This Seattlest's liver already hurts just thinking about all the beers we're going to try this weekend. Granted, the Hard Liver Festival at Brouwer's Cafe in Fremont officially runs all week. But, some of the good stuff will be gone before the afternoon is out on the opening day this Saturday (Doors at 11am). But, if you don't like crowds, don't come on Saturday....it will most likely be packed by noon. The sixth annual......

Friday Theatre: The Solo Performance Festival, SPF2: Sweatproof!, returns to the Theatre Off Jackson with a terrific lineup of uni-personned shows. In fact, tonight has a terrific lineup all on its own, thanks to the Unicycle Collective. Their MonoLodge 4 is an evening of solo shorts from Seattle veterans and up-and-coming talents: Keith Hitchcock, Jennifer Jasper, Troy Mink, K. Brian Neel, Becky Poole, Mary Purdy, Seth Rosenbloom, Mark Siano, and Jenna Bean Veatch. (Saturday......

Starting tomorrow, the next month is going to be a whirl-wind of good beer: REAL Strong Ale Festival at Collins Pub - 2/22 to 2/28 Elysian Winter Beer Festival - 2/23 Barleywine Bacchanal at Beveridge Place Pub - 2/29 to 3/8 Hard Liver Barleywine Festival at Brouwer's - 3/15 Washington Cask Beer Festival - 3/22 Throw in the Seattle releases of Full Sail Bourbon Aged Porter(Mar 1), Oskar Blues Ten Fidy(Mar 1) and the......

If you have enjoyed any beer from Hair of the Dog (HOTD) brewery from Portland, you know that they specialize in big, non-traditional beers (that kick your ass). Going into this past Saturday night's brewers dinner at The Collins Pub, we wondered how their new chef, Erik Wood (previously of Ray's Boathouse), would handle the pairings. He did a fantastic job. Six HOTD beers were expertly paired with six amazing dishes. That wasn't all......

This weekend's highlight for Geoff will be a Brewer's Dinner at The Collins Pub held by Hair of the Dog Brewery from Portland. 6 courses paired with 6 beers, plus a few special releases to boot. As a Bears and now semi-Seahawks fan, he'll be hoping that Brett Favre breaks a hip during Saturday's Seahawks game at Lambeau Field. Aside from the glamorous task of replacing the gutters on his house, Jack's weekend pretty much......

Ah, football. We love it. It’s easily our favorite sport to watch as it gets our usual docile selves all fired up and yelling at the television every week. Basketball, even with its fast pace and high scoring, is a bore. And baseball? Baseball is almost as fun to watch as golf or the Lifetime channel. But for all of football’s glory, there remains its biggest upset. Which is that it’s one of those high-testosterone......

Some people take to relationships like a cat to water. The Swell Season's Glen Hansard sounds nice enough, friends all over Dublin, bit of a hippie -- but give him a girlfriend's ear and he's prone to red-faced verbal jabs, depressed miseries, and emotional archery. He can't keep up, or won't try.We made a choice and we knew we would pay / for stealing the joy and trying to escape / from the arms of......

What better way to raise money for cancer than a good old-fashioned moustache pageant? Seemingly classy-ass Monsieur Moustache is tonight at the Capitol Hill Arts Center, with the proceeds going to help pay the leukemia treatment bills of local waiter extraordinare Nick Farina. (Proceeds will also be shared with the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.) Nick's not the only guy out there with over a million dollars in bills (since, you know, our system's fucked),......

A couple of Seattlest haters and their friends went to the SIFF Cinema last night to check out the new Coen Bros. movie, which is still every bit as good as we already said it was when we saw it months ago. Lucky for us No Country for Old Men is more along the lines of vintage Coen masterpieces like Blood Simple and has absolutely nothing in common with the turd-arific misfires of their more......

Yo La Tengo's current "Freewheeling Tour" is billed as one where "anything can and will happen." Reports from earlier stops informed us to expect the unexpected in a setting that is more "mass hangout than veritable rock show," that we could ask questions and should look for the band to play songs based on those questions. Even so, we weren't sure what to expect. We weren't sure if we'd like the format or if it......

Front-page screamer in the P-I today: School crimes under wraps. The P-I (disclosure: I write freelance sports pieces for them) reviewed Seattle School records and found cases of assault that weren't reported to police. Instead, school administrators tried to deal with these incidents on their own. King County prosecuting attorney Tomas Gahan ain't happy about it. Says he: "I don't want the principals or administrators to sort out what is a crime and what isn't.......

Slate asked Dan Savage and six other "sexperts" what, despite their experience, they still don't get about sex. Savage's answer: What I don't understand is ... gee, how people can be so willfully stupid about sex. Sex came first. Before marriage, there was sex. Before religion, there was sex. Before freakin' humans, there was sex. All human cultures, and all our fanciful religions, were constructed around sex, built to regulate and control sex, sanctify and......

North of Seattle, in Lynnwood, is the restaurant Kirirom. Lurking low in the shadows of the big box stores, the chain restaurants, and the Alderwood Mall, Kirirom means “mountain of joy” and is a national park in Cambodia. Perusing the picturesque menu, we really wanted to order the Chocolate Rice Soup, but Seattlest’s dining companions just weren’t biting on it. Guess they don’t see the humor in calling organ meats “chocolate.” We’re still not sure......

2003: Never Forget This week's Stranger news section contains an article about a Nintendo contractor who was fired for her blog. "Not work appropriate" said Nintendo, although, what the hell does that have to do with anything? The blogger Jessica Zenner blogged anonymously and without naming her employer or her coworkers. It sounds like her blog was known among her coworkers, though, and according to the article she used "hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy" to describe......

