Today Seattlest welcomes our new sports correspondent to the fold. Drew Milam is a longtime Seattle resident who recently returned to the Emerald City after some time in the Bay Area, and claims to be super tight with fellow Santa Clara alum Steve Nash, Brandi Chastain and NFL referee Mike Carey. No word on if he got the gig because he is a Hillary supporter (pleasing Editor Kim) and a Garfield alum (pleasing Seattlest David).......

What with his recent Into the Wild success, it's not a huge surprise that Eddie Vedder's embarking on his first solo tour—announced today—up and down the West coast. What is surprising is that he's not playing Seattle. Where Eddie is playing: Apr-02 The Centre Vancouver, BC Apr-05 SC Civic Aud. Santa Cruz, CA Apr-07 Zellerbach Th. Berkeley, CA Apr-10 Arlington Th. Santa Barb, CA Apr-12 Wiltern Th. Los Angeles, CA Apr-13 Wiltern Th. Los......

It’s one of those Sunday mornings where the air is very still and heavy, and the dim light is giving you plenty of room to recover from Saturday night. For us, it’s the perfect time to visit the newest Victrola Coffee location on Pike Street. We enter the spanky-fresh store, a location mostly done up in the very popular, but tepid modern design. Like a Santa Barbara beach, all the tables are blonde-topped. The......

Could we be any vaguer? No, but that doesn't mean there's still not any reason to get excited. With In Rainbows making its formal debut atop the Billboard charts, Radiohead is set to cover North America in two tour legs, one prior to and one following their recently announced European summer tour (June 6 in Dublin through July 8 in Berlin). There's no exact dates or venues just yet, but the band has confirmed......

Thanks to Espressobuzz for adding this shot of Santa whizzing in an alley to the Flickr Pool.......

Making up for weeks of hibernation and workaholism, Kim will hit the parties this weekend. Tonight, she’ll don her Groucho glasses for a lesbian function at Jabu’s celebrating the births of her two favorite Sagitarii. Saturday, it’s to the War Room for a company party with the missus and her workmates. Finally, she’ll ship off to the sub-tropics on Monday, where she’ll spend what remains of 2007. While his wife is taking a Wilderness......

Birth of a fetish: The Register reports an unfortunate MSN messenger encounter between two young girls and Microsoft's badly programmed Santa chat bot. Apparently "RoboSanta" has "a shocking predeliction for casually dropping in that it likes to talk about a certain sex act." The Register (El Reg, below) replicated the conversation, starting out by offering St. Nick a piece of pizza: El Reg says: pizza (pi) Santa says: Yum! What do you want for......

Fircrest, Washington, is a bedroom community of Tacoma that's just a little bit bigger than Central Park. It was developed in the twenties by Edward Bowes, who later gained national fame as the host of Major Bowes' Amateur Hour, a radio forerunner of American Idol (Frank Sinatra's career took off after he won). Sunday was the first time we'd ever been to Fircrest. Sunday was the first time we'd ever heard of Fircrest. We went......

Sometimes the world really is a beautiful place. Specifically when there's beer involved. Jack's meeting friends on Saturday for a session of oak-aged beer tasting at Brouwer's Big Wood Fest. He'll then spend the rest of the day rubbing his tum tum and smiling a lot. Thrilled about the possibility of the year's first snow fall, Kim will spend as much of the weekend as possible getting over the cold that's been lingering for a......

Downtown at 6th & Pine we spotted Santa's Castle abutting Nordstrom's and an elf standing around with nothing to do, so we thought we'd point you to the web page with the hours of operation and photo costs, but the downtown Nordstrom's store site doesn't believe in Santa. He doesn't show up on their events list, which doesn't seem right. We mean, Santa didn't just build an extremely faux Bavarian castle-hut next to Nordstrom's without......

Retailers have been slopping their Christmas come-ons into the weeks before Thanksgiving since at least 1986--that's the earliest citation Word Spy has for "Christmas creep," the retailers' own term for the phenomenon. The exception: local customer-service nirvana Nordstrom. As reported on Consumerist and elsewhere, Nordstrom hasn't put up their Christmas decorations yet. But they have posted signs explaining why: "We just like the idea of celebrating one holiday at a time." Reaction is mostly positive.......

Seattlest--very much not a design geek--loved last week's match between designers Naz Hamid and Chris Glass. It works like this: One designer creates an image in fifteen minutes. His opponent then has fifteen minutes of his own to edit/riff on/respond to that image. They go back and forth for ten rounds, all while the peanut gallery (that's you) and a designated commentator judge the results. Last week's commentator was Rosecrans Baldwin, who is a funny......

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”......

We're bringing it up because Seattle Times brought it up. Here's why we hate the idea of making clubs get licensed in order to be clubs: If we happen to have some huge influx of new citizens, you can bet the majority of them aren't coming here simply because they want to sit in a cubicle for nine hours and return home to their ever-tinier condo so they can watch TV. Where people work, they......

One day in the early 90s, then-Husky basketball coach Lynn Nance said to himself, "You know, I'm pretty happy with Prentiss Perkins and Bryant Boston at guard," and declined to offer a scholarship to a young Canadian and UW fan named Steve Nash. And a damn good thing, too. Nash, as we all saw Sunday afternoon, will do anything to stay off the court in crunchtime, including spontaneous hemophilia. Gutless. Just gutless. The 92-93 Huskies......

If your significant other’s a shameless grunge geek and has big, blank walls at home, here’s a fine birthday/anniversary/no-real-reason gift idea: an "archivally processed gelatin silver" Charles Peterson print. This one, we think, is a particularly nice choice. Peterson (and Lance Mercer, of course) chronicled the wonder years of Nirvana, Soundgarden and Pearl Jam in incredible candid (and on-stage) photographs. And now, via some New Mexico outfit called Soulcatcher Studio, you can own some......

