"WTOpolice_1" by Seattlest Flickr Pool contributor ntisocl. Daaang, he got right in there. Thanks! We learned our code of behavior from America's suburbs: if the cop's right behind you when you see flashing lights, pull over and turn off your radio. If the flashing lights are on the side of the freeway, slow down a little bit so you can bear proper witness to the speeding culprit's shame. If the flashing lights are parked......

When Amazon.com announced Amazon Fresh last week, it piqued some bloggers' curiosity, but we didn't spend much time thinking about it. Grocery delivery? Interesting, but we weren't going to dive in. Then this weekend we read about the "thug"-infested Safeway -- in Rainier Beach! Crap, we thought to ourselves. That's our Safeway, literally just a few blocks from our house. Apparently we're risking random parking lot beatdowns every time we visit. (It's not the closest......

The supreme granddaddy of Seattle blogging and king shit of the international bicyclist rebellion Rob Zverina has yet another straight from the gut, well written and beautifully illustrated post up on his blog that's worth checking out. After viewing the aftermath of another car on bicyclist collision up in Fremont, Zverina rants: It made me incredibly mad. The equivocator said he knew what it was like because he too was a cyclist. When Sarah......

A Hole in the Suburbs from the Seattlest Flickr Pool. Thanks, grundlepuck!......

Monday BOOK CRUSH: Librarian Nancy Pearl´s latest book is Book Crush, a guide to books you loved when you were growing up. How does she know? Head over to the launch party and find out. 7-8:30pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE PETER BEAGLE SPEAKS: For the Fantastic Fiction Salon, fantasy author Peter Beagle (The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song) teaches "Dialogue Says it All." 7pm // Hugo House......

Monday WOMEN & MONEY: Personal finance expert and author, Suze Orman talks about the complicated and dysfunctional relationship that women have with money in her book, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny. 7:30pm // Town Hall // $5 AGORAPHOBES TAKE HEART: Everything you’ve been told about dating is wrong. Love Will Find You is a new approach to love from dating expert Kathryn Alice. It may be the first dating......

On the phone, Jim Haynes invites us to come for dinner on Sunday, something he's been saying to visitors for decades. By now, well over 100,000 people--most of them total strangers--have accepted his invitation. Mostly, but not exclusively, American visitors. In a not-particularly-fashionable neighborhood in the southeast quadrant of Paris, a high metal gate swings open. We walk into a courtyard and enter a high-ceilinged artist's studio. Jim is on a stool next to the......

Today marks the final edition of the King County Journal, a newspaper that, in various incarnations, has been covering suburban King County for like, a hundred years or something. Yeah, I know: Stop the presses. Newspapers, those rough first drafts of history, aren't supposed to just cease to exist. I worked as a reporter at the KCJ until the end of the year, then started another job. It was a lucky break; I didn't......

The funny German word means something like "in-between city," and it has to do with replacing the old notion of the city as central core with with a more diffuse, polycentric amalgam that contains suburb and urb. (We know! It's hard to focus on work with this kind of exciting thinking going on.) This flies in the face of pro-density dogma, so we're glad to see the Stranger hasn't turned on its own, what......

There's a small item in the P-I today about Governor Gregoire's proposal to halve the price of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Toll for those drivers who carry an automatic toll transponder in their car. People who participate would pay $1.50 round-trip instead of the $3 everyone else pays. Presumably there would also be a fast lane for the traffic that used the transponders that would allow them to drive straight through, although at a somewhat......

No, not the game company. (We'd love to know how many hours Cranium's lawyers spent agonizing over Cranium's Collectibles, though. And whether or not Cranium will be buying craniums.com.) Cranium's has been shuttered for months, but Ericka at Outer Limits reports that the coffee/collectibles/record shop, a popular outpost of funky in nothern Seattle up at 123rd and Lake City Way will not be reopening. We never actually went to Cranium's. When we lived in......

The October issue of the Atlantic Monthly is on newsstands now and on its cover are the words "America's Smartest Cities." Please, nothing draws a Seattleite to a magazine faster than a tagline that indicates his intellectual ego is about to receive some much needed stroking. On the other hand, we've seen articles with this kind of headline on the internet and they're generally disappointing. Yeah, yeah, we have a lot of college graduates and......

