HUGE AMOUNTS OF CHEESE: The Cheese Festival is upon us! This is one of our top three favorite events of the year (#2: our birthday, #3: Christmas). Several reasons: a city block full of cheese, friendly vendors, wholesale prices on bottles in the wine garden (don't buy the red wine that says "bacon" three times in its description, we made that mistake last year), and (it bears repeating) a city block full of cheese. 10......

BEISBOL!: The Seattle Mariners kick off 2008 by hosting the Texas Rangers. Jeff Weaver Eric Bedard will bring his future-talent-sacrificing, spring-home-run-gifting, 8.63 ERA to the mound. Fans will cheer. Fans will get pissed off. There will be the heavenly scents of processed meat, garlic fries, beer, and (imagined) freshly trimmed field. It will, finally, be baseball season again. (Photo courtesy of Seattlest Flickr pool member grundlepuck.) 3:40pm // Safeco Field // Tickets: Ask a......

POLITICS: Samantha Power (where have we heard that name before?), a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is in town Friday night to discuss her book, Chasing the Flame. It's about the 2003 death of UN High Commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello in Iraq, and how we might better deal with the challenges of religious extremism, refugees, terrorism, and ethnic struggle. She also wrote a book on genocide, A Problem from......

This video of the '62 World's Fair has actually been on YouTube for awhile, but it managed to escape our notice until SciFi.com posted it (thanks for the heads-up, Seattle LJ). Favorite scene: about two minutes in when they steal a rickshaw. There's also lots of cool phone technology which makes a lot of sense since this is a Ma Bell production.......

What do George Clooney and local SF author Neal Stephenson have in common? The diamond age: Diamond Age, based on Neal Stephenson's best-selling novel The Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, is a six-hour miniseries from Clooney and fellow executive producer Grant Heslov of Smokehouse Productions. When a prominent member of society concludes that the futuristic civilization in which he lives is stifling creativity, he commissions an interactive book for his daughter that......

Okay, we're bummed we didn't get Slint tickets for Saturday night. If you did, we hate you and would like to point out we'll undoubtedly be having a great time watching Mansquito on the SciFi Network at 9pm. We are sure watching a show about a half-man/half-mosquito is way better than seeing a legendary indie band take the stage after years apart. As an aside, we wish we were in the pitch meeting for......