SEE SEE ME RIVER: If you can get yourself to walk beneath the frightening-toothed clown, nothing should stop you from checking out See Me River at The Funhouse tonight. Led by former Das Llamas front man Kerry Zettel, See Me River offers an audial version of American Gothic, crafting haunting acoustic songs that at once drone and soar. 9:30 p.m. // The Funhouse with Dead Western and Blood Red Dancers // $6 IN RESIDENCE:The Richard......

There are plenty of reasons not to hire an escort you spot in a photo in the back pages of The Seattle Weekly or The Stranger. For one, prostitution (yeah, we know, it's for the "company") is still illegal. For two, STDs STDs STDs! And lastly, as an unlucky 80-something-year-old man learned, they might just steal your money without performing for you. Seattle 911 says a man in his early 80s showed up at the......

Safeco_1999 by Seattlest Flickr Photographer sonoazure. To us, a stadium. To Microsoft, a conference room. Rainier Valley Post warns: beware the Microsofties on I-90 today! The Microsoft annual meeting will be 11 a.m.-2 p.m. at Safeco Field today, and I-90 is sure to be a clusterfuck.Flu season is just around the corner and the B-Town Blog has a comprehensive list of south Sound sites for flu shots.Lights & Sirens reports on the oldest homicide suspect......

"Fire on Hinkley Block, 1908," courtesy of Seattle Municipal Archives Seattlest Abbey is still recovering from a waterlogged Radiohead show, so we apologize for your morning news delay. We're going to let her sleep in, even if we're still jealous we didn't get to go. Happy morning news! ~Your Editor Remember that SNL where they made fun of celebrity Jeopardy, and they had someone doing Sean Connery. He kept calling on the category "Swords for......

Yes, all good things must come to an end, but that doesn't mean we have to be happy when they do. So while we're glad to see she's in good spirits about it, we were crushed to hear that The Stranger decided to cut Ellen Forney's Lustlab Ad of the Week cartoon. Obviously, we were big fans. (And does this mean that the July 31 cartoon was her last? There's a trivia question in the......

The Slog decided to do their version of "Are You Smarter Than the Standardized Test You Support?" with State School Superintendent Terry Bergeson, and she failed. Bergeson was given three sample questions from Port Angeles WASL tests. One from each WASL group tests 3rd, 7th, and 10th graders. The Superintendent only answered two of the three questions, and she answered them both wrong. Realizing she was busted, Bergeson signed the test with a frowny-face...how very......

Seattlest and The Stranger have had disagreements of opinion concerning the quality or fucking lack of quality at certain Seattle taco trucks. In this week's print Stranger, though, there is a statement of fact regarding the highly-hyped tamales at the Rancho Bravo truck in Wallingford that cannot be disputed, and should be highlighted: They never have tamales at Rancho Bravo. Seattlest has taken to ordering them defensively, hopefully, and as an add-on but never......

The Stranger's indefatigable Jonah Spangenthal-Lee gets a wonderful quote from the driver of the Subaru who ran into some (and over one) bicyclists in last Friday night's Critical Mass confrontation on Aloha on Capitol Hill: “I sympathize with [cyclists'] cause. I ride bikes too. I’m a liberal hippie democrat” [...] “I’m gay, the person with me was a lesbian and we were a attacked by eco-terrorists. It’s the most Seattle thing that could have happened."......

Last night, as we were making some Niman Ranch sausage, some Critical Mass bicyclists were almost turned into sausage in the street outside. (We mention the kind of sausage because had it been cut-rate, we might have poked our heads out to take a look, but it wasn't and we were hungry.) At around 7:00 p.m., about 100 Critical Mass bikers were riding down Aloha on Capitol Hill, blocking traffic as usual. One driver didn't......

In his Morning News post, The Stranger's managing editor Bradley Steinbacher lets slip near the end that after fourteen years, his end his near. No future plans, no reasons why. This continues a trend (two makes a trend!) of gnomic departures that began with news editor Josh Feit's abrupt "departure" (made somewhat less abrupt by his continued posting on Slog) earlier this summer. So we provide you instead with the fond memories elicited by Steinbacher's......

Dear Universe, Our month of May is ruined. Carly Smithson was voted off American Idol—which, granted, actually happened in April, but matters now because the finals are in May and she should've at least made the bottom three. Then, last night, Hillary Clinton got canned in North Carolina and barely eked out of Indiana with a win, suffocating every last hopeful breath that our next president would be a strong, confident woman with a wide......

As mentioned on Slog yesterday, Seattle Public Utilities (SPU) has recommended that the City of Seattle remove the self-cleaning public toilets located in and around downtown Seattle. They argue that the public toilets are being misused and abused by drug dealers, drug users, and quickie acts of prostitution, and thus, should be removed. Our question for the City and for SPU is this: What the fuck did you think they were going to be used......

You haven't heard much from us about Capitol Hill's new "gastropub" Quinn's (owned by Scott and Heather Staples, who also own Restaurant Zoe). It's not their fault--it's just like if you're the fourth Californian to move to Ballard in a month, people look at you funny. (We're on a Ballard kick today.) When it opened, we wandered over to 10th and Pike and glanced at the menu plastered with a raft of hip foodie terms,......

Seattlest's been hearing a lot about The Physics lately, and we love their 2007 release, FutureTalk. What goes on behind the scenes? We decided to just ask, already. You were named as 2008 Young Ones by The Stranger....were you expecting that? What does 2008 look like for The Physics from your perspective? We weren't expecting to be named as one of the Young Ones. It's a very good look and we're looking forward to......

