Part of the frustration with reading local daily media is, as HA denizens know, the failure of perspective. It’s sort of like hiring a contractor to build you a deck, and the guy shows up with the tools and supplies and lumber and says, with a wave goodbye, “Figure it out yourself, bub.” So when the P-I and The Times both run stories that a judge has released police reports on Councilman McIver’s arrest, one would kind of like to know why the reports were not released in the first place. That might be a topic worth explaining. And why, if they were withheld before, they’re being released now. This all falls under the heading of media transparency, which means media as well as the cops and courts should be working for you and me, the reader and the public, and not for the privileged and powerful. What the McIver case has become is a poster child for domestic abuse prosecution. The Weekly stirred this pot a few weeks ago, but dailies updates on the case show almost no sense of a larger context: OK, reader, you figure it out. Goldy and I have both observed that in another metro this probably would not be the case; it certainly isn’t in S.F. and Philly.

The housing crisis is another huge local story with virtually no enlightened reporting. Yes, we’ve got the guys showing up with the boards and bricks. The P-I took a stab last Saturday, even including a nearly useless “What’s A Townhouse?” sidebar, and again today with a report on Seattle slipping from No. 1 in housing price increases. One nugget worth noting: “The 4.7 percent change is healthier and more sustainable than the double-digit appreciation the Seattle area saw in prior years, Crellin said Tuesday.” Funny, I never saw a reference to “unhealthy” and “not sustainable” in real-estate stories during the boom years.

To be fair, Seattle is a trailing edge indicator. Housing nation-wide is in a precipitous plummet, down 4.5 percent for the quarter in the worst drop since at least 1988. It was almost spooky during my recent Bay Area visit to hear and see almost no signs of home construction. For years the sawing and hammering and cement trucking has been incessant and pervasive. If Seattle goes as S.F. goes, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The problem with stat-based reporting is the unavoidable data latency. No one walking around Seattle’s once-hot neighborhoods actually believes prices are going up 5 percent. They’re already in decline, and with all the still-unfinished (an unpainted, girder-visible condo on Phinney that just got glass in the windows has a hilarious banner, “Move in this December!!!!”) housing coming on the market, they’re not going back up any time soon. Year-to-year comparisons disguise this, of course, giving no sense of street trends and acceleration. (The stat to watch for, which apparently the locals don’t understand, is number of sales and time on market. Housing prices may hold, but if there’s huge inventory and little turnover, as can happen in a tony neighborhood, the real truth is a cancerous psychology.) And then there’s a bogus inflation index (Krugman has been nailing this in the NYT, pointing out how figures ignore staples like bread and gas), which undermines supposedly inflation-adjusted graphs like this one, skewing the housing boom even more.

Media don’t really want to report dire real-estate news, since housing ads are one of the few revenue streams still buttressing the news business. So it comes as little surprise that the big story is being ignored: How does all this affect those bullish transportation and housing forecasts, fed in big part by Mayor Nickels’ insatiable boosterism of 50,000 new jobs and 22,000 additional housing units. For a stampede, I haveta say it’s awfully quiet out there.

Finally, as a coda to our Cyber Monday skepticism, there’s today’s joy and exultation over a 21 percent sales jump, put in true perspective only if you factor in a 38 percent increase in buyers. So sales increasing, but number of buyers increasing even more, means…guess you’ll just have to figure that out for yourself, bub.

I don’t follow “professional” “sports” all that closely and didn’t really know who Sean Taylor was, but it seems to me that if some white celeb athlete had gotten shot to death in his home in an intruder situation (whatever it turns out to be), we wouldn’t be reading the equivalent of his rap sheet. So yeah, the black sportswriters have a point.

It’s always exciting posting to HA, so when preparing notes for this entry last night I felt a slight roll and jolt, I figured it was just Goldy and the gang egging me on. Turns out there was a mild 4.0 earthquake on the peninsula at 10:18 p.m., and if you did not feel it, you probably weren’t sitting in front of your computer and have a lot more interesting life than I do. O the sacrifices we endure to supply you with your morning fiber. Turns out there has been a passel of teeny quakes in recent days, which you can read as a buildup to The Big One or minor ventings so as to avert The Big One. I prefer the latter, it being loads easier to prepare for The Little One (get in front of the computer and wait till the coffee mug stops shaking).

