Ballard car photo courtesy of Seattlest Flickr contributor pdgibson My Ballard lets all you Ballard-drivers know that a traffic camera has been installed at the busy corner of 15th and Market.The Rainier Valley Post reports that Ana Ortega, the principal at Ali Kurose Middle School has resigned in the midst of an SPD investigation into sexual abuse by a teacher's aide at the school.Phinneywood is mourning the loss of another Woodland Park Zoo animal. Last......

Seattle City Hall by the amazing Seattlest Flickr Contributor--Grundlepuck Seattle City Hall was evacuated this morning because of a minor fire. A fluorescent light on the second floor caught on fire, causing embers to shower on nearby desks. City Hall employees tried to quell the fire with an extinguisher to no avail, so firefighters were called. This is the first fire in the new City Hall building, there was no damage reported. Employees returned to......

Popular Science released its list of the 50 Greenest cities in the U.S. recently. Of course, liberal, green Seattle was on it. We came in eighth. It surprised no one at Seattlest HQ, however, that our neighbor to the South, namely Portland, came in first since some of us believe that Portland is better and we all love PDX regardless. Popular Science "collected survey data and government statistics for American cities of over 100,000 people......

Poets in particular seem to struggle with a bipolar mind, as discussed in Touched with Fire. But perhaps that visibility is just because they're poets, and inclined to make terrific material out of any experience. The new poetry anthology from Eastern Washington University, Living in Storms, shows no let-up to the harsh weather:Schramm has collected more than a hundred poems by some four-score contemporary poets whose lives have been affected in various ways by bipolar......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer's market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs. Seahawks vs Pulled Hogette Sandwiches Preview On Friday night we were continually awoken by the......

We bring you the news as it happens or a little bit later. This was about 3:50pm today: REDACTED says: Holy shit, the building across the street is on fire. REDACTED says: flames and everything. MvB says: no kidding? REDACTEDsays: the Olive 8 MvB says: what's an Olive 8 REDACTED says: It's under construction but you can see the flames and smoke. MvB says: what street is that? REDACTED says: Olive 8 is the name......

We're working in a building next to Westlake Center, and just heard about a bajillion emergency vehicles go by. Looking out the window, they're all Fire Dept cars and trucks, and smoke seems to be coming from a construction site next to Pacific Place. Not that horrific billowing clouds of black kind of smoke, but disturbing nonetheless. There must be at least 12 emergency vehicles blocking the street. Anyone in the area know what is......

Time magazine claims, "You can't swing a dead cat this time of year without hitting a Top 10 List." Never one to waste a perfectly good dead cat, we decided to take a swing and create a Top Random-Number Shows Seattlest Saw This Year. And now, without any further ado, here's how your favorite bloggers broke down the year: According to Dante, everything else pared in comparison to Daft Punk at WaMu Theater 7/29/07. OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!......

News of the Croc's closure sparked a lively conversation at Seattlest HQ yesterday. We suspect reactions at other blogs' virtual newsrooms were equally as visceral. The local blogosphere, if you will, seems to have turned temporarily into a Croco-sphere. Personally, we have found bittersweet solace in the words of Scripture: In 1966, I went down to Greenwich Village, New York City to a rock club called Electric Banana. Don't look for it; it's not there......

Inspired by a random iPod event at Seattlest's Thanksgiving, a friend lamented the early death of John Denver and then launched into a diatribe about how he didn't pull a Kennedy; that is, Denver wasn't a dilettante pilot. He went on to explain that Denver was an experienced pilot who owned many planes and flew often. He died, our friend claimed, when one of the fuel tanks in the experimental plane he was flying......

Six Organs of Admittance is one man--Ben Chasny--and whoever he gets to come along for the ride. Shelter From the Ash, Chasny's ninth album under the Six Organs name (out today), features contributions from his Comets on Fire bandmate Noel Harmonson, Elisa Ambrogio of Magik Markers, and Superwolf/Zwan's Matt Sweeney. The album is a freak-folk magnum opus, full of well-restrained improvisations and fluid ruminations, considered and varied instrumentation (electric, electro, and acoustic), hypnotic vocals,......

It was four years ago that we'd started falling in love with the woman who would one day be our wife. It was about that same time that she'd lent us an album called Night Songs by a band called Stars. And if memory serves us with any amount of clarity, our devoted attention to that album became one of the many things which cemented our infatuation with this woman. Night Songs (Stars' first LP)......

It's cool that Drew Carey has been the face of the new Seattle MLS team, appearing at the G&D and showing up in the booth for Monday Night Football to talk about the team's plans in Seattle, but he's kind of a Cleveland guy. Couldn't we get a Seattle name that's about on par with Carey? Like....oh god there is no Seattle name on par with Drew Carey. Long live Seattle guy Drew Carey! And......

