No word if the Burning Hearts will join the lingerie league. Photo by Michael Alan Goldberg We may have lost the Sonics, but we have gained a lingerie football team!The Green Lake branch of the Seattle Public Library is temporarily closed due to mold according to PhinneyWood. It used to be the algae and mold at the lake you had to worry about, but apparently the mold has spread across the street.The city has pushed......

The Seattle Police Department gave residents of Nickelsville a 20-minute warning at 12:15 p.m. to vacate their encampment or face arrest. As of 12:35 p.m., the homeless residents of Nickelsville were officially considered criminal trespassers and subject to arrest. According to reports, some campers have chosen to follow orders while others have decided to stay and face charges. Sadly, at least those who stay at Nickelsville against orders are more likely to have a roof......

Even if this was John McCain's Chief of Staff, we still wouldn't vote for him. Photo courtesy of Seattlest Flickr Photographer Jessiqua A couple of Seattle's finest neighborhood blogs are also covering Nickelsville. Blogging Georgetown and West Seattle Blog are both giving thorough coverage to the story.Did someone say gumbo? Honest to god, Louisiana-made gumbo in Seattle? Hallelujah! The Central District News has a glowing (tummy-grumble-inducing) review.Ballard High graduate Jean Smart won an Emmy last......

Under the cover of darkness and secrecy, a Seattle homeless encampment named "Nickelsville" in mockery of Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels moved to a new location early this morning. The residents of the new Nickelsville pitched 155 neon pink tents in a field off West Marginal Way. The residents of Nickelsville hope the encampment can become a permanent location for their tent town, while Mayor Nickels says that like any illegal encampment in the city, Nickelsville......

On the front page of the local news section of the P-I this morning is a feature on David Entrikin's 1,500 portraits of local homeless people. (You can read more about Entrikin's photo exhibit on "unsheltered" people here.) On the inside page is this story: Seattle-area foreclosures soar. This August, King and Snohomish counties had 1,185 foreclosure filings, or one out of every 906 households. According to the Greek chorus that is the SoundOff comments......

At 3 a.m. last Sunday morning, Daniel Stoy, a Microsoft employee from Fargo, in town for a conference, was beaten by five or six men "outside a bar" in the "Belltown neighborhood." digg_url = 'http://digg.com/world_news/Belltown_in_Beatdown_Crisis'; That's the P-I, with their view-from-30,000-feet-style coverage. Stoy was in a coma, but emerged from intensive care on Tuesday. A more forthcoming commenter says the attack happened: ...on 1st Ave, between Bell and Blanchard, in front of Bell Tower (which......

If parking lots designed parks they would all look like the new Counterbalance pit at the base of Queen Anne. Generally the park functions as an outdoor place for recreational activities or offers an aesthetically pleasing open space to relax or stroll. Counterbalance Park does neither. That isn’t to say it breaks the conventional mold of how we define the modern park because it doesn’t do anything at all. Deemed an “Urban Oasis” by......

What does the Noo Yawk Effing Times have against Seattle? Frank Bruni, their restaurant critic, puts together a list of ten hot new restaurants around the country. Geographic balance, gotta find one in the Pacific Northwest, let's see: green corner of the country, organic is hot, women chefs are hot, anything fit the bill? Wow! A two-fer, right in Seattle: Tilth, all green and a woman at the stove to boot. They send Matt......

Around the Seattlest newsroom, this contributor's distrust of Real Change News is well known; we've long been dubious of how their editorial side balances activism and reporting. (Since the paper has paid, non-indigent writers, supported by charitable donation and the sale of copies, which is itself more or less an act of charity, we've always wondered why they aren't more consistent and aggressive going after the city for its manifold failures. Could it be they......

You thought your beer was safe left in the back seat of your car? Think again. We got this email from our friend today: So yesterday I was driving home from Vancouver. Per Geoff's recommendation, I stopped at Bounday Bay's taphouse for a few beers. When I left I bought a growler of IPA. I was happy. When I got home, I parked outside and forgot to bring in my bookbag (worthless) and my......

Gas Works Park may not recover its former place as our #1 greatest park ever after its little tar leak last week. We took a walk over there yesterday and wandered around what was basically an empty space on a gray and prematurely cold day, pressing our nose up against the chain link here and there and dwelling on what exactly this park sits on top of: benzene, mercury, lead, etc. It's gross. Current......

In Slate today, Taylor Clark declared our -Ist-less neighbor to the south "America's indie rock Mecca," then spent several paragraphs dropping names and figuring out why. His conclusion? It's easy to live here. In the words of a friend of mine who used to be the music editor at the local alt-weekly, Portland is like a resort community for indie rockers who spend half the year working themselves ragged on tour. You can venture into......

This past Friday, Steinbrueck Park was the site of a free, four-hour concert that punctuated Pike Place Market’s Centennial Celebration. It was a great time to be a proud, passionate Seattleite. A wonderful time to be a frugal tourist. And, despite a tiny bit of Pearl Jam-overpromising by Party promoters, a perfect time to be Seattlest. As people started to pour into the area, claiming spots in what little grass was left by the freshly-erected......

We think Chief Gil Kerlikowske said it best:"We want to hold the ground we've taken and maintain the peace here and have real-time information about where the hot spots are..."Right away you get a sense of the high-level strategy involved in taking Seattle back, street by street, from people with very little money, clean clothes, or a complete high school education. Was it necessary to make the announcement in such a dramatic fashion? We......

