Cheapshit Condos does just what you'd expect: talks smack about "the new urban blandscape sweeping through Seattle." Oh, it's funny because it's true. Got any notably, terribly, cheap condos (or even better worse apartment-to-condo conversions) in your neighborhood? Send your photos and comments to cheapshit@cheapshitcondos.com. We'd love to buy the good folks at Cheapshit a drink, but unfortunately taking on the Seattle Condo Mafia requires author anonymity, if not the full-blown Witness Protection Program. Still,......

It was April, 2006, and a Seattle Times article about online food writers felt obliged to begin with an explanation of what blogs were all about. We've come a long, long way. This week, an essay by a food blogger who writes as TheGastroGnome ("She Eats and Tells"), contends that Seattle foodies are ill-served by print journalism. Nancy Leson at the Times no longer writes specifically for the paper, she reprints posts to her blog,......

One more event for tonight: Christian Lander, the biting satirist of Stuff White People Like, makes a free appearance tonight at the Hideout (1005 Boren Ave) to shill the book based on his blog. There's a private dinner beforehand--begging the question "Exactly what stuff do white people like to eat?"--but tickets to that portion of the evening are long sold out. Show up any time after 8 p.m. to buy a book, get it signed,......

Seth over Sports NW just tipped us off to the bad news regarding the Tacoma News Tribune's Seahawks Insider blog, which won't be updated until training camp. Ironically, the blog's tagline reads: "Where there is no off season." *cough* Frank Hughes explains the situation in a post:As you may have heard last week, the chain that owns the paper, McClatchy, announced that it is laying off 10 percent of its work force, which in our......

"SPD Patrol Cars" by Slightlynorth, from the Seattlest Flickr Pool. Thanks! Ooooh—the Seattle P-I has launched their new crime blog, Seattle 911. It's a resting place for the flotsam and jetsam of the city's police and fire departments, where morbidly fascinated readers can take in side stories, breaking crime news, and details from daily reports. The site promises "news both fresh and forgotten," which we hope means that there will also be info about......

The Craigslist ad reads:Do you want to earn extra cash blogging about your community? MyZip.net is building the first nationwide network of neighborhood blogs. We will pay you $50 per month for writing about your neighborhood on your own ZIP code site (example http://www.98122.net). We're in favor of this because neighborhood microblogs support our top-secret strategy of using RSS feeds and Google alerts to bring you news as if it happened to us. Also, MyZip.net......

Monologuist and fascinating human being Mike Daisey arrives in town next week for a Jan 18 - Feb 3 run of his show Monopoly! at CHAC, followed by a shorter try-out of his newest piece, How Theater Failed America. We got Daisey on the horn the other day and took a walk down memory lane with him, a la Dick Cavett, to soften him up before surprising him with hard-hitting questions about how many pictures......

As ChrisB of Three Imaginary Girls points out, losing your job sucks. Losing a job that meant a lot to you sucks more. And losing all that during the holidays? Well that just blows a goat. So what do you do to help out these fellas who so unexpectedly got canned on Sunday afternoon? If you're former Croc booker Pete Greenberg (now at Chop Suey), you organize a benefit show to help these guys pay......

News of the Croc's closure sparked a lively conversation at Seattlest HQ yesterday. We suspect reactions at other blogs' virtual newsrooms were equally as visceral. The local blogosphere, if you will, seems to have turned temporarily into a Croco-sphere. Personally, we have found bittersweet solace in the words of Scripture: In 1966, I went down to Greenwich Village, New York City to a rock club called Electric Banana. Don't look for it; it's not there......

Oh, it's a rollicking time at Seahawks headquarters. Should be, the team's on a five-game winning streak. Head coach Mike Holmgren's certainly in the spirit; he's using his press conference to burn on his quarterback. Says Holmgren: "I worry about [Hasselbeck] when he runs. You guys ever see Gooney Birds landing on a lake?" Mike Holmgren, ladies and gentleman. He'll be appearing next week at the Chuckle Shack in Trenton, New Jersey. We have not......

What it is ain't exactly clear, however. Back on December 2, PopMatters published "So Long, Something Weird," which made it sound like locally based exploitation/sexploitation distributor Something Weird Video was going out of business. It’s time to call out the carnal color guard and get the bugler to blow a rather trashy and tawdry Taps. After nearly seven years celebrating the best of exploitation, Something Weird Video has parted ways with chief home theater......

Anita Rowland, matriarch of Seattle bloggers, wife and fantastic human being lost her fight with cancer yesterday. Anita was writing about her life and posting it on the web before there was a word for that kind of thing, and her real-world blogger meetups fostered a strong sense of community in an electronic medium that can be cold and isolating without friendly face-to-face contact. She'll be missed by many, as can be seen at her......

Realizing we’re in the midst of the “R” months, we had a sudden craving for happy hour oysters. But where? Recalling a recent review, we Googled “shucker's happy hour oysters” and quickly jumped on a bus after reading the first result: a June reprint of a 2006 rave in the Seattle Weekly about Shucker's fifty-cent oysters, two-dollar margaritas, and free parmesan crisps. We lost on almost all three accounts. Oysters had doubled to a dollar......

