An Atlantic writer has visited Seattle and talked to several former Post-Intelligencer staffers, including one who went from writing about dive bars to co-owning one (the fabulous Streamline on lower Queen Anne).

Remember when we told you about The Impossible Project, the Dutch-based effort to re-invent film for vintage Polaroid instant cameras? One of the companies that’s licensed the Polaroid name is so enthused, it’s going to make the cameras again!

I’ve finally let my Seattle Times subscription lapse, after seven months with SeaTimes and 31 prior years with the now-discontinued print P-I. The only thing I’d still used the print paper for, that couldn’t be done online, was to methodically study how much smaller the SeaTimes was getting.

As a print subscriber, I was hardly supporting the newsroom. Subscription fees barely pay for the manufacture and delivery of the physical product. What I was doing was adding to the aggregate eyeballs the SeaTimes could sell to advertisers. That company’s done a lousy job at selling ads the past several years. Even before the Internet killed want ads and the Great Recession decimated home and car sales, they’d already been losing huge accounts to direct mail.

Supporting “newspaper style journalism,” and transitioning from it to something better, is a topic I’ve long written about.

Online ads earn far less income per reader than print ads. This is unlikely to change any time soon. SeattlePI.com has the potential to become profitable once the general economy improves, but won’t likely ever support anything near the news staff the print P-I had.

I currently see three potential scenarios:

1) Print papers continue to shrink, not to oblivion but to the point that they become vulnerable to startup competitors (who suddenly don’t have to pour in $30 million a year in costs and who can target niche audiences in a way old-line dailies can’t).

2) Print papers continue to shrink, to the point where they’re small enough to become subsidized by their big-business community friends (either through contributions or vanity ads).

3) New ebook-esque consumer devices (the long-rumored Apple tablet?) finally make true online publications with paid subscriptions not only feasible but popular.

Another viewpoint: Doug Morrison sees the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper as an issue affecting the exchange of ideas, the flow of facts, and even the future of democracy itself, and wonders if there could be a political solution.

The Huffington Post just started a books section.

The section’s editor, Amy Hertz, explains she won’t run traditional reviews. Too stale, too one-way, too old-media-paradigm.

Instead, she wants to treat books as a topic of, yep, “conversation with our readers.”

Sounds like Hertz wants to reconstruct the entire book marketing business, a business that could urgently use some new blood and some new ideas.

The ideas she’s choosing to implement are those of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?)—Facebooking, chatting, “buzz” seeding, and the like.

The thing is, these tactics end up looking like hokum when Hollywood movie publicists try to use them. They’ll surely look even more fake when the even less-slick hawkers of books start using them bigtime.

Which will, from the standpoint of online scoffers such as myself, make lots of fun. I can hardly wait.

Playboy, like a lot of oldline media outfits, is in fiscal trouble. Earlier this year, according to industry rumor, its management offered up the company for potential sale. The asking price was apparently far above the firm’s estimated market value. That’s because the 83-year-old Hugh Hefner wanted to make sure he maintained his ultra-hedonist lifestyle (and he didn’t really want to sell anyway).

Still, at least two potential buyers emerged. They’re private equity firms, companies that exist only to buy and sell other companies (like the one that briefly owned Chrysler).

One of these would-be bunny buyers, according to Marlow Harris, also currently owns the Century 21 and Coldwell Banker real-estate brands.

Make up your own puns about “development,” “view lands,” or “treating women like property” here.

Just off most of the Washington and Oregon coast, there’s an oceanic “dead zone.” In the summer months, the water there just doesn’t have enough oxygen to support much marine life. What’s worse, Oregon State U. scientists tell the LA Times that, due to climate-change trends, this dead zone might come back every summer, no matter what humans do.

You know I adore vintage advertisements. There’s now a site chock full of lovely ’50s-’70s TV commercials, in great prints. They were donated by an ad agency to Duke University. This means you open them in the “iTunes U” section of your iTunes app.

This site is still going strong, but still at the interim URL.

I wanted to re-establish it at the server provider I’ve used lo these past 14 years. It turns out that to host a WordPress-powered site over there, I need access to a SQL database. For that, they want me to pay them more.

I did that.

I then tried to launch a WP site there. It seemed to work initially. But it wouldn’t import my interim site’s posts. I only got an error message saying I didn’t have permission to create a new content directory.

Tech support suggested I change the config.php file to note a different directory path for new files and directories to go into. That doesn’t seem to work either.

I might have to delete whatever files WP has already created in my SQL database. To do that, I may need to configure and upload something else called “PhpMyAdmin.” Like WordPress itself, this isn’t an application but a stack of database scripts. The instructions for uploading and starting PhpMyAdmin are written in total unforgiving geekspeak. I have no idea what to do to make it work.

Alternately, I could try to move my domain name and associated files to this server.

No, I STILL don’t have this new site moved back to my old domain name. Every time I try to figure out a tech issue, three more spring up, and I’m just not a code guy.

Hooters just opened in South Park, the first national chain restaurant in that defiantly unchained pocket neighborhood.

(Update 10/11/09: I got there today. It’s really in Boulevard Park, a tiny commercial strip separated from the South Park neighborhood by a lonely highway overpass. A McDonald’s already exists along this strip.)

I don’t particularly care for Hooters.

I really don’t care for essays that attack Hooters from the standpoint of simplistic gender-ideology, such as Lindy West’s piece in the Stranger.

On the other hand, I love the comment thread following West’s piece.

The commenters hit upon some important points West had elided past:

• Is Hooters’ food really any good? (Some say yes; others insist on the superiority of locally-owned hot wing emporia such as Wing Dome.)
• Is the “Hooters Girl” image demeaning to all women? (Some say yes; some say no; I say there’s no such thing as “all women.”)
• Is it wrong to use sex to sell stuff? (If so, many commenters note, the Stranger would be at least as guilty.)
• Are West and the Stranger contradicting their “sex positive” stance? (I say no, they’re simply overriding it with a stance that’s even more vital to “alt” culture—the stance of sneering at anything to do with “the wrong kind of white people”.)

West, most of the commenters, and I agree on one point—the Hooters Girl look (apparently inspired by the sorority-slut uniforms in the 1979 sexploitation film H.O.T.S.) is, to all of us, decidedly unsexy.

And the whole Hooters aesthetic/experience conjures association with/nostalgia for fraternity-sorority bonding, but is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-education. The apparent ideal Hooters customer is an adult who went to college but didn’t learn anything.