FILM: If you see only one documentary about fonts this year, make it Helvetica. New York taxi numbers are also in Helvetica. The font is on IRS tax forms, U.S. mailboxes, and ConEd trucks. The 50-year-old sans serif font spells out countless logos: Sears. Bloomingdale’s. JCPenney. Crate & Barrel. Target. Fendi. Jeep. Toyota. Energizer. Oral-B. MetLife. Nestlé. Once you realize Helvetica is everywhere, says Hustwit, "you just can’t stop thinking about it." 7:15, 9pm......

Last night at Benaroya Hall, author Richard Powers read from a new short story called "Modulation." It was classic Powers; a dense, far-reaching, and meticulously vivid tale of a computer virus that infects music player devices via filesharing sites. He weaves the story around four different individuals: a Japanese hacker recently released from prison and now employed by the RIAA to huntdown filesharers, a Brazilian journalist researching soldiers in Iraq who blast ear-crunching music from......

As a brain-dead "undecided," we were naturally curious when we heard the Implicit Association Test people had set up a Presidential Candidates Test. It takes about 10 minutes, and purports to measure your neurological affinity for Clinton, Obama, Huckabee, and McCain (or little pictures of them). As we understand it, these kinds of tests look for delays in "implicit cognition," deep-rooted neurological associations you aren't usually aware of -- it's just the way the world......

Riding the bus to work the other day, our heart skipped a beat when we noticed signs taped to the window heralding the arrival of new spring schedules (they're blue!). Once we'd calmed down, we realized how silly it is to get excited over the prospect of a slight change to our bus schedule. It was the kind of self-deprecating experience we figured would make a good lede for a post informing you, gentle......

Among the best movies we've seen at this year's festival is Sugar crafted with care by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, the filmmaking team responsible for Half Nelson. The title refers to the nickname of our protagonist Miguel, a young Dominican hoping to make it big in baseball. When we first meet the twenty-year-old pitching dynamo, he's about to leave his homeland for a minor league farm team in small-town Iowa. Of course, he barely......

We may have the lowest crime rate in 40 years, but it sure doesn't feel like it. Depressing crime news item #1 The guy cops thought might have killed Shannon Harps did not kill Shannon Harps. At least, his DNA didn't match samples found at the scene. He'll likely be released today. Once again, cops are suspect-less in the murder which happened three weeks ago now, and the terrifying possibility that Harps was murdered at......

Absurdistan is an allegorically rich comedy care of witty German director Veit Helmer and filmed in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. In the tiny titular land, a war of the sexes break out when the local aqueduct ceases to work, and the men are too lazy to fix it. The women declare a strike--no water, no sex--and two childhood sweethearts find themselves feuding instead of consummating their long-standing love. Looks like it's......

Once upon a time in a land not so far, far away, our head exploded. DreamWorks Theatricals and Neal Street Productions, Ltd. have announced that Shrek the Musical will play an exclusive world premiere engagement at The 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, August 14–September 21, prior to opening on Broadway in the fall of 2008. Preview performances will begin in early November at a theater to be announced. Shrek the Musical is an entirely......

We've been drinkers of good beer for quite a few years now, but it was not until 2005 that we started to fully realize our geekiness. That was the year a friend introduced us to Ratebeer.com, and we started exploring what is available and keeping track of what we drink and evaluating it. That website is essentially the reason we now write about beer and are such an advocate of turning other people on......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer's market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. There may not be a better image in all of football then Packer fans standing......

Once upon a time, WaMu was known for having great customer service (especially for a bank). Then they became known for their amusing commercials about their great customer service, and still being pretty decent (for a bank). Now they're known for losing their shirt in the housing bubble. We have no idea what their customer service is like, because we long ago left them for WSECU and USAA. But a nightmarish account by one......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer's market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. Seahawks vs Pulled Hogette Sandwiches Preview On Friday night we were continually awoken by the......

Here is a statement overheard when a local brewer was talking to Ralph Olson, owner of Hopunion (A Yakima located supplier of hops to world-wide brewers), as he was getting off a phone call: That's just another person trying to get me to shit hops. Beautiful. Something really has to be up in the world of hops when the man who should have them falling out of every nook and cranny in his house......

Five night Hip-Hop Extravaganza "The Program" began last night at 8:45pm, and we were in our pajamas eating stale Cheeto Puffs and drinking cheap red wine from the grocery store. What's that? Did you just call us a slacker journalist? Hardly -- we were watching the show on SyncLive, which streamed the entire show (plus soundcheck!) in surprisingly good video/audio quality. Once we figured out how to re-buffer the feed without refreshing the entire page,......

We love starting rumors. While talking to a Redhook rep at the Winter Beer Fest this weekend and trying their small batch German Winter Wheat (pretty good!), he mentioned that they are hoping to open a brewpub in Fremont within the next 18 months. The rep's best comment: "We've conquered the US; now we need to re-conquer Seattle." It's about time they figured out they made a mistake ever leaving in the first place.......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. Seahawks vs. Cheesesteaks Preview We feel bad for the people of Philadelphia. They’ve given us......

