All of us here at Seattlest pretty much fell for cyclist Tyler Farrar after Seattlest MvB interviewed him this week. After all, he's a local, he's young and funny, and he's going to ride in the Tour de France. What's not to like? So you can imagine our disappointment when we saw that Goldy at HorsesAss read this headline in The Seattle Times: Wenatchee cyclist could get shot at Tour de France Of course it's......

Courtesy of King5.com: "Insane Killer could be Released to Mother in Lakewood" Reads more like a plot from the latest B slasher movie than a news headline. Not that we're not all for hysteria inducing headlines.........

When have you gotten your money back on a ferry purchase? After 20 years? 40? 60? How about 80? Washington State Ferries still had plans to fix at least three 80-year-old ferries before the magnitude of their decay was uncovered. Now, because WSF never imagined the day would come when the ferries would have to be replaced, it'll be a year or more before new ferries can be built and car-ferry service returned. Our favorite......

Say what you will about Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder's politics, but the guys put together a hell of a film and soundtrack. While Penn's Into the Wild might not match its somber weight with Oscar gold, its music, care of Vedder, could score at the Grammys and Academy Awards. His song "Guaranteed" (covered below) already received a Best Song nom from the former. Vedder's sparse, loping tunes that accompany the story of Christopher McCandless'......

Austin-based Anglophile pop quintet Voxtrot just can't help but draw comparisons to bands like Belle & Sebastian, Morrissey, the Wedding Present, and even the Cure. After a couple well-received EPs, the band put out their self-titled debut full-length earlier this year (see above single "Firecracker"), and then proceeded to tour up a storm. Now the boys are back on the West Coast: Voxtrot headlines an extremely twee-centric all-ages show (Division Day, Tullycraft, and Math......

And we mean everybody: the New York Times, Pitchfork, the ever-fickle blogosphere. Seems that it's not hard to garner that kind of love and affection when you're a Brit-leaning pop quintet straight outta Austin. With clever arrangements, charming melodies, limber lyrics, and jangly guitars, Voxtrot just can't help but draw comparisons to bands like Belle & Sebastian, Morrissey, the Wedding Present, and even the Cure. After a string of well-received EPs, their self-titled debut......

We were just about to lean into a nice Sunday morning, working on our NaNoWriMo effort, when we opened the New York Times Web site just to see if any disaster had befallen us overnight that may take precedence over our literary venture. What we saw, buried toward the end of the day's headlines, was this: "Norman Mailer, Towering Writer With Matching Ego, Is Dead." We gasped, choked, looked around the empty basement of Stumptown......

Here are three vaguely computer-related crimes taken from recent headlines in Seattle, Chicago and New England. Seattle: "Man pleads guilty in cybertheft case." A 35-year-old Seattle man has pleaded guilty in federal court to mail fraud and aggravated identity theft in a scheme that utilized peer-to-peer file-sharing programs to gain access to private information from dozens of victims. Gregory Kopiloff admitted during a plea hearing Monday that, through LimeWire and other file-sharing programs, he used......

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods. LAist saw national headlines soar this week with......

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......

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......

Other than June 5th, 1977 and June 1st, 1979, June 28, 2007 has got to rank as the best day in Northwest pro basketball history. The Kiwi & Kangaroo was Seattlest Draft HQ, where Seattlest David, Seattlest me, and our friend Frank kept track of the action and insulted each other. Since ESPN kept showing "must improve" for each player drafted, (example, Spencer Hawes' "must improve" was rebounding) we came up with "must improve"s for......

There's been a lot of hype about this disc--Clarkson fired her management and pissed off Clive Davis in the process of making it--and you can bet pretty much every reviewer will mention that somewhere in their assessment. We're sheep, so we thought we'd open with that and get it out of the way. We'll be honest. Nobody's going to be giving Kelly Clarkson an award for being a great lyricist, so just get it out......

It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by poop. Finally D.C. contemplated taking Vermont's place as a state and marveled at the GOP lessons learned from the "Macaca Moment." Due to some sad shootings......

When we heard about the bowhead whale what was killed up in Alaska recently with the 150-year-old weapons found in it we had only a slight inclination to look up some weird Seattle shit from a century and a half ago. Turns out that the last time this whale was getting stuck with pointy objects the second-oldest lighthouse in Washington was being built. Whoop-de-doo, an old light. We have a stronger inclination, though, to wonder......

Over in Ballard, Archie McPhee sells a cheerful Lunch Lady action figure for $9.95. Tell the disgruntled lunch ladies in Chicago, who are demanding respect from a school system that pays them peanuts (well, $10.46 an hour) and expects them to serve slop to thousands of kids. "We're looking at each other like, 'I wouldn't eat that.' We wouldn't give our kid that at home," one lunch lady told the Chicago Sun-Times. No wonder that......

