As of yesterday, Boeing machinists have been on strike for 30 days with no end in sight. Workers who have waited out previous strikes are predicting this strike will last longer than the previous record-breaking 69-day strike of 1995. This go around, Boeing machinists are striking for better pensions, benefits and a larger wage increase. Also at the heart of the strike is job security, which decreases every day the strike continues: Boeing has begun......

This photo of the picket line in Bellevue taken by Greg Stonebraker and generously added to the Seattlest Flickr Pool.......

Most news reports and editorials that reference the striking Bellevue teachers list salary as the primary motivator for the strike, which is the easy play because it's always about money. Except when it isn't. The striking Bellevue teachers we've talked to (full disclosure: Seattlest's wife is a striking Bellevue teacher) list the current implementation of the centralized curriculum as the primary motivation for the strike. In 2006 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded millions......

If you're a teenager, there is nothing better than a few extra days of summer vacation however you can get them. Students in the Bellevue School District are rejoicing (and their parents are scrambling for child care) as the start of school was delayed due to a teacher's strike. Bellevue teachers took the picket line today after a contract negotiations failed Monday night. At the center of the teachers strike are issues regarding salary and......

Time magazine claims, "You can't swing a dead cat this time of year without hitting a Top 10 List." Never one to waste a perfectly good dead cat, we decided to take a swing and create a Top Random-Number Shows Seattlest Saw This Year. And now, without any further ado, here's how your favorite bloggers broke down the year: According to Dante, everything else pared in comparison to Daft Punk at WaMu Theater 7/29/07. OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!......

The Seattle Times is reporting, way at the top in an unlikable breaking news sentence (read: cub reporter with a police scanner), that there has been an accident involving the Mercer Streetcar. According to the bolded sentence paragraph, an SUV ran an intersection and collided with an empty streetcar at the corner of Mercer and Terry. If this is true every anti-streetcar hippie just got their second morning wood of the…morning. Exclusive Seattlest Video of......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. Seahawks vs. Grits with Ham and Homemade Applesauce preview Rarely do we think, “I really......

What a glorious morning! The Sonics have won three of five, Edgar Martinez wasn't in the Mitchell Report, we've got a kickin' holiday party to attend tonight. Guess we'll just check out Monkey Disaster, the blog of ex-KUOWer, Conservatize Me author and Seattlest favorite John Moe and see what's up with him...I'm writing you this letter to let you know that I'm leaving you. I've met someone else. Someone named Paul. St Paul. I'm going......

With all of the people that live/work on the Eastside, it is really surprising to not find more beer spots to explore. Granted, we probably haven't found everything worth visiting, but it just seems there is plenty of room for more good beer on the Eastside. Below is a summary of what you can enjoy on the other side of the lake. Breweries: Rock Bottom Bellevue is about the only place if you want......

While trolling through today's Floor Proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives for our other job (it's an exciting one), we noticed something that will probably get no coverage anywhere else. However, we think it is important to note when Congress singles out one faith as important. We think it's doubly important to note when the vote is taken while Congress fights with the Bush Administration over funding the government for the next year, haggles......

For a Presidential candidate—especially one who has recently surged in the polls—Barack Obama is kinda a rock star. So it makes sense that he'd host his latest Seattle appearance at a rock club. The Seattle Generation Obama Concert takes place Tuesday night at the Showbox SoDo. Obama will be there, doing his campaigning thing, along with special musical guests the Dusty 45s and (the still-reunited) Brad. Since Obama and company are going after the......

In November, Mike Hamilton adds this racist joke political commentary to his notorious Uncle Sam billboard: In December, massive floods dunk that section of I-5 into suspiciously biblical amounts of water. Co-inkydink? Or is someone "up there" even more displeased with Hamilton's latest message than everyone else who's seen the billboard?......

It's safe to assume that Sharon Jones is cooler than you. The current queen of neo-funk/soul grew up in Macon, Georgia and Brooklyn, singing in church before ending up doing session work in the '70s as the anonymous vocals on dance and disco records. Without a solo contract of her own, she left the industry and took odd jobs like corrections officer at Rikers Island and Wells Fargo armored car guard. Fate intervened in......

The scene at Lake Ontario Green Lake. Snowball Fight!......

Thanksgiving doesn't allow for us Seattlesters to partake in our usual rock and roll lifestyles. Instead it's friends and family and mellow times about the house. Our drinking's liable to be more restrained and coordinated with a heavy meal of rich food. (Seattlest Geoff offered some choice beer recommendations earlier this week for those who've got a pit-stop planned on the way to grandmother's house tomorrow.) And according to the weather report, it's going to......

The snow is falling, our dear Seattle friends, it simply isn't falling here. Whistler just announced it is open for business, bagging the ultimate ski resort coup of cutting powder before we cut the turkey. Of course you want to go, but in fondly recalling the days of 1998 when the US-CA exchange rate swung wildly the other way, you fear you can really only afford to stay home and play Ski Resort Extreme Halo......

