"yellow dragon on pole" by Seattlest Flickr Pool Contributor Seattle rainscreen. Thanks! It's not every day that the local news headlines look so....well....international. This morning, we've got Seattle money going to China to help out after the horrific earthquake; more information about the death of a museum director in town from Thailand who was in federal custody; Seattle-based federal prosecutors in Baghdad conducting a criminal investigation on a Seattlite paratrooper; and an incinerated tavern......

Prince Howard of Schultz, the man who would be our entertainment king, also wants to feed us frozen yogurt. Yes, the man who brought you Frappuccino wants you to start licking his Pinkberry. The instrument is Maveron, a private investment firm Schultz and Wall Street banker Dan Levitan started ten years ago. (Levitan, then with Schroder Wertheim, had handled the Starbucks IPO.) Maveron, duh, is a mashup of maverick and vision. They've put money into......

Londonist are starting to think their city is getting just a little bit too expensive, when even Christian Slater can't afford to go out there. And there's no escaping, as local singer Lily Allen discovered when she was barred entry to the US. The British mapping agency caused further bad karma, by blocking a 3-D representation of London in Google Earth. But the smiles returned to Londonist's faces as they interviewed Baroness von Reichardt,......

This week's Comment of the Week was posted as a reply to a post about an immigration announcement out of the office of Mayor Greg Nickels and uses the word "homo" six times, including such creative constructions as "homo liberals," "homo culture," and "liberal homos." Funny how homo liberals, choose not to see the real enemy in North America and they opt for hating America. Mexico has no culture except being forced into the Catholic......

The press release came in a short time ago and we haven't really had the opportunity to go through it with our hair pick of information discovery, but the fact that the Mayor even has an Immigration and Refuges Initiative is, itself, a good start. Look, World, Seattle has an immigration initiative and it doesn't involve the construction of any Great Walls, much less mass arrests or the floating of barges full of human cargo......

Last year's immigrant rights protest was out of character with the well-publicized, poorly-attended quick hitter marches that seem to be de rigueur in Seattle currently. Thirty thousand people came out for that one and snaked through the streets of Downtown for hours. Yesterday afternoon we left the office a few minutes early to try and track down the 2007 version and after chasing 5th all the way back to Westlake Center and coming up empty......

She wants to know what you think. Apparently, she has some "serious, unanswered questions" she wants to pose to the people of Seattle. Her scope is wide:I will never, ever say that a vote of the people is a waste. That's just fundamentally wrong. I, as an elected official, do not believe that.This morning at Seattlest HQ, we received an anonymous email containing an internal memo from the Gov's office, revealing what some of those......

We at Seattlest have considered the question of "What is Bellevue" before. What we didn't consider is what the Times' Danny Westneat does today. Is Bellevue a "New Brooklyn"? Westneat's riffing off of a new book called Boomburbs: The Rise of America's Accidental Cities. The book's author, Robert Lang, "argues that our quintessential whitebread suburb is now so packed with immigrants it actually looks more like New York's famed borough." ...He doesn't mean Bellevue feels......

Pauls Toutonghi, a product of the Seattle Public School system who now lives in Brooklyn, is in town to publicize his first novel, Red Weather. Random House is the publisher--and, as our friend Jason McDonald says, don't be fooled by the name--they don't publish just anything. Red Weather is the story of teenage boy, the son of immigrants, who's navigating his first romance, his father's drunkenness, and a house crammed with visitors from the home......

Shanghaiist probably knows a little more about China than the Chicago Sun-Times. Giving them the benefit of the doubt on that one. The city does to have a music scene. Don't even front like they don't. They also have Dorito bananas and white guys shopping for wives. What they don't have is any more tolerance for jaywalkers. Bostonist sees Boston and Somerville each whip out their art and face off. A plagiarized novel is the......

You can don your black sweater and black jeans and join the march today, or you can get your ass out of downtown early. We suggest you do one of those, though. People are supposed to congregate at Judkins Park at 4:30pm and we've marked out the route from there out above. Over on Jackson, up on 4th, over on Pike or Union and down on 2nd to the Federal Building. Elsewhere in the......

LAist tracks an award-winning TV writer who worked on Good Times to a homeless shelter and sees a Little Old Lady get a jaywalking ticket because she can't get across fast enough (in the same post!). Poets invade Metro and an LAist contributor's new book asks WWJB. Gothamist gets down with the immigration rally and their readers want to be heard. The anniversary of the Mets' 1986 World Series is celebrated via a RBI Baseball......

We love this town. But we'd love it ever-so-much more if it had these things in it. (Budding entrepreneurs, take note.) 1) Soft-serve frozen custard, preferably attached to a good burger joint and with rotating flavors of the day. We've mentioned this before. 2) Thunderstorms. There's nothing like being able to see lightning strikes when you're a mile away. 3) Street food! Carts pushed by immigrants offering a variety of culinary delights. We long......

The General marched with immigrants and their supporters this weekend in Yakima and has a post up about it now: Immigration is a difficult issue. The owners in Our Leader's ownership society need a workforce they can exploit beyond the limits allowed by law. Undocumented aliens fill that role, because, being undocumented, they cannot complain about being victimized. Now, we've come to a point where the demand for an exploitable workforce has become so......

In all the annals of music, it's hard to imagine anymore specific a genre than "gypsy punk." But that's just the sort of cabaret-esque insanity that Gogol Bordello brings to their shows. The band's story is as strange as their music and stage shows. Frontman Eugene Hutz is a Ukrainian refugee displaced as a child in the wake of the Chernobyl disaster. After bouncing through various European countries, he wound up in Vermont. As an......

The Seattle Times today stokes the raging firestorm of fear created by the discovery last week of the dope tunnel between houses straddling the border with Canada. Who knows what Canadian fury could be streaming into the state of Washington through similar operations? From the Seattle Times: In the most remote parts of the 4,000-mile border the United States shares with Canada, more than 200 roads snake between the two countries, miles from homes......

Never let it be said that Seattlest isn't a tad bit obsessive. The lengths we are now going to in order to find the best cheeseburger in Seattle is leading us into areas of the city some might say are better left undiscovered. Not to mention the fact that our chloresterol is higher than average and we're beginning to get a tad nervous about the whole 'Mad Cow' thing. On the other hand, we've eaten......