Maybe Mother Nature was trying to nudge me to say something positive, like Dick Cheney’s irregular heartbeat being fixed. Now if they could just do something about his irregular heart. Or how about this: The mayor’s war on the homeless being put on hold. Our friends at Real Change have been all over this like…well, like cops on an encampment, with Rev. Rich Lang issuing a clarion call for Mayor Nickels to “be bold”:

Be the first mayor to be bluntly honest, and plainly practical in ending the problem of homelessness.

Forget about these half measured machete attacks.

Stand up to the problem, and implement the final solution.

Be bold Greg. Just kill the poor.

Rich may be facetious, but you have to wonder if Nickels isn’t just spreading holiday cheer while waiting for the spirit of Christmas to recede before going back to his same old ways. What exactly is a “more uniform protocol for dismantling the camps,” as one of his lackeys put it, if not cop talk for clearin’ ’em out.

Or perhaps some will find glad tidings in a proposal to defer up to 25 percent of property taxes, supposedly enabling middle-class homeowners to keep the roofs over their head. And this at a time when property values are actually going down? Is there another election coming up already? We saw this movie in California with Prop 13, and it weren’t pretty. Maybe one of our enterprising media will look at the detritus of tax deferral down there and ask, Could it happen here?? D’ya think?

And of course, for all us Mac users, the best news is that Windows Vista has been declared the worst software in the world, apologies to Keith Olbermann (double apologies if he’s a Windoze user).

Try as I might, though, I could not come up with the positive spin on the stock market tanking (down more than 10 percent in six weeks), the worsening recession, or the fact that the Seattle Marathon doesn’t actually give money to charity, which has The Times mad as heck and not going to take it much longer! But let’s close on a cheerful note: Writer Stephen King has suggested that Jenna Bush be waterboarded so Dad and his henchman can have a first-hand, trusted-source determination of whether it constitutes torture. Perhaps no image can better inform our preparations for this season of goodwill to men.

Shoppers, start your computers! It’s Cyber Monday, the day when Christmas hordes supposedly rush to the office to log on and snap up all those bargain gifts they were too crazed, lazy or calculating to buy on Black Friday. At least, that was the original impetus back in the day, when the vast majority of home connections were dial-up and office offered faster broadband.

Today, of course, the disparity no longer exists. So I’m thinking Cyber Monday is on shaky ground too. I’m thinking bargain hunting is much more iterative, you know, do the search, grab the killer deal, put other stuff on the wish list. Monday really has nothing to do with it any more. Besides, with the network cops monitoring your PC ever so much more closely, is it really a smart idea to spend the day surf-shopping?

Anyway, we’ll see what the data says. My experience was always this: Big Prediction, Day-After Declared Success, Unexpected Falloff and finally, when all the actual stats get analyzed and nobody’s paying attention, online shopping not such a big deal after all.

In addition to killer deals, here’s the deal on killers. This just in from Perugia: the boyfriend did it, according to the German guy’s lawyer, who has the almost Coenesque name of Walter Biscotti (thereby ruining my afternoon tea accompaniment). But the big news is yet another homicide, a 20-year-old Eastern Washington lad dragged to death behind a pickup for four miles in an apparent case of miscommunication.

Normally I’m not so drawn to the ugly side of life. It must have something to do with all the holiday cheer of this, the merriest of seasons.

In normal news, the P–I notes the upcoming legislative session by asking whether “tax fatigue” really exists (best wild guess: it doesn’t, but voters are frightened by incompetence and the economy). I dunno, HA readers: What do YOU think?????!!!!!

