Let's be perfectly honest with each other: As I write this, it's Monday night, and I'm not planning to sleep a wink. The presidency, and, way down the ballot, the monorail, are in the balance, and I doubt you're thinking of anything else. I know I'm not.

That said, my crystal-ball analysis of the most important local race on the ballot, the anti-monorail Initiative 83, is this: Win or lose, Martin Selig and his deep-pocketed cronies in Seattle's development community ($850,000 and counting) have wasted their fucking money. Don't believe me, look at their campaign finance reports, where you'll find this stunning expenditure: $282,000 in legal expenses, most of it spent defending the legally dubious initiative. That sum alone, it turns out, is nearly as much as the pro-monorail forces have spent during their entire campaign.

Strangely, even with all those lawyers, the anti-monorail campaign just can't seem to stay out of legal trouble. Last month, Kim Pederson, head of the Seattle-based Monorail Society, sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding that the I-83 campaign stop using copyrighted images of Pederson's wife and children in their commercials. The ads, which featured photos lifted directly from the Monorail Society's website, were finally yanked off the air last week.

Pederson's response: Not good enough. "This is an incredible invasion of privacy and an act of outright theft," he says. "They owe me."

City government, meanwhile, is still churning along, though not without a certain lack of enthusiasm on the part of some Kerry-campaigning city council members and staff. I don't know what issue could possibly seem pressing in the long shadow of such an apocalyptic election, so here's one that I, for one, think is important: Bike parking spots downtown and on Broadway Avenue, already few and far between, just became fewer and far-betweener. Last month, transportation crews started yanking parking meters, like ungainly metal weeds, from sidewalks. In their place sprouted hundreds of sleek green plastic pay stations. The stations are great for drivers but lousy for bicyclists, who've long relied on parking meters to supplement the city's sparsely distributed bike racks. The city, under pressure from bikers, has stopped uprooting the old metal meters until someone can come up with suitable replacements.

Real Change staffers Timothy Harris and Rachael Myers emerged from a lunch meeting last week with Mayor Greg Nickels (purchased at an auction by a Real Change volunteer) "impressed," in Harris' words, by Nickels' commitment to homeless issues. It couldn't hurt that the mayor included $3 million in his 2005 budget for the long-sought downtown hygiene center, a project that won Nickels' nod only after years of lobbying by Council Member Nick Licata. (The council, ironically, has since balked at the mayor's price tag.) The two activists shared lunch--dim sum, which Myers pronounced "great"--with a couple of baseball-loving out-of-towners, who purchased their admission to the mayor's office in another, unrelated, auction.

barnett@thestranger.com