Our condolences to Erik Martin's loved ones, we fondly remember the day Electron Boy saved Seattle from Dr. Dark's evil machinations. more ›

Saucy Sisters at the Space Needle, PETA activists doing what they do (being offensive and not helping animals, really), people still being out of work and the Seattle Times' unfortunate and slightly sexist choice of a headline. Read up! more ›

Rob McKenna has a reputation for moderation in some quarters, but does he deserve it? Can a centrist still run for statewide office as a Republican? more ›

• My Ballard and Phinney Wood shared a post on the annual Dead Baby Bike Race. With the recent fear-mongering regarding bicyclists in the local media--the bike race could likely have not come at a worse time. We're sure already freaked out Subaru drivers, aren't thrilled to think of the idea of a crudely named (see: hilarious) bike race that celebrates "Mutant Bike Culture."
• Rejoice Francophiles and hipsters not allergic to the sun! Capitol Hill Seattle reports that Cafe Presse has opened a deck to accommodate outside seating. Few things are more French than enjoying a delicious and refined meal at a neighborhood sidewalk cafe, so we're thrilled to have a chance to mimic the experience at our neighborhood pseudo-Parisian cafe.
• The Central District News breathed a sigh of relief and celebrated that this year's Umoja parade was bigger and better than ever.

Today there is an extra skip in our step, and song in our whistle. All across Arizona pitchers and catchers are reporting to work, which means Spring Training is underway. more ›

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Today SIFF hosts the Seattle opening of the documentary The Rape of Europa, about the efforts to save art stolen and/or desecrated by the Nazis in the runup to and during WWII. The Stranger loves it. The Seattle Times loves it. By all accounts, Seattlest shouldn't be as excited by this movie as we are, but we find something poetic about the preservation of culture in the face of war. For now we'll leave you with the trailer, which should convince you that learning about this little-known part of our collective history is worth both your time and money. more ›

Are you guys watching this race? Incredible! Super Tuesday has officially come and gone, delegates divided, $250 million in campaign money spent, and still no Democratic frontrunner in sight. We at Seattlest are beside ourselves and while we may never understand the logic behind superdelegates we do know this: Washington is going to have a big say in how this race is decided. This Saturday, Washingtonians will caucus with 80 Democratic delegates up for grabs in the biggest race in the country this weekend. The Seattle Times actually referred to us this morning as "The Next Big Prize." So you want to make your vote actually count? Well, friends, then you must caucus! And your friendly Seattlesters are here to make the process as painless as possible. more ›

Seattle Police have another guy in custody in regards to the killing of Shannon Harps, and this time it seems like it's actually the guy who did it. The Seattle Times says that his DNA matches that found at the scene. Perhaps the scariest detail is that it seems like the two were complete strangers. "They had no previous contact to our knowledge," said Deputy Chief Clark Kimerer. more ›

The Seattle Times' Jim Brunner points out a head-exploding irony in the Sonics' legal case to escape their Key Arena lease. more ›

We're not actually gloating over WaMu's travails -- there are too many lives involved likely to be disrupted. But there's no denying the majesty with which its home loan mortgage unit steered into the subprime iceberg. The Seattle Times headline reads: "WaMu posts first quarterly loss in a decade," thanks to a $1.78 billion writedown by the home loaners. more ›

The Seattle Times breaks the story of just how diseased college sports fans have become. The newspaper got about 1,000 emails that Husky fans sent to University of Washington president Mark Emmert, athletic director Todd Turner, and coach Ty Willingham through a public records request. more ›

The snow started to fall in earnest around 4 o'clock yesterday, so we cut the family visit short and headed back up toward Seattle -- it was slow going but eventually the snow changed to sleet and then to rain. Up around Federal Way, traffic came to a halt, though the road was clear. We searched on "I-5 traffic" from our phone, and right away the KOMO story on the shooting came up. We were still about a mile south of the South 320th Street exit. We inched forward and passed the scene, the KIRO mobile crew's antenna towering above it all. This was where a 27-year-old man jumped out of a family vehicle on I-5, began running around hitting cars with his belt, mooning them, trying to get inside, lying in traffic. When a state trooper arrived, the man rushed at the trooper, choked him, and -- not responding to a Taser -- was shot. more ›

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. more ›

When have you gotten your money back on a ferry purchase? After 20 years? 40? 60? How about 80? Washington State Ferries still had plans to fix at least three 80-year-old ferries before the magnitude of their decay was uncovered. Now, because WSF never imagined the day would come when the ferries would have to be replaced, it'll be a year or more before new ferries can be built and car-ferry service returned. Our favorite... more ›