I did get one early Christmas gift today: Racist hypocrite (but otherwise good ol’ boy) Trent Lott is resigning. Having my own but not wanting to spoil the fray, I look forward to postings on various theories why. And finally, a clip from
yesterday’s last week’s Seahawks game has climbed way up on the DIGG and YouTube ratings, certain to outrank even the thrilling conclusion (the other QB fumbled on the 2-foot line!) to yesterday’s fiercely contested gridiron clash in the fabled 2007-8 season annals of ‘Hawks replays. Herewith:

What is it about Northwest-tangential murders this holiday season? We’ve got the UW student whose boyfriend now says she’s not the murdering type, although that’s the most flattering thing he can come up with. We’ve got the basketball player in Brazil, whose family and friends think he was murdered despite what the cops say. And now we’ve also got the twin murder suspect connected to Graham, Pierce County, through a prison pen-pal wife he married after being released by a judge appointed by presidential candidate Mitt Romney whom Romney now says must go. Heckuva job, Mittney!

And you thought nothing could dampen the seasonal joy of $22 DVD players and $59 digital cameras. Actually, the august and usually boosterish New York Times had a real downer of a Page 1 story yesterday on just that point: “Bargains draw crowds, but the thrill is gone,” containing such heresies as “the mood was more desperation than celebration,” “the merchandise is blah-humbug,” “exasperated consumers left the store in anger” and “sparse crowds” in upscale shops “were scary.” Contrast that with the still-boosterish Seattle Times’ local banner A1 head: “Splurge Surge,” and a story that gives mall–by-mall rundowns on shopper frenzy (“this truly is the shopping Olympics”) with nary a discouraging word. So the question is, are we living in a shopping bubble here in the Northwest, where sweetness ‘n light still rule the day? Maybe it’s all those Canadian shoppers cashing in on the dollar’s woes (do they still call their own version loonies, or are they taking themselves more seriously these days?)…or maybe we’re just lagging behind the national temperament. Or could it be that shoppers who are tightening budgets and downscaling and feeling frustrated at bait-and-switch are simply unseen by local media?

Anyway, back to Murders on Parade. For a little holiday cheer my wife and I went to see “No Country for Old Men” in hopes that the Coen Brothers of “Fargo” and “Big Lebowski” had somehow rediscovered their touch. Unfortunately, and despite the aura of universal raves (96 on Rotten Tomatoes), 2 1/2 hours of uninterrupted senseless homicide somehow failed to lift our spirits. Only one visual hearkens back to the comic relief that the CBs of old used so adeptly. And as for proclamations that this film is a cinematic metaphor for the post-9/11 world, um, er, pointless killing is a metaphor? Maybe Javier Bardem is a Dick Cheney with hair. I do have one question: Can people actually walk around in public carrying cattle stun guns? Which brings us to my wife Cecile’s assessment of the film as her own definition of a “dick flick.”

But even man-god Jesus would have a hard time recommending “No Country for Old Men” as a movie for the season putatively celebrating his birth. As for metaphors, perhaps it will do for our current Northwest siege of dead and dying…escapism be damned.

There’s little doubt what the top news story of the past, and probably ensuing, 24 hours is: Black Friday shopping. Yesterday’s papers and TV news worked in repeated references to the bold new national initiative to “allow” Christmas shoppers into the malls early, some of them waiting till a full minute after midnight so as not to show disrespect for our most sacred of American holidays, Thanksgiving. KIRO 7 even had an hourly breakdown on early-morning weather conditions (there could be ice on those windshields, folks) for the frenzied hordes. This morning the P-I already has a full report on the rampaging minions (forecast headcount: 20,000) at Alderwood Mall. One promising quote: ‘”I think this is the dumbest idea they have ever had,” said Matt Carter, 28, of Snohomish.’ And why? Because, you know, Christmas is a holy time of worship in the name of our Lord? Because Christmas has been corrupted from a season of reflection, fellowship and glad tidings into a sickening seige of cutthroat consumerism where all that matters is the best markdown and highest retail profits? Because the notion that thousands of people have nothing better to do on the night after Thanksgiving than troll mall aisles is just plain insane, if it weren’t so desperately sad?

Not quite. It’s the dumbest idea because “they need more security.”

So verily, do not say unto me, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Hey buddy, the line’s back there.

