Results tagged “humor”

"Betancourt," said I, "are you aware that you are the cause of great tribulation to me, by persisting in swinging at terrible pitch after terrible pitch?"

Oklahoma business man and Thunder co-owner Aubrey McClendon has lost close to two billion dollars since last summer. The one-time funder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is being forced to sell his prized wine collection to make money. He occasionally he writes for Seattlest on the subject of technology.

You know who you are. Our evil sunny sister site LAist did an interview with co-host Teresa Strasser that's entertaining, and what the hell, it's Friday, we've already got the earthquake out of the way, take a little time for yourself. Here's Strasser on how she got the job: "They called my agent, and asked if they had anybody with a news background who is Latin. Latin newsgirls are in high demand. I was the closest thing. You get the Jew, and that’s the best we can do." Also, we learned she's a former ballerina in recovery for an eating disorder, and that Charles S. Dutton killed a man.

A little while ago we were scanning the Best of Craigslist with a feeling of alarm that there might be some kind of Humor Gap growing between Seattle and other, funnier cities. So we demanded that you, Seattle, step up your game. We're delighted to see evidence of that with a recent Best of Craigslist entry that combines Seattle's indie bands, Georgetown, and bicycles to produce a truly Seattle-flavored oddity. It's a great honor to present: "Self-Proclaimed Yoko's Seek Band For Special Project." Sample quote: "Look, I'm not a fortune teller, but I do have a haunted vagina, notches on my bedpost that total over 100, and I can help you break up your band if you don't have the balls to do it yourself."

We have just spent approximately 35 seconds analyzing the contributions of Seattle residents to the Best of Craigslist, and we have discovered these salient facts: the last time Seattle made BoCL was July 16, when someone was selling an original Bible autographed by Jesus. Before that someone got fired, some dirt asked to be moved, and someone else found a stinky cat. These are all good, but it's been two and a half months since Seattle brought it to BoCL and that's too long. But your entry doesn't have to be. Get to it.

Our laugh echoed off the brick street and buildings when we noticed this flyer on an otherwise empty pole on old Ballard Avenue yesterday.

..Comes the proposed 300-foot-tall Paul Allen statue. The coffee pullers and community activists at Kapow! Coffee have begun a (satirical) petition to erect a 300-foot statue of Paul Allen, destroyer of the Cascade neighborhood and creator of South Lake Union, in the middle of a local park. Jeremiah of Kapow!, who we've always appreciated as much for his wit as his divine espresso, ribs, "We have to show the proper respect for all the wonderful things he's done for the neighborhood." We support the Kapow! petition and believe they should include an addendum to just rename the neighborhood "Allentown."

Have you outgrown Adam Sandler, yet long for foul-mouthed, self-effacing, Jewish-themed humor? It would be too Borscht-belt to make a yarmulke and dreidl joke here, but we'll leave to your imagination to suppose we did. Tonight at the Triple Door, Good for the Jews rocks the house. Or shtetl. If that's what a shtetl is. Oy!

Tonight and tomorrow, it's your last chance to see one of the year's best-reviewed documentaries at the Grand Illusion. King Corn follows two friends who move from the East Coast to the Iowa heartland to raise an acre of the highly-subsidized titular crop and follow it through the "corn industrial complex." It ain't pretty, but the film helpfully points out the extent to which corn is a part of the average American (and the average American cow's) diet, whether or not you realize you're eating it. Goodbye, wholesome summer meals and hellooooo, high-fructose corn syrup and obesity! Good thing that the protagonists and director provide the awful truth with a wink and a sense of humor, a la Super Size Me.

is what you get when you lose even that.

When we heard that Vern recently released a book called Seagalogy, we were perplexed. Why would the voice of badass cinema write a book about NFL cheerleaders?

(This story actually took place years ago but just came up in conversation recently and everyone at Seattlest realized it needs to be preserved here for posterity and for future historians to study...)

Seattle Rep's Twelfth Night, which they're nerdily calling Twelfe Night as per the First Folio, is nearly shipwrecked by dull production design and the cast's inability to make anything of the esoteric wordplay that audiences once found witty, or at least clever. But the portrayal of life lived to excess is still gripping drama, and Frank X.'s steward Malvolio burns with a self-importance that veers from comic over-stepping to something much eerier. Tickets start at $15 ($10 for 25 and under).

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.

The unfortunately named Grand Ole Party opened for Rilo Kiley Saturday night to an audience presumably not too familiar with their work. GOP have a strong, simple, raw kind of sound, not unlike White Stripes or Sweet 75, kind of directionless and inert, but impressive and energetic nonetheless. They ended the set with the first song on Humanimals, "Look Out Young Son," which after a couple of listens sounds like the strongest effort on the disc.

