It's not that development in itself sucks; it's that our county and city government doesn't believe in development for art's sake, despite all those studies about the half billion the arts return to the community. When we look around, we don't see a lot of public investment in the single most expensive thing that artists and smaller arts organizations have to face: a place to work, rehearse, show, perform. We did see this notice that......

The press release came in a short time ago and we haven't really had the opportunity to go through it with our hair pick of information discovery, but the fact that the Mayor even has an Immigration and Refuges Initiative is, itself, a good start. Look, World, Seattle has an immigration initiative and it doesn't involve the construction of any Great Walls, much less mass arrests or the floating of barges full of human cargo......

You probably don't read ex-Seattle Weekly reporter Philip Dawdy's blog Furious Seasons. That's ok. That's why we're here: to read every blog in existence and let you know when something interesting happens (which turns out to be rarely). Philip writes about clinical depression and the little cottage industry of humongous corporations that have grown up around that illness. It's a well-written and well-researched blog by a guy who's been working that beat for several years,......

Last time out, we succumbed to the power of the unappealing Entertainment Book. Could things get worse? Apparently so. Elsewhere in the car we found a soon-to-expire gift certificate for Applebee’s. In case you don’t know, Applebee’s is a growing chain of nearly 2,000 restaurants in 49 states (Hawaii is the holdout) and 16 countries. Seattle (so far) is blessed to be without one – in the city proper, at least. Business trips, though, take......

The funniest moment was when a ref blew his whistle to stop play and shouted, "My timeout, my timeout...I've got a wet spot." He meant a wet spot on the Hec Ed floor, which saw heavy action Wednesday when the state 3A tourney kicked off. Washington's state tournaments are 4-day, 16-team affairs, and the first day is the best--eight games in a row, beginning at 9am, with only 15 minutes in between games. We were......

We've been following brand-spankin'-new art blog That Ain't Art, a collaboration between Kirsten Anderson and Celeste Fuechsel of Roq La Rue, Damion Hayes of BLVD, and Larry Reid of the Fantagraphics store. With that lineup, it's no surprise that That Ain't Art's focuses on lowbrow and pop surrealism -- "the alternative art scene in the Northwest," as their about section says. In their first couple of weeks, they've talked up artists and exhibitions, noted with......

MUSIC: Dancing on the Valentine features wall-to-wall Duran Duran songs covered by local bands, including Say Hi to Your Mom, Valu-Pak, Speaker Speaker, and Peter Parker, all to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. 8pm // The Crocodile, 2200 2nd Ave // $10 -- to fight disease! MOVIE: Age of Consent, a rare Michael Powell film featuring James Mason (Eddie Izzard's voice of God) slurring his lines and Helen Mirren as an incredible young hottie,......

If you got caught in traffic today because Aurora was closed for five hours, you've got your friendly Seattle cops to thank:Just after 1:30 a.m. Monday, officers were called to an apartment building in the 1500 block of Aurora Avenue North following a report that a man there had thrown a knife at his girlfriend and threatened two other people in the apartment with a rifle... Police closed northbound lanes of Aurora Avenue and a......

COMICS: Local cartoonist salon Friends of the Nib, founded by Jim Woodring, will create a work of narrative sequential art right before your eyes. You may purchase a copy of said art at the end of the evening. 6-9pm, drop in anytime // Fantagraphics Bookstore & Gallery, 1201 S Vale St. in Georgetown // TRIVIA: If you think Seattlest James asks tough questions, take a gander at sample categories at the World Affairs Council's Transnational......

The Washington State Farm Bureau and the Building Industry Association of Washington had a federal judge's ruling go against them this week. Both groups were arguing to have the Orca de-listed as an Endangered Species because that classification determines what protections the Sound itself is afforded and, by extension, the waterways that feed the Sound and the land adjacent to those waterways. From the Seattle Times: A Farm Bureau representative said the ruling showed bias......

When we heard about the Lewis County central services director who oversaw the installation of mobile computers with instant message clients in police cruisers and then used the system to make sexy time with a dozen different cops we thought the resulting IM logs would make for fascinating reading. Wrong. Not only is it hideously embarrassing, it's boring as hell and the backwards reading PDFs are awkward to read. There are a bunch of affairs......

Wednesday, November 8 >>>UW Forum for Science and Ethics Policy, 5:30pm. Dr. Dennis Schatz, VP for Education at the Pacific Science Center, cheerleads for “Making Science as Pervasive as Sports in Society.” His ulterior motive? It can only be to pack the Sonics off to Oklahoma and build our very own Exploratorium right here in Seattle, to which we say “Be Aggressive, Be Be Aggressive!” Free. UW Health Sciences Building, T-478. >>>Pacific Science Center......

Rory Stewart spoke at the University Bookstore on Monday courtesy of the World Affairs Council, which, frankly, we had never heard of before. Rory Stewart is that cool guy who's written two bestselling books, walked 6,000 miles across central Asia, and served as Deputy Governor of two provinces of Iraq under the Coalition Provisional Authority. He's 33. What have you done with your life yet? His most recent book, Prince of the Marshes, is about......

Given Martin Scorsese’s gritty, wise guy oeuvre and a mega-talented cast fronted by fellow AFI Lifetime Achievement Award winner Jack Nicholson, we just couldn’t miss Scorsese’s retelling of the 2002 Hong Kong flick Infernal Affairs. (See the ad in the top right corner of the page? Don’t those faces, those colors and that “R” promise profanity, violence, and maybe even some sex? Hey!) So last Friday night—yeah, we’re a bit behind—we beat the devil to......

