Kim is relieved the debate is actually going to happen. She'll be watching with friends tonight before working all weekend. Saturday, she'll take a break for a quiet night out, and then she'll close the weekend off getting funky in the balcony of Jazz Alley with Maceo. You can take the boy off the farm, but...MvB will be spending Saturday in a barn, hauling away old equipment, so Sunday he'll be recovering at Top Pot,......

We sent special Killer Bugs correspondent Roger van Oosten to Town Hall last night to catch Richard "Hot Zone" Preston's talk. Post-decontamination, here is his report. Richard Preston, the award-winning author of The Hot Zone and Demon in the Freezer, had the Town Hall audience on his side with his very first words: “It’s freezing here! This is crazy!” Preston is on the lecture circuit pumping his new book Panic in Level 4, a collection......

In the New Yorker's Talk of the Town this week, they mention the IdreamofHillaryIdreamofBarack website, at which people who have dreamed of either candidate are invited to share what went down (and recently, for balance, McCain dreamers are invited to contribute, too). It's pretty much what you'd expect, but the sole Seattle mention so far is disheartening. It doesn't say if the contributor is from Seattle or not, but either way, is this really how......

Every once in a while at a Town Hall reading, we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we're awake. Is this really true? Did over 150 people just pay $5 to hear a lecture on behavioral economics? Obviously it helps to be interviewed on NPR. Or maybe it was the New Yorker story by Elizabeth Kolbert. Whatever the reason, there are 117 holds (and climbing) on Dan Ariely's book Predictably Irrational at the Seattle......

We're not fools -- a lot of you will miss this, purposefully, because you don't care about rail-riding hobo culture. But that is your loss. When he was still under 40, the New Yorker called William T. Vollman "one of the twenty best writers in America under 40." He's been to Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Seattle. He's in town tonight to talk about his voluntary hobo-age, chronicled in Riding Toward Everywhere. We read an excerpt of......

N+1, the NYC-based literary magazine, launched with a bang back in the fall of 2004. In the inaugural issue, the editors took aim Dave Eggers & the McSweeneys/Believer crowd, deriding them as "the regressive avant-garde," and at the iconic critic James Wood (then at The New Republic, now at The New Yorker) whom they called a "designated hater," and who--along with his TNR co-horts Leon Wieseltier and Dale Peck--they accuse of writing literary criticism that......

Sometimes we just want a slice of pizza. Not a pie. Not a square. Not a round. We’re talking a slice – one that you can grab with a hand, fold inward, and then tilt downward to watch the grease drip to the paper plate before you take that precious first bite No forks and knives for us, thanks. We’re doing it New York style. And given our East Coast sensibilities, we know not to......

Adrian Tomine started making comics in his teens when he created Optic Nerve. In it, he tells stories about people who tend to be searching for answers to questions they seem to think everyone else already knows. After a few years putting out Optic Nerve on his own, it was picked up by publisher Drawn and Quarterly. Tomine is coming to Seattle to promote his first full-length graphic novel Shortcomings. Seattlest used it as......

Towards the very end of last night's People Talking and Singing, as the clock ticked past 10:00 and John Roderick announced he'd play another song and take a few requests from the audience, our butts chimed in: "Hey, this is starting to go on a little long." Our brains, and most of the rest of us, were enjoying themselves thoroughly. But Town Hall started life as a Christian Science church, and the pew we sat......

True confessions time: We've never set foot in 826 Seattle. We think we might have seen the building once, at night, while driving somewhere else. We'd turn in our hipster license, but as Seattlest Jeremy notes, "parenthood remains the antidote to hipness." We've never been all that hip, but we are writers, we (used to) read McSweeney's, and we've been aware of Seattle's hippest educational center, 826 Seattle, since before it opened. We just chose......

