We just got this message after logging in to Scrabulous on Facebook: "Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here." To which we say: KHAAAAAAN! We've also just had to switch back to Firefox 2.0. Any page with Ajax was giving Firefox 3 fits--since we usually have at least three Ajax-heavy Google and Gmail pages open at......

Our best shot of unincorporated Snohomish County It was getting urgent. We knew it was high time to abandon the too-familiar streets of Seattle in pursuit of sanctuary from chaotic, connected city life, or else risk losing our soul and sanity. The original plan for this weekend was to leave the state somehow--head down to Portland, or up to B.C. We informed our checking account of the plan and it began to sqwak in......

But one day, one day...the -est will triumph! And we will store the Webby proudly in our non-existent imaginary headquarters, and it will be magnificent. Sorry, did we say that out loud? The Webby Award winners, the Oscars of the Internet, were announced yesterday and Seattlest was, again, robbed. Winning web-sites included local lolcat phenomenon I Can Has Cheezburger?, which won the peoples/popular vote for both Best Weird and Best Humor web-site. A couple......

Could there be a way to make internet dating in Seattle even more anonymous? A new site, CrazyBlindDate.com, might be coming to our city to do just that. The site's creators explain, "There are no profiles, pictures, winks, or instant messages. Instead, users simply enter the basics of what they're looking for in a date (age, gender, orientation, etc.) and when they're free." Then you get an email or text message with a place......

Until about 30 minutes ago, we were excited about our switch to Clearwire, a provider we'd never tried before. But as we were signing up for their ~$35/mo. Premium (1.5 Mb/s) plan, we discovered whoops some extra costs not mentioned before: the modem was either $99 to buy or $5/mo. to lease. And of course there was a $50 installation fee. (You know, for the service you just plug into a outlet.) Just to set......

"Microsoft Live platform" by niallkennedy. Yesterday, Microsoft announced a pretty cool new online service that will take the Google Documents concept to the next level: users of Live Mesh will be able to sync content from their computers, handhelds, cell phones, and potentially even their Zunes with that of other users in the same mesh, via the internet. As we understand it, the service is like an inter-office computer network, but users can upload/download......

Remember when The Crocodile Cafe closed unexpectedly in December? Remember how up in arms everyone got, yelling about how likely it was that yet more new condos would be the result? Well the future of The Crocodile Cafe wasn't known then and still isn't known now, according to the PI: Groupee Inc., a privately held Seattle-based Internet software company, has withdrawn its application for a restaurant and lounge license at the site, said Susan Reams,......

We here at Seattlest like to provide our readers with valuable advice when we think it’s necessary. Two blog posts we’ve seen today make us think it’s important to advise that you stay the hell away from Denver. First, according to the New York Times blog The Lede, in November, the city’s voters passed a law similar to Seattle’s that makes pot the city’s "lowest law-enforcement priority." Well, it seems that the cops in Denver......

Economic downturn? Recession? Job losses? Really? Sure, Seattle's housing market finally cooled a bit, but listening to business news this morning you'd be excused for thinking all this talk about a bad economy is a crock of shit, at least here in Seattle. First there's Microsoft (via the PI):Microsoft Corp. announced a bid to buy Yahoo Inc. for nearly $45 billion on Friday, pursuing a blockbuster deal that could reshape the Internet industry by......

The Seattle Weekly's Rick Anderson pointed us to what may be the greatest unintentional comedy festival in Internet history. Following a series of nearly thirty break-ins, Magnolia residents have turned to the internets to catch the burgular, through a series of extremely misguided tips.—We had a young white male with a green hooded sweatshirt knock on our door and ask if we would like to sign up for evironmental action support. He walks with a......

"getty-up!" by Dean Forbes, from Flickr via Creative Commons license. Yes, the irony is thick. Fremont's own Getty Images wants to auction itself off and could sell for up to $1.5 billion, reports the NY Times. The stock photo agency has had a rough go of it lately: But the rise of digital photography and the Web created a host of competitors that charged as little as a dollar for an image. Recent events......

We here at Seattlest use the internet a lot, so when a website we visit strikes us as exceptionally useful, we think it deserves some props, even if doing so makes us look a little dorky. We'll warn you in advance, it’s going to be hard to swallow what we're about to say, so brace yourself. For all its faults, our city's government has a truly great website because it is astoundingly helpful and......

Tony Harris was a star basketball player at Garfield High School and Washington State University. After college, he played in a variety of international pro leagues: The Philippines, South Korea, Brazil. He was in his second stint in Brazil this fall, having left his pregnant wife behind in Seattle, when he disappeared, claiming that his life was in danger. He was later found dead. What went wrong? Possibly, it was Harris' own mind. ESPN's Wright......

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook. On Sunday morning, following a trip to a local farmer’s market/major supermarket chain, we will be preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks opponent. Then at halftime we will throw our badly burned hands in the air and make hot dogs One of our best friends from college spurned her native Portland to live in a......

The 1968 film version War and Peace, directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, with the participation of over 100,000 Red Army soldiers, is in a class by itself, not least because it runs 411 minutes and is being presented in Russian with subtitles. We're not sure how to recommend a 7-hour movie, except to agree with Roger Ebert that it does "take the enormous bulk of Leo Tolstoy's novel and somehow transform it into this great......

