Results tagged “utah”

Sounders FC hosts Real Salt Lake Saturday night at Qwest Field. We thought you might want to know a little about the team our local 11 (?) will be facing.

The main event last night was billed as "An Evening with Steven Soderbergh," but everyone knew he'd be showing his new film, The Girlfriend Experience. Steven himself commented on this presumed fact, saying that he didn't know how these rumors got started...and then he showed the new movie. Unlike Che, Girlfriend Experience (or at least the work-in-progress version we saw) is only about eighty minutes long, and made for a little under $2M in just over two weeks last October. Like Bubble, it's another one of Soderbergh's digital films, and it's his most non-linear story-telling since The Limey.

January means one thing, and that's Sundance. This is actually our fourth year in attendance, and this time around, the festival is extra-super-dee-duper green. Which means Brita is handing out reusable (and BPA-free) Nalgene bottles, and you can't find a plastic bag to save your life. Seems that the economy is even taking its toll on Hollywood; compared to previous years, there's not as much swag, fewer press and industry folks are around, and audience figures are, we've been told, about 60 percent of normal. Well, we're still here, and so far we've seen four films.

This legendary folksinger needs your help:

We're not really nutty about most of the American Idol contestants this year. We're pretty convinced cutiepie David Archuleta will win the whole thing, but he's not from here, so who cares? That kid is so incredible, we wonder what's in the water in his small Utah town. Paula wants to hang him from her rearview mirror, and we don't blame her.

Speculation abounded when Charles posted about a recent study showing what would happen to Seattle if a 9.0 quake hit us. The Space Needle was called out as an icon that wouldn't go down. Seattlest's dad is the resident earthquake-and-volcanoes disaster geologist in the family, so we asked for the truth. We were told to consult the disaster flick 10.5, a made for TV turd movie starring Kim Delany (you know, from CSI: Miami, or Law and Order, or, gasp, the OC!). It opens with an Extreme! urban mountain biker evading the quake (because you know, earthquakes chase people--but he was wearing a helmet, safety first!), and ultimately the Needle. Dad uses this clip as a joking intro to a University of Utah disaster course, where the students model disasters like a 9.0 quake hitting Seattle, or a sudden lahar wiping out Orting (where our in-laws live, har). Check it out for yourself:

We here at Seattlest really wanted to go out and caucus on Saturday, however, HBO is showing Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. So we made some calls, and the DNC gave us permission to hold a special caucus today. They even threw in a couple delegates that Utah wasn’t going to use:

The ability to endure month after month of days like today is an unappreciated phenomenon unique to this corner of America.

Sometimes a good ski movie can console you during an off year, but we're already having a record-breaking snow season (ok, it's no 1998, but still, the quality and volume of the snow we've been getting this year is reminiscent of our days growing up in Utah for what that's worth). So maybe you don't need a powder porn flick to fuel your stoke, but we're thinking that Steep (showing in a limited run at the Varsity) will be worth a viewing regardless. (It's a limited run, and we think tomorrow night is the last night, but we can't tell from the website or their phone recording, so you might want to hustle out and see it tonight.)

Boom! Governor Gregoire comes right out of the gate at the new legislative session with a new bill laying "the groundwork for concrete limits on greenhouse gas emissions beginning in 2012." And, in just four short (or long, depending on how you look at it) years, the bill "would give the state Department of Ecology the authority to regulate those emissions," reports the P-I.

When last we checked in with Texas A&M, their fans were sending us insane emails after we wrote about that whole Seahawks/12th man dispute. (Texas A&M has a 12th man tradition too, they said the Hawks were infringing on it). Our favorite such email concluded thusly: "Keep your latte sippin, tree huggin, PETA lovin, flannel shirt, leg humping asses off our traditions." It's funny because it's true. Honestly, what is it with our asses here...

In 2004, Ken Jennings redefined success on Jeopardy!, banking over $2,500,000 as he won 74 games. Those of us who get paid in bar credit know it's hard to make a living through trivia, but Jennings has done it. He turned his obligatory cash-in-on-your-15-minutes book, Brainiac, into something much better and broader, an examination of trivia history and culture.

A friend just emailed Seattlest, gushing with glee that our season's passes to the Summit (Alpental, really) grant us 5 free days of skiing at Crystal Mountain. We'd already written about how the ownership of the Summit by Boyne Mountain (who also owns Crystal Mt.) might be a good thing for mountain bikers. So it sounded like it was already working out for those of us that go mostly to Alpental (due to sheer proximity, especially for occasional drinking night skiing forays) yet like to make the trek to Crystal or Baker occasionally.

