The good news is that if Boeing does announce it’s moving more operations to South Carolina, Seattle can expect at least a decade’s delay based on the airplane maker’s recent performance. Bedeviled to the tune of $1.7 billion in losses on its 747-8 program, Boeing cannot seem to make a deadline stick: “The company unexpectedly announced that the first new 747-8 jumbo jet, slated to fly in November, now won’t leave the ground until next year. The postponement contrasts sharply with confident assertions made by the head of the program just six weeks ago…” reports the Seattle Times.

I don’t know how sharp the contrast is. Boeing has become the home of confident assertions with a six-week lifespan.

Each time a delay or cost overrun is announced, it sets off a new round of blame-assignation. This time a leading theory is that Boeing diverted its dwindling engineering resources to the vastly more troubled 787 Dreamliner program at the expense of the 747-8. (Any day now I expect to hear that the Dreamliner team is foregoing carbon fiber and looking into spruce.)

Jon Talton at the Times takes a longer view, and suggests that its time for the Boeing board to fire Chairman and Chief Executive James McNerney. This would be an unusually proactive move for a board of late, who seem to prefer letting CEOs hit the eject button themselves when they can’t shake the death spiral.

The Seattle Times‘ Jon Talton has a post up about the “hidden banking crisis“: across the country, 98 banks have closed this year. Over the past two years, that makes 120, so it can be fairly said this year has been tough on banks, and it is far from over. 

The latest is that Everett’s Frontier Financial failed to merge, says the PSBJ. Frontier is Washington’s largest commercial bank, which should cause you to swallow hard. It has $4.2 billion in assets, but fully 20 percent of those assets were non-performing as of last quarter.

Last month Lacey’s Venture Bank was seized by the FDIC and resold. Venture was one of the three banks that pressed developer Michael Mastro for an involuntary bankruptcy over the summer. People now have to be giving the stink-eye to Venture’s co-filers, Columbia State Bank and First Sound Bank. Are they in similar cash-reserve-strapped straits? More to the point, what about the eight other banks who asked to be notified of Mastro’s bankruptcy?

For context on a nick-of-time commercial real estate turnaround, the Seattle Times reported today that one-sixth of all Seattle office space is vacant, with a 25 percent vacancy predicted. Vacancies aside, there are other price-depressing factors: “Downtown Seattle’s rates could be deflated further by Northwestern Mutual’s purchase of the former WaMu Center, said Barnes of Jones Lang LaSalle. The insurance giant paid a bargain-basement $115 million for the tower.” Good to see Barnes agrees with The SunBreak.

Just noticed on Facebook: an ad asking, “Do you think your girlfriend is cheating?” along with a map pointing “her” out…somewhere. Curious, I clicked through only to discover Mobile Spy, an online service that allows you to track where a cell phone is carried. Can we say, creepy?

This comes fast on the news that a Bellevue-based company called Intellius is developing a cute new iPhone app called DateCheck, geared towards women on the dating scene, which allows you to quickly run a background check on your date, including criminal records (by name…the most accurate search; I happen to have the same name and birth year as an Alabama child sex offender), financial info (a Kanye song comes to mind I won’t quote here), and the fun stuff, like astrological signs and his interests as compiled from social networking technology.

All of which is to say, we’ve finally come up with a way to protect ourselves from sleazebags and creeps: by becoming sleazebaggier and creepier ourselves.

Scott Schaefer of Burien’s B-Town Blog now has the hands-down funniest story about KOMO’s entry to the hyperlocal blog marketplace. On September 15, Scott got this comment on his site from “Derek”:

Subject: The look at B-town is b-rate!

Message: Geez-Reading your blog is like reading the yellow pages. Could you put a few more ads in there? At least all I have to do is move on, no finding it clogging my porch or having to lug it to the recycle bin.

News I need. Junk ads I don’t!

While “Derek” provided a Yahoo! email account for identification, he also left behind his IP address: registered to Fisher Communications, KOMO’s parent company. Schaefer goes on to say that his advertisers have also gotten calls from KOMO ad reps, asking them to cancel their B-Town Blog advertising and go KOMO.