Monday BOOK CRUSH: Librarian Nancy Pearl´s latest book is Book Crush, a guide to books you loved when you were growing up. How does she know? Head over to the launch party and find out. 7-8:30pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE PETER BEAGLE SPEAKS: For the Fantastic Fiction Salon, fantasy author Peter Beagle (The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song) teaches "Dialogue Says it All." 7pm // Hugo House......

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment The action was thick......

We're going to spoil the end of Jonathan Raban's Surveillance. If you haven't read it yet and don't want to know, stop reading now. Seattlest Seth: I noticed the foreshadowing of the ending in the narrative, but it still came as rather a shock--which I'd imagine was intended. My immediate take on it was the same as Shacochis'--it's a well-taken reminder that, however high we perceive the stakes to be of our personal dramas,......

Let's hope Carrie Underwood doesn't have some virulent STD, or the entire NFL season may have to be canceled. When last we saw Carrie, she'd spurned our own Josh Brown for then-Cowboys-savior Tony Romo. Nice choice, Carrie--Josh Brown is now a franchise player, while Tony Romo is going to be forever linked to a debate about ball rubbing. Obviously the right thing to do here is beg Brown to take her back. But no--instead of......

Under Byen (meaning "under the city" and pronounced "Oh-nah Boon") is a pack of wild Danes who makes orchestral post-rock chockful of unfamiliar sounds, distorted vocals, effects pedals, and heavy feedback. The eight-piece has been together since the mid-90s, but it's their latest release Samme Stof Som Stof that has won them fans on this side of the pond. Part of it is due to their elaborate orchestration and sonic heft, and part of......

Remember we posted about former Seattle Weeklyite Philip Dawdy's blogging on mad meds the other week? Now Australia's ABC Radio National has interviewed him. Dawdy's account of his brush with radio down under is here. Here's the ABC teaser: The Zyprexa story Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly (makers of Prozac) have agreed to pay upwards of 1.2 billion US dollars to nearly 30,000 patients who claim their bestseller antipsychotic medication, Zyprexa (Olanzapine) has caused diabetes,......

By now we don’t have to tell you that both Seattle Public School (what-what) levies are passing, it’s what everyone is talking about. The levies will continue an existing property tax that will pay for new buildings and renovations on existing schools, as well as basic educational programs. We did our part last night, and may have been the only ones. Our polling place happens to be a school, and we always feel that these......

In case you hadn't heard, San Francisco's all abuzz today because their mayor, is, apparently, a sex-crazed maniac. Earlier this year he was dating a 20-year-old restaurant hostess, and now news that he slept with the wife of one of his top aides. The aide, according to a family friend, "confronted the mayor on the issue, expressed his feeling about the situation in an honest and pointed way, and resigned." We'll bet he did. Meanwhile,......

Editor Dan loves you, Seattle. City, people, land, water and professional sports franchises; all of it. However, he cannot back you on the issue of the Seattle Seahawks vs. the Chicago Bears. If you're looking for calming words of compassion or hilarious Seahawks histrionics Seattlest will take care of you there, too, but one of us grew up with a Bears helmet painted on our neighbor's garage door and didn't appear in a photograph......

There is no doubt that the reports of a family that intentionally stunted the growth of their disabled daughter so she would be easier to care for are bizarre and surprising. But what Seattlest finds even more bizarre and surprising is that the P-I, known of late for finding one small, boozy detail of a story and then blowing it up to inappropriately Herculean proportions, chose to entirely omit the detail that the condition the......

David Streitfield in the LA Times (registration required, regrettably) notes a new experience for him at Amazon.com: books he adds to his shopping cart get more expensive if he doesn't buy them right away. On Nov. 6, seeking to boost my dubious culinary skills, I decided to buy "The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook." I went to Amazon and placed the book in my electronic shopping cart but got distracted and never finished the transaction. The......

--Pot is now the number one cash crop in the United States. We can't help but feel a tinge of Washington pride while reporting that. --SXSW becomes that much more do-able for Seattleites this week as American Airlines announces direct Austin-to-Seattle flights. --Wikis have been kind of a flop, except for Wikipedia, of course. Well, now Amazon may keep the wiki flame alive. --A timber company purchased 440,000 acres of southern Oregon for the......

Tuesday, December 5 >>> Peter Walker at El Corazon. Not to be confused with Paul Walker or Peter Weller, Peter Walker's in town to support Young Gravity, his second album. We have read, though, that Walker evokes another Pete--Yorn. With maybe a bit more bite. 7pm doors; $10. All ages. With Division Day. Wednesday, December 6 >>> Victrola's own folk chanteuse Molly Rose headlines a singer/songwriter parade of not-yet stars at the Sunset Tavern.......

We are not running out of oil. So says UW professor of Economic Geology, Eric Cheney. (Economic Geology? Never heard of it but apparently it exists.) It will just eventually cost more than anyone could probably ever afford. It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon. Let's see, fuel becoming scarce enough......