((((Burp)))) courtesy of Flickr photographer RSKT Only in Tacoma... The Tacoma Municipal Court is scheduled to have a hearing today to decide if Judson Morris can keep his pet pot-bellied pig or if it violates a 1912 city statute banning hogs. On one side is the city of Tacoma, who contends that Morris' pet "Pig-Pig" is a hog and is thus banned from living within city limits. On the other side is Morris and his......

Unfortunately, the following story is not a plot-outline for next weeks Law & Order or CSI. Rather it's the gruesome fate a young army couple met this weekend in Parkland, WA. Randi and Timothy Miller were shot in their home this weekend and then doused in muriatic acid, in hopes that the evidence of their killing would be destroyed. The suspect, Spc. Ivette Gonzalez Davila, also kidnapped the couple's young child, Cassidy. Davila was......

Speculation abounded when Charles posted about a recent study showing what would happen to Seattle if a 9.0 quake hit us. The Space Needle was called out as an icon that wouldn't go down. Seattlest's dad is the resident earthquake-and-volcanoes disaster geologist in the family, so we asked for the truth. We were told to consult the disaster flick 10.5, a made for TV turd movie starring Kim Delany (you know, from CSI: Miami, or......

Dennis McLerran, head of the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency is "pissed." Governor Schwarzenegger is suing federal regulators. According to more than 500 news articles, The Environmental Protection Agency denied California’s bill to place limitations on vehicle emissions, which would have cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent in the next 10 years. McLerran claims in a Seattle Times article the EPA’s decision is purely political, not factual. Washington was one of the 18 states that......

Making up for weeks of hibernation and workaholism, Kim will hit the parties this weekend. Tonight, she’ll don her Groucho glasses for a lesbian function at Jabu’s celebrating the births of her two favorite Sagitarii. Saturday, it’s to the War Room for a company party with the missus and her workmates. Finally, she’ll ship off to the sub-tropics on Monday, where she’ll spend what remains of 2007. While his wife is taking a Wilderness......

Today John Cook mentioned a new, locally based social networking site in his Venture Blog: ListenToYourWife.com. Howard Ro, the husband in the husband-and-wife team behind the site, explains: Ro, an IT consultant, says that many married women feel as if they are not "being heard." "It's not due to abuse or neglect, but just due to the nature of male dominance in a marriage," he said. "We wanted to create a forum for wives to......

The way Seattlest's routine works out we're afforded precious little time down in Tacoma, so we're particularly unqualified to speak to the panhandling scene there as opposed to here. Maybe someone more familiar with the City of Destiny can explain the need for the panhandling ban there, though? We do spend a significant amount of time downtown Seattle, and there are panhandlers around, but they tend to either be so consistently present as to become......

In the lobby of the ACT Theater, 25 minutes before curtain of A Christmas Carol, a pretty 20-something girl wearing a cute holiday sweater surveys the scene. Four Dickens Carolers are singing in lovely harmony. Children toddle by, then look back at the carolers, their eyes wide with wonder. Garland and lights are everywhere. The 20-something's face spreads into a wide smile. She turns to her boyfriend and stage-whispers: "I love this!" What's not to......

It’s almost Thanksgiving and we’ve yet to deliver any holiday recipes. We feel deep shame. If there was a Seattlest penalty box, we would sit in it. The truth is that this year we’ll be sitting back, relaxing and watching the dog show that’s after the Macy’s parade while our sister-in-law (also a chef) does the bulk of the heavy cooking. We will, however, be bringing our pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie is something we’ve always......

There is something seriously wrong in this city right now. The fight between drivers and bicyclists has been brewing for years, but recently it seems to be reaching a boiling-over point. It pushes what we consider to be sane people, on both sides of the argument, into a state of rage that we honestly find a bit frightening. It needs to stop (and by stop we don't mean that we want to see a bunch......

Maybe it was the woods in Into the Woods at 5th Avenue Theatre that made us think of it as the "Schoolhouse Rock" of musicals -- they're cardboardy, blocky swirls of of branch and leaf painted a not-found-in-nature green. But the 5th Ave's show itself -- inspired by Bruno "I was wrong about everything" Bettelheim's Uses of Enchantment -- brims with '70s-childhood nostalgia, rhythmic energy, and a love of lyrical ping-pong that recalls the gleeful......

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? Then we noticed that it's not Sea Gal-ogy. Seagal. As in Steven Seagal. More badass, less hotpants-clad ass. To quote Vern's PR email: More than 5 years in the making, the new book SEAGALOGY by Vern is the first serious analysis of the films of Steven Seagal. Using......

Seattlest left Cooper's Alehouse at 10:40 last night with a brand new bucket, part of our team's prize for coming in 5th place. And we wondered why we'd never managed to check out their trivia night when we lived within walking distance. It was a good quiz. Cooper's quiz is scheduled for 8:45 Tuesday nights, though last night's kicked off at 9:00. It's 40 questions, uncategorized. Teams trade answer sheets for scoring. After about......

You may not like getting pulled over by the state patrol, but at least you have a sartorially pleasing view leaning in your window. Our state's troopers are the best-dressed state law enforcement officers in the country, according to the National Association of Uniform Manufacturers and Distributors. Washington State troopers, in case you're lucky enough to have stayed fashion runway distance from them, wear campaign hats and black bow ties, and have done so since......

