BOOKS: Local author (from Anacortes) William Dietrich will be making the rounds of local book stores, starting tonight at University Book Store. He'll be reading from his recent book, The Rosetta Key. The book sounds a little stressful, but full of Indiana Jones-style adventure. 7 p.m. // University Book Store // Free IN BALLARD: Pufferfish is probably one of Seattle's most awesome, little-known folk-rock bands. We're talking guys with shakers on their ankles dancing......

Long ago and not so far away, in this very country, average everyday folks stood up against their bosses, against the town militias, against the industries that owned their boom towns. They fought and, in several cases, died for the right to workplace regulations. The 40-hour week. The weekend. Child labor laws. Safety regulations. The right to organize a union at all. Those posters you have at work that tell you your rights as......

Bill Gates doesn't have to wait for much of anything these days, even when it comes to Homeland Security altering laws based on his recommendations. Gates testified before Congress on March 12th of this year requesting the government to reconsider its stance on the length of time foreign non-immigrant students could remain and work in the US. Less than a month later, on April 4th, the Department of Homeland Security granted his request verbatim.......

"Immigration Queue" by Flickr conrtibutor lcars Has immigration become the most divisive issue in America? If the battle brewing at the University of Washington over planned protests on the issue is any indication, we're leaning towards yes. An email from College Republicans is making the rounds at UW, announcing a planned game of "Find the Illegal Immigrant Tag" on the HUB lawn. The "game" is planned for Tuesday afternoon to call for the securing......

Poor John Vanderslice. John wrote the bulk of his new album, Emerald City, while knee-deep in legal limbo after a visa application for his girlfriend, a French national he met in Paris, was rejected by US Immigration. The songs and themes are fueled by an era of deep insecurity and paranoia; they develop in front of a backdrop of ritualized and mythologized current events. But at its simplest, Emerald City is made up of......

Trader Joe's Silent Movie Mondays wrap up tonight at the Paramount -- the redoubtable Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer Organ -- with a trifecta of Charlie Chaplin shorts from 1917: The Cure, The Immigrant, and The Adventurer. Tickets are $12. The show starts at 7pm, but if you get there early, you can hear Freehold Theatre's George Lewis talk about Chaplin's contribution to the field of physical comedy. In the first short, an alcoholic......

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked......

This week's Comment of the Week was posted as a reply to a post about an immigration announcement out of the office of Mayor Greg Nickels and uses the word "homo" six times, including such creative constructions as "homo liberals," "homo culture," and "liberal homos." Funny how homo liberals, choose not to see the real enemy in North America and they opt for hating America. Mexico has no culture except being forced into the Catholic......

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......

Everything we know about dodging the draft by heading to Canada we learned from The Brothers K and popular mythology. So, we don't know much. Little before our time, there. Despite the fact that today's army is all volunteer (and today's Canada is more Conservative) there are still some soldiers waiting out Iraq up north. Almost everyone that this Salon article mentions seems to have already pulled a shift in the Middle East and is......

Last year's immigrant rights protest was out of character with the well-publicized, poorly-attended quick hitter marches that seem to be de rigueur in Seattle currently. Thirty thousand people came out for that one and snaked through the streets of Downtown for hours. Yesterday afternoon we left the office a few minutes early to try and track down the 2007 version and after chasing 5th all the way back to Westlake Center and coming up empty......

Austinist gets arty with an interactive guide to SXSW, loved some local art galleries and a new art exhibit and lamented the possible loss of "Friday Night Lights" production to New Mexico. Bostonist was happy they finally found an Anna Nicole Smith connection to their fair city and that an Apple Store was opening up. They were less happy that new rules have been established limiting underage shows and that their Governor is spending......

We sent our passport off to Philadelphia last week for routine renewal, then got unexpected assignment to cover a travel symposium in Italy...next week! No chance of getting new passport in time. Called State Department, expecting endless bureaucracy, got helpful advice on first ring. Used automated system to schedule interview right here in Seattle, got appointment within the hour. Impressive staff at Passport Office. At least one federal agency doing things right, makes leaving home......

Peter Bagge has an incredible comic in Reason that skewers absolutely everyone involved in immigration debate in this country. There are even some panels depicting the immigrant rights protests in Seattle that we attended.......

