CBSchadenfreude

The red states of the blogosphere are falling all over themselves reading between the lines of CBS' internal verdict on the 60 Minutes hack job that used clumsy forgeries to attack Bush's National Guard record. Was it motivated by bias? Duh. Were the documents fake? Duh. Did the report say so? No. What, you expected it to? At least give 'em credit for not releasing it at 5:30 on a Friday.

My reaction is one big yawn. Who cares whether CBS News self-destructs? You mean, like, it hasn't already? I can't remember the last time I tuned in to a network news show on purpose.

The far more interesting question is where the news center of gravitas will be in, say, five years.

TV? Feh. A newsbot? The Daily Me is a dead end. Bloggers? Entertaining parasites. Newspapers, online or off? They'll be wondering where all their classifieds went -- and how many FTEs they took with them.

What then? We've gotten so good at deconstruction that we've forgotten what construction is.

My 2c: Something will arise from the next-next generation of social networks. News mediated for you by the sum of the vectors of everyone you trust, plus everyone they trust. The algorithm won't choose stories; it'll suggest sources -- and respect your selections. Eventually, money will start flowing in this direction.

It might be v3 of something like Dan Gillmor's startup, but more likely will emerge from somewhere completely unexpected.

I do know what the future won't be: blow-dried.

Melting point

Seattle is the northernmost large city in the Lower 48 -- it's at roughly the same latitude as Québec or the very tippytop of Maine -- but it has a surprisingly mild climate. We typically get one or two light snowfalls a year, and it's a big deal when even a few flakes fall: Businesses send people home, TV stations go into panic mode and drivers lose their tiny little minds.

Having grown up in Southern California, I crave weather. Anything out of the ordinary is good, especially snow. Nothing adds as much magic to reality as a snowfall, the deeper the better. In the winter of '96, our first in Seattle, we got 18 inches over New Year's, and I thought: Hoo-ya! This place is all right.

Well. For the past week, the National Weather Service has been predicting snow in our suburb, and for the past week, the NWS has been full of it. We saw a couple of flakes the other morning, but nothing stuck. The massive wave of frigid Arctic air predicted just a couple of days ago has been rerouted to Montana or somewhere. The moisture has all been stolen by California. It's 38 and dry outside. Nothing's happening. We've been had! I want my blizzard back! Death to El Niño!

UPDATE: We got an inch of the white stuff Sunday morning. BFD.

Chestita nova godina

Behave well in this life, and in your next one you'll get to join a band and play live music for a club full of Balkan émigrés on New Year's Eve. Our band did, and once again got to enjoy the curious thrill of having fans come up and start talking to us in Serbo-Croatian or Bulgarian because they assume we're countrymen. Except for Amir, we're not -- just Americans in love with songs from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia, Greece and Albania.

There's nothing better than seeing people from the old country shed tears in their new homeland out of joy at hearing their favorite music again -- sometimes for the first time in years. We often see fans point cellphones at us after calling friends back home to say, "Can you believe this? We're in Seattle USA and we're hearing ..." We can't think of a better way to say: Welcome to America at its very best.

To our Bulgarian friends in particular: Chestita nova godina! Happy New Year!

Vie d'Arthur

You know how it goes: A movie gets mixed reviews when it opens, so you wait for the DVD. I passed on King Arthur (Clive Owen, Ioan Gruffudd, Kiera Knightley) in the theaters, but caught the director's cut the other day, and was pleasantly surprised at how good it was. Perhaps critics expected a remake of Camelot, one of the worst hit movies ever made, and were taken aback to see a movie closer to Gladiator in its gritty depiction of a pre-romantic world.

If Arthur really existed, he may well have been what this film portrayed: the dux bellorum who rallied Britons against the Saxon incursions that filled the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the island's last Roman legion. No fairytale Camelot, just blood, guts and honor. Kiera Knightley's Guinevere, closer to Xena than to Vanessa Redgrave's limpid adulteress, feels forced -- but the male relationships that form the dark heart of the movie, on the Saxon side as well as the Roman, do not. Recommended.

Greed neverending

King County taxpayers and visitors currently cough up just shy of $1 million a week in taxes to subsidize local sports palaces built on the public dime, including KeyArena (Seattle Sonics and Storm), Qwest Field (Seahawks) and Safeco Field (Mariners).

This gravy train is supposed to end in 2020 ... or maybe not. The Seattle Times reports that the Sonics plan to ask the state legislature to make the stadium taxes permanent. A million bucks a week forever. More, in fact, because the revenue base for the 2% hotel/motel tax, .017% sales tax, 0.5% restaurant food-and-beverage tax and 2% car-rental tax will grow over time.

Expect people to be instantly up in arms over this. There's still a lot of animosity over the way the baseball and football stadiums were foisted on the public -- miltibillionaire Seahawks owner Paul Allen shoulda paid cash -- and the stadium levy that raised the most money last year, the restaurant tax, is the one that hits locals hardest.

When will state and local governments wise up? Pro sports are entertainment, not public services. They already lead a soft life, with guaranteed revenue from TV deals and other licensing agreements. They don't deserve public subsidies of any sort -- not in Seattle, not anywhere. Let NFL, NBA and MLB teams pay their own way or go belly up. Maybe they'll discover en route that journeyman jocks aren't inherently worth $5 million or $10 million a year...