• Fret not about Bill Gates’s pending retirement from MS’s day-to-day operations. The whole joint’s hardwired around his mindset. MS will continue to produce and market just as it’s been doing.
• Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to read/solve the NY Times crossword in the Seattle Times. No word on whether it’ll continue in the P-I.
• One more reason to quit smoking: A guy asks two Belltown lowlifes if they’ve got a light, gets robbed.
• Wash. state will boldly go where Greyhound no longer bothers to go, bringing intercity bus service to the state’s small towns.

• “A 29-year-old Wenatchee man told police a pterodactyl caused him to drive his car into a light pole…”
• The film Dancer in the Dark notwithstanding, no woman has ever been sentenced to death in Wash. state. Sadly, this might change.
• Spokane Catholics have raised $8 million to help pay abusive-priest lawsuit settlements.
• Help a rural flood victim— donate a cow.
• Sonics fans (and, yes, there still are many of us) have a new mantra. During last night’s laugher against the even more pathetic Timberwolves (which the Sea. Times chose to cover on sports-section page D14), when fans were encouraged to make noise during an opposing-team free throw, the repetitive shout came loud and clear from the rafters on down: “Clay Bennett sucks! Clay Bennett sucks!” TV announcer (and all around good guy) Kevin Calabro responded with a brief giggle, before he returned to strictly commenting on the action on the floor.

• Even architects can’t afford to live in Seattle these days without special programs.
• The end of Netscape Navigator as a web-browser brand doesn’t mean all that much. The best of Netscape lives on in its open-source successor Firefox.
• One of the ex-Mariners named in the Mitchell Report has admitted to using steroids and uppers in 1999. His explanation: All the other kids were doing it. (Except catcher Dan Wilson.)
• It’s the law: If you’re stoned, don’t install other drivers’ tire chains.
• You can tell it’s a slow news day when every TV station reports the following: “Woman doesn’t want dog in bathroom during couple’s shower.”
• Betcha didn’t know there was anything historic in Tukwila. Except it’s not there anymore. It’s being barged to Seattle.

• Despite off-and-on cleanup efforts over the years, Seattle’s five biggest “urban streams” (formerly known as “creeks”) are in sorry shape, eco-wise.
• The lowly Sonics played three periods of valiant basketball against the mighty Celtics, before the NBA’s best team finally switched into high gear in the fourth.
• Atlas Clothing, Broadway’s biggest vintage store (and, very briefly last year, an all-ages music venue), is reportedly moving to a Fremont antique mall.
• Wash. state’s minimum wage goes up on the first. Don’t spend those extra 14 cents in one place.
• Can suburban sprawl be eco-friendly? A Spokane developer of “enviro-townhomes” claims it can.

Seattle’s no longer America’s “most literate city”— Minneapolis is, with St. Paul third and threatening. And you thought the only thing separating Mpls. and St. P was the Mississippi River. (No jokes about “it’s damp enough here today it feels like the Mississippi River,” please.)

• There goes the most-recent great hope for cooling down the heat of violence in Pakistan and vicinity.
• The bus tunnel’s open again. But the SLUT has been stalling intermittently.
• Do Wash. state Republicans stand a ghost of a chance of survival, let alone renewed relevance? The Seattle Times would like to think so. As for me, I think the local GOP will come back only when it can again field candidates of an Evans (or at least a John Spellman) level, and actively try to appeal to those of us who believe evolution is real and wrestling isn’t.
• It’s the law: Don’t text and drive.
• Starbucks is experimenting with sugar-free latte syrup.
• The good news about Puget Sound’s housing market? “Not as grim as rest of U.S.”

• That temporary passenger ferry between Seattle and Pt. Townsend? Some folks would like it to be a little less temporary.
• Meanwhile, some guy’s hoping to start a commercial passenger train between Bellevue and Snohomish—just the thing for bringing new customers to my mom’s antique-mall spaces there!
• One way to annoy the sandals-and-wool-socks voting block: Propose mandatory licensing for bicyclists.
• The bus tunnel: Still shut.
• The American Stasi is on the watch for peculiar behavior at airports. Insert your own joke here.
• The White Christmas thang sure looked damn great yesterday afternoon, whilst I was returning to Seattle from northern realms. Could we get an encore?
• The local holiday ended in typical fashion, with the ceremonial State Patrol officer shooting a naked guy who was walking across I-5.
• Idaho police academy students got to choose their own graduating-class slogan: “Don’t suffer from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], go out and cause it.”

…archives aren’t posting on this site properly. I’ll have to look under the hood after the holidaze and see what’s (not) going on.

• Wash. state insists on giving kids “medically accurate” sex-ed info instead of the federally-mandated abstinence-only nonsense, loses federal funding.
• MS and Amazon decide they’d rather fund Democrats, at least for this cycle.
• Would you like the King County Courthouse to continue looking like a poorly “modernized” ’60s efficiency-architecture victim or have it restored into the stately authoritative edifice it once was?
• A UW frat member was arrested for shooting a gun at tin cans in the frat house’s basement. Hey, at least he wasn’t aiming outside.
• What??? Evergreen State Coll.’s actively soliciting students from in-state???
• Huckabee (hearts) regressive taxation, Wash. state-style.

…post-shopping-season Sunday. This means the Sunday paper’s a much more compact product, stuffed with far fewer flyers and far easier to carry. Still, there is some news today:

• Who wouldn’t love a fancy home holiday display, depicting a full-size Santa on a cross?
• The American Stasi wants to know everything about you.
• Another old ferry has potential problems.
• Capitol Hill’s delightfully delapidated “Undre Arms” Apartments might give way to yet another mixed-use whatever blah blah blah.
• And my Belltown Messenger colleague Mary Lou Sanelli has a nice li’l essay, summarizing some of her thoughts about the novelty of urban living.