Thanks to the kind Lori at Espresso To Go in Fremont, I recently got a look at the SeaTimes’ Washington Territorial Centennial supplement.

This was an eight-section addition to a Sunday paper in the summer of 1953. Each section ran twenty pages or more. (Remember, newspaper pages then were one-third wider than they are now.)

There’s little to no content about the state’s pre-Statehood past. Instead, what little “editorial” content there is consists of puff pieces for the advertisers.

Most of these advertisers aren’t companies selling consumer goods. They’re construction firms, timber giants, commercial truck dealerships, shipyards, cement plants, fishing-rig outfitters, metals processors, agribusinesses, restaurant-supply companies, etc. Their common, simple message: They’re proud to be part of the Evergreen State’s great industrial infrastructure.

OK, there is one huge ad for Fisher Flouring Mills and its about-to-launch subsidiary operation, KOMO-TV. The ad juxtaposes a drawing of the big Fisher plant on Harbor Island with a glamour image of that fresh, new television talent Betty White, who could be seen in her sprightly comedy series Life With Elizabeth once KOMO-TV started telecasting later that year.

Can you imagine today’s SeaTimes managing to sell even a fraction of all that ad space to local companies that have nothing to sell to a mass audience?

…a national girlie mag created a fictional pictorial essay about a Seattle coffee shop, the “Big Cups Coffee House,” with nude baristas. Now, someone in Maine has really opened one. The owner claims to have had 150 applicants for the 10 available jobs.

…is over, and the party races are just as muddled as before. In other nooze:

• Seattle transportation planners have a desire named streetcar.
• We say goodbye today to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, TM founder, mantra seller, and guru to everyone from John Lennon to David Lynch; to Barry Morse, costar of the original The Fugitive and Space: 1999; and to Dr. Ernesto Illy, purveyor of canned espresso beans and a promoter of better coffee back when Howard Schultz was still playing college football.
• Starting this June: Nonstop flights from Sea-Tac to Beijing.
• Wall St. goes kablooey, recession’s probably already here.
• Meanwhile, the housing slump’s shut down 18 sawmills in the state.
• Issaquah bans panhandling, car washes, not cookie sales.
• Guy pretends to be a member of rock vets Queensryche, as part of a plan to steal people’s IDs.
• “Boy hit in the face with water bottle thrown from car.”
• A judge rules against BushCo, says the Navy still has to protect orcas from sonar.
• One more reason to visit my ol’ hometown: A museum full of vintage telephone gear.
• Tornados in the South kill at least 48. Could climate change be one reason for the storms’ severity?

(My apologies if that word-wraps weirdly in your browser.) As we await the potential end of at least one party race, knowing we’ve got our own state caucuses this Saturday, here’s some other nooze:

• Bush’s budget has good news for Sound Transit, bad news for education and health care.
• The Legislature’s working on relief for tenants of condo-converted apartments, just as that trend seems to be reversing.
• Oregon had gay marriages, then it didn’t. Now it’s got “domestic partnerships.”
• Georgetown: Potential haven for live theater groups displaced by gentrification elsewhere.
• Tully’s Coffee, which has turned a profit in exactly one of its 16 years, might be for sale.

…GOP presidential frontrunners as of this morning, and none of them are Fred Thompson. In other news:

• Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner may face still more delays. How smart does globally-outsourced component construction sound now?
• Raw milk— its proponents claim it’s really good for you. Except when it isn’t.
• An appeals court ordered the Belltown-based Mars Hill Graduate School (not connected with Mars Hill Church) to pay $300,000 to its first female faculty member, in a long-standing discrimination suit.
• REI’s building an eco-friendly store in Texas. Now the weekend warriors who drive 75 miles or more to their wide-open spaces can feel a little less guilty.
• A state legislator would like to ban plastic grocery bags. Yeah, but then how will our children learn the pleasures of self-asphyxiation?
• There was a cable TV outage in Kent Tuesday, due to pranksters shooting at utility lines.
• Richard McIver’s charges were dropped, one day before his domestic-abuse trial was to have started.
• Tully’s Coffee underwent another executive purge. Make your own “grounds for concern” joke here.

