According to the recently released "F as in Fat" report, almost 25% of Washington residents are obese. However, according to another recently released study, we are also the 12th healthiest state in the nation overall. Despite 24.5% of the state's population being considered obese, Washington is only the 32nd most obese state in the country. Surprising no one, Mississippi is the most overweight state in the country (can you say fried everything?) and Colorado is......

In the wake of a brutal tussle between car and bicycle last weekend, it's good that New Belgium Brewing's Tour de Fat, the "traveling celebration of all things bicycle," arrives in town on Saturday, opposite the carbon-spewing, combustion engine worship-fest that is Seafair, what with the supersonic jets and souped-up motorboats. So for those who favor pedal-power over horsepower, you can show up at Gas Works Park at 9 a.m. to register yourself and your......

Last night we flipped on the tee-vee, and stumbled on a KCTS fundraiser: Dr. Daniel G. Amen in his self-produced show, "Change Your Brain, Change Your Life." If you missed it, you're in luck: it's showing fifteen more times locally. This is the same Dr. Daniel G. Amen featured on Quackwatch (his response) and whose claim to help "prevent" Alzheimer's was severely critiqued on Salon recently (once again, Amen responds). Whatever else is true (Amen......

We sent special Killer Bugs correspondent Roger van Oosten to Town Hall last night to catch Richard "Hot Zone" Preston's talk. Post-decontamination, here is his report. Richard Preston, the award-winning author of The Hot Zone and Demon in the Freezer, had the Town Hall audience on his side with his very first words: “It’s freezing here! This is crazy!” Preston is on the lecture circuit pumping his new book Panic in Level 4, a collection......

Okay, the good news is, we didn't have sunstroke and don't have to hand in our secret, California-native Golden Bear flag lapel pin. Whew. The bad news is, there's a pretty contagious, extra-strength bug going around town. We don't see anything on the Department of Health website yet, so we must, as usual, be trendsetters. We met a friend of ours for lunch Friday at Mexico at Pacific Place, and both of came down with......

Want further proof America is going to hell? The Seattle Times reports kids in Lynnwood are drinking the bong water from meth pipes to get high. According to the Times, “Worb water" is the meth-laced water that's left in a water pipe after it's been used to smoke methamphetamines.” Move over crack-pipe scrapers, there’s a new scumbag on the drug-desperation block and he’s called “worb water." Silly us thought drinking normal bong water was......

On Presidents Day, it's time to pause for some quiet reflection on our drug use. Too much? Too little? Just right? Tonight Yale's Charles Barber drops in on the Elliott Bay Book Co. to report that in 2006 the U.S. accounted for 66% of the global antidepressant market. We know, it's exciting to be number one! There's a lot more in his book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation. Over at Slate,......

Thank goodness for a Congressional committee looking into misleading pharmaceutical ads to detail the shady saga that is pseudo-jock Dr. Jarvik. You know Jarvik from the Lipitor ads: late 50s, receding hairline, cornerstone of Pfizer’s $258 million cholesterol-lowering campaign. Apparently he’s a fraud. Well, when it comes to rowing. We became suspicious of Dr. Jarvik the moment the ad with him jogging with his robotically stiff son came out. "These guys don’t jog," we thought.......

Riding the bus to work the other day, our heart skipped a beat when we noticed signs taped to the window heralding the arrival of new spring schedules (they're blue!). Once we'd calmed down, we realized how silly it is to get excited over the prospect of a slight change to our bus schedule. It was the kind of self-deprecating experience we figured would make a good lede for a post informing you, gentle......

Former Washington governor Booth Gardner has Parkinson's. He's been using his leftover political capital to campaign for a "Death with Dignity" initiative, to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Washington state. And it's been working. Even the New York Times took note of Gardner's labors. But P-I columnist Joel Connelly disagrees with Gardner's stance. To Connelly or his headline writer, it's a "last selfish act." So, "for balance," Connelly says, he retails the story of Chris Carlson:Chris......

Monday afternoon, instead of sitting around in our pajamas and baking cookies, we had the pleasure of attending a King County Food Worker class, a necessary evil which must be endured in order to obtain a Food Handler’s Card. On our scant and unpaid time off, we the food workers of King County trundle off to strange and inconvenient locations to listen to a lecture, watch a video and fill in a Scantron sheet. The......

Making up for weeks of hibernation and workaholism, Kim will hit the parties this weekend. Tonight, she’ll don her Groucho glasses for a lesbian function at Jabu’s celebrating the births of her two favorite Sagitarii. Saturday, it’s to the War Room for a company party with the missus and her workmates. Finally, she’ll ship off to the sub-tropics on Monday, where she’ll spend what remains of 2007. While his wife is taking a Wilderness......

Running text ads on your blog never really struck us as the Get-Richest-Quickest path; we used to have Amazon ads on a book review blog and after a year or two and no checks, we decided we could better use the real estate and quit the program. A few months later we got our first and final check for...$6ish? But Seattle's Furious Seasons blog has just discovered firsthand the pain of algorithmic rejection. The email......

If you were here right now, you'd see us looking around suspiciously like we don't quite trust we're awake because we just read Knute Berger's latest deep thought over at Crosscut and we...agree with him.While promoting green consumption might be politically more palatable than getting people to change their habits and expectations, promoting consumption still offers an answer that doesn't solve the bigger problem. Global warming's hawks have to be honest with us: Fighting the......

