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......

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......

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". A short summary: An eccentric socialite in the Roaring '20s finds her madcap Manhattan lifestyle turned upside down when she is appointed guardian of her orphaned nephew. Auntie Mame takes him on one whirlwind adventure after another, proving that "life......

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......

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. At least 100 emails, say Times reporters Nick Perry, Bob Condotta, and Ken Armstrong, included threats of withholding financial support. But an email from Ed Hansen, founder of Frontier......

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. She also......

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. This year we're filing as a newly married, first-time independent contractor who bought a home last year and we're mighty worried. We liked the 1040-EZ we'd grab while dropping......

Still need to pick up some beverages for a party tonight? Don't disqualify beer from your plans just because it's not what most people drink at midnight on NYE. We know, we know....many of you like to be fancy pants when it comes to NYE and break out the champagne, even if you don't really enjoy it all that much. Hey, this Seattlest was even seen drinking champagne for the Christmas toast this year......

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 P-I got the scoop from Ben Anderson, the suspected killer's nephew and grandson of the victims.:The violence, Ben Anderson said, stemmed from a dispute over money, and a long-standing fight between Michele Anderson and her parents. He said his aunt had been......

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......

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. Seems the Argosy people that host the singers (Seattle Girls' Choir) on their ship have their own tradition: Ask the choir to sing beautiful, traditional holiday carols that everyone in attendance will recognize and sing along with no one will......

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 our money, the timing of the arrival of the Jesus Christ Superstar tour at the Paramount couldn't be better -- a day or two before Christmas, the Nativity, the whole frankincensed hoopla, you can skip to the end and see how Jesus turned out. What's the competition: the film about the musical about cannibal serial killers? Ho ho ho. For the tour, Ted Neeley is Jesus, as he was in the 1973 film. That......

Bolstering our faith in the local transit authorities, for the second time this week, the downtown bus tunnel is closed. The official reason is computer problems, as a H.A.L.-like super-brain down in the I.D. station controls the heating and ventillation, traffic signals, and zombie-workers that make possible Seattle's pathetic attempt at a subway. No word on when the tunnel will re-open, but earlier this week it was same-day; as before, tunnel lines are re-directed......

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. A couple of things about......

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......

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! A comedic indie rock duo (read: half-Flight of the Conchords, half-Sarah Silverman) featuring Rob Tannenbaum (of VH1 commentator......

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......

The Christmas ships are running, and Culinary Fool's captured them in "The Mother Ship Draws them In." We love our Flickr pool members!......

Birth of a fetish: The Register reports an unfortunate MSN messenger encounter between two young girls and Microsoft's badly programmed Santa chat bot. Apparently "RoboSanta" has "a shocking predeliction for casually dropping in that it likes to talk about a certain sex act." The Register (El Reg, below) replicated the conversation, starting out by offering St. Nick a piece of pizza: El Reg says: pizza (pi) Santa says: Yum! What do you want for......

This is the end, the end of free movies, care of Scion. Single tear. Via their Route film series, the youth-oriented car company has already tackled the true-to-life topics of blood diamonds in hip hop and nightclubbing in the late '80s NYC queer community. Now for something completely different: Daft Punk's Electroma is an odyssey of two robots who journey across a mythic American landscape of haunting, surreal beauty on a quest to become......

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......

It seems like we've been seeing a lot of plays lately with children in them. Into the Woods at the 5th Avenue had kids, and Whistle Down the Wind at the 5th Avenue and A Christmas Carol at the ACT both do. We wondered, who are these child actors? How do they find time to act when there is so much television to watch? So we had a short chat via email with Elijah Ostrow,......

Redmond native and actual Guitar Hero Carrie Brownstein did some work on the advertising of the game Rock Band. You might have seen these commercials; four rocker-lookin types sit around and cut on each other in the jaded and weary fashion of musicians on the road. That's not her work, thank god. She was on a different team pushing a different concept. Anyway, she's got an article up at Slate today about her experiences with......

This weekend Mr. and Mrs. Seattlest drove out to North Bend to cut a Christmas tree down and haul it back to Seattle. No, we didn't hike up Si with an ax and harvest a sapling, although that does sound fun. There's a tree farm out there by the name of Crown Tree Farm. It was our first time getting a tree from anywhere other than those road-side dealies or the enclosures that pop......

In the lobby of the ACT Theater, 25 minutes before curtain of A Christmas Carol, a pretty 20-something girl wearing a cute holiday sweater surveys the scene. Four Dickens Carolers are singing in lovely harmony. Children toddle by, then look back at the carolers, their eyes wide with wonder. Garland and lights are everywhere. The 20-something's face spreads into a wide smile. She turns to her boyfriend and stage-whispers: "I love this!" What's not to......

Until the day after Thanksgiving, Seattlest hadn't seen The Nutcracker -- probably the world's most famous ballet -- in years. But we had a solid image in our head of what it looked like because when Seattlest was a little kid, our mom made an annual birthday tradition to see it every year on opening night. For much of our childhood, this meant getting all spiffed up and walking a few blocks to Lincoln......

Retailers have been slopping their Christmas come-ons into the weeks before Thanksgiving since at least 1986--that's the earliest citation Word Spy has for "Christmas creep," the retailers' own term for the phenomenon. The exception: local customer-service nirvana Nordstrom. As reported on Consumerist and elsewhere, Nordstrom hasn't put up their Christmas decorations yet. But they have posted signs explaining why: "We just like the idea of celebrating one holiday at a time." Reaction is mostly positive.......