MISC celebrated the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street last month by consuming a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.

SIX OF ONE DEPT.: Was intrigued (if not completely satisfied) by the new Prisoner miniseries on AMC. It was well produced and exquisitely acted, even though the ending explained too much. (I won’t spoil it for you future BitTorrent DVD viewers.)

The old show mixed Swinging London iconography with Cold War politics, 007-esque spying with Big Brother paranoia.

The new show mixed Matrix psycho-techno-babble with corporate oppression, social-gaming fantasies with the suffocating terror that is Reagan-Bush era “family values.”

And it was fun to hear the Brian Wilson music samples. Because most of those were from Smile, which had been composed at the time of the original Prisoner series but not finished until 2004, they added a time/space distortion field that perfectly fit the story’s psycho-consciousness distortion field.

THE CLEARCUT BEGINS: The Seattle Center’s Fun Forest amusement area is one of those institutions nobody liked except the people. From its inception after the end of the 1962 World’s Fair to the present, assorted civic bigshots from Lou Guzzo to David Brewster scorned the very notion of a little bit of carny culture amid all the Center’s fine arts venues.

A decade ago, the Experience Music Project took a big swath of the Forest’s rides space. The business was unprofitable ever since.

A half decade ago, the City floated several potential master plans for the Center’s future development. Every option excluded the Fun Forest.

In 2007, the City and the Fun Forest’s private operators agreed the rides and games would clear out after Labor Day 2009. The carny-game arcade, the only one of its kind in Seattle, is being dismantled this week. The rides are shut down. The indoor game arcade (to the upper right in the above photo) remains open for the time being.

BUILDING EMPIRES: The BNSF Railway used to be the Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Before that, it was Burlington Northern. Before that, it was “the Hill lines.” Those were four separate companies (Great Northern, Northern Pacific, Burlington Route, and Spokane Portland & Seattle) with the same ownership (assembled by “Empire Builder” rail tycoon James J. Hill); the Feds wouldn’t let them merge operations until the late ’60s.
Hill’s Great Northern, in particular, influenced Seattle’s development as the Northwest’s premier shipping and business capital. When the Northern Pacific’s then-owners built their own company town (Tacoma) to be their western terminus in 1873, Seattle’s civic leaders scrambled long and hard to get their own, vastly needed, rail connection to the East. When the Great Northern finally arrived in January 1893, Seattle’s future was secure. When Hill bought the bankrupt Northern Pacific soon thereafter, Seattle’s dominance was secure.

Hill was the late-19th-century definition of a business giant, an industrialist. He built tangible physical things (or rather, hired people to build them). In the process, he helped turn a scattering of tiny white settlements into an agricultural, transportation, and manufacturing powerhouse.

Now, BNSF’s being bought by Warren Buffet. He’s the late-20th-century definition of a business giant—a speculator. He buys, sells, and trades companies and pieces of companies.

As speculators go, he’s more admired than many. He doesn’t randomly decimate the employment rolls at the companies he buys. He assumes a relatively frugal personal life. And he’s promised to leave most of his estate to the foundation run by his pal Bill Gates.

Gates, in turn, is the early-21st-century definition of a business giant—a purveyor of “products” no more tangible than arrangements of zeros and ones. But that’s another story.

BEGIN THE MCGINN: Just as we were getting excited about the prospects of multiple recounts dragging into the new year, the Seattle mayoral race ended with a thud, or rather with a silent data post late one Monday afternoon. Mike McGinn wound up with a lead well beyond automatic-recount range. Opponent Joe Mallahan conceded.

Once again, Seattle’s NPR-proggy voters spurned the downtown business establishment and the big-money campaign and instead embraced the “outsider” who promises to put neighborhoods first.

Of course, all the past mayors who marketed themselves this way ended as loyal suck-ups to the developers and construction lobbies they’d campaigned against.

McGinn insists he won’t turn his back on his base.

We shall see.

YOU AND YOUR BIG IDEAS: McGinn, building on his campaign branding as a “Netroots” candidate, has a Web page where citizens can suggest their own “Ideas for Seattle.”

I trust and hope McGinn knew what he was doing when he let his transition team set this up.

This has always been a city of dreamers and schemers, of utopian fantasies at greater or lesser war with one another.
You could make a whole book (and a few people have) of different people’s ways of closing Seattle’s most popular all-time conversational starting phrase, “What this town really needs is...”

I’ve heard, and spoken, that phrase all my adult life. The least imaginative versions invariably go that Seattle’s a total nowhere until it gets a _____ exactly like the _____s of San Francisco. But there have always also been more Seattle-appropriate (in civic-planning jargon, “site specific”) visions.

I like some of the ideas on the site, like replacing (instead of just scrapping) the Fun Forest, reducing Seattle’s stormwater pollution into Puget Sound, and micro P-patches in parking strips.

Of course, you know I’ve got my own ideas. Some of them I’ve shared here over the years.

So in the spirit of McGinn’s invite, here are a few of my own dreams and schemes for a brighter, shinier, sweller Seattle (admittedly, not all of these can or should be city government endeavors):

• Non-car (mostly street-level or elevated rail) transport between all in-town neighborhoods, regardless of what suburban voters vote for or against.
• An outdoor, all-ages concert venue running throughout the “dry season.”
• A real daily newspaper.
• A preserved and fixed-up Viaduct (or, if we really need a seawall project that a highway tunnel wouldn’t add much more cost to, repurposing part of the Viaduct as a park).
• Lidding more of I-5 and some of I-90 too.
• Legalized gambling, escorting, and public nudity. (Oh, and I suppose legalized toking as well, since so many seem to want it.)
• Year round sidewalk and street parties rotating around town.
• A municipal philosopher.
• A one-year trial ban on official use of the phrase “world class” within the city limits.
• Some men’s pro basketball games; those always used to be fun attractions.