Yesterday was the hottest day of the year so far! Plus, overwhelming public support for mandatory paid sick leave, some tunnel business, the Seattle School Board's new budget, government layoffs and some wayward honeybees. more ›

"Operation Freak Out My Cat" by shawnmebo from our Flickr pool more ›

Our pet has needs like any other. Good food, good walks, good rubs… what else were we missing? We went to Animal Talk Pet Shop (6514 Roosevelt Way NE) to find out. Our pet was keen to investigate the goodie-crammed store: pet food, pet treats, even the potential for new friends. Animal Talk sells cats, birds, turtles, snakes, and even a tarantula that would have been a very good friend. more ›

Hobo cat. by mraaronmorris, from the Seattlest Flickr Pool more ›

"cat" by Ryan Holloway Photography, from the Seattlest Flickr Pool
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How? All you have to do to is go nine weeks without food or water, locked inside a window seat. David Blaine, take note! From September 28 to November 30, Bess the cat was trapped inside a window seat, wasting down to 4.7 pounds before finally deciding to meow for help and being rescued. "Nine weeks locked in a box, without food and water, or even much air. What was left? What was meowing?" $3,000 in vet bills later, she's moving slowly but is back up to 6.4 pounds. And now, a LOLcat. (Thanks to tipster H.W. Duncan.) more ›

We can't decide if this story is more straight out of a Dr. Strangelove-esque world or National Lampoon's road-trip vacation post 9/11, so we'll let you be the judge. more ›

magazine claims, "You can't swing a dead cat this time of year without hitting a Top 10 List." Never one to waste a perfectly good dead cat, we decided to take a swing and create a Top Random-Number Shows Seattlest Saw This Year. And now, without any further ado, here's how your favorite bloggers broke down the year: more ›

Behind our couch lives what we refer to as our "third cat." Much more well-behaved and definitely lower-maintenance, petting-wise, than the two actual cats from whence it came, but more or less inert unless there's a breeze. When we sweep behind the couch every three or four years we generally don't carry the third cat down to the Sound and chuck him in, but that's what storm runoff is doing right now to a lot of people. 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 ›

You begin to see why a girlfriend might leave him. "And how in the world did you come / to be such a lazy love?" he sings with Cat Stevens' flair for passing judgment, or pleads for time with a barbed hook on the line: " Maybe if you slowed down for me / I could see you're only telling / lies, lies, lies." more ›

Hello all-- more ›

Front-page screamer in the P-I today: School crimes under wraps. more ›

Last night was our first live encounter with Ohio's Over the Rhine, and the Triple Door turned out to be the perfect venue for the neo-cabaret sound of their new album The Trumpet Child (which they're streaming on their site). Tonight's show is sold out, but they're doing SRO sales at the window. The Triple Door website will tell you the show's at 8pm, but we showed up at 7:45pm last night and got sat during opener Griffin House's set. more ›

The husband-and-wife team Over the Rhine [MySpace] play at the Triple Door at 7:30pm this Thursday and Friday, and both shows are already sold out -- SRO tickets will be on sale the nights of the shows. more ›

Seattle-based journalist Dave Neiwert posted this video today of a "border patrol" down south taking pot shots at alleged border crossers. more ›

Last night at the Crocodile was one of those evenings you stumble on where things just keep getting better and better. We went down to see headliners Sea Wolf [MySpace] after hearing them do an in-studio bit at KEXP (not posted yet). About two songs in, the indie-folk melodies and lead singer's baritone duets with cello swept us and Shelves of Vinyl off our feet. more ›

For once, it was actually nice weather at the Gorge for Sasquatch. Last year was all sturm und drang and the year previous was approximately the temperature of the sun, but the gods smiled down on all gathered in George, Washington yesterday afternoon, as it was a pleasant 80 degrees under partly cloudy skies. more ›

