Story looks harmless enough: local entrepreneurs use an exotic sweetener to flavor their line of diet soda. That's the line Pee Eye reporter Andrea James swallowed in her piece today about a local brand of soda called Zevia. Here's the part the paper doesn't tell you: Zevia is one of the greatest "second act" stories of personal redemption in local history. It's also demonstrates how to avoid food labelling laws. First things first: the cast......

We're no prude, but we have to admit to being a wee bit (okay a lot) shocked to see the following banner ad attached to a local news story on the Seattle P-I's site. And since most of you thought we doctored the photos from the great bad soup debacle of early 2008, here's a photo showing it's actually on the P-I's news site and not their version of LustLab or erotic advertisements. (We haven't......

A couple days ago, the internet was abuzz with the release of a silent sex tape featuring Jimi Hendrix (or his doppelganger). We've been waiting to hear what the local estate and foundations associated with Jimi Hendrix would have to say about the release. Today, we got our answer in the form of an email from Shyan Selah of the Jimi Hendrix Foundation. Regarding tape's release, she said: On behalf of both the Jimi......

"Jimi Hendrix & The Electric Lady" by Seattlest Flickr Contributor cap'n surly Vivid Entertainment, which is promoting the new Jimi Hendrix: The Sex Tape certainly hopes so. The 45-minute DVD, which has no audio, shows Hendrix engaging in a variety of sexual acts with two women. Ever the rock star, Jimi never removes his trademark headband. Starting today, you can purchase the video online (duh, site NSFW) and decide for yourself if the fellow in......

People searching for information on Blue Mountain Community College got an eyeful Monday, when the school's URL was hacked and redirected to a porn site. The community college, located in Pendelton, Ore., was changing its URL and undergoing website redesign when the XXX mistake occurred. The "error" only happened when someone searched for the community college through Google's search engine. The user would click on the now defunct Blue Mountain Community College link and......

Man, the ferry system is really having a time of it this year. First they realize that 80-year-old ferries might not be seaworthy or even worth fixing. Then no one wanted to buy a used ferry on eBay and mechanical issues put a ferry on the Pt. Defiance route out of commission earlier this month. And let us not forget the Ferry in a Storm pictures that were emailed around last fall. Now King......

Besides being in the running for Owner of the World's Most Glamorous Name, Katjana Vadeboncoeur plays the maternal hen Aunt Julia in blahblahblahBANG at On the Boards. To make a point of it, she sips then spits up her tea into a cup, complete with birdlike neck spasms, and hands it to her beloved, coddled nephew Yorgen Tesman -- who drinks it, onstage, to an audience of wrinkled noses. If you're an Ibsen fan (blahblahblahBANG......

Kim is off to see Susan Werner at the Triple Door Sunday night. This weekend is a toss up for Matt between going down to Portland for the final days of the Body World 3 show at OMSI or heading out west to the The 26th Annual West Coast Oyster Shucking Championship and Washington State Seafood Festival. As previously noted, Seth is going to take The Grand Tour with George Jones at the Paramount. Friday,......

Sometimes when you start going off about how *hysterically funny* someone is, people take it as a dare not to laugh. But Lauren Weedman cracks us up, and we don't care who knows it. Tonight she's reading from her new book, A Woman Trapped in a Woman's Body (Tales from a Life of Cringe). It's a free reading, 7pm at Neumos, 21 and over only. If you want to prep beforehand, here's a Seattle Times......

Tonight Earlimart, The Quiet Ones, and OFFICE play the Croc. We already said plenty of good things about Earlimart when they were in town last month, so this time we'll plug OFFICE. In their first ever video, the Chicago boy-girl glam-pop five-piece decided to insert themselves (huh huh) into clips from cheesy 80s porn. Despite the presence of Peter North, it's totally SFW. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah have a two-night stand at Neumo's Saturday......