In other so-called news:

Prop 1’s failure raises the timeline of when to institute tolls: ‘ “There’s no question about it,” Senate Transportation Chairwoman Mary Margaret Haugen, D-Camano Island, said. “The issue is whether you toll early”…’ Or as the Prop 1 vote should’ve been framed: Pay us now, or pay us later. We can look to the toll–riddled Bay Area for guidance. Most bridges are $4 and headed for $5, the Golden Gate is $5 and headed for $8 or $10. They put out feelers to gauge public opinion on rate hikes, and most of the time it’s a shrug. Voters there understand you have to get the money from somewhere. Here I doubt reaction will be so blithe. A lot of motorists apparently think bridges should be free. Little do they know, $3 is a bargain!

East of the mountains may be clear and cold, but the air is ugly. As are, surprise, the politics. Now we all know that anonymous bloggers, especially on this site, have nothing but the highest regard for truth, honesty, justice and the American way. But in Yakima, apparently they don’t cotton to the idea. The mayor thinks a newly elected council member should resign simply because his wife dished dirt on his opponent in an anonymous blog. And get this: some of it wasn’t even true! Anonymity is a cancer on Web dialog, of course — one reason identity-authenticating Facebook is so hot right now…which is why top Google (fully vested, it should be noted) execs, according to TechCrunch, are actually leaving the search giant for riper opportunities with the younger, smarter set. Somewhere Steve Ballmer is smiling…

And thanks to Erica C. Barnett for answering the question I posed Thanksgiving eve on whatever happened to the Amazon play for SoLa? Um, nothing. Although I have to say, it looks like the neighbors are getting suckered. Hey, maybe they’ve just been overwhelmed by the spirit of giving this holiday season.

Shop on, ye Christian soliders! Or as Dan might put it in his ongoing series, “O they will know we are Christians by the Black Friday discount tags on our shrinkwrapped baubles…”

I was traveling and missed the big Kindle announcement from Amazon, but my initial reaction was: They’re gouging huge holes in South Lake Union for this? I mean, if Amazon really is the “secret” tenant holding the city hostage over further hi-rise development in Allentown, then it should hardly be mired in the vision of yesteryear, foisting on its weary clientele yet another iteration of 1990s technology no one has ever indicated they wanted or would actually use. As anyone who reads books knows, it’s virtually impossible to improve on a book. Think of all the time, for example, you don’t waste booting up. To be fair, I haven’t actually seen a Kindle (and at $399 won’t be putting one on my Wish List). But if Amazon is going to further desecrate one of Seattle’s remaining shapeable people zones, it had better be talking technology that deposits new books directly into my brain via ubiquitous wireless transmission, so I don’t even have to read. (Didn’t you love the New York Times headline, “Amazon Reading Device Doesn’t Need Computer” — to which should have been appended, “Neither Does Moby Dick.”) Maybe Jeff Bezos, who has always reminded me of what a grown-up Harry Potter, having lost his hair and gained contacts (or Lasik), might look like, should get together with one of Puget Sound’s other fun-loving CEOs, Craig McCaw, and hash this out.

The problem with eBooks isn’t technology. “Paperless ink” could read just as well as print (it doesn’t), and a hand-held device could simulate pages so well you’d find yourself automatically reaching for the pen to underline (it’s been done, but you know, the experience just isn’t the same with pixels as really going to town on dead trees). The problem is that people aren’t reading books, and the future leaders of our doomed society don’t seem inclined to reverse the trend. I found morbid irony in Kindle being announced with great fanfare on the same day as results of a depressingly “alarming” National Endowment for the Arts study showing “the percentage of adults who are proficient in reading prose has fallen at the same time that the proportion of people who read regularly for pleasure has declined.” So Jeff, the booming market for Kindle is what, exactly?

