The Hugo House Literary Series kicks off Friday night with "Lost in Translation," and the program features Seattlest-favorite and monologist Mike Daisey, novelist Randall Keenan and historian Lesley Hazleton. We don't know why Seattle ever lets Daisey leave, once we've got him here. He's ours! We should just band him or do that thing like with dogs where they are electronically forbidden to leave the yard. Daisey, et al, have each produced three new pieces......

Stand at the corner of First and Pike, and you almost hear the thunder of Seattle's hotel wars, the howitzers of the future as they battle for attention in the trades, the travel mags, the lifestyle glossies. First into battle: a new Four Seasons, across the street from the downtown Art Museum: 21 stories, 149 hotel rooms, 36 residential condos, opening 2008. If your memory goes back more than two years, you'll recall that Four......

Jim Riches, Deputy Chief of the FDNY, is one of the producers of the Urban Legends video that questions the supposedly heroic actions of Mayor Giuliani on 9/11. Jen Carlson recently interviewed him for our sister site in New York. How long have you been in the FDNY? 30 years experience in some of the busiest firehouses in NYC. Which firehouse are you working at now? Assigned to Bureau of Operations as Deputy Chief FDNY.......

Local comic journalist (that's a journalist working in the medium of comics, not a journalist covering comics) Peter Bagge made the cover of Reason magazine this month. Bagge is on staff at the magazine and routinely does hilarious/horrifying cartoons about life in Seattle through Libertarian eyes (and if there's a ground zero for material for a Libertarian cartoonist it could very well be Seattle). The cover image is, of course, a self portrait. The Washington......

We'll just come right out and say it: World Trade Center is not as bad as we expected. But then again, we thought it'd be baaaaad. Oliver Stone + Nicolas Cage + a weighty topic = a recipe for disaster. Seattlest went to a screening primarily to see just how bad it could be, but unexpectedly, we smirked a lot less in this film than in United 93. And that's even taking into account......

On Tuesday evening, Seattlest saw United 93 so you don't have to. Because really, who in the hell is eager to watch this particular film? Even with free admission, the theater was pretty empty. That's not to say it's poorly made. In fact, we liked the movie's documentary style---hand-held cameras, filmed in real-time (or close to it), busy shots with characters out of focus---as it really added to the "what's happening?" confused feel. Another good......

Shopping for cartophiles this holiday season? We suggest a visit to any one of Seattle’s swell map stores. Of course, maps primarily serve a practical, navigational purpose, but one needn’t be map-literate to dig them as works of art. This is no more apparent than at Metsker Maps, ground zero of Seattle mapperies. Metsker sells all kinds (physical or political, terrestrial or nautical, contemporary or historical), in all shapes (flat, bas-relief, spherical), and in all......

Seattle as a city is currently in danger of becoming the guy at the party with the undone zipper. When we come strutting out of the men's room anxious to talk about technology and the environment and progressive politics all anyone can see is the Discovery Institute hanging out of our pants. Seattlest cringes every time the national media references a particular "Seattle-based think tank" - They won't let us pretend for a minute that......

The number of name brand alt/tech/culture journalist heroines Seattlest is aware of can be counted on one finger, and so far our city has spawned none of those. We have to look to our little sister metro down south to find the breeding grounds of the Xeni Jardin. San Francisco, of course, is ground zero for Xeni production in the United States, although it's possible that chronologically she hasn't been born yet and is only......