Results tagged “rape”

Sounders striker Nate Jaqua, the reigning MLS player of the week, stands accused of rape, according to the Courthouse News Service.

When SPD reports came out earlier this month with the news that major crime in Seattle has gone down by some 11%, the Southeast Seattle Crime Prevention Council was skeptical. They crunched the numbers on their own neighborhood themselves, and found some startling results: assaults, homicides, and non-residential burglaries have all increased by huge numbers. Though even the police chief went on record this week to speak on Seattle's deepening gang violence problems, the police department is refuting the SSCPC's numbers, saying they aren't taking all the factors into account (precinct boundary changes and incidence of "actual crime" versus dispatch calls).

A 45-year-old Yakima karate instructor was convicted of child molestation yesterday by a jury in that city. He was charged with rape, but escaped with only the molestation rap for the 2002 crime. Now everything about child rape and child molestation is awful and terrible, but we'd just like to point out that there is no skeevier occupation for a child molester than "karate instructor."

A 15-year-old student at Franklin High School reported that a fellow student tried to rape her in a school bathroom this week; school officials promptly notified the SPD and expelled the two students who were identified as her attackers, and police are investigating the case. Any rape story chills us down to our bones, especially those involving such young men and women, but in this situation, one detail stood out as well: a bystander said she saw the bathroom door being held closed and heard the word "Stop" from inside, but "didn't think anything of it at the time." Since when is that somehow not noteworthy behavior on school grounds? Ugh. We're grateful to the police and to Franklin officials for taking the appropriate actions on this case.

• Capitol Hill Seattle has found the answer to the "graffiti problem"--passive aggressive semi-anonymous notes. Because passive aggressiveness has worked so well at solving everything else in Seattle.
• If you like mojitos as much as we do, you might be tempted by this Belltowner post. Apparently, the failed Mojito Cafe is selling their big neon sign on Craigslist.
• Lights & Sirens brings us the sad and disturbing story of a Tacoma woman who is reportedly suing the city of Tacoma, Pierce County, and a retired Tacoma police officer, after videos of her sexual abuse were found in the disgraced officer's private collection. The officer, who illegally kept the video of her abuse, has recently been sent to jail for first-degree child rape.

No. But that doesn't make this factoid from a political campaign article in today's any less disturbing:

We hear the insults. Bloggers are no-names. We are malcontents. We live in our parents' basements, practicing onanism like Tiger Woods practices putting. Well we have news for you, blogger-haters. Laugh no more, because a man who has the earned respect of many for his political activism and musical genius is joining our growing club. Krist Novoselic has started a blog. This hero of the 1990s, a man who had the courage to throw his...

From the papers in Europe, and particularly in England, you'd think that UW student Amanda Knox had already been tried and convicted of sexually assaulting and killing her roommate Meredith Kercher in Perguia, Italy.

Just when you thought that college campuses would be unable to handle any more scourges to their populations, with meningitis and date-rape rampant, a new scourge has reared its ugly head: severe, humorless sobriety.

Seattle Shakespeare Company's Pericles is awash in contradiction. It's the rarely performed Shakespeare play that Shakespeare may not have written. It's a comedy about a singularly painful life. It's fueled by strong performances -- Reginald André Jackson's Pericles is every minute compelling -- but marred by a directorial misstep that plagues the whole production. We don't recommend it as anyone's first Shakespeare play, but if you have never seen Pericles before, this production is a good reason to go. It runs through November 18 at Seattle Center's Center House; tickets are $20 - $34.

When we first glanced at the headline on Boingboing we read "Teacher resigns after giving 13-yr-old student Eightball," and we thought, "Well, no shit. Man, Boingboing is really reaching these days." It actually reads "a copy of Eightball," Eightball being a Daniel Clowes/Fantagraphics comic book. Clowes is, of course, a badass who wrote Ghost World and is currently running in the New York Times.

Next up was Juno, the latest comedy from Jason Reitman. We loved his first feature, Thank You for Smoking, and had heard nothing but good buzz about this flick, which is kinda Knocked Up meets Superbad, if Judd Apatow stopped focusing so much on male friendships and paid more attention to the pregnant girl. As the titular acid-tongued, preggo high schooler, Ellen Page keeps on getting better and better, and the rest of the cast (JK Simmons, Allison Ranney, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman, reunited here with his TV son, sweet baby Michael Cera) ain't no slouch neither. A couple minor quibbles: if anything the film is too cute by half. We don't need pop culture references for the sake of pop culture references: "No, It's Morgan Freeman. I'm here to collect some bones." And we certainly don't need a quirky folk song introducing every goddamn scene (Wes Anderson much?). Still, the film was ultimately very moving -- we always appreciate it when a foul-mouthed movie turns out to have some heart.

