Are food safety and food tasty mutually exclusive goals? You have to ask after both Zesto's and Wild Ginger show up on the P-I's list of Seattle's dirtiest restaurants. Zesto's, the venerable burger joint of 15th N.W. and 65th, has the most "red critical" violations of any restaurant in Seattle this year: 15. Frankly, if it takes 15 red critical violations to get the yumminess into their burgers and shakes, we will assume the risk.......

In November, Mike Hamilton adds this racist joke political commentary to his notorious Uncle Sam billboard: In December, massive floods dunk that section of I-5 into suspiciously biblical amounts of water. Co-inkydink? Or is someone "up there" even more displeased with Hamilton's latest message than everyone else who's seen the billboard?......

Of that much, we are certain, given Ted Miller's nine hundred word essay on Christal Morrison's "killer looks." First off, he's right. The girl is absolutely stunning -- in that bible school, girl-next-door kind of way. In fact, we'll readily admit that when we saw her smiling face on the front page of this morning's PI, we cut straight to page D1 for the full-size photo. Yeah, she's not bad. After cooling ourselves off with......

Attention Pearl Jam fans and Flatstock attendees: You need the new, superfancy art book Pearl Jam vs Ames Bros: 13 Years of Tour Posters. The book is a compendium of the band's 1995-2007 gig posters by artists Ames Bros and Brad Klausen, PJ's exclusive print-design minds. Though (sadly) it doesn't date back to the Golden Days of Grunge, at 229 posters, it's an exhaustive collection. But it isn't just poster reproductions. Pearl Jam vs......

Someone just forwarded Seattlest the coolest Washington State ferry pictures of all time saying they were embedded in an email going around the office. We'll paste them all below, in order and with the authors commentary intact. If you took these or if you know of a place online where we can link to these, please email Seattlest. [UPDATE: We've been directed to the Bitter End blog, although he didn't take them either. Ross Fotheringham......

On a recent Wednesday morning, Seattlest was exiting Vivace on Denny with our clergy mother, happily discussing something secular. As we descended the ramp, Seattlest noticed a group of five thirty- and forty-somethings trailing past, each with a Bible in hand. We grew confused and a little nervous. After all, this has been our haunt for a solid year now and this was the first group of Bible-toting folk we've seen there yet. That would......

We've been trying to keep abreast of the latest strike news via the networks as well as our singular Canadian television channel down here but both the quantity and quality of coverage has been most unsatisfying. So we took matters into our own hands. (Confidential to Metroblogging Vancouver: If you don't provide any sort of contact address, we cannot reach you for guest/expert commentary.) We contacted The Vancouverite because we believe in their attractive......

Lisa See is the author of the megabestselling novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a book that received so many good reviews that we decided not to read it out of pique. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a historical novel based on the true story of women in rural China who created and used a secret writing system to communicate with each other. Her new novel, Peony in Love, is about a......

We hadn't originally planned on taking Little Miss Seattlest along on our sneak preview of Roq La Rue's latest show, Venus, but we got some art criticism out of her. "Pretty," she said of Joshua Petker's "There Is a Light that Will Never Go Out." Isabel Samaras' "Black Venus"? "Nudies." Further clarification: "No bra on." Double true. Most of the rest of her commentary involved asking "What's that, Daddy?" as we walked from painting......

Stravinsky125 @ PNB Through June 10 // McCaw Hall // Tickets $18-$145 The big thing on PNB's Stravinsky-celebrating program is State of Darkness, a 34-minute solo choreographed by Molissa Fenley. We saw Jonathan Porretta, but the casts change. The music is Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, and in contrast to the "pagan sacrifice" orchestral theatrics, Fenley emphasizes solitary ritual and the limits of human endurance. A movement sequence (nothing showy, nothing too aerial) is presented, the......

1) How did you get the picture of Segway mom? Spare us no detail! I had arrived at work (at the Pacific Northwest Ballet) at about 10am. At about 10:30, my co-workers started yelling, “Jen, Jen, you have to come see this!!!” Generally when this is called out, by the time you get there, whatever the spectacle was has since ended. This time, this was not the case. When I first saw Segway Mom she......

Somehow, we figured we just might meet up with Editor Dan on last Saturday's Viaduct tour. So it was no surprise when he called out our name and we saw him and Mrs. Seattlest walking our way. After filling up on coffee and donuts (thanks WSDOT!), we all went up the Columbia Street ramp. We took some pictures, 14 of which follow the cut along with some of our commentary. The full set, which contains......

Howard Schultz is probably enjoying his first relaxing day in a while today after the Starbucks shareholder's meeting yesterday. At least, he finally had a chance to explain to everyone just what the hell he was talking about with that whole memo thing. You remember the memo--we're talking about the one where he complained that Starbucks had lost its way in the name of growth and had become a cookie cutter retail chain that was......

Well, we're finished with World War Z, which means we'll finally have time to pick up Jonathan Raban's Surveillance and that some lucky souls at the library will move up a notch on the hold list. Surveillance, of course, is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on......

Ditto what the Stranger said, unfortunately - This show did kinda suck. The crowd seemed really excited about The Blow, but they came out and delivered what was more of a staged representation of a high-energy show (complete with self-referential commentary: "This is the part where I do such and such!" Such and such occurs.) than an actual high-energy show. And when we say "they" we actually mean "she." The Blow is supposed to......

