It’s the madcap return of the MISCmedia In/Out List, the longest-running and most accurate list of its type anywhere in the western hemisphere.

As long-term readers know, this is a prediciton of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the months to come. If you think everything hot now will just keep getting hotter forever, I’ve got some Mariners season tickets to sell you.

…notes that Americans’ freedoms are being attacked from the inside, not the outside.

I’m only able to write this now because Diane Larson, the veteran UPS driver who services a stretch of Belltown, fended off two would-be shoulder-bag robbers until they fled. Otherwise, I’d be without the computer on which I write this.

That happened around 12:45 p.m. Wednesday. Later, in the Two Bells (where I told Diane I would be after I thanked her for her help), I told a uniformed cop (with a plainchothes detective standing behind him) what had happened.

I’d just been to the bank, and was walking north on Fourth Avenue toward the Two Bells for lunch. I was thinking this solstice day was the first day of the rest of my life–that from this day on, I vowed, I’d have no more financial worries, no career worries, no stress. I would have to say goodbye to my old existence of being waylaid by constant panic.

Then, out of my peripheral vision, a stringy-haired, unshaven white guy person lunged toward me, cornered me against the wall near the Chinese Wok restaurant, and grabbed at my shoulder bag (containing, among many other things, this laptop). I held onto the bag for dear life (no pipsqueak punk does THAT to ME!) and yelled “NOOOO!” repeatedly.

A stocky black guy from across the street ran toward me and the crook, yelling “I got it. I can handle it.” Instead of helping me fend off the crook, he lunged for the bag himself. (He might or might not have been a mate of crook #1.)

I held onto it like it was part of me (the computer is, of course, my most intimate tool and even an extension of my mind). A half dozen Chinese Wok patrons came out to yell at the crooks but did nothing more.

Then Diane came, stomped her foot on the fallen bag to keep it in place, and held both crooks at bay until they chose to run off.

That, my friend, is what Brown can do for me.

I learned: For a self-styled lifelong passive weakling/wuss, when I have to I can be as feisty and ornery as my Snohomish County bad-boy upbringing has reared me to be. I’m also good at making a spectacle of myself; my stubborn “NOOO,” one of many frustration catch phrases which have often cused others to dismiss me as a weirdo and a freak, effectively helped save my ass. I’m a fighter. I’m a survivor. I triumph against all odds. I’m a “real man,” damn it.

While I couldn’t give a good enough description of the crooks for the cops (who told me “tunnel vision” often occurs in people at moments of sudden panic), I still remember the steely, desperate, focused evil look of the first would-be thief, and how he instantly turned into a running coward when he knew he’d lost.

Some guy in The Nation a few years back wrote about having been mugged in New Haven, CT. He said that, far from turning his back on urban society and wanting to cocoon in the burbs, he was grateful his crime took place in a city, where passersby were immediately there to help him and where emergency-room care was only minutes away.

I feel likewise today. If I’d been mugged in Woodinville (and, yes, it happens), I’d have been stuck one-to-two against the muggers with no one to hear me for miles. Heck, if it’d happened in one of the nether regions of West Seattle where I sometimes find myself wandering off of buses, I’d have been TSOL.

I also can’t stop thinking of the thieves, not as the opposite-race subhumans the conservatives would claim to protect me from, but as right-wingers without resources. These dorks wanted to take my stuff for no good reason, offering nothing in return, just because they believed they had the power to do so.

…of Sudoku puzzles are herein explained.

…a music festival and nobody showed up, would it make a sound? The Red Bull Music Academy brought dozens of European techno DJs to Seattle from Nov. 7 through Dec. 8. Each year, the “energy drink” people bring assorted mastes and tyros of electronica to a different city.

The academy’s workshops and conferences were hidden behind the obscured storefront of the former Beatty Book Store on Third and Virginia, compared to ROCKRGRL’s highly promoted events in the Madison Hotel.

Aside from fancy brochures and flyers in the participating bars and nightclubs, the Red Bull event was hardly even publicized locally. Too bad; the local electronica scene’s been on stagnant times, and could’ve used some high-profile events to bring back the local crowds—even if the most famous participant at Red Bull was Eumir Deodato, who’d made a hit disco version of the 2001 theme three decades back.

Even Red Bull’s PR packet contained nothing introducing the event to Seattle; only long essays introducing Seattle to the event’s Euro performers and reporters. Some excerpts:

“Seattle, while not as large as the American metropolises of New York or Los Angeles, is host to a bustling, shucking and jiving culture…. Seattle has long had a vibrant Asian and Asian-American population, and well-established communities of Scandinavians, African-Americans, Jews, Latinos and thoroughly Native Americans. The city represents the ‘melting-pot’ that logically fosters around the coastal areas of the United States.”…The grunge proliferation and later Internet boom created a dreamlike atmosphere in the city. RealNetworks, Amazon, and Adobe populated the Employment opportunities section of newspapers with wanted ads. Seattle-baed Starbucks replicated itself exponentially on a tidal wave of too-sweet corporate coffee to jolt the technologically-inclined into their 12-hour workdays…. While the Internet boom and bust were a manic time of too much wealth and then too much poverty, they did help revolutionize the culture of Seattle. The limitations of the finite world were kept at bay, if only briefly, and allowed dreamers to indulge. The staid American work tradition of business attire was cast aside, and three-piece suits were retired in favor of ratty T-sshirts and Levi’s. Tradition was scorned for new invention. It is perhaps for this reason that Seattleites insist on proudly wearing jeans and Teva sandals with white tube socks to restaurants with $200 price fixe menus.”

