...and nobody escapes, does anyone really care? "Prison Bus, Getting Directions" courtesy of Flickr Contributor, hansntareen If this had happened in Hollywood rather than North Bend, we imagine the details would have read a little differently. Yesterday morning a bus carrying 39 high-risk inmates broke down in a wooded area on I-90 near North Bend. The inmates were all being transferred to the Washington State Pentitentiary in Walla Walla. Before crossing the pass, the bus......

Like anybody else, we appreciate the sentiment of the Presidents' Day long weekend--well, for those of us who have that day off or are able to take it. It provided us the perfect opportunity to temporarily ex-patriate ourselves and pump money into Canada's economy. That's what it's all aboot, anyway. This so-named Presidents' Day has become just a reason for the commercial sector to entice us with Fabulous Savings. Nobody thinks about Washington or......

In 1987, the British illustrator Martin Handford creates a cartoon character named Wally for a series of children's books. Renamed Waldo for the American edition, he becomes an icon of pop culture. Meantime, Marie-Eve Gilla moves from graduate school in Burgundy to the Pacific Northwest, becoming the first classically trained French winemaker in the Washington, working at Covey Run and Gordon Brothers before being recruited as general manager for the new Forgeron Cellars in Walla......

POLEMIC: Understated, respectful, sober -- these are words that describe someone else besides Christopher Hitchens, who we suspect would beat you senseless with his shoe if it meant that he could own "iconoclastic." Here's the pro-Iraq War Hitch on Michael Moore: "Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of 'dissenting' bravery." Here's......

Dishin’ doesn’t typically do fast food, but we did and we offer you a fast review. A recent road trip to Oregon meant a perfect opportunity to check out the much-heralded Burgerville. We’d been hearing good things about their vegetarian cows, Walla Walla onion rings, and fresh, seasonal shakes. It’s even lauded by Eric Schlosser as the only place he can recommend in our nation of fast food (see the Nightline Online video). It was......

Destination marketing: it's Patrick McFarlan's specialty. Happens that he's employed by Willows Lodge in Woodinville; that doesn't stop him from marketing Washington's distant vineyards. As president of the Woodinville Chamber of Commerce last year, he spearheaded an event called the Washington Wine Highway, held again this past weekend on the lawn at Chateau Ste. Michelle. Food, drink, and roadsigns that let you pretend you were in Yakima or Walla Walla without having to spend hours......

Yep, sonny, there was a time, less than 25 years ago (don't giggle!), that you could write a whole guidebook to Washington wine and list only 37 wineries. Seattlest should know, we typed every word of the fucking thing. Ah, just look how young we were in 1983:     • Page 1: "wine touring ... a new concept"     • Page 5: "Are all these new wineries going to make it?" As it......

We wandered the campus of Walla Walla's Whitman College campus, our alma mater, this weekend. We visited old professors, found our old dorm room, and then applied some blackface and attended a campus party, where other guests treated us like an outcast. It turns out that following recent events, that sort of behavior is now frowned upon. The entire student of body didn't go to class last Thursday, instead all students and faculty without access......

Seattlest is a bit of a wino. We can't help it, we love the red stuff. Living in Seattle has only fed our addiction, considering Washington State is the second-biggest producer of wine in the country (after California, of course). So recently, we decided to head east to see where that wine comes from, besides a brown paper bag. Walla Walla ho! We don't know what MapQuest and Google Maps were talking about, but......

Those design-obsessed types over at Coudal Partners have just recently posted Field Tested Books, an online compendium of book reviews by lots of bookish (and blogish) people. Not just your ordinary reviews, these focus on books read in specific places and the impact the locale had on the reader's experience (hence, Coudal likes to refer to them as "experience reviews" instead). Local boy done good, John Moe, has his Raymond Carver college moment in Walla......

Other countries have them, official "Route des Vins" complete with signposts. Why not here? Indeed. Imagine a road actually called the Washington Wine Highway linking the state's major wine-growing regions, with signs to tell you what wine was all about: it would begin in Puget Sound, meander a bit in Woodinville, cross Snoqualmie Pass and take in the entire Yakima Valley. Or it could cross Stampede Pass and noodle around Lake Chelan, follow the......

Congressman Jim McDermott will be playing all the hits, sending out your long distance dedications, and generally getting the Led out all week. Tired of trying to make-out with Osama, Saddam, and the rest of those Al-Qaeda villains, Baghdad Jim will be hosting Dave Ross' weekly KIRO radio show while Ross is on vacation. One question you may want to ask McDermott, besides what exactly do you do for Seattle, is what should be done......

Someone called Chemical Consortium Holdings, Inc. made an interesting announcement today. With a scary name like that you'd expect them to issue a press release saying that they absolutely refute all charges brought against them by the EPA, however in this case they have something positive to say. Today they announced that they're building a Biodiesel plant in Walla Walla that will be capable of producing 60 million gallons of fuel a year. Yay......

-Seattlest's own Seth Kolloen will be appearing on John Moe's "The Power of Voice" radio show tonight at 8. Moe will be discussing the question "Do sports matter?" with a panel and Seth will counter with "Does anything else?" 94.9 on your FM dial. -Washington's GOP sent out a mailer with a picture of what appears to be some random dude on it with the dire message that this violent sex offender may live in......

As we may have mentioned before, we love us some wine. While our tastes are biased against the lighter stuff (i.e., to paraphrase Kanye: Seattlest doesn't care about white wines), we loooooooove reds. We like them deep, dark, meaty and full-bodied with a smooth finish. All the better if they're stored in American oak barrels, which can give wine a nice nutty hint of baking spices. With that in mind, we recently went "all the......