What a stable, non-disastrous weekend it's been for us thus far! We're making curried chicken salad, eying the unopened bag of Cheddar Sour Cream Ruffles, and catching up on a week's worth of unwatched YouTube videos. It turns out that when you search for "Seattle" on YouTube, this very helpful National Geographic video about the Nisqually earthquake in '01 (and the fault that runs under downtown Seattle) is the second result. Were you living in......

"The Viaduct Under Construction,1951." We don't mean to play favorites, but this image is from the beloved Seattle Municipal Archives, which amazes us more with each image they share. Then again, isn't that what they always say? The Washington State Department of Transportation claims that the most recent repairs have stopped the so-called settling of the viaduct. (They call it settling because it sounds much nicer and considerably less alarming than "sinking.") It seems......

TODAY IS WORLD REFUGEE DAY! The International Rescue Committee is hosting a benefit night of poetry, music, dance and crafts from our local refugee community at the Seattle Center, and John Hilde's Made In China (a documentary about his father's childhood in pre-WWII China) is screening at the NWFF with proceeds going to Mercy Corps' work in the devastated Sichuan province of China. Be a good neighbor and enjoy these artsy celebrations of diversity and......

Since Seattle isn't criss-crossed with enough fault lines already, the U.S. Geological Survey's new seismic hazard maps include two new fault lines in Western Washington. One of the new faults is located between Bellingham and the Canadian border, and the other runs east of Port Angeles. The study also found that a fault located South of Whidbey Island is longer than previously thought. The new fault close to the Canadian border has been named......

The Alaskan Way Viaduct is sketchy. So much so that it was featured in Popular Mechanics' special report "The 10 Pieces of U.S. Infrastructure We Must Fix Now." The Viaduct graces the list, which also includes Atlanta's failing water system, New Orleans' canal locks, Chicago's notorious O'Hare Airport, and the country's oldest suspension-bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge. From what we've seen, Popular Mechanics was very diplomatic and didn't use descriptions like "death trap" and "converts atheists......

Another gem of the Viaduct, courtesy of prolific Flickr Contributor Slightly North Though the Alaskan Way Viaduct continues to sink—or, as the engineers like to call it, "settle"—a section of the Alaskan Way Viaduct has been declared safe. Preliminary results from the semi-annual inspection that closed the viaduct last weekend show that a section of the bridge between Columbia and Yesler St. has settled an additional 3/8th of an inch. The settling is visible......

The aptly titled, "Empty Viaduct?" by Seattlest Flickr Contributor slightlynorth The Alaskan Way Viaduct is closed for its semi-annual inspection this weekend. The viaduct will be closed from 6am to 6pm on Saturday and Sunday. The Battery Street Tunnel will be closed all weekend to traffic. The semi-annual inspections check for that settling Dan was talking about earlier this week and the cracks we all pretend aren't there when we speed down the viaduct, fearing......

When we used to work at the Starbucks in the Bank of America building (nee: Columbia Center), one of our duties was to bring up boxes of cups, napkins and other sundries from the storeroom located in the garage on level E, five stories below ground. According to one urban legend in the building, the lowest level of the parking garage was supposed to be the safest place to be in downtown Seattle during an......

Londonist are starting to think their city is getting just a little bit too expensive, when even Christian Slater can't afford to go out there. And there's no escaping, as local singer Lily Allen discovered when she was barred entry to the US. The British mapping agency caused further bad karma, by blocking a 3-D representation of London in Google Earth. But the smiles returned to Londonist's faces as they interviewed Baroness von Reichardt,......

For those of you just tuning in, yesterday we wrote a little piece about the steam pipe that burst in New York. Apparently it pissed a bunch of people off, and we have to concur that actual true (non-sensationalist) details have been slow to trickle in over here. Everything we've read the last couple of days focuses on a "geyser of steam and debris," which seemed like an overblown fearmongering catchphrase at first, but......

We're going to spoil the end of Jonathan Raban's Surveillance. If you haven't read it yet and don't want to know, stop reading now. Seattlest Seth: I noticed the foreshadowing of the ending in the narrative, but it still came as rather a shock--which I'd imagine was intended. My immediate take on it was the same as Shacochis'--it's a well-taken reminder that, however high we perceive the stakes to be of our personal dramas,......

Sunday. Usually, a quiet, contemplative day in the Blogosphere. But not here in the Ist-a-Verse. Nonono! Just look below and see all of the wild and crazy stuff our staffs are up to. In Austin, bands are beginning to confirm for SXSW and the rumor mill is up and running. Good thing, too, because we all know how much Austinites love live performances. Austin also found itself in the national spotlight, with Longhorn Legend......

It's got AM and FM radio, a flashlight, a siren, multiple phone chargers, hand-crank recharging and a motherfucking earthquake detector! It's from Japan so maybe it detects Japanese earthquakes, but it could still be useful here as a tsunami detector. Either way it's cool. Honestly, it's a little late to be buying this device, even though it's the perfect gift to enable your kid brother's paranoia. You have to buy it from Japan, so that......

There have been three nationally televised Seahawk home games this year, and each time our city has been hit with a wicked weather storm. First there was the Monday night game against Oakland when were setting one day rainfall records. Then came the Packers game which was played in, what was for us, a driving snow storm. Finally tonight, with a brutal wind storm bearing down on the Puget Sound, the Hawks will knock nuts......

We checked the tidal charts--nope, nothing crazy there. Any tsunami warnings for last night after that earthquake in Hawaii? Nada on that front as well. So we're still trying to unpuzzle how we came to find a starfish--a real formerly-live starfish as in, hey that thing used to scoot around in the ocean--on the husband's car yesterday morning when we left for work. Any theories, trusted Seattlest readers?......

