The amusing story of how we wound up at the Showbox Saturday night to see the Old 97s begins with a plan hatched amongst friends far too late at night (and after far too many drinks). And, what with the constant internet access you get with the iPhone, we wound up with tix to the show, while everyone else turned out to be spread between Las Vegas and Palm Springs last weekend. And thus......

Fourteen very talented actors and directors have come together to perform Neil LaBute's Autobahn, a collection of five scenes that do what LaBute does best: take a very raw look at personal relationships. All of the scenes are set in the front seat of a car, and highlight conflict between two people--most with only one of the actors speaking. The stories take place in the aftermath of an event that has left the characters with......

Who knew Dr. Lion was from India? He's a physician. He's a lion. Duh. We've read Richard Scarry books hundreds of times—both as a wee tot and as a parent—and a subcontinental accent for Busytown's resident physician Dr. Lion never occurred to us. When Auston James' Lion gave Lowly Worm his check-up, we realized it was a perfect detail—and, happily, Seattle Children's Theatre's production of Busytown has perfect details in abundance. That's good, because......

The Seattle Opera Young Artists performance of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi and Ravel’s Enchanted Child left audiences satisfied last weekend, delivering two acts full of family humor and ironic tales of greed. The evening began with the mildly curious opera Enchanted Child. The artists were full of energy, which is a necessity to re-enact the wacky adaptation of a child tormented by wrongful acts from the past—from torturing dragonflies and caging chipmunks to disrupting a fifth......

According to our current addiction, the Democratic Convention Watch blog, some less than stellar reporting created confusion over the status of Rep. Jay Inslee's endorsement of Clinton. Inslee, who represents Washington's 1st Congressional District (Bainbridge Island, Kitsap Peninsula, north King County and parts of Snohomish County) is a super delegate. As we all know by now, the super delegates could be the ones to decide the nomination this year if the pledged delegate counts......

Time magazine claims, "You can't swing a dead cat this time of year without hitting a Top 10 List." Never one to waste a perfectly good dead cat, we decided to take a swing and create a Top Random-Number Shows Seattlest Saw This Year. And now, without any further ado, here's how your favorite bloggers broke down the year: According to Dante, everything else pared in comparison to Daft Punk at WaMu Theater 7/29/07. OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!......

On Saturday, we took our godson, his mom and his dad to Baby Loves Disco. Since we don't have a kid of our own and don't have any experience with kid-themed events, 17-month-old Eli agreed to let us interview him about the party. We'd like to preface his comments by saying that from the moment we walked in until the time we left, Eli was trailed by a gaggle of older-than-him little girls. Undoubtedly this,......

"They should take off their left socks." "Let's dance to Jesus." "Let's talk about Jesus." "It's a time to be jolly after all." "It's like a wine disco." "It's like hanging out covered in blood." "We need some leap frog!" "We need some Percosets." Seattlest actually heard all of the above during Clockwork Reduction Live Friday night at Northwest Film Forum. Some of the words came from the mouth's of performers, others came from the......

N+1, the NYC-based literary magazine, launched with a bang back in the fall of 2004. In the inaugural issue, the editors took aim Dave Eggers & the McSweeneys/Believer crowd, deriding them as "the regressive avant-garde," and at the iconic critic James Wood (then at The New Republic, now at The New Yorker) whom they called a "designated hater," and who--along with his TNR co-horts Leon Wieseltier and Dale Peck--they accuse of writing literary criticism that......

Remember SimCity? Seattlest had some incredible towns built in that game, with commercial and residential districts packed full of shiny, tall towers and trains and street traffic all flowing as effortlessly as rivers. Scroll way over to the left to the edge of the city grid; now that is a healthy industrial district, perfectly bisected by a pollution-eating green belt. The landmarks sprouted everywhere and the money and accolades poured in. Of course, it took......

The Columbia Journalism Review has our number. It's not actually true that Baby Einstein videos "suck the vocabulary out of your kid's brain." Wea culpa. Baby Einstein has been playing dueling press releases with the UW for a few days. If they don't stop it soon, we're sending them to their rooms for a time out. Throughout the squabble and on their website, Baby Einstein is careful not to make any specific claims about what......

What can you say about something like Smokey Joe's Cafe that isn't self-evident from the hype that it's the "Longest Running Musical Review in the History of Broadway(TM)"? Either that does it for you or it doesn't. If you're (relatively) young, bent and jaded you probably won't connect with the graying clap-and-sing-along demographic excited by the highly polished but hammy renditions of popular top 40 songs from their childhood. Our friend Andy who tagged along......

You may have seen the urban density photos that came out earlier this weekend. Sightline linked to the site on Friday. You have to create a profile to log in and see all the pretty/ugly pictures, but since you can fill one of those out with either factual or completely made-up information in under a minute by now, it's worth the effort. If you browse around you'll find that they have pictures from all over......

Kurt Vonnegut, up there with Twain and Melville and Kesey as the most original American novelists ever in the history of writing stuff, died tonight. He was 84. He'd been in the hospital since a fall a couple of weeks ago. Attention kids: this is what happens if you chain-smoke for 73 years. Based on our cursory search of local newspaper archives, Vonnegut's last local appearance would seem to be at Eastern Washington University's GET......

Monday THAT STARBUCKS "I WAS A CHILD SOLDIER" GUY: At twelve, Ishmael Beah found himself fleeing rebels, wandering from village to village. At thirteen, he was a soldier in Sierra Leone, hooked on drugs and capable of things he would never have imagined. Now, rehabilitated and living in the U.S., he tells his story in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, in an attempt to raise awareness of the child soldier......