--A former Redmond church leader is being charged with child rape.

So we're not exactly clear on the methodology behind the Humane Society of America's animal compassion index, but we kinda thought that hosting the nation's most notorious bestiality den would prevent our fair city from attaining a high ranking.

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to...

We were really looking forward to Seattle Rep's Fire on the Mountain last night, in part because it's an Appalachian coal mining thing and we love the Steven Segal movie Fire Down Below based on the same. Yes, we know, it's an indication of some serious flaw in our cultural map if upon hearing "Appalachian coal mining" we respond with "Steven Segal!" Maybe we fixed it last night. Maybe the next time we hear "Appalachian coal mining" we'll respond with "Fire on the Mountain at the Seattle Repertory Theater through March 24!" All we remember from Segal's version is that he saves some mining town and gets the girl through strength of body and character. Seattle Rep's production does a much better job of communicating the blatant rape of culture, people and land of the southern mountains that was (and is) perpetrated by the coal mines. They cover the low wages, black lung, cave-ins, busted families, ruined earth, the unions, strip mining, flight to the cities, the end of agrarian society, man's inability to confront death without a fistful of morphine, etc, all via song. The black and white photographs of Appalachian miners that were projected on large screens behind the musicians were a great addition, although none of the photos depicted a greasy-haired man with a little paunch righteously delivering a roundhouse to the face of a one-dimensional bad guy.

Naturally, it's not without controversy. Apparently, if you do the monologue titled "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could" these days, you have to leave out the line "If it was rape, it was good rape," from a woman recalling her teenage experience with an older woman. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. For ourselves, we found "Because He Liked to Look At It" particularly relatable. This year's production features a scene called "Crooked Braid" that they haven't done before.

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 (and how they get that way), that just says something vital about what it means to be human -- any rich, vibrant tapestry has got to have a few loose ends.

Today is an absolutely lovely day in Park City, sunny and so warm that we had to take off our coat and scarf to walk around. Yesterday was lovely too, but we wouldn't know, because we spent, oh, approximately fourteen hours in a single theater. Was it worth it? You be the judge:

You should go see Balagan Theatre’s wild west version of Titus Andronicus at CHAC, but if you want a taste of what you’re getting into before you go you should check out episode 501 of Southpark.

Three days after the Seahawks' Jerramy Stevens and the Raiders' Tyler Brayton engaged in a groin-kicking contest, the debate rages on--mostly about Stevens' immaturity.

By embracing you with hard rocking hands, petting your head with beats, and letting you know in a sweet falsetto voice that the rocking will never stop, Spoon bends you into believing that everything is going to be okay. Even in the hot hot sun, even when the only food you can afford is roasted corn, even when they have David Cross do an interpretive dance of one of their songs and he shows the entire audience his ass, you know that the rocking will never stop.

Seattlest went to one of those liberal-arts, don't-know-your-grades, frisbee-throwing, dialetical-discoursing, call-your-professor-by-their-first-name NW colleges. No, not that one, the other one. What do you think we are, some kind of shade-grown coffee-drinking hippie? Kee-rist.

The Seattle Times had a front page piece the other day about how a UW fraternity has given up the date rape and brawling in lieu of correct posture, wine tasting and knowing which fork to use for the salad. This is the SigEps' "Balanced Man" program. Seattlest is guessing that Balanced Men still find the time to get shitfaced and punch holes in the drywall, but ideally at someone else's house and not while wearing identifying markings.

While anyone working under the title "former police chief" could reasonably be expected to endorce throwing the book at drug users, actual former Seattle chief of police Norm Stamper wrote a book entitled, "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing."

On Friday night Seattlest caught the Washington Ensemble Theatre's production of Crave. Not to be confused with one of our favorite restaurants in town, this play is the handicraft of Sarah Kane, a brilliant, troubled artist who spat out five intense and violent works before hanging herself at age 28. The marketing we've seen for the play would like you to think that the play is "sexy and brutal." Make no mistake---this play is definitely brutal, but focusing on the topic of sex does not automatically make something sexy. Crave is certainly anything but.