Bloglander

Is this your speedy day? Huh, punk? Suspected motorcycle thief, armed with a Glock, can't outrun Coeur d'Alene Police Chief Wayne "Going" Longo in a foot chase. Longo has run 30 marathons. (CdA Press)

Ballots on Tuesday, mud is forever There are two stories in today's news about dust-ups in the final days of the local primaries — one over an Al French mailer and the other involving Bob Apple and alleged unpaid bills. (SR)

'Need $$ for panhandling fines' This could be the new cardboard plea made by panhandlers in Spokane Valley, which has outlawed "aggressive begging" as of yesterday. Police say they will allow a grace period before issuing tickets. (KXLY)

And I'd like some statins with that double bacon cheese Researchers in the UK say fast food joints should hand out a cholesterol-lowering pill with every order in the same way smokes come with filters and cars come with seat belts. (BBC)

Kadah fans have started two Facebook pages — “Jason Kadah Rocks” and “Keep Jason in Spokane” — where they speculate about his departure, mourn the loss of his off-beat humor in the mornings and post updates on his latest movements.

A post from July 26 reads, “Where [oh] Where is my favorite weatherman? I wonder if he was at Skyfest...” And then, on Aug. 2: “Has anyone seen Jason around Spokane?”

You can already buy “Keep Jason in Spokane” T-shirts on the web and there is also talk about running pro-Kadah ads in local publications, including The Inlander.

Meanwhile, neither Kadah nor KREM is willing to put the speculation to rest. For his part, Kadah is reluctant to speak, citing pending legal action. He joined the station in 2008.

“I can tell you that despite KREM telling viewers I ‘left to pursue other opportunities,’ that is utterly false,” he tells The Inlander in an email. “I feel that people who welcomed me into their home every day deserve to know why I suddenly disappeared, and the reasons given (to me) by KREM for my dismissal. But I'll wait until some legal issues with KREM have been finalized. I/we continue to be DUMBFOUNDED by the support of the community, and sincerely thank them for it. This is just one of the reasons we want to stay. I am looking for opportunities in or out of television locally, however there is currently more interest from out-of-town employers. Thank you again to everyone who has been so supportive!”

KREM’s News Director Noah Cooper referred all questions to the station’s general manager, Jamie Aitken, who is on vacation until Monday. We will check back with Aitken on Monday.

So, beside southeastern Germany and maybe a couple (hundred thousand) other places, Spokane is first in Oktoberfests! (Take that Leavenworth!)

More important than the name, though, are the location, dates, times, prices and breweries attending, so let's get to that:

Riverfront Park

Sept. 24        4 pm-8 pm  

Sept. 25        Noon-8 pm

Sept. 26        Noon-6 pm

Eastern Washington: Northern Lights, CI Shenanigans, Iron Horse, Riverport, Paradise Creek, Palouse Falls, Laht Neppur, Rocky Coulee, Alpine

Western Washington: Georgetown, Elysian, Snoqualmie, Elliott Bay, Fremont, Pike, Schooner Exact

We're stoked. The Washington Beer Commission seems to have thrown some weight behind this first year event. The well-designed logo alone makes us want to over-imbibe. Just kidding. Stay in School.

It's $20 in advance or $25 at the door. You get a tasting cup and six sample tastes. Check out spokaneoktoberfest.com for — not much at the moment, but we're sure they'll update soon. 

Got this email from Spokane County Sheriff's spokesman Dave Reagan today. Weird stuff going on these days...

Things that make you go, “hmmmm.”

Sometime overnight Monday, someone stole a set of unmounted elk horns from behind Moffat’s Taxidermy in the 8900 block of E. Euclid. The medium set of 6x6 horns was valued at $400. Lousy hunter, better thief?

A 76-year-old woman living in the 1500 block of North Bowdish Road reported that security cameras installed in her apartment carport on Sunday were immediately stolen. Value of the cameras is unknown, and the following day her car was prowled.

On Tuesday, a man and woman stole a $300 fan from the Target store at 13724 E. Sprague. The female suspect hid the fan underneath her shirt. The man reportedly had many tattoos, and the woman must have been wearing an XXXXL blouse. They left in a red Impala with Washington plates.

Earlier this week a 60-year-old woman living in the 100 block of North Adams Road reported that a transient had been sleeping in her backyard gazebo for several days. On Tuesday, she awoke to discover him gone, as well as the cushions to her outdoor furniture.