The third annual 826 Seattle benefit People Talking and Singing will fill the seats at Town Hall next Thursday. Comedian Patton Oswalt had to cancel, but the event still features host John Roderick of the Long Winters, Dave Eggers, comedians Todd Barry and Eugene Mirman, New Yorker music critic (and current blogosphere gadfly) Sasha Frere-Jones, local songstress Rosie Thomas, and Geologic of the Blue Scholars. People Talking and Singing has become the must-see annual......

Bumbershoot 2005 hosted the inaugural People Talking and Singing show, where 2,800 festival attendees packed McCaw Hall to see Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket), Mike Doughty, Sarah Vowell, and Death Cab for Cutie, all the while raising $18K for 826 Seattle, the youth writing center in Greenwood. Last year's event, also at Bumbershoot, was hosted by Daily Show Resident Expert™ John Hodgman and singer Jonathan Coulton. Eggers, Handler, Gibbard, and Vowell were back......

Seattle condo, or Baltimore project? "Through the wire" by Seattlest Flickr pool contributor onejen adds a grittier perspective to Pike Place residences. (Fans of the Wire might want to check out this profile of David Simon in the most recent New Yorker...)......

Tonight through Saturday, On the Boards is presenting a world premiere from the John Jasperse Company. Jasperse is a New Yorker-recommended choreographer, and that's more than you've done, admit it. Misuse Liable To Prosecution is a 5-dancer work "about capitalism, having capital and not having capital, worth, wealth, whoring, begging, stealing, seduction, philanthropy and blood money. Everything used in the production, all the props, costumes and sets were either found, borrowed or stolen." Electric harpist......

It’s so great, they had to name it twice. Before you start belting out “New York, New York,” think again. We’re in Seattle, and we’re talking about one of New Yorker Anthony Bourdain’s favorite local eateries: Piroshky, Piroshky. Piroshky, Piroshky is easy to find. Follow your nose as it detects the sweet butter aroma that prevails over the other super smells at Pike Place Market, and you’ll soon be in line with others eager to......

Saturday night, Pacific Northwest Ballet's season sampler began with Balanchine and ended with Robbins but cannily included fresher works in the middle. It was their gala night, and the lobby was filled with suspiciously tanned women of a certain age in demi-haute couture. Our coverage is going to be bloggily breezy, but if you're interested in a more substantial take, check out Richard Campbell at the P-I. Ballet Imperial: it's tutus and tights and corps-de-ballet......

So we've developed this routine of biking over to Cafe Presse on Sunday afternoons to read our New Yorker; there's coffee-and-a-croissant involved, usually a soccer game on, and then maybe an afternoon Stella starts to sound good. On a good day, three hours go by like that and we emerge happily over-caffeinated and edified -- or slightly wobbly and rooting for Manchester United. Enter the Seattle Times to ruin everything with a glowing review. (The......

The Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker showed up in the mail box yesterday and the Pacific Northwest (ok, Portland, really, but so what) is well represented. Miranda July, of Portland, has two pieces; one a short story called "Roy Spivey" and the other a recollection of summer movies called "Atlanta." It starts: From the stains on the mattress it was clear that people had died on this bed, slowly, over the course of......

FACT: On August 24, 1919, film star Harold Lloyd -- while posing for publicity shots in which he was lighting a cigarette from a lit bomb -- blew the thumb and forefinger off his right hand. "Somehow," accounts explain, "a real bomb had gotten mixed in with the props." In 1923, as if to underscore learning nothing from the experience, he released one of the most famous films of all time, Safety Last! (Which......

Jonathan Lethem understands what being an unabashed fan feels like, and we are an unabashed, dorky fan of his many books and recent essays. When we heard that he is non-exclusively sharing some of his short stories for $1 to be reused in other works of art (films, songs, etc) and he is giving away the option to his new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet, and releasing the ancillary rights after five years, we......

