This troublemaker eleven-year-old is quickly becoming a legend. In 2007, Semaj Booker stole a car and drove it on the highway until the engine blew. Then, he snuck past security onto two flights to get his runaway self from SeaTac to Texas. Booker tried the plane trick again just last month, and now he's back in court for attempted burglary. What is going on here, exactly? Someone needs to find the back story on......

"Jump Off 15th," courtesy of Seattlest Flickr user JeanineAnderson Seattlest, as you know, has long been an advocate of playing hooky on Friday. Today, if you're looking for an excuse to cut out early, just tell your boss you can't bear to sit in the office any longer on the Happiest Day of the Year. How did "they" figure out that today is the happiest? A simple math formula, of course: "According to the......

Slow! by smohundro, another fun image found in our wonderful Seattlest Flickr Pool.......

"Play smart," came the exhortation from Blanchet parents, as their children began to fritter away a lead that had been 13 points with three minutes left. But let's face it, people--asking high school basketball players to "play smart" is like asking high school musicians to "maintain your vibrato" or high school cheerleaders to "save it for marriage." So, on our Metro League Tuesday (TM), through a series of ill-advised drives, poor passes, bad fouls and,......

Bellevue is entertaining its crazed shoppers and downtown urbanites with daily holiday drum lines, snowflake lights and snow (yes, fake snow). We have seen it with our own eyes, and it is as if you chasséd on stage of a live performance of the Nutcracker. Snowflake Lane is a Bellevue tradition and is going on now until December 24, beginning at 7 p.m. daily. If shopping under fake snow doesn’t get you excited, you......

Birth of a fetish: The Register reports an unfortunate MSN messenger encounter between two young girls and Microsoft's badly programmed Santa chat bot. Apparently "RoboSanta" has "a shocking predeliction for casually dropping in that it likes to talk about a certain sex act." The Register (El Reg, below) replicated the conversation, starting out by offering St. Nick a piece of pizza: El Reg says: pizza (pi) Santa says: Yum! What do you want for......

Fircrest, Washington, is a bedroom community of Tacoma that's just a little bit bigger than Central Park. It was developed in the twenties by Edward Bowes, who later gained national fame as the host of Major Bowes' Amateur Hour, a radio forerunner of American Idol (Frank Sinatra's career took off after he won). Sunday was the first time we'd ever been to Fircrest. Sunday was the first time we'd ever heard of Fircrest. We went......

Sometimes the world really is a beautiful place. Specifically when there's beer involved. Jack's meeting friends on Saturday for a session of oak-aged beer tasting at Brouwer's Big Wood Fest. He'll then spend the rest of the day rubbing his tum tum and smiling a lot. Thrilled about the possibility of the year's first snow fall, Kim will spend as much of the weekend as possible getting over the cold that's been lingering for a......

It seems like we've been seeing a lot of plays lately with children in them. Into the Woods at the 5th Avenue had kids, and Whistle Down the Wind at the 5th Avenue and A Christmas Carol at the ACT both do. We wondered, who are these child actors? How do they find time to act when there is so much television to watch? So we had a short chat via email with Elijah Ostrow,......

In the lobby of the ACT Theater, 25 minutes before curtain of A Christmas Carol, a pretty 20-something girl wearing a cute holiday sweater surveys the scene. Four Dickens Carolers are singing in lovely harmony. Children toddle by, then look back at the carolers, their eyes wide with wonder. Garland and lights are everywhere. The 20-something's face spreads into a wide smile. She turns to her boyfriend and stage-whispers: "I love this!" What's not to......

Until the day after Thanksgiving, Seattlest hadn't seen The Nutcracker -- probably the world's most famous ballet -- in years. But we had a solid image in our head of what it looked like because when Seattlest was a little kid, our mom made an annual birthday tradition to see it every year on opening night. For much of our childhood, this meant getting all spiffed up and walking a few blocks to Lincoln......

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......

Thanksgiving doesn't allow for us Seattlesters to partake in our usual rock and roll lifestyles. Instead it's friends and family and mellow times about the house. Our drinking's liable to be more restrained and coordinated with a heavy meal of rich food. (Seattlest Geoff offered some choice beer recommendations earlier this week for those who've got a pit-stop planned on the way to grandmother's house tomorrow.) And according to the weather report, it's going to......

In this corner, we have the accused, Amanda Knox, Seattle's girl-next-door and alleged participant in the murder of one. Google News hits: about 1,811. In the other corner, Risperdal aka risperidone, one of the most widely used anti-psychotics in the world, approved for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and marketed off-label for the "irritability" associated with autism, Asperger's, ADHD, and being teen-aged or elderly, and related to the deaths of at least 1,000 people (according the......

As if The Terrorists haven't already been winning by employing their agents, the American Indian, to poo-poo on our Thanksgiving parade of turkey, football, and/or explaining your deviant behaviors to your meddlesome aunts and uncles whom you only see once a year. This time, worst of all, our very own government is getting in on the act. Are you flying this holiday and wondering if you can bring aboard your grandmother's delicious jelly or......

It's pouring rain and it's exhausting looking for a new hard drive, so we pull over on Greenwood Avenue, right in front of Herkimer Coffee. It's bustling with people, despite the rain, and we anticipate a long wait. To our surprise, the line moves lightening fast and we're soon faced with two adorable and cheerful baristas. If you want to feel trendy without being surly or "holier than thou," Herkimer Coffee is your place. Although......

