BREAKING: A. Birch Steen returns to the ombudsman / table of contents post at the Stranger in this week’s issue. We’re mildly embarrassed by the amount of joy that this brings, but this is the best news from the paper since the last time he returned from exile. It’s hard to reconcile our general love for the paper with our assertion that the Critical Overview is the strongest column, but we embrace our contradictions because they make us seem more interesting.

Honestly, we’re really way too excited about this to review the rest of the content other to say that almost all of the I SAW U ads are tragic in their own special way. More so than usual, or maybe that’s just the effect of a midnight reading of unrequited personal ads.

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In The Seattle Weekly, the cover story reports on how the times, they are a changin’ in the music industry [#]. Basically, it’s builds on items two and three from last week’s Starbucks post [#], except a much longer format. To their credit, the author does the journalism thing and actually trys one of the Media Bars (thumbs down, glad we didn’t waste our time!). But they have a budget, and we don’t; so we aren’t feeling too much shame.

The article is accompanied by weird fish-eye pictures, which comes across as mildly upsetting and made it harder to read the whole piece without feeling disoriented.