Think nightlife is getting the short end of the stick in Seattle? Filled with righteous indignation over the way hiphop gets portrayed as Capitol Hill's downfall? We do, and we are, so it was a healthy shock to the system (and yet oddly familiar) to read about this Saudi hiphop group which, to the great chagrin and social shame of the guys' fathers and wives, made it onto MTV Arabia. From the MSNBC story about......

No, Seattlest is not just a fan of alliteration and 80's slang, as the headline might suggest. Burying the beef, is the current plan of the Seattle Public School District to rid itself of 230 cases of possibly contaminated beef. The beef, provided to school districts through a USDA lunch program, came from a California slaughterhouse in the center of the largest beef recall in USDA history. Nearly two-thirds of the school districts in......

Any Seattlest readers in the market for their very own Washington State Ferry? If so, you can head on over to EBay and make a bid on the decommissioned Chinook Passenger Ferry. (Guess you really can find everything on EBay!) The Chinook was posted on the site late Thursday night, with an asking price of $4.5 million dollars. The auction for the ferry will remain open to bidders until February 24th. The ferry's condition......

Seattlest grew up in Central Florida and, even though we haven't lived there for many, many years, we still crave the sunshine. Maybe it's because our body expects more vitamin D? We certainly don't want to add to the choruses of imported souls who bitch and moan about Seattle winters. Nonetheless, we wind up doing so, anyway, every year around mid-January. But, we've come to delight in February, which always gives us a week......

Wild speculation surrounding the possibility of Radiohead playing somewhere in Washington sometime in the next year has got us pissing ourselves with excitement. The P-I A P-I reader blog called Ear Candy** thinks they might headline the Sasquatch Festival at the end of May with REM and The Cure but our sources are suggesting the band will embark on a West Coast run after their European summer tour ends. As of right now, the......

We have gathered some of the top political writers in the country and asked them to discuss the presidential race throughout the year. Today they discuss McCain’s new frontrunner status, religion in American politics, and Edwards’ departure. Seattlest: How do you handicap the Republican race following John McCain’s win in Florida? Mark (The New York Times): The GOP in Florida has given McCain true front runner status. It must suck to be a wacko Republican......

Last time we checked in on Shawn Kemp, Jr., he was a 6-7 wingman considered a fairly decent prospect in Georgia. Now, Kemp is considered one of the top prospects in the nation, and, according to Glenn LaFollette of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a recruiting target of Lorenzo Romar. As you might expect, Kemp is a pretty good basketball player--a 6-9 dunk machine who Rivals rates as the #9 center in the class of '09. (Yes,......

This Seattlest took one look at the weather forecast and headed to sunny Florida yesterday. Now here we are in our hometown of DeLand, population 24,375 (per 2006 census). Our mother doesn't have wireless at the house, and is operating off a 1997 iMac. It's cute and compact, but slow as hell, so we headed out this morning for the one source of public wifi in town: Boston Gourmet Coffeehouse. A couple of things about......

If you're a Cuban exile somehow randomly transplanted from Miami to Seattle, don't go see The Cook at Seattle Rep. The overwhelming majority of sources (including this play) depict you as pretty angry, and The Cook will only further piss you off. If you're anyone else, go see it--You'll love it, although it may also piss you off. If you're a hipster or, less likely, a commie, dress up in your little Castro hat......

Katelyn just mentioned Common Market, but there's also hip-hop aplenty at the Showbox this weekend, with Portland's Lifesavas and New Orleans' funk-tastic Galactic (featuring Chali 2na of Jurassic 5 and Boots Riley of The Coup) tonight and Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, and The Mighty Underdogs (featuring The Gift of Gab, Lateef the Truth Speaker and Headnodic) tomorrow night. Here's some footage of Blackalicious freestyling at Florida's Langerado festival a couple months ago.......

Seattle Rep's The Murderers is three monologues, one after the other, that thankfully get more entertaining as the show goes along. Each monologue deals with a murder (or murders) committed at the Florida retirement community, and sends up a different view of senior citizens -- as old moneybags who keep their heirs on tenterhooks, as randy old goats, as cash cows for the unscrupulous. It's a mildly dark series of "I-dun-its" for Matlock's urban audiences......

We're not one of those people who hate "chemicals." Mmm, Diet Dr Pepper. But a few months ago we started to avoid buying milk that contained bovine growth hormone. Are we convinced it's bad for us? No, but we're convinced it's not explicitly good for us, either, since it exists to make life easier for dairy farmers. It's easy enough to avoid, and having a real live growing kid in the house makes us more......

Seattlest grew up in a tiny town you've never heard of in Central Florida, where a real sandy ocean beach (on which you could drive) was 20 minutes in one direction, and a crystalline gulf beach was an hour and a half in the other. Now that we live in the Land of the Rain, we wait all year for weeks like these, when the sun is high and hot, the breeze is soft and......

When an undercover Marion County, Florida, sheriff told former Seahawks punter Rick Tuten yesterday that she had two stolen TVs to sell him, Tuten had this classic reply: "I don't know nothin' about nothin'." Can someone get this guy into a Humphrey Bogart movie? Anyway, then the fun started:[Tuten] agreed to purchase the TV’s for $600. The TV’s, new and still in the original boxes, had a total value of $1,500. The TV’s were delivered......

Now that the opening gala has kicked off SIFF all proper-like, it's time to join the orgy of cinema for the next 25 days. For all film screenings, the general/member ticket prices are $10/$8 (and matinees $7/$5), except for gala screenings, which are $25/$23, and the closing night film event, which is $40/$35. If you really want to be prepared for this year's fest, check out Microsoft's Live Search Maps SIFF collection. Unlike most......

