The last film we caught at the festival was The Visitor, written and directed by Tom McCarthy, best known for his 2003 Sundance darling The Station Agent. Like the previous film, McCarthy's sophomore piece is a well-crafted work about how people from disparate backgrounds can come together and form an unconventional family. Walter Vale, an uptight widower and bored college econ professor, has totally shut down and withdrawn from everything in his life, but......

The oddest thing about watching last night's Iowa caucus coverage along with the Sonics game is that we had one TV tuned to TNT, and one TV tuned to CNN--and Chuck Norris was on the latter one. Yes, the man who reportedly counted to infinity...twice--was standing behind Mike Huckabee with his (Norris's) ex-model wife. Huckabee's own wife, who if not model material is hardly repulsive, did not appear in your picture as Huckabee spoke about......

Conventional wisdom says these days ain't happy ones for pulp-and-print publications. Circulation's down. Ad revenues are down. Everyone wants to read online. So nearly every newspaper, magazine and television news program has a host of blogs these days, to compete with the millions of self-described experts, autodidacts, conspiracy theorists and Chuck Norris-aficionados who propagate the blogosphere with their own brand of citizen journalism (read: poor spelling and poorer grammar). Indeed, it's hard to get noticed......

For some reason no big deal is being made of the rails-to-trails thing going on right now on the Eastside. Preventing the addition of capacity to I-405 is a big deal to Seattle environmentalists, but the impending doom of a potential passenger rail corridor that runs north-south from Renton to Snohomish is of no interest. We don't get it... One guy who does get it is Chuck Mott who seems like an interesting guy.......

So we'll begin, the guy at the podium said, the huge black blast door in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Downtown Library eased down its track, slowly cutting off our view of the lobby, and we shivered. "I wish the P-I were here," said the Stranger's Josh Feit at one point. "This is what they do really well." Oddly enough, the Seattle P-I, the hands-down leader in news on the web around here, wasn't on......

Where to begin? Morning news & inbox full of depressing stuff.Wall Street Journal reports on a study showing convenience foods don't really save time. Maybe not, but they'll turn you and your family into fat, lazy slobs. Stanford study reported in Seattle Times shows that kids will eat anything if they think it comes from McDonald's, even carrot sticks. Conclusion: Mickey D does a fantastic job! Wanna sell more carrots? Hire Ronald McDonald. Times also......

The Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker showed up in the mail box yesterday and the Pacific Northwest (ok, Portland, really, but so what) is well represented. Miranda July, of Portland, has two pieces; one a short story called "Roy Spivey" and the other a recollection of summer movies called "Atlanta." It starts: From the stains on the mattress it was clear that people had died on this bed, slowly, over the course of......

Yes, technically it’s spring, but here in Seattle temperatures are still bouncing from arctic to downright balmy and almost everyone we know (including yours truly) is sick, so we’re going out on a limb and declaring Seattle safely inside the Chicken Soup Zone. Enough has been said about chicken soup’s use as a tonic for what ails you, so we don’t feel the need to rehash it here. Chicken soup makes you feel better.......

Monday BOOK CRUSH: Librarian Nancy Pearl´s latest book is Book Crush, a guide to books you loved when you were growing up. How does she know? Head over to the launch party and find out. 7-8:30pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE PETER BEAGLE SPEAKS: For the Fantastic Fiction Salon, fantasy author Peter Beagle (The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song) teaches "Dialogue Says it All." 7pm // Hugo House......

One of the weirder blog posts about the Seattle Weekly "expose" of Real Change is over at Crosscut, courtesy of ex-Weeklyite Chuck Taylor. (We'd point you to the Metblogs recap but it's fatally flawed, in that it's missing one of the seminal posts on the subject, namely ours. So no can do. But here's Real Change's take on the kerfluffle-thus-far.) Taylor's post is titled: "You don't have street cred if you can't do the......

