” new authors. Which would be an interesting argument if the (major) old-style publishers were still truly interested in “breaking” new authors (you know, with actual promotional budgets and marketing support).
• Graham Joyce at the Guardian scoffs at novelist Jeanette Winterston, who seems to want more novels with “daunting” and daring use of language for its own sake. Joyce insists that profound works can be deceptively “readable.”
• A guy’s going around the book-publicity circuit claiming to have “hooked up” (but didn’t always have sex) with 120 women over a year and a half; despite being bald, overweight, and non-wealthy. In other words, women exist who aren’t obsessed with superficial appearance. (This is news?)
• One more Don Cornelius tribute: Ryuichi Sakamoto on Soul Train!

freecabinporn.com

• This site of nothing but pictures of countryside cabins (rustic to postmodern) reminds me of my young adult years, when all writers were supposed to want to live in cabins. I never did. To me, the countryside was something to escape from.
• On a similar thread, some of the same “writerly lifestyle” folks who’d demanded that I be a mellow back-to-nature lover also kept laundry lists of everything they hated about the modern world. Meet today’s incarnation of that trope, Jonathan Franzen.
• NHL hockey in Seattle: even more likely?
• Here’s something novel for ya: Scenes of women in superhero comics that female readers actually like!
• When a Google attorney goes on a Time Warner site to advocate for less draconian copyright laws, something’s going on. I don’t know exactly what, but something.
• A young Brit couple Tweeted® about their upcoming trip to the States. They said they were gonna “destroy America” by, among other hard-partyin’ things, “digging up Marilyn Monroe’s grave.” Agents arrested ’em on their arrival at LAX, detained ’em, and shipped ’em back home. They insist they were just joking. Memo to Homeland Security: Anyone who actually wants to destroy America probably won’t Tweet® about it.
• If the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation wanted to keep selling itself as the voice of defiant courage, it shouldn’t have caved to the phony right wing smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.
• Don’t watch porn on your laptop in a public library where kids can see it. Make ’em find the really good sites on their own.
• Just why do restaurant websites so consistently suck?

• Clever entrepreneurs in Philadelphia have a line of T-shirts and posters exhorting what I and many of my fellow writers and artists have been shrieking lo these many years to cheapskate dot-com and media execs: FREELANCE AIN’T FREE!
• Good idea in the legislature #1: Looking into the abundance of “special taxing districts” around the state, with an eye toward paring them down.
• Good idea in the legislature #2: Getting rid of a Cold War-era ordinance that authorized state government to persecute, blackball, and ban “subversive” people and groups.
• Let’s all welcome the Houston Astros to the American League West (the Mariners’ division), not this year but next year. Except they might not be called the Astros by then.
• Shepherd Fairey, that “radical chic” Obama and Andre the Giant portraitist, didn’t just steal from AP wire photos. He’s regularly “borrowed” even entire images from sincerely political artists around the world, completely uncredited and uncompensated.
• SeattlePI.com is even more short-staffed than before, but it’s still got some good stuff. Like Vanessa Ho and Joe Dyer’s excellent feature on homeless people sleeping under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, who are being kicked out of there by the state. As Anatole France wrote back in 1894,

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.

• All right, fans of glass buildings and obscure dangerous plants, you all have one year to figure out how to save the Volunteer Park Conservatory.
• Update: That 83 year old activist Tacoma priest, who was on a hunger strike while in federal detention? He’s still detained, but off the hunger strike.
• Another of those silly surveys claims Washington DC has surpassed Seattle as the nation’s “most literate” city.
• A Republican state legislator introduced a bill to scuttle any enforcement of the feds’ prescribed remedies concerning excessive force by Seattle police, and shunt the matter over to “a bipartisan taskforce.” Where, presumably, Republican politicians would hold veto power on any policy changes.
• In other legislative news, farmers and farm workers both back a bill to slow the local spread of “E-Verify,” the federal background-check program for immigrant workers.
• The new Businessweek’s cover story discusses Amazon’s latest move into publishing its own e-books—the opening of an NYC office intended to issue bigtime books by bigtime authors. The headline (“Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business”) and the cover image (yes, a burning book, straight outta Fahrenheit 451) depict the viewpoint of an NY publishing cartel both scared to pieces and smugly defensive of their old time business-as-usual, now threatened by this dot-com upstart. And just as you’d expect, the piece quotes the industry’s Big Six conglomerate-owned mega-publishers defending their wasteful, slow traditional practices by hyping their “role as nurturers of literary culture.” As if the commercial book biz had ever been about that.

Without any further ado, the big new product announcement promised here on Tuesday.

Actually, it’s an old product.

But a new way to buy and enjoy it!

It’s The Myrtle of Venus, my short, funny novel of “Sex, Art, and Real Estate.”

It’s now out in ultra handy e-book form, for the insanely low price of merely $2.99.

Yes, that link goes to the “Kindle Store.” But you don’t need a genuine Kindle machine to read it. They’ve got free apps for Macs, PCs, iPads, and lots of mobile platforms.

Why should all of this site’s loyal friends and true download it?

Because it’s alternately sexy, hilarious, and poignant.

Because it takes you back to those heady days of the real estate bubble.

Because it’s a rollicking tale of eleven lively characters who combine, clash, and re-combine.

The action all occurs amid the dying days of an artists’ studio cooperative. The artists’ new landlady, the World’s Blandest Woman, wants them out. But the artists have a plan. They’ll seduce her into becoming one of them.

But their best laid plans don’t get her laid the way they plan.

What happens next is as wild as it is unpredictable.

To find out, you’ll just have to get the thing and read it already.