When family’s in town, Seattlest usually troops to Pike Place Market so the out-of-towners can say they saw our city’s bustling bazaar. Though we’re not repeatedly thrilled by it, the Market is a sense-assaulting place to burn an afternoon with all-ages, crowd-tolerant kin. But it’s something else entirely beyond the northernmost booth or on the exit stairs facing the viaduct. It’s a trashy, scare-little-cousin-Susie jungle out there. Even now, with the Centennial Celebration in......

Since Monday, Seattle's Parks Department has hired buskers such as Hickman to play from about 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays through September at Pioneer Square and four other parks downtown: Freeway Park, Waterfront Park by the Seattle Aquarium, Westlake Park and Hing Hay Park. Each busker gets paid $30 to play at a park during those hours. The buskers are an expansion of the city's effort during the past two summers to change the......

Since its development in 1982, Victor Steinbrueck Park (formerly "Market Park") has been a melting pot of downtown green-space seeking citizenry and tourists. Just about every class of human being can be seen here on a warm, sunny day. We, being fortunate enough to work near the market, spend many a lunch here. We always bring a book to read, but on a day like today, little reading gets done because of all the people......

The Seattle Weekly pulled feature writer Huan Hsu off the bashing-local-charities beat this week, and instead had him profile the coach of a high school girls tennis team. A coach who is now fired. Why? Well, let's take a look at the fourth word of Hsu' story: "Sexy." Hsu leads with the salacious details of a "sensual" poem coach Aaron Silverberg read to his Ballard High charges.Drinking you in. Melting you under my tongue. Touching......

--Brawny men are tearing apart the old Rainbow Grocery space, but the brawny men won't say why. --"To the lechy homeless men: I am not a dancing female gift the City of Seattle decided to kindly bestow for your afternoon entertainment." --Eyewitness to a suicide. --The new Sufjan Stevens album will be called Oregon, With the Wind and will be release only in a hoaxy parallel universe. --USS Mariner has a few ideas for......

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti......

On Saturday, a tractor clearing brush from under I-5 near South Massachusetts struck and killed a homeless man in a sleeping bag, hidden away in the blackberry brambles. The accident is "sparking," as the P-I has it, "a policy review.""This is a horrible accident for everyone involved," Transportation Department spokesman Russ East said. "We're going to take a look at our practices and procedures. We're asking, 'What do we need to do to make sure......

One of the weirder blog posts about the Seattle Weekly "expose" of Real Change is over at Crosscut, courtesy of ex-Weeklyite Chuck Taylor. (We'd point you to the Metblogs recap but it's fatally flawed, in that it's missing one of the seminal posts on the subject, namely ours. So no can do. But here's Real Change's take on the kerfluffle-thus-far.) Taylor's post is titled: "You don't have street cred if you can't do the......

--Are we dense yet? The Sightline Institute's Eric de Place has realized that more than half of the people that live in Seattle don't live in traditional house-and-yard setups. --ESPN's Jim Caple has a message for Ichiro, unfortunately, he wrote it in English. --Bill Nye, the Science Guy on Dice-K and the gyroball ...who knew he was such a big baseball fan? Via Baseball Musings --Here's Huan Hsu of the Weekly's Real Change piece. It......

The Seattle Weekly was criticized on various blogs last week for their story on the inner-workings of Seattle's homeless newspaper Real Change. Today on their blog they've started running letters that they received in response to that story. Sent: Monday, April 09, 2007 6:00 PM To: sw letters Subject: Grandmother from Ballard says you suck Dear Weekly, I've read you for years and the article on dissing Real Change is the worst reporting ever. Whats......

Real Change executive director Tim Harris says on his blog that the Seattle Weekly wants to exposé his street newspaper back to the Gutenberg age. In Harris' post, entitled "Seattle Weekly: What the Fuck?," he gives the history of his contact with reporter Huan Hua, and relates what he says he heard from a Hua interview subject, former Real Change employee Israel Bayer:From the questions he was asking, Huan's angle wasn't hard to suss......

--We're fucked. --The B&B that Greenlake has been trying to oust will be allowed to stay. Old story. Wallingford has since eclipsed Greenlake as Seattle's NIMBYest. --Some people think Schultz should stop pining for the past and get back to work. Faster. --Hahahahaha, oh man... The homeless voting... What a hoot. --Not sure how to vote on this one... --Someone just bought a Pierce County ferry boat on Ebay. --First Seattle to Paris non-stop and......

Yes, we think you will be able to spare some change, should you get panhandled by a newly-homeless Napavine family. The family, which Lewis County sheriffs are evicting from their home, owns four Bengal tigers. Now that they are homeless, they're sending two of their tigers to a rescue organization. But, the AP adds with a frustrating lack of detail, "The family is keeping two tigers with them." They're doing what now? We suppose Bengal......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

Its Christmas Eve and the pickens are slim. Here are some random things around town tonight that look potentially do-able: MUSIC: Punk, Pabst and Porn with DJs 23rd Hour and Nils Forever. This is mostly because we love the Juju, their deals are usually no cover and this doesnt look too holidays-ish. 9 p.m. // Bad Juju // Free MUSIC: The Suffering Fuckheads Xmas Eve Party. No clue if this is worth recommending or......

There's no such thing as a free ride. This week in speaking happenings is bursting with free-for-alls, but beware the "hidden costs" lurking beneath. Wednesday, December 6 >>>DORKBOT, 7:30pm. We love the name, but saying that they plan to "discuss their innovative approach to immersive, participatory entertainment" doesn't hide the fact that this will be geeks talking about videogames. Free, but only if you know the secret code: 'Knock knock, who's there?' 'Um, dorks?' 'Come......