…of indie espresso stands, drive-thru division, gets a little colder (this time of year, at least) as baristas don lingerie and retro-burlesque attire. This is apparently a suburban-only phenomenon, at least so far. I won’t pass judgment on them vis-a-vis “empowerment” issues. But I will note that (1) the gimmick goes back at least to the thonged hot-dog vendors of Miami (if not to the serving wenches of old English country inns), and (2) back in the ’90s, a porno mag created a fictional pictorial about nude baristas at a supposed Seattle “Big Cups Coffeehouse.”

…in its incessant search for trends to parse, has suddenly discovered “The Starbucks Aesthetic.” As you assuredly already know, it’s onr of comfort, reassurance, self-congratulation, and smug pseudo-hipness.

• “The curse,” reversed?
• Could Stephen Colbert be right about America’s biggest threat being bears?
• It’s official: Even Marshall Field’s in Chicago is getting Macyfied, alas.
• The mainstream media have discovered that Starbucks is a “lifestyle brand” even more than it’s a restaurant chain. Duh. I could’ve told you that, and have. From the pre-Howard Schultz start, Starbucks’ original founders intended to rebrand European-style coffee as an essential acoutrement to a young-professional, neo-bourgeois lifestyle. They offed the image of coffeehouses full of bongo-playing beatniks, and invented the image of a home espresso machine next to every Cuisinart.
• My recent acquaintance David Goldstein has a nice essay pondering out loud about whether we can use the “F” word (no, not the boring ol’ “F” word but another, more incindiary one) to describe the current U.S. political machine.My take: This word has been so overused in political discourse, especially in online discussion boards, that it’s become nearly worthless as a descriptor. Besides, its use can easily confuse readers/listeners. We’re not (or at least I’m not, and I believe Goldstein’s not) talking about some wholesale adoption of all the cultural, verbal, and sociological shticks of 1933 Germany—or even those of 1920 Italy, which our current regime more closely resembles.

  A Texas two-step is not a goose-step.

  America’s devolution from democracy to empire has occurred in an all-American way. It’s rooted in the dark side of our own traditions. And it’s within the good side of our own traditions that its effective responses must be found.

• Last week, I was interviewed by a white hip-hop DJ from the Seattle U student Internet radio station. He was eager for stories about gangbangin’ violence in Belltown. I tried to explain to him that the noise and the rowdiness and the drunken brawling seen on First Avenue in the weekend wee hours are principally the work of young affluent Caucasians, who often arrive here en masse on chartered buses from the Eastside.I could have digressed, but didn’t, that the whole gangsta mythology was a stereotype invented a decade ago by LA record producers, specifically to nakedly exploit young affluent Caucasians’ images of young black males as sexy savages.

  In real life, violent criminals of any race tend not to be alluringly handsome, well-spoken, or well-dressed. They’re far more likely to be pathetic, desperate losers, out of touch with their own souls.

First, Starbucks bought up Seattle’s Best Coffee, and promptly shuttered many SBC stores near existing Starbucks outlets. Now, it’s completely shuttering SBC’s subsidiary chain Torrefazione Italia, known for serving robust coffee drinks in old-world style ceramic cups. Let’s hope new indie operators can take over at least a few of Torrefazione’s locations.

The labor organizers who couldn’t get into Wal-Mart just might have a new goal. New York magazine, in a story largely ignored here even by the “alternative” media, reports about one guy’s attempt to bring union representation to a Manhattan Starbucks outlet. Among the grievances he and his coworkers cite: mandatory perkiness. The union organization they’re trying to bring in: None other than that ol’ nemesis of the Northwest timber barons, the Industrial Workers of the World.