Today in two-newspaper town coincidences: real estate made the front page of both the Seattle Times and the P-I. "King County home sales edge up in June," says the Times, while the P-I makes a stronger claim for temperature-based sales, "Local housing market warming up with the weather." Both are referencing an insignificant increase from last month--compared to a year ago, sales are still down almost 34% and listings are up about 42%. That has......

The mass insanity of the housing bubble over the last few years has pretty fully revealed itself by now. One need only visit our good friends over at Seattle Bubble to read about the increasing devastation. On Jan. 15, Tim posted the big news: according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS), King Co. finally posted negative year-over-year median closing prices on housing. According to the same report, active listings are up in the YOY......

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. We'd like to preface his comments by saying that from the moment we walked in until the time we left, Eli was trailed by a gaggle of older-than-him little girls. Undoubtedly this,......

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. Head north on 99, and you’ll start hitting some Korean restaurants at the upper reaches of the city limits. Many are mediocre, while one is great for grilled meats, but continue on to our prime pick for a special soup that’ll cure the winter blues. Destination: Hoosoonyi, where......

Did you know that there's only one credible real-estate industry voice in Seattle? It's a marketing firm in town that works with real estate developers. We've learned this from reading Aubrey Cohen's real estate reporting in the Seattle P-I. Here's a search on articles containing the exact phrase "Williams Marketing" -- they're quoted in at least one article per month since last November. (Who are the schmoes paying the P-I for ads when there's so......

Gas Works Park may not recover its former place as our #1 greatest park ever after its little tar leak last week. We took a walk over there yesterday and wandered around what was basically an empty space on a gray and prematurely cold day, pressing our nose up against the chain link here and there and dwelling on what exactly this park sits on top of: benzene, mercury, lead, etc. It's gross. Current......

Since our last Uwajiwhat focused on coconut milk, it seems appropriate to address the other staple in our Thai pantry: curry paste. And the best of the bunch is again Mae Ploy. Purists might insist on pounding out their own paste, but Mae Ploy provides a shortcut that we welcome wholeheartedly. (Kasma Loha Unchit, our Thai cooking guru, also endorses it.) Mae Ploy offers several flavors, including red, yellow, Panang and Massaman (a.k.a. Matsaman), but......

We randomly checked out the Walkmen and Kaiser Chiefs show at the Showbox last night, mostly in the dark about their work. Although we had seen the Walkmen live once before, we couldnt remember if they had made much of an impression. During the opening, a friend summed up their sound as "like the Strokes except not irritating." That's a good enough summary although we'd swap out the Strokes with Rod Stewart, who Walkmen lead......

--A Seattle lawyer is officially in on the Menu Foods Ltd sue-a-thon. Local pets blog Itchmo Seattle is claiming a vastly different number of dead pets across the country than we've seen in the MSM, by the way. Which is closer to the truth: The P-I's 13 or the blog's 1,000? --Seattlest had a few science teachers in our high school days that should have been carried out of the building with an administrator......

Special Gonzaga correspondent Sean O'Connor reports that the Zags will make the tournament. It’s been an interesting season for the boys over in Spokane, to say the least. After a hot start and wins over North Carolina, Texas and UW there were four losses in a row to Nevada, Duke, Virginia, and Georgia. Then came the 2 conference losses, the arrests of Josh Heytvelt and Theo Davis, and a 3rd conference loss (the most since......

Blue Door is part confessional crisis, part historical saga -- or part Philip Roth's The Human Stain and part Alex Haley's Roots. It's showing in the smaller Leo K Theatre at the Rep, which features continental seating (no center aisle) and jumpy Rep subscribers. We sat down 10 minutes early and stood up 8 times to let people in and out. Holy crap. Don't let anyone tell you older people are all ruled by......

Tuesday, February 6 >>> Spanish classical guitarist Pepe Romero at Benaroya Hall. The flying-fingered flamenco phenomenon, knighted by the King of Spain, plays several of his father's compositions and one of his own, plus other Spanish works. * video: Recuerdos de la Alhambra 7:30 pm // $29-$61 // Cheap seats are in the rear orchestra section. >>> From the North at High Dive. Seattle rock music history comes full circle in a way with......

'Member when we made a funny ha-ha joke about thieves breaking into staged homes for sale? Well--irony of ironies--a thief did same to a friend's house last night, so we had to Tivo Saturday morning's Husky game while we spent the day repairing a broken door frame. After watching the Huskies lose by 30, we're wishing they'd broken the whole fucking house. Why do the Huskies suck? There's as many theories flying around Seattlest HQ......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

David Lynch premiered his hopeless, boring mess of a film last night at the Cinerama and the only thing worse than sitting through three hours of mindless scenes of people staring in to space and nothing happening was the insipid, gushing fannish Q&A with the Lynch freaks immediately following the film. Did you know that Lynch's fans are all filmmakers too? You do now. Do you care that every one who took the mic wanted......

If you're in the mood for some wide-eyed, Kool-Aid stained boosterism, look no further than this article in today's P-I. It's in response to the New York Times piece announcing a condo-sales slump. The tone is strictly "move along, nothing to see here." It begins: Seattle's market was not to blame for a recent decision to change a planned 34-story downtown building from condominiums to apartments. Rather, the slumping condo markets in cities such......