God knows we love that funny, brainy ole Tom Stoppard. If you're not an Oxford undergraduate or an actor of bit parts, though, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is just likeable, a diversion about the way we divert ourselves from facing death. Stoppard deploys his fearsome rhetorical skills, disembowels Hamlet, ponders probability, and argues mightily that death "is not." (So you can't, strictly speaking, be dead.) You can't keep Stoppard fans away from this kind......

Mono - "Yearning" We've seen Japanese rockers Mono enough times to know how much we're going to fawn over them in our future review post. With their constant touring they've honed themselves into one of the best live acts out there, and tonight's Crocodile performance should be just as wonderful as every other time we've seen them. We'll be slightly annoyed with some of the patrons there that won't know to shut the hell up,......

Will every software guy in the audience who's ever thought about cashing in the badge and putting on a chef's coat raise your hand? Wow, a lot of you, great! Some of you aren't so sure... You there in the front, did you read Kitchen Confidential? Yeah? Did that help push you out the door or keep you in front of the keyboard? OK, keep them up there. Now, keep them raised if you've actually......

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......

We told you we didn’t know much about Earl Greyhound, and after Wednesday night’s Paramount show, we’re still ignorant. (Will call tickets trickle in after the opening band takes the stage? Really?) When we finally made it in, Greyhound was pounding through their last song. We noted that singer/guitarist Matt Whyte had worked himself up quite a sweat. We got this photo. They exited stage right. But late for the opener meant early for the......

Last night's Arcade Fire show was rife with problems. Not with the Arcade Fire, Lord knows they can do no wrong, but with the opening bands, and most of all, with the venue. Somehow, even though the scheduled time for the show was 7:30pm, the time published everywhere---on the Ticketmaster site, in ads for the show, in UW emails, on the goddamn tickets---doors actually opened at 6:30pm and the Gossip started playing right around......

Our single favorite taste characteristic in a beer is possibly smoke.....or hops.....or coffee. Well, for today it is smoke. For those of you that stick to macro beers and the like, this may sound a little odd. But, to those of you who enjoy craft beer and wine, this flavor profile should not be surprising. Smoke flavor can get into beer from essentially two methods: using malt that was roasted over an open fire, or......

Seattlest spent this weekend visiting friends in Spokane. We know, we know. "Why, in God's name would you go to Spokane?" Trust us, we've heard it before. But Spokane isn't all bad. It has a few great restaurants, a small but fascinating music scene made up alternately of young, unable-yet-to-escape kids in punk rock bands and older, happy-to-be-settled-down really good musicians all playing in a small town which is full of outdoor opportunities in urban......

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.......

Monday the 10th, at 7pm, the Paramount Theatre presents Charlie Chaplin's 51st, 52nd, and 53rd films, all from 1916: The Floorwalker, The Fireman, and The Vagabond. They're all half-hour or so shorts from early on in his Mutual Films era, and feature Chaplin's genius for environmental comedy, with mishaps with escalators and fire poles. In his autobiography, Chaplin wrote that his notion of humor was based on "the subtle discrepancy we discern in what appears......

The other day we walked into KeyBank with a KeyBank check, asked to cash it, and they said, "Are you a customer?" We said, no, but it's your check. They said, "That'll be $5 please." We started looking around nervously, feeling like we'd walked into some kind of wormhole and banks in this reality didn't understand that the value of a check rests in its being "as good as cash" for the recipient. But it's......

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked......

We're sorry to hear that a nail salon, a chiropractic office, and a Panda Express were destroyed by a fire in Renton this morning. And glad to hear no one was hurt. A shift supervisor at the Diamond Lil's casino across the street called 911 and said the fire was burning on a table inside "Stop 4 Nails" and quickly spread. The blaze also destroyed the other three businesses in the structure; Panda Express, Hemp......

There are two kinds of people in this world: People intrigued by the phrase "hobo cabaret," and people repelled by it. On the fence? Consider that the Yard Dogs Road Show describes their audience as "modern hobohemians." If you're comfortable with that, you'll love the show. They embrace their gimmick, and their enthusiasm makes it work. We went to the Sunday night performance, and the show grabs you by the lapels and shakes the......

Seattlest took a little jaunt up to downtown Pacific Rim Canada the other weekend. Vancouver is the Toronto of western Canada and, just like its gritty eastern counterpart, we just *big throbbing heart* the place. We love its density, its layout, and its landscape. We love the architecture, even its endless kilometers of glass and steel high rises. Moreover, it's a walkable city. If you're a reasonably able-bodied tourist, you should be able to stomp......

Remember the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind, the album that made the band—and the word "grunge"—a household name? A naked baby, swimming blithely in pristine water, reaches for a dollar bill—a dollar bill that's on a large fish hook. The image is memorable for its ironic, dangerous, clear message. Courtney Love didn't catch the meaning. Director AJ Schnack does. Love reportedly made $50 million selling 25% of Nirvana's song catalog in 2006. More recently, she......