• Radical activists associated with Adbusters magazine want to organize a long-term “occupation” of Wall Street, with the aim to force an end to the “politics of greed.” Paul B. Farrell isn’t so sure it’ll work.
• Bad news of the day: Espresso Vivace general manager Brian Fairbrother was badly injured in a cycling accident. (Yes, he wore a helmet.) On Wednesday, loved ones decided, in accordance with his previously stated wishes, to remove life support.
• Good news of the day: The INSCAPE arts center in the former immigration building got a $10 million grant for needed structural upgrades and interior refits.
• Eh? news of the day: Wash. state’s slashing of higher-ed support was only tied for worst in the nation, with three other states.
• Update #1: The Belltown substance-abuse center boss accused of trying to rape a boy? He wasn’t the psychologist he’d claimed to be.
• Update #2: That Snohomish County stink mentioned here yesterday? It’s chicken byproduct.
• The long-delayed development at Ballard’s former Sunset Bowl site is finally underway.
• Turns out that creepy plastic faced “king” mascot wasn’t the only scary thing about Burger King.
• Tacoma: The city that knows when to say no.
• The City’s got this “Only in Seattle” program, promoting local businesses in various neighborhoods. The program’s Belltown edition was unveiled Wednesday. The four honored outfits were two upscale restaurant-bars, one upscale furniture emporium, and Federal Army & Navy Surplus.
• Coming to a 7-Eleven near you (depending on where you are): A locker where you can pick up your Amazon purchases. 7-Eleven in Japan has had this for years. It’s great for people who work during the day and live alone (or with other people who also work during the day).
• The Wall St. Journal discovers grunge nostalgia.
• The Seattle Weekly/Village Voice Media/Backpage.com sex ad mess just gets messier, as politicians of more stripes use it for cheap grandstanding.
• Cartoonist Ruben Bolling seems to wish George Lucas could digitally alter the past 10 years.
• The St. Petersburg Times fact checked Wednesday’s GOP Presidential debate and came up with at least two statements deserving the ultimate “Pants On Fire” rating.
• Our ol’ pal Tim Harris appeared with C.R. Douglas in a great segment on KCPQ on the topic of “Homeless in Seattle.” If you’re wondering how something this insightful got on a program entitled Q13 Fox News, let me repeat (for what seems like the umpteenth time): KCPQ has no connection to the Fox News Channel (except for airing the latter’s Fox News Sunday “spinterview” show). KCPQ is an affiliate of the Fox Broadcast network. KCPQ is really owned by the (Chicago) Tribune Co. I wish the station itself would make this clearer.

• A victim of the war-on-terra hype some folks would like brought back: busking musicians on ferry boats.
• Here’s CNN’s take on the scandal of Border Patrol agents unfairly harassing Latino locals on the Olympic Peninsula. The headline: “Border agent says there’s nothing to do, says money being wasted.” In other words, if it weren’t for the war-on-terra hype, none of this would be happening.
• There’s a reason all the local media latched onto the aging Hall and Oates as this year’s big Bumbershoot stars. It’s because they were the only act this year both famous enough and old enough for media people to have heard of. (Apparently, the big name acts now want a cool half million per show. And you were wondering why you haven’t heard many recessionary protest songs by said big name acts.)
• The Neptune Theater’s official re-opening, later this month, will include a one-night nod to the U District house’s roots. I speak, of course, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which played midnight shows at the Neptune for more than a decade.
• Recession Sign #1: More parents are discovering public schools are just fine after all.
• Recession Sign #2: Realistic novels and stories about the socio-economically struggling are back in vogue.
• Adam Doree wants Steve Jobs to finally get around to donate a few buck to charity already.
• Sady Doyle really, really hates the Game of Thrones books. And Alyssa Rosenberg doesn’t particularly care for Doyle’s putdowns of the books. The point-O-contention: The novels depict women enduring some of the violent brutalities one might find in a violent, brutal fictional setting.
• Elsewhere in genderland, Hugo Schwyzer wants you to define the word “man” to mean not-boy, instead of not-woman.
• The Guardian, ever on the prowl for American weirdness with which to addle and astound its Brit readers, has discovered the “muscular Christianity” in evangelical-fringe books such as No More Christian Mr. Nice Guy. The writer seems to have never heard of the Church of the SubGenius and its “real FIGHTIN’ JESUS.”