On Monday, an employee at Kindercare at 205 S. Sullivan Road reported that someone had entered their transport bus and discharged a fire extinguisher all over the interior. The bus did not appear to have been on fire at the time. It had to be towed to a detail shop for cleaning.

UPDATE! Rep. Walt Minnick, D-Idaho, is donating his air miles to help Vernon Baker's widow attend the Medal of Honor winner's funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. (KHQ)

Help needed for trip to Arlington Widow of Vernon Baker, one of the few black soldiers belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery in a pivotal battle against the German army during World War II, can't afford to attend his burial in Arlington National Cemetery. (KREM)

A gruesome fall Spokane police reveal man was tied up before being tossed over the 12-story Sunset Bridge. (KXLY)

Details of crash, rescue attempt The plane crash that killed former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and four others happened in remote mountains in fog. Still, two helicopters dropped medics on the mountain within hours. (ADN)

Gaaaaa! Spiders a'coming August is Hobo spider mating season, which means they are crawling back into your house. (KHQ)

Or I could watch Childrens Hospital, a medical drama spoof that refers to scalpels as "nut-cutters."

Unsurprisingly, Dionysian beats Apollonian. Childrens Hospital wins.

Childrens Hospital is a quality show that cheerfully exaggerates the absurd excesses of medical TV shows and films. The brazen supply-closet hookups. The absurd choose-one-to-live surgical dilemmas. The surgeon who believes in treating illness with only the healing power of laughter. The doctor who fakes a brain tumor to break up with a guy. The female doctor having a torrid affair with a six-year-old with advanced aging disease.

Other times the parody is more direct. From Meredith Grey's voiceover on Grey's Anatomy: —-

"The dictionary defines grief as keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow; painful regret. As surgeons, as scientists, we're taught to learn from and rely on books, on definitions, on definitives. But in life, strict definitions rarely apply. In life, grief can look like a lot of things that bear little resemblance to sharp sorrow.

From a voiceover on Childrens Hospital:

Webster's dictionary defines "Love" as a roof lantern or turret, often with slatted apertures for escape of smoke or admission of light in a medieval building.

And, with a sort of confused look from the Meredith stand-in, the voiceover ends there. 

But most encouragingly, it's a triumphant return to the genre of "Spoof" on television. The Naked Gun series of films, after all, began as the failed Police Squad television series. But as Scary Movie led to Date Movie led to Epic Movie led to Disaster Movie, "spoof" morphed into something aggressively in-your-face bad, a cruel perversion of earlier work.

It's time our nation learned what, exactly, spoof is, and isn't. We're glad to help.

Notes on Spoof

1.Spoof is more than mere parody. It's a critique and celebration of the tropes and cliches of any given genre. It highlights them, subverts them, exaggerates them. It is, at its core, criticism.

2. Spoof benefits from brevity. That's part of the genius of Childrens Hospital. That type of "wackiness" would lose its novelty in only twenty minutes. Good thing Childrens Hospital is only 11 minutes long.

3.The spoofer should actually sort of love the genre or film they're spoofing. Malice and bitterness tend to weigh the comedy down. Though Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz are more homages to the zombie and action genres than outright spoofs, they both excel because they're celebrations of those films. Not just critiques. 

4. Spoof keeps its scope narrow enough. As spoof, the Scary Movie movies sort of work. At times, Not Another Teen Movie approaches an almost respectable sort of lowbrow brilliance. That's partly because they stick to their advertised mission statement: Mock horror films, or mock teen movies. Naked Gun works, in part, because it sticks to the detective genre. (Sorry, Epic Movie. Lawrence of Arabia is an epic movie. Superbad is not.)

5. Great spoof hinges mostly on jokes that still hit for someone who's never seen the specific work being parodied. 

6. Spoof shouldn't laugh. At least, not at itself. The most absurd moments are always played best with utter conviction from the actors,oblivious to the world's absurdity. (See: Nielsen, Leslie.) Genres most given to self-seriousness then, are more spoof-worthy.

7. Spoof doesn't parody comedy. Well, it shouldn't parody the comedic elements to that comedy. Childrens Hospital can parody the saccharine moments of Scrubs, and the Funny People ad campaign can spoof the corny I-learned-something-today moments of Adam Sandler flicks.

