What a stable, non-disastrous weekend it's been for us thus far! We're making curried chicken salad, eying the unopened bag of Cheddar Sour Cream Ruffles, and catching up on a week's worth of unwatched YouTube videos. It turns out that when you search for "Seattle" on YouTube, this very helpful National Geographic video about the Nisqually earthquake in '01 (and the fault that runs under downtown Seattle) is the second result. Were you living in......

Documentary: Los Angeles and art don't have the strongest association. (Glen Hansard at the Oscars, shaking his statue at the audience, "Make art! Make art!") But it's more of a signal-to-noise problem. The documentary The Cool School explores the lives of the founders of L.A.'s artistic "cool." Regina Hackett describes the situation: Back to L.A. in the early 1950s: Progressive artists had nothing going for themselves except themselves. New York didn't bother to spit......

Caitlin Snaring of Redmond (that is she, pictured above) won the National Geographic Bee yesterday. Snaring, who is home-schooled, estimated that she studied 60 hours a week to prepare for the competition. It paid off--in two days of the Bee, she didn't miss a single question. Snaring is the first girl to win the competition in 17 years. Stephen J Boitano/AP Photo......

READINGS: Jonathan Raban continues his all-out assault on the bookstores of Seattle with a reading tonight at the University Bookstore in support of Surveillance. How many times can we say it: Go. 7pm // University Bookstore // free THEATRE/FUND RAISER: Book-It's raising the funds tonight at Seattle Center with a Guilty Pleasures style romp through material that people actually read, for a change. Not for the faint of wallet, however. Remember a few years ago......

--On Tuesday the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town asked a judge to disappear the Joint Operating Agreement that tethers the Post-Intelligencer to the Seattle Times. We're not quite sure where they're going with that one yet. --Safeway burst onto the local biodiesel scene today with a pump in West Seattle. $2.85 for B20! Damn! We mean, uh, that's good that the Earth is being saved. --Replacement's replacement needs replacing on the Stranger masthead. We......

Wednesday, September 27 >>>Town Hall, 7:30pm. Science and medical writer Thomas Hager tells you all about the drug that you won't hear about on House, M.D.: "The Nazis discovered it. The Allies won the war with it. It conquered disease, changed laws, and single-handedly launched the era of antibiotics." But does it make you feel like hugging strangers? $5 at the door. >>>Bella Cosa Foods, 4:00-6:00pm: Federico Bibi lets you taste two organic olive......

Helen Thayer, one of National Geographic's "20th Century's greatest explorers," has crossed the Sahara and the Antarctic on foot, and runs an outdoor-education initiative called Adventure Classroom. Her most recent adventure saw her spend a year living among wolves in the Yukon--accompanied by her husband and their part-wolf dog, Charlie. She'll speak about this latest adventure Thursday night at the Mountaineers. If you're curious about wolves, life-changing adventure, or outdoor education--or if just going......

Flea-sized crustaceans with seven sets of legs, four moving mouth parts, and a voracious appetite for wood-borne bacteria could cause the edge of downtown Seattle, Washington, to slip into the Puget Sound. ...as the National Geographic reported last year. To put it simply, gribbles have eaten chunks of the sea wall away. Now global warming is potentially adding to the mess that the gribble hath wrought. (Kids! No jumping on the sea wall!) No......

If you're a fan of the documentary Spellbound or a fan of reliving your awkward junior-high years, the next two weeks are all you. First off, we have the National Geographic Geography Bee, which takes place today and tomorrow in D.C. and will be televised Saturday at 9 am on KCTS (channel 9). The GeoBee is similar to a spelling bee--rounds of questions and you're out if you miss one. It's hosted by none other......