• Despite what Republican politicians would have you believe, Washington state actually leads the nation in new business creation these days.
• One of these new businesses will be a downtown JC Penney store, in the old Kress five-and-dime store building at Third and Pike. That’s just a block from the old (1930-82) Penney store (Target’s going in on that site later this year). It’s great news, but what will become of the loveable, and vitally needed, Kress IGA supermarket in the building’s lower level? Its operators insist they’ve got a long term lease and are staying no matter what.
• It’s not just the state civil payroll that’s ethnically un-diverse. The state legislature is only 6.8 percent nonwhite.
• Local theater blogger Jose Aguerra asks whether local troupes are being too coy and inoffensive, even in their depiction of female orgasms. (In my day, Seattle’s live theaters prided themselves on presenting edgy, daring material, even if the promise was grander than the product.)
• A UW Medical Center administrator got caught embezzling a quarter mil from the hospital. You’re only hearing about it now because the state auditor made a statement publicly praising the U for how it investigated and prosecuted the inside thief. A potential huge scandal was thus turned into a low-key moment of triumph for the administration. At least if you read the Seattle Times version of the story. KOMO offers a far more critical spin on the affair.
• Grist.org’s David Roberts ponders what the heck Friends of the Earth is doing getting involved with right-wing lobby groups in proposing a “green” federal budget slashing scheme.
• The link we ran last week about the electric-guitar company? The company that got raided by federal agents, who were supposedly looking for endangered imported wood? The company flatly denies all allegations. And the Murdoch Wall St. Journal, ever eager to bash anything environmentalist, claims the feds could next go after folks who own old vintage instruments that contain now-restricted components.
• Should any of us care about speculation about the new Apple CEO’s private life? Ars Technica says no.
• Birth rates are dropping in many countries, especially those where female fetuses are sometimes selectively aborted. The Economist calculates some countries, at their current rates of decline, could totally run out of people in 600-700 years. Of course, if you’re not a dystopian scifi fan you know trends don’t stay the same, at the same rate, forever.
• Sasha Brown-Worsham believes “we should parent more like they did in 1978.” More Boo Berry and daytime TV; less overprotectiveness and constant fear.

from alleewillis.com

• The Martin Luther King Memorial in DC will not be dedicated this weekend as scheduled, due of course to the hurricane. That gives more time for critics to bash the whole thing—for being designed and built in China (allegedly by unpaid labor); for being backed by big corporate interests King might have protested against; and for generally depicting King as a “dreamer,” not the rabble rouser and afflicter of the comfortable he really was.
• Veterans’ activists allege the suicide of a Ft. Lewis soldier a few weeks ago should be considered murder, committed by a military that utterly fails to tend to Iraq vets’ post-traumatic and other disorders.
• Campagne, the longtime upscale Pike Place Market restaurant that’s produced the annual Post Alley Bastille Day fetes, will now be called “Marché.” I guess it’s OK since that outfit a couple blocks away isn’t using the word anymore.
• The Boeing 787 was officially approved for passenger travel, more than three years behind schedule.
• Erica C. Barnett asks why the $400,000 the City contributes toward Metro Transit’s potentially doomed Ride Free Area couldn’t instead be used to buy automatic ticket-selling machines. Because that’s not free downtown transit for the people who need it, that’s why!
• In other transportation news, the Sightline Institute has the good news that young adults are driving a lot less these days.
• MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan has a new name for the billionaires and their cronies grifting from the rest of us for their own needless gain—”corporate communism.”
• Was your favorite American-made electric guitar built with endangered imported wood?

