Aurora Bridge on the 4th of July by Seattlest Flickr photog gapey The Aurora Bridge has a long tragic history of being the final structure some hopeless Seattleites ever stand upon. Since its opening in 1932, more than 200 people have jumped to their death from the bridge. It is second only to the Golden Gate Bridge in suicide deaths. Now it would seem those who live around the bridge, and the state of Washington,......

Some asshole’s broken-down Dodge Caravan is making Nirvana look bad. The decrepit piece of shit has been rusting like a cheap can in front of a hotel on Bell Street for the better part of two months, the lone Nirvana sticker on the back window convincing tourists only poor people and scumbags listen to Nirvana around here anymore. Normally we’d expect a Megadeth sticker from this type of vehicle, but to soil Nirvana’s good......

Besides being in the running for Owner of the World's Most Glamorous Name, Katjana Vadeboncoeur plays the maternal hen Aunt Julia in blahblahblahBANG at On the Boards. To make a point of it, she sips then spits up her tea into a cup, complete with birdlike neck spasms, and hands it to her beloved, coddled nephew Yorgen Tesman -- who drinks it, onstage, to an audience of wrinkled noses. If you're an Ibsen fan (blahblahblahBANG......

Booth Gardner, governor of Washington from 1985-1993, is the cover boy of New York Times Magazine this week. You may already know that he's suffering from Parkinson's disease, you may already know that he's campaigning to legalize physician-assisted suicide. But there's more, Daniel Bergner tells us:Only his current cause keeps [Gardner] much interested in living — this and one other goal: to connect with his son, Doug, whose growing up Gardner missed as he took......

The script to Birdie Blue is the sort that, if there was any justice in this world, would have been unceremoniously trashed by every producer whose desk it crossed. Unfortunately, this being the real world and all, this awful script has been produced off-Broadway and in regional theatres all across the country, despite the fact it's guilty of every terrible conceit and device you could associate with the modern theatre. Nothing would have made us......

Yes, it's actually been 14 years since Unplugged in New York aired the first time, on the TV channel that once stood for Music. Fourteen years since you perched on the edge of the couch, possibly stoned, wearing intentionally crappy clothes, your bleary eyes glued to the set. Since Kurt Cobain had just a few months left of his short, tortured life. Today, you can buy/rent/rip the DVD. If you're like Seattlest, you haven't......

Next year’s publication of Itch, Love Stories About Heroin means that if you've been waiting for a full-length, in-depth book about Alice in Chains' Layne Staley—well, don’t get your hopes up. You'd think someone would've managed to write a Heavier Than Heavenish Staley biography by now. After all, Staley's voice was as unique, his contribution to Seattle's 90s music scene (arguably) as important, and his death as grisly as fellow heroin addict Kurt Cobain's.......

Melbourne-based quartet The Drones are a little bit country, a little bit blues, and a lotta bit rock 'n' roll. And check it out, they've got one of the most eclectic list of influences we've ever seen: Van Morrison or Dylan or Suicide or Bad Brains or Nina Simone or Black Flag or the Scientists or Ornette Coleman or Thelonius Monk or (australian)X or Townes Van Zandt or John Lee Hooker or Karen Dalton......

Yeah, yeah, yeah… we’ve bawled a bunch about the blahness of Queen Anne cuisine, from the "exotic" Chinoise at the top of the hill to the "exotic" Racha at the bottom of the hill. So we lowered our expectations a bit to try some good ol' American food at Floyd's Place, which reviewers consistently Yelped as, well, "decent." "Decent" is a decent enough descriptor of the BBQ pork loin sandwich, served with sides of slaw......

Tomorrow, the biggest, bestest band to ever emerge from Seattle—there, we said it—releases a new concert DVD. You can buy (or Netflix) Immagine in Cornice (Italian for "Picture in a Frame") and watch it in the privacy of your own condo, or—lucky us—catch it big-screen-style at the Metro. Cornice is a film from photographer-turned-director Danny Clinch, who knows from shooting big-shots (Johnny Cash, Tupac Shakur, Bruce Springsteen) and documenting their acts on film (Spingsteen’s Devils......

Yesterday the CDC released the news that one of the smallest subsets of people who kill themselves saw an 8% increase from 2003 to 2004.For all young people between ages 10 to 24, the suicide rate rose 8 percent from 2003 to 2004 -- the biggest single-year bump in 15 years -- in what one official called "a dramatic and huge increase." ... The biggest increase -- about 76 percent -- was in the suicide......

Alice in Chains’ former lead singer would be blowing out candles today had he not said yes, yes, yes to drugs. The Chains gang would likely still be making both crunchy (Dirt) and beautiful (Sap) music. Jerry Cantrell, who co-founded the band with Layne, probably would have written some lighter lyrics and cut his hair. Seattlest would have had the pleasure of seeing Alice in Chains—or the supergroup Mad Season—live. Even more importantly, had Layne......

Both the Mariners and the Sounders are in second place in their respective divisions, and both played the teams ahead of them last night. We'd promised a friend we'd go to the Sounders game as they were playing their archrivals, the hated Portland Timbers. The Sounders dominated throughout, they had more speed than Portland, and more energy. Frenchy Sebastian Le Toux provided much of the latter, he flew all over the field. By the second......

--Sally Clark has pulled her nightlife plan citing the fact that everyone from the mayor to the other city council members to the lowliest 1st ave drunk hates it. --A woman may have successfully attempted suicide by train in Auburn this morning. --4th of July ain't nothin but Thanksgiving in the summer. --Starbucks starts to look at its carbon emissions. --So, you’ve decided to join a Startup and live the life of high risk,......