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy...with the recent trend of oak aging beer, we were pumped to hear about Brouwer's Big Wood Fest starting this Thursday at the Fremont bar. Brouwer's will clear their taps to have 40+ wood aged beers pouring this weekend. They won't discriminate; Belgian style sours, big, burly stouts and everything in-between will be lined up side-by-side. What is wood aged beer you ask? It is exactly what wine makers......

Cascadia's new cocktail menu (now that we've dispensed with Big City interlopers) includes a classic called Satan's Whiskers, a combination of gin (high-end Plymouth, ideally), sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, orange juice, Grand Marnier and (very important) orange bitters. All ingredients we're very fond of, so let's go for it. Bartender Michael Candelaria, long a master of his craft, builds the drink with care, measuring precise amounts of liquor into an empty glass, squeezing fresh juice,......

Some people take to relationships like a cat to water. The Swell Season's Glen Hansard sounds nice enough, friends all over Dublin, bit of a hippie -- but give him a girlfriend's ear and he's prone to red-faced verbal jabs, depressed miseries, and emotional archery. He can't keep up, or won't try.We made a choice and we knew we would pay / for stealing the joy and trying to escape / from the arms of......

When we sat down to do our endorsements we reached a disturbing conclusion. We cannot, in good conscience, vote for anyone. Position 1 Jean Godden: Wrote for the Seattle Times when it endorsed Bush in 2000. Joe Szwaja: Involved in a 1990 domestic dispute in which his then-girlfriend threw a bottle at him and he threw a plate at her. Position 3 Bruce Harrell: Doesn't spend enough time with his 15-year-old son from a previous......

If you saw the film Once, you know that one day Irishman Glenn Hansard met Czechwoman Marketa Irglova and they made beautiful music together. Actually, there's a whole backstory there. Martha Wainwright opens for them tonight at the Moore. The band/album, The Swell Season, is named after a novel by Czech author Josef Skvorecky who may be better known for his novel, The Engineer of Human Souls, a little Stalin smack from back when people......

With the lights dimmed enough to put you at ease, Twisted Cork in downtown Bellevue is the perfect after-work wine bar. Once inside, you are greeted by some of the friendliest hosts in town. If a table is not open, you may relax at the cobblestone fountain bench and peruse a wine menu of more than 100 wines by bottle and glass. Our original intent was to test our knowledge of port wines during......

The South Lake Union Streetcar will begin an eight-week test period soon, according to the Seattle Transit Blog. First they will do a walk through test to ensure that the streetcars are able to clear branches, traffic signals, and other erroneous things that may disrupt the streetcar along the whole route. Once that is done they will do speed tests on Valley between Mercer and Westlake to see that the streetcar can achieve and maintain......

Hello all-- News from the front lines of the blogging revolution: We've killed guest comments. Well, to be accurate our corporate overlords have killed guest comments. Ist-wide, the vast majority of spam and boorish behavior comes from guest commenters. As many Internet pundits have observed, total anonymity seems to make even the nicest person act totally insane. It hasn't been much of a problem here at Seattlest, and I'd like to thank those guest commenters......

Initially, we were a little surprised to hear that ACT--A Contemporary Theatre--was putting on Clare Booth Luce's The Women. Although having debuted in 1936 placed the play in the Modern canon, its view of women is about as un-p.c. as they come: in short, the play presents women as gossipy and back-stabbing, assumes marital infidelity is a function of the Y chromosome, and ends with a note suggesting that for the sake of a healthy......

Foul weather holds off until Sunday afternoon, leaving plenty of time under cool gray skies for Seattlest & friends to launch a Flexcar and sail out to the farm. Once we get past Redmond, the familiar trappings fall off: shopping malls, housing developments, the last Whole Foods, the last gas station & mini-mart. We ford the Tolt River at Carnation and sail into a vast theme park called Remlinger Farms. Indoors, a country market......

Last night's Arcade Fire show was rife with problems. Not with the Arcade Fire, Lord knows they can do no wrong, but with the opening bands, and most of all, with the venue. Somehow, even though the scheduled time for the show was 7:30pm, the time published everywhere---on the Ticketmaster site, in ads for the show, in UW emails, on the goddamn tickets---doors actually opened at 6:30pm and the Gossip started playing right around......

About three lives ago, when we were living in a scientific research station in Ecuador, we watched The Postman (Il Postino) with a group of Westerners. After the movie, which is one of our favorites, we were sitting there, wondering why the room had suddenly gotten all dusty, when a privileged teenage British hipster/tourist named Aelys (pronounced like Alice, but her parents preferred the Welsh spelling) announced that she hadn't liked the movie because it......

Once upon a time Seattlest considered North Aurora to be a shithole, to be avoided at all costs. But, eventually, we had to go to Home Depot and a used car lot, and that car rack store, and (doh) the unemployment office, and the movie theater, and IHOP and the European deli and Computer Stop and Chubby & Tubby (so far not Stupid Prices, though) and Kmart, Burgermaster, the cemetery and a hundred other tiny......

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.......