Lake Union on the 4th of July courtesy of Seattlest Flickr Photog Jonathon Hanlon THE LAKE IS CELEBRATING: Summer is when neighborhood pride reaches its zenith here in Seattle, and Lake Union is no exception. LUFest, a festival including a pet parade, live music (Harvey Danger! Local funksters The Staxx Brothers!), and food, happens this Saturday, and we recommend you head down there to experience some classic fun in the sun. To repeat: Harvey Danger......

Just in case you forgot why you live in Seattle, a photo-refresher course. A rum drink really sets the mood, if you have anything like that handy.......

That's a lotta boats.......

Has the failing economy not touched you? The housing crunch not gotten you down? Would you enjoy tourists taking photos of your home or even planning sight-seeing trips to see it? Then do we have the home for you! The South Lake Union houseboat made famous by Sleepless in Seattle, is on the market. It could be yours for just $2.5 million. If you've been lucky enough to forget the hype of the house......

The second-longest serving member of the Washington House of Representatives, Helen Sommers, is retiring at the end of the current session, according to Crosscut. The second-longest-serving member of the Washington Legislature has confirmed she will not run for re-election. “This is my last session. I’m not going to run again.” Asked why, she laughed and said: “Because I’m 75 years old and I’ll be 76 in a couple weeks. That’s why.” She's been in the......

Photo by Tim Willis Thanks, snow. You've got one guy pledging never to take the bus again, and another venting obscenities. Both on LiveJournal. First, the new car convert:In Dec I got a job in the South Lake Union area, close to REI. I live in Greenlake and was busing it into the city everyday ... Today I drove to work because of the weather and fear of bus delays... My trip by car: $5.25......

Old guy: "I'm sick of this shit!" Young girl: "Sick of what?" Old guy: "Everything. All of this shit!" Young girl: "What do you mean?" Old guy: "I'm sick of everything. All of it!" [Deafening traffic noise.] Young girl: "I'm going fishing tomorrow." Old guy: "Fishing? Where?" Young girl: "Lake Union." Old guy: "For what?" Young girl: "I don't know, salmon." Old guy: "There's no salmon in Lake Union!" Young girl: "I don't know."......

It's not that development in itself sucks; it's that our county and city government doesn't believe in development for art's sake, despite all those studies about the half billion the arts return to the community. When we look around, we don't see a lot of public investment in the single most expensive thing that artists and smaller arts organizations have to face: a place to work, rehearse, show, perform. We did see this notice that......

The South Lake Union Streetcar will begin an eight-week test period soon, according to the Seattle Transit Blog. First they will do a walk through test to ensure that the streetcars are able to clear branches, traffic signals, and other erroneous things that may disrupt the streetcar along the whole route. Once that is done they will do speed tests on Valley between Mercer and Westlake to see that the streetcar can achieve and maintain......

#1 on our list of events for the weekend is the Elysian Pumpkin Beer Festival this Saturday up at the Capitol Hill location. There will be 13 different pumpkin beers on tap, including the GABF silver-medal-winning The Great Pumpkin Ale. Festivities begin at noon with the tapping of the Great Pumpkin at 4pm; a huge pumpkin in which a batch of Night Owl carried out its secondary fermentation. Yum. Beers From Elysian: Night Owl Pumpkin......

Sometime this week it's going to be announced that Seattle's soccer team the Seattle Sounders will be entering the MLS. GOALSeattle says tomorrow. Our friend in Chicago who knows about these things says it'll be announced at MLS Cup, which isn't until November 18, so we'll discount that and say tomorrow. It seems pointless, by now, to argue whether or not it will be announced. The Sounders aren't selling 2008 season tickets, Paul Allen......

For those (like Seattlest) who are too lazy to actually visit in person the South Lake Union coffee shop Kapow! to get their S.L.U.T. tee shirts (which they may or may not even have), they are now available online. Remember a week ago when the SLUT poster first appeared on Seattlest? A few days later the P-I, King5, the AP caught on. Joe Whatshisnuts from forty miles east of Boise is going to crack his......

Funny picture just turned up in the Seattlest Flickr Pool: In the neighborhood where I work (South Lake Union) there is a fairly unpopular project going on to create a trolley line that serves no real transportation purpose other than perhaps to give some office workers more places to eat lunch. In the meantime the construction of this project is wreaking havoc with all other attempts to get around, and the tracks are an enormous......

So, yeah, there's been this Russian-Turkish style "urban spa" called Banya5 on Ninth for, like, three years now. It's kind of a giant community sauna, with a central oven providing both wet and dry heat, surrounded by a bunch of fresh- and salt-water pools. The guy who built it, Seattle-born real estate developer John Goodfellow, isn't even Russian; he got hooked on the concept in New Yawk City. You have to know where it is,......

Can you think of a better way to spend your Saturday than kicking back on the lawn, chowing on a burger and listening to great live music? Didn't think so. Grab your shades, your sunblock and your appetite, kids. The barbecue is upon us! Providing the tunes are Blue Scholars (with 7-piece band!), Cloud Cult, Pela, The Cave Singers and The Blakes. We've seen most of these bands and can vouch for their fun factor,......

Last week we made it out to our first Duck Dodge sailboat race of the year -- there was no theme, but it was hot, the upper-80s, and there was a good breeze which made for an actual race as opposed to beer drinking and chip munching punctuated by the occasional slow-motion tack. Notes on the race from Duck Dodge HQ mention that "Shoot the Moon had a kayak that just couldn't stay away from......