Mars Hill is killing the Paradox not by closing it, but by taking over its operation. The Ballard church opened an all-ages music venue named the Paradox as a youth ministry/outreach type of thing in 1999, but after a lot of complaining about concert-goers being baited with cool bands only to get switched to Mars Hill's conservative religious agenda the megachurch loosed the reins on the Paradox and today it runs with no involvement from......

Monday, loafiing around at home, we noticed a Seattle submission on Overheard in the Office:He Prefers to Be Called RichardGuy: I am full.Girl: Full of what?Guy: Full of Dick's. 539 Queen Anne Avenue North Ha ha! Dick's jokes never get old! Leastways, not in New York. Regardless, we realized that we just don't see Seattle crop up often enough on Overheard in the Office. We searched the site for Seattle to see what came......

Vodka Lemon opened its run at Central Cinema last night and Seattlest was there because, after a forceful interior discussion, we couldn't recall ever having seen an Armenian film. Certainly not lately. Vodka Lemon was shown in Seattle for the 2004 SIFF, but since we usually stall out by the third page of the catalog, this was news to us. In other news, before we get to the movie, Central Cinema has a new spring......

As far as we can tell the second installment of the city's super cool OnHold program went into rotation over the weekend. No, we haven't spent the last two days on hold with city hall, but it appeared in our RSS sometime over the weekend so we're assuming it's new. You remember OnHold, right? It's a playlist composed of various Seattle-based musicians that you hear if you're on hold with the city or if you're......

The coldest ticket in town right now might be the Mariners - Seattlest bought tickets off the street for $5 the other day to sit on the back of the mound as Moyer implausibly led them to a win over the World Champs in 11. What's the hottest ticket? If you're thinking of Tool and the depressing state of affairs on CL regarding those it's a good guess, but no. Think loafers instead of combat......

The city of Renton, which radiates out from the south end of Lake Washington east toward the Cascade foothills, is "eager to shed its blue-collar reputation," according to the Seattle Times. City officials have decided on a two-pronged approach: 1) Remove this guy from his job as Renton's director of arts and cultural affairs. 2) Lure the Sonics to town. They want a new basketball arena to be Phase Two of an "urban village" development......

We're glad we stuck around for the audience Q&A after the panel discussion on gentrification Thursday night, hosted by the University of Washington's Evans School of Public Affairs. That way we got to hear from the intense woman who discoursed on a variety of topics, including the abomination of Wal-Mart, things being done in Boston, and the lack of education about some guy whose name we can't remember; and from the gentleman who wondered aloud......

A little while ago, we did a little data mining of the Missed Connections on Craigslist, to check Seattle's romantic pulse. Frankly it was feeble and thready. But we were hoping that with the onset of spring, things have picked up. It wouldn't be fair to pick on CL MCers again so soon, so this time our unofficial data mine was the Stranger's I Saw U listings. 208 men saw women, 148 women saw men,......

Seattlest shelled out the $255 and got our new license-plate tag in the mail the other day. (Remind us to tell you the story sometime about the time our brother's mother-in-law, horrified at the state of affairs at her daughter's apartment, took the initiative to vacuum...and inadvertently vacuumed up their new license-plate tag.) Imagine our surprise when we popped open the envelope to retrieve the world's most expensive sticker and saw what's pictured on this......

Didn't we just do a stadium post yesterday? That one was to complain about a potential NASCAR track in the area. We approached it from the public monies angle, but, as a commentor pointed out, traffic is also a concern. Today there are some rumblings in regards to a potential Key Arena replacement. Tomorrow, who knows. Maybe we'll be posting on the new 40,000 seat Ultimate Frisbee stadium in Shoreline. So, let's run through some......

If the names "Captain Oats" and "Princess Sparkle" mean nothing to you, you'd best plan to skip to the next post. Because Seattlest is about to geek out in a major way over the approaching season premier of- some of you guessed it- The O.C. A teen soap, yes- but a teen soap with depth, dammit! And breadth- strewn with more pop-culture references, adventurous music choices, and nerd-chic than any show can contain and expect......

For some time now, weblogger and documentarian Chuck Olsen has been working on his film Blogumentary. Now, combining a subject and a city near and dear to Seattlest, Blogumentary will be premiering this Friday at the UW's Evans School of Public Affairs....

Did you know that you can make cheese out of human milk? <Homer>Mmmmmm...human milk.</Homer> Seattlest didn't know this litle tidbit of a fact until we had a night at a wine and cheese pairing class held by Pike Place Market's own Beecher Cheese. Our thinking was that if we took this class, we could learn a few manners and get invited to the more swanky food affairs that occur in this city. The class was......

A lot has been written both in the mainstream media and online about Microsoft's reversal on the state of Washington's gay rights bill and Seattlest would like to add to the din provide a few links here. The short of it is that Microsoft had been getting resounding cheers from across the land (and on the web) for supporting House Bill 1515, an anti-discrimination bill, until the 11th hour when it withdrew its support for......

David Brin and Cory Doctorow will be reading and signing tonight at the JBL theater from 7-9pm. We had to look up the exact location of the JBL Theater and that exhaustive research has uncovered the shadowy near-certainty of its geographic placement, but not a street address. It is adjacent to the Science Fiction Museum in the EMP. Cory Doctorow, aside from being one of our favoritest people on the interweb and beyond, is a......

How is that Seattlest has not only never read, but never heard of the novel that The Seattle Weekly based their issue around this week? We read a lot; books and the like. We love regional novels. We love science fiction novels. We love ecological science fiction novels! Of course there's a regional, ecological science fiction novel out there somewhere. There are probably a hundred of them: little vanity press affairs or handwritten manuscripts getting......