We couldn't help but notice that maitre d' Mikel Kanter from Vancouver's Elixir bistro is telling tourists an awfully familiar story:

He also offered that the term "Skid Row" was coined just outside the window for the logging skids that led to the water in earlier times. Skid Row, of course, became a term for the down and out, and there's nothing down and out about Vancouver these days.

We can't remember where we first stumbled across the link, but we've been noodling around with LibraryThing's UnSuggester for the last day or so. more ›

Yeah, yeah, Amazon is using tags. But Amazon.com is soooo 20th century. more ›

We've been through the Underground Tour several times and read Sons of the Profits, but it occurred to not-originally-from-here Seattlest that we could stand to increase our knowledge of Seattle history. So, encouraged by Jonathan Raban's recommendation of it as "one of the very best informal, intimate histories anywhere," we picked up a library copy of Murray Morgan's Skid Road: An Informal Portrait of Seattle to read between films at SIFF. more ›