Another beautiful photo from Seattlest Flickr contributor Tim Willis Yesterday's stormy weather left over 35,000 homes in Western Washington without power. Nearly 20,000 of the homes affected were in Seattle and South King County. The National Weather Service warned of gusts of over 55 mph yesterday and, while it's no scientific measure, the windows of our house were rattling and the power flickered more than once last night. Thankfully, it never went out. The Washington......

On this, the 26th day of March, it was snowing at 8pm on Capitol Hill--and it was even sticking to cars, to the grass, to the trees. WTF? It is nearly April, right? One more snowy pic after the jump.......

You can't quite tell from today's weather, but it's the first day of spring. Pike Place Market celebrated this seasonal milestone with their 11th annual Daffodil Day. We spent a couple of hours downtown, at our station in front of Pacific Place, handing out our share of 30,000 daffodils to complete strangers. We quickly discovered that there are two types of people in Seattle: those who brighten up when presented with free flowers on......

THEATRE: Young Jean Lee's Theater Company presents Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven (A Show about White People in Love), which is an aggressively exotic title for someone raised in Pullman, WA.Writer/director Young Jean Lee's worst nightmare was to make a confessional, ethnic identity play with a flowery Asian-sounding title. So, the young NYC-based artist did just that [...] a character named "Korean-American" navigates increasingly disturbing levels of a pseudo-Korean world intercut with......

Boom! Governor Gregoire comes right out of the gate at the new legislative session with a new bill laying "the groundwork for concrete limits on greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2012." And, in just four short (or long, depending on how you look at it) years, the bill "would give the state Department of Ecology the authority to regulate those emissions," reports the P-I. The main thing is that "big polluters" in Washington State would......

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......

Seattlest loves the planet with a lusty and soulful passion. Just wanted to say that up front. But the Green stuff is getting to be too much. Maybe we should say "greenwashing" as, of course, we have no problem with actual, beneficial efforts to protect the Earth. You want to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, compost in your kitchen and load your groceries into your little burlap sack, fine. It's gonna take you a hell of......

We gotta admit to being kind of a sci-fi nerd. We own all the Star Wars movies in most of their various formats and edits, have read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels numerous times (including the atrocious Mostly Harmless), and actively seek out any books and films that depict any kind of a dystopic view of our future. So when we heard that yet another cut of Blade Runner was playing......

A few weeks ago, Nobel Prize Laureate and co-discoverer of DNA Dr. James Watson blew through town, reflecting on how he's stayed away from stupid people, then delving into his now-customary slurry of sexist patois. Apparently he waited until he got across the pond to London to pull out the big guns:The 79-year-old geneticist said he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that......

Remember SimCity? Seattlest had some incredible towns built in that game, with commercial and residential districts packed full of shiny, tall towers and trains and street traffic all flowing as effortlessly as rivers. Scroll way over to the left to the edge of the city grid; now that is a healthy industrial district, perfectly bisected by a pollution-eating green belt. The landmarks sprouted everywhere and the money and accolades poured in. Of course, it took......

I love Al Gore and I was really looking forward to seeing him talk at Town Hall on Monday night, but I was under no illusions that I would get to see him announce that he was running for President. I fell for that one before. When Barack Obama came through town on a book tour I got in a blood-boiling, fist-pumping frenzy for some kind of announcement, but what I got was a tepid......

This weekend the National Weather service is calling for mid-70s to 80 degrees. You may want to recover from heatstroke by rehydrating in an air-conditioned theater with other bepinkenned Seattleites, and their melanin-endowed friends savoring their little moment of schadenfreude. (Here's the Seattle Times cheat sheet on the various venues.) · We caught the press screening for the not entirely laugh-free Death at a Funeral with a friend who said, summing up Frank Oz's......

EXTINCTION SCIENCE: UW professor of biology and earth and space sciences Peter Ward is the author of Under a Green Sky. In it, Ward explains how the Permian extinction more than 200 million years ago did in more than 90 percent of all species and nearly 97 percent of all living things. Whatever the trigger event was, his research on mollusk fossils indicates that the wipe-out was caused by a familiar pair of culprits: rising......

TONIGHT at Meany Hall, it's "Climate Change and the Future of Life on Earth," a two-hour multi-media presentation designed to freak your climatological shit out. It stars the world-famous paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and environmental activist: Dr. Richard Leakey. Shazam! (What? We never get to say "Shazam"!) Author of The Sixth Extinction, Dr. Leakey will talk "about our impact on the environment"...um, no, he's gonna open up a can of knowledgifying whup-ass is what. The Sixth Extinction......

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......

THIS MONTH we've been talking about Seattle author Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time. We went over the big plow-up of the prairie, the hard-scrabble living, and Egan's decision to tell the story novelistically, rather than textbookily. NEXT MONTH we're reading Seattle native Pauls Toutonghi's novel Red Weather. To join in, visit Bailey Coy Books on Capitol Hill, or Santoro's Books in Greenwood, and ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount. That's right, a......

This Saturday offers at least three ways to make a difference in Seattle, or at least look like you care whilst furthering your own selfish interests. Start things off at the Egyptian Theater for the SIFF volunteer meeting from 10am to noon. This is your best opportunity to learn about all the different jobs that you can do to pitch in for the festival. It's also a good way to get a few good......