Fall--and yes, we think we can say it's now officially fall--is a great season for concerts. Yet another good one this weekend is an all-ages affair, with Port Angeles' own The Lonely H celebrating their second record release tonight at the Vera Project (7:30pm, with Model Photographer and Don't Tell Sophie, $7). The band's comprised of five teens just outta high school, but don't let that negatively influence your opinion of them. The guys......

Late summer is berry season, which means it is also bear season. A 51 year-old man mountain biking in Banner Forest (near Port Orchard on the Kitsap Peninsula) was attacked by a male black bear last week. His dogs were running ahead of him, and he heard them barking. He turned a corner, and was face-to-face with the bear, which then attacked him. Attacks by black bears are remarkably rare, which makes the situation all......

The "I'm not ashamed" angle to the unsanctioned whale hunt perpetrated by members of the Makah Tribe over the weekend hit the papers this morning. "I'm not ashamed. I'm feeling kind of proud. ... There is only a few guys in Neah Bay that can get a whale and bring everyone home safely. This blog seems to have the extended remix version of the quotes that Johnson gave the Seattle Times--Maybe it's an earlier......

It's the custom in Seattle to eschew the umbrella in favor of some kind of REI space-age jacket with a hood and bunch of rubberized and velcroed pockets, or maybe a hoodie if you're too cool for the North Face, but never an umbrella. "Umbrellas are for tourists" and all that, right? WRONG. Seattlest was dying for our umbrella this morning, picturing it fondly in the drawer of our desk at work where it's been......

Lottie's Lounge, located in Colombia City, is a coffee shop, diner and bar, rolled into one. It's an experiential panacea for those who like to center their lives around one neighborhood joint-- not that Colombia City doesn't already have a lot going on. Lottie's is smack dab in the middle of a re-gentrifying neighborhood, filled with junk stores, boutiques, dive bars and...Starbucks. We walk in and are greeted by retro tables and chairs and what......

Last night, Young Frankenstein, playing at the Paramount through September 1st, came to life, sang, and did some wicked dance moves. The official world premiere of the new Mel Brooks musical, based on his horror-comedy film of the same name, had the full house's rapt attention from the initial flash of lightning over Transylvania Heights. The script preserves many of the film’s great lines ("Put...the candle...back!"), while adding nearly two dozen original songs with......

Alice in Chains’ former lead singer would be blowing out candles today had he not said yes, yes, yes to drugs. The Chains gang would likely still be making both crunchy (Dirt) and beautiful (Sap) music. Jerry Cantrell, who co-founded the band with Layne, probably would have written some lighter lyrics and cut his hair. Seattlest would have had the pleasure of seeing Alice in Chains—or the supergroup Mad Season—live. Even more importantly, had Layne......

Hey, whaddya know? There's another show worth your attention at the Sunset this week. Tonight it's Irish singer-songwriter Fionn Regan. Yeah yeah, we know what you're thinking: "Another singer-songwriter? Just look at him, all broody with messed-up hair strumming a guitar in an alley." Truth be told, we usually avoid the genre as a whole, since most singer-songwriters run the gamut from boring hippie to boring douchebag. But in this case, don't be so......

Fate, karma, kismet -- call it what you will but the week before A Fine Frenzy came to town a friend in Switzerland sent us a YouTube video of her song "Rangers." We listened, found the album, and two days later noticed she was coming to town that Sunday. Here is the video, just so you can follow along: (And here is YouTube's A Fine Frenzy catalog.) What we didn't know at the time was......

Seattlest arrived on scene soon after the Capitol Hill Block Party had opened. We wandered, checked out the stage locations and thought about getting a beer, then spotted a booth touting free bottled water. It looked like the booth had something to do with praying to the Earth Spirits or some other new wave white hippy crap, but we decided to take our chances. We asked for a water and oddly enough their were no......

Remember—or recognize—Silverchair? Chances are the last song you heard from the Australian trio was 1995’s grunge-ish "Tomorrow," which hit #1 on US charts. The band’s mates were 14 when that single, off debut album Frogstomp, made them international stars. American interest in their music may have ebbed since, but Silverchair remains Australia’s biggest act. Young Modern, their new—and decidedly un-grunge—album is their record-breaking 5th Aussie chart-topper. It hits US bins on July 24. The......

We wouldn't yet call ourselves bicycle "enthusiasts," but we're getting there. We've started riding from work (downtown) to home (Shoreline) about three days a week and we're loving it. We're getting exercise, doing something we enjoy and the majority of the ride, along the Burke-Gilman Trail, is just gorgeous. Now, most days, our ride through the UW campus is an uneventful pleasantry. We glide along, casually admiring young co-eds as they jog by in......

Since its development in 1982, Victor Steinbrueck Park (formerly "Market Park") has been a melting pot of downtown green-space seeking citizenry and tourists. Just about every class of human being can be seen here on a warm, sunny day. We, being fortunate enough to work near the market, spend many a lunch here. We always bring a book to read, but on a day like today, little reading gets done because of all the people......

No, Seattlest didn't quite make it to everything on the checklist we created last Friday, but we did manage to stay out past midnight on both weekend evenings, proving we've still got it after all. Friday night's Purr toga party proved to be a sausagefest, which I'm sure was fun if you're into that sort of thing. We, however, are not, so we headed down to Chapel to party with our people. Damn it was......

The press release came in a short time ago and we haven't really had the opportunity to go through it with our hair pick of information discovery, but the fact that the Mayor even has an Immigration and Refuges Initiative is, itself, a good start. Look, World, Seattle has an immigration initiative and it doesn't involve the construction of any Great Walls, much less mass arrests or the floating of barges full of human cargo......

It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by poop. Finally D.C. contemplated taking Vermont's place as a state and marveled at the GOP lessons learned from the "Macaca Moment." Due to some sad shootings......