Streaming audio of the Seattle performances can be heard at redbullmusicacademy.com.

…Seattle was onto the downtown residential revival thang decades before the rest of the country: “During the 1990s, downtown population grew by 10 percent, a marked resurgence following 20 years of overall decline. Forty percent of the sample cities began to see growth before the 1990s. While only New York’s two downtown areas and Seattle, Los Angeles, and San Diego saw steady increases from 1970 to 2000, another 13 downtowns have experienced sustained growth since the 1980s.”

I’ll always remember the late comedy legend for one of my earliest memories of what would now be called “performance art.” I’m thinking of some of his early appearances on Mike Douglas and Merv Griffin, in which he didn’t tell one-liner jokes but instead weaved a complex comedic story, with minor gag lines along the way, leading to one tremendous big punch line–that was invariably completely bleeped. The buildup, the seconds of silence, the uproarious studio-audience laughter and applause. You just don’t get experiences like that anymore.

…in the state officially go smokeless.

Some bar owners have predicted a fiscal disaster, as smoking customers would find fewer reasons to linger in their favorite watering holes.

Alcohol service is one of Seattle’s biggest employers and most prominent industries. It’s an industry that’s continued to thrive while the rest of the regional economy’s sputtered and faltered.

One reason it’s continued to thrive has been its steady, piecemeal deregulation. A few oldtimers remember when hard liquor by the drink (a.k.a. cocktails) could only be served in Washington state at private clubs, such as the Elks. Later, from the 1950s on, the strong stuff could only be served in full-service restaurants. These restaurants had to offer full meals, devote more seating area to dining than to drinking, and earn a certain percentage of their revenues from food as opposed to liquor. In these places, as well as in beer-and-wine-only taverns, the taps officially shut down at 1 a.m. Monday through Friday, and at midnight on Saturday. Sundays were dry all day.

Even the number of drinking places in a neighborhood was restricted, by regulations designed to limit “destination” nightlife areas. The idea was to limit drunk driving by making people drink closer to their homes, but it never really worked in that regard; particularly in the suburbs, where everybody drove anyway.

Over the years, the Washington State Liquor Control Board relaxed these restrictions a little at a time. Perhaps the two most important steps came in the mid-1990s.

The neighborhood bar limits were eased, leading to robust nightlife zones in Pike-Pine, Belltown, South Lake Union, and most recently in Fremont.

Cocktail lounges still had to offer something vaguely resembling food, but no longer had to be adjuncts to restaurants–the “bar menu” could be as simple as microwaved frozen entrees. This move, which coincided with the outbreak of the “cocktail nation” fad, gave previously beer-and-wine-only outlets access to higher profit-margin items, making the whole business less of a gamble.

But while public drinking became more convenient, public smoking was the new target of restriction. With the passage of a state initiative last month, Washington’s now got the nation’s toughest anti-smoking laws.

As a result, a local hospitality industry that had seen nothing but growth for a decade now sees a threat to its livelihood.

Cigar bars, and that new downtown fad of hookah bars, will have to sue the state in court to continue existing.

Bars will no longer get big promotional incentives and advertising support from tobacco companies. (Bars will still be allowed to sell smokes for off-premises consumption.)

And fewer regular customers, some bar owners predict, will show up. When they do show up, they’ll linger for shorter amounts of time, hence buying fewer drinks, because their nicotine urges will force them outside.

I have my doubts about the latter concern. There are more and more nonsmokers out there these days, though you wouldn’t know it if you hung out at some bars. I know several people who no longer go to bars or nightclubs, even when their favorite musical act’s playing, out of an aversion to second-hand smoke. The absence of such smoke from drinking establishments can increase, not deacrease, their potential customer base.

IN OTHER BOOZE NOOZE, Seattle City Councilmember Tom Rasmussen has introduced a bill that would offficially designate all of central Seattle, including Capitol Hill, as an “alcohol impact area.”

The anti-smoking law impacts on-premises drinking spots; Rasmussen’s bill would impact retail stores. These businesses would no longer be allowed to sell fortified wines or malt liquors. They couldn’t sell single cans or bottles of beer or single-serving bottles of wine. They couldn’t sell any alcohol prior to 9 a.m. daily (up from the current 6 a.m.).

Such restrictions have already been “voluntarily” imposed on retailers in the Central Area and Pioneer Square; but that’s just sent these products’ customers elsewhere. Now Rasmussen wants to impose it upon a wide swath of the city.

This bill is unabashedly class-biased. It would make it harder for poor people to get cheap booze. It wouldn’t help poor alcoholics get treatment. It wouldn’t stop people with money from making drunken fools of themselves in public. It would only affect the surface image of Seattle as a “clean city” inhabited only by “nice people.”

…but unmistakable snow flakes briefly appeared, among the more typical precipitation, at 11:09 a.m. The world is a better, more beautiful place already.

…can’t get enough bodies into the Experience Music Project at full admission prices. He won’t lower those prices, because that would interrupt his long-range plan to make EMP self-supporting. Instead, he’ll broaden the institution’s focus (again), this time with works by big-name painters.