Cirque Dreams @ The Moore Theatre Sat 2pm & 8pm, Sun 2pm // Ticketmaster $29-$49 (plus fees) Who doesn't love a circus? Maybe dead people. They might not like the hustle and bustle. The guy next to us was in his forties, in a suit, and kept pointing out things to his date, exclaiming, "Oh, no way!" Most of the rest of the audience was pre-teen or just-teen. We developed a strange craving for......

To recap our past few weeks spent with Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: the initial disaster set-up was working for us (collect all the characters, watch as they fail to heed dire warnings, shake heads as rain stops coming and wheat stops growing), but Seattlest Michael questioned whether people could really relate to the days of mud-houses and not eating and all that. What we hadn't thought along the way was that Egan's book......

Now just a minute. Seattlest was actually aboard the Zaandam as she sailed up the coast last week. Along with 1,400 other passengers, we participated in the traditional (and mandatory) lifeboat drill. And a good thing, too. That night, a Greek cruise ship fucking sank (yes, sank!) off Santorini (two passengers missing), and another one out of Florida nearly capsized. This particular cruise was all about the wines of Washington, by the way. Once we......

Florida may have won their second straight National Championship last night, however, there will be no three-pete in Gainsville. Once National Coach of the Year Tony Bennett leads his Washington Huskies back on the court in November, they might as well mail the trophy directly to Montlake. UPDATE: According to Sports Illustrated, Bennett's Huskies will have their work cut out for them. In their hella early 2007-2008 rankings they place three Pac-10 teams in......

Tonight at 6:45pm the 10th-seeded Zags will tip off their 9th consecutive NCAA Tournament against 7th-seeded Indiana. Zag faithful from all around Seattle are set to gather at Spitfire and other quality drinking establishments to witness the start of yet another tournament run. Earlier this week the Gonzaga equipment manager was likely instructed to pack both the white uniforms and the road blues for the Zags trip to Sacramento. In the tournament, the lower seeded......

This just in: Seattle Rep’s 2007-2008 season in the Bagley Wright Theatre begins with Shakespeare’s beloved comedy, Twelfth Night, followed by a powerful play about the Cuban revolution, The Cook by Eduardo Machado. A new play, The Breach about Hurricane Katrina comes next, then the classic Molière comedy, The Imaginary Invalid, and finally Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney brings his skills to a classic Greek adventure in The Cure at Troy. In the Leo......

Dorkbot, we've missed you. If our attendance record for the monthly technology and art event has been spotty at best recently --we've only been to one meeting since it lost the CoCA digs-- it's not because of the scheduled themes. They've all been awesome: Multimedia Performance at the Abbey, Innovation in Games back at CoCA, remote aerial photography at CHAC (actually we did get to that one)... New curator whatshisname (can't find it on the......

It's a huge menu, somewhere between "too many notes" and "there's got to be a pony in there somewhere." Chef Bruce Dillon, most recently in Florida, offers an almost overwhelming panoply of Indian, Chinese, Thai, Indonesian, Cuban, and Carribbean flavors at the soon-to-open Marazul. Perched atop Whole Foods, adjacent to the Pan Pacific Hotel, the restaurant's 170 indoor seats focus inward on a wood-and-copper décor that suggests palm trees and a whiff of the exotic.......

Seattlest remembers that back when Gary Payton was about to be a free agent, we saw some ESPN story about how players like to play in Florida because there isn't (or wasn't) state income tax there. The interviewer asked Payton about this, and he said something along the lines of "Yeah, that sounds pretty sweet." At which point we jumped up from our couch and screamed at our TV, "But Gary, Washington doesn't have income......

Monday LOCAL AUTHOR, LOCAL AUTHOR: Clear Cut Press presents two of its novelists: Matt Briggs' Shoot The Buffalo is about a boy growing up in Snoqualmie during the '70s. Stacey Levine's Frances Johnson, set in a small town in Florida, details the random choices made by the eponymous Ms. Johnson. 7pm // University Bookstore // FREE SCI-FI SALON: One of the finest authors on the "humanist" wing of American science fiction and fantasy, Paul......

In some ways, we wish we could experience Sundance every week, but on the other hand, we're pretty f-ing exhausted. So it's a good thing that this is our last day here. We've had a great time with both the movies and the festival-goers. We've had film discussions with strangers everywhere we went, we've argued with film critics, and we've interacted with some really remarkable people, including two Lauras from Portland, a Bermudan film......

How come we're not convinced this a good thing? Hollow swizzle sticks made out of genetically engineered celery, for fuck's sake. From fucking Florida, as if we couldn't guess. A Bloody Mary should help us recover from the night before, make us swear we'll never again drink Hennessey shooters (at least not that many, that early in the night), make us grateful for the restorative powers of tomato juice and vodka. Not weird us out.......

A record-setting 20 teams competed in Seattlest trivia at the Old Pequilar last night. The winning team scored 64.5 points (out of 80) and toook home $150. We'll post complete results this afternoon. Want to give it a whirl? Here are the 60 regular questions. Look for the answers later, too. Round 1: Geography -- Special All Islands Edition 1) What is both the county seat of and the largest town in San Juan......

If you think it's too early to talk Halloween, you must really hate those Xmas tchotchkes that have shown up in major retailers near you. We, on the other hand, think Friday the 13th is the perfect day to start celebrating. And so does local lowbrow institution Roq La Rue -- they're kicking off their traditional Halloween show ("Monster Mayhem and Day of the Dead Delights") tonight. In a break with tradition, though, it's not......

The October issue of the Atlantic Monthly is on newsstands now and on its cover are the words "America's Smartest Cities." Please, nothing draws a Seattleite to a magazine faster than a tagline that indicates his intellectual ego is about to receive some much needed stroking. On the other hand, we've seen articles with this kind of headline on the internet and they're generally disappointing. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of college graduates and......