That kind of impertinence got me put on Amazon’s “Do Not Call” list almost from the get-go back in the ’90s, although no reporter I know ever had much luck with its Public Irritations department. As The Times’ Brier Dudley pointed out, his paper wasn’t even invited to Kindle’s big New York hoo-hah. It may have been because Brier beat up on Amazon’s MP3 eulas in a recent column. Or maybe because hometown papers don’t have the headcount and cachet of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. My pet theory is that Amazon wants to drive The Seattle Times out of its South Lake Union headquarters so it can…

Of course, none of the press’ leading lights present at the rollout apparently had the presence of mind to ask Bezos about the decline-in-reading study. It might’ve shown disrespect.

OK, I’ll give the Amazin crew a benefit of the doubt here. What Kindle is has nothing to do with what it’s meant to be. It’s simply placeholder, spaghetti-on-the-wall technology for Amazon to be a player as reading technology evolves. Note Newsweek’s reference to an iPod of reading. eBooks are the focus simply because to show off anything else would’ve gotten Bezos laughed off the stage. For now, the market is people who have to carry around a lot of books — academics, students, avid readers — and may find convenience in having them on a device, whatever its drawbacks. That isn’t a very big market, and from the study is apparently a dwindling one, but it’ll do while literature and books figure out where they stand in the still-chaotic business model of the Web. Google has an obvious stake in this, so does Apple (the iPod Touch and iPhone make pretty good book readers, too), as does the publishing industry (which includes newspapers, don’t forget, even ones that aren’t invited to the rollout). The more deep-pocketed players, the better the opportunity for someone coming up with the true iPod of reading.

P.S. Did I miss it, or has the mystery tenant for SoLa been announced? It was supposed to happen “within days” in early October…

P.P.S.For an alternative viewpoint, Danny Westneat feels Kindle’s burn.

You return from a couple of weeks in the Bay Area, you expect to have a lot of catching up to do on the news of the day. But sheesh, after a daily diet of oil-spill scandal, Barry Bonds indictment, gas prices passing $4 a gallon and real estate tanking in the one place you’d think was recession-proof (besides Seattle)…well, coming back home is a little like leaving a Quentin Tarantino premiere party for an evening with the Cleavers.

So let’s see…a local former high-school basketball star turns up dead in Brazil. Coming home in the middle of this I was trying hard, reading the updates, to figure out who Tony Harris even was, let alone how he wound up in Brazil, and what in God’s name had happened to him. I do happen to know, however, who his former coach is, and his name is not spelled Al Hairstone, as Q13 had it. Finally, The Times ran a pretty good overview, apparently from a freelancer. I’m still not sure why this is such big news. I guess the answer is, bigger news just ain’t there. Or it ain’t being reported.

I mean, if we want to talk former basketball stars, I found it interesting that John Johnson, or JJ to the many Sonics fans who remember him as one of the best passing forwards basketball has ever produced (at a time when the competition was stiff, what with Larry Bird, Rick Barry, Bill Walton, Magic and other purveyors of that fine art among JJ’s contemporaries)…now where was I? Oh yeah. It turns out JJ was robbed in Redwood City, and it made pretty big news in the peninsula dailies. Robbed by a 74-year-old man, apparently, and robbed of his 1979 championship ring! O the pain, the outrage, the embarrassment! But not a word in the Seattle dailies, from what I can tell using their admittedly lame Web search engines (other than some random forum mention). I mean, you don’t call this news?

Then there’s the case involving, from what I can tell, a UW student who is somehow entangled in the murder of a British college student in central Italy. Whew, can someone do an org chart on this story? Again, I’m not sure what places this convoluted tale, sordid though it be, in the realm of headline buster. Maybe when it’s all investigated and tried it will make a good True Crime report, but without more details right now it’s hard for me to know why I should care. My suspicion is that TV coverage drives the print “make good” factor on stuff like this. I remember when it was all just the opposite.

Then there’s the Fun Forest. Guess it’s time for the old arcade to head off to that great amusement park in the sky. Many fond memories there. But none of them even remotely recent, of course; and there you have the whole problem in a nutshell.

Oh well. At least I was spared even a passing mention of the David Copperfield-aspiring model nastiness in the Bay Area news media.