8. Spoof rewards nerds. Spoofs should be just as obsessed with the minutia of the work or genre being parodied. The subtle aspects of set design and background gags reward eagle-eyed, obsessive, or DVR-ready viewers. No need for the film to zoom in and pause on visual gags, just to make sure the viewer "gets it."

9. At no point should a joke of a spoof be purely that Iron Man shows up, and Iron Man is a movie that many people have heard of, and that one of the protagonists says, "It's Iron Man!" And that's the end of the joke. The jokes, in other words, should have jokes.

10. Slapstick is always the weakest part of spoof, but seems tragically, irrevocably, tied to the genre. Still, let's hope that slapstick is beyond the cow-landing/crotch kicking variety. There is no need to add slide-whistles, whoopee cushions, or exaggerated "Bonk!" sound effects to drive home the subtle point of a guy getting hit by a school bus sign.

11. Spoof will never win awards. It will never garner much critical respect, or be the subject of lengthy water-cooler discussion. But it doesn't have to be lazy. It can even, on rare occasion, make an insightful observation or two.

Mary Roach, Packing for Mars (Norton, Aug. 2)

If you're living on a space station in zero-G, how exactly do you, um, you know ...? (And don't tell us you've never wondered.) Roach also investigates the burning question of what happens if you're on a space-walk and you throw up a little bit inside your space helmet.

Hans Keilson, Comedy in a Minor Key (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 20)

OK, so this novella was written in German in 1947, and nobody has translated it into English until now. Must not be very good. Au contraire: Francine Prose calls Keilson a genius and Comedy, along with its companion work, The Death of the Adversary, masterpieces.  In Comedy, a Dutch couple hides a Jewish merchant from the Gestapo.

Noam Shpancer, The Good Psychologist (Holt, Aug. 3) 

From this novel's lectures, diary entries and records of counseling sessions, we figure out that that one of his students is a stripper prone to panic attacks. Shpancer, who was raised in a kibbutz, lives and teaches in Ohio.

Mona Simpson, My Hollywood (Knopf, Aug. 3) 

In this novel's alternating chapters, we gather the stories of a Santa Monica mom, a professional musician, who gets overwhelmed and hires a Filipina to take care of her son. It turns out that the caregiver-child relationship, however it starts, can get bruised when broken. The wisdom and heartbreak of a woman who takes care of other people's kids so she can provide for her own comes through clearly. 

click to enlarge

The powers that be at Auntie's Bookstore will throw the doors of their new location (in the skywalk of Riverpark Square in the old Children's Corner Books and Toys location) wide open on Friday. But for now, they're just sort of cracked opened for their "soft opening." We wandered by the new location this afternoon to check it out. Right now it's a sparser version of the big store down the street, and not everything's ready for business just yet (there were pieces of tape tagging the genres on some shelves). But by Friday, we're sure everything will be sparkling and ready to go.

All day on Friday (Aug. 13) customers get 20 percent off their purchases. Patrick McManus (The Double-Jack Murders) signs books on Saturday (Aug. 14) at 2 pm, and Jess Walter (The Financial Lives of Poets, Citizen Vince) signs at 4 pm.

You can go sniff around now, but if you're like us, you're waiting until Friday to get that sweet 20 percent off.

Every Tuesday, all the latest video games, DVDs and CDs are released, taunting you with their entertainment possibilities. In order that we might entice you further into wasting your hard-earned money on fancy gewgaws, here's a run-down of what's out today.

MUSIC
Gaelic Storm, Cabbage
Though this is technically breaking the only (unwritten) law of the This Just Out posts — only talk about things released this week — I don't play by your fascist rules, man. Cabbage (which dropped Aug. 3) is too good to ignore. Despite lacking a nice rowdy track like "The Night I Punched Russell Crowe" from What's The Rumpus?, Cabbage is still enjoyable. It seems to dip more into the traditional Gaelic for the melodies, though the lyrics (as is the case with "Space Race," which laments Ireland's non-entry into the race to reach the stars) are definitely modern. But fear not, rock fans! Some tracks, like "Green Eyes, Red Hair," have a decidedly rock-y edge to them. The album is a "must" for all Celtic music fans, and a "should' for the rest of youse.

