Results tagged “rat”

that have been backing up on our TiVo. But alas, we had agreed to check out some band from Portland called Casey Neill and the Norway Rats. We'll be honest--the main draw for us was Jennie Conlee (the Decemberists). We had been so stoked about seeing the Decemberists and Laura Veirs next week, and then a Decemberist came down with some illness bad enough to make them cancel the tour (we hope they're okay!). This was going to be about as close to the Decemberists as we were going to get this year.

The Friends of the Seattle Public Library are trying to get people to write to members of the City Council in support of funding collections before the council meets to discuss the budget Tuesday, October, 30. Seriously, a $2.5 million shortfall this year, and a shortfall every year since 2000 when Libraries For All funded a bunch of building upgrades (including the Central Library)? That's really lame, particularly here where we get all proud whenever some list ranks us as the most literate city in the world. The most literate city in the world shouldn't have budget shortfalls at the library, and unless it's all a big show we need to fix SPL funding. We've got a bunch of cool new branch libraries, and the Central Library is great (or not, but whatever, we've got it) but If we're going to take the time to burrow through the rat maze it would help if we could be reasonably certain of actually going home with the book we're after. It has to be fixed.

Friday night, waiting to be let in to the center field beer garden because there was a private party going on-- a group of lawyers or something who'd rented the space until game time. We stood patiently at the barricades, listening to the big 'ol tongue-in-ass Griffey ceremony. We couldn't see anything from our vantage except Junior's bright red hat in the distance. Couldn't see the TV to see what was going on because we were sandwiched between the barricades and the beer-fueled fratboy meatheads pressing to get into the garden. We watched some girls as they looked overhead to the jumbo scoreboard thing. They were crying.

Some of you may be interested in checking out the newly opened Tap House Grill in downtown Seattle. Although we have had issues with service, beer quality and availability of beers on their list at the Tap House in Bellevue, we are still hoping the Seattle location works out. With 160 beers on tap, it should not be hard to find something you want. The new Seattle location is in the old Planet Hollywood building on 6th Ave., between Pike and Pine. The location is prime, which means it will likely be constantly packed.

Sniff sniff, single tear. It's the last full week of SIFF, so you're well approaching your last chance till next year to take in some of that sweet filmy goodness. SIFF's not just movies; this week offers both the Opticlash 2 VJ battle at the CHAC and the Face the Music party at Neumo's, the latter of which includes performances by Viva Voce, Jesse Sykes, and Siberian. Tickets for both are going fast!

Thirty years after the release of their first single (“Fall Out”), The Police are playing live again. And they’re still “unbelievably lame.” Hey, don’t get pissed at us—that’s 54 year-old drummer Stewart Copeland’s opinion.

Wowee wow wow wow. The erstwhile "Japanese Beck" Cornelius really brought it at El Corazon the other night. Keigo Oyamada (as his mama calls him) and the other three members of his fashionable group made sure that the "Sensuous Synchronized Show" lived up to its name. They put on a performance that was multimedia to the extreme, with scrims and colors and lights and videos that were a little more than the venue could handle. Seriously, the last time Cornelius was in town ('01? '02?), he played a sold-out set at the Showbox (which featured some of the same visuals, btw), and this time around he's at an all-ages and not-close-to-being-packed El Corazon? Look, we haven't been to that club since before the name change, and with good reason--it sucks. Anywhere else in town and this show would've been sold out (or at least people would've been aware of it). But we digress....

Seattlest is a horrible role model. If we're not pickling our livers at famous local dives then we are snorting rat droppings in our basements. Either that or we're licking rusty old rail track. That's the price we pay to bring you, dear reader, this here fine reportage. In short: Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Seattlests. Get out of this dirty dirty town and consider playing hooky on the next available gorgeous day to head on up to Skagit County for the annual Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.

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.

Howard Schultz is probably enjoying his first relaxing day in a while today after the Starbucks shareholder's meeting yesterday. At least, he finally had a chance to explain to everyone just what the hell he was talking about with that whole memo thing. You remember the memo--we're talking about the one where he complained that Starbucks had lost its way in the name of growth and had become a cookie cutter retail chain that was squeezing the romance out of caffeinated beverages. When he was dictating that memo it must have occurred to him that he'd be standing on the stage inside McCaw Hall someday soon explaining it. Yesterday was the day.

THEATER: 12 Minutes Max is experimental theater at On the Boards with each artist given 12 minutes or less to do their thing. The Stranger got us excited for the artists the Vis-a-Vis Society in this show, but according to the OtB website they're out sick tonight. It looks like there are still plenty of upstanding acts in good health, however.

Comic Book Party: Fantagraphics celebrates the grand opening of their new retail & gallery space with an opening reception. Live music by The Rhaes. There's also an exhibit around the corner at Belle & Wissel, Co. to make the trip a twofer.

No, the Other Theater: The new movies out this weekend are shite, so this is your chance to catch up on the wealth of quality films already in theaters. Babel, Borat, Casino Royale, For Your Consideration, The Fountain, Little Children, Marie Antoinette, The Queen, Stranger Than Fiction, and Volver are all continuing their Seattle runs. Go now before you get back-logged further with the scads of Oscar contenders released later this month.

A Seattle real estate investor discovered last night the petrified corpse of a fried dead rat baking on the heating element in his new condo. This will come as unwelcome news to certain gloom and doom real estate haters because it demonstrates that the Seattle market remains bubble proof. When you look at other real estate markets outside of Seattle - Darfur, Glod, Buffalo - first time home buyers have to a pay a premium for condos that come with fried rat carcasses.

This past weekend, the Seattle Times ran a piece on a man who is starving himself so he can live a few years longer (we can't seem to find it online, however). The practice is called calorie restriction, and it is based on research suggesting, for reasons still mostly hypothetical, that restricting one's daily diet to at least 2/3 of the recommended calories for your age/weight could lead to an increase in your lifespan.

