The Washington State Department of Corrections wants local companies to know that the prisons are open for business. The DOC has contacted local Chambers of Commerce to say that the real way to cut costs is to use workers who have no right or say in what they do...prisoners are the perfect captive workers! While inmate labor had been previously shut down by the State Supreme Court, Washington voters opted to re-open prisons to private......

A haunting image of the Port of Seattle and its cargo, courtesy of Seattlest Flickr contributor slippery joaquin Longshoremen at the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma are conducting a walk-out today to protest U.S. military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite warnings from a Union arbitrator that all longshoremen must report to work on Thursday, reports from the Port of Seattle say that only a handful of workers showed up for their scheduled shifts. Officials......

This legendary folksinger needs your help: Your $20 donation goes to help pay medical bills Phillips has accrued recently in dealing with his heart disease. His health took a turn for the worst last fall, although his blog notes that he's recently been able to come home from the hospital. Nonetheless, paying for heart disease care when you don't have a pension or benefits isn't easy. There to entertain you, beginning at 7 PM, will......

That sure didn't last long, did it? Barely nine months. Wild Salmon, an eatery in Noo Yawk City that supposedly showcased Pacific Northwest cuisine, is calling it quits. Charles Ramseyer, who left Ray's Boathouse to open the joint for his friend Jeffrey Chodorow, will stay in the Big Apple (for the time being) and labor for other properties in the China Grill group. Chodorow went off the deep end after Frank Bruni dumped on......

Seattlest wanders. ¡Mira! is no more. Not even the upside-down exclamation point was able to save it from the, er, difficult location (basement of the Labor Temple). Intrepidly going where so many others have failed is the Middle-Eastern Zaina, installing a clone of its Pioneer Square falafel stand in subterranean Belltown. Cafe Minnie’s is no more. Belltown’s greasiest greasy spoon, and only 24-hour joint at that, was finally done in, not by crappy food and......

Economist and NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman was speaking at Town Hall last night. We were going to do this thing where we pretended to mistake him for Jack Klugman and then complained the whole post about him never mentioning acting with Tony Randall or Quincy. Luckily, we thought better of it. We were inspired by Krugman himself, though, who turned out to be a very droll fellow, or at least acts that way on cold......

Kurt Cobain’s widow and his hometown have a lot in common. Both Courtney Love and Aberdeen have battled substance abuse. Both are scorned for their blighted appearance. And both had a lot of wood running through them in their heyday. But only one of these Cobain survived-bys wants to memorialize Kurt Horcrux-style—to protect and preserve the bits of his soul still influencing music, pop culture, and the minds of talented, tortured teens. That would be......

Seattlest lives close to what is easily the weirdest Safeway ever. The Wedgwood Safeway, any of the store's employees will be happy to tell you, has been serving the neighborhood since 1951 and is as small-town America as a branch of a major chain can get. That said, the Wedgwood Safeway is definitely an odd place. It hasn't been updated in years so the now-common Safeway Earth-tone colors aren't in the produce section and the......

The food news may seem depressing, but there's hope. Bear with us. In 1651, Thomas Hobbes, not known for his optimism, wrote that the life of man was doomed to be nasty, brutish, and short. Couple hundred years later, the even less-cheery Thomas Malthus predicted that the Industrial Revolution would cause worldwide famine. Yet humans survive, even prosper. Oh, sure, we waste resources fighting one another. Granted, too, that political systems everywhere seem to encourage......

How easy it is to poke mean-spirited fun at Silverman Festivals, aka Bite of Seattle. The family-owned commercial enterprise, enabled by the City of Seattle in the guise of a community festival, symbolizes so much of what's wrong with America today: greed, exploitation, overweening appetite and tons of just plain crappy food. A cheap and easy target for the smug and self-satisfied. (For one such potshot, see Cornichon's "Blah of Seattle" post a year ago.)......

We’re only going to be in our twenties for the next three weeks, so lately we’ve been trying to feel younger--and there is no better place to accomplish this than at a local district Democrat meeting. Once again we were one of the youngest people in the room. We love you sweet, sweet democracy. What always strikes us about these meetings is how hard it is to find parking, and all the wasted paper......

Watching David Hare's dramatization of the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq last night at ACT, we were reminded of an email exchange we had that summer with an old college friend. Our friend, a Brit, was at the time starting her career as a history teacher, and if we recall correctly, we wrote her something to the effect of, "You know why World War I started, you know why World War II or......

This Adbusters piece about liberalism and its current state of crisis isn't exactly new--looks like it's from their May/June issue--but it should be required reading in Seattle. The author talks about how liberals are rich white guys who don't really have anything to complain about, but don't seem to do much besides complain. They need to man up and start acting like the born and bred civic rulers they are and blah blah blah. You......

Most know it as a cute green glob on the corner of the sushi platter, many from mistakenly putting a large first taste in their mouths without realizing it packs a potent punch. Unlike chili pepper, which burns the tongue, wasabi strikes the sinus cavity. But it’s actually protecting you, historically used as an anti-bacterial for the raw fish that often accompanies it. Some says it’s offensive to add more than the sushi chef smears......

Now that the UW finally picked a commencement speaker (they settled on Congressman Norm Dicks after Doug E. Doug cancelled), we've compiled this list of 2007 grad day yakkers at all local colleges (source: The Chronicle of Higher Education). Please let us know if we're wrong or if we left anyone out. Local colleges Bastyr College: Joycelyn Elders, masturbation proponent City University of Seattle: James Donaldson, ex-NBA player Evergreen State College: Maxine Mimms, education expert......