Running text ads on your blog never really struck us as the Get-Richest-Quickest path; we used to have Amazon ads on a book review blog and after a year or two and no checks, we decided we could better use the real estate and quit the program. A few months later we got our first and final check for...$6ish? But Seattle's Furious Seasons blog has just discovered firsthand the pain of algorithmic rejection. The email......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. It’s very possible that the Arizona style enchilada was made up by a marketing firm......

Over at Ballhype, Jason created a Google Maps mashup that shows the birthplace of every NBA player. Is Seattle represented? Yes, oh yes. Seven players are born in Seattle. That, ladies and gentleman, is more than any single city north of Los Angeles (14) or west of Dallas (9). San Francisco proper has as many NBAers (1--Jason Kidd) as Edmonds (Martell Webster). Ha! Eat our dust, Golden Gaters! Overall, 10 NBAers were born in Washington......

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). Indeed, it's hard to get noticed......

Redmond native and actual Guitar Hero Carrie Brownstein did some work on the advertising of the game Rock Band. You might have seen these commercials; four rocker-lookin types sit around and cut on each other in the jaded and weary fashion of musicians on the road. That's not her work, thank god. She was on a different team pushing a different concept. Anyway, she's got an article up at Slate today about her experiences with......

If you were here right now, you'd see us looking around suspiciously like we don't quite trust we're awake because we just read Knute Berger's latest deep thought over at Crosscut and we...agree with him.While promoting green consumption might be politically more palatable than getting people to change their habits and expectations, promoting consumption still offers an answer that doesn't solve the bigger problem. Global warming's hawks have to be honest with us: Fighting the......

Retailers have been slopping their Christmas come-ons into the weeks before Thanksgiving since at least 1986--that's the earliest citation Word Spy has for "Christmas creep," the retailers' own term for the phenomenon. The exception: local customer-service nirvana Nordstrom. As reported on Consumerist and elsewhere, Nordstrom hasn't put up their Christmas decorations yet. But they have posted signs explaining why: "We just like the idea of celebrating one holiday at a time." Reaction is mostly positive.......

Why do food writers go apeshit every time they see a fucking insect? Popular blogger named Adam Roberts, aka The Amateur Gourmet, knows his limits. Couple of weeks ago he admitted he's not qualified to review restaurants (would that the Pee Eye's Leslie Kelly would do the same). Today, preparing dinner at home, he's freaked out to find an bug in his arugula. Oh, Adam! It's organic arugula, hence no pesticides, and that tiny critter's......

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. (The gala, which celebrates the release of the first Beaujolais of 2007, is sponsored by French-American Chamber of Commerce and takes place......

It was a terrifying night for former Garfield and UW basketballer Tre Simmons, who's playing in Israel this year. Israeli basketball fans are notoriously crazy, but the fans--or at least one fan--got a little too crazy yesterday at a contest between Holon (Simmons' team) and Jerusalem. A Jerusalem fan (presumably) threw a firecracker at the Holon bench. An alert security guard who tried to pick the explosive up and toss it away got his hand......

So Krist Novoselic blogs for the Weekly now. Oooh. Courtney Love doesn’t need any stinking alt-paper to share her anarchic thoughts. She’s got authenticity. She’s got voice. She’s got MySpace. Love’s latest piece, a 3700-word manifesto—titled "oh shit the inspartion fairy sprinkeld her glitter"—speaks volumes about her character. its ironic cos its loose and sick and cool and beuatiful and Linda doesnthave time ever- wich is a shame as its our record mostly tho......

We hear the insults. Bloggers are no-names. We are malcontents. We live in our parents' basements, practicing onanism like Tiger Woods practices putting. Well we have news for you, blogger-haters. Laugh no more, because a man who has the earned respect of many for his political activism and musical genius is joining our growing club. Krist Novoselic has started a blog. This hero of the 1990s, a man who had the courage to throw his......

We really don't feel it's the day after an election until we overhear people talking about how they forgot to vote, didn't know there was an election, and how they'll definitely vote next time. If they had been paying attention from August through this morning, they would have learned that Seattle voters will not let you drive 50mph down Market Street after a few drinks, but they will let you work for an anti-gay organization,......

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......

We have no doubt that one day we'll all live in little Matrix pods where a single media conglomerate will spoon-feed us newspapers, TV news, radio and, yes, blogs and collect our excreted dollars and votes for their own nefarious purposes. Jay Inslee, however, thinks that future may not be inevitable, and blathers on about it below. If you're of like mind get thee to Town Hall on Friday for the final public hearing on......

Economist and NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman was speaking at Town Hall last night. We were going to do this thing where we pretended to mistake him for Jack Klugman and then complained the whole post about him never mentioning acting with Tony Randall or Quincy. Luckily, we thought better of it. We were inspired by Krugman himself, though, who turned out to be a very droll fellow, or at least acts that way on cold......

According to his blog, NYTimes Op-Ed columnist and Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman is "sick as a dog" today, right before his visit to Town Hall tomorrow night. Krugman, like Bill Greider at Rolling Stone in the Reagan years, has taken up columnistic arms against the flow of disinformation from the White House. Who will tell the people? Krugman, that's who. (Actually Greider will too.) Sick or not, Krugman will be at Town Hall to......