Results tagged “christmas”

When Culinary Communion closed last month, they announced that their Lunch Counter and Swinery elements would remain open. However, Beacon Hill Blog reports that the Lunch Counter just lost its lease--and the Swinery is in an increasingly tight spot as it tries to sell its last month's worth of delicious bacon legally. Sad, but there's an upside: The Swinery is selling "Bacon Pimp" t-shirts, free with your purchase of 50 or more pounds of their bacon. Early stocking stuffer idea? We emphatically believe so.

Finally we've found a replacement for clicking updates on political polls--clicking for weather updates on Cliff Mass's blog: "There should be an inch or two by the end of the Wed. morning commute. At this point it looks like temperatures will warm up enough by midday that that the snow might turn very wet or even to rain at the lowest elevations...but we are right on the edge." Then later on Wednesday, another system is headed our way that could bring rain or a lot more snow, depends on how lucky we are. Has anyone read Cliff's book?

BAKE THINGS: Did you read Seattlest Rachael's bomb recipe for molassas cookies earlier this week? They include cardamom, which is an inspired stroke of spice. Today could be your day to try a batch of those. On Sunday, we made Orangette's nutmeg doughnut muffins, and we can highly recommend that recipe as well. Make sure you'll have a few people around to help you consume them, though--those balls of goodness are dense and rich. If you have oranges around (it's Christmas... who doesn't have oranges around?), consider adding a teaspoon or two of orange zest to them.

Seems like everyone's linking to the White House Christmas video, which this year is, yes, completely wackadoodle. But Videogum found the one Holiday-themed video that is even further off the deep end. Behold, Christmas greetings and yuletide cheer from Fred Phelps and his wacko hatemonger friends at the Westboro Baptist Church:

Being Swanson's virgins, we didn't know about the annual Reindeer Festival.

Crown Hill isn’t our favorite neighborhood, but we’ve found the perfect combination Christmas errand to warrant a visit to this forgotten corner of North Ballard. 15th Avenue NW is host to Seattlest’s favorite tree lot and is also conveniently located right on the way to the best of the "Original" Pancake Houses.* And yes, there is a best.

So you thought it was going to be a lot of work, all this holiday cooking? We know, just thinking about it can be exhausting. The spirit of fussy Martha Stewart dueling with the ghost of drop-the-turkey-on-the-floor Julia Child? Top Chef duking it out with Iron Chef? Paula Dean versus Rachael Ray? It's enough to make you send for Chinese takeout.

 

If Bret Harte was considered the American equivalent of Charles Dickens during his time, as asserted by Taproot director Karen Lund, then The Christmas Foundling (at Taproot Theatre, Tues.-Sat. until through Dec. 27; tix $20-$33, $10 under 25), a Harte-inspired Christmas tale by Norman Allen, would be the equivalent of Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Warning: First-person singular follows.

The Christ Child and the spawn of Satan, a.k.a. secularists, have been duking it out in Lakewood about who gets to claim "that major event in December involving an evergreen tree and lights on a string." Though Andrew Neiditz, the Lakewood city manager, says he wants to use inclusive language whenever possible to avoid offending non-Christians, he is firmly in Baby Jesus' camp: Neiditz declared that at least on his watch, said wintry event shall be named Christmas and said evergreen shall be named a Christmas Tree. It's the American way.

We don't have a shred of evidence for that headline; it's a gut thing. We're rollin' Jack Fuckin' Welch-style. But Citigroup research analyst Mark Mahaney does predict this will be a Kindle Christmas; he's doubled his sales estimates to nearly 400,000 units. At $359 per, that's over $136 million from a single product. Mahaney says Amazon's e-reader will bring in $1 billion by 2010. This projection is based on the Kindle selling as many units in its first year as the iPod. No one outside of Amazon knows how many that is--Mahaney is guesstimating, using in part the 4,000+ mostly positive Kindle reviews on Amazon's site, more than half of which give it 5 out of 5 stars. Our favorite contrarian response? Peter Kafka says hold on a sec: "iPod users immediately had access to thousands of songs they already owned the minute they synced their machines to their computers. And they could get anything else they wanted for free (if they chose to steal). Kindle users, however, are pretty much forced to pay $9.99 each time they want a new title."

The Seattle Men's Chorus has announced its 2008-09 season and it includes (gay gasp!) Debbie Reynolds. As a girlfriend of ours (the platonic kind) noted, "I bet those men about had a heart attack." Also in the 08-09 season: a Christmas concert called Fruitcake which, according to the press release, will be "soaked in spirits; with a bit of spice, nuts, and fruit tossed in for fun." The release also said the show will contain "music, laughter, and tears." We're not so sure what those boys will be crying about, but okay.

We're by no means theatre majors, but we do loves to get out for some culture from time to time. Which is why this Thursday we're getting dolled up for the 5th Avenue Theatre's "MAME".