One measure of how truly significant a piece of news is has to do with its geographic reach. From what I gather, Barry Bonds was a big story up here. The oil spill got a few mentions, too. And California gas prices, outrageous as they are, probably popped into the roundups. As far as the Bay Area’s housing collapse, that probably didn’t get much play up here. We’re not there yet, folks, and let’s hope we don’t get there. Except for the tony legacy neighborhoods (Marin County, S.F. proper), it’s a real meltdown in the making. Of course, down there The Chron doesn’t sugar-coat. The bare hungry cryin’ truth, with corroborating stats, is all laid out. By comparison, the Seattle dailies are kind of tiptoeing around, from what I can tell. At street level here, I’m starting to hear the ugly stories of defaults and flips gone bad and, worst of all, overbuilding in a time of real-estate downturn. When already-constructed condos aren’t moving, why is DPD still rubber-stamping every townhouse and hi-rise development coming in through the door? There’s a real-estate story I’d read.

But somehow, I still expect the next Seattle headline I see on the subject to read, “Housing market showing growth despite national trend.”

In any case, getting back to my original point (two weeks away perhaps has given me a mild bout of blogorrhea)…Cali headlines made it all the way to Seattle, but I have to say I cannot recall a single Seattle headline making it down to the Bay Area. Even the sensational, and sensationally covered, FCC hearing on media consolidation failed to raise a 2/18bi (ancient newsie talk for filler). So perhaps our mild, gray climate bespeaks a certain news temperament as well. Or maybe it’s that our news outlets are failing to find and report the real good stuff. A wise editor once told me a reporter’s job was to “tell me what happened, and make me care.” It’s so much easier to just leave off that second part.

Delicious philippic from SFGate: “It is now becoming increasingly easy to actually dare to think that, in less than one year’s time, Dubya will begin packing his bags, jamming into his Spongebob duffel his map of the world coloring book, English-to-English translation dictionaries, mangled pocket edition of the U.S. Constitution, Bibleman action figure set and a “Mission Accomplished!” sweatshirt, and heading off to face his destiny as one of the bleakest, most morally repellent chapters in all of American history…”

Another disaster, another delayed response. Another round of finger-pointing, another chorus of denial. The San Francisco Bay oil spill isn’t getting the nation-wide attention of Hurricane Katrina, the Minneapolis bridge collapse or the SoCal wildfires, but its aftermath is depressingly similar.

Having been in the Bay Area since the spill happened a week ago, I have no feel for Seattle’s level of awareness. Think of it this way: If inner Puget Sound was coated with brown gobs of sticky goo, if beaches were closed to the public (even to volunteer cleanup), if boats at local marinas had tarred bathtub rings marring their hulls, and if waterfront property owners had days of cleanup on their hands…well, you might be seeing some play in the local media.

Puget Sound and San Francisco Bay have a lot of physical similarities, which makes it all the more puzzling that oil-spill experts from the Seattle area were not hustled down here as soon as the magnitude of the spill became apparent. (They may have been, as were crews from Texas and elsewhere, but it reportedly took three to four days to summon any outside assistance.) In any case, once oil spills in an enclosed estuary, it doesn’t exactly disappear in the wash. Expertise in current patterns, containment technology, weather and other variables is badly needed, and response time is absolutely critical.

So what did we have in the Bay? The Cosco Busan, a 902-foot-long container ship heading out of harbor in a heavy fog, apparently was warned by the Coast Guard that it was on collision course with the Oakland Bay Bridge, but kept going because, as the ship captain evidently radioed back, radar showed the ship position to be safe. One might think you call a time out in this situation to do some trouble-shooting, but the boat kept going. The next thing anyone knew, it had “touched,” as Capt. John J. Cota termed it, a bridge tower. He could have said “kissed,” he could have said “nicked.” But what really transpired was a demolished wood-and-wire tower bumper and a 160-foot-long, 4-foot-deep tear in the vessel’s side. Within half an hour, 58,000 gallons of really toxic diesel fuel had seeped out, the bay’s biggest spill in 20 years.