• Warren Buffet “saved” Bank of America with a $5 billion investment. So now what should he do with it? How about breaking it up? Sell Merrill Lynch to help pay for Countrywide’s involvement in the mortgage bubble and subsequent crash. Then turn the retail banking operation into regionalized spinoffs attuned to their local communities rather than to the Wall St. casino.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Seattle Bike Blog believes SW editor Mike Seely’s “ill-informed and widely off base” rant against the City’s “road diet” programs (re-laning schemes, sometimes including separate bike lanes) is part of a desperate agenda to bash Mayor McGinn for anything and everything, including programs actually started by the previous mayor.
• Media Matters parses, and debunks, the arguments made by media toadies in favor of Boeing’s union busting drives.
• Seattle’s new art mecca? The now sparsely occupied interior-decorator showrooms at Georgetown’s Seattle Design Center.
• James Altucher lists some little known facts about the recently retired Steve Jobs. These include several less than flattering things. None of those involve his role in the outsourcing of almost all North American consumer-electronics manufacturing.…
• …while Kelefa Sanneh believes the iPod phenom, with its penchant for mixing and mashing, has driven the music biz back toward flashy hit singles.
• The story we linked to yesterday, the one that was all aglow about Iceland flouting the global bankers? Seems it was somewhat exaggerated, alas.
• And for political point making combined with snarky laffs, explore the highly unauthorized by any campaign committee site, “What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far?“

Steve Jobs had essentially retired from Apple Inc.’s day to day management back in January. On Wednesday he simply made this move official.

Thus ends the second (third, if you count the NExT/early Pixar years) era of Jobs’s involvement in, and leadership of, the digital gizmo industry.

I will leave it to others more laser-focused on that industry to give the big picture of Jobs’s work and legacy. But here are a few notes on it.

Jobs and Steve Wozniac did not, by themselves, “invent the personal computer.” Many individuals and companies had seen what the early mainframes could potentially do in the hands of smaller-than-corporate users. The early “hacker culture” was a tribe of programmers who worked in corporate, institutional, and particularly collegiate computing centers, who snuck in personal projects whenever and wherever they could get processor time.

As the first microprocessor chips came on the market, several outfits came up with primitive programmable computer-like devices built around them, initially offering them in kit form. One of those kit computers was Jobs and Wozniak’s Apple (posthumously renamed the Apple I).

That begat the pre-assembled (but still user-expandable) Apple II. It came out around the same time as Commodore and Radio Shack’s similar offerings. But unlike those two companies, the two Steves had nerd street cred. This carefully crafted brand image, that Apple was the microcomputer made by and for “real” computer enthusiasts, helped the company outlast the Eagles, Osbornes, Kaypros, Colecos, and Tandons.

Then the IBM PC came along—and with it MS-DOS, and the PC clones, and eventually Windows.

In response, Jobs and co. made the Apple III (a failure).

Then the Lisa (a failure, but with that vital Xerox-borrowed graphic interface).

Then came the original Macintosh.

A heavily stripped-down scion of the Lisa, it was originally capable of not much besides enthralling and inspiring tens of thousands into seeing “computers” for potential beyond the mere manipulation of text and data.

The Mac slowly began to fulfill this potential as it gained more memory, more software, and more peripherals, particularly the Apple laser printer that made “desktop publishing” a thing.

But Jobs would be gone by then. Driven out by his own associates, he left behind a company neither he nor anyone else could effectively run.

Jobs created the NExT computer (a failure, but the machine on which Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web), and bought Pixar (where my ol’ high school pal Brad Bird would direct The Incredibles and Ratatouille).

The Mac lived, but didn’t thrive, in the niche markets of schools and graphic design. But even there, the Windows platform, with its multiple hardware vendors under Microsoft’s OS control, threatened to finally smother its only remaining rival.

Back came Jobs, in a sequence of maneuvers even more complicated than those that had gotten him out of the company.

Out went the Newton, the Pippin, the rainbow logo hues. In came the candy colored iMac and OS X.

And in came a new business model, that of “digital media.”

There had been a number of computer audio and video formats; many of them Windows-only. For the Mac to survive, Apple had to have its own audio and video formats, and they had to become “industry standards” by being ported to Windows.

Thus, iTunes.

And, from there, the iTunes Store, the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, and an Apple that was less a computer company and more a media-player-making and media-selling company. The world’s “biggest” company, by stock value, for a few moments last week.

Jobs turned a strategy to survive into a means to thrive.

Along the way he helped to “disrupt” (to use a favorite Wired magazine cliche) the music, video, TV,  cell-phone, casual gaming, book publishing, and other industries.

