Grundlepuck, a regular contributor to our Flickr pool, shared this photo of Seattle Ramen. According to the label, it's produced by Pal-Do World, a Korean grocery in Lynnwood. We're curious about the ingredients. What does it take to turn ordinary ramen into Seattle Ramen? Geoduck? Dick's Deluxe? Pike Place Roast? If you've tried it, let us know if it captures the flavor of the city.......

Skate King was the venue of choice for this Seattlest's elementary and middle school-sponsored events, as well as for countless cruel friends' birthday parties. Over all those years of practice, did we ever really catch the knack for rollerskating? No. Did the flat stench of the soda-sticky carpets, the feel of waxy pizza cheese on our tongues, and the tinny strains of Ace of Base's "I Saw The Sign" omnipresent at this place ever truly......

After over 45 years as Seattle's most visible man-made icon, the Space Needle is in dire need of a bath. Turns out the Needle has not had a serious cleaning since 1962, when it was introduced to the world as Seattle's symbol, during the World's Fair. The much-needed bath began yesterday, at the hands of a German company which promises a "green clean" of the icon. Karcher has also been tasked with cleaning some......

"I heart Seattle" by Mike Anderson (Viking054) So do we, Mike. So do we. Thanks for sharing!......

Speculation abounded when Charles posted about a recent study showing what would happen to Seattle if a 9.0 quake hit us. The Space Needle was called out as an icon that wouldn't go down. Seattlest's dad is the resident earthquake-and-volcanoes disaster geologist in the family, so we asked for the truth. We were told to consult the disaster flick 10.5, a made for TV turd movie starring Kim Delany (you know, from CSI: Miami, or......

The intrepid and dedicated bloggers over at My Ballard.com have been providing nearly minute-by-minute coverage of the Seattle Landmark Preservation Societies vote on the old Denny's building on 15th and Market. According to their pain-staking notes, around 6:30 the board's final vote of 6 to 3 in favor of landmark status, was met by gasps and cheers by supporters in the audience. The vote means that the building cannot be demolished and replaced by......

The American steakhouse--that dimly lit, mahogany-paneled, mafia-chic hideout for fat cats and their trophy molls--you'd think it would never fly in laid-back, egalitarian Seattle. You'd be wrong. Yet another high-end steakhouse, from Atlanta's 25-unit Capital Grille chain, is opening an outpost downtown, just steps from chain rivals Ruth's Chris (New Orleans, 92 units) and Morton's (Chicago, 70 stores), not to mention a couple of locally-owned, downtown standbys, the Met and the Brooklyn. We were invited......

We just read Melanie McFarland's farewell column and we're a little choked up. It's good news for her -- she's off to become a TV editor at IMDB. But we're out a reviewer who likes all the right shows for all the right reasons. McFarland's that rare breed of critic who has high standards and knows when to check them at the door. She won a place in our hearts forever with her reviews of......

So we may have found a new favorite website--last night, a friend pointed us to the seriously awesome image to the right, courtesy of Vintage Seattle, a high-resolution visual blog documenting Seattle history, a labor of love undertaken by one Jess Cliffe. There's plenty of fantastic stuff at Vintage Seattle (we've only barely begun to sort through it), but nothing's struck us so much as this pic, posted back on Jan. 3: According to Cliffe,......

It turns out, it wasn't our booze-addled brains: The Seattle Center fireworks display on Monday night was messed up due to a computer program glitch (Y2K strikes 8 years late!). According to the Times: About a minute before midnight, technicians with California-based Pyro Spectaculars realized that the computer program that controlled the display was not going to work, said Mary Bacarella, a spokeswoman for the Space Needle. They rebooted twice, then decided to do......

The new Zagat is out, at least the one "devoted to Seattle" restaurants. And with "all due respect" to "local editor" Alicia Comstock Arter (who also contributes to Northwest Palate), it's "a freakin mess." The trouble, "brewing for years," is that the "capsule reviews" take isolated "nouns and adjectives" from "reader comments" and string them together to make "nonsensical" and "often inaccurate" profiles. It's a Fox News approach to dining, all pseudo-oracular, disjointed headlines with......

To see Seattle's culinary scene up close, just like the locals do, get thy butt over to the Gray Line tour desk! Aunt Minnie from Moline can spend a summer afternoon watching a real live chef! Gray Line of Seattle figures plenty of rubes will want to tag along on a trip through the market and demo in the kitchen. Jason Wilson of Crush is the only "name" to sign up, but the Space Needle,......

Well, it's been a month, and that can only mean one thing: time for the next free edgy youth culture documentary, care of Scion. Last time around, the topic was blood diamonds in hip hop; this time it's all about nightclubbing in the late '80s NYC queer community. Paris is Burning is all about New York fashion houses, but not the ones you may think you know. African American and Latino gay men and......

This Sunday evening, the Seattle Phonographers Union will be holding a sonic performance at Magnuson Park. Phonographers?!? The hell you say? Rest, assured; we misspeelled neither photographers nor pornographers --although, for the record, we support many of those engaged these activities. We like the term phonography, first, because it sounds nicely antiquated and, given that we are currently embroiled in The Digital Future, somewhat analog what with its allusion to the phonograph. Now we're......

How easy it is to poke mean-spirited fun at Silverman Festivals, aka Bite of Seattle. The family-owned commercial enterprise, enabled by the City of Seattle in the guise of a community festival, symbolizes so much of what's wrong with America today: greed, exploitation, overweening appetite and tons of just plain crappy food. A cheap and easy target for the smug and self-satisfied. (For one such potshot, see Cornichon's "Blah of Seattle" post a year ago.)......