A decomposed body was found in the house of ex-radio guy Mike Webb. We heard that first on the television, but we've been reading about Webb on the excellent Blatherwatch blog for a while now--they've been following Webb's fall for months, even from way back in the days before they had a special category for "Mike Webb Missing" on the blog. Webb used to be a liberal talk radio guy. He was charged with some......

Laser Rocket Arms hates it when we call them "the new Husker Don't." Then again, they keep winning, so our motivation to stop doing so is minimal. 16 teams played the quiz, and the mighty Arms overcame a second-place finish at halftime to take the lead in the end. The loudest groan of the night came during the Nudity category, when Seattlest asked this question: Janet Jackson had a famous breast-exposing wardrobe malfunction during......

--Brawny men are tearing apart the old Rainbow Grocery space, but the brawny men won't say why. --"To the lechy homeless men: I am not a dancing female gift the City of Seattle decided to kindly bestow for your afternoon entertainment." --Eyewitness to a suicide. --The new Sufjan Stevens album will be called Oregon, With the Wind and will be release only in a hoaxy parallel universe. --USS Mariner has a few ideas for......

This week the weather's cooperating a bit more. Nothing like escaping rainy days with a film festival (except if you get stuck in a downpour while waiting in line, so pack that umbrella). Once inside you'll be golden thanks to your perusal of Seattlest picks. Trust us. Golden! But first, we want to highlight some special events: · A Conversation with Julien Temple, with musician/critic Sean Nelson, will no doubt cover Temple's three music......

Once the dust had subsided, after we'd sawed through a concrete wall and brushed the rat droppings from our heads that rained down on us as we demolished our basement bathroom, we began to find unusual things. Old toys stashed behind sheetrocked walls, left there to mourn their solitary confinement at the hands of a former owner who was too lazy or cheap to free them amidst the detritus of the dump. And then we......

We've heard that people commit suicide by jumping off of bridges instead of going a less spectacular route like pills or closed garages precisely because it does create a spectacle. Going out with a bang, so to speak, after failing to make an impact in life. Well, the person who jumped from the Aurora bridge late this morning succeeded in the spectacle-making department above and beyond the usual depression in the Adobe parking lot. The......

Two people were killed in a shooting on the UW campus at 9am this morning. Medics responded to the shootings and found the victims inside Gould Hall, and the Seattle Times is reporting that campus police are investigating a murder suicide. Gould Hall is the building off 15th that houses the Dean's office, a couple of departmental offices, classrooms and the Court Cafe. Classes at Gould Hall are canceled for today.......

Lovely and melancholy Twiggy lookalike El Perro Del Mar (née Sarah Assbring) sings about parties and candy like she's about to place a call to the suicide hotline. Alright, it's not quite that depressing, but she's able to make her 60s girl group harmonies and "shoo-bee-doos" sound downright despondent, and that takes a special Debbie Downer-ability. How very Swedish. Of course, we say all of the above in the nicest possible way. Her poppy......

Last night, Parent Map, a "Monthly Newsmagazine and Online Resource for Puget Sound Parents", hosted UW Emeritus Professor of Psychology Dr. John Gottman for a talk called "The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work," as part of their Pathways lecture series for parents. New parents can check this site out. Actually, we were hoping to attend this suicide lecture at the UW, but of course in Seattle you have to be an early freaking......

We don't really have to look any farther afield than the Stranger to get more than our fill of Seattle Weekly bashing in any given week, but right now there's an article in a Phoenix daily about the New Times Media vs. Village Voice Media culture war that jettisoned Weekly longtimers out the Weekly's door (and into something yet to be seen). The gist of the article is that across the country the left-leaning, axe-grinding,......

We admit, one statue of an ancient Greek philosopher looks a lot like another, so picking Plato instead of Socrates in our "identify the alleged seducer of youth from the picture" round was a little cruel. Regardless, you all did very, very well, with the average team correctly identifying 7.77 pedophiles out of 10. But note, classics scholars: we aren't the ones pegging Plato as a pedo. We picked up that tidbit from the Pedophile......

Cities in other states. Why, during 24 tonight, did Fox 13 news use their "Coming up" commercial break to tell us they have Breaking News about a bunch of people who got shot in a mall in Salt Lake City? (Granted, we're from there, so we care but we don't understand why this is making the Seattle news.) And why are they reporting on their site about a murder-suicide in Philadelphia? Next thing you know,......

By hurling themselves to their deaths over the Aurora Bridge, local Grumpy Guses have area workers miffed.Sarah Edwards drives on the left side of the street near her office because the body of a suicide from the bridge towering above once crashed onto the hood of a co-worker's car. The bloody aftermath of suicide is so common in the upscale neighborhood that grief counselors regularly visit the offices of Cutter & Buck, the sportswear company......

According to this guy's cost analysis, not only is Vista going to screw you, the person who purchased the software, it's also going to doom Microsoft itself and quite possibly the computing universe as we have come to know it. Particularly, he's got issues with the Visa Content Protection specification of which he says in the Executive Executive summary of his paper "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note......

For our money, there's bigger news than the city's suicide hotline putting people on hold (which made the Slog's morning round-up). We noticed it thanks to the after-the-jump sub-hed in the print version of the Seattle P-I. Online, there's no particular emphasis given to the fact that people below the Aurora bridge are complaining about the bodies landing on cars. You have to read the whole story to get to this little bit: This......

About a year ago Seattlest drove down to San Francisco and saw some of the touristy sights -the most mainstream among them being the bridge they've got down there: Golden something-or-other. It was cool. It's a great bridge and there are some pretty neat views available from it if you walk out there, and walking out there is generally encouraged by the wide walking path. One of the things that struck us as being particularly......