We have just spent approximately 35 seconds analyzing the contributions of Seattle residents to the Best of Craigslist, and we have discovered these salient facts: the last time Seattle made BoCL was July 16, when someone was selling an original Bible autographed by Jesus. Before that someone got fired, some dirt asked to be moved, and someone else found a stinky cat. These are all good, but it's been two and a half months since......

Our laugh echoed off the brick street and buildings when we noticed this flyer on an otherwise empty pole on old Ballard Avenue yesterday.......

..Comes the proposed 300-foot-tall Paul Allen statue. The coffee pullers and community activists at Kapow! Coffee have begun a (satirical) petition to erect a 300-foot statue of Paul Allen, destroyer of the Cascade neighborhood and creator of South Lake Union, in the middle of a local park. Jeremiah of Kapow!, who we've always appreciated as much for his wit as his divine espresso, ribs, "We have to show the proper respect for all the wonderful......

Have you outgrown Adam Sandler, yet long for foul-mouthed, self-effacing, Jewish-themed humor? It would be too Borscht-belt to make a yarmulke and dreidl joke here, but we'll leave to your imagination to suppose we did. Tonight at the Triple Door, Good for the Jews rocks the house. Or shtetl. If that's what a shtetl is. Oy! A comedic indie rock duo (read: half-Flight of the Conchords, half-Sarah Silverman) featuring Rob Tannenbaum (of VH1 commentator......

Tonight and tomorrow, it's your last chance to see one of the year's best-reviewed documentaries at the Grand Illusion. King Corn follows two friends who move from the East Coast to the Iowa heartland to raise an acre of the highly-subsidized titular crop and follow it through the "corn industrial complex." It ain't pretty, but the film helpfully points out the extent to which corn is a part of the average American (and the......

It's been said that Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot was a play in which all that was left to the characters was hope; if that's the case, then Endgame is what you get when you lose even that. In one long act, the play features a cast of four characters in increasing states of immobility and decrepitude, the last dismal dregs of humanity gasping their final breaths, telling incoherent stories and hoping for a bitter......

When we heard that Vern recently released a book called Seagalogy, we were perplexed. Why would the voice of badass cinema write a book about NFL cheerleaders? Then we noticed that it's not Sea Gal-ogy. Seagal. As in Steven Seagal. More badass, less hotpants-clad ass. To quote Vern's PR email: More than 5 years in the making, the new book SEAGALOGY by Vern is the first serious analysis of the films of Steven Seagal. Using......

(This story actually took place years ago but just came up in conversation recently and everyone at Seattlest realized it needs to be preserved here for posterity and for future historians to study...) Johnny Ryan, the supreme king shit of scatalogical humor, once visited the Seattle offices of his publisher and became a part of the greatest moment in the history of "life imitating art" when his exit from the building was obstructed by......

Seattle Rep's Twelfth Night, which they're nerdily calling Twelfe Night as per the First Folio, is nearly shipwrecked by dull production design and the cast's inability to make anything of the esoteric wordplay that audiences once found witty, or at least clever. But the portrayal of life lived to excess is still gripping drama, and Frank X.'s steward Malvolio burns with a self-importance that veers from comic over-stepping to something much eerier. Tickets start at......

North of Seattle, in Lynnwood, is the restaurant Kirirom. Lurking low in the shadows of the big box stores, the chain restaurants, and the Alderwood Mall, Kirirom means “mountain of joy” and is a national park in Cambodia. Perusing the picturesque menu, we really wanted to order the Chocolate Rice Soup, but Seattlest’s dining companions just weren’t biting on it. Guess they don’t see the humor in calling organ meats “chocolate.” We’re still not sure......

The unfortunately named Grand Ole Party opened for Rilo Kiley Saturday night to an audience presumably not too familiar with their work. GOP have a strong, simple, raw kind of sound, not unlike White Stripes or Sweet 75, kind of directionless and inert, but impressive and energetic nonetheless. They ended the set with the first song on Humanimals, "Look Out Young Son," which after a couple of listens sounds like the strongest effort on the......

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......

Ron Rosenbaum, in Slate, has discovered and dissected the worst op-ed article ever written: Stanley Fish's "Getting Coffee Is Hard to Do," in the August 5 New York Times. Rosenbaum spends three amusing pages shredding Fish's article, examining the many, many instances of "unintentional humor" and "comic cluelessness." And he pegs early on one of the shopworn observations Fish attempts to pass off as insight. As Fish notes: First you have to get in......

Well, this piece certainly is interesting. We recognize it as satire because we know the cultural context that is Dan Savage. We only wish that Mr. Savage would have done the same about a month or four ago when he royally skewered Garrison Keillor, who wrote his own bit of satire in this Salon piece. At first, we couldn't help but giggle at his error in judgment. Perhaps he didn't understand Mr. Keillor's cultural context?......

Armistead Maupin is an anagram of 'Is A Man I Made Up', he tells us, but he claimed to be a real person last night at Elliott Bay last night. Stupid baseball traffic took up all the parking spots near Pioneer Square. We cruised around for half an hour, then finally ditched and paid $5 to park in the Sinking Ship. Too late! The cafe in the basement was already packed to the gills and......

Seattlest got a Sony Walkman for our 15th birthday, and bought our first couple of cassette tapes with saved allowance: Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Eazy-E’s Eazy-Duz-It. As any self-respecting male teen would be, we were offended thrilled by the latter’s raw language and humor. So within a few weeks, we’d procured N.W.A.’s tape, Straight Outta Compton. That’s how we knew what we were hearing Sunday night when we were put on hold after......