You've been in a meeting all morning. Exactly how many coworkers have to pontificate on the benefits of the new TPS reporting system before they let you out of there? All of them, apparently, even though everyone in the room knows you're moving to the new reports. "Um, excuse me, but can we go over the submission system again?" "Which part of it?" "All of it. I just got here." It looks like a few......

A few weeks ago, we posed this question, prompted by a debate on Wikipedia: Is Bellevue a suburb? At first, we thought the answer was obvious: yes, Bellevue is a suburb. But we were intrigued by the debate, both on Wikipedia and in our comments. As denver put it: The problem with the word "suburb" is that it lumps all kinds of communities together in a kind of pejorative limbo. Not a quaint "town" but......

Seattlest's kneejerk answer: Um, yeah. Is this a trick question? But it turns out suburb vs. not a suburb is a hot topic on Wikipedia at the moment. Arguments against Bellevue's suburban status: 1) It may have started as a suburb, but now it's really an edge city. 2) It's too big. It's got 117,000 people! It's the fifth largest city in Washington state! 3) Bellevue's economy isn't dependent on Seattle's anymore. 4) The......

Bus Rapid Transit as an alternative to actual mass transit sucks. It's what anti-transit people offer to cities to ridicule their efforts at light rail or monorails. "You want to move people around without cars, eh? How about this ridiculous thing, then? You can't say no! It isn't a car! Look, it can move people from poor inner suburbs to job sites just as well as elevated trains and it costs nothing so in two......

Londonist prepares a Happy Birthday bath for Buddah this week and then things get all cliched. A madman goes on a rampage while axe-wiedling and London's mayor warns an American diplomat to avoid the kitchen if the heat bothers him so much. LAist has finally come around to purchasing tickets for Clipper Train. Hyper local dating sites are spamming L.A. neighborhoods and the fascinating Dame Darcy talks with LAist about art, the city and earthquakes.......

Today, One Reel canceled their Summer Nights concert series, which was to move from South Lake Union to Gasworks Park. The move comes after a group calling themselves Friends of Gas Works Park, but who we call a bunch of hippie assholes, claimed that the concerts would bring crowds, traffic and parking problems to the area. Boo-fucking-hoo. The group sued the city and One Reel, causing One Reel to back out. We went to......

Back in the mid '80s, when Seattlest was experiencing the mysteries of adolescence firsthand in the suburbs of Milwaukee, one of the local radio stations offered its listeners a chance to pick the programming. Submit your favorite songs and you could play them on the air! Very exciting. Of course, Seattlest's lists were never chosen -- we hadn't yet figured out that there was no way the Velvet Underground or the Pogues were going to......

This just in from the "No Shit Sherlock" department at King County: There are more overweight people in the suburbs. Please someone, stop the presses. The Neighborhood Quality of Life Study has released the results of their investigation into urban sprawl, linking a lack of "walkability" in suburban neighborhoods to an increase in body mass index, or BMI. Just 30 minutes a day drops the pounds--a message being pummeled into people by their doctors,......

Seattlest should have mentioned by now the weeks-old news (months-old in blog years) that the cartooning chores for the Batboy comic strip appearing every week in America's Leading Newspaper have been outsourced from the quaint suburbs of Ballard to wherever the new cartoonist lives. As mentioned here last summer when Seattlest suggested voting for WWN archiving the strip online, the Batboy has been rendered by HATE creator and Ballard resident Pete Bagge. His tenure with......

King County will be holding its primary election next Tuesday; however, in two races the primary will also act as the general election. Because Democrats live in the city and Republicans live on the Eastside, the two races that feature only candidates from a particular party will be decided next week (or in the courts sometime next June). The King County Council is being shrunk from thirteen seats to nine, meaning that four sitting council......

We dropped our Stranger vs. Weekly faceoff feature (lawsuits), but we do occasionaly still flop those rags open for a scan. Last night we were grinding through the top-heavy feature section of this week's Stranger, when almost without noticing we began flying through one of them. Take us away, Stranger, take us away. Until suddenly we came to a screeching halt on a single word: gimcrack. Gimcrack..? Raban! Our eyes scanned upwards and sure enough,......

Betty MacDonald's The Egg and I, published in the mid-twentieth century, tells the tale of her decision, along with her husband, to quit their suburban Seattle lives and rough it on a farm out on the Olympic Peninsula. We love the book because it's real, and funny, and because the lust for a simpler life (and the realization, as David Lee Roth once said, that "the simple life ain't so simple") hasn't changed to this......