Tony Harris was a star basketball player at Garfield High School and Washington State University. After college, he played in a variety of international pro leagues: The Philippines, South Korea, Brazil. more ›

Brand new year, same familiar venue: Seattlest Trivia returns to the Old Pequliar tonight, with Seattlest James hosting. more ›

For the tour, Ted Neeley is Jesus, as he was in the 1973 film. That means he's been playing Jesus for longer than Jesus did -- and, no disrespect intended, with more of a vocal range. (We don't recall any of the Gospels remarking on Jesus's top notes.) He's matched up against Corey Glover's Judas, who knows all about cults of personality. more ›

in the summertime more ›

Conventional wisdom says these days ain't happy ones for pulp-and-print publications. Circulation's down. Ad revenues are down. Everyone wants to read online. So nearly every newspaper, magazine and television news program has a host of blogs these days, to compete with the millions of self-described experts, autodidacts, conspiracy theorists and Chuck Norris-aficionados who propagate the blogosphere with their own brand of citizen journalism (read: poor spelling and poorer grammar). more ›

We'll be honest, Ms. Friedberger, we'd listened to the new album, it was...different, we thought why not hear a live show. We were not planning on getting home at 1:30am. But we had never heard a band like this before -- not live -- maybe back in Weimar, maybe back in bienvenue, wilkommen, the perfectly Weill -- but not with this Brooklyn inflection. more ›

We were first turned onto Susan Werner back in our New York days when she played a free show at the World Trade Center. We were broke and all about free things, and we had a nice healthy respect for the sort of music the show sponsor WFUV felt like sharing with the world. We were impressed then by her candid poetics and a particularly lovely tune called "Time Between Trains" that stuck with us quite a while. more ›

Some of the best sports writing anywhere is on FreeDarko, where a group of very smart, very funny people talk hoops in an utterly inimitable way. more ›

Ten Sheriff's deputies were found by rescuers Sunday after a spending a night in the woods of southwest Washington. The officers were reportedly "removing" marijuana plants from an operation they'd busted when they suddenly became "disoriented." more ›

A big 'thank you' to Seattlest commenters for making the previous two posts on the Gas Works Park Mystery Party the definitive places for speculation and conjecture. Just this morning an unregistered guest indicated that they'd received an email asking for actors to "protest" the party at $100 a head, which kind of dulls the luster on a previous commenter's note that Melinda Gates's birthday is August, 15. Anyway, in lieu of any actual, factual new information on our part we'd like to point you once again to those threads and leave you with these bad photographs and the lyrics to the seventh song on Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 album The Sounds of Silence. more ›

And I figured if anyone would know, it would be you guys. more ›

A while ago we were looking for a picture of a mojito and in our search we ran into local author (and mojito photographer) Amanda Ford. She told us she had a book coming out and we said, Great, let us know when it's on the shelves and we'll interview you. more ›

Watching David Hare's dramatization of the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq last night at ACT, we were reminded of an email exchange we had that summer with an old college friend. Our friend, a Brit, was at the time starting her career as a history teacher, and if we recall correctly, we wrote her something to the effect of, "You know why World War I started, you know why World War II or Vietnam or Korea or the Falklands started...but in ten years, when your students ask you, 'Why did we invade Iraq?', what are you going to say? What's the explanation going to be?" Her despairing response: "They already are asking. And I don't know what to tell them." more ›

In an interview that will air tonight after the M's game, Ken Griffey, Jr. tells FSN that he wants to retire as a Mariner:

Would I [come back]? Yeah. For the simple reason that this is the place where I grew up. And I think I owe it to the people of Seattle and to myself to retire as a Mariner.

When we first bought our house the "backyard" was a complete eyesore, replete with a tar-roofed carport next to a plot of head-high blackberry bushes held back by a sagging chain-link fence. We joked about renting goats to clear the whole thing, but in the end resorted to a backhoe. (And this past weekend, a mere 3 1/2 years after we moved in, we finally have a backyard, huzzah!). Apparently, we're not the only one who had that goat idea: Just 4 blocks down from our house, construction company Saltaire hired "Rent-A-Ruminant" to graze an entire quarter acre in just 48 hours. We wandered down the street and lo and behold, there were 60 goats (we could only see about 15 at a time, the rest were wandering up inside the blackberry bushes) munching away like a, well, 60-goat wrecking crew. We were joined by many neighbors, all of us slightly shaking our heads and laughing, just marveling at the sight of a pack of goats on a steep sidehill just steps away from an insanely busy intersection at Dearborn and Rainier. Slowly more and more kids arrived, squealing and pointing and petting (note to neighborhood associations: if you want to have a packed and lively block party, rent some goats). more ›

This month Seattlest Book Club is reading Seattle-born and -raised Pauls Toutonghi's debut novel Red Weather, just out in paperback from Random House. You'll get a discount if you buy it at Bailey-Coy or Santoro's. more ›

