Results tagged “smoking”

• The big news in local blogs today is the Seattle Times "collaboration" with hyperlocal blogstars such as West Seattle Blog, MyBallard, Capitol Hill Seattle, and Rainier Valley Post. Sure, there's warranted kicking and screaming about anything to do with the Times and online media, but is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship?
• Speaking of hyperlocal news, belltownpeople (giddy about being the densest neighborhood in Seattle) and CHS broke out mayoral race votes by 'hood.

Depressed, laid off, drunk and want a cigarette? Unless you can bum one off a friendly big spender, you'll pay dearly for it, thanks to a state sin tax increase that went into effect today. In Washington, each pack of smokes now carries a $3.035 tax. Perhaps it's time to pick a different, cheaper vice, such as womanizing or watching reality television.

No one noticed, but last week the King County health department raised the stakes in the city's war on smoking by suing two bars for failing to comply with the nah-they'll-never-enforce-it rule that prohibits smoking within twenty-five feet of the doors, windows, and vents of bars and restaurants. You may have noticed that the twenty-five-foot rule generally isn't enforced, and smokers seem to wander as far afield as twenty-five inches from the door of most bars before lighting up. Check outside Neumos between sets, the Tractor on weekends and most neighborhood bars any time at all where it's not unusual to see patrons straddling the threshold of a back door; Manny's just inside the bar, American Spirit just out.

Photographer Taylor Hain headed this "Cigarette Solice" in the Seattlest Flickr Pool.

Seattlest wanders.

We don't claim to be an expert on male attractiveness, but if forced to rank television personalities by hotness or notness--well, let's just say that Bill Nye, "The Science Guy", would be closer to Willard Scott than to Matt Lauer.

Cooper's quiz is scheduled for 8:45 Tuesday nights, though last night's kicked off at 9:00. It's 40 questions, uncategorized. Teams trade answer sheets for scoring. After about 15-20 minutes the host announces results. That's a longish delay, but it's a well-paced quiz overall.

Next up was Juno, the latest comedy from Jason Reitman. We loved his first feature, Thank You for Smoking, and had heard nothing but good buzz about this flick, which is kinda Knocked Up meets Superbad, if Judd Apatow stopped focusing so much on male friendships and paid more attention to the pregnant girl. As the titular acid-tongued, preggo high schooler, Ellen Page keeps on getting better and better, and the rest of the cast (JK Simmons, Allison Ranney, Jennifer Garner, and Jason Bateman, reunited here with his TV son, sweet baby Michael Cera) ain't no slouch neither. A couple minor quibbles: if anything the film is too cute by half. We don't need pop culture references for the sake of pop culture references: "No, It's Morgan Freeman. I'm here to collect some bones." And we certainly don't need a quirky folk song introducing every goddamn scene (Wes Anderson much?). Still, the film was ultimately very moving -- we always appreciate it when a foul-mouthed movie turns out to have some heart.

Seattle Police, or the Washington State Ferry system, or the FBI, or whatever shadowy anti-terrorist unit is in charge of this particular investigation hasn't contacted Seattlest at this time. They haven't asked us into the evidence room in the basement of some nondescript building and opened the box containing the suspicious device they found in a Seattle/Bainbridge ferry bathroom and asked us to identify it. We can identify it, however, and you probably can too if you ever smoked pot in a college dorm.

Oh Seattle, you make us feel so .

We're trying to decide if we're panicked about the bees. The other day -- sunny, warm -- we were in Volunteer Park in the middle of a patch of clover and it was completely bee-free. It would have been chilling except, like we say, the sun was out and it was in the 80s. We have a lot of respect for bees, and not just because a dead one stuck in some honeycomb took revenge on us from beyond the bee-grave. It's because they always seem to be busy getting stuff done. You rarely spot a bee just fucking around out there.

Since Seattlest loves fake robots and Missed the Boat, we're totally holding hands with this video right now. It's love. Shut the light on your way out, please.