We have all been affected by Jobs, his products, and the design and business creations devised under his helm.

He’s backing away for health reasons. But we’ve all been the subjects of his own experiments, his treatments for “conditions” the world didn’t know it had.

•

The post-Jobs Apple is led by operations chief Tim Cook, whom Gawker is already calling “the most powerful gay man in America.” That’s based on speculation and rumor. Cook hasn’t actually outed himself, keeping his private life private.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.

• Juan Cole does something that a lot of pundits do, to my dismay. He posts a list of the “Top Ten Myths About the Libya War.” But he never quotes or cites these memes he’s denouncing. Who actually claimed Gaddafi was a “progressive,” or that he would not have massacred more of his own people given the chance? Cole only sources one of the assertions he puts down, quoting Alexander Cockburn as saying the war would end badly and Libya could get broken up at its end.
• Here’s the full text of Dennis Kucinich’s Hempfest speech calling for “a new activism in the United States.”
• Is it culturally insensitive to call a young boys’ sports league “midget football?”
• Much of Capitol Hill, including big swaths of Broadway and Pike/Pine, were rendered powerless by an electrical blackout Monday afternoon/evening. It lasted just long enough to mess up the commute home and close bars during happy hour.
• A Seattle U. report claims the South Lake Union developments have generated all the jobs they were predicted to generate back in the early 2000s, and a little more.
• The state’s now making the sellers of toys, cosmetics, and baby products reveal when their products contain any harmful chemicals.
• Mercer Island (sort of) street theater, part 2: Lefties put up a huge bare-butt balloon near Seward Park, with the caption SHARED SACRIFICE MY ASS. It was hoisted within view of Paul Allen’s M.I. compound.
• In case you wondered, the Elwha Dam will be dismantled, not imploded.
• Is this what we’ve descended to, a guy (author-essayist Sam Harris) pleading with America’s rich to put their money behind something, anything, more noble than their own selves?
• Hollywood scholar Matthias Stork has a name for loud, frenetic, disjointed action movies. He calls them “chaos cinema.” And he doesn’t like it:

It’s a shotgun aesthetic, firing a wide swath of sensationalistic technique that tears the old classical filmmaking style to bits.… It doesn’t matter where you are, and it barely matters if you know what’s happening onscreen. The new action films are fast, florid, volatile audiovisual war zones.

• R.I.P. Jack Layton, leader of Canada’s New Democratic Party, who’d led his left-of-center bloc’s recent push to become that country’s Official Opposition (i.e., #2 in number of Parliament seats). That was in May. In July he stepped down from the NDP, announcing he had cancer. Layton was a fighter for workers, for the homeless, for the environment, and for preserving Canada’s superior health care system.

The cowriter (with Mike Stoller) of countless hits for Elvis, Peggy Lee, Ben E. King, Shirley Bassey, Big Mama Thornton, Bill Haley, the Drifters, the Coasters etc. died 34 years to the week after Presley’s own death.

While Leiber and Stoller hadn’t many new hits after their ’50s-’60s heyday, their older songs remained alive in the oldies canon, as well as in the general culture.

Alice Walker wrote an oft-reprinted 1983 essay lauding Thornton’s version of “Hound Dog” as superior to Presley’s (an opinion with which Leiber agreed).

Twenty years ago, the Broadway revue Smokey Joe’s Cafe mixed slick-sanitized renditions of 40 Leiber/Stoller oldies within a fab-’50s nostalgia theme.

In the early 2000s, Leiber was an outspoken co-plaintiff in the record industry’s lawsuits to shut down online file sharing.

And, of course, there was the Leiber/Stoller tribute episode of American Idol this past May with guest star Lady Gaga.