We had to agree with On the Boards' executive staff (Lane Czaplinksi and Sarah Wilke) statement in the liner notes to The Adventures of Ali and Ali and the Axes of Evil that they had been “excited about presenting Vancouver’s neworldtheatre since the first moment [they] saw the image of a smiling President Bush holding a little wild eyed man baby.” Admittedly, this was a large part of the reason why we wanted to......

TONIGHT at Meany Hall, it's "Climate Change and the Future of Life on Earth," a two-hour multi-media presentation designed to freak your climatological shit out. It stars the world-famous paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and environmental activist: Dr. Richard Leakey. Shazam! (What? We never get to say "Shazam"!) Author of The Sixth Extinction, Dr. Leakey will talk "about our impact on the environment"...um, no, he's gonna open up a can of knowledgifying whup-ass is what. The Sixth Extinction......

Maybe (okay, most likely) Seattlest is waaay behind on this, but we just watched The Comedians of Comedy and we gotta say, good stuff. You see, our better half is out of town this weekend so we're passing the time doing what any good husband would do in his wife's absence -- putting a nice dent in the checking account by renting movies and drinking too many gin & tonics. The Seattle connection? Okay. The......

You may have heard of the feature-length Aqua Teen Hunger Force, out in theaters starting this Friday. We've been excited about the movie film for a while now, and not just because it freaks out the fuzz. We just wanna see what the good folks at Adult Swim can do, given a million bucks and ninety minutes to work with. Based on the trailer, it looks like there's gonna be lots of surreal circumstances,......

We don't get it. There's been so much hype over this Brandi Carlile character for so long, and we finally "broke down" and went to see her last night at the Triple Door. We're not sure what all the buzz is about. Is it because she's got a voice with so much power, it could stop a speeding bullet in mid air? Is it because her backup boys -- the "twins" -- are cute......

...in which we pit two bands against each other, to better determine how you should spend your Tuesday night. In this corner: Peachcake Weight: 200 lbs soaking wet Hometown: Phoenix Peachcake is composed of Stefan Pruett and John O'Keefe, two enthusiastic Arizona kids who like to dress up and make sunny electro-dance rock. Their debut full-length won't be out until this summer, but what we've heard of it is upbeat synthy pop songs with completely......

Seattlest's AP US History teacher, George Henry, was something of a rabble-rouser at our Salt Lake City high school. At the time, we only barely appreciated that we were getting a hands-on miniature lesson in civil disobedience from the only African-American teacher at the school. What we knew at the time was that when the school board started debating talking about condoms and sex ed, George Henry started one of his lectures by replacing every......

Over at Inkling, one of our favorite science magazine/blogs (that just happens to have been started by three women, and is published out of Vancouver, BC) David Ng gets into the mind of an Intelligent Designer, causing Seattlest to spew coffee this morning. Sorry, keyboard, we wanted a new one anyhow. Now, of course, I need to work in a clown somehow. I love clowns. In truth, clowns are my all-time favorite design. How will......

Seattle Shakespeare Co.'s Macbeth Seattle Center House, Tickets $32 - $22 Thurs - Sun, through April 8 We loved this Macbeth's brutal, intense fight choreography (by Gordon Carpenter) -- swords clang, guys vault over the sets, thump to the ground and wrestle, hell, a baby gets stabbed. It was like the IFL onstage. That's gonna be a pretty bruised-up cast by the time this thing closes. On one hand, the performance as a whole......

Providing yet more evidence why you should avoid documentaries with far more than a 35-millimeter pole, the producer of Iraq in Fragments today released a gag-inducing "open letter" to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences calling on them to apologize because someone made a joke he didn't like. The offender? Jerry Seinfeld who, to quote the aggrieved documentarian "poked fun" at documentaries in his introduction of the five nominees for Best Doc., and......

We've been following brand-spankin'-new art blog That Ain't Art, a collaboration between Kirsten Anderson and Celeste Fuechsel of Roq La Rue, Damion Hayes of BLVD, and Larry Reid of the Fantagraphics store. With that lineup, it's no surprise that That Ain't Art's focuses on lowbrow and pop surrealism -- "the alternative art scene in the Northwest," as their about section says. In their first couple of weeks, they've talked up artists and exhibitions, noted with......

Jesse Thorn, member of sketch comedy group Prank the Dean, produces his public radio show from his own living room in Los Angeles. At first, Seattlest thought that was code for "I am unemployed and play a lot of XBox" but it turns out he actually does have a radio show (this is still ambiguous on the "unemployed" detail), and even more to the point: it is very good. For many, even those of us......

Monday AUTHOR, AUTHOR: In Bich Minh Nguyen's memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner, a young family escapes from Vietnam shortly before the fall of Saigon and relocates to Grand Rapids, Michigan. "In her recreation of a world populated by family ties, Ritz crackers, and Judy Blume books, she has captured the 1980s with perfection," says Kirkus Reviews. 7:30pm // Elliott Bay // FREE Tuesday ANNE LAMOTT RECOMMENDS: Elizabeth Gilbert talks about her book Eat, Pray, Love:......

Admission: We don't know shit about graphic novels (we were more baseball cards than comic books in our day) We read Maus in the mid 90's and the Watchmen for a college class, and that's it. But as we were down in Georgetown for a work function, we thought we'd check out the new store. The lovely and charming Rhea (pictured at right) picked something out for us based on the bibliography just mentioned and......