619 tenants forced to evacuate early, more developments in last week's shooting of a pregnant woman, our sports teams sucking. Plus, a video of a happy, sleepy baby, just to keep things positive. more ›

"Baby with hard hat, 1959" by Seattle Municipal Archives, from the Seattlest Flickr Pool. more ›

A $100m shortfall in sales tax may cause Metro to cut service by 20 percent. Metro General Manager Kevin Desmond--who obviously just saw The Wrestler--called it "a body blow." Why linger at Forever 21 when it's not all that hard to get into Ft. Lewis if you're a teenage girl? But children are the future. And somewhere out there in the Puget Sound, J-pod orcas are still trying to lose the baby weight. Welcome to the world, J44 and L122. more ›

"Quite a few people in the world have seen my penis. So that's kinda cool." We've known for a while (thanks to Kirsten Anderson) that the naked baby on the cover of Nevermind is all grown up and basically normal. But last night, NPR's All Things Considered aired an interview with the now-17-year-old Spencer Elden, sharing his story with comfortable liberals nationwide. Spencer still seems like a normal high school kid, and, as seen above, is perfectly willing to deploy the best conversational icebreaker we can imagine. (Seattlest Clint's alternate suggestion: "The penis that gave international rise to the Seattle Sound.") He's officially eclipsed Dolores Erickson (the woman slathered in whipped cream on Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream and Other Delights) as the northwest's most famous album cover model, even if he is from California. more ›

In case you haven't been following the story, imaginary Dana has been knocked up for a little over 9 months now. more ›

On Saturday, we took our godson, his mom and his dad to Baby Loves Disco. Since we don't have a kid of our own and don't have any experience with kid-themed events, 17-month-old Eli agreed to let us interview him about the party. more ›

Making up for weeks of hibernation and workaholism, Kim will hit the parties this weekend. Tonight, she’ll don her Groucho glasses for a lesbian function at Jabu’s celebrating the births of her two favorite Sagitarii. Saturday, it’s to the War Room for a company party with the missus and her workmates. Finally, she’ll ship off to the sub-tropics on Monday, where she’ll spend what remains of 2007. more ›

Kingzmen came out in matching striped jumpers, which was cute. They certainly have charm, Nphared's beats were beautiful again, and if the Kingzmen tighten up their presence just one notch further, they'll make our list of groups to be excited about. Here's who we ARE excited about: GMK. Bright, bursting energy, hustling like a pro. This guy is flying, he's got the spark, and everything about his act works really well. He only had fifteen minutes on stage, but after the Parker Brothaz (not bad, just... flat), it was clear GMK deserves to headline. The Parker Brothaz were formulaic, packaged, commercial ("Where's your iPhones? Where's your Sidekicks?" is the refrain in their latest single), but admittedly smooth. Smooth, but not inspiring. GMK, on the other hand, got the crowd swooping and bouncing right along with him. Good man, good man. "Baby wanna drop that? Go ahead, drop that." Encore! more ›

The Program (Dec. 18-22) will be way cooler than we initially thought, folks. Not only will some of the biggest names in NW hip-hop be on stage for your entertainment five nights in a row, but the latest news is that there are all kinds of technological tie-ins that will make this event very, very 21st-century. more ›

Francophiles attending the Beaujolais Nouveau gala in Bellevue Friday will have the chance to bid on more than a dozen travel packages (tickets to Paris? ho-hum...) as well as some rare and valuable works of art. An original lithograph by the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is likely to draw the most interest. more ›

Baby, it’s getting cold outside. Not that we need that excuse, but the nip in the air has us craving something volcanic. Time for some soon-doo-boo chigae. more ›

Earlier this fall, Laura Dern's baby-daddy Ben Harper released his eighth album, Lifeline, the product of a week-long marathon recording session in Paris. The record's been heralded as Harper's best work in years, due to its casual simplicity and laid-back vintage sound, drawing comparisons to Bill Withers, Otis Redding, and Van Morrison. That's almost enough to get us to ignore the fact that he discovered surfer/"musician" Jack Johnson. In his first ever seated theatre... more ›

If you’re gonna make an album with orchestral arrangements care of living legend composer Van Dyke Parks, you’re gonna have to go all out to perform it right. That’s why the first half of super English major/elven queen Joanna Newsom’s grandiose show last night at Benaroya Hall featured the accompaniment of local 29-piece chamber orchestra the Northwest Sinfonia to cover her last full-length, the epic five-song masterpiece Ys ("ees"). It’s not hard to recreate a lushly recorded album when you’ve got the combination of the Sinfonia, Newsom’s three-person touring group---which she’s termed the "Ys Street Band"---and Newsom plucking complex polyrhythms (and making it look easy) on an ornate harp, itself a work of art. more ›

