If you are a market regular then you know Rachel is the hardest working fundraiser in town. She stands 24/7 at the entrance of Pike Place Market raising funds for human services which serve the market community. more ›

It's not murder on the Holland America cruise ship Zaandam, says a spokeperson, but it may be suicide. Alaska state troopers say Washington's Amber Malkuch, 45, went missing Monday morning while the ship was visiting Glacier Bay National Park, northwest of Juneau. A woman's body was found in the 57-degree water at 4:30 p.m. Monday, but hasn't been positively identified. more ›

Princess Cruises and Holland America are both currently in a kind of limbo in Seattle. They use Terminal 30 by Harbor Island which the Port wants to convert back to something that can be used by container ships. The plan is to move the cruise berths to Terminal 91 in Magnolia where they can be properly outfitted with shore power and whatnot, but the cruise lines aren't excited about it because that will mean a bigger moorage bill for them and they'll have to schlep their passengers that much farther from the airport. Last month the Port announced that it was delaying the project, uh, until construction prices come down? Does the Port know something we don't? Construction prices don't come down. more ›

The Tacoma News Tribune had their big Seattle cruise season preview a few weeks ago: 191 cruise ship calls, 3,000 busloads of passengers from the airport to the cruise terminals, 14,082 cruise industry jobs created in 2005, 1 article we couldn’t get completely through. Harpers index it ain’t. Unless this is it, we’re still waiting for the Seattle dailies to publish their yearly love poems to the cruise industry. more ›

We're only weeks away from that magical time of year when we turn our local waters over to those diesel coughing, gray water vomiting, tourist dollar extracting devices the cruise ships. All hail! There have been a few changes at the Port this year and the new cleaner, greener personal have passed muster with the Bluewater Network, the cruise industry's traditional foil in local media, but Seattlest remains skeptical that increased cruise traffic in the Sound is in our best interest. See today's article on maritime pollution in the Post Intelligencer or this one on cruise ship wastewater. Let's throw our worries and a rock into a burlap money bag for the time being, though, and toss the whole thing overboard. Welcome to Seattle, cruise passengers! Hopefully you find something interesting on Seattlest for your 17 hours in the city! We're going to be talking a little bit about some of the cruise vessels that are coming to town and we're starting with the MS Zaandam. more ›

Seattlest has a vision of our coming fall. We need to get away. We need some sun, some beaches and some babes. We need a cruise with our affably fat buddy. Man, everyone's so friendly on this cruise. Seems like every guy wants to get close to us - And we were worried about how we'd fit in with the cruising set. Pshaw! Wait, where are all the babes. We saw that bikini team out by the pool, but there seems to be an awful lot of man on this boat. Is this a gay cruise? Were we seriously duped into going on a gay cruise because we were rude to a travel agent? Yep. Gay cruise. Whoa is us. Oh, well, we'll just have to expand our social consciousness, embrace a little inner gay and eventually hook up with the hot (female) social director. Can't hold us down. Not in this terrible Cuba Gooding Jr. vehicle of life, anyway. more ›

There was a great editorial in the P-I over the weekend in which the writer Daniel Jack Chasan said (and this is Seattlest’s Paraphrase): The Sound is a mess. The Sound was a mess in the 80’s and we said we’d fix it and we never wanted to foot the bill so the Sound is mess now and we’re saying we’ll fix it and we won’t foot the bill. That was the gist of it, but it’s worth going to read for yourself if you haven’t. more ›

We're pretty lucky here in Seattle that our main industries are pretty clean from an environmental standpoint. We've been shipping all of those dirty industries out of cities since the seventies and have been doing so at hyperspeed now that we've recognized our urban areas as holding pens for the creative class. There just aren't a lot of harmful byproducts invloved in computer software manufacturing - Maybe an overabundance of NorWestNerdCons, but that's about it. Every economy's gotta grow, though, right? Isn't that the system that we've agreed to? An economy that isn't expanding is dying, so bring on those new industries. more ›