Being born about three decades too late early to appreciate Go, Diego, Go LIVE: The Great Jaguar Rescue, a musical based on the TV show of the same name, we sent our two-year-old nephew. Seattlest: How did you like Go, Diego, Go? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew: (swaying from side-to-side) Goooood. Seattlest: Did you have fun? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew:: Yes. Seattlest: What was your favorite part? Our Two-Year-Old Nephew:: (Prolonged silence) Wow, we had no idea that......

Tonight, the nation's hardcore gamblers' eyes will be on Seattle as our fair burgh hosts Monday Night Football. The Hawks' opponent is the San Francisco 49ers, the team that was everyone's trendy pick to be a darkhorse contender in the NFC, with the eminently predictable result that they've started 2-6. Here's how ESPN's The Sports Guy saw it in his season preview:Call it the Winston Wolf "Let's Not Start Sucking Each Other's Popsicles Yet"......

Last week we mentioned that Seattle's WaMu was accused of colluding in a appraisal-inflation scheme. Today, Bloomberg reports that the fall-out has fallen: "Washington Mutual fell $4.04, or 17 percent, to $20.19 at 1:15 p.m. in composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest decline since the stock market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987." As a result, significant bets are being made:The risk of Washington Mutual defaulting on its debt soared to the......

In an oh-so-scientific survey, a "national emerging health care discount service" we'll decline to name (take that, PR flacks!) discovered that the most caffeinated city in the country out of 20 is ... Chicago! We don't make the top 5 there, but Seattle/Tacoma is number one in coffee consumption -- apparently we've mastered Starbucks lingo enough to order decaf on a regular basis. "58 percent of residents surveyed [said] this elixir of alertness would be......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer's market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. Note: This weekend we are injured reserve, so trading in the visor and clipboard for......

Even that movie voice-over guy will be unemployed. You have heard of this impending strike, have you not? It may seem unrelated to you, the sad inner workings of Hollywood, but in truth, if you are someone who ever turns on their TV, if 8pm every day marks your celebration in the church of Stewart-Colbert, you best care. Without writers, the only thing left standing is Reality TV. We have known this for a long......

Unconfirmed reports from Halloween night place a Peet's "Coming Soon" sign at Broadway and Denny. Maybe a scary mask obscured someone's vision? Dunno, but we're interested to find out. A Peet's at that intersection would be a preemptive strike in anticipation of a Broadway light rail station. Anyway, we're stuck indoors right now and can't get over to Denny to check it out. Since you performed so spectacularly last week getting a shot of the......

It's Seattle Shakespeare Company's version of the wandering prince Pericles on Friday night for MvB, followed Saturday night by Britain's accordion-driven, Brechtian street opera trio with neo-castrati Martyn Jacques, the Tiger Lilies at the Moore, ladies and gentlemen. Having been invited down to San Francisco for a friend’s bachelorette bacchanalia with only one directive ("Bring a wig"), Courtney is hoping she doesn’t end up in the clink this weekend. While laughing at Charles for attending......

Will every software guy in the audience who's ever thought about cashing in the badge and putting on a chef's coat raise your hand? Wow, a lot of you, great! Some of you aren't so sure... You there in the front, did you read Kitchen Confidential? Yeah? Did that help push you out the door or keep you in front of the keyboard? OK, keep them up there. Now, keep them raised if you've actually......

A friend just emailed Seattlest, gushing with glee that our season's passes to the Summit (Alpental, really) grant us 5 free days of skiing at Crystal Mountain. We'd already written about how the ownership of the Summit by Boyne Mountain (who also owns Crystal Mt.) might be a good thing for mountain bikers. So it sounded like it was already working out for those of us that go mostly to Alpental (due to sheer proximity,......

The Go! Team - "Grip Like a Vice" The Go! Team (surely you remember them from all of their Pitchfork love and their incessant adoration in the blogosphere - including us - for 2004's Thunder, Lightning, Strike) play Neumos tonight in support of their new album, Proof of Youth (the video above is for the first single). The new album's been criticized as being a bit of a rehash of ideas from the group's debut,......

It's not often that a play comes along that unites both senior citizens and the people who want to kill them. If your parents are elderly, this may strike you as "fair and balanced" theatre. Seattle Rep's The Murderers also unites the talents of "highly respectable playwright" Jeffrey Hatcher and respectability's opposite in many ways, actress Sarah Rudinoff. Her character Minka says about killing: "You do it once, it just gets easier and easier --......

The Hugo House Literary Series kicks off Friday night with "Lost in Translation," and the program features Seattlest-favorite and monologist Mike Daisey, novelist Randall Keenan and historian Lesley Hazleton. We don't know why Seattle ever lets Daisey leave, once we've got him here. He's ours! We should just band him or do that thing like with dogs where they are electronically forbidden to leave the yard. Daisey, et al, have each produced three new pieces......

Lately the Seahawks' offense has been about as offensive as a Bastyr College commencement address. Against Pittsburgh on Sunday, they didn't score once (much like your average Bastyr College commencement speaker, unless we're talking about scoring weed). What's wrong? Well, it sure ain't the coach. Mike Holmgren has called the plays for four Super Bowl teams--as easy as it is to blame the coach, we can rule it out in this case. Thus, it's the......