The Seattle Times got rid of 125 staff members this past week through a combination of buyouts and layoffs. Among the writers who accepted a buyout deal was Melinda Bargreen who has been their classical music critic for 31 years. Her farewell was published on Sunday. The Times intends to keep the classical music beat staffed but hasn’t figured out how yet.

Seventh-inning stretch standard “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is a waltz that starts with an octave jump. At 100 years old, it is third on America’s most-sung songs list after “Happy Birthday” and the national anthem. It has been recorded by more than 400 musicians. You could argue that it’s helped keep Cracker Jack alive after all these years. Jack Norworth wrote the song in 1908 and it was sung in movie theaters during reel changes. In the mid-1970s Chicago White Sox and then Cubs announcer Harry Caray popularized it as a singalong in the seventh inning and the tradition soon took hold in ballparks across the country.

Thoughts after returning to Disneyland after 27 years:

• Everything looks a lot shorter.
• The correct response to why the Autopia cars are still using smelly gasoline is not “because it would cost lot to change it” but “look at who is sponsoring it” (Chevron). (Honda sponsors the electric motors in Hong Kong Disneyland.)
• It’s a little embarassing to almost get outgunned by a three-year-old at Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters.
• There’s nothing wrong with taking your kid’s place if he gets to the front of the Minnie Mouse line and then refuses to get a photo taken with her.
• I don’t care what anyone else says, the spinning teacups are awesome.

Irvine Robbins grew up in Seattle and worked at his father’s dairy in Tacoma, so the Seattle PI’s obituary has the details on his local life. The co-founder of Baskin-Robbins was born in Winnipeg, and his family moved to the area when his uncle purchased an ice cream company on Capitol Hill. He had his bar mitzvah at Temple DeHirsch Sinai, was a yell leader at Stadium High School, and graduated from the University of Washington. When he opened his first ice cream store he defected to sunny California.

The Nintendo Fan Network at Seattle Mariners’ games lets fans with a DS Lite chat with other fans in the park, order food, check game scores and stats. Seattle PI reporter Jon Naito tried it out and gave it a lukewarm review as a “nice distraction from those inevitable ballpark lulls.” Now free after its $5 pilot last season, the network lets you order only basic ballpark foods, and only before the seventh inning. A DS Lite can be rented for $10 if you don’t have your own. (Nintendo is the owner of the Mariners.)

I’m taking a few days off from blogging to catch up on work and sleep, but I should be back next week with tales of adventures in L.A.

The rising rice prices are affecting the Asian Counseling and Referral Service Food Bank, where this basic staple is the mainstay of the diet for the community they serve.

So you’ve decided that shiny CDs and releasing files direct to the Internet are too good for you. You want your album on that good old stuff: vinyl. What do you do? Freddie Feldman has a guide for you based on his experience releasing an a cappella version of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. You get to have a lacquer master created to make your metal stampers, pick the weight of your vinyl, test your proofs (you do have a turntable, right?), make sure your artwork is ready to be blown up to 12″ album cover, and print labels for your records. Don’t delay, this technology may not be available for much longer.

As I read about what types of purchases people are cutting back on in the current economic climate, I keep thinking that Target is nicely poised to attract the consumer who could afford to shop a bit higher class, but who chooses not to when it takes $50+ to fill up on gas and the grocery bill is suddenly something to consider more closely. Today I walked past the cosmetics aisle in Target and noticed a black aproned Boots cosmetics salesperson chatting with women about this British drugstore brand and decided that I may be more right than I’d anticipated.

When we visited Fort Bragg, California along the Mendocino coast a few years ago, the highlight of the trip for me was a visit to Glass Beach. There, glowing in the sun, lie smoothed shards of glass from years of household garbage, beaten by the waves. The nearby presence of dioxin went understandably unpublicized in the tourist trade. The town housed a redwood mill, now closed, which left behind a toxic waste legacy. A unique clean-up proposal has been proposed by town residents: mushrooms. Mushrooms have been successfully used in experiments to clean up oil spills and research has also shown success with plastics and other chemicals. The Fort Bragg fungi proponents would like to be a pilot study for mushrooms cleaning up dioxins, and called in expert Paul Stamets to assess their situation. Despite some skeptics, Georgia-Pacific is financing a pilot project to see if mushrooms can bioremediate 10 cubic yards of the toxic soil.