Today was a bad day for the stock market, a bad day for Washington oyster farmers, and a bad day to be a crack dealer--but it was a great day to fly the friendly skies, as the Blue Angels delighted the masses (and snarled traffic). more ›

Chalk one up for the SPD narcotics unit and Belltown's spandex-clad bike teams this weekend, as they brought down a large and highly organized Honduran drug dealing ring that had been corralling the crack-cocaine market in the neighborhood. Known to hide the packaged drugs in their mouths--gross--the small army of Honduran drug dealers had been pushing out the Belltown "regulars," and commanding the street corners since January 2009 (apparently they began in Queen Anne, clearly not their scene). Typically, we tend to bitch about Belltown, but for good reason, the crazy bums, the lack of police presence, naaaasty garbage dumpsters and oh yes, drug trafficking. So, it's relief to see serious action being taken. Current score: 30 dealers arrested, 22 left to go. more ›

Have you been following the Belltown crackdown on crack "controversy"? Guy named Brett Paulson, barman at Txori, thinks it's so bad that the mayor needs to call in the State Patrol. We're not saying that the corner of Second & Bell isn't a bit, well, dodgy, especially in the wee hours, but c'mon, gang. The last person killed in Belltown was a tourist who got flipped out of a runaway pedicab and run over by a minivan, nothing to do with crack, but the vigilantes would have you believe there's gunfire nightly. more ›

We understand you're upset, Belltown. What, with all these drug deals going on right outside your high-rise condos. You've video-taped and photographed the deals going down, you've created a YouTube channel and taken your complaints to local blogs and newspapers...and still it doesn't stop. Maybe that's because the drug dealers and users in Belltown were there long, long before the condos and well before the neighborhood was given its trendy name. more ›

more ›

An armed man was forcibly subdued in the lobby of a downtown hotel this weekend after an alarmed ex-girlfriend alerted staff that the man had a gun and intended to use it. The altercation, which involved as many as four employees, escalated into a full-fledged wrestling match as the suspect became violent and refused to hand the firearm over. more ›

This is the coolest collection of random, old Seattle photos we’ve ever stumbled upon while not working at work. For anyone who can’t imagine 3rd and Pine before crack, or the masochistic liberal who wants to marvel at a time when people would have paraded massive, old growth firs down the street in celebration, this is your time capsule. more ›

Baby, it’s getting cold outside. Not that we need that excuse, but the nip in the air has us craving something volcanic. Time for some soon-doo-boo chigae. more ›

If you’re gonna make an album with orchestral arrangements care of living legend composer Van Dyke Parks, you’re gonna have to go all out to perform it right. That’s why the first half of super English major/elven queen Joanna Newsom’s grandiose show last night at Benaroya Hall featured the accompaniment of local 29-piece chamber orchestra the Northwest Sinfonia to cover her last full-length, the epic five-song masterpiece Ys ("ees"). It’s not hard to recreate a lushly recorded album when you’ve got the combination of the Sinfonia, Newsom’s three-person touring group---which she’s termed the "Ys Street Band"---and Newsom plucking complex polyrhythms (and making it look easy) on an ornate harp, itself a work of art. more ›

And every ego will be crushed more ›

Real estate search engine Rotten Neighbor promises to help you "find bad neighbors before you move." What evils have users uncovered behind the closed doors of the Emerald City? more ›

For those (like Seattlest) who are too lazy to actually visit in person the South Lake Union coffee shop Kapow! to get their S.L.U.T. tee shirts (which they may or may not even have), they are now available online. more ›

It's been a few short weeks since we shared our friend's tasting notes on Bacon Salt. Since then, we're sure you've ordered several jars and whipped up any number of tasty bacon-salty recipes. more ›

more ›

We had an AHA! moment last night when we first started hearing about the Veggie-Booty-and-salmonella mash-up. The P-I reports:

More than 50 people in 17 states, mostly children age 3 and younger, were infected with salmonella bacteria after eating Veggie Booty, according the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Web site.

Mark Siano has been performing in Seattle for over ten years (with stops in New York, LA, and most recently the Orlando Fringe Festival!). His new show ‘The Mark Siano Soft Rock Spectacular’ plays this weekend at Re-bar, and features soft rock, dance, and comedy. more ›

German squirrels are roaming Berlin on a murderous rampage. more ›

Through June 10 // McCaw Hall // Tickets $18-$145 more ›

Wasn't that long ago, matey, we'd be lucky to see fresh salmon in Seattle. Bristol Bay had a huge sockeye fishery, the largest in the world, but the catch was frozen stiff before it made it to local markets. Now, we're spoiled silly, with fresh, wild salmon coming in from the mouths of rivers all along the Alaska coast: the Yukon, the Taku, the Stikine and, best of all, the Copper. more ›

This month Seattlest Book Club is reading Seattle-born and -raised Pauls Toutonghi's debut novel Red Weather, just out in paperback from Random House. You'll get a discount if you buy it at Bailey-Coy or Santoro's. more ›

