Via the Northwest Film Forum mail list:

We are pleased to announce that the 6th annual Cephalopod Appreciation Society meeting will be held on the afternoon of Sunday, August 10th at our favorite location—the Northwest Film Forum (1515 12th Ave - off Pine St. on Capitol Hill - Seattle, WA).

We'll kick everything off at 12:30 pm with some cephalopod-inspired music, art, poetry, impassioned speeches & Other, and end with a cephalopod film (TBA).

The Specifics:
Sunday, Aug. 10th
12:30 - 2:30 pm
@ Northwest Film Forum
1515 12th Ave / Seattle, WA
All ages!
$5 suggested donation
Free stickers!
More info: songsforsquid@hotmail.com

Here's what you can do:
* First - save the date & come celebrate!

* Second - spread the word to your friends and favorite cephalopods. (Reminder: Cephalopods include the octopus, squid, chambered nautilus, and cuttlefish. All molluscs are welcome, but we'll only be celebrating cephalopods on this day.)

* Last but not least -- if you have (or will have) a CEPHALOPOD-INSPIRED SOMETHING to present or perform at the meeting, please let me know so I can schedule you in! We're open to all media (music, dance, lecture, fashion, multi-media, art, poetry, puppets, interactive, super-8, slide-show, Other), and although it's a fairly lo-fi affair we'll do our best to accommodate your technological needs.

And if you know of someone who might be interested, please pass this on.

Hope to see you there!

This seems like the right time to mention that if plain old Moleskine notebooks have become too dull for you, you can purchase all kinds of etched modifications from Modofly. Those by Dan Hillier tend to involve human-cephalopod hybrids:

(Thanks, Caroline.)

Half the shot glasses are round, half are square, and the set comes with a checker board. According to the rules on the back of the box, you're supposed to fill the shot glasses with booze and when one of your glasses gets jumped, you have to do the shot. One game should put you under the table. Two should send you to the emergency room.

The round and square glasses would seem to obviate the need for booze of two different colors—but, hey, if you like shots of Blue Curacao, go for it.

All yours for $14.99 at Value Village on 11th.

...brought up in the comments to this post, by the enticingly named crk on bellevue ave:

Until Pike Place Market is open until at least 8pm, it is nothing more then a quaint tourist trap. I love the produce vendors there... but 6pm? Too early for me.

I want the thank the Mayor and city council of Seattle for opening up a huge money making opportunity for me! Starting in January, 2009, I plan to be standing outside your nearest grocery store selling bags, just off their property, next to a Democrats political sign and a homeless person, for only 10 cents each! For starters, I have purchased 50,000 of these at a cost less than one cent per bag. And I will be shopping just outside the city limits and will never shop in town again! And if you want to tax me for making a profit, and using public or private land to do it on, you will also have to remove the political signs for being placed on that property illegally and tax the homeless for making money also! So thanks again!

You don't need the New York Times--or any of a hundred small-town newspapers that have run likewise stories--to tell you that cars are out/bikes are in. Not if you work above a bike shop. There is seemingly a new bike in the window at Velo, the bike shop below The Stranger's offices, every day. The other day there was nothing in the window--and they weren't just faking people out. "We're selling 13 or 15 bikes a day on weekends," says Velo sales associate Annie Gillberg. "Our mechanics are having trouble keeping the shelves stocked." (There's currently a 6 to 9 day wait for tune-ups at Velo, even though they have several mechanics and a tune-up is a one-hour job.) Ben Atkinson, a mechanic at 2020 Cycle, says the shop has been "absolutely insane"--not so much with new purchases as with repairs on bikes that people haven't used in years and just hauled out of the basement. Wayne Fujiki at Gregg's Cycle says "racks are flying out the door"--lots of new customers retrofitting old bikes, "putting racks on them to carry stuff to work." He repeats, "Rack and panniers have been going crazy." Erica at Recycled Cycles says, "It's really busy in here. A lot of people who come in say they want to start commuting," and are buying bikes to ride to work.

Just felt like scaring up some good news, bike-wise, to counterbalance all the acrimony over the Critical Mass mess.

(With reporting by Julia Mullen Gordon.)

Ladies and gentlemen, Armor of God PJs.

Thank you, Slog tipper Jonathan.

Yesterday, out of morbid curiosity, I typed www.saveourstarbucks.com into my browser. Lo and behold, there was already a website protesting the 600 closed Starbucks. There are lots of complaints like this one:

We must stop this insanity. People are losing their jobs. Starbucks has been a responsible addition to the communities they serve, their employees and customers. Loss of community is NOT the American way. Time to rally and save our Starbucks. No more java jive!

