--Brawny men are tearing apart the old Rainbow Grocery space, but the brawny men won't say why. --"To the lechy homeless men: I am not a dancing female gift the City of Seattle decided to kindly bestow for your afternoon entertainment." --Eyewitness to a suicide. --The new Sufjan Stevens album will be called Oregon, With the Wind and will be release only in a hoaxy parallel universe. --USS Mariner has a few ideas for......

A new musical genre: not heavy metal, but fiberglass. First, Seattle Opera got in on the frenzy of Pigs on Parade, whipping up an Opera Pig named Rusty. Then the scenic studios manager, Michael Moore, composed a 20-second "aria" for the pig to sing, and persuaded baritone John Boehr to lend it his voice. A bit of electronic wizardry in Rusty's snout senses when people come snooping around the plaza in front of McCaw......

POLEMIC: Understated, respectful, sober -- these are words that describe someone else besides Christopher Hitchens, who we suspect would beat you senseless with his shoe if it meant that he could own "iconoclastic." Here's the pro-Iraq War Hitch on Michael Moore: "Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery." Here's......

Providing yet more evidence why you should avoid documentaries with far more than a 35-millimeter pole, the producer of Iraq in Fragments today released a gag-inducing "open letter" to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences calling on them to apologize because someone made a joke he didn't like. The offender? Jerry Seinfeld who, to quote the aggrieved documentarian "poked fun" at documentaries in his introduction of the five nominees for Best Doc., and......

Even though we are way way past school age, we still get a little melancholy at the close of summer. Fortunately, our friends across the -ist network know that the shenanigans don't need to end just because the big yellow buses are back on the roads. So, grab your sunscreen and your favorite hangover cure, as we take a tour of end of summer fun from -ist cities all over the damn place. SFist......

Seattlest enjoys a good documentary, so we were excited to see that the Grand Illusion will be showing two politically-charged features later this week. They sound like doozies: · Twist of Faith, a 2005 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary, deals with the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal head on---by following a now-adult survivor of molestation, as he first reports the abuse and then takes his bishop to court. This film played at SIFF earlier this......

It may not be as desirable as hottest rock star wife or as prestigious as greatest novel, but our own Congressman Jim McDermott has been named the 38th worst American. In a new book by conservative author Bernard Goldberg the 100 worst Americans are ranked, from Michael Moore (number 1) to Hippie O'Flagburner (number 100). Goldberg told the AP that McDermott had made the list because of his visit to Baghdad in the fall......