In short, no. (Duh.) But, Paste magazine ran an article recently suggesting that, perhaps, it's on its way out. We thought the article made a lot of valid and interesting points, like this one: “Mayor [Greg] Nickels and other city leaders don’t have a clue about the impact of their policies on this community,” says Tim Hatley, lobbyist for the Seattle Nightlife & Music Association. “If you’re Dan [Cowan, owner of Seattle fixture the......

Saigon descended upon Neumos Wednesday night in true East Coast style, backed by three hype-men, two photographers, one DJ, and for awhile two dancing "homegirls". (Yes, his shirt did come off for a brief moment, and we did get to see those famous bulging arm muscles.) A sparse but expectant crowd watched as the New York rapper and his posse blew through an aggressive set that included the extra-tight club favorite "C'mon Baby" dropped......

Is live theater still relevant in a society where computer users can create high-quality video and distribute it almost instantly via the web? That's been the subject of an ongoing, rancorous debate between two Seattlest contributors, Jeremy and Charles, both former theater artists. Jeremy maintains the theater can yet be a powerful art form -- Charles feels it's a dying, irrelevant medium (most likely wounded by its own hand). To stir them up appropriately, the......

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......

We've been Ellen Forney fans since we read "I Was Seven in '75" -- back when it ran in The Rocket. Her latest project is Lust, a collection of the "Lustlab Ad of the Week" cartoons she does for The Stranger, published this month by Fantagraphics. We interviewed Forney about the cartoon at Georgetown's All City Coffee, just down the block from the Fantagraphics store where there will be a book launch party tomorrow night.......

This Seattlest will be heading to a private party tonight, where we will celebrate among our favorite people the fact that Super Tuesday is FINALLY here. But, if you're looking for somewhere more out-on-the-town to get your drink on and watch the returns trickle in, and pancakes aren't your bag, here's the guide for you. Most of these events start at 5pm, and they're all free. Go America! The Paragon is hosting an indie......

Franklin vs. Garfield is one of the Seattle sports events that you just shouldn't miss. Here's what we wrote about it for The Stranger in September:True local hoops fans don't miss this game between two perennial inner-city basketball powerhouses, even at the cost of connubial tranquility. The 2005 game at Garfield fell on Valentine's Day, but happily married Husky basketball coach Lorenzo Romar was there anyway. A win in this game means neighborhood bragging rights......

Conventional wisdom says these days ain't happy ones for pulp-and-print publications. Circulation's down. Ad revenues are down. Everyone wants to read online. So nearly every newspaper, magazine and television news program has a host of blogs these days, to compete with the millions of self-described experts, autodidacts, conspiracy theorists and Chuck Norris-aficionados who propagate the blogosphere with their own brand of citizen journalism (read: poor spelling and poorer grammar). Indeed, it's hard to get noticed......

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, theoretical mass transit), when you're talking about supporting mass transit, you're talking about supporting buses. And buses suck. Last week, Erica C. Barnett had a column in The Stranger that spoke to our experience riding the bus to and from work daily: It's......

Why is it important to vote? Let Dan Quayle explain: “Votes are like trees, if you are trying to build a forest. If you have more trees than you have forests, then at that point the pollsters will probably say you will win.” Um, wait, what? My God, Dan Quayle is a nitwit. Yet he was elected to the Vice-Presidency--and was just one George H.W. Bush infarction away from leading the free world--because thousands of......

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......

Outfit called Not For Tourists has just published a guide to Seattle. It's a handsome book, looks just like Moleskine journal, complete with oilcloth cover, fat elastic closure, gorgeous paper. The Seattle version is tenth in a series, cobbled together by a design staff in faraway Noo Yawk with input by a locally based "city editor" named Fred Beldin, who contributes occasional music reviews to The Stranger. NFT Seattle starts out with a grid of......

The Stranger has endorsed a No vote on the RTID Proposition 1 (along with the Seattle Times, but thankfully with more logic and, er, research). Their reasoning? "Rather than letting compromised politicians tell us what's possible, the people should tell the leaders what's needed: more light rail without massive roads expansion." So what is the proper course of action for Congress regarding the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, or ENDA, bill? The bill would ban employment discrimination......

This weekend, Seattlest scored an email interview with Larry Mizell Jr, aka Gatsby of Cancer Rising, aka Man About Town (our term, not his). Readers: read on! Mr. Mizell, you write for The Stranger and keep an active music blog, in addition to being a local hiphop artist. What's it like to be an artist AND an observer of the Seattle hiphop scene? What trends are you seeing in local hiphop? It's been fantastic writing......

Well, shit. This weekend has been kind of a bust for shows Seattlest was supposed to see. Friday night, we were supposed to go see Hillstomp at Conor Byrne. We thought we had seen them, and we thought they rocked our socks. Apparently, we saw Miss Mamie Lavona the Exotic Mulatta and Her White Boy Band. Last night, we drove on over to West Seattle to the Skylark to check out Mishka Shubaly. This one......

At the moment, Seattlest is an Enemy of Slog, due in part to this critical post on Seattle's aging weeklies. (In retrospect, we should not have implied that Dan Savage was getting older. He's evergreen, like many of our trees.) But we're not bitter -- it's an honor just to be listed! -- but puzzled by the news that Dan's getting kicked upstairs and arts editor Christopher Frizzelle is now Editor di tutti. There's so......