Tell him there's about a 1 in 6 chance he'll appear on Jeopardy! in the next couple of years. He'll obsessively check his phone messages the whole time. That's right: we passed the recent in-person Jeopardy! audition held in Seattle, which means we're officially in the applicant pool. 400 contestants appear in a season, the applicant pool is 2000-2500 people--voila! One in six. What next? The waiting game. Oh, and studying like a mofo. Ken......

Study up on Jesus. That was the topic for last night's hardest round at Seattlest Trivia. Average score/ 5.9 out of 10. Can you do better? 1) In 1966, the Ku Klux Klan burned Beatles records after who said the group was “more popular than Jesus now”? 2) The Depeche Mode song “Personal Jesus” was inspired by the autobiography Elvis and Me, written by whom? 3) The Jesus and Mary Chain’s song “Just Like Honey”......

This summer, Seattlest thought we were smart. Oh so smart. We were engaged. Our financial missteps were behind us. We’d plotted to start saving dough—to get a less-expensive apartment, sock the monthly savings into a high-yield account and, in a couple of years, look for a condo or fixer-upper in West Seattle. Rent something cheaper now; buy something modest later. Damn, it felt good to be a forward-thinker. So we searched for that less-expensive......

There was a time when every urban iPod listener had a choice to make regarding personal speakers. Do you use some pair of headphones from the 80s with the orange foam on them that you found in the spare electronics box in the garage to disguise your identity as an iPod owner? Or do you fly the snowy whites your iPod came with and announce your Apple Cool to everyone on the bus, and......

One Saturday a few weeks ago, we went to the Rainier Beach library with Little Miss Seattlest. After picking out several books, we were making our way to the circulation desk when one of the librarians behind the public service desk spoke. "Excuse me," she said. "Have you heard about the summer reading program?" We were, of course, familiar with the concept of a summer reading program, but we hadn't really thought about enrolling our......

Seattlest's house was broken into last week. The burglar absconded with our PowerBook, our D80, some watches, our wife's jewelry box (high sentimental value, low retail value), and our peace of mind. "Our house was broken into" isn't as exciting a story as "our car mysteriously caught on fire while we were driving it." (Digression: Volkswagen accepted responsibility for whatever weird mechanical failure caused it, which made Liberty Mutual happy.) Since then, we've filed our......

You may recall that Seattlest recently moved to Rainier Beach. The house we're renting came complete with a mystery: a newspaper box posted next to our mailbox. We haven't subscribed to a newspaper for over a decade but, we know what a newspaper box is for. What we don't know is anything about the newspaper advertising on our delivery receptacle: the Western Sun. Google? Nothing. Wikipedia? Nothing, unless it's an unmentioned alternate name for......

When we first bought our house the "backyard" was a complete eyesore, replete with a tar-roofed carport next to a plot of head-high blackberry bushes held back by a sagging chain-link fence. We joked about renting goats to clear the whole thing, but in the end resorted to a backhoe. (And this past weekend, a mere 3 1/2 years after we moved in, we finally have a backyard, huzzah!). Apparently, we're not the only one......

Unopened moving boxes. Furniture in temporary locations. No clue where the closest pizza, Thai, or Indian delivery places are. All signs that even though we've moved all of our possessions from Wedgwood to Rainier Beach, Seattlest is still in the liminal period between our North Seattleite and South Seattleite identities. One of the many things long-time Rainier Valley residents have dealt with that we're learning: the MLK Way light rail construction. In the abstract, when......

One of Seattlest’s best friends of the past 8 years, Jared Washines, died suddenly last Sunday from some kind of inexplicable seizure in his sleep. He was 32. A huge crowd of heartbroken friends attended his wake held at Linda’s (one of his favorite watering holes) last Monday night and funeral services that we can only describe as royal treatment went on for days at the Yakama Indian Reservation where he was buried at sunrise......

Microsoft is attempting to yank the developing world into the age of Personal Computing and to that end they just announced $3 software bundles for developing nations. Windows XP Starter Edition and Office Home for $3, which is about $3 more than what we think developing nations currently pay for their software. Todd Bishop at the P-I writes: The company says its goal is to double the number of computer users in the world by......

Once the dust had subsided, after we'd sawed through a concrete wall and brushed the rat droppings from our heads that rained down on us as we demolished our basement bathroom, we began to find unusual things. Old toys stashed behind sheetrocked walls, left there to mourn their solitary confinement at the hands of a former owner who was too lazy or cheap to free them amidst the detritus of the dump. And then we......

Shortly before our car exploded, we were looking for a new place to rent. After our car exploded, our apartment search took a back seat to car shopping. But in the last few weeks, once our new car was settled, we returned to scanning Craigslist and strolling through neighborhoods. After spending all of our time in Seattle living above the cut (Wallingford, Wedgwood), we were hoping to move to the Rainier Valley (better work commute)......

Monday WOMEN & MONEY: Personal finance expert and author, Suze Orman talks about the complicated and dysfunctional relationship that women have with money in her book, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. 7:30pm // Town Hall // $5 AGORAPHOBES TAKE HEART: Everything you’ve been told about dating is wrong. Love Will Find You is a new approach to love from dating expert Kathryn Alice. It may be the first dating......

We vividly remember the first time we saw Brett Wolfe: in 1998, we were standing outside in a parking lot on Dexter, talking to someone on our cell phone. We stopped silent when we saw a guy with only one leg riding his bike up Dexter, and he was passing people like they were standing still. This was before we became immersed in mountain biking ourselves, before we found out about Wolfe, who has completed......