B-Town Blog isn’t the only neighborhood blog crying foul over Fisher’s aggressive entry into the marketplace, according to the Puget Sound Business Journal. While it’s hard not to applaud the moxie of creating and posting an ad for a business and then calling the business owner to sell them on it, you wish KOMO would put as much energy into breaking its hyperlocal news.

Despite a Q13 “investigative” report, featuring video of a different coffee hut’s bikini barista dropping her bikini bottom for the change from a $20, the owner of Everett’s Grab-N-Go says the sting and subsequent prostitution charges are untrue, and are due to some Everett police having “romantically pursued the baristas and been rebuffed.”

What is true is that owner Bill Wheeler is not helping himself by referring to a hiring agreement which specifically forbids his employees to spray whipped cream on themselves. There’s a whiff of “Shocked! I’m shocked!” in his denial that anything besides wholesome coffee slinging is going on.

The real question is where else this might go. Can we expect dual-purpose roadside cafés–remember the KFC-Taco Bell hybrids?–that bring coffee and pole dancing together at last? Or will the thrill of 2% sex somehow make its way into the grocery aisle?

Jay Leno made an unfunny ACORN joke about the stripistas, but the punchline in life is always in the comments section. Here, from the Everett Herald story, is this gem that seems drawn from a John Cheever story:

My husband said one day a few months ago, he stopped at the stand along Broadway and while he was on one side of the stand, the “gentleman” in a car on the other side was cutting up w/ the girls who were slapping each other on the butt and grabbing each other’s breasts. As he put it, he was “embarrassed” to see such behavior by these young women and pulled away from the stand.

Last Friday I ganged my way onto Holland America’s Zandaam, a “mid-sized,” 9-floor, floating buffet that comes with its own Dutch pipe organ. It was due to sail for Alaska’s Inside Passage at 2:30, but I was there for a luncheon hosted by Seattle Theatre Group, Broadway Across America, and Holland America, to talk about tourism and the arts economy heading into the holiday season.

To get us into the right spirit, we got a mini-Rockettes show, in advance of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular that will have 43 performances here over the holidays (making 14 weeks of Broadway fare the Paramount offers this season). A lot of arts groups have learned to make the most of the holiday season with extended runs: besides the Nutcracker at PNB, ACT has its Christmas Carol and Intiman has Black Nativity. STG’s Josh LaBelle mentioned that about 300,000 people are expected to attend a Seattle arts or cultural event in December.

From Tracy at the Seattle Convention and Visitor’s Bureau came more stats: 9.5 million people visit King County each year, they spend just over $5 billion, and bring in $470 million in taxes. And in general, the larger the arts or cultural event, the more likely attendance by tourists is to exceed 40 percent.

A ship like the Zandaam, for instance, carries just over 1,400 passengers who will pass through Seattle coming and going. They have free hours here and there, and they want to be entertained. You can almost smell the synergy. Tourist-friendly arts events can influence a choice of port of sail for a cruise. If you’re going to drop $700 on a 7-day Alaska cruise from Seattle, why not bookend it with Seattle Opera’s Ring festival or Bumbershoot? And so on.

After lunch (rack of lamb), a Rockettes-run raffle, and a Rockettes photo op, I broke for the views from the upper deck, passing through what seemed to be an entire floor of buffet options already crowded with embarking cruise passengers. Up top, a band ran through a repertoire that ranged from Stan Getz to Fleetwood Mac, while a man in a fishing hat stewed himself in one of the hot tubs. No one was in the pool yet.

We were docked at the newly cruise line-ready Pier 91. Carnival (parent of Holland America and Princess) has a 10-year non-binding agreement with the Port to keep funneling about 420,000 cruise passengers through Seattle each year. The Interbay location is a hike from the airport, but maybe the Port is more canny than I thought–the distance is only an obstacle if cruise passengers aren’t scheduled to attend a show in Seattle. If Carnival puts its co-promotional mind to it, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.