There has to be a better was to do this, guys. Border patrol agents are reporting another huge bust at the Lynden border crossing into Canada. Agents followed footprints they found on the Canadian side of the border into some bushes, where they found three individuals and two duffel bags filled with 115 pounds of marijuana. Despite the stoner stereotype of smoke-induced dimwittedness, these type of stories and the frequency which they are reported astonishes......

Royal Canadian Mounted police announced today that two of the five severed human feet found along the coast of British Columbia came from the same person. Who that person is or how they lost their feet is still unknown...but surely, this is a step in the right direction.......

A Bellingham man accused of deserting his Army unit in 2001 has been arrested by U.S. Border Officers. Nicholas Olson, now 29, was arrested in Sweetgrass, Mont., on July 3rd as he was trying to re-enter the country from Canada. He will be extradited to the Army to face charges of desertion. The maximum penalty a U.S. soldier can face for desertion during a time of war is death. While the U.S. has not......

Guy Maddin films are not for everyone. With his love of silent film flourishes and his often bizarre sense of humor, Maddin can easily confound viewers. To wit: we have a good friend who lives and breathes cinema. He likes his films weird and dark and avant garde. But even he says of Maddin, "I just can't handle the guy." Well, think again Nick, because Guy Maddin's latest critically-acclaimed film, "docu-fantasia" My Winnipeg has......

While this Friday is the US's big holiday, our fair neighbors to the north, Canada, celebrate their national holiday—aptly called Canada Day—today. (That's Fête du Canada for all you French Canadians.) Just like universal healthcare, the legal drinking age, and Thanksgiving, the Canadians just have to do it before us. So, celebrate all things Canadian today—sing a few bars of "O Canada", add 'eh to the end of your sentences, crave a cup of Tim......

Tonight, Das Llamas celebrate their new album Class Wars: K-12 at the Comet. The local rock fourpiece stomp out a little bit of everything, from synthy no-wave punk to dirty electro rock, offering up "a platypus of sound that is a new noise in a new era." Tonight is also the second of three shows (in three nights) for the CD release of Sounds from the Seattle Underground, care of the good folks at NadaMucho.......

Just kidding about the sixth foot found, literally. It appears to have been a prank, rooted in that quirky Canadian sense of humor. According to the Associated Press via the Seattle P-I:The coroner's service says a forensic pathologist and anthropologist examined the latest foot and found it actually was an animal paw inserted into the shoe, along with a sock packed with dried seaweed.......

The word on the tubes is that a 6th human foot was found floating in British Columbia this morning. Courtesy of Boing Boing, who has a connected reader in B.C.: I work for a newspaper in Campbell River, B.C. on Vancouver Island. Another foot was found here this morning at Tyee Spit (the second this week!). What is up, Canada? Even if it is just some strange current from the middle of the ocean......

Walking over to Baguette Box for lunch yesterday (the all-star Salumi's cured meat sandwich, $7.50), we were startled by a U-Haul with the most alarming marketing artwork we've ever seen. We're not sure anyone moves to Manitoba strictly for the snake dens ("We're alive with snakes") in the first place, but just to the right of the snake explosion is the tagline, "Where will U go next?" (Sorry, we were keeping one eye on the......

Brazil vs. Canada at Qwest Field Soccer Comes to Seattle: Seattlest was lucky enough, to catch the international friendly between Brazil and Canada at Qwest Field Saturday evening. Seeing an explosive game between well-matched teams, from some truly great seats, got us even more excited for the inaugural season of the Seattle Sounders FC. We hope the Sounders inspire a dedicated drum section like the Brazil team brought along. We don't know if we've ever......

NOT REINVENTING THE WHEEL: If you're considering quitting your corporate job--you know, the one with benefits and a customer lunch expense account--to build your own business from the ground up, you're crazy. Have you read the financial pages in the newspapers of late? Sometimes, however, it takes exactly that edge of craziness to make your dreams come true. In that case, let us direct you to the Six Hour Start-Up Conference this weekend. Your bucks......

Maybe we've seen Outbreak too many times, but this does not sound good: Canadian authorities have a train in northern Ontario traveling between Vancouver, B.C. and Toronto, Ontario under quarantine after one person died and several others came down with an undetermined illness. Apparently, 10 people have come down with flu-like symptoms on the train and one woman has already succumbed to the mystery illness. We guess flu-like symptoms are better than ebola-like symptoms,......

The rugged terrain surrounding Ross Lake, courtesy of Flickr User Rich Sobel Usually, when we hear about people dying trying to cross the border, it is the other border being discussed. However, North Cascade National Park employees recently discovered the body of a man who died trying to walk across the Canadian border this winter. The body of 37-year-old Peter Kim was found on Friday by park employees who were clearing trails near Ross Lake.......

This year if Sasquatch just ain't your thing, there's an upcoming brand-new music festival hosted by our neighbors to the north. Yes indeedy, this summer marks the first-ever Pemberton Festival, to be held July 25-27 in Pemberton, British Columbia. Considering it's their first year, this little baby music fest has rounded up some big names, including Coldplay, Tom Petty, Nine Inch Nails, Jay-Z, Interpol, Death Cab, Flaming Lips, and Vampire Weekend. There'll be two......

Seattlest was in Vancouver this weekend, and, on a whim, made our first foray into a Tim Hortons. We'd heard good things -- "the apex of Canadian cuisine," for example -- and as lifelong doughnut fans we were happy to test that claim. We bought a maple glazed ring and a chocolate longjohn and took them back to our room. The verdict: Canada, you're better than that. The doughnuts were fine, but they're nothing......

