Thanks to four city council members, Burien won't get screwed.

Lucy Krakowiak, Jack Block Jr., Rose Clark and Sue Blazak voted last week to reject the 40-foot-high, $80,000 tilted screw-like sculpture the arts commission proposed as the Town Square's centerpiece.

The concept behind the statue began as a salute to Gunther's Tower, a spiral staircase around a tree built by a Burien land speculator to show off potential home sites.

But from there the idea got seriously derailed. A dangerous-looking winding saw blade replaced the staircase. I'm sure plenty of trees were cut to clear the land but Burien was never known as a sawmill town.

The Town Square site used to get muddy so the artwork was designed to resemble the Archimedes screw that in ancient times drew water up from the ground.

The site has a view of Mt. Rainier so the sculpture was tilted to correlate with the north-south axis of the mountain, or something like that.

To people who complained it was ugly in the daylight, they were told at night it would be bathed in blue light and serve as a Burien beacon much like the First Avenue car dealers use during sales events.

To Marge and me, the proposed sculpture reminded us of the fairy tale about the adults who refused to see that the emperor was not wearing clothes.

Some proponents argued that the proposed sculpture, at least, got people talking about art.

I've never bought the notion that negative attention is better than no attention at all. My male ego tells me that being ridiculed is worse than being ignored.

But the biggest argument used against statue opponents was that they are not being edgy enough.

I plead guilty to being an aging Burien boy influenced by a practical Boeing engineer dad.

But I've tried to get with the program and not be one of those who longs for the good old days when we had more American restaurants like the Swiss chalet.

IN A recent column when I said KOMO/KVI pundit Ken Schram got it wrong about the Lora Lake Apartments I thought there was slight chance he might react.

But I didn't expect he would go after my wife.

Marge was among the more than 300 employees evacuated after a suspicious package was delivered to the headquarters of the state Department of Corrections.

It turned out to be a "Schrammie." That's a bobblehead likeness of commentator Schram that he awards for dubious achievements. This one was for the Corrections chief, not the one meant for Port of Seattle commissioners for their role in trying to close down the Burien apartments.

The Lora Lake saga has become even more interesting since Schram bestowed his statue on the Port commissioners.

King County Executive Ron Sims has threatened to withdraw county participation from Burien's planned Transit Oriented Development.

That prompted my conservative colleague Ralph Nichols to compare Sims to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who recently shut down an opposition television station.

Of course, Sims is playing slow-pitch softball compared to the hardball tactics of Bush buddies like Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and Tom "The Hammer" DeLay.

(Actually, Ralph doesn't want to be counted as a Bush buddy anymore following the president's immigration proposals. Would the last conservative to leave Bush, please turn off the lights?)

Anyway, housing authority officials say there is a critical shortage of low-income housing in the county. Perhaps they should have thought about that before converting neighboring High Point and Greenbridge (formerly Park Lake Homes) into mixed income developments.

To repeat, "Your failure to plan is not my emergency."

The message to Burien lawmakers is to continue to hang tough.

Now here's an edgy idea-in return for keeping the apartments open until we really need the development site, the county could fund a giant Schrammie-like bobblehead statue of city founder Gottlieb von Boorian for the Town Square plaza.

Eric Mathison can be reached at hteditor@robinsonnews.com or 206-388-1855.