A Seattle real estate investor discovered last night the petrified corpse of a fried dead rat baking on the heating element in his new condo. This will come as unwelcome news to certain gloom and doom real estate haters because it demonstrates that the Seattle market remains bubble proof. When you look at other real estate markets outside of Seattle - Darfur, Glod, Buffalo - first time home buyers have to a pay a......

The Post Intelligencer has an article today on the pesky old buildings that dot Seattle and the heroes who have been swooping in to convert them to condos. No need to tear down a perfectly good old building, necessarily, although that sometimes works too, but you can only wring so much out of renters before you shuffle them off to Kent or something where they belong and get some buyers in there. "We can offer......

If the voting public of the United States had gotten a chance to vote directly against Donald Rumsfeld last night, it would have been a landslide on the order of Seattle Initiative 91. Doesn't matter who the other guy was. It could have been Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer himself, or Mike McGavick even, getting sworn into office in January. We can dispense with all that, though, because all the Democratic voting for State......

-Rep. Dave Reichert-Clouseau continues to "investigate" whether the earth revolves around the sun whether global warming is caused by humans. -Was The Stranger wrong about that whole urban archipelago thing? Maybe, says The Stranger. -How many times does Defective Yeti have to say it? He's not into yetis. He's not into cute yetis and he's certainly not into cute wampas, so knock it off already. -Now is your chance to help the Capitol Hill......

Mr. Cranky has nothing on local freelance film critic N.P. Thompson, famous for casting a critical eye on the cinema on his website Movies into Film and also for slamming local alt-weekly film critics: An editor, an editor of a newspaper, one might suppose, has certain obligations to his readers. One of those obligations isn’t to suppress the voice of a writer whom the editor himself apparently cannot get enough of. In the case......

-Federal type investigators busted a prostitution ring today with arrests in Seattle and L.A. It turns out smuggling Southeast Asian women into the country in containers and forcing them into prostitution to settle their "debts" is not an urban myth after all. More tomorrow... -The NYT explains their new anonymous source policy. Please read and interpret for Seattlest. -View the Real Estate Bubble through the P-I's lens. -This graph shows that the majority of......

Sometimes you need to clean yourself up, get serious, and move in with daddy for a few months before you head to Latin America for a new gig. The District bids Jenna Bush adios. D.C.-based television shows have an elderly audience and DCist has some suggestions to fix that. They're also throwing Butterstick the panda bear a birthday bash. Yeah, we may have a few issues with our World Cup broadcasters here, but this guy......

In Bothell this weekend there's something called Country Village that's apparently a period piece shopping experience. So, kind of like a smaller version of Port Gamble? And 4Culture and the artist Amy-Ellen Trefsger will be doing an installation there in which AE lives on a small boat in the village for nine days. You know, it doesn't really strike us as having the same impact as that guy who lived in the water bubble thing......

Seattlest is still buzzing after the wonderful Redfin-sponsored Techcrunch meetup a few weeks ago (what can we say, free pizza goes a long way). That said, we had tempered expectations regarding Tuesday's (also Redfin-sponsored) nPost networking event, but found ourselves happily surprised by how enjoyable this pure networking gathering turned out to be. nPost is a relatively new Seattle entreprenurial site. Based primarily around interviews, the site strives to provide its readers with a variety......

and drink lots of beer Burlesque and vaudeville seem to be thriving here in Seattle, and one of the liveliest displays is at the annual Moisture Festival in Fremont. The third annual carnival of the absurd brings together a motley assortment of scantily clad dancers, trapeze artists, jugglers, contortionists, clowns, rabbis, acrobats, musicians, comedians, and magicians. See the amazing Bubble Guy! Marvel at the Magical Mystical Michael! Whistle at the Flordigan Can Can Girls! We......

Seattlest serves up musical jambalaya for the masses… Delicious! Monday 27th: >>Listening Party at Easy Street Records! First chance to hear The Flaming Lips’ At War With The Mystics and Built To Spill’s You In Reverse, have some drinks and win some prizes! Drink and appetizer specials on hand of course! And who knows, maybe you'll see a bunny or two... 6-8pm, all ages welcome, 21+ over in the bar >>Metric at The Showbox… Intense,......

Thanks to local bean fiend tonx, Seattlest was alerted to the "soft" opening of Espresso Vivace's new espresso palace, across the street from REI on Yale Avenue North. From the new Vivace cafe, you can peer into the verdant foliage in front of REI. Camping gear mecca, meet espresso mecca. The Grand Opening is April 18. Owner David Schomer isn't messing with his winning formula of "una bella tazza di caffe." Anyone who's been......

Professor Jared Diamond might be wicked smaht (said with a proper Bawston accent like his), but he's no Edward Tufte. Stay with us on this one... We've attended one presentation by Tufte, and even considering the potentially drought-worthy material in some people's eyes (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information), he is more entertaining than Space Mountain. Despite the fact that Seattlest is mighty interested in the subject of Diamond's most recent book, that couldn't save......

A friend and Seattlest discovered the UW surplus warehouse while walking home from Agua Verde one day a couple of years ago. We just walked in and started wandering through the shelves of cast-off computers, unidentifiable but important looking measuring equipment and bad office furniture. To us, techies both, it was like two sixteen-year-olds accidentally wandering into a porn shop for the first time. This is before we'd come across Re-PC. Everything had a little......