Like anybody else, we appreciate the sentiment of the Presidents' Day long weekend--well, for those of us who have that day off or are able to take it. It provided us the perfect opportunity to temporarily ex-patriate ourselves and pump money into Canada's economy. That's what it's all aboot, anyway. This so-named Presidents' Day has become just a reason for the commercial sector to entice us with Fabulous Savings. Nobody thinks about Washington or......

On Presidents Day, it's time to pause for some quiet reflection on our drug use. Too much? Too little? Just right? Tonight Yale's Charles Barber drops in on the Elliott Bay Book Co. to report that in 2006 the U.S. accounted for 66% of the global antidepressant market. We know, it's exciting to be number one! There's a lot more in his book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Over at Slate,......

When it comes to good beer, brews made in Belgium are usually the cream of the crop. So, no one should be surprised that American brewers often try to emulate their success by brewing their own versions of Belgian styles. And you know what? Some of them are fantastic (And some, not so much...) Starting this Friday at The Collins Pub, they'll be rotating about 15 taps of Belgian-style goodness brewed right here in the......

Last night we made up for our dumb-assedness last week and caught episode 2 of Douglas Coupland's JPod, and damn if that weren't a strange beast. Coupland's surreal, self-referential, novelistic discourse on globalism has been transformed into an odd-ball, dry-humored, dramedy miniseries that's strangely addictive. The show centers on Ethan and his fellow programmers in the "J" pod at Vancouver's EA (redubbed Neotronic Arts for the show) campus. Ethan & co. are working on a......

In case you missed it on Monday, British Columbia Liberals announced a $14 billion transit upgrade plan. The Vancouver region already has the 49-kilometre SkyTrain system - the longest automated transit system in the world. But Mr. Campbell yesterday committed to about 30 kilometres of new SkyTrain-style and light-rapid-transit lines, plus bus systems elsewhere in the province, and $1.6-billion for 1,500 new clean-technology buses to increase the provincial fleet by about 60 per cent. B.C.......

Sometimes the world really is a beautiful place. Specifically when there's beer involved. Jack's meeting friends on Saturday for a session of oak-aged beer tasting at Brouwer's Big Wood Fest. He'll then spend the rest of the day rubbing his tum tum and smiling a lot. Thrilled about the possibility of the year's first snow fall, Kim will spend as much of the weekend as possible getting over the cold that's been lingering for a......

There's nothing like the prospect of a smart hip-hop show to build up our anticipation on a Saturday night. One where we know that the act we're going to see can't fail to deliver, cranks that up a little higher than we can generally handle when we're forced to first stop by a friend's party before the show. To all those in Shoreline that we bored with excited chatter about Lyrics Born and Blackalicious......

There are a lot of things we can see being seized at the border between Canada and the United States: handguns with the serial number filed off, bricks of heroin, briefcases with the radioactivity sign on the side. Hard drives we'd expect to make it through, but unfortunately we'd be wrong. The guy bringing the masters of the songs Chris Walla recorded in Vancouver back down to Seattle had the drive containing them yanked by......

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......

The Seattle Times has a quickie little snippet about some ski resort ownership swapping, namely that Boyne USA has bought the Summit at Snoqualmie from Booth Creek. At first we were a little concerned, namely because Booth Creek has a great track record from a customer service perspective, especially when they extended our season's pass for free after the disastrous winter of 05-06. But after a little more research, we're very excited because this is......

When we were last up in Whistler, local stores had signs next to their cash registers that read: "Exchange rate: on par." We figured they just didn't want to bother with the shrinking exchange rate, but there still had to be one, right? We must still be in better financial shape than Canada, sheesh. No? Oh. Long gone are those heady days when we first made pilgrimage to Whistler and emptied our wallets to the......

Our postings have been light (OK, nonexistent) this summer as we gallivanted about the western US and Canada teaching people how to ride mountain bikes. We were most excited about a trip in late August to Blue River, BC, the spot of legendary Mike Wiegele's heli-skiing outfit. The plan was to get dropped at 9,000 feet via helicopter and escort about 40 people back down through fields of granite rock slabs and unending alpine......

No question about it: there's too much Bordeaux on the market. The answer: find new ways to sell it. Howard Goldberg, who once wrote for the NewYork Times, thinks the answer is for Bordeaux estates to sell shrink-wrapped, powdered wine, which could be reconstituted (with designer water, to be sure) into vino. Great idea, Howard; we'll get back to you. Seriously, it's time for international action. Justin and Andy, what's your plan?Cut a hole in......

As noted previously, we're fans of the Uptight Seattleite persona because it seems to be gloriously, teeth-grindingly true. The Weekly's incarnation makes us laugh every so often, but the best gut-punch comes when we run across someone's real-life experience. The September issue of Harper's captures a great moment in an article on Canada's stepped-up defense of a less-iced-up Northwest Passage. The Canucks have been steaming around up there with warships, pissing on islands to piss......

Not to be outdone by his ex-wife’s recently rebounded career, Eddie Van Halen has reunited the band to hit the road again this fall in a joint effort remind everyone that they’re still alive. Forcing his kid to take sides in his battle for the spotlight, Eddie has appointed his sixteen-year old son, Wolfgang, to replace Michael Anthony on bass while David Lee Roth rejoins the new and improved band because it's Van Halen, not......