SOUPY SALES, R.I.P.: I never saw the early TV comedy pioneer perform his principal kidvid act, until best-of packages showed up on home video. His major work was a live local show that began in Detroit back in the medium’s dawning years, then bounced between stations in LA and NY. Only brief portions of these runs attained national syndication.

To those of us in the rest of America, Sales was principally known as a journeyman TV personality—a game show panelist, a talk show guest, an Ed Sullivan Show novelty act. Even without his puppets, his cream pies, and his running gags, he remained an always-welcome presence, an eternal icon of youth and wit and absurdity.
He also nurtured the early musical careers of his sons Hunt and Tony Sales. They went on to play on Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” and in David Bowie’s band Tin Machine.

AN INCONCEIVABLY GOOD READ: I continue to be impressed by the quality of serious lit coming out of our corner-O-the-world.

One recent point-with-pride example: Misconception, the first novel by Ryan Boudinot (a current Writer in Residence at Richard Hugo House).

The story’s plot is deceptively simple. Our hero, Cedar Rivers, is reunited with his middle-school crush, Kat. She’s written a memoir of their time together in small-town Wash. state, centered around her pregnancy and abortion—a pregnancy conceived, she insisted to him at the time, by her mother’s creepy new fiancee. The predicament had sent the confused, virginal Cedar into a brooding, complex course of vengeance, with clumsy and disastrous consequences.

But the novel’s genius isn’t the story itself but the way Boudinot tells it. The narrative goes back and forth, in time and in point of view—with a catch. Everything set in the present day (including Kat’s quoted dialogue) is by the adult Cedar. Everything set in the past (even the parts written from Cedar’s first-person perspective) is by the adult Kat, as part of her memoir manuscript.

If you lose track of all this, don’t worry. The story still makes sense. So, thankfully, do the characters. Both Kat and Cedar had long since moved on from that youthful trauma, forming successful (separate) adult lives. But a shared past like theirs never really goes away. Boudinot deftly traverses the rocky path from his clever (if superficial) basic schtick, into the depths of overt and repressed agonies.

And along the way, he sneaks in some darkly funny gags about awkward, embarrasing pubescent sexuality. One of these starts out the book, as the adult Cedar reads the adult Kat’s account of the younger Cedar bringing a novel experiment to science class—a lab slide of his own semen.

SEATTLE TIMES SHRINKAGE WATCH: I’ve finally let my Seattle Times subscription lapse, after seven months with the SeaTimes and 31 prior years with the now-discontinued print P-I. The only thing I’d still used the print paper for, that couldn’t be done online, was to methodically study how much smaller the SeaTimes was getting.

As a print subscriber, I was hardly supporting the newsroom. Subscription fees barely pay for the manufacture and delivery of the physical product. What I was doing was adding to the aggregate eyeballs the SeaTimes could sell to advertisers. That company’s done a lousy job at selling ads the past several years. Even before the Internet killed want ads and the Great Recession decimated home and car sales, they’d already been losing huge accounts to direct mail.
I currently see three potential scenarios:

1) Print papers continue to shrink, not to oblivion but to the point that they become vulnerable to startup competitors (who suddenly don’t have to pour in $30 million a year in costs and who can target niche audiences in a way old-line dailies can’t).

2) Print papers continue to shrink, to the point where they’re small enough to become subsidized by their big-business community friends (either through contributions or vanity ads).

3) New ebook-esque consumer devices (the long-rumored Apple tablet?) finally make true online publications with paid subscriptions not only feasible but popular.

OPEN HOUSE PARTY DEPT.: Playboy, like a lot of oldline media outfits, is in fiscal trouble. Earlier this year, according to industry rumor, its management offered up the company for potential sale. The asking price was apparently far above the firm’s estimated market value. That’s because the 83-year-old Hugh Hefner wanted to make sure he maintained his ultra-hedonist lifestyle (and he didn’t really want to sell anyway).

Still, at least two potential buyers emerged. They were private equity firms, companies that exist only to buy and sell other companies (like the one that briefly owned Chrysler).

One of those would-be buyers now owns the Century 21 and Coldwell Banker real-estate brands.

Make up your own puns about “development,” “view lands,” or “treating women like property” here. Speaking of which...

WHEN WOMEN HAD WINGS: Hooters just opened in Boulevard Park, a tiny commercial strip separated from the South Park neighborhood by a lonely highway overpass. (A McDonald’s already exists along this strip.)
I don’t particularly care for Hooters.

I really don’t care for essays that attack Hooters from the standpoint of simplistic gender-ideology, such as Lindy West’s piece in the Stranger.

On the other hand, I loved the online comment thread that followed West’s piece. The commenters hit upon some important points West had elided past:

- Is Hooters’ food really any good? (Some say yes; others insist on the superiority of locally-owned hot wing emporia such as Wing Dome.)
- Is the “Hooters Girl” image demeaning to all women? (Some say yes; some say no; I say there’s no such thing as “all women.”)
- Is it wrong to use sex to sell stuff? (If so, many commenters note, the Stranger would be at least as guilty.)
- Are West and the Stranger contradicting their “sex positive” stance? (I say no, they’re simply overriding it with a stance that’s even more vital to “alt” culture—the stance of sneering at anything to do with “the wrong kind of white people”.)

West, most of the commenters, and I agree on one point—the Hooters Girl look (apparently inspired by the sorority-slut uniforms in the 1979 sexploitation film H.O.T.S.) is, to all of us, decidedly unsexy.
And the whole Hooters aesthetic/experience conjures association with/nostalgia for fraternity-sorority bonding, but is anti-intellectual and anti-education. The apparent ideal Hooters customer is an adult who went to college but didn’t learn anything.

SEX IS THE QUESTION: Two researchers have a new book called Why Women Have Sex. The researchers have determined there are exactly 237 reasons for a (hetero) woman to do the sex—no more, no less.
You know most of the common reasons—lust, love, baby-making, social-ladder climbing, cash, barter, kicks, comfort, novelty, submission, empowerment, celebration, consolation, getting/keeping/dumping a guy, because all the other girls are doing it, because parents/teachers/preachers say not to, and so forth.
But let’s imagine some reasons that might land a little further down on the list of 237, some of the less-common reasons for sex:
— He cooked a really great dinner.
— He wore something so ugly, she had to get it off of him.
— There was nothing good on TV.
— The only good DVDs at the store were taken.
— Pilates just gets too repetitive.
— That church retreat weekend made her feel too clean.
— To crowd out the noise of the neighbors/kids/voices in her head.
— She wanted to try out a Sleep Number bed and he had one.
— She wanted to prove he wasn’t gay.
— She wanted to prove she wasn’t gay.
— She wanted to prove she didn’t have implants.
— She wanted to prove the rumors about men of a certain profession/ethnic group/nationality/weight class.
— Hey, why not?

Then there are the “reasons” that would fall off the 237 altogether. For instance, I’m pretty sure no woman has ever had sex with a man just because he used a certain brand of deodorant body spray.