You've heard about all the quality bands based out of Seattle and working their way up the ladder lately. Here's your chance to get in on the ground floor and say "hey, i saw them back when...". Personally, we love it when we can do that, does that sounds braggy? Tomorrow at Columbia City Theater there are a couple bands that could fit that category and you should definitely check them out. Seismic-Sound.com presents Hotels' cd release show with The Royal Bear and The Devil Whale. To top off the night, Marco Collins will DJ the spaces in between, you just can't lose. more ›

• The cocoa butter bandit didn't slip away from the Everett police--officers have arrested a 24-year-old Lake Stevens man who is suspected to be responsible for the recent string of tanning salon robberies.
• The Southlake reports that Denny Triangle's Days Inn and Eighth Avenue Inn have been leased to Cornish College, who is in the process of turning the once skanky hotels into residence halls for 280 first-year art students. (Pointing) Ha, ha freshmen.
• The chaotic Seafair boating traffic on Lake Washington, is finally over. In total, authorities handed out 110 BUIs (Boating Under the Influence). Seattle 911 reports that's a 23 percent increase. Don't say we didn't warn you. Tsk, tsk.

Seattlest spent the weekend in Gothamist territory to see one of our favorite acts, Japan's Mono, perform one of only two tenth anniversary dates in North America (and with a full orchestra to boot). The show was positively transcendental (pics, official pics), but that's not the point of this post. Instead, we've got to call out the experience we had with the Ace Hotel, as we had plans to stay at the new Manhattan location of the boutique chain. more ›

What do you get when you cross first-class amenities with a blood-thirsty, third-world parasite? If you’re a downtown Seattle hotel you get bed bugs. more ›

When you're seen as the number-two city and number-two university in the state you can either embrace it or try and avoid the notion. more ›

Seattlest likes parks. Especially the big ones with plenty of room for family picnics, Frisbee, flag football and lots and lots of gay sex. more ›

We recently asked friends and strangers if hosts of popular television shows “Devine Design”, “Flip This House” and “House Hunters” were real-life designers and real estate agents before network giants “discovered” them. more ›

Once upon a time Seattlest considered North Aurora to be a shithole, to be avoided at all costs. But, eventually, we had to go to Home Depot and a used car lot, and that car rack store, and (doh) the unemployment office, and the movie theater, and IHOP and the European deli and Computer Stop and Chubby & Tubby (so far not Stupid Prices, though) and Kmart, Burgermaster, the cemetery and a hundred other tiny places the memories of which have congealed into one big impression of Aurora Avenue North. Now we consider it one of the most organic, vibrant and honest places in the city. more ›

End of May, we posted about how the city sold the Alaska Building to a developer, with the understanding that it would be turned into affordable "workforce" housing. The city took a loss of somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million because of that stipulation, Mayor Nickels was able to gesture grandly at his affordable housing gesture, and then Kauri Investments Ltd. and Ariel Development got to thinking and they were all, "Hey, you know what would be better than affordable housing is a 250-unit Marriott hotel! People who work stay in hotels a lot, so it's not even a big difference when you look at it." more ›

Seattlest took a little trip to the Oregon coast recently. We experienced two opposing points of the coastal experience within several miles of each other. True to its name, the city of Seaside is the archetypal replete with an arcade, candy stores, cheesy tourist shops, and snooty beach-fronting hotels that will be the first to go when the tsunami hits. One would think that this is the place one would find litter on the beach. Not true, Strawman! Seaside's beach was as free of junk as the coffee at Pig 'N Pancake was free of flavor. more ›

We got these "Complimentary VIP" tickets in the mail about a million years ago advertising some "wealth creation workshops" at various hotels around Seattle. We finally got around to calling them to see what the hell this was about and the phone answerer acted completely sketchy. We asked where the Income Strategies Institute is located and she said, "I can't answer that. All I can tell you is: somewhere in Utah." more ›

McMenamins, a Portland-based chain of hotels, restaurants and brew pubs, submitted a 2005 letter of intent to lease the seminary building and turn it into a hotel with a restaurant and a conference center. more ›

--Turns out 1% of the best hotels in the world are in the Seattle area. more ›

In Bellevue, no less than in Belltown, you are you eat. Tasting notes from two opening nights. more ›

--Defective Yeti is live-blogging as he reads Moby Dick. And on the other end of the intellectual spectrum, Seattlest Seth is live-blogging as he watches every episode of The Rockford Files. more ›

Last time we reported on a Starbucks lawsuit, public sympathy was tilted in the caffeine giant's favor. Even the frequently anticorporate commenters at Consumerist thought it was stupid to sue them for "betrayal" over a botched email coupon. more ›

The Port of Seattle has made the pages of both local dailies the last few days. Knowing the Port, they're feting the PR department. more ›

-We haven't heard when they're going to move it down here, but it's reported that a Seattle company is buying heavily into The Pearl. more ›

Other countries have them, official "Route des Vins" complete with signposts. Why not here? Indeed. more ›

Taittinger Champagne toasts this week in the Spanish Ballroom of the Fairmont Olympic. The French ambassador, His Excellency Jean-David Levitte, was in town to attend the 20th anniversary gala of the French-American Chamber of Commerce and used the occasion to describe the state of French American relations after two centuries: Lafayette, Pershing, Normandy, Iraq. more ›

We have mixed feelings on Rudy's Barbershop. On the one hand, Seattlest gets our hair cut there. On the other hand, we hate it. What can we say - We are large... We learned today that Rudy's is about to begin opening shops in LA, but when you roll into Jonathan's town you can't come in with a name like "Rudy's." No. You gotta go bigger. Fabulous-er! Rudy's in LA will be known as "Rudolph's." We're not making this up. more ›

The city's reporting manpower has been devoted to the Capitol Hill shootings for the past 48 hours as they should be, but were we not experiencing a story of that magnitude you'd be hearing a lot about the man who's been robbing area hotels recently. Apparently they caught a guy in Bellevue who they think is the man who perpetrated a string of some fifteen robberies including at least one in Seattle last week. more ›

Ron Sims graces the editorial pages of the Seattle Times today to dangle the carrot of a "re-imagined Seattle Center" in front of us. The Center sucks, he says, and it does. We can do better, he says, and we can. Some things like the Needle and the fountain should stay, but the Center House and the Fun Forest are crap he tells us in colorful metaphor: "Too much of Seattle Center remains like a relic from the '60s: a beloved but worn-out eight-track tape playing a dated, low-fi tune in an iPod world." more ›

This website about Modernism in Seattle bubbled up via Del.icio.us and after checking it out it struck us that the website is a lot like Modernism itself: Nice skeleton, but where's the meat? more ›

Under the Table: The Seattle Times is calling out the SPD and a few local businesses for routing around 911. The Edgewater was one of Seattlest's favorite hotels even before it was mentioned in relation to this story. more ›

Seattlest may have our kinks, but we've never delved into the magical world of furries. Oh sure, we watched the MTV: True Life on the topic, and yes, yes, there's that one CSI episode where the paraphilia comes into play, but besides that, we don't know much about people who dress up in animal costumes. more ›

It was just a single line in the weekly newsletter from the Northwest Film Forum, but it set Seattlest's heart a-flutter: more ›