We're getting a new Major League Soccer team and everyone either is or should be excited. Drew Carey's walking around town, season tickets are flying off the shelves and the MLS Cup is approaching this weekend. On the field Houston faces New England, but there's sure to be a lot of talk during the broadcast about Seattle, our new team and the interesting ideas that have been associated with it. Unfortunately, no one in Seattle......

Seventeen teams showed up at the Old Pequliar last night to see if our voice would give out. We managed to get through the evening without having a Peter Brady moment, but we're grateful to those of you who were willing to step up to the mic at a moment's notice. We thought we'd produced a slightly more difficult quiz than usual, but we were proven wrong -- every team got 40 or more......

We're sure a lot of people bought tickets to Friday night's Symphony Legacy concert strictly to see Ann and Nancy Wilson or Alice in Chains. We were there primarily to see how the rejuvenated grunge band would sound with a new singer and backing orchestra at Benaroya Hall. But the symphony, written by Mateo Messina, benefited Children's Hospital, and we like to think that by the end of the evening, everyone appreciated the composer's philanthropic......

Mateo Messina, a Seattle native, has been composing television and film scores and penning symphonies for 10 years. His most recent score is for the upcoming, buzz-magnet comedy Juno. His latest symphony will be heard tonight at Benaroya Hall's (sold out) Symphony Legacy concert. (That's him above, at last year's show.) Messina's Symphony--a benefit for Seattle Children's Hospital & Regional Medical Center--features the combined musical talents of the Northwest Symphony Orchestra and the Northwest......

Like our high school hero Dan Zanes, we prefer to share "all ages" music with our toddler instead of mind-numbing "children's music." While we are not bumpin' to tales of Jay-Z's unfortunate experiences with his lady friends in various high-priced vehicles, neither are we interested in musical lessons on counting, going potty, and naps. And just taking kids-themed music and applying the trappings of an edgier genre doesn't fool us. That's why we're hoping the......

Adult gorillas aren't cute. The last time we saw one at the Woodland Park it climbed a tree and crapped a giant turd into its giant hand. Parents were shielding their poor children's delighted eyes. Baby gorillas, though, seem pretty cute. Check out this video we found on the Big Blog.......

1. Things We Lost in the Fire. There are a few things we liked about this (supposedly based here, though there is nothing to indicate that it actually takes place here) movie---mostly that the heroin junkie played by Benecio Del Toro lives in a flophouse in Renton and that Halle Berry plays a Seattle woman named Audrey, leading to a scene where Del Toro runs after her calling, "Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, Audrey, Audrey!" Call......

Real estate search engine Rotten Neighbor promises to help you "find bad neighbors before you move." What evils have users uncovered behind the closed doors of the Emerald City? Near Carkeek Park: Grouchy Old Man w/ Loud Music The grouchy old man who lives here likes to play his radio very loudly in his backyard. Lately he has begun playing it in the middle of the night and the cops have been called several times.......

Famous neo-fro advocate Steven Pinker drops in at Town Hall tomorrow night, 7:30pm. Tickets are just $5. He'll be flogging his new book, The Stuff of Thought. Stuff? What's next, the Lintball of Thought? The Harvard psychology professor and writer has spent years learning how children acquire language and then writing books about it without cutting the kids in on a single penny: The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate. An unapologetic......

Somehow, in between day jobs, practices, live shows, and recording their second album Beehive Sessions (produced by the Posies' Jon Auer), everybody's favorite performance group/art collective/pop band "Awesome" has found the time to put together a new theater extravaganza for all ages. And though it's kid-tested mother-approved, there's still scads of local talent involved: Here's What Happened is directed by WET's Jennifer Zeyl and has a different guest narrator each night--actor Charles Leggett, Almost......

When you become as popular on the local music scene as "Awesome", it’s good to give back to the community, and do a little something for the kids. Hence Here's What Happened, which the band describes as a children’s show with an adult brain. We asked to the band members to pass along some advice to the children-- who will always be our future. John Ackerman—"Keep playing no matter how old you get." "You......

Last night Richard Wiseman -- "Britain’s only chair in the Public Understanding of Psychology" -- spoke at Town Hall about his study of quirkology. Which, if you don't know, is the study of the offbeat in human behavior as a way of shining light on why we act the way we do. Here's a short recap of what we learned about: >>Speed dating: He didn't get into this in the talk, but it sounded interesting,......

Jim Riches, Deputy Chief of the FDNY, is one of the producers of the Urban Legends video that questions the supposedly heroic actions of Mayor Giuliani on 9/11. Jen Carlson recently interviewed him for our sister site in New York. How long have you been in the FDNY? 30 years experience in some of the busiest firehouses in NYC. Which firehouse are you working at now? Assigned to Bureau of Operations as Deputy Chief FDNY.......

Yesterday the CDC released the news that one of the smallest subsets of people who kill themselves saw an 8% increase from 2003 to 2004.For all young people between ages 10 to 24, the suicide rate rose 8 percent from 2003 to 2004 -- the biggest single-year bump in 15 years -- in what one official called "a dramatic and huge increase." ... The biggest increase -- about 76 percent -- was in the suicide......