We were downtown at Pacific Place for lunch (salmon chowder). It was a little less peopled--a quiet Monday--but what was a little odd was how subdued everyone was, like queasy rollercoaster riders. No one was laughing. No one was regaling buddies with a loud, "What I did last weekend" story or arguing sports. They spoke softly. Out on the street, a single unbalanced woman was screaming at no one in particular: "Fuck you, fuck all......

It wasn't just the Dow Jones setting records today; the NASDAQ index had its 3rd largest one-day decline ever by percentage, losing 9% of its value. Among the tech stocks taking a drubbing were locals Microsoft (-8.7%) and Amazon (-10.4%)--though Redmond might enjoy the schadenfreude of knowing that Apple closed down nearly 18%.......

With a vote of 228 to 205, the U.S. House of Representatives has rejected the bail-out that lawmakers hammered out over the weekend that would have thrown an up-to-$700 billion lifeline to Wall Street. Washington State Rep. Jay Inslee (D) joined Republicans Doc Hastings, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, and Dave Reichert in voting No. The markets sunk as news of the vote made its way around the world, and the Dow is down nearly 600 points......

On the flatscreen in the Acres of Clams bar on Pier 54, the CNBC ticker is showing Boeing's market flame-out, WaMu's inexorable descent. We are doomed. You want to scream at the TV: "It's not about the ("fundamentally sound") economy, stupid! Don't you get it? It's about the fundamentally corrupt financial system!" As if in response, up at the mic, a folksinger known as Captain Charlie strums his guitar and sings a ditty composed decades......

Washington Mutual stock closed down today (why haven't we made that into auto-text yet?), at $2.01, which is also the price of this Murder City Devils DVD on eBay. The market closed down 500. The Fed let the market put a bullet in the head of Lehman Brothers over the weekend, and the Merrill Lynch bull was sold to the Bank of America slaughterhouse, so no one's in the mood to buy WaMu's pigs-in-a-poke shares.......

WaMu's bargain-basement stock dropped almost 30% today--it's currently rallied to $2.60 from a low of $2.30--after a 20% fall yesterday. So the market doesn't seem impressed with the WaMu Board's tardy ejection of Kerry Killinger from the executive suite. Bloomberg says: "Credit-default swaps on WaMu are now trading at a price that implies a greater than 90 percent chance the company will default within five years." New accounting rules make selling WaMu and its subprime-mortgage......

Last week we mentioned that Seattle's WaMu was accused of colluding in a appraisal-inflation scheme. Today, Bloomberg reports that the fall-out has fallen: "Washington Mutual fell $4.04, or 17 percent, to $20.19 at 1:15 p.m. in composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest decline since the stock market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987." As a result, significant bets are being made:The risk of Washington Mutual defaulting on its debt soared to the......

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't officially start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to... Over at Sampaist, spring has more than sprung: it's sweltering! But, as everyone knows, museums are an......

David Streitfield in the LA Times (registration required, regrettably) notes a new experience for him at Amazon.com: books he adds to his shopping cart get more expensive if he doesn't buy them right away. On Nov. 6, seeking to boost my dubious culinary skills, I decided to buy "The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook." I went to Amazon and placed the book in my electronic shopping cart but got distracted and never finished the transaction. The......

Rumors abound that Apple is interested in buying TiVo; both companies had no comment. The merger makes sense to Seattlest for a number of reasons: 1. Apple's on a roll, and Steve Jobs declared 2005 "the year of high-definition video" at the recent Macworld Exposition. Wethinks Apple likes television. 2. TiVo's President and Founder/Chief Executive have both announced plans to leave their posts; no replacements have been announced. The company faces a big struggle......