They can handle uncertainty--it is a professional requirement, in fact--but they tend to avoid speaking about their research unless they are very certain about something. (At least the good ones do.) Increasingly so, the precision and certainty of science are being put on trial on a public scale never before experienced. And to a degree, the admirable tendency of scientists to demand certainty is in conflict with our need as the public to potentially act......

Monday LESS IS MORE: In Trance of Scarcity: Stop Holding Your Breath and Start Living Your Life, Victoria Castle asks why we feel that nothing is ever enough. Castle's book shows us how to escape this malaise and become more relaxed and alive. Hopefully it doesn't involve crisscrossing the U.S. on a book tour. 7pm // Third Place Books // FREE NATURE WRITING: Robert Michael Pyle's Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps......

Monday SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES: Art Spiegelman's 1992 Holocaust tale Maus (based on a true story) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a comic book. Its success paved the way for the graphic novels thriving today and led to Spiegelman's ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) gathers his recent broadsheets of disenchantment with the war on terror. 7:30pm // Benaroya Hall // Tickets:......

Sightline's Eric de Place celebrated his own private Kyoto on Friday by congratulating the region for their collective environmental work. British Columbia, which has been slow to catch up with even the rest of Canada, has finally been pushed in the right direction by the Prime Minister's recent green initiative talk. Oregon's governor Ted Kulongoski has recently said that he wants the state to become the "clean energy capital of the nation" and released an......

That was the clear message at Benaroya Hall last night, where New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert presented a sampling of the climate change research she covers in her much-lauded book (Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change), and then joined a few colleagues on-stage for a panel discussion. Touching on a few of the main locations and research findings from her book, the punchline is a real punch in the gut, or......

MUSIC: Yeah, we're really not sure about this, it could go either way, but the Crocodile is hosting a Disney cover night, featuring members from Catch, Kane Hodder, Pris, and a bunch of other acts. That's right. Disney covers. If it fails, it should fail in a uniquely horrifying manner. 9pm // Crocodile Cafe // $7 SPEAKING: Come learn about the horrible ways in which you and your children will live and die as John......

There's no such thing as a free ride. This week in speaking happenings is bursting with free-for-alls, but beware the "hidden costs" lurking beneath. Wednesday, December 6 >>>DORKBOT, 7:30pm. We love the name, but saying that they plan to "discuss their innovative approach to immersive, participatory entertainment" doesn't hide the fact that this will be geeks talking about videogames. Free, but only if you know the secret code: 'Knock knock, who's there?' 'Um, dorks?' 'Come......

Wednesday, November 29 >>>Third Place Books, 7:00pm. Another weighty tome, Unreleased Beatles by Richie Unterberger, to add to your Beatles-only reference section. It details the shitload of stuff that was recorded but, you know, forgotten about what with being so high at the time, plus the whole headtrip with Yoko. Free with OCD collecting disorder. >>>University Bookstore, 7:00pm. Elizabeth George backtracks: in her last Inspector Lynley mystery, the Inspector's wife was killed. In What......

A few weeks back we suggested you might lay off the local salmon, you know keep your mercury levels in check and all that good stuff. However, in even more doomsday-ish news, some marine biologists are concerned that we might not have fish to avoid eating within the next 40 years. A group of Nova Scotia researchers used data from the Vancouver BC-based Sea Around Us project to analyze almost 500 million records of catch......

Wednesday, November 1 >>>Benaroya Hall, 7:30pm. Seattle Arts and Lectures brings prolific big shot and errant van survivor Stephen King by. Maybe you’ve heard of him? For the Constant Reader, it’s an event not to be missed. He'll talk about Lisey’s Story, his latest novel. Tickets $25 and $35. But, like many things in King’s Dark Tower world, they’ve already moved on. >>>University Temple Methodist Church, 7:00pm. Keeping with the All Soul's Day theme,......

Temperature is a skilled communicator, even in small doses. Under normal circumstances, minute changes we might not notice are essential for sparking bird migration; more extreme fluctuation is the very heart of concerns regarding what long-term havoc climate change could wreak on our environment. Yesterday evening while walking our dogs, we tuned into temperature. The quality of the air had shifted, but nearly imperceptably so. Our neighbhorhood was bustling with the usual activity of football......

College baseball is dominated by teams in sunny states, for good reason. It's played from January to June. Not many guys clamor to spend four Marches playing ball in cold, rainy Oregon and Washington. So recruiting top talent is very hard. The weather, we'd have thought, provides an insurmountable obstacle to winning a college baseball championship. Evidently that's not the case. The Northwest's own Oregon State Beavers won the NCAA baseball championship last night.......

Peak Oil isn't a story to frighten just kids with anymore. Adults are getting in on it, too. We missed seeing doom-and-gloom purveyor James Howard Kunstler deliver his patented jeremiad at Town Hall last Sunday, but the good news is he's going to be popping up like Caddyshack molehills on the Seattle Channel throughout June. The title of his blog, Clusterfuck Nation, gives you some idea of how he's raised the tone of his discourse......