There was a small earthquake at Mt. Rainier, and the question that leaps immediately to mind is whether we will all soon be flash-cooked alive like the residents of Pompeii or something. The last major geologic event at Mt. Rainier was about 5,000 years ago: the Osceola Mudflow, when the top 1,600 feet of the mountain went on a day trip to Puget Sound. If such an event happened again, Wikipedia doesn't like our......

People in the Northwest might be more attuned to manifestations of the wrath of God than normal people. Volcanos, fault lines and the deceptively calm sea are all guns pointed at our head and sometimes it seems like the smallest slip-up on our part might activate the muscles in His holy trigger finger. Is this why we're so polite with one another? Smile, and maybe we can escape the cap of God for another......

Someday the Viaduct is going to collapse and kill a bunch of not-so-unsuspecting Seattleites and maybe a few guys from Everett. Only the elevated highway nymphs and the guy deep in the earth who pulls the earthquake levers knows when, exactly, that will be, but we have a pretty good idea that it will happen "someday." So we busy ourselves fixing it, or, failing that, arguing about how to fix it. So far we've got......

SFist commeters pose for before and aftershocks when the mayor commemorates a 1906 earthquake...at 4:30 in the morning. A hot tip on the Chronicle vending machines comes in and the SFist war correspondent risks life and limb to post this dispatch from the frontlines. Houstonist announces their new Cops spinoff "World's Funniest Tazer Videos" and the possible cancellation of their pervs' "World's Grossest Bathroom Videos" and PBS trains cams on cows at, uhg, Mootube. Also,......

Magnolia is getting a new bridge, if the city can get some money to pay for it. Damaged in the 2001 Nisqually Quake, the current Magnolia Bridge is in a race with the Alaskan Way Viaduct to fall over. While it will probably take decades for something to be done about the Viaduct, the city will move ahead with the Magnolia project in 2009. Two options were proposed: rebuild the bridge in its current location,......

The Viaduct's closing this weekend for repairs and we should keep it closed. We're never going to decide anything while traffic is flowing freely because the problem isn't apparent enough. The Viaduct isn't safe. We're going to replace it with a tunnel or a bigger viaduct or maybe nothing at all, but we'll vote on that for the first time at the end of 2007 and who knows how long it'll be after that. We'll......

At 2:30 p.m. today, March 13th, the Seattle City Council is holding a hearing with members of the Washington State Department of Transportation and the Seattle Department of Transportation concerning the controversial Alaskan Way Viaduct program. Grace Crunican and Bob Chandler of SDOT and Ron Paananen of WashDOT are expected to be questioned by council members about funding issues with regard to Team Nickels' increasingly questionable replacement choice for the earthquake damaged waterfront highway. The......

Congressman Jim McDermott is calling for Seattle to move quickly on a plan to replace the Viaduct. This leaves us wondering if he’s spending to much time in that other Washington, because clearly he has forgotten how we do things out here. Upon returning from a tour of areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina he told the AP, "I came away with the strong feeling that here in Seattle we have to have our own plans......

Earlier in the week it looked as if Mayor Nickels' plan to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel had run out of time. Olympia lawmakers wanted him to present a funding package by April 1, an almost impossible task given the project's 3 to 4 billion dollar cost. Yesterday, the state House approved a plan that would give Governor Christine Gregoire until January 1 to decide the future of the viaduct. The plan......

Monday Nov. 28 5:30: Jane Midgley, Elliott Bay Book Co. Women and the U.S. Budget: Where the Money Goes and What You Can Do About It 6:00: Anne Rice, Third Place Books -- Lake Forest Park Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (signing only) 7:00: Peter Blecha, University Bookstore (University District) Rock 'n' Roll Archaeologist: How I Chased Down Kurt's Stratocaster, the "Layla" Guitar, and Janis's Boa 7:30: Richard Bach, EBBC Curious Lives: Adventures from......

Seattle has an affinity for pirates that Seattlest has always found a little confusing and exraordinarily dorky, and it goes beyond the SeaFair guys, but they're undoubtably the main culprits. Being the port city that it is, as well as housing more than its fair share of crusing-types, you'd think that Seattle would display a little awareness that piracy is alive and well in 2005. You don't see many floats parading through town glorifying ye......

We're skeptical over here at Seattlest that tent cities are really the best option for providing zero cost housing. Well, "providing" is not actually the right word. An empty lot is all that is "provided," but even empty lots are not so easy to come by when the prospective tenant is a tent city. They have to move from place to place, often for unclear reasons. They provide minimal shelter from the elements. There are......

If you loved that great feeling you got in your heart from being charitable after the tsunami and Katrina, well, get ready to give a little more. There was that big ol' earthquake in Kashmir a couple weeks ago, remember? Apparently, most people don't, because the international fundraising is not at the levels it needs to be. While the media has been going on and on about how we're all shell-shocked from "disaster fatigue," Seattlest......

Daily papers like the Seattle Times have the jump on local and national publications scrambling to release disaster preparedness material as soon as possible. At the Seattle Times there's no need to scrap the thrice-annual real estate issue in lieu of reminding the readership of the region's pending apocalypse when you can just toss it in any old Monday edition, though. The headline reads "Who'll be to blame if viaduct, 520 bridge collapse?" and the......

Under an overcast sky we began the day with Iguales. These local boys have been slowly building a following over the past couple years. Each time we see them, they play in front of more energetic crowds. This former 3 piece, now 5 piece (though 1 piece was missing today) has hitched it up a notch with the extra percussions. Dig it and dance. Next, we swung on down to the EMP to check out......