In this corner, we have the accused, Amanda Knox, Seattle's girl-next-door and alleged participant in the murder of one. Google News hits: about 1,811. In the other corner, Risperdal aka risperidone, one of the most widely used anti-psychotics in the world, approved for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and marketed off-label for the "irritability" associated with autism, Asperger's, ADHD, and being teen-aged or elderly, and related to the deaths of at least 1,000 people (according the......

An HIV vaccine that helps you get HIV was not the idea behind the STEP Study, but that's what scientists are saying they got. 100 volunteers in the program were from Seattle, and the now-halted trial was co-sponsored by the Vaccine Trials Network, which works out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The Seattle Times and the P-I are both reporting on the story, which if nothing else illustrates a case of Donald Rumsfeld's......

In an oh-so-scientific survey, a "national emerging health care discount service" we'll decline to name (take that, PR flacks!) discovered that the most caffeinated city in the country out of 20 is ... Chicago! We don't make the top 5 there, but Seattle/Tacoma is number one in coffee consumption -- apparently we've mastered Starbucks lingo enough to order decaf on a regular basis. "58 percent of residents surveyed [said] this elixir of alertness would be......

Capitol Hill studio Pilates Body Fitness is celebrating their 5th year in the Capitol Hill Arts Center with an open house this Sunday. It's a good chance to stop in to check out the equipment, meet the instructors, and see if you're interested in giving this hippie holistic exercise bullshit a try. (Tongue-in-cheekiness aside, pilates is great, and we'd totally do it every day if we were an independently wealthy ex-trophy wife and/or trust......

Corner of 3rd and Union last night, the air's full of crazies. The rabid anti-Hillary crazies, fueled by and fueling right-wing panic even as they convince the mainstream that she's unelectable because she's so polarizing ("Just look at us!"). The Ron Paul crazies, all suited and tied. The 9/11 crazies in search of evil conspiracies. So what do the street crazies have to do with, say, the newspaper crazies? It's the possibility, however small, that......

The first thing to know about Devra Davis is that she's not speaking from the sidelines: she's director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is an environmental health expert, professor of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health and visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz School of Public Policy and Management. So when she said that the war on cancer has been almost......

Sometime this week it's going to be announced that Seattle's soccer team the Seattle Sounders will be entering the MLS. GOALSeattle says tomorrow. Our friend in Chicago who knows about these things says it'll be announced at MLS Cup, which isn't until November 18, so we'll discount that and say tomorrow. It seems pointless, by now, to argue whether or not it will be announced. The Sounders aren't selling 2008 season tickets, Paul Allen......

If you're having trouble getting used to the gray days of fall, head over to Salon Dewi this weekend for a UV-infused pick-me-up. This Friday, Saturday, and Sunday we are offering complimentary trips to our UV - Infrared Sauna. This little hot box helps with the effects of SAD. It is also nice and toasty - it will help loosen up sore muscles and give you a mini break from your day! As previously......

Remember SimCity? Seattlest had some incredible towns built in that game, with commercial and residential districts packed full of shiny, tall towers and trains and street traffic all flowing as effortlessly as rivers. Scroll way over to the left to the edge of the city grid; now that is a healthy industrial district, perfectly bisected by a pollution-eating green belt. The landmarks sprouted everywhere and the money and accolades poured in. Of course, it took......

That headline was designed to hector Seattle because we know how awful it is for this part of the world to be compared to New York City. But showing Seattle how New York does something better seems to produce results (the M's notwithstanding). This time they're creating truly bike-friendly streets. It's always been unbelievable to us how Seattle presents itself as an uber-environmentally friendly city, while drivers clog the freeways in Hummers, voters kill the......

Yesterday the CDC released the news that one of the smallest subsets of people who kill themselves saw an 8% increase from 2003 to 2004.For all young people between ages 10 to 24, the suicide rate rose 8 percent from 2003 to 2004 -- the biggest single-year bump in 15 years -- in what one official called "a dramatic and huge increase." ... The biggest increase -- about 76 percent -- was in the suicide......

The other day we walked into KeyBank with a KeyBank check, asked to cash it, and they said, "Are you a customer?" We said, no, but it's your check. They said, "That'll be $5 please." We started looking around nervously, feeling like we'd walked into some kind of wormhole and banks in this reality didn't understand that the value of a check rests in its being "as good as cash" for the recipient. But it's......

So, yeah, there's been this Russian-Turkish style "urban spa" called Banya5 on Ninth for, like, three years now. It's kind of a giant community sauna, with a central oven providing both wet and dry heat, surrounded by a bunch of fresh- and salt-water pools. The guy who built it, Seattle-born real estate developer John Goodfellow, isn't even Russian; he got hooked on the concept in New Yawk City. You have to know where it is,......

Amy Winehouse ain't gonna be playing at the Paramount next month: Due to the rigours involved in touring, Amy Winehouse has been advised to postpone her upcoming September US and Canadian tour dates. All ticket holders may obtain refunds at their point of purchase. Amy's European and UK tour dates in October and November remain in place. Plans are being made to reschedule her US tour for early 2008. Until then, Amy has been......

We don't have a lot of parenting pet peeves. Little Miss Seattlest has already picked up our usual response to a lot of great debates: "Whatever." But we've never cared for Baby Einstein videos. We're not one of those evangelistic no-television people -- we own a television, and we're not afraid to watch it. But we figure our daughter has several decades to interact with video screens, so why start early? The American Academy of......

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......