But we didn’t know that, either. Initial reports were that only 140 gallons had spilled. It took more than 8 hours before the full magnitude of the spill became apparent, more than 12 to send out a full alert. The fog had something to do with this, hindering air surveillance. But let’s face it, some folks weren’t using much common sense, either.

The initial fumble made everything else about the spill just that more awful. Bay Area jurisdictions weren’t notified in a timely fashion. Additional equipment and expertise took that much longer to get in motion. Days after the spill, hundreds of volunteers still were being physically barred from the beaches (at least one was arrested for disobeying authorities) with the warning that they could do more harm than good, and might get sick from the stuff. Hundreds of oiled birds, many dead, were found, the crab and oyster seasons have been affected, and experts say that the bulk of the oil will never be recovered and may play havoc with the bay’s ecosystem for decades. Next to history’s really big oil spills, 58,000 gallons seems like a spitball. But diesel fuel is heavier, more toxic and more persistent than oil, and the Bay is more bathtub than washing machine. The stuff doesn’t have anywhere to go.

Official response has ranged from the ludicrous (Dianne Feinstein called it a “learning experience” — like Exxon Valdez wasn’t?) to the litigious, with one attorney estimating damage claims will total “well into nine figures.” The crew, all Chinese, has been subpoenaed. After visiting the magnificently restored (before the spill) Crissy Field, which must have taken a nasty hit, Nancy Pelosi suggested it might be time to double-hull retrofit fuel tanks of container ships, a costly requirement surely to be resisted by the shipping industry. The Coast Guard, now in high dudgeon, says the incident was “preventable human error” without embracing an iota of culpability. There’s even the suggestion that Coast Guard resources have been so diverted to Homeland Security that it cannot be bothered with mere oil spills any more. But hey, couldn’t anyone at least have ordered the ship to cut engines or something?

Meanwhile, a solitary eeriness haunts Bay beaches during remarkably balmy 75-degree, sunshiny, Indian summer days. If you doubt martial law could succeed in the U.S., all you have to do is spend a little time encountering guard after guard, blockade after blockade, barring access to the Bay’s multitude of public beaches.

Like Katrina, the Minnesota bridge and San Diego fires, the Bay oil spill will fade all too soon into our domestic-disaster woodwork. But one more brick has been laid in a disturbing bulwark of flubbed response and feckless hand-wringing, with the expectation of eventual cultural amnesia and resultant whitewash.

It all may seem like institutionalized ineptitude, starting at the top with G.W. Bush and his pernicious band of neo-con merrymakers. Listening to the Coast Guard commandant on the radio gave me the deja vu of Heckuva Job Brownie and Do Not Recall Gonzales, putting on airs of genial but simple-minded folk in way over their heads.

Instead, watching Bush himself fly over the devastation of Katrina back when, it occurred to me that incompetence is the strategy. We know neo-cons hate government, that they want to, as Grover Norquist puts it, drown the baby. But were they to act like it and execute on it, they know a compassionate and democratic public would revolt. So they simply act like they just can’t do any better. They appoint political hacks to make sure all the public’s money gets given away to their lackeys, and when a real crisis hits they simply fart around. Let the levees breach and the bridges collapse and the fires rage and the oil slime. What better opportunities to show how evil, useless and unnecessary government really is?

Apple Insider has the scoop, with fingers crossed as always: Macworld’s big bust-out will be the long-awaited, much-speculated (including here), disk driveless ultra-lite notebook. Drat, and I was planning to upgrade from my PowerBook next week!

There’s so much pent-up demand for this baby, and combined with the Leopard upgrade it promises to give so much pop to Apple sales, that some boosters have put a target of $350 for the stock price (currently around $155 on profit-taking and general jitters after passing $190). Even conservative analysts are talking $225. So if you’re looking for a safe haven from the weak dollar, the shaky financial market and the DJ index, here’s your chance. You might want to wait till the profit-taking ride ends to jump in. If recent history is an indicator, the stock will roll back up as fast as it unraveled.

Of course it could all be smoke signals aimed at backstopping shares and pimping Macworld…but that would freeze current Apple sales during the crucial holiday period.