Kid-friendly restaurants have a children's menu with macaroni and cheese and other toddler staples. They welcome families and have more than one high chair and booster seat. Most have crayons and some have craftier stuff, like Tutta Bella's wiki stix. That is usually as far as the accommodation goes--unless you frequent suburban junk food hell-holes like Chuck E. Cheese. Last night, we experienced something more...kid-welcoming...kid-happy...kid-fond. Thanks to a suggestion by Mike, we brought our daughter......

Jesse Thorn, member of sketch comedy group Prank the Dean, produces his public radio show from his own living room in Los Angeles. At first, Seattlest thought that was code for "I am unemployed and play a lot of XBox" but it turns out he actually does have a radio show (this is still ambiguous on the "unemployed" detail), and even more to the point: it is very good. For many, even those of us......

--On Tuesday the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town asked a judge to disappear the Joint Operating Agreement that tethers the Post-Intelligencer to the Seattle Times. We're not quite sure where they're going with that one yet. --Safeway burst onto the local biodiesel scene today with a pump in West Seattle. $2.85 for B20! Damn! We mean, uh, that's good that the Earth is being saved. --Replacement's replacement needs replacing on the Stranger masthead. We......

Mossback Returns! This is the most salient news item we see in the Seattle Times story on David Brewster's Crosscut, an online regional news site slated to hit the e-streets on March 12. [Brewster] has enlisted two other Seattle Weekly veterans to work on the venture. Former Weekly Managing Editor Chuck Taylor will be Crosscut's editor. Knute "Skip" Berger [aka Mossback], the Weekly's former editor-in-chief, will write for the publication. Brewster, who will be......

Yesterday, the Mariners signed closer J.J. Putz to a three-year contract with a team option for the fourth year. The contract's worth $13.1 million, and includes a $1.5 million signing bonus. We've got a feeling J.J. will just be randomly checking his balance at pretty much every ATM in the city the next couple of days. "Putz," in Yiddish, means "penis," something we learned when living in New York. Senator Al D'Amato called his 1998......

Wednesday, January 17 >>> West Side Story at Central Cinema. When we first saw the opening sequence to West Side Story, we were convinced our English teacher was playing some kind of joke. Then the Jets vs. Sharks fight sucked us in, and since then we've known the joke was on us for ever doubting the Greatest Musical Ever Made. 7pm; $10 (plays through the 21st) Thursday, January 18 >>> Carrie Clark & The......

This is Tom Landry, the greatest coach the Dallas Cowboys ever had. This is Chuck Knox, the best coach the Seattle Seahawks ever had. The met only once, on Thanksgiving Day 1986 in Dallas. The Hawks won 34-14, thereby proving that Chuck Knox was a better coach than Tom Landry. Even though Homer Simpson bought Landry’s hat in order to earn his worker's respect, and even though Sarah Vowell took a break from snooping around......

Wednesday, October 4 >>>Central Library, 6:30-8:00pm. If you've been meaning to get a better handle on stem cell research, then... Wait, let's try that again. We'll just let this event speak for its sexy self: "Regeneration Gaps: Promises, Problems and Policies in Stem Cell Research" by Charles E. (Chuck) Murry, M.D., Ph.D. His research focuses on repair of the injured heart. See? You get out of the way, the poetry comes. Free, but you're......

Things we learned at trivia last night: In the right circumstances, the Bellevue skyline (not a contradiction in terms) resembles Anchorage, Portland, Everett, Cleveland, or Cincinnati. Jessica Biel was a very unpopular choice for Esquire magazine's 2005 sexiest woman alive. (Most popular guesses: Angelina Jolie and Jessica Alba.) No one realized PowerPoint was an original Microsoft Office program. And there were not a lot of Judy Collins aficionados in the crowd. Thirteen teams turned out......

The answer is clear: Chuck Palahniuk would beat Charles Burns in a fight, if the outcome was decided by audience vote. Charles Burns, author of Black Hole is funny, local, and writes and created fantastic, morbid art. But Chuck Palahniuk, author of among other works Fight Club, opened up by tossing dozens of bottles of Wild Turkey into the audience. He followed this with a reading of Guts, a short story famous for making people......