• Jonas Brothers, X-posed — This sounds illegal. Aren't they, like, 12?
• Mike Posner, 31 Minutes to Takeoff — He'll be in Boise on Friday.
• Blake Shelton, All About Tonight — The second installment in Shelton's "Six Pak" series features more of the same "rural party anthems." Sometimes, I don't even have to make stuff up.
• Various Artists, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World OST — Considering most of the comics' background story focused on the travails and tribulations of indie bands, it'd be impressive if they manage to make this suck.
• Cam'ron, The UN: Gunz N' Butta — Finally, someone solves the problem of the United Nations. They've always had the guns. But they FORGOT the butta. (Side note: Ow, my grammar.)

DVD
Date Night
It's probably not as funny as you'd expect a movie starring the king and queen of comedy (I crowned them myself in a lovely ceremony yesterday evening), but that's probably just because you have unrealistic expectations. Sure it's not hilarious with a capital Funny, but this movie just as easily could have devolved into traditional rom-com awfulness (see: The Ugly Truth). What you get is an actual date movie (not Date Movie, thank god) that normal people of both sexes can enjoy. (Read Carey Jackson's review for an actual critical appraisal.)

• Welcome — The story of a Kurdish refugee who's traveling across Europe to be reunited with his girlfriend. Stopped on the French border, he decides the only way to get there is to swim the English Channel.
• My Name is Khan — Regrettably, neither Genghis nor Wrath Of, The. Still supposed to be good, though.
• Death at a Funeral — As with all things, it was funnier when the Brits did it. And since when have blaxploitation movies gotten budgets this large?
• The Joneses — David Duchovny just can't seem to escape suburban dystopias.
• Letters to God — A substitute postman's life is touched when he starts picking up letters addressed to God from a kid with cancer. So saccharine-sweet, everyone who watches is at risk of diabetes. Brought to you by Jesus™.
• Multiple Sarcasms — A whopping 5 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes)

VIDEO GAMES
Madden 11 (360, PS3, Wii, PS2, PSP, iPhone, iPad)
This game gets the nod for sheer obstinacy, being in its 24th (!) incarnation. Like an octogenarian popping Viagra, Madden arises every year in steadfast defiance of all that is holy and good in the world. For all those who complain Madden doesn't ever change: First of all, stop it, you're making Art Director Matt Young cry (about 2/3 of the way down the page). Second, it does so change. For example, in this iteration, Brett Favre won't* be playing. But what Madden always delivers is to attention to detail — apparently, they spent four days just modeling Drew Brees' head. Which seems like a super-productive use of time, given that football is the only professional sport where you CAN'T SEE THE PLAYERS' FACES. And yet last year still saw no referees on the field or players on the sidelines.

*Just kidding. It's only Week One of the preseason. God knows he'll be starting by Week Three.

• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (PS3) — This might not suck. They were smart enough to use 8-bit, 2-D side-scrolling graphics, which could indicate an awareness of the kitsch level this title requires ... Or they're just cheap.
• Monday Night Combat (360) — This title is touted as a mix of Team Fortress, tower defense games and sports-game camp. Those are all good things, so by the second law of thermodynamics, this has to be good too, right?
• Victoria II (PC) — From the GameSpot description: "a grand strategy game set in the colononial era of the 19th century." Ah, the colononial era.
• Enjoy Your Massage! (Wii) — Uhm ... what? A "massage simulator puzzle game" just doesn't sound... respectable, on the Wii.
• Bejeweled Blitz (PC) — Normally, this would be the game to be sure to get your mom this Christmas ... but chances are, she probably already bought it.
• Absolute Chess (DS) — Is it chess? Your guess is as good as mine. My guess? Absolutely.

The Spokane City Councilman, who's running for state representative in Washington's 3rd Legislative District, is likely playing off his last name with his signs' color scheme, but the effect is as jarring as those terrible websites everybody used to make on Angelfire. It's a nightmare. Even for the ably sighted, that red "Apple" can look as if it's floating weirdly over the green. (Green on red is almost just as difficult to read.)

It's even worse for those with a color vision defect — one of the most common symptoms for which is a difficulty differentiating between red and green.

So while, to the normally sighted, Apple's sign might just look poorly designed, for those with red-green color blindness it might look something like this:

Even this clunker below (which I hastily threw together in Photoshop) would be more soothing to the eye, amateurish though it may be.

Next time, it might be better to stick with the red, white and blue.

Designers: Can you whip up a better way to incorporate Apple's logo and colors without giving voters eyeball seizures? Send us what you got.