Female beluga centerfolds must play a role

Let’s hope the good folks at the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium close the curtain occasionally on the beluga tank.

We don’t want the kiddies to see the Kinsey-like experiments being done on Beethoven, the current resident, and Qannik, the youngster due in Tacoma later this month.

We don’t know all the details – frankly, we’re afraid to ask – but apparently the scientist types have trained a whale to “voluntarily” give up some of his, uh, essence. They haven’t yet figured out how to keep the sample from becoming contaminated by saltwater, but apparently this first step is considered quite a feat.

We’ll take their word on it. But getting a young, warm-blooded male of any species to participate in this activity doesn’t sound so tricky to us.

Let’s also hope they have someone researching blindness in juvenile male belugas.

Esteemed reader Michael Johnson points out an article in the May/June issue of Travel & Leisure Golf magazine about a Seattle custom clubmaker who produced a $380 putter. It’s called the “Slighter Tacoma.”

At first this sounds like a typical Seattle jab against its neighbor to the south, but in fact Slighter is the man’s last name.

As for the high-priced golf club, Johnson says no thanks; he’ll happily keep his hand-me-down from Parkland Putters.

“Three hundred and eighty dollars will buy me a round of golf, a round of beers and half a caddie at Chambers Bay,” he said.

We’re still not sure why Mr. Slighter would have named his putter “Tacoma,” though.

Maybe because it weighs 350 grams – the average yield from a T-town meth bust.

Being an artsy type, we’re impressed with local poet Daniel Blue’s ode “OK Tacoma.” (See it online at www.feed tacoma.com.)

What we want to know is, how did he manage to hang around that fountain downtown, hollering like that, without somebody coming along and jacking him?

Must’ve shot it on a weekend.

Sorry, as wired up as we might be, we didn’t get to see U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Tacoma, Thurday night on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.” (It re-airs tonight at 8:30.)

Rep. Brian Baird, D-Vancouver – once named Washington, D.C’s “funniest celebrity” – was a good sport on the show back in January, though we’re compelled to report the segment didn’t deliver many laughs.

It’s hard to imagine Smith being named funniest anything. So we believe him when his press guy warns “the result of his interview will not be pretty.”

We’ve been to Ellensburg a bunch of times. Stopped there for gas on the way to somewhere else. Stopped again for gas on the way home.

Gig Harbor’s city attorney was there this week, too, and she offered the elected Ellens-burghers a warning: Wise up and avoid liberal land-use planning, like what allowed Costco and others to cram together in north Gig Harbor. The result, said legal eagle Carol Morris, is a “virtual traffic moratorium” and a $40 million mess.

For Harborites, there’s bad news, good news and more bad news:

The bad: Ellensburg doesn’t want to be you.

The good: You can still get a monte cristo and a Peninsula Porter at The Tides.

The more bad: A month from now, your Tides budget gets sucked into your Good to Go! account.

We used to think it would be anachronistic for your Seattle SuperSonics to keep their name if they packed up and moved to Oklahoma City.

Kind of like when the Jazz relocated from New Orleans to Utah.

So imagine our surprise when we recently read that the Sonic drive-in fast-food chain is based in Okie City.

Call it destiny.

Except, instead of Squatch, the mascot will be some guy dressed up like an extra-long Chili Cheese Coney.