KB Toys goes under, right in the heart of the holiday season.

Teenagers have bodies. They have sexualities. They have occasional tendancies toward ill-advised behavior. Get used to it.

The Census Bureau confirms it. The economy’s sucked for years for most non-zillionaire Americans.

I had some good news to tell you today about one of my own publishing projects. But it’ll wait. For today, there’s just bad news. Quite bad news indeed.

It’s about Su Job. She’s a longtime local artist, specializing in fabric-based works. She’s also designed and made custom scarves and shawls, and taught art classes at the Art Institute of Seattle and elsewhere.

She’s lived in the Tashiro Kaplan artist lofts since they opened in 2004, and played an influential role in getting the Pioneer Square building preserved as artist spaces.

But perhaps her best-known role has been as the longtime queen bee of the 619 Western building. For more than a decade, she ruled its five stories of gallery/studio lofts with a friendly but firm hand. (Artists, and people who claim to be artists, can occasionally be fiscally flaky.)

That’s where I spotted her last night, during the First Thursday gallery openings. She was her usual self—gracious toward friends and patrons, stern toward an artist/tenant who’d allegedly been slow on her rent.

Job did all this from a motorized wheelchair, taversing 619’s levels via Seattle’s second coolest elevator (after that in the Smith Tower). A friend followed closely behind, towing a shopping cart. Inside the cart were flowers and gifts from Job’s tenants and friends, as well as an extra jacket for Job and some emergency medical stuff.

Job’s friend was also passing out postcards with Job’s face superimposed on the classic “Rosie the Riveter” poster. The postcard advertised a benefit art auction to help pay her hospice-care expenses.

Yep: She’s dying.

She’d had a lingering pain in a leg for weeks. Doctors simply advised her to live with it until it went away. It never went away.

Then, as she announced in an email to friends on Nov. 18, she got the real diagnosis. She had a rare, fast-spreading bone cancer. It was incurable and untreatable. All that could be done was to care for her.

But that late-stage nursing care, which she needs in order to stay in her TK space, isn’t covered by her insurance. Thus, the auction on Saturday, Dec. 13 in the former Davidson Contemporary space within the TK, 310 S. Washington St. The 6 p.m. auction’s preceded by an afternoon preview.

(Read this link at CaringBridge.org to learn more about Job’s daily bravery.)

(And here’s P-I arts writer Regina Hackett on Job’s story and the auction.)

…some clever entrepreneur finally caught the idea of putting out officially licensed Popeye brand bagged spinach. It took another two decades for somebody else (specifically, Safeway (which, despite the oft-spread urban legend, IS NOT and NEVER WAS “owned by the Mormons”)) to come up with officially licensed Bugs Bunny carrots!

(Thanx and a hat tip to Matthew Hunter of Golden Age Cartoons.)

…a lot lately, letting interesting-sounding links take me any which where. While browsing the “Stores” page listings, I ran across something called “I Love ‘Boobs.’” Within the “Wall” (comments thread) was a lovely, loving ode to women’s self confidence. (Hint: It might have scrolled off of this particular page by the time you click on it. Keep going back through the thread.)

I like the idea that a woman telling other women how smart, daring, and beautiful they are can coexist, with seemingly no contradiction whatsoever, in an online discussion dedicated to the most superficial expression of admiration toward the female physique.

My mother told me that she’d once heard my late father tell of the delightful and luxurious time he once had staying in the Taj Hotel in Bombay (now Mumbai), as he was about to be shipped home at the end of WWII. Now, the place is a battle zone instigated by one of those thug bands that think blowing stuff up + killing people = victory (or its emotional equivalent). How macho; how dumb.

Forty-five years after JFK’s slaying, it’s still poignant to view the initial TV coverage. CBS happened to be the only network feeding programming to its eastern/central affiliates at that hour. As the World Turns was such a ratings powerhouse in those days, NBC and ABC didn’t bother to program against it.

Thus, the catastrophe that (according to some perverse nostalgists) jump-started 12 years of further catastrophes first came to the nation’s attention by interrupting the most sedate and reassuring TV series yet devised.

ATWT creator Irna Phillips had sensed that TV was, by nature, a more ambient medium than radio. (Former ABC exec Bob Shanks called TV “the cool fire.”) So she toned down the melodrama and the histrionics, and devised an extremely quiet, low-key drama, in which an average Midwestern family discussed its average Midwestern daily doings.

Thus, the media’s most lulling, calming tribute to Ike-era ideals gave way to Walter Cronkite telling us, indirectly, of that fantasy America’s violent demise.

This year, T-Day week sees the nation in another cusp between eras.

A “perfect storm” of economic collapse has yet to reach bottom.

An unneeded, unending war continues to destroy lives.

Yet tens of millions of us still bathe in the afterglow of that great joyous moment three weeks ago.

There’s a feeling in the social zeitgeist. A feeling of optimism, of unashamed sincerity. A feeling that we really can turn the corner on all our crises. A feeling that the world really canturn, into a better place.

I share this feeling, and hope you do too.

If anyone has a reasonable explanation for this, please tell me.

Bonneville International, which just regained ownership of KIRO Radio last year, will switch KIRO-AM to all sports talk next April. KIRO-AM’s news and news-talk fare will move exclusively to 97.3 FM.

Thus will end more than 35 years of what was successively billed as “KIRO Newsradio 7,” then “KIRO Newsradio 71,” then “710 KIRO.” (Each more precise frequency reference responded to the prevalence of more precise tuning displays on car radios.)

KIRO-AM is one of the city’s oldest stations. It goes back to the Old Time Radio golden age, during which it amassed a larger collection of CBS Radio network recordings than CBS itself had (a collection of phonograph records that’s now owned by the UW). It eased into a middle-of-the-road music and news format by the early 1960s.

In the early 1970s, Bonneville spent its way to the top of the local ratings by ditching the DJs (except on weekends) and hiring a full news reporting staff.

I heard Nixon’s resignation speech on KIRO. I heard the start of the first Gulf War on KIRO. The voices of Bill Yeend, Dave Ross, Jim French, the late Wayne Cody, et al. are permanently etched in my brain’s ROM.

It was weird, on Election Night, to bring a cheap, FM-only portable radio to my temp office site and try to listen (during a dinner break) to NPR’s blathering “analysis” of returns that hadn’t come in yet. KIRO had already begun simulcasting its news-talk on FM, but I couldn’t pull in that signal from where I was.

But that’s one reason why they’re doing this. The public now associates AM talk with looney right-wing demagogues. FM is now where the targeted demographic audience segments go for everything except sports (with a few notable exceptions such as KIXI and KPTK).

LET ME BE the first to bestow the most freakin’-obvious nickname onto the Mariners’ new manager: The Intentional Wakamatsu. Thank you, really.

SOME 3,000 WAMU HEADQUARTERS STAFFERS could lose their jobs in the next few months. Three thousand bankers hitting the pavement at once won’t be a good thing for all the local consumer industries (from real estate on down to doggie daycare) that have staked their futures on catering to the upper professional caste.

And where are we gonna place all these idled IT techs, comptrollers, paper pushers, junior flunkies, second-tier poobahs, and adjustable-rate adjusters? Michael Moore, on Larry King Live, suggested any automaker bailout be predicated on making the automakers start making what we need to have made (public transit infrastructure, post-petroleum vehicles). But what kind of make-work project can we create for bankers? Can we (and by “we,” I really mean Gates and Allen) launch a massive startup employing hundreds upon hundreds of bureaucrats to create an eco-friendly actuarial table? Or will we see panhandlers outside the WaMu Center tower holding professionally designed signs reading WILL WOO-HOO FOR FOOD?