Tibetan Hayagriva mask with Padmasambhava mask in background by Wonderlane more ›

FULL PUPPET NUDITY: You might have noticed that big banner on the side of the Paramount advertising puppet cleavage Avenue Q. Well, tonight is opening night, so if you haven't gotten your tickets for this ever-so-brief run of the Tony Award-winning show, now's your time. Seattlest will be there tonight for the kick-off, but then it's up to you to get out and see those puppets sing and swear all over the place. more ›

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We have a few friends helping out this weekend for the Dalai Lama's visit. They are kind and giving people, and we appreciate their work. And yet, all we can think about is this: more ›

Just Monday we were writing about how much we love farce, and here today, San Francisco plays host to a farce of global scale as the Olympic torch--a flash-point for anti-China rallies--arrives in the Bay city. (Follow all the news at SFist.) Regardless of what you think of the hosts of this year's Summer Olympic games, your position on Tibet or Uighur ethnic autonomy, or whether Western nations should symbolically protest Chinese crackdowns by skipping the opening ceremonies, we're sure everyone agrees with us when we ask: who the hell thought to send the torch through ? The city of a million different protesting special interest groups, right next to UC Berkeley, home of thousands of radical-chic college students. Yup. That was going to go well. more ›

Chinese Official: The world’s media is here, and they are going to be looking around. I need you to make sure that these Tibetan monks are locked up and don’t disrupt anything. more ›

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. more ›

Whoa, whoa, whoa there, Spencer Kim. We just caught up with Salon's reaction to James Kim's father's finger point-a-thon in the Washington Post. James Kim is, of course, the San Francisco technology journalist who died in the mountains of Oregon after getting stranded there with his family, and Spencer Kim's article blames the credit card and cell phone companies who put a lot of red tape in front of the transaction and call records of the lost family and he blames the search and rescue people who tried and failed to find his son in time to save him. It's tragic. James Kim's trek through the mountainous terrain in an attempt to save his family after they had been stranded for over a week was heroic. But blame put on Oregon forestry and search and rescue is misplaced. more ›

>>>Hugo House, 7:30pm. Screenwriters Salon: Geoff Miller and Mark Handley invite you to bring your questions about format, technique, structure, dialogue, writing characters, and how to use your catering gig to hand your script to celebs. $5 general/$2 students. Free to members. more ›

Since there's a pretty heavy overlap between the set of people who read this site and the set of people who listen to KUOW, we're going to guess that most of you already heard of Conservatize Me by KUOW's John Moe, despite our inexcusable failure to review this entertaining, thought-provoking book. For those who haven't, profuse apologies. more ›

We saw Maria Coryell-Martin's haunting, ghostly paintings in the lobby at Benyaroya Hall after Elizabeth Kolbert's talk this week, and were instantly drawn to a collection of small watercolor landscapes entitled "Greenland Suite." We were struck by how reminiscent her work was of abstract desert landscapes, despite all the ice and snow, and as we were scribbling down the artist's name and scheming to get a few prints for Xmas presents, she popped up next to our shoulder. We chatted about how Greenland is really just an immense, cold desert and Maria explained what "expeditionary art" is. The short version: this woman has watched a lot of ice melt. more ›

A while ago we brought up Tuning the Air...um, was it April? Last night, we finally made it out to Ballard to check out the circular guitar ensemble and were not disappointed. more ›

The Hu stalking was pretty straightforward yesterday: airport, downtown, Redmond, Medina, roughly. You could have followed the helicopters around to get a good idea of the Chinese president's movements, or the protests were also a good indicator. Notable signage we saw around the CBD included Falun Dafa and the old standby: Free Tibet, which we love to see. It's just comforting to know that despite all the trendy new reasons to be pissed off at China there are still diehards out there willing to dust off the Free Tibet signs they drew up in the 90s. You go, protesters. Free Tibet. more ›