Apparently the same kind of PR firm that emails proposals from a yahoo account. So says our confidential source at Coastal Kitchen, who told us that, just minutes after Ronald Holden's hilarious, pun filed Seattlest screed showed up in her RSS feed, she was immediately bombarded by PR companies offering to help her "spin" this story. Here's one that showed up via email (note the time stamp proximity to Ronald's post): From: Date: Wed, 5......

Or you could get your ass FIRED! Just ask our old pal/arch nemesis/best livejournal trainwreck on the internet the Bicycle Hobo(TM), who just got let go from his job at the Times for visiting Fleshbot.com [evidently NSFW] while ostensibly "working." From the hobo's blog: I could have gotten drunk at work, groped a coworker and peed in the corner of the building, and I would have gotten a warning, but a little ass & tickle......

It's fantastic that Rev. Hutcherson's pro-discrimination ballot initiative died a sad, lonely death recently. The fortunes of domestic partnerships in our state are on the rise, Democratic Presidential candidates seem to have their gay houses more or less in order and Seattle Pride just wrapped up its second go-round Downtown. Things seem to be looking up, but Seattlest likes to judge which way the wind blows by figuring out where the money goes. The local......

We don't really have to look any farther afield than the Stranger to get more than our fill of Seattle Weekly bashing in any given week, but right now there's an article in a Phoenix daily about the New Times Media vs. Village Voice Media culture war that jettisoned Weekly longtimers out the Weekly's door (and into something yet to be seen). The gist of the article is that across the country the left-leaning, axe-grinding,......

--When someone called out "Who wants the Sonics?" everyone but Renton and Everett stepped back. Looks like Renton might take it. --LaRouchbags have been striking on campus, in classrooms even. --Sound on the Sound has a comprehensive list of Seattle bands slated for SXSW. They also cover Portland and Vancouver. --Seattlest inspires something. --Octopus porn is scheduled at the Aquarium tomorrow. Two long separated creatures meet and satisfy all your tentacle dreams. --ESPN's Sports......

Now, don't let the chicken- and cat-rape, possum-gutting, or deep-frying a sparrow put you off. (Or the hamster, which we don't have time to get into.) There's a lot of tenderness to playwright Kelleen Conway Blanchard's depiction of small-town life. And if former Pork Queen Lucinda is one-eyed, the Sheriff's plastic cranium doesn't seal that well, bemulleted Bud has testicular size-and-quantity issues, and Lucinda's brother Stu Lionel has a too-lively fascination with dead things......

KING 5's Investigators have their panties in a bunch about the racist and pornographic emails Port of Seattle police were sending on Port time, using Port computers. In their story, they can hardly bring themselves to present the liberally pixelized graphic evidence. Again and again. It turns out, "over a two-year period, 32 officers -- nearly a third of the entire force -- either received, saved, or passed on more than 175 inappropriate e-mails,......

We’re not the only ones who noticed Redhook’s recent India Pale Ale facelift. They changed the brew’s name to "Long Hammer" and removed the reference to "Ballard Bitter." And as far as we can taste, didn’t change the beer’s recipe. Pyramid did the same thing last year with their IPA, appending “ThunderHead” to the acronym. Finally—someone’s applied the porn name game to beer! Seriously, since when did macro-microbrews need makeovers? Sierra Nevada keeps it classic,......

We didn’t see In DisDress, Marya Sea Kaminski’s one-woman show, when it was part of On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival last June, but from what we gather, it involved a huge red dress, a television set, and porn. The Washington Ensemble Theatre restaging of that show, In DisDress Now Redux, doesn’t involve any of those things (though porn does get a shout out), and the title primarily exists to allow for the......

THEATER: You have only five more chances to catch WET’s latest offering, In Disdress Now: Redux. Marya Sea Kaminski’s one-woman show was originally developed as as part of On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival in June 2006. Now the “story of a girl wrestling meaning out of love, porn, and the folds of an enormous red hoop dress” has been expanded into a full-fledged tour de force. 8pm // Washington Ensemble Theatre // 608......