Later this month, the 5th Avenue Theater opens what they're calling a 50th-anniversary production of West Side Story, recreating the original Jerome Robbins choreography. This isn't a touring show starring some washed-up 70s sitcom star--the 5th Avenue is using local talent. Hoorah! Rogers (Puyallup) High product Louis Hobson, a 5th Ave regular, is playing Tony. We emailed questions, he emailed answers. Is it Lou-wee or Lou-wis? I never know. It's Louis and not Louie, or......

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......

It's not often that Seattlest shows up early to a show to catch an entire bill, since we've learned that the extra time is often not worth the effort. Saturday was a thankful exception to the rule, with all three bands on the Parts & Labor/Erase Errata/ADULT. bill worth the price of admission on their own. It was the last night for that package, and it was obvious that all bands involved knew they were......

Last month there were some reactionary-crats out there who claimed that the Viaduct advisory vote was a meaningless waste of money. Well it turns out that they were as wrong as a brown belt with black shoes after Labor Day. The vote killed the tunnel and literally threw a monkey wrench into any re-build plans. A final decision on a Viaduct replacement should come during next year’s legislative session. However, why should we do anything?......

Charles Simonyi, the man who gave us Microsoft Word, has been sent into space by the Russian government as punishment for the development of "smart quotes." Neither his billion-dollar fortune, his ownership of the world's 33rd-largest yacht, or his relationship with Martha Stewart could prevent his just and fair ostracism from the society that he's tortured by autoformatting every other damn thing we type and filling half of our screen with useless toolbars. Simonyi and......

Our first taste of the 2007 Bumbershoot lineup leaves us hungry for so much more. The full-flavored list of cross-genre musical artists scheduled to perform at the 2007 Bumbershoot includes: The Shins, Wu-Tang Clan, Panic! At The Disco, Crowded House, Lupe Fiasco, Steve Earle, DeVotchKa, Devendra Banhart, Gogol Bordello, Kill Hannah, Norma Jean, Plain White T's, The Gourds, Lyrics Born, Roky Erickson & The Explosives, The Holmes Brothers, The Avett Brothers, Yungchen Lhamo, Allison......

What would we do without the P-I? Kristen Millares Bolt and Eric Nalder deliver a late hit on the Port today, following up an earlier story on the Port's unwillingness to police its police force. It's a good day when you kick off an article like so: Port of Seattle documents released Tuesday reveal a police chief fearful of a litigious union and overwhelmed by an e-mail scandal engulfing a third of his officers.......

"Streetcar gongs ceased their clamor; newsboys cast their unsold papers into the street; from the doors of mill and factory, store and workshop, streamed 65,000 workingmen. School children with fear in their hearts hurried homeward. The life stream of a great city stopped." That's how Mayor Ole Hanson described the beginning of the general strike that was held in Seattle February 1919, one of the few general strikes ever attempted in the U.S. The Bolsheviks......

Monday LOCAL AUTHOR, LOCAL AUTHOR: Clear Cut Press presents two of its novelists: Matt Briggs' Shoot The Buffalo is about a boy growing up in Snoqualmie during the '70s. Stacey Levine's Frances Johnson, set in a small town in Florida, details the random choices made by the eponymous Ms. Johnson. 7pm // University Bookstore // FREE SCI-FI SALON: One of the finest authors on the "humanist" wing of American science fiction and fantasy, Paul......

On a recent visit to pastry chef Sue McCown’s new Capitol Hill dessert venue, Coco La Ti Da, we had the pleasure of tucking into Sue’s signature (and namesake) dessert, a multi-layered marriage of coconut and dark chocolate. Ever since, we’ve pondered more ways to showcase the ambrosial coconut/chocolate combination. This last weekend, we finally found the answer when we held a party to celebrate the debut of a friend’s fledgling karaoke project (Large Walter--he’s......

We woke this morning with a smile because for once in our topsy-turvy lives, we were going to indulge in a pastry baked by someone else. We were going to Ballard’s Cafe Besalu. The last time we went to Besalu we were en route to the Sunday Farmer’s market and ordered just one croissant to share with our market buddy--we knew we’d sunk very low when we shouted “Hey look, free beets!” in a ploy......

Somehow an article about the IWW and Starbucks slipped through our comprehensive web of Google alerts yesterday and we didn't find it until today when Starbucks Gossip linked to it. Sorry about that. Baristas at a few New York Starbucks and one in Chicago affiliate themselves with the IWW. It's a story we've heard over and over for the past three and half years now and it's not going away any time soon, despite the......

That Seattle WTO movie that's filming in Vancouver will allegedly shoot at least a few frames in Seattle proper this weekend. Here's an excerpt from the call for extras from the Washington State Jobs with Justice that's making the rounds: Filmmakers are in town shooting the scene "Anti-WTO Labor March." for the Hollywood movie "Battle of Seattle!" directed by Stuart Townsend, starring Charlize Theron, 'Andre 3000' Benjamin, Martin Henderson, Woody Harrelson, Ray Liotta, and Michelle......

We don't know if you caught this weekend's Seattle Times article on the downfall of an Eastside mortgage company, which suffered a mini-Enron implosion this spring. We note that the local business media never saw it coming, due to the proximity of their lips with the company's ass. To the Puget Sound Business Journal, Merit's founder Scott Greenlaw was "an up-and-coming businessman," the Times points out. In 2004 Washington CEO magazine proclaimed Merit one......

Thanks to an act of federal overreaching outraging Wiccans and Druidic Orders everywhere, the State of Washington has coughed up a 65-foot Christmas Tree for the U.S. Capitol Building in the other Washington. You might think it's funny that the federal government has made off with our tree, but how about this: child labor was part of the deal. It's "decorated with 10,000 lights and 3,000 ornaments handmade by schoolchildren." They really have no......