Monday the 10th, at 7pm, the Paramount Theatre presents Charlie Chaplin's 51st, 52nd, and 53rd films, all from 1916: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, and The Vagabond. They're all half-hour or so shorts from early on in his Mutual Films era, and feature Chaplin's genius for environmental comedy, with mishaps with escalators and fire poles.

Well, this piece certainly is interesting. We recognize it as satire because we know the cultural context that is Dan Savage. We only wish that Mr. Savage would have done the same about a month or four ago when he royally skewered Garrison Keillor, who wrote his own bit of satire in this Salon piece.

Armistead Maupin is an anagram of 'Is A Man I Made Up', he tells us, but he claimed to be a real person last night at Elliott Bay last night. Stupid baseball traffic took up all the parking spots near Pioneer Square. We cruised around for half an hour, then finally ditched and paid $5 to park in the Sinking Ship. Too late! The cafe in the basement was already packed to the gills and there was not a single solitary chair left for your poor correspondent. If today's sketch sucks more than usual, blame it on the angle I had to assume: head craned over the banister. Ow, my neck.

Seattlest got a Sony Walkman for our 15th birthday, and bought our first couple of cassette tapes with saved allowance: Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It. As any self-respecting male teen would be, we were offended thrilled by the latter’s raw language and humor. So within a few weeks, we’d procured N.W.A.’s tape, Straight Outta Compton. That’s how we knew what we were hearing Sunday night when we were put on hold after calling Mad Pizza:

We had to agree with On the Boards' executive staff (Lane Czaplinksi and Sarah Wilke) statement in the liner notes to The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil that they had been “excited about presenting Vancouver’s neworldtheatre since the first moment [they] saw the image of a smiling President Bush holding a little wild eyed man baby.” Admittedly, this was a large part of the reason why we wanted to see this piece, in addition to the generally good reviews and awards it had won in Canada. In its U.S. debut, the play more than lives up to that photo, with its pointed and consistently funny script.

TONIGHT at Meany Hall, it's "Climate Change and the Future of Life on Earth," a two-hour multi-media presentation designed to freak your climatological shit out. It stars the world-famous paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and environmental activist: Dr. Richard Leakey. Shazam! (What? We never get to say "Shazam"!) Author of The Sixth Extinction, Dr. Leakey will talk "about our impact on the environment"...um, no, he's gonna open up a can of knowledgifying whup-ass is what.

Maybe (okay, most likely) Seattlest is waaay behind on this, but we just watched The Comedians of Comedy and we gotta say, good stuff. You see, our better half is out of town this weekend so we're passing the time doing what any good husband would do in his wife's absence -- putting a nice dent in the checking account by renting movies and drinking too many gin & tonics.

You may have heard of the feature-length Aqua Teen Hunger Force, out in theaters starting this Friday. We've been excited about the movie film for a while now, and not just because it freaks out the fuzz. We just wanna see what the good folks at Adult Swim can do, given a million bucks and ninety minutes to work with. Based on the trailer, it looks like there's gonna be lots of surreal circumstances, random occurrences, and twisted humor, and not so much by way of coherent plot---just the way we like it.

We don't get it. There's been so much hype over this Brandi Carlile character for so long, and we finally "broke down" and went to see her last night at the Triple Door. We're not sure what all the buzz is about.

...in which we pit two bands against each other, to better determine how you should spend your Tuesday night.

Seattlest's AP US History teacher, George Henry, was something of a rabble-rouser at our Salt Lake City high school. At the time, we only barely appreciated that we were getting a hands-on miniature lesson in civil disobedience from the only African-American teacher at the school. What we knew at the time was that when the school board started debating talking about condoms and sex ed, George Henry started one of his lectures by replacing every noun in it with the word condom. "So during the condom treatise of the late 1880's, condoms became the most important condoms under discussion." Or something like that, you get the idea. He also sent us to steal tables from the football coaching offices when he was told there was no more budget for him to have an extra table (one extra table!) in his classroom; he instructed us to bar the door to his classroom with said table when the football coach came looking for it. Plus, he took his entire class (all white, mostly Mormon) to his baptist church where he played the organ every Sunday. And George Henry never once got suspended. But we also know that he never ran into the cafeteria and jumped up on the tables screaming obscenities--George Henry knew how to make a point without making a fool of himself.

Now, of course, I need to work in a clown somehow. I love clowns. In truth, clowns are my all-time favorite design. How will I do this? Perhaps give the animal a raucous and overt sense of humor? Make it wear funny shoes? Make it scare the shit out of young children? No, not subtle enough – I want this animal to be so much deeper than that.

Thurs - Sun, through April 8

Providing yet more evidence why you should avoid documentaries with far more than a 35-millimeter pole, the producer of Iraq in Fragments today released a gag-inducing "open letter" to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences calling on them to apologize because someone made a joke he didn't like.