Overheard walking away from Husky Stadium: "That Trenton Tuiasosopo...I wonder if he's related to Marques Tuiasosopo?"

We're not one of those people who hate "chemicals." Mmm, Diet Dr Pepper.

Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote entirely, but it was something to the effect of characterizing "world music" as "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, a peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he become a "world musician," performing traditional Balkans music in restaurants for disinterested diners under the name Kultur Shock. While he admitted the original incarnation of Kultur Shock could have done well, it's easy to see why he rebelled against the entire world-music cachet by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys."

We’ve been on a mountain bike clinic road trip smörgåsbord, starting in Bellingham a few weeks ago and then cruising through Hood River and ending up this past weekend near our hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah. This past weekend we coached a camp up in Park City, where it was a breezy 92 degrees for our afternoon rides—a temperature that is ridiculous in its own right yet still a respite from the record-setting spree of triple-digit temps currently being recorded down in the valley. This is not normal. Utah is generally populated by people who say they like the heat, in large part because it’s not too hot. That was our mantra when we grew up here: "It’s not like Arizona hot." Except now it is Arizona hot here.

We got these "Complimentary VIP" tickets in the mail about a million years ago advertising some "wealth creation workshops" at various hotels around Seattle. We finally got around to calling them to see what the hell this was about and the phone answerer acted completely sketchy. We asked where the Income Strategies Institute is located and she said, "I can't answer that. All I can tell you is: somewhere in Utah."

Wonder why we need to spend $100 million to renovate Garfield High? Because Garfield gives the world things like this:

Trail Blazers guard Brandon Roy was chosen as the NBA's Rookie of the Year on Wednesday after leading all rookies with averages of 16.8 points, 4.0 assists and 35.4 minutes in 57 games.

Continue reading "Brandon is ROY"

Really the only thing worth remembering from last night's game was an amazing swing by Ichiro. In the 4th inning, Harden threw him a nasty splitter that fooled him. But he changed his swing mid-stroke, adjusted his bat downward, and reached the ball about a foot off the ground. And he didn't just make contact, which would've been an amazing feat in itself--he lined the ball into centerfield.

While Seattlest Jack was at Crystal, we made a run for the northern border, with promises of a huge dump of snow up at Whistler. We were buzzing as we drove up the Sea-to-Sky from Vancouver, as there was snow on the ground starting in North Van. It was the most snow we've ever seen in that area, the entire drive up from Squamish was a powdered-sugar-covered winter wonderland.

Sometimes you earn a win, and sometimes the other team gives you one. Here are the all-time screw-ups by opponents that helped Seattle teams win big games.

We returned to the homeland over the holidays. Lugged skis and snowboards to the land of 3.2 beer, special garments, and the "Greatest Snow on Earth" only to find they had half the snow base compared to what we have here. Everything seemed backwards.

The hometown Portland Trailblazers make a special appearance in Seattle tonight, taking on the Oklahoma City Sonics. It's the season opener for both teams.

Remember the monoski? The snow skate? Exactly. It is with great reservation that Seattlest takes a peek at the SMX, a mountain bike/ski hybrid thingamajigy. It feints at combining our two favorite sports, and yet we remain skeptical--is this the Segway of snowboarding?

Fresh off our unfortunate dining experience at Chinoise in food-bland Queen Anne, Seattlest is lamenting the lack of good dim sum in our Chinatown-ed town. Why are all of our dumplings and buns and rolls and cakes so soggy and stale and limp and lame?

Yeah, we know you just spent all weekend at Bumbershoot. Is the wee little baby tired? Can't handle any more music? Ah, look at that poodum...

Last week we were watching the progress of local adventure racing team, DART-NUUN, at the 2006 Primal Quest in southern Utah. We checked back in on Saturday and oh dear, team member Ryan VanGorder apparently collapsed from heat stroke and had to be airlifted to a hospital in Salt Lake City. Not good, as heat stroke in those conditions has a high fatality rate.

No, not those crazy people. Adventure racing uber-event Primal Quest is underway outside Moab, Utah. Anyone familiar with the terrain down there is probably wincing at this point, because that part of the world is just downright miserable at this time of year, especially for us NW types. Temps are supposed to get into the triple digits as of tomorrow, and there's a few local teams slogging through the harsh desert for a minimum of at least 5 days.

Governor Gregoire, apparently unaware that her job could be taken from her in two and a half years, is leaving it up the state's National Guardsmen whether they want to patrol the US-Mexico border. President Bush is sending 6,000 National Guard members to the Southern border to end the problem of people entering the country illegally.