Maybe it's the recession like it was in the early 90s, but as a city, we're recycling more than ever before. Mayor Greg Nickels announced today that Seattle set a new city record for recycling rates in 2006, with 47.5 percent of the city's residential, commercial and self-haul waste heading to recycling bins instead of the landfills. That’s a good thing. Did you know that every single day, we send a mile-long train filled with......

Seattlest got a Sony Walkman for our 15th birthday, and bought our first couple of cassette tapes with saved allowance: Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It. As any self-respecting male teen would be, we were offended thrilled by the latter’s raw language and humor. So within a few weeks, we’d procured N.W.A.’s tape, Straight Outta Compton. That’s how we knew what we were hearing Sunday night when we were put on hold after......

Seattlest got our first chance to stick our fingers in the Viaduct's wounds this weekend courtesy of a WSDOT walking tour. Unless you're the type to sign up for a St Patrick's Day 15,000 K fun run or something like that opportunities to walk around on the Viaduct's road bed are few and far between, so this tour was greatly appreciated. On Saturday morning we met at the 1st and Columbia onramp to collect......

Seattlest and Mrs. Seattlest have been getting take out on Friday nights at Chantanee Family Thai Restaurant in Bellevue for almost 3 years and have found no better Thai restaurant on the Eastside. From time to time, we eschew the styrofoam containers and eat our meal in the gold and purple themed interior. The service? Efficient and friendly. Mrs. Seattlest is the more adventurous of our duo and has eaten her way around most of......

Valentine’s day is complicated. So Seattlest likes to celebrate with something simple, something unobtrusive, something like shortbread. Shortbread is plain enough to please everyone, and when lovingly prepared, delicious enough to impress them too. Chummy coworkers? Shortbread. Been on a few dates, but not official? Shortbread. Shortbread says: I like you, but in a noncommittal sort of way. Also, if you are the decorating sort, shortbread is a great blank canvas sort of cookie. We......

Tattooed guy, Larry (we think it was Larry) Conner (we think he said Conner), headphones, cigarette, ignores Monday night's snowstorm under makeshift tarp and jury-rigged work lights to complete tattoo-themed mural outside Wann Izakaya on Second Avenue. Hey, if Hasselbeck and Alexander can work in the snow, let alone artists like Conner (or did he say Cotter?), then the rest of us ought to as well, right? On the other hand, too cold & windy......

That was the greeting we received when we rounded the corner to the front lobby of said market. That and a giant, bland sign listing the coffee drinks this new "café" will be selling. "Are you fucking kidding me?" is what we wanted to say to the lady behind the counter, wearing a sparkling clean apron and Lisa Loeb glasses. Instead, we rolled our glazed eyes from her face up to the strips of brown......

There was a lot of disappointment in the air Sunday night, as concertgoers arrived to Chop Suey to find out that expected headliners You Say Party! We Say Die! weren't going to be playing due to visa issues. Seattlest was among the few that decided to stick out the show despite its 2/3 deficit of exclamation points in band names, hoping that Thunderbirds Are Now! would make up for the missing awesome. They did,......

Truly, Seattlest walked into the opening of 9 Parts of Desire at the Rep with trepidation, well-founded in experience, about tremendously topical one-person shows. And when it began with a woman at a river telling us about dumping shoes with "worn out soles" in the water (say it to yourself, "worn out soles," savor the homonymity), we slouched a bit in our seat. But after five minutes, we spent the rest of the evening......

There's probably no other restaurant in town that Seattlest eats at as much as Crave. Given how much we enjoying dining out, this is saying a lot. We frequently spend our weekends brunching at Crave, we take out-of-town guests there for dinner, and occasionally we play hooky just to have their mid-day lunch. It doesn't hurt that we live nearby, but it's the friendliness of the servers and the quality of the food that keeps......

Pssst. Hate Mexicans? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not here, Buddy. Come inside. We're looking for a few patiriots like yourself to help man the wall in Washington state. No, no, see, Washington is on the northern border. With Canada. See, if we do a vigil up here it makes it seem like we don't hate the Mexicans. We'll be like equal opportunity haters, get it? No, we don't hate the Canadians we hate the Mexicanos, but-......

Seattlest's bus ride to work lasts about twelve minutes. That's just long enough for us to find a seat, sit in it, open our bag, take out our laptop and boot it up, Start, Shutdown, Yes we would like the computer to shut down, put it away and get off the bus. Ah, another productive commute! You didn't notice it, but during the minute our computer was on it attempted and failed to find any......