Our brief moment in the sun is over. Rain's in town and it's staying for the weekend. Lame? Kinda--but Langston Hughes has the counterpoint: more ›

Ex-Seattleite, ex-Stranger-nic and ex-grassroots campaign manager Phil Campbell wrote a book that we loved about Grant Cogswell's run for City Council in the wake of WTO. The book is Zioncheck for President, which we've discussed with Phil in the past. Now Stephen Gyllenhaal has bought the rights to the film adaptation and plans to produce the thing DIY style here in Seattle. more ›

The Mariners' player payroll will top $100 million in 2007. $111 million, to be more precise, an $18 million increase over last year. more ›

Seattlest is going to see a show tonight at the Showbox. It's Of Montreal which has been around forever, it seems, but is currently rising to the point that they're selling out the Showbox. It's also The Blow from Portland and Aqueduct from here. Of Montreal is a kind of guitar disco dirty pop thing - We've been listening to Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? and we can see why tickets are available through Craigslist and not TicketsWest. They also have a weird schtick going on and have really wordy album titles (Horse & Elephant Eatery (No Elephants Allowed); Deflated Chime, Foals Slightly Flower Sibylline Responses) which we're usually suckers for. Despite it being about the music, of course. more ›

President Gerald Ford's memorial service is today, we thought we'd present these remarks Ford (shown here with George Harrison) made about Seattle upon his visit here as president on September 4th, 1975. Not the most interesting reading, but they seem extemporaneous and are perhaps a good snapshot of what one president thought when he thought of Seattle in the 70s: fish, Boeing, and international trade:

It is really wonderful to be in Seattle, and I do thank you for the beautiful salmon. We are now the beneficiaries in my State of Michigan, not of salmon quite as large as that, but salmon. We started developing a few years ago by transplanting some salmon from this area of the world, and we now have tremendous supplies in Lake Michigan of Coho salmon. And we are proud of it. They don't match that salmon in size, but they do remind us of the west coast and the wonderful opportunities that all of you have who live here. more ›

--Another M's fan idly threatens a boycott here. more ›

Monday, after posting our pro-lap dance response to Susan Paynter's PI column, we received an email from an anonymous local stripper:

I just read your defense of your right to make women touch you sexually for pay and was wondering: more ›

Keeping with today's apparent Seattlest themes of cute little references to the past and Comcast, we'd like to tell you about a complaint we have. Remember that guy a few years ago who refused to get a cell phone and what a pain in the ass it was to hook up with him? "I'll meet you at the North gate at 8 o'clock, or, if I'm not there, at the unintelligable gate at 9:45. And I won't forget the tickets this time." When it comes to digital cable, Seattlest is that guy. more ›

Remember those heady days before the 2004 election? When all anyone ever talked about was red vs. blue? Those were good times for America, and good times for internet comedy site JibJab, who captured the zeitgeist with a little Flash-animated featurette called "This Land." We didn't hear much from JibJab for a while, but they're back with the Great Sketch Experiment, in which they teamed up with legendary comedy film director John Landis (Animal House, Blues Brothers, Coming to America, to name a few) to produce six short films performed by some of the best independent comedy troupes in America. more ›

Sometimes, The Seattle Times has got to make you wonder. It was one thing to go ahead and endorse David Reichert for Congress over Darcy Burner despite widespread dissatisfaction with Republican leadership, but to spin his shameless partisanship as moderation? That's a new low. more ›

Tuesday 10th more ›

A Washington State political race got some national ink on Friday at Slate under the unflattering headline "Unusually Stupid Campaign Ads," but unfortunately for us the headline alone doesn't really indicate which campaign Michael Kinsley's talking about in this article. It's Monday and a semi-holiday, so we'll spare you the effort of dredging up all the current campaigns. He's talking about McGavick/Cantwell. more ›

Courtesy of Boing Boing (it's this little blog you should check out sometime), we discovered that Radar Online -- a.k.a. the magazine that refuses to die -- has an interview with Winter, a 34-year-old freelance computer programmer who has made it his life's mission to visit every Starbucks in the world. That's 12,000 and counting. An excerpt:

The primary rule is I have to drink at least one four-ounce sample of caffeinated coffee from each store. The store has to have actually opened for business; I can't get there the day before, when they have friends-and-family day and they're giving drinks away—in many ways that's kind of arbitrary. It has to be a company-owned store, not a licensed store. I have to drink the coffee, but there is no time limit on when I have to drink the coffee. But the longer I go without drinking it, the greater the risk that I might lose it. There are two stores I need to go back to in Washington State because I didn't finish the coffee—I lost it. I took it out of the store, I had it in a cup, and in the middle of the night I forgot I hadn't drank it all and I used the cup to relieve myself. more ›

Last week when Salon came to town to check in on the Ballard megachurch Mars Hill there was a lot of commenting here and elsewhere, both condemning the church and inviting non-believers to attend a service. The proprietress at the local Electrolicious blog took them up on it and went to Mars Hill this Sunday, and today Seattlest sits down with the resulting post for a chat. more ›