Charges against Marie Robinson have been dropped and she'll probably be turned over to a state mental hospital. Marie Robinson was facing murder charges after authorities arrived at her apartment to find her drunk with two of her three children starved to death - a 6-week-old and a 16-month-old died (although she believes they were "kidnapped by a secret police agency that wants to stop her from doing scientific research"). Her 2-year-old lived by eating......

MUSIC: Kled, with a lineup that boasts some of our favorite band names in town, including A Gun that Shoots Knives and We Wrote the Book on Connectors. 9pm // the High Dive // $5 NERDS: Flashback to your middle school days of trying to talk to girls and spending too much time in the bathroom with the JC Penney catalog (you know, the phone-book-size one with all the super hot 18-hour bras) as Wing-It......

We returned to the homeland over the holidays. Lugged skis and snowboards to the land of 3.2 beer, special garments, and the "Greatest Snow on Earth" only to find they had half the snow base compared to what we have here. Everything seemed backwards. We picked up the local weekly, which feels smarmily like Seattle's version as so many do (albeit, sadly, the SLC web version makes the Weakly look divine). And what do people......

The PI's John Cook offered the best short summary of what's new at Zillow in his Venture Blog today: Big changes at Zillow.com today, with the company overhauling its Web site to include user-generated for sale listings, a real estate wiki and a new service called "Make Me Move" that allows any home owner to set a dream price for their home on the site. You can get more sober and insightful discussion from Zillow's......

Well, that was weird. We like the Cat Power, don't get us wrong. But, in retrospect, we would have skipped Chan Marshall's set at the Showbox last night. We wish she had. It all started with her complaining about wearing size 26 pants when she's really a 28. "I fucked up," she said, dryly. (We thought that was banter but she kept hitching her pants up all set long, even unzipping them onstage, a......

Wednesday, November 15 >>>UW iSchool at Kane Hall, 7:00-9:00pm. "Voices in an Empty Room: Five Apologies for the Narrative": Children's author Richard Peck discusses his writing and teaching careers, and his experiences with the kids today. He'll read from On The Wings Of Heroes, his new novel about a World War II childhood. Free with RSVP. Kane Hall, Rm. 220. >>>Third Place Books, 7:00pm. We saw this book talk about adoptive parents and thought......

What's the kindest thing you can say about the Empty Space Theatre closing its doors after 35 years? It can't be this, in the comments section over on the Stranger's Slog: No more life support for dying theaters. E[mpty] S[pace] should have gone under 10 years ago. Creative destruction is important to arts scenes. Energy that could have gone into pulling together a new theater was dumped into propping up a dying one. That......

We caught one of those Sound of Young America stand up shows the other night at the Rendezvous, featuring three openers - ranging in quality from okay to just slightly less than great - followed by the hilarious, bordering-on-genius headliner Brent Weinbach. Someone named "Brian Palmer" accurately summed up Weinbach's surreal schtick better than we ever could in this intro to his interview with him from last year: Onstage Brent Weinbach holds the microphone......

No story or snide blog commentary, we just thought this was a cool photo.......

Seattle baseball fans will be watching Oakland vs. Detroit in the ALCS to see if ex-Mariner Carlos Gullien can exact revenge on the A's for giving the Mariners a colossal asshole-drubbing this season, and to listen to former Mariners manager/savior, Lou Pinella, provide colorful commentary on FOX. The rest of the country, however, will tune in to witness the battle that will once and for all decide which television show was the best of the......

Friday night's performance by Dorky Park at On the Boards was surreal on many fronts. Seattlest was running late for the show, and as we screamed past Queen Anne Ave N. on Roy street with zero idea where we'd be able to park, someone pulled out of a street parking spot one block from OtB. We slid into the spot and then into the theater, where we promptly scored a seat dead-center in the fifth......

We sat down to write something about congress's attack on internet gambling and the parallels to Washington state's recent anti-online poker legislation, but a few quick Google searches that started out as "research" morphed into an hour of Texas Hold 'Em. An hour, it turns out, is exactly as long as it takes a complete idiot to lose $1000 of play money at a poker table. Congress's bill doesn't explicitly prohibit online gambling like our......

If you go see only one play about possibly pedophiliac priests this year, we can heartily recommend you make it John Patrick Shanley's Doubt. Shanley's play, set the year after Zapruder's Zoomatic became famous, pulls you back into the context of a much different time, when nuns wore habits, the Catholic Mass was a mumbled Latin, and the priesthood enjoyed a less tarnished status. While Shanley's Pulitzer and Tony-winning play complicates its story's facts,......

Ron Fairly is not a good baseball announcer. He repeats himself, his commentary is full of non-sequiturs ("if that ball were hit a little higher, it would've been a home run!"), he can't actually do play-by-play at all...we've poked fun at him before. Fairly's verbal bobbles are legendary--here's a compendium. But when we heard yesterday afternoon that Red's retiring at the end of the season, we were very, very sad. The guy's been a Mariner......

Answers will be forthcoming this afternoon, along with final standings and any other information we feel like we can cram into a post. In the meantime, entertain yourself with the questions from last night's quiz at the Old Pequliar: Round 1: Geography 1) What is the busiest airport in Europe, measured by passenger traffic? 2) What glacier created Lake Washington, Puget Sound, and Green Lake? 3) What country is home to the tallest skyscraper in......