We randomly checked out the Walkmen and Kaiser Chiefs show at the Showbox last night, mostly in the dark about their work. Although we had seen the Walkmen live once before, we couldnt remember if they had made much of an impression. During the opening, a friend summed up their sound as "like the Strokes except not irritating." That's a good enough summary although we'd swap out the Strokes with Rod Stewart, who Walkmen lead singer Hamilton Leithauser sounds exactly like and if you don't agree then fuck you. more ›

Somehow, we don't expect many people to be reading Seattlest this afternoon (and honestly, if you are right now, please stop and run outside while you can). We'll use the gorgeous weather as a touchpoint for our brief initial comments on Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: Thank god we don't live in the Midwest. That aside, so far we're enthralled with Egan's ability to craft historical figures into living, breathing characters with better depth than we find in a great deal of fiction. He's working a small bit of Lost magic on us, introducing a range of characters all drawn into small-town Dalhart--a once unpopulated stretch of the Texas-Oklahoma panhandle that experienced a sudden boom thanks to deceit and false promises from greedy land developers and a federal government desperate to settle what had been known forever as "No Man's Land." more ›

But we here at Seattlest all but exist to report and kvetch about this stuff, and despite it all, we love living in the city. So it was with a mixture of empathy and amusement that, over the course of the last week, we watched a series of reports pop into our inbox from a good friend going through hell over a stolen car. It's one of those stories that epitomizes life here in Seattle: crack heads, useless cops, endearing neighbors, and even an act of courage. This is the sort of story that human-interest reporters live on; we're not public interest reporters, though, so we're just going to let the people involved tell the story in their own words as it happened. more ›

Bill Scott died Sunday. As Bill the Beerman, he was Seattle's most recognizable sports figure in the early-80s. Him or Jack Sikma. more ›

Seattlest got our first chance to stick our fingers in the Viaduct's wounds this weekend courtesy of a WSDOT walking tour. Unless you're the type to sign up for a St Patrick's Day 15,000 K fun run or something like that opportunities to walk around on the Viaduct's road bed are few and far between, so this tour was greatly appreciated. On Saturday morning we met at the 1st and Columbia onramp to collect our hard hat, safety vest and donuts. Maybe ten or fifteen of us formed a group and WSDOT guy Ali Amiri marched us out onto the roadway. When we took Ali's picture he said, "Oh, no. This isn't for some website is it?" The world can read Seattlest like a book. more ›

A friend of ours just told us a little story today about how her Marine boyfriend, recently back from a tour of duty in Iraq, tried to break up a drunken fight a couple months ago outside the Jack in the Box at Broadway and Denny. Our soldier in question was out late one night with a drunken friend, who decided that what he needed most out of life was the thrill of throwing orange traffic cones in to the street, and then inevitably one of these hit a passing car. The offended driver jumped out to kick some ass, but the man's obesity handicapped his ass-kicking abilities and soon the lard-ass found himself on the ground under the fists of the drunken cone-thrower, who managed to successfully rip the fat bastard's shirt off. Our Marine -- unscathed from his deployment to the Middle East -- intervened to break up the fight, only to have the fat man's girlfriend jump out of the car and punch him in the face, slicing the flesh around his eye with her ring. If surviving the Sunni/Shiite conflict gives one a justified sense of confidence bordering on invulnerability, then take heed: Don't fuck with porked-out pears while in such close proximity to the hallowed grounds of Jack in the Box, for they are the protected chosen people enjoying magical defenses near their promised land. more ›

Steve Jobs just unveiled the new iPhone in his keynote speech at Macworld in San Francisco. If you're a Mac freak you already know this because you've been sucking down the Mac Insider streaming coverage like crack through a straw. If not, would you just lookit this thing? more ›

--Turns out 1% of the best hotels in the world are in the Seattle area. more ›

There are those who espouse the theory that "experiences" make better gifts than things (does Deja Vu offer gift certificates?), but we're not above worshiping material goodies ourselves. Either way, Seattlest wants you to give good, yummy, thoughtful things--tangible or experiential--to those you love and so over the next couple of weeks, we'll offer our local picks for things to pick up. more ›

The premise of last night's technology event Ignite Seattle was simple. Get into groups and spend a half an hour building bridges out of popsicle sticks, stand on them until they break, and then listen to a bunch of super short presentations. It worked. We learned so much about happenings in and around the Seattle tech world we feel like we leveled up like twenty times. Really, we had high expectations --enough so that we became a sponsor-- and those expectations were consistently exceeded: We thought it would be well-attended and it was packed. We thought the geeks would build a few popsicle-stick bridges that could withstand the weight of a team member and almost all of them did (although not the bridge that we helped with - sorry guys). Most importantly, we thought the presentations would be short enough to not get boring and they were universally exciting and full of ideas and we didn't want a single one of them to end so quickly. more ›