Okay, it's not like we're going to upgrade to Vista in solidarity, but we did swell with a little hometown pride to read this about Bill Gates in this week's New Yorker: That afternoon, [Wolfowitz] took part in a panel on foreign aid with Bill Gates, whose philanthropic foundation has an endowment of $30.6 billion; William Easterly, an economist at New York University who is a well-known skeptic of development policy; and Ellen Johnson......

MOVIES: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who are attracted to a film program called Monument Recall: Public Memory and Public Spaces, and those who are repelled. If you're the former? Tonight's your night. 7 and 9pm // Central Cinema // $5 BOOKS: New Yorker-approved author Deborah Eisenberg reads from Twilight of the Superheroes. 7:30pm // Elliott Bay Books // free THEATER: SPF 1: No Protection, "Seattle's first solo performance theatre......

SPELLING BEES: The Re-bar's adult spelling bee was on Evening Magazine recently so there may be an even stronger turnout than usual. Doors at 7pm // Re-bar // $5 MOVIES: Seattlest and Mrs. Seattlest jumped in the car this weekend for a cruise up to the cheap theater for Academy Award winner The Departed. It was packed, with every single seat occupied by a warm ass--go early. Also, be careful on the drive home. We......

Monday SEATTLE ARTS & LECTURES: Art Spiegelman's 1992 Holocaust tale Maus (based on a true story) won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a comic book. Its success paved the way for the graphic novels thriving today and led to Spiegelman's ten years on the staff of the New Yorker. In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) gathers his recent broadsheets of disenchantment with the war on terror. 7:30pm // Benaroya Hall // Tickets:......

A while ago, we were invited to a happy hour at Coco la ti da, and then we didn't review its offerings because we know when we're out of our league. All we'd heard about it was that it was a "dessert lounge," and our ears perked up because we like to sample how different places do chocolate mousse. (It's a quirk.) Well, it's a dessert lounge like Hearst Castle is a weekend cabin.......

Monday LOCAL AUTHOR, LOCAL AUTHOR: Clear Cut Press presents two of its novelists: Matt Briggs' Shoot The Buffalo is about a boy growing up in Snoqualmie during the '70s. Stacey Levine's Frances Johnson, set in a small town in Florida, details the random choices made by the eponymous Ms. Johnson. 7pm // University Bookstore // FREE SCI-FI SALON: One of the finest authors on the "humanist" wing of American science fiction and fantasy, Paul......

As we predicted when we first heard this story about Frosty Hardison--a parent who convinced the Federal Way school board to stop showing An Inconvenient Truth back in December--a whole host of sane, level-headed people wrote into the school board to suggest that Frosty was a bit off his rocker. Sadly, the Federal Way school board still insists that teachers, when covering a "controversial" topic, offer a "credible, legitimate opposing view" about that topic. There......

God dammit! We're in no way convinced carbon offsets are any kind of a solution to global warming, but the news that a King County court has decided that Seattle City Light can't use ratepayer's money to buy them pisses us off nonetheless. Their argument is that it should be general taxpayer money that saves the Earth, and that ratepayer money is for the operation of the utility. From the Seattle Times: The decision followed......

MUSIC: Carrie Clark & The Lonesome Lovers. Memphis Radio Kings headline this show, but we're here for Carrie Clark all the way. Clark's been wooing Seattle crowds with her superb voice -- both playful and brooding for over ten years now. Backed by her band, The Lonesome Lovers, things seem to be coming together beautifully for Miss Clark; her new album, Seems So Civilized, produced by Darryl Neudorf (Neko Case, Kinnie Starr, The Sadies, The......

Monday AUTHOR, AUTHOR: Barbara Ehrenreich talks about her book Dancing in the Streets, in which she explores the desire for collective joy (see photo), historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing. 7:30pm // Town Hall // Tickets $5 Tuesday MANUSCRIPT READING: Frances McCue, former artistic director and co-founder of Richard Hugo House, reads from "Chasing Richard Hugo" and presents a short film shot in Montana with Charles D'Ambrosio, Bill Kittredge and......