South Lake Union is currently under water after a 20" main was broken by contractors this morning. Some businesses in the area aren't getting water and the area around Harrison and Dexter is flooded. "I just took my dog for a walk, and when I came back I saw a river coming down Harrison," said Nic Roussouw, who is working on opening a coffee shop at 404 Dexter Ave. N. "I imagine the city must......

The Tacoma News Tribune had their big Seattle cruise season preview a few weeks ago: 191 cruise ship calls, 3,000 busloads of passengers from the airport to the cruise terminals, 14,082 cruise industry jobs created in 2005, 1 article we couldn’t get completely through. Harpers index it ain’t. Unless this is it, we’re still waiting for the Seattle dailies to publish their yearly love poems to the cruise industry. Empress of the North The Empress......

MUSIC: Earl Greyhound. Power drums + steel blanket riffs + soaring vocals = a good old fashioned rock beat-down. Our ears are already ringing from all the comparisons to Zeppelin. *mp3: S.O.S. 9pm // The Crocodile // $8 READING: Book-It Theatre presents Darfur Stories, a staged reading, created from written accounts and original interviews with Darfurians, activists, journalists, and aide workers 7pm // Roosevelt High School Theatre // $5 suggested donation BOATS: 60th Annual Seattle......

Last night Sightline, the Seattle-based enviro-wonks, were hosting GreenDrinks, the networking event for the environmentally minded [email sign-up here]. Despite a blizzard of epic proportions (we're talking about local media weather coverage, not the weather itself), we walked down to the South Lake Union Discovery thingie to see what it was all about. We stood in line to get a name tag. (The woman ahead of us, impatiently, "How long is this gonna take?......

BOOKS: Dave "Mr. McSweeney's" Eggers' latest is titled What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Mr. Deng himself--a survivor of the Darfur shitstorm--discusses his life tonight. Bring tissue. 7:30pm // Elliott Bay Book Co. // Free JAZZ: Detroit's Kenny Garrett, a former Miles Davis sideman, brings his "blues-tinged, precise and rapid-fire style" (BBC Music) here for two nights. Tonight's the first. Wade through a dumbass Flash site to hear mp3s here. 7:30pm......

MUSIC: Criminally underrated British singer-songwriter Jim Noir delivers his psych-pop twice tonight: first an acoustic set at Sonic Boom in Ballard, and then rocking out at the Croc as part of the Sub Pop/Barsuk Winter Celebration and Holiday Party Extravaganza. 6pm // Sonic Boom Ballard // Free 8pm // Croc // $10 SINGIN': Have a very piratey Christmas at this month's Northwest Seaport sing-along, full of shanties and featuring a recitation of "A Visit from......

Initiative 91 is one answer. We just voted against spending public moneys on sports stadiums. Major League Soccer wants all its teams to play in small, soccer-specific stadiums, but we don't currently have one of those laying around and one would be tough to build in the current environment. Too bad, because those are really cool stadiums that have great atmosphere and look sexy on TV and professional soccer at the highest (American) level would......

ROUND 1—GEOGRAPHY 1. What county in Pullman in? 2. What is the tallest mountain located entirely in British Columbia? 3. What is the capital of Mongolia? 4. Lake Union was landlocked until the completion of what? 5. Name Italy's largest lake. 6. State Route 99 runs from Everett to which city? 7. Which is the only Oregon County to observe Mountain Time? 8. How many Baltic States are there? 9. Which country is located directly......

Screw you, Kenmore Air. You fly these things over our duplex every 2.5 minutes en route to Lake Union and you offer that tantalizing tourist flight around Seattle that's just out of Seattlest's financial grasp, and then, if those two weren't enough, you confound us by never ever hacking any boaters to bits when you're on the lake. We've been out there when it's busy and we can attest to the fact that it's difficult......

On this date in 1918, the worldwide flu pandemic hit Seattle, as 700 cases were reported among the sailors at the University of Washington Naval Training Center on Lake Union. The disease primarily struck those between 20 and 35. Some 1,600 persons died in Seattle during the next six months despite the closing of theaters and schools, the banning of public gatherings, and the widespread wearing of gauze masks. At first, Seattle authorities acted by......

-Green Tortoise Hostel's time is up. Who won the dead pool on that block going condo? -Defective Yeti figured out the key to effective spam yesterday: brevity. -In some places a Starbucks cup isn't a sign of affluence and excess; rather it's a signifier that the neighborhood's gone to hell. -The Mayor's budget allocates some doubloons to displaying the Wawona, so apparently the city is reneging on that threat to send it to the bottom......

With both the South Lake Union block party and the KEXP BBQ this weekend and Bumbershoot less than a month away, there's another festival coming up, one that requires taking a couple vacation days. How does Las Vegas at Halloween sound to you? If over the top is your cuppa tea, you might want to look into attending the second annual Vegoose, held this year October 27-31. Vegoose proper is a huge two-day outdoor......

What a workload, what a record! For close to ten years, 3,500 nights in a row, the barkeeps at Tini Bigs have been shaking, stirring & pouring. Not to mention researching, developing & testing, testing, testing. (Who can say as much? 13 Coins and Denny's, those always-open stalwarts, don't have the same reputation for innovative drinks, to say the least.) To celebrate, owner Keith Robbins dropped the price of libations to $3.50...for a couple......

The P-I has an article today that explores the panic that the North Korean missile tests of 5, July have struck into area hearts. "I don't think Seattle will be a target," David Cahn stuttered in terror. "America has occupied their country for 50 years. America's policy is the provocation for this sort of thing," Ted Roberts told the paper while impaired by fear . "Even if (the missile) could reach the U.S., it would......