Once upon a time you could write a book on the typewriter in your attic, bundle the pages together with some butcher paper and twine and schlep it to New York to give to your publisher and then forget about the whole thing until it was time to blow the dust off the keys for the next go round. Or so we imagine it. Then came the critics. And then the book tours. Then Amazon.com and the damned reader reviews. Then the blogs. Now you gotta respond to all that shit. Any critique that goes unanswered, regardless of how obscure the publication or how ridiculous the charge, is out there for the world to see. A criticism of an author's work, floating around out there on the internets somewhere, is indistinguishable from a hard fact until the power of Google puts it in front of the author himself and he responds. more ›

Whitman College: Jeffrey Sachs, economist and author more ›

Through Sunday, May 6; Tickets $24 more ›

If you missed Reggie Wilson's group at On the Boards a few weeks ago, you have the chance to not only make up for it, but to add three other stellar choreographers and one of Seattlest's favorite dance companies to the bill. Opening this evening at Meany Hall as a part of UW's World Series, the Dayton Contemporary Dance Company performs the Seattle premiere of colôr-ógrăphy, n. the dances of Jacob Lawrence. There have been many works of dance inspired by works of art (and obviously, vice versa), but this strikes us as one of the most inspired and poignant pairings we've heard of. We've long been a fan of Lawrence's ability to craft narrative and emotion with simple graphic representations peppered with explosions of color and implied motion (his "Ironers" hangs in our dining room, still by far our favorite). more ›

Dorkbot, we've missed you. If our attendance record for the monthly technology and art event has been spotty at best recently --we've only been to one meeting since it lost the CoCA digs-- it's not because of the scheduled themes. They've all been awesome: Multimedia Performance at the Abbey, Innovation in Games back at CoCA, remote aerial photography at CHAC (actually we did get to that one)... New curator whatshisname (can't find it on the website--someone help) has done great things. Please, though, find a permanent home. Last night was at the 911 Media Arts Center and that seems like it could work. Make it work, Dorkbot. more ›

Tons of classic Spiegelesque wit bombs dropped last night at the Benaroya Hall lecture/slide show/performance. Our favorite was the curt dismissal of Roy Lichtenstein's work at the very start: "He did for comics what Andy Warhol did for soup." Oh, Spiegelman, you dog... You get him! more ›

Austinist gets arty with an interactive guide to SXSW, loved some local art galleries and a new art exhibit and lamented the possible loss of "Friday Night Lights" production to New Mexico. more ›

Yes, we think you will be able to spare some change, should you get panhandled by a newly-homeless Napavine family. more ›

After some un-Country-like hemming and hawing Seattlest decided that the Merle Haggard show was too expensive and we stayed home. Yeah, yeah, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity, but it's the city -- once in a lifetime opportunities come up three or four times a week. Others went and are happy to tell us about it. We are very interested in this event from the evening, though: more ›

A Canadian mining minster in British Columbia recently flamed someone who wrote in about a policy decision via email. He pretty much tore the guy up and attacked him on the grounds of the guy's questionable Canadian pedigree ("It is my understanding that you are an American, I don't give a shit what your opinion is on Canada or Canadian residents"). Big story. The guy seems to have resigned over it. Shit's in the P-I. more ›

It was a one-night-only monologue, Mike Daisey's Stories from the Atlantic Night Cafe, and CHAC artistic director Matthew Kwatinetz was happily rearranging chairs for a packed house. Backstage, the program informed us, Daisey was taking an hour to scribble away on a yellow legal pad the outline for what would be a brand-new 90-minute-ish monologue, his delivery punctuated only by pauses as he sipped from a glass of water or glared at remembered insults and injuries. more ›

Now, don't let the chicken- and cat-rape, possum-gutting, or deep-frying a sparrow put you off. (Or the hamster, which we don't have time to get into.) There's a lot of tenderness to playwright Kelleen Conway Blanchard's depiction of small-town life. And if former Pork Queen Lucinda is one-eyed, the Sheriff's plastic cranium doesn't seal that well, bemulleted Bud has testicular size-and-quantity issues, and Lucinda's brother Stu Lionel has a too-lively fascination with dead things (and how they get that way), that just says something vital about what it means to be human -- any rich, vibrant tapestry has got to have a few loose ends. more ›