Results tagged “corruption”

Our sister site Chicagoist has been rocking and rolling on the Rod Blagojevich story all morning. The Illinois Governor was taken into federal custody on corruption charges, and Chicagoist went straight to the profanity-laced complaint that has multiple, wiretapped instances of Blago making what sound like illicit "deals." Discussing Obama's vacant Senate seat, Blago said: "I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing. I’m not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there." Then they live-blogged the arrest press conference, took a hard look at Blago's Chief of Staff, and went hunting the web for all the Blago news fit to pixelize. While they were doing all that, we discovered Capitol Hill's Joe Bar has new crepe-making hours for December. Now the deliciousness begins at 7:30 a.m. Make a note of it.

The most senior (and it's said most powerful) Republican in the U.S. Senate, Ted Stevens was indicted by a federal grand jury for not mentioning the $250,000 in labor and materials he received from a construction company. Veco Corp. actually lifted Stevens' house in the air while a new first floor was built, and no money changed hands. They also threw in a Viking grill. If you have had any remodeling done lately, you know that's a pretty sweet deal. Normally, you pay contractors through the nose, and to get them to finish before your kids start calling the hotel "home," you throw in the grill.

(This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs.)

Starbucks, give 'em credit, is able to do more than one thing at a time. Mark of maturity, that. The papers are full of its plans to expand into every corner of the globe; this week it's Russia. On the domestic front, meantime, they're promoting a slogan to follow up on last year's "Geography is a Flavor." The new catchphrase: "Coffee is Culinary."

The food news may seem depressing, but there's hope. Bear with us.

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys."

Memorial Day weekend is finally behind us, so it's time to settle into SIFF. Yes, it's absolutely lovely outside, but Seattleites can only handle so much sun. Get away from all that UVA/UVB exposure and spend your time in the theaters' comfortable darkness.

Somehow, the world of -ists managed to make it through the week despite news that Jen & Vince broke up.

Occidental Square has always been kind of awesome and uniquely Seattle, to this writer at least. It's walled in yet open, yet cluttered, yet ordered. There's a distinctive sense of wood, but the predominant building material is stone or brick. There are no people, but there are trees! Have you ever been to a square in Europe? They're great in their own quaint little way, but they're somewhat of a celebration of treelessness. "Hell yeah there was a forest here when we showed up - We fucking hacked it down and replaced it with all these cobble stones and scary churches and shit." That kind of thing was cool a few centuries ago.

The Seattle Town Hall is officially On Notice, for having the Elizabeth Kolbert Science Series lecture in the basement. Far too many people were interested in her lecture based on her climate change writing--we were third in line when they locked the doors and turned us away, and the line was still snaking around the corner. They're not quite Dead to Me, because Seattle Channel is filming Kolbert's talk, and will broadcast it online sometime soon for all to see for free.

DCist helps us make more sense of the world this week. Posts like this concert review are the reason for Scott Stapp. DCist also enumerates the reasons for playing ultimate frisbee, Condi’s tight buns, their love of a local convenience store, and their jealousy of a person in Seattle calling the city.