…these days. As if the kiddies weren’t hyper enough already.

It took trekkin’ to seven stores, but I now have my yummy centennial Hydrox pack. Yay!

Hydrox is coming back!

…I’m skipping the morning-headlines thang on days when there’s not much interesting to pass on. Today, we’ve got a few items:

• Certain Pokemon valentine cards were recalled, after some of the heart-shaped lollipops attached to them contained metal fragments. Looks like Team Rocket has finally won a battle.
• Could the world’s oceans soon become beyond saving?
• Real headline: “State patrol to drivers: 911 not a traffic hotline.”
• Evergreeners: Not all as passive as the old stereotype.
• The state’s new plan for replacing those four obsolete ferries? Replace them with three new, smaller boats.
• Your help is needed in a one-time census of Puget Sound octopi.
• Sleazy corporate lawyers want access to a car-crash victim’s old MySpace page.
• A Starbucks barista plans to donate a kidney to a loyal customer. Let’s hope this doesn’t get into the next employee manual.

…rolls along, even into primary states. Elsewhere:

• Ron Sims would really like all King County agencies to solve socio-economic inequality. (Hey you: Stop scoffing. What if they could really do it?)
• A Seattle swimwear designer’s creations are featured in the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue; as are the (fully costumed) Seafair Pirates.
• Please: If you must steal porn, use BitTorrent, not armed robbery.
• Jones Soda becomes the official fizzy drink of Alaska Airlines.
• Old nudist magazines used to sport such wholesome titles as Sunshine & Health. Now, some doctors claim a lack of Vitamin D-bearing rays really could weaken us.
• Gay-bashing attacks on Capitol Hill—on the rise.
• State GOP boss Luke Esser: Playing favorites or just incompetent?
• More fun news from my ol’ hometown: America’s first tribal TV station, streaming online.
• And the TV/movie-biz writers’ strike is over. Now Leno can go back to having other people to blame for his lameness.

…know, there used to be a segment in this endeavor called “Junk Food of the Week/Month.” I phased that out two or three diets ago. But that doesn’t mean the food-tech geniuses have stopped devising new and wondrous things. Why, just this wek, the ol’ Blog-O-Sphere has caught on to the latest thing from a German hiker’s-supply company: A cheeseburger in a can! Just drop the unopened can in boiling water for a minute, take it out, open it up, and enjoy, sesame-seed bun and everything. (Apparently, it’s only sold in Europe at this time.)

• As the floodwaters from Rainstorm 2007 still linger, the blame game commences. Was the state laggardly in building Chehalis River flood control systems after allocating money to do so? Does Seattle have an insufficient drainage infrastructure? And, of course, does climate change/global warming have anything to do with all this unseasonably warm rain coming here via the “pineapple express?”
• Jones Soda’s CEO, whose surname (naturally) is Van Stolk, will leave the company at the end of the month. Jones’s massive growth in recent years has come with allegations of financial irregularities at the Seattle-based “boutique soda” marketer.
• Seattle was named #6 on a Brookings Institution list of America’s “most walkable cities.” Portland was #5. Washington DC (Brookings’ home town) made the top spot.
• Seattle Center’s future fate is still undecided, but one legacy building has a new, at least temporary, use. Seattle Opera will stick some staff members and scene storage into Mercer Arena, the former Seattle Ice Arena (home of the 1917 Stanley Cup champions!). The structure, which has also housed rock concerts, the old Seattle Reign women’s basketball team, and many other events, has been idle the past four years.
• The Lake Union streetcar finally has an official opening day. It opens for pubilc rides on Wednesday, Dec. 12. Yes, the clever folks who promoted the unofficial nickname of South Lake Union Trolley, or “SLUT,” promise to be on hand, proudly sporting “Ride the SLUT” T-shirts.
• Amateur film-based photography’s rapid decline hits home. PhotoWorks, formerly Seattle FilmWorks, is selling itself to American Greetings Corp. Seattle FilmWorks was originally a piece of American Passage Marketing, which posted gazillions of ad posters on college campus bulletin boards hawking everything from magazine subscriptions to term paper “research guides.” It originally bought Kodak 35mm movie film, repackaged it for still cameras, and sold it by mail in film-and-processing joint deals.

• PCC groceries ban all products containing high fructose corn syrup. Remember: When mainstream soda pop is outlawed, only outlaws will Do the Dew.
• The biggest class action lawsuit in Wash. state history’s underway. The class of plaintiffs: Every Washingtonian who’s ever worked for Wal-Mart.
• Those Kansas “Christians” harassing the families of dead gay soldiers at funerals showed up in Port Orchard, along with the expected counter-protesters.
• The state Dept. of Ecology claims stormwater drainage from parking lots, driveways, and roads sends more than six million gallons of petroleum into Puget Sound every year. That’s about half the output of the Exxon Valdez disaster, a drop at a time.
• Today’s dentist-caught-abusing-sedated-female-patients story comes to you from Shoreline.
• Beware of “sham recyclers,” outfits that charge you to take your stuff away and then just dump it in landfills.

• The end of the ride may finally be in sight for the delightfully seedy/carny Seattle Center Fun Forest. The amusement park’s lessee/operators never recovered from losing a big chunk of their space to the Experience Music Project. They’re way behind on their rent to the City. Everybody in city and county officialdom wants the arcades and rides outta there. They’d like to replace it all with something more befitting of New Seattle world-class-osity, such as a big lawn peppered with public art, or a miniature “real” forest. Will nobody step forward in defense of this business-for-pleasure, this bastion of pre-Space Mountain carnivality?
• Glammie-gate’s repercussions continue. Gay Bingo’s new boss told its beloved host, the foul-mouthed drag performer Glamazonia, to clean up her act or be gone. As you might expect, she didn’t go away quietly.And again this year, the Sheraton’s got a huge display of gingerbread structures to benefit, of all causes, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

…per capita than almost anywhere else in America, says an A.C. Nielsen survey. Only Salt Lake City and Boise (which this survey counts as a single region) consume more of the sugary stuff. So much for our healthy/fit rep.