1983 ad from vintagecomputing.com

• Hewlett Packard’s spinning off or selling its PC hardware business, and shutting down its smartphone and tablet lines altogether. The hereby linked article doesn’t mention HP’s printers, or their worth-their-weight-in-gold ink cartridges.
• Krist Novoselic’s staging an all-star Nevermind tribute show on Sept. 20, during the breakthrough Nirvana album’s 20th anniversary week. It’ll be a fundraiser for Susie Tennant, a longtime local music industry fixture who’s going through some nasty cancer treatments.
• Sarah Ann Lloyd at Seattlest’s take on the state’s drive to make bars pay thousands in back “opportunity to dance” taxes, which the bars had never heard of before: It’s a vague ordinance, open to too-wide interpretation.
• As we’ve already reported, the County Council’s compromise to save Metro Transit includes dumping the downtown Ride Free Area, starting in Oct. 2012. Real Change’s Timothy Harris alleges Metro management was in on “this opportunistic attack on the poor,” in order to “get the visible poor off the bus.”
• Stephen H. Dunphy at Crosscut claims there are “two economies” in the Seattle area, (1) high-tech and (2) everything else. Guess which one’s actually working?
• If you’re in that stagnant second economy, you might consider retraining in a new field. If so, you might think of this as absolutely the wrong time to slash community college funding.
• Casino losses have funded something important. It’s the Tulalip Tribes’ new $19 million cultural heritage center.
• In non-tunnel road news, construction of the new 520 bridge is set to start next year, even though the state doesn’t have the money to build anything on the bridge’s Seattle end.
• There are (relatively) little guys in the gasoline business. They’re the station owners, trapped in unequal marriages with their franchisor/suppliers. One such case has resulted in 17 ex-Arco stations in Tacoma and environs and a bitter legal dispute between a multi-station franchisee and BP.
• Can ex-UW president Mark Emmert, now running the NCAA, actually do anything to stem big-money corruption in college sports?
• Bill Clinton now claims to be a vegan. Does that mean he’s going to become as annoyingly sanctimonious as the rest of ’em?
• Someone’s found a use for print newspapers! It involves stealing them in bulk for the purpose of “extreme couponing.”
• Here comes the backlash against Standard & Poor’s, about three years late.
• According to the “hacktivists” at Anonymous, a defense contractor and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got together to infiltrate and sabotage progressives in online social networks. One scheme involved fake a Facebook profile using the real name of a Maxim model.
• R.I.P. Gualtiero Jacopetti, creator of the original Mondo Cane and many of the “shockumentary” films that followed it.
• Elsewhere in filmland, here’s an essay praising Chinese underground cinema as real independent cinema. No official support. No submissions to state censorship committees. No theatrical or above-ground video releases. No commercial potential. No careerist ambition. No bosses except Art herself.
• Here’s a Vegas hotel implosion story with a difference—the 27-story tower has never been opened.

• Ex-Seattleite Tom Spurgeon wrote for The Comics Journal after I left there, then wrote for the Stranger after I left there. More recently, he’s had a debilitating medical condition, which he doesn’t fully explain in his hereby-linked essay. What he does discuss are his thoughts during his enforced bedrest, about comics, film, and being human.
• At least five enlisted personnel at Joint Base Lewis-McChord have committed suicide in less than two months. More needless casualties of the two needless wars.
• State officials found what they apparently thought was a simple “tax loophole” whose “closing” would generate much-needed revenue. It involves imposing “dance taxes” on bars and nightclubs—retroactively—based on a decades-old ordinance intended to regulate exercise studios. Some clubs say it could put them out of business.
• Unemployment in our state is still icky big.
• Amazon boss Jeff Bezos just gave $10 million to the Museum of History and Industry’s new complex at Lake Union Park, set to open late next year.
• If you don’t have enough to be scared of, just think about the “brain-eating amoeba.”
• Headline of the day: “Social Security Declares 14,000 Living People Dead Every Year.”
• The amorphous tangle of billionaire-funded “populist uprisings” collectively known as the “tea party” is massively unpopular. I mean massively.
• PBS’s Judy Woodruff tries to explain the consequences of extreme wealth inequality on a show underwritten by corporate funders out for a nearly-exclusively upscale audience…
• …while Amanda Marcotte (no, I don’t expect you to know all these web-pundit names) looks at right-wingers’ replies to the Verizon strike and declares we’re living in a new feudalism. So where are all the Renaissance Faire costumes?
• Among the top-grossing movies so far this year, you have to go down to position #8 to find a live-action, non-sequel, non-superhero film (Bridesmaids).