We didn't laugh when we read Sandra Tsing Loh's jokey review of Joan Sewell's book in this month's Atlantic Monthly. In fact, we were flummoxed by the first few sentences: "Here’s the next wild turn in the female sexual revolution. Goodness! we hear you wondering, half in excitement, half in alarm. Is it some hot new wave of Seattle girl-on-girl action? (Or is that “grrrl-on-grrrl”? Indeed, do we even have grrrls anymore—are they still in......

Because our last car threw itself a Viking funeral while we were driving it, we're clearing some space on our new dashboard for St. Barbara. "O Beautiful Maiden once imprisoned in a high tower, protect us from the fire that rages in our engine." St. Agatha, St. Catherine of Siena, or some other fire-retardant saint may work, but we've got a sentimental attachment to Barbara. She's invoked against fires that come as flaming bolts......

No, we still don't know what caused our 2003 Passat to burn up a couple of weeks ago. Our insurance company, Liberty Mutual, hired an independent investigator to look at the car (they were careful to mention that they don't suspect us of torching it). They officially totalled it a week and a half ago ("99% damaged," the claims agent told us on the phone). In the meantime, it's up in Arlington, wrapped in......

A friend of ours just told us a little story today about how her Marine boyfriend, recently back from a tour of duty in Iraq, tried to break up a drunken fight a couple months ago outside the Jack in the Box at Broadway and Denny. Our soldier in question was out late one night with a drunken friend, who decided that what he needed most out of life was the thrill of throwing......

Two nights ago, we were frantically hunting for our Nano. We played the "last time we saw it" game, as it is usually tucked safely in our purse and had apparently gone AWOL. Let's see--we listened to it riding the bus on Thursday, didn't use it Friday...Thursday night we went mountain biking but were chatting with folks at the beginning of the ride, so we put it in the pocket of our bike shorts. Our......

We were planning to write some posts this week on Pair (we love it) and Columbia City (we really love it). But then our car burned up, so we thought we'd put that at the head of the line. About two minutes before this photo was taken, we were headed to a service station. My wife was driving, I was in the passenger seat, and our daughter was in back. Then, BANG! Someone grenaded......

We're following James' lead, as we're finally ready to invest in a digital SLR camera (shockingly, we've got some cash burning a hole in our pocket). We plan to use it for more outdoors/nature shots, plus capturing all the nonsense our friends and family get into on bikes, boards, and boats. Our top three contenders, in no particular order are: a Nikon D80, Canon's Digital Rebel XTI, and (if we're really feeling flush) the Canon......

We're thinking about moving. Note to our landlord, if you're reading this: Thinking about.. We aren't declaring our intent yet. So if you'd like to consider that recent rent increase ... well, we're still in Wedgwood, so that might not actually change anything. We're at least a year away from being ready to buy a house, so we're focusing on apartments. Here's what we want: to be within walking distance of anything interesting. Ideal trifecta:......

We checked the tidal charts--nope, nothing crazy there. Any tsunami warnings for last night after that earthquake in Hawaii? Nada on that front as well. So we're still trying to unpuzzle how we came to find a starfish--a real formerly-live starfish as in, hey that thing used to scoot around in the ocean--on the husband's car yesterday morning when we left for work. Any theories, trusted Seattlest readers?......

Steve Wozniak hit Seattle like a whirlwind, gracing the Chamber of Commerce, RealNetworks, and more for a total of an alleged 8 speaking appearances on Friday. The last of those was at the University of Washington, where Woz dazzled a full house of eager acolytes. Woz is an 'engineer's engineer'. He co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and invented the Apple I and Apple II, which revolutionized computing (among other things - he casually mentioned that......

This summer, many people I know were injured mountain biking. The list goes: two broken arms (both required surgery), one broken ankle (another surgery), one severely dislocated shoulder (you guessed it, another surgery), two torn ACLs (yes yes, surgery for both), one concussion (hooray, no surgery!), and one broken hand. All but one of those injuries happened at Whistler. And yours truly was the last in that list. Ah Whistler...I'd planned a trip there that......

Consider two of the "ten most emailed" articles from yesterday's NY Times (registration required): * A eight-year-old Scarsdale tot who obsesses over outrageously expensive fashionable jeans * A nine-year-old African boy who spends his days breaking up rocks that his mother sells for pennies to a cement contractor How can Americans put up with this kind of disparity? The only explanation we at Seattlest can come up with is mind control: they're putting something in......

Seattlest is horribly distracted right now. Not only is our site acting a wee bit like Tom Cruise on Oprah’s couch (sorry about the paucity of posts, and comments may be down for a little while), but we’re getting married in a few weeks. OK, not all of Seattlest is, just this contributor and well, our esteemed editor Dan (huzzah!). But not to each other. Really. But we digress. We had a lot on our......

Don't leave us hanging. What's James driving these days? A 2003 Passat GLS wagon. It's anthracite blue, with black leather seats and automatic transmission. How'd the acquisition go? About a week after we first talked to her, Janna of Auto Consultants Northwest called us, described the car, and asked if we wanted to try and buy it at a dealer's auction in California. We gave her the thumbs up, and ACNW got the car for......

Last night, Seattlest came in a humbling-but-deserved third in our regular trivia contest at the Old Pequliar. Ten teams were playing, so we won $10 (double our entry fee), but the first-place team raked in $70. Seattlest is there most Tuesday nights, so if you've ever got an urge to give us a run for our money, show up by 8:00. We had to let the rest of our team handle a round on their......