UPDATE: Apparently response from developers has been so thunderous that Google is now offering to pay them to write programs. Yeah, that’ll work…

I’m playing catchup on this, but my take on Google’s new phone platform, Android, is a lot less breathless than what you might have read elsewhere last week. Promising to turn cell phones into pocket PCs, whatever that means, Android was front-page news here in Silicon Valley, and even in The New York Times, which also effused editorially. I consider Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer closer to the mark, though, in calling it a mere press release and “a bunch of words.” That’s what I love about Steve, he never speaks in code. Ballmer of course took the opportunity to boast about Windows Mobile’s staggering success on 150 different handsets from 100-plus operators. Silly me, I can’t name a single one.

But Ballmer knows mere press releases when he sees ’em, as any veteran of Microsoft FUD knows. My favorite example will always be the hugely trumpeted mid-1990s Microsoft At Work (MAW!) initiative to put Windows on all office machines — copiers, fax machines, printers. That one was front-page news, too. Unless I missed something, though, I never saw a “File/Edit/Format” etc. interface on a fax machine.

The fact is, these industry-wide initiatives get lots of feel-good ink and very little traction. Standards, as a friend likes to joke, are useful mainly for giving everyone something to unite against. If they were really crucial, digital camera makers would have figured out the best interface for setting and unsetting automatic flash, for example. Remote controls would all have the “Enter” button in the same place. And cell phone makers might even agree on where to put the SEND button.

As it stands, phone makers have little incentive to adopt a Google platform because 1) it gives any of their really good ideas (albeit rare) to their competition, 2) they lose the ability to differentiate features (often tied to handset UIs) from competitors, and 3) the bulk of any monetization of the platform (in this case, advertising) is sure to go into the already deep pockets of Google.

The other reason this thing won’t go anywhere, though, is the curiously unchallenged role of Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It so happens that Schmidt sits on the board of Apple Inc. and is a BFF of Steve Jobs. So if Android is a mobile platform and the iPhone is a mobile platform, isn’t that what you call your classic conflict of interest? Apparently Schmidt is skating this with one of his engaging winks and some vague blather about the ecosystem of mobile technology nurturing many forms, but in reality what it says to me (absent a shareholder revolt) is that, yeah, the whole enchilada is meaningless. Apple can keep doing its closed iPhone thing (although my bet is that after its AT&T commitment runs out, we’ll see iPhones on other carriers as well) with no fear from Google’s putatively open-platform let’s-all-hold-hands-and-sing “press release” … while Ballmer pouts about someone else getting lots of attention for a hollow gesture. Android is just a straw dog to freeze potential competition to the iPhone till Apple can license it to other vendors or build a monopoly so fast and strong it doesn’t matter what the phone makers do. Whether conflict of interest or backroom collusion, the whole thing deserves regulatory inspection.

Till then, the annoyingly named Android — and by the way, why didn’t anyone ask what the name means, other than the company that Google bought…and shouldn’t it have been called Handroid instead? — is something everyone can smile and nod about. Isn’t that nice, we’ll all be able to IM one another and post photos to Flickr when the next earthquake hits. Remind me to check back in a couple of years. About then, hopefully, Google will be announcing an open platform for digital camera software.

I filled up the van in Palo Alto and paid $3.81 a gallon, a new personal record. I felt so proud, doing my bit to get American kids killed in Iraq and start a nuclear war with Iran. In reality, of course, I support $10-a-gallon gasoline, so long as the obscene profits go to light rail and renewable energy instead of the oily companies and Bush’s fatcat pals.

It’s intriguing, comparing the psychology at the pump today with the Arab oil embargo back when. The issue then wasn’t price but supply. Americans were outraged when they could not actually mosey on down to the gas station and fill ‘er up any time they felt like it. They kicked Carter out of office for it. So as long as there’s plenty of gas, it seems, folks are not going to get unruly, no matter what it costs. But here’s a safe bet: If a Dem gets elected President, we’ll be back to gas rationing before you can say Homeland Security. And it’ll all be the Democrats’ fault.