IT'S BEEN A STRANGE SUMMER thus far, what with the unseasonable rains (Eureka! The crops are saved!), and the Mariners deciding not to be doormats (at least sometimes), Seattle cops arresting some of the World Naked Bike Ride riders

THE FOURTH AND DENNY 7-ELEVEN was one of 12 stores across North America to temporarily become a Kwik-E-Mart during The Simpsons Movie's promotional lead-up. Three-dimensional folks from all over arrived to have their pictures taken next to the two-dimensional characters.

(remember, everyone: War and global destruction are obscene; lap rugs and pickles aren't), and the long, interminable, slow wasting-away of the Bush era, like a bad jam band that won't get off the stage no matter how loudly everyone boos and throws plastic beer cups at it (more about that below). GOOD NEWS, PART 1: Macyfication is officially a failure! Kohlberg Kravitz Roberts, that former king of the '80s leveraged-buyout scene, is eyeing a hostile takeover of the mega-retailer formerly known as Federated Department Stores, which includes the store formerly known as the Bon Marché. Let's hope KKR realizes the dormant but still high value of the grand local department store brands still owned by the ex-Federated, and changes them all back even the chains it might end up reselling to pay for the acquisition.

GOOD NEWS, PART 2: Sometimes there's justice after all. Ex-Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio just got sentenced to six years' imprisonment over sleazy corporate accounting tricks. Now if we could only get our old, public-service-minded Pacific Northwest Bell back....

IF YOU CAN BELIEVE reports coming from the dreaded MSM (mainstream media), the Weekly World News is shutting down. Unlike most of my readers, I won't miss it.

WWN, that most beloved of all periodicals by the would-be hipsters and the easily amused everywhere, began in 1980 as a spinoff of the National Enquirer. The Enquirer was morphing from its previous weird-news format into the highly successful celeb-gossip sheet it is now. The WWN was created to service fans of the material the Enquirer would no longer emphasize.

The rag found its market niche among all the kids who bought it to sneer at all the other people who supposedly bought it. By 1985, it was being written and edited by hip young adults for hip young adults, but still pretending to be targeted at the mouth-breathers out in flyover country.

It traded on its outrageousness. But that's difficult to maintain. Every year the WWN became more over-the-top, more ridiculous. Its fake news schtick evolved into a house of mirrors they knew it was fake, you knew it was fake, they knew you knew, but they pretended they didn't know you knew, and you pretended they didn't know you knew.

It's amazing they kept it up this long.

The beginning of WWN's end may have come when it hired my ol' acquaintance, cartoonist Peter Bagge, to create a weekly comic strip based on "Bat Boy," a character whose airbrush-created face made the paper's cover at least once a year. The pretense had ended with Bagge's arrival. The editors had included true urban-hipster material.

American Media, current owners of the Enquirer and WWN, apparently turned down at least one offer to buy the publication, for reasons unknown. THOUGHT FOR FOOD DEPT.: The fine bureaucrats of our City of Upscale Casual Dining, having apparently solved all other locally-solvable problems, are now considering heavier regulations fo what we eat and how we dispose of what we don't eat. Mandatory composting? No trans fats in restaurant food? Nutritional charts for every item in chain restaurants? At least I know cottage-cheese salads will never become mandatory so long as Greg Nickels remains mayor. HEY BABY, IT'S THE FOURTH OF JULY: Last month we commemorated baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, Chevrolet, and, oh yeah, the brave actions of our forefathers n' foremothers lo those 23 decades ago. They didn't get it all right, not right away (slaves, women not voting, etc.). But they got us started on the path toward equality under the law. They stood their ground against the greatest global military power of their day. They sought not just autonomy from the monarchy, but a better way to run a country. They fought to replace the rule of monarchs with the rule of law. They got out from under the thumb of a capricious, incompetent, power-mad ruler, a king named, well, you know. Among other people, Keith Olbermann suggests we desperately now need to get out from under our current mad monarch's thumb - not to overthrow our current system of governance but to renew and reclaim it, to take it back from the despotic elite who would destroy it from within. I can't think of a better wish for this day.

If the Democratic Congressional leaders are too bureaucratic (i.e., chicken) to act toward Bush/Cheney's immediate removal, we all will have to put out the ol' screws of public opinion to get 'em movin'. If they still won't, we'll have to "route around" the blockage, as they say in Internet jargon. By this I don't mean overthrowing the whole U.S. government. That wouldn't succeed; and even if it did, something even more brutal might emerge. No, our task is both more subtle and more obscure. We have to make the current federal executive occupants irrelevant, even if they remain for the duration of their term.

SPELLBOUND: The big chain bookstores of North America have held their final Harry Potter midnight madness event. The massive hoopla over what's essentially a well-written, well-plotted piece of commercial fiction has failed to silence the elitist critics who pooh-pooh the series' success as a fluke, and who continue to insist, as they have for the past three decades or more, that (1) either "real reading" or "reading for fun" (which are separate, contradictory terms anyway) is dead, dead, DEAD mind you, and that (2) everyone younger than the critics themselves is an illiterate, TV-addled subhuman.

No matter how huge the chain bookstores get; no matter how far TV ratings tumble; no matter how big those Interwebs get (most of which falls under any consistent definition of "reading for fun" and some of which even qualifies as "serious reading"); the same ol' everyone's-an-idiot-except-me-and-my-friends meme just keeps rolling along, as unkillable as Voldemort. IN ONE OF THE THOUSANDS of iPhone hype stories this past month, Apple honcho Steve Jobs was quoted as calling "the human finger the most sophisticated navigation device known to mankind." I'm sure the ladies at the Babeland stores would agree.