BOMBS BURSTING, ETC: Happy Independence Day! Grill up some zucchini, down a beer or three, and enjoy your day off. Ivars is doing their exploding chemicals thing after sunset, so if you're into that, sedate your dogs/chickens/goldfish and enjoy the 23 minute show over Elliott Bay. Or wherever: check here and here for your options. 10 p.m. // Your Roof // Free(dom) GANGSTA RAP—SERIOUSLY: Get your gangsta self to Chop Suey on Saturday for Crooked......

Want to get away from the craziness that is Seattle during the Fourth of July? Try the San Juan Islands. This Seattlest will be packing her camping gear and kayak to explore the beautiful (and likely rainy, WTF?) San Juan Islands. If a tent and campfire are not up your alley, the islands offer a few inns and B&B’s that cater to every need from luxury spa service to private airplane tours. How do......

So much for feeling all wonderful and relaxed after getting out of the city and off the computer for the three-day weekend. This is what greeted Seattlest at the 93 mile marker when we left The Gorge early "to miss concert traffic:" Stop and go traffic, as bad as any Seattle rush hour we've ever encountered, in the middle of the mountains. The car and camper crawl lasted from mile marker 93 to 60, and......

Seattle hiphop artist Kublakai (aka Ian Waller) released The Basics in early January, and we've happily kept tracks from the record such "Oh Lord" and "Power Food" in our frequent playlist rotation ever since. This week, Kublakai talked to Seattlest in an exclusive about jazz, Snoop Dogg, his mom, a budding film career, and more! What kind of music did you listen to during your growing up years? What was the first record you......

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......

Before we moved our worldly possessions across Elliott Bay to West Seattle, we'd never visited that neighborhood's Beveridge Place Pub. And we'd never tasted 3-Grid IPA, an excellently hoppy product of that neighborhood's Schooner Exact Brewing Co. Now that we pose as West Seattle regulars, we recognize both pub and brewer as priceless neighborhood gems; there's no better place to kill a few (happy) hours, and no finer micro-local IPA. So it's with great......

If you're awesome, you don't get SAD, we see. You get BOLD! Awesome's John Osebold [MySpace] is filled with the spirit of the season:Hello! Happy December. I love this month. I wish I could give you all something this holiday season but I'm not very good with cards or throwing parties.So what he's doing is putting on a holiday show, featuring songs from his newest holiday album, Fly the December Skies, which includes guest vocals......

It feels like a still from a dark, soul-wrenching movie, but no, it is "happy holiday!" from EdgarDiazRocks. Were it not for his other sets, we'd not have known that heshot this in Leavenworth, and has no idea who that guy is. Drop your little slice of mystery into the pool, too, won't you?......

Making up for weeks of hibernation and workaholism, Kim will hit the parties this weekend. Tonight, she’ll don her Groucho glasses for a lesbian function at Jabu’s celebrating the births of her two favorite Sagitarii. Saturday, it’s to the War Room for a company party with the missus and her workmates. Finally, she’ll ship off to the sub-tropics on Monday, where she’ll spend what remains of 2007. While his wife is taking a Wilderness......

What a glorious morning! The Sonics have won three of five, Edgar Martinez wasn't in the Mitchell Report, we've got a kickin' holiday party to attend tonight. Guess we'll just check out Monkey Disaster, the blog of ex-KUOWer, Conservatize Me author and Seattlest favorite John Moe and see what's up with him...I'm writing you this letter to let you know that I'm leaving you. I've met someone else. Someone named Paul. St Paul. I'm going......

Not the best holiday season for baseball. But this untitled photo, added to the Seattlest Flickr Pool by Troy McClure SF, shows that they are keeping the spirit alive. With lights!......

You recall the other day we were mad as hell at the Washington State Ferries for running their boats until they rusted through, leaving everyone high and dry while new ones can be built. WSF is still dead to us, but Governor Gregoire could make our "holiday card" list if she keeps it up. First the viaduct course correction, now she's scrounged up $100 million to pay for three new ferries. Budget, schmudget! She's......