-Between the rat infestations, soup shortages, and unexpected restaurant closings, Electrolicious had a rough time at local restaurants over the weekend.

Given Martin Scorsese’s gritty, wise guy oeuvre and a mega-talented cast fronted by fellow AFI Lifetime Achievement Award winner Jack Nicholson, we just couldn’t miss Scorsese’s retelling of the 2002 Hong Kong flick Infernal Affairs. (See the ad in the top right corner of the page? Don’t those faces, those colors and that “R” promise profanity, violence, and maybe even some sex? Hey!) So last Friday night—yeah, we’re a bit behind—we beat the devil to Ballard’s Majestic Bay half an hour early for the eight o’clock show … to find a hundred other people had beat us there. Good for Warner Bros. accountants, bad for our necks.

Kirsten Anderson emailed Seattlest to remind us that Tales of the Rat Fink, the new film about hot rod legend Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, opened tonight at the Grand Illusion. From their website:

From the award-winning director of Comic Book Confidential and Grass comes Tales Of The Rat Fink, Ron Mann’s wildly inventive biopic about influential Renaissance man Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, who engineered a shift in mid-twentieth century culture with his customized cars, “monster” T-shirts and America’s alternative rodent – “Rat Fink.” Ed Roth helped fuel the “Kustom Kulture” / Hot Rod movement of the 1960s in Southern California and Hot Rodding grew from crude backyard engineering where performance was the bottom line into a refined artform where aesthetics were equally important. Mann’s largely animated documentary features the voice talents of John Goodman, Ann-Margret, Brian Wilson, Tom Wolfe, Matt Groening, Robert Williams, Stone Cold Steve Austin and the ever lovable Smothers Brothers.

Man, is there a LOT of Bumbershoot stuff on Seattlest right now. If you're anything like Editor Dan you're hoping for a break in the Bumber action; a contributor's recounting of a trip to Lake Chelan, a reaction to a dunderheaded Seattle Times editorial, or even some lame PR survey naming Seattle 16th Most Fashionable City West of the Rockies. Anything! Well, you can hope for something different, but your hopes will be dashed because this is another Bumbershoot post.

Seattlest may have spent Saturday sweating our asses off and getting seriously sunburned, but we managed to catch some of the best of the best of what that Bumbershoot thing had to offer.

You be the judge. This Saturday, two wheel-obsessed events face off at Magnuson Park. In one corner we have the Northwest Film Forum's Bike-In, an outdoor event with music, bike-related demonstrations, beer garden, raffle, and screenings of bike-themed films on a large outdoor screen. The event is co-sponsored by the Cascade Bicycle Club.

-This item has musical accompaniment, but it's going to have to be user supplied. Hum "Taps" while you read. Today's issue of the Seattle Weekly will be the last from the intrepid Knute Berger, Chuck Taylor, George Howland, Geov Parish team.

Oh Walkmen. Sure, with the release of your latest album, you're not quite the critical darlings you once were, but you certainly don't deserve to play to a venue that's only a third full. When Seattlest got to the Showbox on Friday night, we were shocked (shocked!) at how empty it was: one of the bars was closed, the other bar area was far from packed, and the floor held groups of people scattered about in pockets here and there. Yes, everyone's precious Mountain Goats were playing across town, but surely the Venn diagram isn't that overlapped, right?

Maybe we failed to give credit where credit was due yesterday in the Bumpershoots post. Some of the best stuff at the festival tends to not be music (notably the 826 thing from last year) and they have a lot of cool sounding events listed on their website that aren't music, but definitely are worthy of a mention.

A much younger Seattlest probably had several discussions revolving around the mythological Exlax bomb in an unsuspecting foe's milk carton. Oh wouldn't that be funny. And we could live forever in harmony with all the rest of the kids on a playground paradise after the bully was finally brought low. And we can remember at least two distinct occasions when the subject of dosing a municipal water supply came up at a party. Again, ha, ha, ha. Never have we actually poisoned anyone.

First they closed Leilani and you didn't speak out, because you didn't bowl. Then they closed Southgate Skate Center and you didn't speak out, because you didn't roller skate. Blah blah blah you know at the end there's no one left to speak out for you. Well, that and you can speak out all you want but ain't nothing but $1.8 million going to save the White Center roller skate place. Efforts are there, though.

We noted the arrival of some new water rat to the Seattle area on Friday, but after every single newspaper in the entire free world printed the AP story about it over the weekend maybe we should note it again. We're also going to note that nearly everyone who printed the article was fine with the AP headline, "South American Rodents Found in Seattle." Descriptive, but not all that punchy. You know, fine for the AP and thirty other newspapers around the world, but not quite up to Fox News standards. Fox had to modify rodents and spice up the verb a bit --"Ravenous South American Rodents Invade Washington State Lake". They INVADED. Personally Seattlest wonders if some editor at Fox News mistakenly thought he was heading an article on immigration when he wrote this.

-The president of China is hitting Seattle for a little vacay next week and you absolutely cannot come to Seattle without stopping by Bill's for a little of Melinda's casserole. Hopefully he'll be taking a few souvenir Boeings home with him.

Geov Parrish in this week's Seattle Weekly has bought the city's line about a new push to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.

On Monday night, Seattlest arrived at the Showbox like we often do, a half hour early so we could sit in the Green Room, have a beer or two, and watch the under-agers patiently waiting in line outside. Our well planned arrival turned out to be somewhat premature however, as we held court with very few other grown-up types in the cozy little bar hugging the south side of the Showbox. Meanwhile, a growing line of minors in faux-punk fatigues wrapped itself around the building like a python to a rat.