Results tagged “detroit”

Not only does Detroit's last place baseball team sweep other last place teams (ours), they also have teams that make the postseason.

(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.)

Well, that was spectacular. From the heady days of August 25th, when the M's were three up in the wild card and only one back in the division, had won two straight in Texas, when we were all excited about Blue-za-palooza or whatever the fuck it was...to now, after 11 losses in 12 games, when we're all pretty much in wait 'till next year mode.

The Detroit Cobras make hard-rocking versions of R&B and soul classics utterly devoid of irony. On their latest album, this year's Tied and True, the female-fronted Motor City five-piece run the gamut, covering such greats as Bettye LaVette, Leadbelly, Tammi Terrell, The Equals, and Little Willie John.

The Detroit Cobras, from the selfsame city, mix the old and the new, combining the sounds of Motown girl groups with raw garage rock. With their tough chick singer Rachel Nagy (and female guitarist Mary Ramirez), the Cobras are kinda like a certain big-haired British trainwreck minus the trackmarks. LA Weekly said it loud and clear: "No offense to Amy Winehouse, but it was the Cobras [and] Rachel Nagy who first reinvented the 60s soul-pop diva as a boozy, punk-informed, smart-mouthed chanteuse in the late 90s."

The combination of a Mariner win and losses by both New York and Detroit last night meant that the Mariners leapfrogged 'em both and woke up today as the leader for the American League Wild Card!

At work the other day, Seattlest was talking to a coworker and friend who originally hails from Minnesota. Naturally, we talked of the bridge collapse. As one would expect these sorts of conversations to go, the conversation logically ended with us looking up the coordinates for the northernmost point in Maine.

Neither making the NFL Hall of Fame as a fourth-round pick or crushing Mike Harden could've prepared Seahawks legend Steve Largent for the opponent he faces now: Google.

Got an email from a friend the other day: "My boss says he's officially back on the Mariners bandwagon."

--A former Redmond church leader is being charged with child rape.

Vitals: 24 yo RHP. Born in Manakin Sabot, VA. 6-5, 200. 19-12, 3.66 career. 2-1, 2.75 in 2007. $1.03 million salary.

Vitals: 29 yo LHP. Born in Wichita, KS. 6-2, 225. 36-43, 4.44 career. 3-1, 2.48 in 2007. $3.26 million salary.

Vitals: 24 yo RHP. Born in Kennewick, WA. 6-2, 220. 46-53, 4.67 career. 1-0, 3.69 in 2007. $4.5 million salary.

We knew that Carlos Guillen's 2001 bout with tuberculosis was serious, but until we read this feature by Jon Paul Morosi (formerly of the P-I, now with the Detroit Free Press), we never knew that Guillen was so close to death:

He could barely sleep. He had a fever every night. He battled headaches and weakness. He lost almost 20 pounds. He coughed up blood. Yet, Carlos Guillen continued to play shortstop for the Seattle Mariners.

Continue reading "Six Years Ago, Carlos Guillen Was a Coin Flip From Going Six Feet Under"

Yet another postponement, and the new plan is to try to play a doubleheader on Monday, beginning at 10:05 am PST. The M's have a day game in Boston on Tuesday, so this would mean they'd play 3 games in about 28 hours. Not good.

THAT STARBUCKS "I WAS A CHILD SOLDIER" GUY: At twelve, Ishmael Beah found himself fleeing rebels, wandering from village to village. At thirteen, he was a soldier in Sierra Leone, hooked on drugs and capable of things he would never have imagined. Now, rehabilitated and living in the U.S., he tells his story in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, in an attempt to raise awareness of the child soldier phenomenon.

Ex-Seattleite, ex-Stranger-nic and ex-grassroots campaign manager Phil Campbell wrote a book that we loved about Grant Cogswell's run for City Council in the wake of WTO. The book is Zioncheck for President, which we've discussed with Phil in the past. Now Stephen Gyllenhaal has bought the rights to the film adaptation and plans to produce the thing DIY style here in Seattle.

Seattle's an expensive place to live, no doubt, and we've been noticing a trend towards taking a certain amount of pride in that fact, even among those of us that are just scraping by here. When someone complains we're quick to kick 'em a few times and remind them that you get what you pay for. Hey, if you can't take the price of the opera subscription go back to Boise. Seattlest is as guilty of this kind of attitude as anyone, of course. We bust our ass to take advantage of everything the city's got. Why shouldn't we bust on the complainers? Well, the Economist just released a list of the World's most expensive cities that's making us reconsider just how pricey Seattle is in the grand scheme of things. Of course we don't expect to compete in the top ten (Oslo 1, Paris 2, Copenhagen 3). Or the top thirty (New York 28). Or even the top fifty. Oh come on, already! Not in the top fifty? We're 61st, actually.

ART: Roq La Rue hosts Detroit's celebrated lowbrow underground artist Glenn Barr for the signing of his new hardcover book Haunted Paradise.

Yesterday we wrote that the Huskies would beat #10 Wazzu, and we were wrong. Don't be that surprised, it happens a lot.

The Seattle Times reported today that commute times all around Seattle are increasing. We've never heard of a metropolitan area that had decreasing commute times, so it's not exactly news that it's taking people here longer and longer to get to work (We'd love to hear of a metro area with decreasing commute times, though, so if you know of someplace please share. No fair citing Detroit during the 90's or something with similarl rapidly declining population). It is vaguely news that commute times are escalating so rapidly, but it doesn't really seem like they're keeping up with population growth, so maybe the actual story is that commute times are not advancing as fast as could be expected given all the new jobs and residents in the area and the lack of any mass transit to speak of. Despite our numerous watery choke points, maybe we had superfluous highway capacity? That could be ridiculous bullshit, of course, because we can't quickly come up with any census data that has the granularity to match the Seattle Times's 2004-2006 time frame.

Former Boeing executive Alan Mulally took over as Ford's CEO in September, and so far, well, um...

Ford Motor Co. lost a staggering $12.7 billion in 2006, an average of $1,925 for every car and truck it sold. The company that invented the assembly line and whose name was a byword for the auto industry warned it will bleed cash for two more years before it has a shot at making money.

Continue reading ""The Seattle Way" Comes to Detroit"

BOOKS: Dave "Mr. McSweeney's" Eggers' latest is titled What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Mr. Deng himself--a survivor of the Darfur shitstorm--discusses his life tonight. Bring tissue.

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

There have been three nationally televised Seahawk home games this year, and each time our city has been hit with a wicked weather storm.

What do poet David Wagoner, poet Shannon Borg, executive director of the Richard Hugo House Lyall Bush, and Seattlest co-editor and sports guy Seth Kolloen have in common? Besides the fact that they all live in Seattle, smartass? Yes, they've all been selected for the Stranger's Genius Awards shortlist of literary badasses.

Has Seattlest mentioned that we are in love with Sufjan Stevens? Yes, we love him, but it's totally not in a sexual way. Though we certainly appreciate his boyish good looks (and nicely toned arms), for us to touch someone with such wide-eyed childlike wonder would surely make us a pedophile. More than anything, we'd love to hold him close to our bosom, thereby protecting him from the cold, cruel world. Still, when a man attempts a project even he knows he's not going to finish---creating an album per state of the union, and on each chronicling the state's feel via extensive research, personalized lyrics, and elaborate folk orchestration---well, we kinda hafta fall in love with him. Especially when he chooses as his second state the place of our birth, and the big single off the album is about our hometown.

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.

"I think [for] anyone that drives in over 130 runs numerous times in his career, it's impossible not to be clutch." -- Alex Rodriguez, May 2006.