And people are getting involved in more specific ways, too. The above photo is from a website devoted to saving the lower Greenville Ave Starbucks (store 6262, Dallas, TX). It's good to see that people are out there fighting for what's right. They've embarked on a letter-writing campaign, an online petition, and a protest. It's unknown if any of the protesters know what a "Darfur" is.

In more understandable angry consumer news, this website is devoted to convincing frozen-yogurt chain Pinkberry that these juicers:

are racist and shouldn't be sold in their stores.

This is going to be the best Olympics ever!

The important thing that is lost here is the hyphen, which was represented as a star. This is actually a change in company culture.

When I lived in Colorado Springs, I worked many, many shitty jobs. I worked at a Wendy's for three hours, I was a landscaper, a mall Easter Bunny, a K-Mart shoe salesman and more. But worst of all, I worked to set up a Super Wal-Mart at the very end of my time in the Springs. I was desperate for cash. There were no customers, since the store had yet to open, which was a major plus.

The downside was that we had storewide meetings every single morning. Every single day, the store manager, whose name was Gary Peacock, would blast the song "Takin' Care of Business" on repeat and I and all of my other blue-vested compatriots would assemble around the makeshift stage, clapping in time with the music. At the end of every meeting, where we would hear about the progress of the store—mostly our job was assembling and stocking all the shelves, which, in a Super Wal-Mart, is a hell of a job—we would do the Wal-Mart Cheer. This is apparently the Wal-Mart way; other former Wal-Mart employees have told me that they've done the cheer, as well.

Peacock would shout, "Gimme a W!" and all the adults, dressed in their blue smocks, would hold their hands above their heads to make a giant W with their bodies. Then, he would shout "Gimme an A!" and we'd put our hands together to form an A and so on and so forth. It would end with a cheer, of course, and our morale would be suitably boosted for another day of shelf-stocking.

But the most demoralizing part of the whole thing was the hyphen. When we got to the space between the L and the M, Peacock would shout: "Gimme a squiggly!" and everybody would have to do the twist and lower ourselves to the floor before twisting back upright, while making a "Whooooooooooooop!" noise that got lower as we went down and higher as we stood back up. Never mind that it was a hyphen and not at all squiggly, a fact which drove me insane every single day. The worst part was that some of the employees fucking loved doing the squiggly. It was probably the high point of their days. They would laugh every time.

So what are the Peacocks of the world going to shout now, between the L and the M? Is there still going to be a squiggly? Are they going to acknowledge that it's an asterisk at the end? Or are they going to shout "Give me a Kurt Vonnegut asshole!" instead? And what will happen then, dear Lord, what, exactly, will happen then?

It's not like they taste like poop—or worse, carob—but 3 Musketeers has always been the candy bar you eat when there's nothing else. With their blandly sweet, fluffy inside and cheap milk-chocolate outside, 3 Musketeers are essentially virgin Milky Ways, or neutered Snickers, and are the preferred candy of no one on earth. (Not even those with nut allergies and/or caramel paralysis.)

However, last night I sampled the new 3 Musketeers Dark Chocolate Mint, and it is a candy worth loving. Thinner than the old-school Musketeer nougat log and split into two perfect-sized pieces, 3MDCM is a perfectly harmonious candy. Wrapped around the more slender form, the dark-chocolate enrobing achieves a bit more thickness than its milk-chocolate counterpart, and the dense mint-nougat center is like an Andes mint making love to a York Peppermint Patty. It's perfect.

Also, while we're on the topic of candy, can anyone tell me the difference between the impossible-to-find (perhaps discontinued?) Mars Bar and the ubiquitous Almond Snickers?

The seller is a company called Tshirts.com, which also stocks a large number of political T-shirts, band shirts, and "humorous" shirts like this one:

Amazon's seller policy prohibits the sale of items that are "illegal, inappropriate or offensive," which "includes any good or service that violates local, state, or federal laws or regulations or that would be generally offensive to others."

I think the "anti-abortion, pro-date-rape" T-shirt almost certainly qualifies--and so do the many customers who reviewed it.

Have you been craving that Mormon Fundamentalist Polygamist look for yourself and/or your pet? Then you simply must check out FLDSDress.com, where all the fashions that marched across our TV screens during the recent FLDS flare-up in Texas are available for sale to any and all.

As Slog tipper Tom wrote, "The Teen Princess Dress is every pedophile's dream!"

Personally, I think the site works best as an adolescent rebellion deterrent: "If you're not home by 11:30, young lady, your entire back-to-school wardrobe comes from here!"

Jezebel informs us that American Apparel has started selling the Hitachi Magic Wand. This is the first time that American Apparel has been linked to masturbation, ever.

(As a side note: I think that this is good news for cities that might not have great sex shops, but Seattleites should continue to buy their Hitachis from Babeland.)