FACT: Formerly the Sultan Theater, Seattle's Lusty Lady is the original Lusty Lady. The one in San Francisco is the one that unionized and, eventually, became a worker-owned co-op. Seattle? Not a co-op. On the plus side, it's not owned by the Colacurcio family, either. FACT: The $20 that buys a 2-minute lap dance at Déjà Vu gets you 20 minutes of glassed-in nudity at the Lusty Lady. One quarter keeps a peep show......

Seattle’s first new strip club in nearly 20 years is set to open sometime this summer in the basement of Fantasy Unlimited, ironically right on the S.L.U.T. line. With a nod to freedom of speech, the newest addition to the Déjà Vu family marks the end of the city’s 17 year moratorium on such establishments and is considered a huge victory for First Amendment activists and dirty old men alike. And to think, people......

The City Council finally got around to passing "adult cabaret" zoning laws that just might let Seattle develop a strip club scene worthy of a would-be world-class city. But there's a provision that kills one of our brilliant ideas: The new rules, which passed by a unanimous vote, require strip clubs to be at least 800 feet from elementary or secondary schools, child-care centers, community centers, public parks or open space where children tend to......

What can you say about something like Smokey Joe's Cafe that isn't self-evident from the hype that it's the "Longest Running Musical Review in the History of Broadway(TM)"? Either that does it for you or it doesn't. If you're (relatively) young, bent and jaded you probably won't connect with the graying clap-and-sing-along demographic excited by the highly polished but hammy renditions of popular top 40 songs from their childhood. Our friend Andy who tagged along......

Who knew such bitter emotion roiled beneath the placid surface of the local independent baking industry? A couple of weeks ago, Seattlest mentioned that the Sugar Shack Baking Co. was about to open on Lake City Way. All seemed well -- people in the pastry-light area were ready for espresso, scones, and German chocolate cake. Then last week, Stephanie Crocker of West Seattle's Sugar left a comment: Geeze, everybody. Can't anybody who starts a......

--A Seattle lawyer is officially in on the Menu Foods Ltd sue-a-thon. Local pets blog Itchmo Seattle is claiming a vastly different number of dead pets across the country than we've seen in the MSM, by the way. Which is closer to the truth: The P-I's 13 or the blog's 1,000? --Seattlest had a few science teachers in our high school days that should have been carried out of the building with an administrator......

The Washington Huskies have scored their first points in the Fulmer Cup, an annual competition to see which college football team is the lawbreaking-est. The indispensable, hilarious college football blog Every Day Should Be Saturday started and adjudicates the Fulmer Cup, awarding points for every legal run-in by a team's players, and tallying them at the end of the year. (The cup is named for Tennessee coach Philip Fulmer, whose players may be volunteers, but......

So Rick's was raided on Wednesday night: P-I night reporter Scott Gutierrez was out on the scene and reports that police arrested 14 dancers and one manager for what a police spokesman said were violations of the city's adult entertainment ordinance. Hmm. 14 dancers and a manager. Who's missing? Right. The johns. Well, maybe there weren't any customers there at the time, with a squad of Seattle's Finest patronizing the place? No, that's not it:......

--Expect to hear all about City Councilman Peter Steinbrueck's strip club proposal tomorrow. His plan will include club dispersal to different areas of the city in opposition to the mayor's red light district plan. --People who suspect themselves of being Wikipediholics can now self diagnose via this test. --Another instance of inconsiderate parking. --If the Ghost of Thanksgiving Present visits you tonight, the feature presentation will be turkey-less dinner plates for hundreds of White......

City results County results State results National results Democrats assume majority in House, need two more seats to take Senate and lead in bo th. Mike obliterated by Cantwell. 200,000 vote loss means he's stripped of exclamation point. Reichert leads Burner (who Nancy Pelosi called "Burnerman" on CNN last evening, securing the anti-Semitic vote for Reichert). Voters say no to tax breaks for the greedy, and property "rights" for the confused, but yes to......

Susan Paynter thinks all the talk about "freedom of speech" around Referendum 1 (the four-foot rule, etc.) is a ruse -- what the clubs really want to keep "legal" is prostitution: If we want a vote, up or down, on legalizing prostitution, then, in the words of G.W. Bush, bring it on. But if, outside of Nevada, we still oppose the oldest profession when it is practiced on the street, do we ignore it when......

Things we learned at trivia last night: Some people thought the Molucca Islands might be popularly known as the Rattan Islands, the Rubber Islands, the Molasses Islands, or -- our favorite given the question -- Java. No one reads Ellery Queen these days. (Nor, to be fair, do we.) At least one team thought perhaps Steve Irwin won the women's 400m sprint at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Alternate theory: your mom. Like Seattlest......

Washington Husky running back Michael Houston is off the team and, presumably, not going to get a pickup from Orange Cab anytime soon after some Saturday night hijinks involving a taxi, a McDonalds, and--it goes without saying--a strip club. From the Times: According to a police report from the King County Sheriff's office, Houston, two other men and a woman were picked up by an Orange Cab at Déjà Vu, a strip club on Bothell......

-Lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, pride...blogging? -A USS Mariner pizza feed (we love that terminology, by the way) goes terribly awry when one pushy dude threatens to eat all the pizza and a few sports bloggers as well. -Some guy in Colville, Washington tried unsuccessfully to put a hit on his unborn child. -BoingBoing hammers on Vista today on two fronts: licensing and licensing. -A bunch of pro-strip club commercials are out there in......

Back when we made our oh-so-controversial declaration that Seattle's strip clubs sucked, there was a little nagging voice at the back of our head. "What about the Sands?" it whispered. "You haven't actually been there. And they were remodeled recently. Maybe it's awesome!" We ignored that voice and published our post anyway -- we've got quotas to meet. Last Friday night, however, we ended up at Ballard's sole strip club to celebrate one of our......

Strip club owners got their wish: The referendum to overturn Nanny Nickels' anti-ecdysiast laws will be on the ballot in November, not September. At least, so says the PI: The City Council settled the question Monday of when the proposal should go to voters -- not whether it should. That was decided for politicians some time ago when the strip-club industry collected sufficient petition signatures to challenge new rules banning lap dances and dim lighting......

We established yesterday that Portland wants to be Seattle by pointing out the fact that they have residents who quit the car (for a month) in much the same way Ballard resident Allen Durning has (for good). Tenuous, maybe, but good on 'em. The idea that families need automobiles like they need prime time television should be challenged. Today we suggest that San Francisco wants to be Seattle by pointing out the fact that their......

Face it. There are no good strip clubs in Seattle. If our restaurant scene were as craptastic as our strip club scene, we'd be eating out at Applebee's, Chili's, Olive Garden, or Red Lobster (for those who swing a different way). We're happy that two local strip club owners, a.k.a. Seattle Citizens for Free Speech, have ponied up over half a million dollars to save lap dances. We like lap dances. We'll vote to save......

Shanghaiist probably knows a little more about China than the Chicago Sun-Times. Giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one. The city does to have a music scene. Don't even front like they don't. They also have Dorito bananas and white guys shopping for wives. What they don't have is any more tolerance for jaywalkers. Bostonist sees Boston and Somerville each whip out their art and face off. A plagiarized novel is the......

Today is No Pants Day. It's also Cinco De Mayo. Seattlest thinks celebrations for the former will get started after celebrations for the latter, continuing until tomorrow. Since they'll run into tomorrow anyway, Seattlest declares this weekend No Pants Weekend. You can celebrate as you see fit, but for all the ladies, tomorrow's DJ Assault show is going to be the place to get your Girls Gone Wild on. The recommended trip to PDX for......

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......

We love this town. But we'd love it ever-so-much more if it had these things in it. (Budding entrepreneurs, take note.) 1) Soft-serve frozen custard, preferably attached to a good burger joint and with rotating flavors of the day. We've mentioned this before. 2) Thunderstorms. There's nothing like being able to see lightning strikes when you're a mile away. 3) Street food! Carts pushed by immigrants offering a variety of culinary delights. We long......

Mayor Nickels' campaign to make local strip clubs no fun for anyone popped up on the local radar again yesterday. Turns out Georgetown residents aren't too happy with Nickels' desire to create a strip club zone that borders their neighborhood to the north. If this zoning change is approved, any new strip clubs in the city would be built there and Georgetown residents would have to explain the sex industry to their impressionable children,......

Next to Centerfolds, Seattle's only male strip club (unless you count that place way out in Rainier Valley--which we don't), sits a dive bar worthy of the moniker, Crown Hill Pub. It is, afterall, in Crown Hill, and seeing as they only serve beer and wine, it is merely a pub. Most establishments which only serve beer and wine make up for lack of hard liquor with a vast selection of local microbrews and regional......

Seattlest is pretty fond of our neighbors to the North--this much you probably already know. But despite our weakness for Canuckery, we can't avoid mocking curling as a sport, albeit an Olympic one. As luck would have it, a bunch of Seattlest's co-workers went curling and we got dragged along. Research, we rationalized, just research. We were happy to find there is a bar at the local curling rink. OK, it is less a......

Student Flyers: The region's Top Gun for teens (uhg) suffered the loss of two students over the weekend when the plane of two freshman students lost power and crashed. Aviation High School has had approximately 1.2 million student flyers since its inception in 1992, but this is the first serious incident. Possible 'Double Voter' IDed: Washington State Republicans believe they have identified 16 voters who voted twice in the election last year and one woman......

Not that we don't have our share of gubanatorial insanity here in Washington, but at least we're not California. You may remember that they elected the Terminator as their governor in a special recall election. Yes, it's still funny and getting funnier every day. We only wish that Seattlest was around in 2003 so we could legitamately say, "We told you so," now. The excuse we're using for this little round of jeering is the......

There's a strip club just far enough north to sometimes escape notice called Rick's on Lake City Way. It's been in the news before and depending on the circles you run in it's notorious/famous for skirting the law. A "well-known, documented vice location" according to Seattle Police report issued yesterday. The report (which you really should see for yourself) details misconduct allegations against members of the Seattle Police Department for relationships carried out by SPD......