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All mass transit is not created equal; here in Seattle, a city with buses and, well, nothing else, unless you're specifically talking with someone about monorail or lightrail or streetcars (you know, mass transit), when you're talking about supporting mass transit, you're talking about supporting buses. more ›

The Seattle Times has a quickie little snippet about some ski resort ownership swapping, namely that Boyne USA has bought the Summit at Snoqualmie from Booth Creek. At first we were a little concerned, namely because Booth Creek has a great track record from a customer service perspective, especially when they extended our season's pass for free after the disastrous winter of 05-06. But after a little more research, we're very excited because this is excellent news for mountain bikers. more ›

This morning, reported on inaccuracies in its article from a week age today on elements of the sting operation, including the disputed claim that a gun made it into Tommy's on the Ave after a bouncer was offered a $100 bribe. Jush Feit over at the Slog tore them a new one for getting info wrong again, particularly on the point about violence. more ›

To mark Stevie Wonder’s first tour in a decade and his stop at the Chateau Ste Michelle Winery down the road in Woodland, our compadres over at The Seattle Times invited its readers take their "Stevie Wonder Quiz" in their Monday edition. Having fond memories of one Stevland Hardaway Judkins as this funky white blog’s first introduction to Motown, funk and the ever –ambiguous “R&B”, Seattlest curiously accepted The Times’ challenge to find out just how well we know Stevie. more ›

The cold wind of actual necessity is blowing up Seattle's skirt. Much like our childhood erector-set constructions, the Viaduct has a certain amount of "give" in it (though hopefully not due to the same reason: our dislike of tightening every single nut on things we were just going to take apart anyway), but the news last week that it has sunk 5 inches at its saggiest point has bells going off because 6 inches is the magic number when it's an emergency. Aaooogah! more ›

There was a lot of talk on the blogs last week about newly-released census data that highlighted the 23% of Washington residents that get to work by means other than riding in a car alone. Seattle is in the top ten US cities in walking to work, taking the bus to work and biking to work (although not in carpooling) all of which are impressive and encouraging. There is an element of spin to all that fantastic news, of course, and the fact remains that 77% of us still drive to work alone. more ›

, a quiet storm has been brewing. On June 6, Ostrom followed up with a report on the overwhelming number of requests for "opt-out" bracelets researchers had received following her story (the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium, the parent organization running the study through the UW and Harborview, provides the bracelets free to people requesting them). more ›

We knew Bremerton residents were the step-chilins of the Washington State Ferry System, but now that wireless access for the 55-minute run has been delayed again we're starting to suspect a conspiracy. Bainbridge has been happily browsing away on their 30-minute jog since like the mid-nineties or something, but can Bremerton catch any of that wifi gold? Hell no. At least not until July at the earliest. Of course, the Rich Passage is the official culprit according to Parsons which has the contract to provide wireless internet to Washington ferries. more ›

, which melodramatized the all too real phenomenon of American and European drug companies finding it more expedient (if more ethically questionable) to do research on poorly educated and ill informed Third World subjects. Turns out, Hollywood could just as well have set their cameras on good old Seattle. more ›

SonicsCentral pointed us to this story from the Daily Oklahoman, where Clay Bennett is as explicit as ever about his desire to move the Sonics:

"For now, without a building solution, it's our intent to play in Seattle and apply for relocation immediately after the (Oct. 31) deadline."

The Seattle Times tries to put a happy face on the news that the Seattle Symphony is projecting an accumulated $5.5 million deficit by pointing out that ticket sales are up. But the troubling fact remains that over the past three years the deficit has grown from $1 million, to $3.2 million, to $5.5 million. For an annual budget of around $21 million, a deficit of $5.5 million is remarkable. more ›

Seattle will continue to have two daily newspapers, at least for the immediate future. It sounds like both papers were unwilling to leave things entirely in the hands of the arbitrator who was set to deliver a binding verdict on the dispute: They settled with each other and the terms include the Times buying the P-I out of JOA stipulation that the smaller paper would continue to receive revenue in the event that that paper ceased publishing. more ›

This week the Washington State Senate is deciding whether to make Washington to the first state in the nation to ban the fire retardant deca-BDE [ESHB 1024]. (The House, where Jamie Pedersen was a sponsor, passed the bill this February.) more ›

That's the reason we're using Speakeasy right now to upload this post -- because Qwest, while in fact servicing the building we work in, does not realize that it services the building we work in. We tried to convince Qwest salespeople that they do, but they refused to believe it and transferred us to an engineer who could explain why they didn't. Researching, the Qwest engineer found out they did and offered to set us up, but then their phone system dropped our call and since we'd been transferred there, we had no way to get back. Enter Speakeasy. more ›