Michael Dirda, in the New York Review of Books: In contemporary America, as Jonathan Raban reminds us in Surveillance, any quest for anonymity—"to live obscurely" according to the Greek ideal for happiness—has grown increasingly difficult, if not impossible. And it's not only an Orwellian Big Brother who is watching. We track each other. We check out the backgrounds of friends, Saturday-night dates, and business associates; we data-mine and Google-search; when on line we worry......

Washington State 70, Oral Roberts 54: Oral Roberts was the trendy upset pick--nearly 25% of ESPN users expected Wazzu to Coug it (by comparison, less than 5% had #3-seed Oregon losing)--but our faith in Wazzu didn't waver. Though it was close at halftime, we predicted that Wazzu would play their typical strangling defense to open the second half, and they proved us right, holding O-Rob to one field goal in the first six minutes of......

Well, we're finished with World War Z, which means we'll finally have time to pick up Jonathan Raban's Surveillance and that some lucky souls at the library will move up a notch on the hold list. Surveillance, of course, is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on......

Monday SEATTLEST BOOK CLUB PICK: For March, we're reading Jonathan Raban's Surveillance, set in a not-so-distant future, when everyone's actions are highly monitored. Get a head start on the conversation by hearing from Raban himself. (We'll know if you went or not.) 7pm // UW Bookstore // FREE FANTASTIC FICTION SALON: Connie Willis, an award-winning SF writer, hosts this discussion of sci-fi/fantasy fiction writing. (As a new member of Hugo House's "Writing Fantastic Fiction"......

Monday A NADER REMEMBERS: Recalling his childhood in Winstead, Connecticut, former presidential candidate and longtime political and social activist Ralph Nader offers 17 values a child should learn to become a conscientious adult. Not helping elect neo-fascists was, unfortunately, #18. 7pm // Third Place Books // FREE Tuesday EROTICA: "One Foot on the Floor: A Reading of Erotica." Jennifer D. Munro (aka Dawn O'Hara) -- whose work has appeared in many collections, including "Best......

When you lose 108-87 and the recap writer feels compelled to point out that the game "wasn't nearly as close as the final suggests," something has gone very wrong. The Zags, who beat then-#2 UNC and then-#8 Washington earlier this year, have lost four in a row, capped off by last night's loss at Virginia where they trailed 60-26 at half. John Blanchette, writing in the Spokane Spokesman Review, asserts:They're overscheduled. They're undermanned. They're expectation-heavy.......

The title is a little pun about the Dyson sphere, Freeman Dyson's main claim to fame and the source of his name-check in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Outside of the ranks of science fiction fans, Freeman Dyson is known for being an award-winning physicist and the author of several popular science books. Dyson spoke at Town Hall on Monday to promote his latest collection of book reviews and essays, The Scientist As Rebel. Dyson......

--Last night's Frontline was on ex-Spokane mayor Jim West, and today the Spokesman Review has posted a reaction. --Some of these Zune backgrounds lead us to believe that Microsoft execs have been shopping at American Apparel recently. --This is the best sports-related post by Charles Mudede that we can recall. Also the only... --Shaun Alexander practiced today and looked great, but keep your fingers crossed prayers coming--the real question is: Will his foot feel......

Wednesday, November 8 >>>UW Forum for Science and Ethics Policy, 5:30pm. Dr. Dennis Schatz, VP for Education at the Pacific Science Center, cheerleads for “Making Science as Pervasive as Sports in Society.” His ulterior motive? It can only be to pack the Sonics off to Oklahoma and build our very own Exploratorium right here in Seattle, to which we say “Be Aggressive, Be Be Aggressive!” Free. UW Health Sciences Building, T-478. >>>Pacific Science Center......

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......

-Microsoft's confirmed that, yes, Toshiba is making the Zune and, no, it probably won't suck as bad as you think. -Some unknown amount of mail was stolen from the loading dock of a Capitol Hill post office. -There's a seawall cam? C'mon, let's get that thing up on Seattle.gov, guys. -A military investigator has found "reasonable grounds" to prolong, amplify and intensify the trial of Ehren Watada which could be taken as good news......

A quick rundown on where our beloved Husky basketball types are now. Brandon Roy: Averaged 19.0 ppg for Portland's Vegas Summer League team. That's 8th in the league. Here's video, and a podcast interview with Roy and Jarrett Jack. Want to smile? Here's Roy swatting Jordan Farmar in last year's UCLA-UW game at Hec Ed. Marques Johnson's comment: "Woooooooooo! Get down, young fella!" Bobby Jones: The Philadelphia media is making much of Jones' similarity to......

Someone wrote in yesterday alerting us to the site "The Seattle Pizza Review" and while we were frantically trying to click to the next email as quickly as possible we accidentally hit the link and went to the site. It's not that we hate pizza. We love it. If not for the fact that we'll soon be marrying a somewhat rational person we'd eat it two or three times a week. Pizza reviews, on the......

Seattle, are you ready to laugh? Yes, that is what we thought. Well the Seattle Times hears you loud and clear, and they don't care. Realizing that they'll need to give their new Week in Review section some much needed zip, they have hired the funniest guy at the Times to pen a series of jokes based on the week's news. So who is this lucky scribe? Dwight Perry? No. Pamela Sitt? No? Ron C.......

The Seattle Public Library kicked off its new adult summer reading program, Step Into Reading, with a big event at the main branch last night. KUOW book reviewer, former director of the Washington Center for the Book, author of the best-selling Booklust and librarian action figure Nancy Pearl interviewed four local authors. It was a tribute to fun summer reads. G. M. Ford (bluff) and Elizabeth George (unflappable) write mysteries. Jayne Ann Krentz (sharp) writes......