Yesterday Seattlest took a few minutes out of a "working at home" day to run up to 45th and the taco truck in the Winchell's parking lot (man's gotta eat), and since the Seattlest household got a turntable for Christmas and Golden Oldies is right there we stopped in after eating (man's gotta rock out). Our record collection is pretty thin, consisting of maybe a dozen or twenty records which is great because we have absolutely no desire to amass those huge boxes of vinyl that DJ's and nerds tend to acquire, but, you know, maybe one box wouldn't be so bad. One box of rotating content, maybe?

The Seattle Times breaks the story of just how diseased college sports fans have become. The newspaper got about 1,000 emails that Husky fans sent to University of Washington president Mark Emmert, athletic director Todd Turner, and coach Ty Willingham through a public records request.

In a story that's being emailed around the city, mostly with the subject line "Dude, did your dad start jogging?", cops want to find the short, brown-haired jogger who flashed a lady while running yesterday. Writes Levi Pulkkinen of the P-I:

The woman told officers the man pulled up his white T-shirt and dropped his black running tights as he ran past her near the intersection of Wallingford Avenue North and North 54th Street.

Continue reading "The Search for the Green Lake Flasher"

Generally after the warm, fuzzy glow of our New Year's hangover wears off, Seattlest is left staring into the abyss of January without much to cling to, except our quickly fading memories of the resolutions we made and the knowledge that tax season is fast approaching.

Details are starting to leak out about the Carnation woman suspected of killing her parents, her brother and her wife, and their two kids Christmas Eve with the help of a boyfriend.

The snow started to fall in earnest around 4 o'clock yesterday, so we cut the family visit short and headed back up toward Seattle -- it was slow going but eventually the snow changed to sleet and then to rain. Up around Federal Way, traffic came to a halt, though the road was clear. We searched on "I-5 traffic" from our phone, and right away the KOMO story on the shooting came up. We were still about a mile south of the South 320th Street exit. We inched forward and passed the scene, the KIRO mobile crew's antenna towering above it all. This was where a 27-year-old man jumped out of a family vehicle on I-5, began running around hitting cars with his belt, mooning them, trying to get inside, lying in traffic. When a state trooper arrived, the man rushed at the trooper, choked him, and -- not responding to a Taser -- was shot.

Seattlest and the fiancee have a holiday tradition that manages to work out each year, even when our procrastination reaches DefCon Four: Catch the annual Christmas Ship show at Gas Works on December 23.

Alright, this photo is a little Evening Magazine for our tastes and it's got nothing to do with Christmas Eve, but screw it--we like it. Uploaded to the Flickr Pool by Timwillis.

For the tour, Ted Neeley is Jesus, as he was in the 1973 film. That means he's been playing Jesus for longer than Jesus did -- and, no disrespect intended, with more of a vocal range. (We don't recall any of the Gospels remarking on Jesus's top notes.) He's matched up against Corey Glover's Judas, who knows all about cults of personality.

This Seattlest took one look at the weather forecast and headed to sunny Florida yesterday. Now here we are in our hometown of DeLand, population 24,375 (per 2006 census). Our mother doesn't have wireless at the house, and is operating off a 1997 iMac. It's cute and compact, but slow as hell, so we headed out this morning for the one source of public wifi in town: Boston Gourmet Coffeehouse.

While trolling through today's Floor Proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives for our other job (it's an exciting one), we noticed something that will probably get no coverage anywhere else. However, we think it is important to note when Congress singles out one faith as important. We think it's doubly important to note when the vote is taken while Congress fights with the Bush Administration over funding the government for the next year, haggles...

Okay, friends and neighbors. December is a huge month for local hip-hop, and not just because of Blue Scholars' The Program. This week, Chop Suey's got you covered for Monday and Tuesday with the Parker Brothaz tonight (GMK will be there! We love that guy!) and freestyle master Eyedea & DJ Abilities tomorrow night. Over in Fremont, Nectar's offering Waves of the Mind and Gabriel Teodros/Abyssinian Creole on the 13th (there are nine acts on the bill, as a heads up) and an apparently two-night-long extravaganza featuring One Be Lo and Grayskul (along with some big name producers and djs) on the 15th and 16th.

Have you outgrown Adam Sandler, yet long for foul-mouthed, self-effacing, Jewish-themed humor? It would be too Borscht-belt to make a yarmulke and dreidl joke here, but we'll leave to your imagination to suppose we did. Tonight at the Triple Door, Good for the Jews rocks the house. Or shtetl. If that's what a shtetl is. Oy!

Bellevue is entertaining its crazed shoppers and downtown urbanites with daily holiday drum lines, snowflake lights and snow (yes, fake snow). We have seen it with our own eyes, and it is as if you chasséd on stage of a live performance of the Nutcracker. Snowflake Lane is a Bellevue tradition and is going on now until December 24, beginning at 7 p.m. daily. If shopping under fake snow doesn’t get you excited, you...

Inspired by a random iPod event at Seattlest's Thanksgiving, a friend lamented the early death of John Denver and then launched into a diatribe about how he didn't pull a Kennedy; that is, Denver wasn't a dilettante pilot. He went on to explain that Denver was an experienced pilot who owned many planes and flew often. He died, our friend claimed, when one of the fuel tanks in the experimental plane he was flying...