• The rules of cricket.
• The real names of the Residents.
• Who the characters “really were” in any ’50s-’60s novel set in New York City.
• What’s under a kilt.
• What’s under a Utilikilt.
• What heroin use feels like.
• What (insert name of debilitating disease here) feels like.

j.p. at the pike place market centennial, 2007

• J.P. Patches (sometimes also known as Chris Wedes), the beloved former local kid-vid star, has announced he has terminal cancer and will retire from public appearances in the next year.
• For a time on Monday, the deal to save King County Metro transit with a car tab surcharge seemed in trouble. But enough Republican County Council members eventually came through. Yay!
• Speaking of which, you know Metro’s Route #48? The long route that goes almost all over Seattle except downtown? The Bus Chick blog relates the route’s hidden history. It was the result of a ’60s community drive to bring more bus service to the Central District, particularly directly from there to the UW.
• A book collector and an author claim storied frontier bank robber Butch Cassidy wasn’t killed in Bolivia but retired quietly to eastern Washington, where he lived until 1937. (Thankfully, that was long before the awful cartoon show that stole his name.)
• Speaking of cartoons, Renton police believe they’ve identified, and have disciplined the officer who allegedly posted those web animations critical of the department.
• The lady from suburban Detroit who got in trouble with her town council for having a vegetable garden in her front yard? She was in Seattle recently, and has some intriguing thoughts about what makes our city different from hers.
• SeaTimes writer Jon Talton really doesn’t like that Washington Mutual’s execs won’t get prosecuted for their role in the housing-bubble fiasco.
• Adventures in intellectual property: A heretofore obscure provision in the 1978 copyright law means recording artists can start reclaiming their rights to works from that era, away from the once mighty record labels, providing they give two years’ notice about it. Of course, the record labels interpret this part of the law far differently.
• Warren Buffett wants folks in his tax bracket to pay more taxes. Which will happen as soon as folks in his tax bracket no longer control the election process.

2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue

• The Lenin statue in Fremont is privately owned, and is for sale. But nobody apparently wants to buy it.
• Minorities: Bellevue’s got a lot more of ’em these days, sez the Census. Seattle’s got a lot fewer.
• Art Thiel wants you to know the big Husky Stadium rebuild, to begin this winter, involves no taxpayer funds. Just private donations and bond issues to be repaid out of UW Athletics income.
• Ex-State Rep Brendan Williams wants Washington state’s progressives to “get some backbone” about preserving vital services in the state budget.
• Starbucks boss and Sonics seller Howard Schultz’s latest big idea: Big election-campaign donors like him should vow to boycott funding election campaigns. Of course, if Democratic donors like Schultz are the only ones doing the boycotting….
• There’s a plan to create a “Jimi Hendrix Park,” next to the African American Museum at the old Coleman School. It would be the fifth Hendrix memorial of one type or another (not counting the Experience Music Project, which parted ways with the Hendrix heirs during its development). Cobain still has just that one unofficial park bench in Viretta Park and a city-limits sign in Aberdeen.
• Rolling Stone put out a reader poll declaring the top punk acts of all time. The list put Green Day on top and included not a single female. FlavorWire has come to the side of justice with its own in-house listing of “15 Essential Women Punk Icons.” The NW’s own Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, and Sleater-Kinney are on it, as is onetime Seattleite Courtney Love.
• Many, many indie-label CDs were in a warehouse that burned during the London lootings. Some labels might not survive the blow.
• Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac sez Apple’s invented all the big things it’s going to invent for a while. We’ve heard this one before.
• And for those of you heading back into the working life (you lucky stiffs, you), take heed Peter Toohey’s thoughts (partly inspired by the late David Foster Wallace) on “the thrill of boredom:”

Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.

As some of you know, one of my recent research obsessions has been to unearth instrumental recordings by all-female pop/rock bands.

I’ll tell you all about this peculiar quest another time.

But I can’t wait to share what might be the mother of all such tracks.

It’s the Brooklyn Organ Synth Orchestra, more than 20 female keyboardists from NY-based bands, getting together (with the help of video editing) on that ’70s prog rock overproduction classic “Tubular Bells!”

(Thanx and a hat tip to PCL Linkdump.)