Air France 046 touched down right on schedule Monday--the first-ever nonstop flight from CDG to SEA, water cannons spraying the Airbus A330 in a festive salute, the pilot waving French and American flags from his cockpit window. Champagne toasts and official speeches followed, blessing this long-overdue rapprochement of the Eiffel Tower and the Space Needle. Francophile Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur said we'd finally been kissed on both cheeks by the standoffish French. But the......

We don't need the Space Needle looming overhead to know we're in Seattle. We count on the minutia of the built environment to constantly remind us where we are. The shape of the curb, the width of the sidewalk, the placement and condition of the news boxes all serve to inform us, again and again, that we're home. We're in Seattle--a warm and familiar place--where we have friends and responsibilities. We know we're expected somewhere......

--Ken Griffey, Jr. bitched out Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger today. --The news: Sonics' bill gets out of committee. The real news: Even though said committee is chaired by the bill's biggest supporter, it only passed by one vote. --The Real Change v. Weekly sniping continues apace. --Cutter & Buck: sold! --Local author John Moe discovers that lying to your child=entertaining blog post. Space Needle sketch from this awesome post.......

Seattle has some truly wonderful public conference rooms: Room A has that unmistakable Capitol Hill decor, while Room B evokes the Puget Sound. Room C, pictured above, has the coveted Space Needle imagery. Quite a few attendees were already there by 4pm, but we found a spot just in time for the conference call. We weren't aware there was going to be a conference call, but there was. A middle-aged tourist couple sat down......

--The Seattle Mystery Bookshop gets sucked into a publisher's con game. [Seattle Mystery Bookshop] --BibliOdyssey stumbles across a trove of Space Needle and Century 21 sketches. [BibliOdyssey] --A's 1B Dan Johnson is out for three months. [SFGate.com] --Yeah, maybe teachers should be paid as much as athletes. [Seattle P-I] --Ellen Forney talks comics. [Inkstuds] --Should Starbucks compensate a barista who had stuff stolen from her car while she was at work? [Starbucks Gossip] Farmland......

You'd think it was the Second Coming or something. TV news shots, front page of the local dailies, big story in the New York Times. It's a fucking ski lift, for chrissakes. You get on, you ride in a gondola for five minutes, you get off at the top. But it's in Portland, you know, so it's got to be terrific. Even Amy Jenniges, former Stranger staffer now at the Portland Mercury, thinks it's......

SAM just can't wait to open its sculpture park. Over on the Slog, Jen Graves summarizes the kvetching about SAM's sculpture park's January 20th opening. Here's another reason why 1/20 isn't working for us, and it's the same reason SAM employees were rooting against the Hawks on Saturday. According to our highly placed museum source, had the Seahawks lost, the Space Needle would've been lit up with a sculpture park related display. But with the......

Picture all the money in the state rounded up and stuffed into an enormous paper mache taxpayer suspended from the Space Needle. Blindfold Governor Gregoire and Mayor Nickels and hand them each a baseball bat. The mayor proposed a budget yesterday and hopefully the wonks are currently poking at it with those little CSI evidence sticks and ogling it through the magnifying glass helmets popularized by Rick Moranis in Honey I Shrunk the Kids. We'll......

Fall? No. College football season. We hate it. Specifically, we hate the Cougar/Husky rivalry. Why? Because we don't care. We went to a microscopic liberal arts college in the midwest. But we hear about it anyway. It's easier to avoid Packer-themed jibber-jabber in the shadow of Green Bay than it is to avoid Dawgs and Cougs exchanging antique insults and warmed-over jokes originally told about more interesting teams. We're sick of mass emails sent to......

We were all set to write a little thing about the minimum wage protest tomorrow and belittle it along the lines of "who cares about the national minimum wage when our state's is already the highest in the country" without knowing anything about it (as is our wont), but we accidentally stopped to read what was being protested. HR 5970, which has passed the House and is now heading to the U.S. Senate, contains......

The P-I has an article today that explores the panic that the North Korean missile tests of 5, July have struck into area hearts. "I don't think Seattle will be a target," David Cahn stuttered in terror. "America has occupied their country for 50 years. America's policy is the provocation for this sort of thing," Ted Roberts told the paper while impaired by fear . "Even if (the missile) could reach the U.S., it would......

Here's a shocker: Seattlest is fond of websites. We're especially fond of the kind of websites built by people like Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer, two of the brains behind Web design magazine A List Apart. Which is why our heart quickened when we saw that An Event Apart is coming to Seattle. An Event Apart is, per their site, "a concentrated, creative learning session that will change the way you approach web design." Why......

Yeah, we know -- out-of-town guests are the only reason you visit the Space Needle in the first place. But there's more to this city than really tall spires with Galileo-inspiring drops. Got friends or family coming from out of town? Here's 43 suggestions for things to do with them. 1) The Fremont Troll followed by the statue of Lenin. 2a) If they're male, show them the badass urinal in the 5 Point Cafe where......

Like seemingly most people in Seattle, Seattlest is a transplant. From Virginia specifically. This morning we had this article from the New York Times Magazine sent to us [requires registration]. It discusses the difficulty in reaching a consensus on a design for a future expansion of one of the most revered areas on the Grounds of the University of Virginia (Seattlest's alma mater). For those unfamiliar, the University of Virginia was originally designed by......

Oh no, oh no, the ferries are a top target for the terrorists! The No. 1 target, in fact. Well, the No. 1 target for maritime terrorism, which is kind of like saying Cupcake Royale is the No. 1 target for cupcake terrorism. Just as we don't buy that Bad Men would threaten our cupcake supply, we are similarly unconvinced that any maritime target is likely to be the subject of an attack. When we......