Our little ditty against the Statuette of Liberty drew some comments from Dan Savage yesterday: And isn't there something meaningful about one Lady Liberty on the East Coast facing Europe and another on the West Coast facing Asia? (Now if we could only get one in, say, Texas facing Mexico and South America—and to hell with bronze, make that one out the bones of the Minutemen.) When you consider the United State's long history......

Seattlest has been a fan of the Hamilton Corner billboard (a.k.a. the right-wing Uncle Sam billboard) between Centralia and Chehalis since our first trip to Portland after moving here in the '90s. We love it in a "defend to the death your right to say it" sort of way. When sloganeer Al Hamilton died a couple of years ago, we wondered if the tradition would live on. Happily, his family has decided to carry......

Interleauge play begins again this weekend. In baseball stadiums all over the West geographical rivals will stare each other down: Oakland vs. San Francisco, Houston vs. Texas, Los Angeles of Los Angeles vs. Los Angeles of Anaheim, and Seattle vs. San Diego. Yeah, we know, the Padres again. While everyone else in the AL West will celebrate a weekend of, "We're neighbors so I hate you," we will end up dancing with the only girl......

Yesterday, in the midst of a would-be rush hour, Seattle bore witness to one of the largest marches the city has seen in many years. Seattlest watched from our office as police hit the streets, roads were blocked, and busses and other downtown traffic slowed to a desperate crawl. According to reports, this march was to be larger than the last one, but it was tough to say. Either way, it was big, and......

Before yesterday's game, seven Mariners of Latino descent asked for a private meeting with manager Mike Hargrove. Inside his office, they told Hargrove that, to show solidarity with immigration rights marchers, they were sitting out Monday's game against Minnesota. The Times reports what happened next: Adrian Beltre: "[Hargrove] said three times, 'Are you serious?' " "He was getting red, like he was ready to pop a fuse," added Guardado. And Hargrove's reaction? "Which one......

We noted the arrival of some new water rat to the Seattle area on Friday, but after every single newspaper in the entire free world printed the AP story about it over the weekend maybe we should note it again. We're also going to note that nearly everyone who printed the article was fine with the AP headline, "South American Rodents Found in Seattle." Descriptive, but not all that punchy. You know, fine for the......

LAist tracks an award-winning TV writer who worked on Good Times to a homeless shelter and sees a Little Old Lady get a jaywalking ticket because she can't get across fast enough (in the same post!). Poets invade Metro and an LAist contributor's new book asks WWJB. Gothamist gets down with the immigration rally and their readers want to be heard. The anniversary of the Mets' 1986 World Series is celebrated via a RBI Baseball......

There's a whole lot of latino going on in the park right outside our house in the Central District. Normally our neighborhood is exceptionally quiet all day, save for the sound of baking donuts from Gai's, until the little league softball or pee-wee football teams start showing up around 2:30. So we were mighty surprised to hear quite the ruckus out in Judkins Park, and peeking out we saw at least a couple hundred......

In 2000 or 2001 a number of shipping containers showed up at Harbor Island filled not with stereos and Nikes, but with hopeful new residents. Local author Jonathan Raban was so affected by the human smuggling operation at that time that he wrote it as central to his 2003 novel Waxwings in which an entrepreneurial-minded transplant from "Everett" arrives on our shores the sole surviver of a similar container cruise and sets about making good.......

The General marched with immigrants and their supporters this weekend in Yakima and has a post up about it now: Immigration is a difficult issue. The owners in Our Leader's ownership society need a workforce they can exploit beyond the limits allowed by law. Undocumented aliens fill that role, because, being undocumented, they cannot complain about being victimized. Now, we've come to a point where the demand for an exploitable workforce has become so......

Seattlest saw a house party get senselessly attacked with a shotgun and end in seven dead. A local senator is debated and their version of the big dig is investigated. To truly get to the bottom of it they interview the writer Jonathan Raban. Bostonist has its first birthday party and investigates how to attach more gambling dollars to the Red Sox. Benjamin Franklin is celebrated and Johnny Damon is not. Image by Ethan Bagley......

The Seattle Times today stokes the raging firestorm of fear created by the discovery last week of the dope tunnel between houses straddling the border with Canada. Who knows what Canadian fury could be streaming into the state of Washington through similar operations? From the Seattle Times: In the most remote parts of the 4,000-mile border the United States shares with Canada, more than 200 roads snake between the two countries, miles from homes......