This troublemaker eleven-year-old is quickly becoming a legend. In 2007, Semaj Booker stole a car and drove it on the highway until the engine blew. Then, he snuck past security onto two flights to get his runaway self from SeaTac to Texas. Booker tried the plane trick again just last month, and now he's back in court for attempted burglary. What is going on here, exactly? Someone needs to find the back story on......

We had a laid-back, happy time at Dope Emporium on Saturday. It felt like a hiphop block party: a family affair with barbeque, a beer garden, and kids running around doing cute things like breakdancing. There even was a producers' battle from which MTK (of Himalayan Rickshaw Run fame) emerged triumphant. Check out some photos from the event, taken by Seattlest and Terry Creighton.......

Love it or hate it, there's no denying the commercial success of Kidz Bop. A big hit with the kids, as well as their parents, the family-friendly Kidz Bop series has sold 10.5 million CDs in the past seven years, no small feat in the dying music industry. And to think, all they're doing is taking pop songs (sometimes current, sometimes retro) and adding incredibly chipper kids' vocals to the mix. Now Kidz Bop is......

Now that whoredom is all over the news, won't somebody think of the children? On Saturday, April 19th at 10am local time in select movie theaters nationwide, the highly popular BRATZ dolls star in their first animated musical BRATZ: Girlz Really Rock, featuring 8 new songs and a new character in a one-day special event. BRATZ: Girlz Really Rock shows girls that winning sometimes isn’t everything. Although the Bratz get wrapped up in the......

On Saturday, we took our godson, his mom and his dad to Baby Loves Disco. Since we don't have a kid of our own and don't have any experience with kid-themed events, 17-month-old Eli agreed to let us interview him about the party. We'd like to preface his comments by saying that from the moment we walked in until the time we left, Eli was trailed by a gaggle of older-than-him little girls. Undoubtedly this,......

Those crazy kids at WET have put Ibsen's Hedda Gabler on a crash diet -- the subtitle is "A Pistol Fit in One Act" -- and added what they call "dance and circus vocabulary" to the mix. According to the Weekly, The show is “movement intense,” says director Jennifer Zeyl; actors can and do literally run up the walls.So it won't be your usual neurotic drawing room drama, where people stand there stiffly and occasionally......

Last night there were tons of Ron Paul's people outside the Showbox Sodo. Before, during, and after Barack Obama's fundraising event/rally, the Paul supporters waved their signs and interacted with anyone who would give them the time of day. Too bad they couldn't afford tickets to the event due to the current tax structure--if only someone would abolish the IRS and the Federal Reserve.... Meanwhile, inside the venue was a crowd of teens, twenty-somethings,......

This Seattlest started his carpet-bagging campaign here about ten years ago, so maybe we have an imperfect understanding of the Fun Forest and it's cultural baggage. When we heard that the City Council had elected to raze the Fun Forest in 2009 our first reaction was "What?! They're clear-cutting the Wenatchee National Forest?!" But then we caught on, as we occasionally do, and realized they were talking about the little carnivalette that lives in Seattle......

For a Presidential candidate—especially one who has recently surged in the polls—Barack Obama is kinda a rock star. So it makes sense that he'd host his latest Seattle appearance at a rock club. The Seattle Generation Obama Concert takes place Tuesday night at the Showbox SoDo. Obama will be there, doing his campaigning thing, along with special musical guests the Dusty 45s and (the still-reunited) Brad. Since Obama and company are going after the......

Zooey Glass gives a little sermon, in the longer sermon that is Franny & Zooey, about "the Fat Lady" -- Seymour once told him to shine his shoes (before a radio show?! as Zooey argued) for this mythic creature, who it's said lives inside every one of us. When we saw Jersey Boys at the 5th Ave on Friday night, though, she was sitting behind us. She clapped as the familiar doo wop songs began,......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. It’s very possible that the Arizona style enchilada was made up by a marketing firm......

The Seattle School District paid some education Ph.Ds to assess the district's gifted program, the Advanced Placement Program (APP). [Full Disclosure: We were in APP (then called "IPP") from 1st-8th grade.] The Ph.Ds produced a report containing a bunch of observations that are incomprehensible to anyone that isn't a Ph.D., such as the need for "socio-emotional counseling" and "overall curricular vision." [Full Disclosure: In IPP we had this goofy slogan that went "You pee-pee, I......

Sometimes the world really is a beautiful place. Specifically when there's beer involved. Jack's meeting friends on Saturday for a session of oak-aged beer tasting at Brouwer's Big Wood Fest. He'll then spend the rest of the day rubbing his tum tum and smiling a lot. Thrilled about the possibility of the year's first snow fall, Kim will spend as much of the weekend as possible getting over the cold that's been lingering for a......

Ski season is, thankfully, here and Seattlest couldn't be more excited. In fact, even though our friends are completely lame and won't go with us, we're off to Crystal tomorrow to take advantage of cheap lift-ticket prices (and cause we're jonesing). For a variety of reasons though, we don't own any of our own equipment and are not yet ready to buy our own stuff. So before heading out to catch some early-season slope action,......

It seems like we've been seeing a lot of plays lately with children in them. Into the Woods at the 5th Avenue had kids, and Whistle Down the Wind at the 5th Avenue and A Christmas Carol at the ACT both do. We wondered, who are these child actors? How do they find time to act when there is so much television to watch? So we had a short chat via email with Elijah Ostrow,......

Until the day after Thanksgiving, Seattlest hadn't seen The Nutcracker -- probably the world's most famous ballet -- in years. But we had a solid image in our head of what it looked like because when Seattlest was a little kid, our mom made an annual birthday tradition to see it every year on opening night. For much of our childhood, this meant getting all spiffed up and walking a few blocks to Lincoln......

