While out and about the other day, we ran across these items. Now, seeing shoes hanging from wires is nothing new, of course. Like you, gentle reader, we've been seeing them everywhere ever since we can remember. What is new, though, for us is seeing a pair of boots up there. We're kinda surprised we haven't seen this much sooner. Also, we are thankful that the utility crews hadn't gotten around to taking them down before we finally photographed this important cultural artifact. more ›

True story! The other afternoon we were IMing about some important work-related stuff with our friend Scott G. and he asked if we'd seen Spamalot at the Paramount yet, and and we said, "Nope, you?" and it turned out he had, so he started to tell us about it and we said -- in a flash of brilliance -- "Hey, would you mind if this ended up on Seattlest?" more ›

Somehow, in between day jobs, practices, live shows, and recording their second album Beehive Sessions (produced by the Posies' Jon Auer), everybody's favorite performance group/art collective/pop band "Awesome" has found the time to put together a new theater extravaganza for all ages. And though it's kid-tested mother-approved, there's still scads of local talent involved: Here's What Happened is directed by WET's Jennifer Zeyl and has a different guest narrator each night--actor Charles Leggett, Almost Live! and Seattle Channel's Nancy Guppy, and man about town Sean Nelson. more ›

So we'll begin, the guy at the podium said, the huge black blast door in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Downtown Library eased down its track, slowly cutting off our view of the lobby, and we shivered. more ›

It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by poop. Finally D.C. contemplated taking Vermont's place as a state and marveled at the GOP lessons learned from the "Macaca Moment." more ›

This weekend the National Weather service is calling for mid-70s to 80 degrees. You may want to recover from heatstroke by rehydrating in an air-conditioned theater with other bepinkenned Seattleites, and their melanin-endowed friends savoring their little moment of schadenfreude. (Here's the Seattle Times cheat sheet on the various venues.) more ›

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Ah, the storied cherry blossoms of UW! more ›

Seattlest had a really good friend years ago that was a huge Sparklehorse fan. We grew close over talks of her dealings with the band (one member in particular) along with other more personal dramas. Despite all of the talk, we never talked about the band's music directly, it was all at a very meta- level. Going into the show Wednesday night we were flooded not with excitement over the return of Sparklehorse after a five-year hiatus, but with thoughts of our friend, having had a bit of a falling out last year. We were worried our emotions would cloud the show, but instead it enhanced the experience, as did our alone-status on Valentine's Day. more ›

We hadn't been to the Comet for awhile, but everything looked just the way we left it. Everyone was just as scruffy and working-class-bluesy and it wasn't until we sat down and talked to them later that we discovered they were from Perth, Australia, and worked at Microsoft and Amazon. We holed up in the "Being John Malkovich" lounge upstairs (complete with 3/4-size red door marked "Private") trying to guess who that maddeningly familiar band was they were playing on the stereo (Social Distortion) until Prosser's melancholic indie-alt-country pulled us downstairs. more ›

AIR SUPPLY: Eric Klinenberg’s new book, Fighting for Air, examines how corporate ownership and control of local media has remade American political and cultural life. Klinenberg, a sociology professor at New York University, is interviewed by Michael Fancher, Seattle Times editor-at-large. more ›

He's not raking muck for any paper publications currently, but ex-Seattle Weekly all-star Philip Dawdy is still managing to rouse the rabble on the internet. He got noticed by Reddit.com this week after making the jump from reporting to editorializing and dissing Google, MySpace, "Web 2.0" and blogs from, uh, his blog. more ›

>>>Third Place Books, 7:00pm. Another weighty tome, Unreleased Beatles by Richie Unterberger, to add to your Beatles-only reference section. It details the shitload of stuff that was recorded but, you know, forgotten about what with being so high at the time, plus the whole headtrip with Yoko. Free with OCD collecting disorder. more ›

There's a great opportunity to participate in a hack of Amazon.com today that won't net you a big list of credit card numbers or any free books or anything, but it will let you feel like you put one over on a local giant while at the same time helped a local website save the planet. And who would pass that up? The WorldChanging book which we've been mentioning lately (here and here) is for sale at Amazon and doing well, but WorldChanging.com and their book's publishers don't really have the capacity to do the huge marketing push that is necessary today to get a book in front of a whole lot of people. In lieu of millions of dollars of PR they've designed a situation that should get WorldChanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century way up on the Amazon bestseller's list. That list is more or less real time as it takes into consideration only sales over the last twenty four hour period, so if a whole lot of people buy a book at the same time that book is likely to be an Amazon bestseller, if only for a day. A day is enough, though, to get a whole lot of notice. People pay attention to what happens on Amazon. more ›

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A: What Ken Jennings writes when he autographs copies of Brainiac. more ›

Last night, Seattlest was witness to a monumental pop culture event: Ian Bell's Brown Derby Series' interpretation of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet (Chapters 1-12). Look, if you don't know by now about this epic tale of adultery, berettas, incontinent midgets, and terrible rhyming, we really can't take the time to explain it to you. Just go here, watch all twelve chapters, delight in the so-bad-it's-goodness, and you can thank us later. more ›

Now, Seattlest was paying attention to this episode, really we were. It's just that shortly prior to the program's start, we received a disturbing piece of news that has tainted this—and dare we say, all future—episodes. You see, Seattlest was spending something of a lazy Sunday afternoon catching up on back issues of magazines and one in particular had a feature on Miss Grey herself, Ellen Pompeo. Now, ordinarily, we stay away from mentioning anything about the actors and stick, instead, to the gooey goodness of the characters themselves—the meta potential, quite frankly, frightens us. But ladies and gentleman, this particular article gave us information so shocking, nay, unexpected, that we had to share. That our dear sweet Meredith, our innocent, world-unweary, naïve, inexperienced in the ways of the world intern, is, actually...36. more ›

This Friday, "America's Funnyman" Neil Hamburger will turn the Funhouse into the Funnyhouse (sorry, but we had to say it before he did). more ›

As we enter the final days of this year's SketchFest, let's take a walk down memory lane, all the way back to the heady times of the previous weekend: Last Saturday night, three members of Seattlest's collective entity assembled ourselves in a Voltron-like fashion for some comedy at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. We were there for the performances of two troupes, San Francisco's Prank the Dean and NYC's Elephant Larry. more ›