Maybe the first thing we should tell you about Striking 12 at CHAC -- besides the SAD tie-in, the rave reviews, or the fact that only 600 people in Seattle will have the chance to see it -- is that you can win half-off tickets to it. A limited number of $15 tickets are being held for those who correctly answer the following trivia question:Name at least one of the bands featured the first year......

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......

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......

The way Seattlest's routine works out we're afforded precious little time down in Tacoma, so we're particularly unqualified to speak to the panhandling scene there as opposed to here. Maybe someone more familiar with the City of Destiny can explain the need for the panhandling ban there, though? We do spend a significant amount of time downtown Seattle, and there are panhandlers around, but they tend to either be so consistently present as to become......

Look up the definition of “hot-to-trot” and you’ll find two sets of meanings: (1) willing and eager and (2) sexually exciting. To us, hot pot is both. All the recent hot pot talk on food message boards and in the local and national newspapers tempted us to do a turkey trot to Seven Stars Pepper (at 12th and Jackson, our favorite food corner in Seattle) on Thanksgiving Day – thankful to the Chinese for having......

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......

Besides the Big Wood Festival going on up at Brouwer's (which even exceeded expectations last night), this weekend marks the 3rd Annual Winter Beer Festival put on by the Washington Beer Commission. The Winter Beer Festival is held at Hale's and will feature over 30 different winter beers from Washington brewers. It can get a little packed, but it's a great time and last year was a solid lineup. This year keep your eyes......

For a quarter century, Kent Stowell and Francia Russell, artistic directors of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, stood at the summit of Seattle's cultural elite. Russell founded the company's ballet school and still travels widely as a consultant. Among his many achievements, Stowell choreographed Seattle's holiday favorite Nutcracker before stepping down three years ago. So what's he going to do for an encore? Hold that thought. Meanwhile, the Stowells' son, Ethan, had became a self-taught chef,......

This weekend Mr. and Mrs. Seattlest drove out to North Bend to cut a Christmas tree down and haul it back to Seattle. No, we didn't hike up Si with an ax and harvest a sapling, although that does sound fun. There's a tree farm out there by the name of Crown Tree Farm. It was our first time getting a tree from anywhere other than those road-side dealies or the enclosures that pop......

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......

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......

Retailers have been slopping their Christmas come-ons into the weeks before Thanksgiving since at least 1986--that's the earliest citation Word Spy has for "Christmas creep," the retailers' own term for the phenomenon. The exception: local customer-service nirvana Nordstrom. As reported on Consumerist and elsewhere, Nordstrom hasn't put up their Christmas decorations yet. But they have posted signs explaining why: "We just like the idea of celebrating one holiday at a time." Reaction is mostly positive.......

It’s almost Thanksgiving and we’ve yet to deliver any holiday recipes. We feel deep shame. If there was a Seattlest penalty box, we would sit in it. The truth is that this year we’ll be sitting back, relaxing and watching the dog show that’s after the Macy’s parade while our sister-in-law (also a chef) does the bulk of the heavy cooking. We will, however, be bringing our pumpkin pie. Pumpkin pie is something we’ve always......

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......

Is a new front opening up in the Culture Wars? Seattle school officials say no, but King 5's producers not-so-subtly imply yes. "A letter from the Seattle School District is raising some eyebrows about Thanksgiving and how it should be handled in the classroom," writes King 5 News' Eric Wilkinson. "The letter tells school district staff that the holiday is seen by many Native Americans as a 'time of mourning.'" Specifically, the letter cites this......

The glorious fall sunsets have disappeared along with the mouldering husks of Halloween pumpkins, and according the weather report, we can all expect a long, cold, wet weekend. But this being the Northwest, that's never stopped us from getting out and about; here's the weekend plans of your intrepid Seattlest contributors: By the time this hits the digital newsstands, Jeremy is going to be on his way to Fadó for post-work cocktails; after that......

The husband-and-wife team Over the Rhine [MySpace] play at the Triple Door at 7:30pm this Thursday and Friday, and both shows are already sold out -- SRO tickets will be on sale the nights of the shows. They're touring for their new album The Trumpet Child, which All Music Guide reviews thusly:Produced by Brad Jones and recorded in Nashville, the album's music is steeped in the other kind of Americana: not the gothic country one......