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. In response to a fear of "dirty bombs" being smuggled in from Canada, Homeland Security has been monitoring I-5 for radioactive materials. The following incident was recounted by the number two man in charge of Blaine, Wash., border patrol. A vehicle traveling 70 miles per......

Time 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: According to Dante, everything else pared in comparison to Daft Punk at WaMu Theater 7/29/07. OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!......

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......

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......

Some people take to relationships like a cat to water. The Swell Season's Glen Hansard sounds nice enough, friends all over Dublin, bit of a hippie -- but give him a girlfriend's ear and he's prone to red-faced verbal jabs, depressed miseries, and emotional archery. He can't keep up, or won't try.We made a choice and we knew we would pay / for stealing the joy and trying to escape / from the arms of......

Hello all-- News from the front lines of the blogging revolution: We've killed guest comments. Well, to be accurate our corporate overlords have killed guest comments. Ist-wide, the vast majority of spam and boorish behavior comes from guest commenters. As many Internet pundits have observed, total anonymity seems to make even the nicest person act totally insane. It hasn't been much of a problem here at Seattlest, and I'd like to thank those guest commenters......

Front-page screamer in the P-I today: School crimes under wraps. The P-I (disclosure: I write freelance sports pieces for them) reviewed Seattle School records and found cases of assault that weren't reported to police. Instead, school administrators tried to deal with these incidents on their own. King County prosecuting attorney Tomas Gahan ain't happy about it. Says he: "I don't want the principals or administrators to sort out what is a crime and what isn't.......

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......

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. They're touring for their new album The Trumpet Child, which All Music Guide reviews thusly:Produced by Brad Jones and recorded in Nashville, the album's music is steeped in the other kind of Americana: not the gothic country one......

Seattle-based journalist Dave Neiwert posted this video today of a "border patrol" down south taking pot shots at alleged border crossers. The video is not produced by the Minutemen border freaks who have an outpost up in Blaine, Washington, but it's a spinoff of that group and Dave uses it to illustrate the fact that these guys are not fucking around. Q: What do you shout at a Canadian before you shoot at him? Dave......

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. They're a six-piece -- Alex Brown Church on vocals and......

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. Our day started off at the Yeti Stage (where the Wookie stage used to be - when did that happen?)......

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......

Now that the UW finally picked a commencement speaker (they settled on Congressman Norm Dicks after Doug E. Doug cancelled), we've compiled this list of 2007 grad day yakkers at all local colleges (source: The Chronicle of Higher Education). Please let us know if we're wrong or if we left anyone out. Local colleges Bastyr College: Joycelyn Elders, masturbation proponent City University of Seattle: James Donaldson, ex-NBA player Evergreen State College: Maxine Mimms, education expert......

Cynthia Hopkins @ On the Boards Through Sunday, May 6; Tickets $24 Frankly, it's a delusion that we can discuss art -- if by that we meant we could, by telling you about Cynthia Hopkins' Must Don't Whip 'Um, persuade you how good it is. Once we were talking with the sculptor Jun Kaneko about his obelisks and someone perplexedly burst out with, "Sure, but what do they mean?" Kaneko smiled and said, "If I......

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......

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......

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! There were some unintentionally funny moments, like when befuddled old geezer Spiegelman segued from talking about Will Eisner's The Spirit to Jack Cole's Plastic Man, he kept pointing......

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. Bostonist was happy they finally found an Anna Nicole Smith connection to their fair city and that an Apple Store was opening up. They were less happy that new rules have been established limiting underage shows and that their Governor is spending......

Yes, we think you will be able to spare some change, should you get panhandled by a newly-homeless Napavine family. The family, which Lewis County sheriffs are evicting from their home, owns four Bengal tigers. Now that they are homeless, they're sending two of their tigers to a rescue organization. But, the AP adds with a frustrating lack of detail, "The family is keeping two tigers with them." They're doing what now? We suppose Bengal......

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: Merle played through several of his......

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.......

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......

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......

It's the end of Week 1 of Canada's trial of the century and so far absolutely nothing has happened. The jurors have been watching a long interrogation of Pickton from way back when they thought he had killed a couple of women but didn't have evidence that said he killed a lot of women. The Vancouver Sun has clips from the interrogation: Pickton told Adam there were others involved in the killings, but then insisted......

Last March we were trying to keep a stiff upper lip as we informed you that the bill banning PBDEs, a wily fire-retardant chemical, had been stifled for another year. PBDEs are tricky because while they should just sit there and avoid catching fire, it turns out they display a proclivity for striking out on their own, and have been busy making their homes in people, even in breast milk. This is a red......

Seattle Metro Transit is reporting that 2006 was a record year for bus ridership with 103.2 million boardings and for some reason we feel like cheering this news. Yay Metro Transit, you're competently running a bus service for the city of Seattle. Way to go. The release claims that this year's numbers represent a 4.3% increase over 2005 and attributes the increase in ridership to additional jobs in the area - The previous high-ridership......

Dead-beat pet owners who refuse to pay the city's pet licensing fees are about to have a rude awakening: Seattle Animal Shelter has announced it's going to start actively policing city parks for unlicensed pets and issuing $125 tickets. On the one hand, it's another sign of the city's apparent desire to mollycoddle the citizenry by regulating every aspect of our lives; on the other, pet registration fees help fund the Seattle Animal Shelter,......

It didn't take long for Mindy Smith to bring her audience to tears Sunday night at the Moore. Armed with a slew of new tunes from her critically acclaimed second album Long Island Shores, she made no apologies for the depths of sadness in her songs. From her radio hit "Out Loud," to "Peace of Mind," we couldn't stop shedding tears. Neither, apparently, could the woman sitting next to us. When she broke into "One......

On Friday, December 29th at 10am, KEXP will begin counting down the top 90.3 albums of 2006 (does that mean 90 good albums plus one only a third of which is any good? We don't know). In the meantime, until December 26th you and everyone you know can vote for your own top five albums of the year. Seattlest Jack voted and as difficult as it was, here's his top five: 1. Neko Case -......