Get this while you can, local hip-hop fans: GMK's anticipated new mixtape, Perfect 10, finally dropped and it's available online for free download, thanks to the largesse of host DJ B-Mello. more ›

Adult gorillas aren't cute. The last time we saw one at the Woodland Park it climbed a tree and crapped a giant turd into its giant hand. Parents were shielding their poor children's delighted eyes. more ›

We recklessly disregarded Seattlest Audrey's advice and saw Gone Baby Gone this weekend. more ›

1. Things We Lost in the Fire. There are a few things we liked about this (supposedly based here, though there is nothing to indicate that it actually takes place here) movie---mostly that the heroin junkie played by Benecio Del Toro lives in a flophouse in Renton and that Halle Berry plays a Seattle woman named Audrey, leading to a scene where Del Toro runs after her calling, "Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, Audrey!" Call us vain, but we like the sound of our name. more ›

It's still raining, but that's not stopping us this weekend. As we get ready to head out the door, the Seattlest staff is once again sharing our weekend plans in the hopes that we'll see you along the way. more ›

[REDACTED COMPANY NAME] 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 ›

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Katelyn Hackett attends local hiphop shows. She will write about them for Seattlest. more ›

It's a big, bad world out there, and there are plenty of reasons to be mad as hell. An undisclosed conflict of interest? Well, depends on the circumstances: whose conflict, whose interest? more ›

Sometimes when you start going off about how *hysterically funny* someone is, people take it as a dare not to laugh. But Lauren Weedman cracks us up, and we don't care who knows it. more ›

We knew that last winter's windstorm was a boon to salesmen of propane and propane accessories, but now it seems like it gave a little nudge to young lovers as well. Apparently there was a "baby boomlet" this September, nine months following the storm and mass power outages. This is always the cool part about big weather events: they bring people together. My roof is fucked up, my neighbor's roof is fucked up--we can set aside the fact that he brings his dog over to crap on our lawn and he can temporarily forget that our non-starting car has been collecting leaves on the curb directly in front of his house for some six months. There are shingles everywhere! Let's have a little solidarity over that! Who cares that they're mostly his and he's never going to come around and clear them out of our bushes! The same holds true inside the house. The generator only puts out enough wattage to run the space heater, the plasma and the wine fridge so there's no question about whether the Xbox is going to get any play tonight. That's a recipe for love. more ›

British boy wonder/musical polyglot Jamie T makes his first trip to Seattle to play the latest incarnation of John in the Morning at Night, coming up this Saturday at the Croc. On his debut full-length Panic Prevention, the young Mr. T. makes veritable sound collages, amalgams of rock, reggae, punk, soul, rap, heavy cockney accents, and assorted audio clips. That's exactly why he gets comparisons that run the gamut from a baby Bob Dylan to a "one-man Arctic Monkey" to "the bastard lovechild of Billy Bragg and Mike Skinner doing his best Joe Strummer impression" (eminently choice quotes care of Wikipedia). When we asked Jamie how he would characterize his sound, he cheekily referred to a bandmate's description: "My friend Ben who plays drums in the Pacemakers [his backing band] describes it best--well, it's the only way I like to describe it--like liquid shit being poured into your ear." Delightful. more ›

Seattlest doesn't go to a lot of concerts -- we never did, and once parenthood embraced us we tend to invest in babysitters for stuff like movies and restaurants. There's less thrill in staying up until 1:30 when you know, no matter what, that 7:00 would be sleeping in. more ›

Just because it's a modest storefront doesn't mean it's a hole in the wall. Au contraire, mes amis. Two new spots in Belltown--both French--forgo pomp in favor of hospitality. more ›

With a Freedom Fries eating contest. Here is the relevant flickr set for last night's contest, evidently won by bicycle hobo associate identified only by the alias "Michael." Here are the rules for the 9/11 Eat Off Commemoration that apparently took place at Red Robin: more ›

Next up was Juno, the latest comedy from Jason Reitman. We loved his first feature, Thank You for Smoking, and had heard nothing but good buzz about this flick, which is kinda Knocked Up meets Superbad, if Judd Apatow stopped focusing so much on male friendships and paid more attention to the pregnant girl. As the titular acid-tongued, preggo high schooler, Ellen Page keeps on getting better and better, and the rest of the cast (JK Simmons, Allison Ranney, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman, reunited here with his TV son, sweet baby Michael Cera) ain't no slouch neither. A couple minor quibbles: if anything the film is too cute by half. We don't need pop culture references for the sake of pop culture references: "No, It's Morgan Freeman. I'm here to collect some bones." And we certainly don't need a quirky folk song introducing every goddamn scene (Wes Anderson much?). Still, the film was ultimately very moving -- we always appreciate it when a foul-mouthed movie turns out to have some heart. more ›