Peter Steinbrueck, a soon-to-be--former City Council member, announced legislation today that would require all city departments that review the environmental impacts of projects to take greenhouse gas emissions into account. Besides the fact that it's kind of crazy that they don't already do that, we think this is a great idea. It's great because it's an attempt to take into account and limit all of those emissions that are usually ignored as too hard to......

Seattle Rep's The Murderers is three monologues, one after the other, that thankfully get more entertaining as the show goes along. Each monologue deals with a murder (or murders) committed at the Florida retirement community, and sends up a different view of senior citizens -- as old moneybags who keep their heirs on tenterhooks, as randy old goats, as cash cows for the unscrupulous. It's a mildly dark series of "I-dun-its" for Matlock's urban audiences......

In New York, a place where we once lived, recycling does not--despite being mandatory--actually happen. Example--in our office building in the Flatiron District, we had, as mandated by law, little blue waste receptacles where you deposited only paper. But when the janitor came around, he emptied those blue receptacles into the same garbage bag where he dumped all the other trash. So perhaps it was to inspire the locals The New York Times ran a......

We failed to notice yesterday, among all the hubub over Councilman Richard McIver's arrest on domestic violence charges, a post from Seattle Weekly political reporter Aimee Curl. McIver remains in jail and has claimed he'll be pleading "not guilty" to the charges. Columnist Robert Jamieson Jr. is taking him to task in today's P-I stating, "For his sake, that stance had better just be a legal formality before coming clean -- or a typo. Otherwise,......

Along with the million other words being written on this topic, we at Seattlest thought it was a good time to share some of our thinking on the Roads and Transit bill we're going to have the chance to vote on this November. The crux is this: Voters in the greater Puget Sound region are being asked to approve almost $11 billion for a 50-mile expansion of light rail and $7 billion on highways around......

Front-page screamer in the P-I today: School crimes under wraps. The P-I (disclosure: I write freelance sports pieces for them) reviewed Seattle School records and found cases of assault that weren't reported to police. Instead, school administrators tried to deal with these incidents on their own. King County prosecuting attorney Tomas Gahan ain't happy about it. Says he: "I don't want the principals or administrators to sort out what is a crime and what isn't.......

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods. LAist saw national headlines soar this week with......

This afternoon at two o'clock the city council will vote on proposed new nightclub regulations, bitterly opposed by Seattle's entertainment industry. Yet even as the council prepares for the vote, controversy continues to swirl over SPD's nightclub sting op from Saturday, Sept. 8. This morning, The Seattle Times reported on inaccuracies in its article from a week age today on elements of the sting operation, including the disputed claim that a gun made it......

Overheard at Seattlest HQ: "I can see how the guy might have a case, but it's pretty common knowledge in the industry that you don't fucking sell AutoCAD on your own -- at least not on obvious places like eBay." That Seattlest was referring to Timothy Vernor, a local guy who filed suit against Autodesk because they used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to have eBay pull auctions where he was trying to sell used......

Admittedly, Seattlest is a bit late on this one, but hey, we gotta pay the bills too so please, forgive us for being a couple of days behind the news cycle on the Flexcar story. To us, the state's decision to force Flexcar users to pay a car-rental tax stinks from here to Olympia. First and foremost, the whole point of Flexcar is to make it easier for a household like ours - stuck......

In Slate today, Taylor Clark declared our -Ist-less neighbor to the south "America's indie rock Mecca," then spent several paragraphs dropping names and figuring out why. His conclusion? It's easy to live here. In the words of a friend of mine who used to be the music editor at the local alt-weekly, Portland is like a resort community for indie rockers who spend half the year working themselves ragged on tour. You can venture into......

According to a report in this morning's Seattle Times, Mayor Nickels has decided to play hardball in his attempt to get all Stasi on Seattle's nightlife. In what appears to be a blatant attempt to politicize Seattle's police force, according to the Times, "Seventeen bouncers, bartenders and other nightclub employees were arrested Saturday night for allegedly violating state liquor laws." Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske and City Attorney Tom Carr used the sting to push for......

The P-I is still defending its decision not to run the random photo of Arab-lookin guys the FBI passed them last week, as if not participating in a man-hunt for two guys who happened to ask a question about the workings of the ferry in front of the wrong citizen detective is something that needs any more ink. Robert Jamieson Jr says: The trouble with public outings goes beyond these men being stripped of their......

Back in mid-July, the Seattle Times brought the sad story of Mark Cruz, Renton, to our attention. Cruz was busted for honking at the car in front of him, which was lingering at a green light. This morning (thanks, Kayvaan G!) we noticed the P-I headline "Hold that honk: car horns are for safety only." To our surprise, Mark Cruz was again in the news, but for the same exact story. The fine, by......

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......

Seattlest finally got around to reading Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. It's been on our "to read" list for, oh, about eight years now. Imagine our surprise when, on page 47 (hardcover), we came across a strong local connection for the titular lexographically gifted madman, William Minor: A third half-brother, Thomas T. Minor, died in peculiar circumstances many years later.......