Is Seattlest the only person left that hates seeing the last of the city's beer-only drinking venues launch themselves into the new cocktail era and start serving hard alcohol? The Comet--that was a blow. We loved the fact that you could only get beer and wine there up until a year or so ago. You could buy everyone who was bellied-up a "shot" for like $20. The shot was actually some weird glug or something that walked the line of alcohol content they were allowed to serve, but it was cheap as hell. Now the Blue Moon has apparently made nice with the Control Board and is updating their liquor license to enable the sales of hard alcohol. Great, great bar, as it is. Great residents, great transients. One of the funnest bars in Seattle and the patrons seem to get plenty drunk on the current offerings. When Seattlest Dan and Seattlest MVB were in there recently we hadn't been sitting for ten minutes before some woman from Alaska dumped the contents of her purse on our table and sprayed us with cheap perfume. She got 86'd about 20 times and every time she returned she'd show up at the table looking for her phone and her coat. The last thing she needed was a shot, but if it were available at the bar we have no doubt someone would have slipped her one. Now, we understand that bars make a crap-load of money from the sales of hard alcohol and that dives have been getting killed lately by the smoking thing and the sprinkler thing, but we still love us a pub. Are there any left? And if we're going to continue to phase out these Draconian, Victorian-age drinking laws where are we going to address the ridiculous state-run liquor stores?

Real Change executive director Tim Harris says on his blog that the Seattle Weekly wants to exposé his street newspaper back to the Gutenberg age.

Under Byen (meaning "under the city" and pronounced "Oh-nah Boon") is a pack of wild Danes who makes orchestral post-rock chockful of unfamiliar sounds, distorted vocals, effects pedals, and heavy feedback. The eight-piece has been together since the mid-90s, but it's their latest release Samme Stof Som Stof that has won them fans on this side of the pond. Part of it is due to their elaborate orchestration and sonic heft, and part of it is due to their blonde bombshell of a lead singer. Henriette Sennenvaldt is smoking hot, with quirky vocals in the vein of Bjork--case in point: the album's title track [mp3]--that serves to complement the band's deep sound. Under Byen headlines tonight's Euro-leaning show at Chop Suey, also featuring Au Revior Simone and Frida Hyvonen. We've been told all three bands are solid, a rare occurrence indeed.

Friday night, our buddy remarked that in NYC these days, you can tell how good a club is by how many people are outside smoking. Saturday night down at the Croc, we reflected that you can probably tell how good a band's going to be by how many body piercings and tattoos you can spot in the crowd. By that measure, we didn't have much to look forward to from Alexi Murdoch.

The P-I's Joel Connelly fires a shot across the Stranger's bow this morning with a satirical column titled "Peer into future after car ban -- it isn't pretty."

We hadn't been to the Comet for awhile, but everything looked just the way we left it. Everyone was just as scruffy and working-class-bluesy and it wasn't until we sat down and talked to them later that we discovered they were from Perth, Australia, and worked at Microsoft and Amazon. We holed up in the "Being John Malkovich" lounge upstairs (complete with 3/4-size red door marked "Private") trying to guess who that maddeningly familiar band was they were playing on the stereo (Social Distortion) until Prosser's melancholic indie-alt-country pulled us downstairs.

might be the Best Best of the -ists ever. We're exhausted just thinking about it.

25 teams! Free ashtrays for the taking! Controversy about whether or not Bangor is a "city" or just part of Bremerton! And a geeky white boy dance-off to close the evening!

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost.

We didn’t see In DisDress, Marya Sea Kaminski’s one-woman show, when it was part of On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival last June, but from what we gather, it involved a huge red dress, a television set, and porn. The Washington Ensemble Theatre restaging of that show, In DisDress Now Redux, doesn’t involve any of those things (though porn does get a shout out), and the title primarily exists to allow for the Apocalypse Now reference. Though originally intended to be an expansion of last year’s show, this performance is completely different. As the playwright explains, “I am not capable of and am absolutely not interested in being the person I was seven months ago, even in performance.” Fair enough.

These pictures have a distinct "Usual Suspects" air about them, like something's about to happen and it's going to involve automatic weapons fire and European accents with a few mutants or extraterrestrials on the side.

7 & 9pm // Grand Illusion Cinema [1403 NE 50th (Corner of University Way and 50th)] // $7

Mars Hill pastor Mark Driscoll is blowing up. His recent blog post on Ted Haggard, the meth smoking, gay prostitute hiring Colorado pastor displayed all of Mark's trademark bravado and bluster and unfortunately it probably made him as many new friends as new enemies and his apology for that post in no way apologizes for anything. And why should he? It's a very orchestrated campaign that presupposes, fosters and needs opposition.

What am I doing here? Standing in the cold, with all these people? I swore I'd never do this. Swore I'd never join the crazies, waiting all night for some sale that can't possibly be worth it. But here I am.

"I don’t venture north of even the cut, unless provoked." So said one Seattlest contributor when we asked what inspires us to turn our backs on downtown and drive north. Wimp.

That's one thing we learned from The Moth Story Tour on Sunday night at Town Hall. Actually, we learned that from the brochure, which explained what local voices were going to appear in which cities. Cho in LA, Savage in SEA.