-This item has musical accompaniment, but it's going to have to be user supplied. Hum "Taps" while you read. Today's issue of the Seattle Weekly will be the last from the intrepid Knute Berger, Chuck Taylor, George Howland, Geov Parish team. -We haven't listened to it yet, but apparently this week's Podcasting Liberally contains a discussion between Geov Parrish and Sandeep Kaushik on the theme of an alt-weekly writer's life after alt-weeklies. -We probably won't......

Even as the stores sport back to school sales (which depress us, even now), summer lingers on your friends the -ists. This week's collection of links provides some of the best, worst, and oddest bits of summer fun. So, bring your laptop up onto the roof, make yourself an umbrella drink or ten, and enjoy this week's choice posts from across the Gothamist network. Torontoist (where it's 75 degrees F as of this writing)......

There's been a lot of talk about playwright Elizabeth Heffron's decision to use "abortion" in the title of her play. We're concerned about the use of the name "Mitzi." As you no doubt know, Mitzi reached its height of popularity in the 1960s (481st out of the top 1,000 girls' names), then fell off a cliff by the 1980s, no longer in the top 1,000 at all. What was Heffron thinking, picking such an......

-Lt. Watada was charged with conduct unbecoming today for his refusal-to-deploy stunt out of Ft. Lewis and he's now facing 8 years in prison. -Rush Limbaugh will not be charged in relation to his recent Viagra dealy. -The wildfires are here early this year after the weekend's lightning storm. -The weekend's fireworks storm is burning nothing but film, though. Well, and NOAA. -Southwest is coming back to earth after their fuel hedge and ticket......

Word is that Chuck and Knute were burning the midnight oil in the Seattle Weekly metallurgical laboratory recently when an experiment intended to result in a bronze alloy went awry. The smoke cleared and three blogs with attending RSS feeds lay in the bottom of the cauldron. Should be fun. Are three blogs really necessary, though? In this corner, you have the Stranger blog containing posts on topics so various that no mere group of......

TicketBastard just emailed Seattlest HQ to tell us "Don't Miss Kenny Loggins!" And thank goodness, because Seattlest most certainly doesn't. Miss Kenny Loggins, that is. And then a wierd creepy feeling overtook us, something about Ticketmaster and this weekend...Argh, can't remember, what was it again...Look panick-stricken in the direction of Editor Dan sitting across the room, he mouths "What is wrong with you" because he's on the phone with Tom Delay trying to explain to......

Back in our freelance days, Seattlest was happy to get 50 cents a word. So imagine the triple cherries that flashed before our eyes when we learned that down in PDX you can get 250 writers for three measly bucks! This literary super value menu is Wordstock, a three-day confab that kicks off today through Sunday at the Oregon Convention Center. In addition to local folks Charles D’Ambrosio and Garth Stein and omnipresent indie publisher......

Phillyist notes a fistfight between local pols that leaves one man down for the count. Jehovah's Witnesses get a Philly contributor out of bed, things get a little geeky with a film festival and geeky gets taken to a whole new galaxy when they talk with the Dragon Queen of the Dark Kingdom. Shanghaist gets all excited this week over a new nightclub in the city unfortunately named "Snatch" and Mike Tyson is scheduled to......

Whenever a big-time sports team gets in some serious championship contention, local radio starts playing quickie novelty songs inspired by (or exploiting) the team in question. Usually some unknown artist will give a popular song the Weird Al treatment, altering its lyrics to fit the team, and often enhancing the tracks with fake play-by-play announcers and crowd cheers. The earliest example we recall is “Husky Fever,” adapted from "Boogie Fever,” the Sylvers’ #1 disco hit......

The first time we saw the Young Fresh Fellows, at the UW’s HUB Ballroom in 1989, frontman Scott McCaughey had that cryptic “poop” phrase scrawled on the face of his acoustic guitar. Near the end of the joyously ramshackle set, he smashed the instrument onstage and flung its tangled scraps over drummer Tad Hutchinson’s head. This fairly well sums up the Fellows’ brand of goofball garage-pop. Since 1982, McCaughey and co. have combined the raw......