The Friends of The Seattle Public Library Book Sale The Library Book Sale is going on at Magnuson Park this weekend. If you haven't been you should go. If you've been there you know you should have been throwing elbows against the heavy bag for weeks--little old ladies don't move themselves when you're trying to get to those diamonds in the rough, but what a rough! We're talking about a few acres of loose, unsorted......

Time to shake our collective heads. Anyone with half a glass and half a brain knows there's terrific wine in Washington. Chateau Ste. Michelle has been an industry leader for over two decades; we've gone from a handful of wineries to 500 licensed producers since 1980; we're the envy of the growers worldwide. But that obviously excludes the business staff at the Seattle Times. They can't even run a Google search on their own content.......

The holiday spirit was in full-swing Friday night at The Crocodile, as Three Imaginary Girls hosted a jolly evening of karaoke, preceeded by a special performance from the U.K.'s Jim Noir and solo sets from members of Tiny Vipers and the Fruit Bats. In short, it was a blast. Something about this event not being a a full-on rock show made it feel very casual, friendly, and a lot of fun. Seattlest arrived about halfway......

SPORTS OBSESSION: Any longtime Seattlest reader knows that we can't get enough of curling, whether it's watching on the CBC or playing ourselves at Seattle's Granite Curling Club, the only dedicated curling facility on the West Coast. Our obsession is often met with odd looks, but a curling open house is honestly one of the best ways going to spend your time/money. 12pm-5pm // 1440 N 128th St. // $10 MUSIC: In an act of......

Urban Craft Uprising has their timing down. Most of the people we talked to at the show were there to do their Christmas shopping. While some diehard craftaholics were doing all of their shopping there, we settled for checking off half the people on our list. Because we know some of those recipients read this blog -- you know who you are -- we won't get into too much detail. But we did manage......

Hollywood babbles on: Babel [info and showtimes] Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan [info and showtimes] Flushed Away [info and showtimes] The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause [info and showtimes] Indy films and the temple of the marketplace: Central Cinema Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick): 7 and 9:30pm Fri-Sun The Harder They Fall (Bogart!): 3pm Sunday The Egyptian The Monster Squad ("Wolfman's got nards!"): midnight Fri and Sat Grand......

Note to editors of Seattlest: not all your readers (or contributors) care that much (i.e., to the exclusion of all else) about outdoor festival music. [Ed. Note: We took a vote and after this post we're all Bumber all the time. Sorry.] No matter. Labor Day weekend has come and gone, signaling the end of Bumbershoot (see the last 27 Seattlest posts), summertime picnics and backyard BBQ. No worries, though, for us yardless Belltowners. They......

Food Lust: a catchy name for a zesty cause: closer connections between farmers and chefs. Farmers and fishers turned out: Willie Green's Organic Farm, Taylor Shellfish, Lopez Island Farm, Skagit River Ranch, Full Circle Farm, Whistling Train Farm,, Fall City Farms Restaurant and catering chefs turned out: Herban Feast Catering, Kaspar's, 35th Street Bistro, Bon Appetit Management Co., Flying Fish. Serious foodies turned out, too, most notably author and farmer Michael Ableman, who read from......

Magnolia is getting a new bridge, if the city can get some money to pay for it. Damaged in the 2001 Nisqually Quake, the current Magnolia Bridge is in a race with the Alaskan Way Viaduct to fall over. While it will probably take decades for something to be done about the Viaduct, the city will move ahead with the Magnolia project in 2009. Two options were proposed: rebuild the bridge in its current location,......

-Someone finally bought Knight Ridder and The Conversation today deals with what implications there are for Seattle. More importantly, Eli from The Stranger mentions Seattlest on the air after a parade of experts blame us (non-specifically) for the demise of the newspaper industry. Thanks Eli! -A flight was delayed for two hours at Seatac Sunday when someone found a .22 bullet in the cabin. -At first we thought this was some sexploitation camp from......

What's Seattlest doing this weekend? What isn't Seattlest doing this weekend? Disconsolate about Rainier Beach losing in the state tournament last night, Seth doesn't know if he can even face the world. If he does, it will be to see star Husky gymnast Kelly McDonald in her final college meet. Sunday he thanks God for being seemingly invisible to the opposite sex, because he has no girlfriend to drag him to an Oscar party. Matt......

Santa Claus is so f-bomb-ing yesterday. We all know he is coming to our town to watch us sleep, yadda yadda yadda...Thanks St. Nick, but been there, done that. This holiday season Governor Gregoire is coming to town. However, instead of presents for all the good boys and girls of the state, she will be bringing spending proposals for the upcoming legislative session. Ho-ho-ho. That's right ---while other governors will execute Jamie Foxx, our governor......

Well, folks, judging by the lack of scenes from next week's Grey's Anatomy at the end of this holiday-filled episode, we don't anticipate a new show next Sunday. Or, presumably, the Sunday after that. But lucky for us, this episode included lots o' tide-us-over bombshell dropping. Well, not so much bombshell dropping as long-coming revelations we've known for awhile. Plus, some comeuppance for George, which Seattlest never really thought he needed, but after careful consideration......

Apparently the annual Wacky Santa Festival, whereby legions of rowdy and rambunctious impersonators of Saint Nick spread hysteria and yule around town, will commence tomorrow for the enjoyment of Seattle's children and families: The plan is to meet at 12 noon at the Ballard Smoke Shop (5439 Ballard Ave NW), and to end up at Consolidated Works (500 Boren Avenue N) for the SeaCompression party in the evening. But the Santa Planners are a smart......