Jack has already mentioned Stars at the Showbox, and Katelyn's put the word out about Grayskul and Hangar 18 at Chop Suey. That leaves us to mention M.I.A. and the Cool Kids at Showbox SoDo, or, if you like things a little more old-school, Mudhoney is at El Corazon. Here they are playing "Hate the Police" in Prague: Saturday, it's a Brit-pop double-header with Travis and openers Maximo Park at the Moore. There's also The......

On Wednesday, we spent $50 to see a basketball game between two mediocre college teams. The game was sloppy and largely unremarkable. We enjoyed ourselves immensely. We enjoyed ourselves immensely because we love basketball. And we suspect that if you love musicals as much as we love basketball, you won't mind spending $50 to see the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Whistle Down the Wind, playing through December 2nd at the 5th Avenue. The two leads,......

We're getting a new Major League Soccer team and everyone either is or should be excited. Drew Carey's walking around town, season tickets are flying off the shelves and the MLS Cup is approaching this weekend. On the field Houston faces New England, but there's sure to be a lot of talk during the broadcast about Seattle, our new team and the interesting ideas that have been associated with it. Unfortunately, no one in Seattle......

Nothing ages as poorly as sketch comedy television. You remember it being it hilarious, but when you sit someone down in front of a "Mr. Show" or "Kids in the Hall" or "Ben Stiller Show" DVD, invariably, the first episode passes in uncomfortable silence before you have to admit that, at the time, it was hilarious, but maybe it would have made more sense to watch a few clips on YouTube instead of buying the......

Being born about three decades too late early to appreciate Go, Diego, Go LIVE: The Great Jaguar Rescue, a musical based on the TV show of the same name, we sent our two-year-old nephew. Seattlest: How did you like Go, Diego, Go? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew: (swaying from side-to-side) Goooood. Seattlest: Did you have fun? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew:: Yes. Seattlest: What was your favorite part? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew:: (Prolonged silence) Wow, we had no idea that......

Towards the very end of last night's People Talking and Singing, as the clock ticked past 10:00 and John Roderick announced he'd play another song and take a few requests from the audience, our butts chimed in: "Hey, this is starting to go on a little long." Our brains, and most of the rest of us, were enjoying themselves thoroughly. But Town Hall started life as a Christian Science church, and the pew we sat......

True confessions time: We've never set foot in 826 Seattle. We think we might have seen the building once, at night, while driving somewhere else. We'd turn in our hipster license, but as Seattlest Jeremy notes, "parenthood remains the antidote to hipness." We've never been all that hip, but we are writers, we (used to) read McSweeney's, and we've been aware of Seattle's hippest educational center, 826 Seattle, since before it opened. We just chose......

Seventeen teams showed up at the Old Pequliar last night to see if our voice would give out. We managed to get through the evening without having a Peter Brady moment, but we're grateful to those of you who were willing to step up to the mic at a moment's notice. We thought we'd produced a slightly more difficult quiz than usual, but we were proven wrong -- every team got 40 or more......

Just when you thought that college campuses would be unable to handle any more scourges to their populations, with meningitis and date-rape rampant, a new scourge has reared its ugly head: severe, humorless sobriety. Last night we found ourselves in the midst of a sedate and calm crowd of clean-cut, upstanding young college students at a co-ed mixer held in the HUB Ballroom, featuring the touring acts of the NME Rock 'n' Roll Riot......

Bumbershoot 2005 hosted the inaugural People Talking and Singing show, where 2,800 festival attendees packed McCaw Hall to see Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), Mike Doughty, Sarah Vowell, and Death Cab for Cutie, all the while raising $18K for 826 Seattle, the youth writing center in Greenwood. Last year's event, also at Bumbershoot, was hosted by Daily Show Resident Expert™ John Hodgman and singer Jonathan Coulton. Eggers, Handler, Gibbard, and Vowell were back......

Donte's blurb for Man Man is "warpaint!"; our motto for the fun-time Philly circus band is "everybody hits something!" Regardless, the "Viking-vaudeville punk-wop rock-and-soul collective" consistently puts on a great live show. Last night at Neumo's, even their sound check was awesome, and that was way before they donned the all-white outfits and face paint. In fact, the over-the-top performance is so central to Man Man's appeal that we don't even bother to listen......

Outfit called Not For Tourists has just published a guide to Seattle. It's a handsome book, looks just like Moleskine journal, complete with oilcloth cover, fat elastic closure, gorgeous paper. The Seattle version is tenth in a series, cobbled together by a design staff in faraway Noo Yawk with input by a locally based "city editor" named Fred Beldin, who contributes occasional music reviews to The Stranger. NFT Seattle starts out with a grid of......

In 2004, Ken Jennings redefined success on Jeopardy!, banking over $2,500,000 as he won 74 games. Those of us who get paid in bar credit know it's hard to make a living through trivia, but Jennings has done it. He turned his obligatory cash-in-on-your-15-minutes book, Brainiac, into something much better and broader, an examination of trivia history and culture. He also moved from Utah to the Seattle area. That, and Brainiac's paperback release tomorrow, gave......

The Halloween crowd was bleeding out of orifices, jack-booted and silk gowned, and they roared at the songs about compulsive masturbation; the sheep fucked and sheared and shot; school kids on heroin and cocaine; the schizophrenic dead under an overpass; the anti-hymn with the chorus "banging in the nails." The Tiger Lillies stood on the Moore's stage beneath red and blue lights that left livid bruises on the smoky air and profaned life in an......