--The snow is finally here. --The guy who broke the ferry blogs about it here. (via WSB) --Something called Meth Coffee launched in San Francisco today. Thank god we're not responsible for that. --Instead, we're responsible for Starbucks, who defended their Frappuccino price hike yesterday. --Porn stache alert on the cover of NCAA 07 March Madness.......

MUSIC: Blue Scholars and Common Market 8pm // Neumo's // $20. 21+ MUSIC: Harvey Danger with Slender Means and "Awesome." 9pm // Crocodile // $25. 21+ (also an early show at 4pm for all-ages; $5) PARTY: Arcana: New Years Masquerade Ball 9pm // Capitol Hill Arts Center // $30 (or $75 for deluxe pimp action) MUSIC: The Melvins, Big Business, Porn, "Hot Sauce" Butch Darlene 8pm// Showbox // $25 "MYSTICAL" PARTY: There's this weird......

Its Christmas Eve and the pickens are slim. Here are some random things around town tonight that look potentially do-able: MUSIC: Punk, Pabst and Porn with DJs 23rd Hour and Nils Forever. This is mostly because we love the Juju, their deals are usually no cover and this doesnt look too holidays-ish. 9 p.m. // Bad Juju // Free MUSIC: The Suffering Fuckheads Xmas Eve Party. No clue if this is worth recommending or......

This item on Amazon.com: Courtesy of Maggie over at Mighty Girl. Here's the real product listing. If we could pick one, the most surreal detail of this comes from the tags people gave this item: Update: Yes, it appears that this item got squelched rather quickly, but if you were the person assigned to remove that thing (and by this we are reminded of Mike Daisey's stint as an Amazon.com porn sniffer), dontcha think you......

Another in a string of online sex stings recently caught ex King County Prosecutor's Office employee Lawrence Corrigan trying to meet up with a 13-year-old for sex. You asshole, Lawrence. Undercover detectives targeted Lawrence after learning that he was communicating with young girls online. A detective contacted him and Lawrence emailed a bunch of porn and set up a meeting outside of a Capitol Hill video store and when he showed for that meeting he......

This weekend Seattlest ventured out into the wilderness to spend both nights in Ballard. This rarely occurs, but we're willing to make the arduous journey if we know the music's going to be worth it. Friday night was Dan Bern at the Tractor. We've seen Dan perform approximately nine million times, and he's always good and full of charming stage banter, especially when there's politics to discuss. So Dan did his best nasally Bob Dylan......

--Our friend Tad would eat up this story about anti-terrorism exercises being foiled by the size of mail slots. --Gawker parses a stream of Courtney Love's consciousness and pulls out Frances Bean's first word: Pee. --Line Out's got some thing about gay porn appropriating Yellow Magic Orchestra samples that strikes us as funny, but we can't think of anything funny to say about it. --Todd Bishop checks in on Microsoft's Chinese blog policy today......

--That lovey dovey crap we said about Microsoft and China earlier today? Forget it. --Best unloved Reality TV-based Halloween costume. Ever. --Couple local skiers seem to be mixed up in a porn thing with a guy called Warren Miller. --John Moe unveils the girls team secretly plotting the violent overthrow of the boys team. Go on, girls! --SeattleDuck says no to procrastination, yes to Getting Things Done. --Renton's Displaced Hipster displaces himself even further,......

"I don’t venture north of even the cut, unless provoked." So said one Seattlest contributor when we asked what inspires us to turn our backs on downtown and drive north. Wimp. What counts as northern Seattle? We don't mean "North Seattle" -- the U District, Ballard, Fremont. We mean northern Seattle -- north of 85th, city limits until 1954. We fudged a bit, including a few places between the city limits and King-Sno county line.......

Ok, it's not funny when someone's house gets invaded by the cops. The continued erosion of our rights in the name of the war on terror isn't funny in the least. Perpetrating obscene phone calls isn't funny. The police making an error and therefore not apprehending the person making the obscene phone calls isn't funny, either. Multiple squad cars driving up onto someone's lawn in search of porn is, well, kind of funny. And this......