Today John Cook mentioned a new, locally based social networking site in his Venture Blog: ListenToYourWife.com. Howard Ro, the husband in the husband-and-wife team behind the site, explains: Ro, an IT consultant, says that many married women feel as if they are not "being heard." "It's not due to abuse or neglect, but just due to the nature of male dominance in a marriage," he said. "We wanted to create a forum for wives to......

"On October 1, when tickets went on sale for the Seattle premiere of Jersey Boys," the press release solemnly informs us, "all 5th Avenue Theatre box office records were broken." Obviously someones of a certain age miss their white doo wop. A big money-maker on Broadway, Jersey Boys is the story of Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons and how they ruled the airwaves between 1962 and 1967, on the strength of Valli's signature falsetto.......

So Danny Westneat is musing on the future of email, on the occasion of the announcement that spam volume has doubled this year, to 120 billion emails per day. Remember the Spam King, he asks? Remember the drop in spam we were promised? Well, it's been more of spike. At our work email, our spam folders fill up solely with ED medication and upscale watch pitches. The narrow range of products is puzzling, but the......

Journalist Jim Romenesko is amassing a vast barista army with which he'll one day conquer the world, or at least Seattle (Seattlest, for one, would like to welcome our new caffeinated overlords). He's doing this through his blog StarbucksGossip.com where he invites Starbucks team members to discuss various Starbucks-related news items with him. At least, that's what he seems to be doing at the site--We know he's infecting them somehow. It's like his own real-life......

This has probably already circumnavigated the Internet, but it's new to us:......

Walking down 15th the other afternoon, we were a little Hitchcocked out by the sight of a crowd of crows (or ravens, the comments section is of two minds about which) assembled on a neighbor's house and lawn. Naturally, we immediately suspected said neighbors of being witches. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. Live and let magick, we say.) A woman got out of her car while we were taking the picture and,......

Wednesday we decided to do a little recon of the new Wine & Beer shop on Pike Street. Encouraged by Geoff's post, we picked up Franziskaner Hefe-Weisse Dunkel ($3) and Hefe-Weisse Hell ($3) to accompany our Thanksgiving meal, along with some Saison Dupont ($10), which is perhaps why one of the owners mentioned to us that today, from 5-7pm, they were having a beer tasting that would include Belgian beers and we should stop by.......

Ravens & Chimes [myspace] have been artist of the day on Spin, and you've heard them on John in the Morning. Their new album, Reichenbach Falls, "dropped" last month. They are hot. Two Ravens, Abe Pollack and Brittany Anjou, are Seattle types. Pollack went to U Prep, Anjou's a Roosevelt grad. Word! We emailed Pollack some questions, he emailed back answers. 1) How did you end up in Brooklyn? I moved to New York six......

From the papers in Europe, and particularly in England, you'd think that UW student Amanda Knox had already been tried and convicted of sexually assaulting and killing her roommate Meredith Kercher in Perguia, Italy. The source said: "The flat where Meredith was killed was full of evidence, there was blood, fingerprints and other bodily substances. "It was obvious very quickly that those responsible were from a close circuit of friends and we were able to......

Sometimes, the hip-hop planets align and send their benefactions down upon Seattlest. This was probably why we ended up standing in line behind Nam at Chop Suey on Saturday night, waiting to get into the Little Brother show. (Watch for an interview with him later this week!) However, we give full credit to Northwest hip-hop promoters Obese Productions for the line-up that allowed us to finally see The Physics AND Grynch (at right). AND Dyme......

Beneighbor.com is the questionably named site that lets condo-dwellers meet the people they share a wall with, and there's nothing questionable about that raison d'etre. Meet em, friend em, complain about the shoddy tile in the hall with em. Hey, maybe we can woo that little old lady who's been giving us the stink eye in Wallingford for the past half a decade. Seriously, our Real Life efforts ("Hi! How's it going!" Bitch.) have thus......

We may have invested in a DSLR camera a few months ago, but we're not made of money. Which is why we've never gotten around to investing in Photoshop. At this point in our learning curve, we'd rather spend our time taking a lot of photos than tweaking them to death on our MacBook Pro. Give us infinite possibilities and we're paralyzed. Which is why, when we've been editing photos, we've been using locally......

There are a lot of things we can see being seized at the border between Canada and the United States: handguns with the serial number filed off, bricks of heroin, briefcases with the radioactivity sign on the side. Hard drives we'd expect to make it through, but unfortunately we'd be wrong. The guy bringing the masters of the songs Chris Walla recorded in Vancouver back down to Seattle had the drive containing them yanked by......

Hello all-- News from the front lines of the blogging revolution: We've killed guest comments. Well, to be accurate our corporate overlords have killed guest comments. Ist-wide, the vast majority of spam and boorish behavior comes from guest commenters. As many Internet pundits have observed, total anonymity seems to make even the nicest person act totally insane. It hasn't been much of a problem here at Seattlest, and I'd like to thank those guest commenters......

Tonight will be the final live performance version of Guy Maddin's Brand Upon the Brain at the Cinerama, this time with Maddin in person as narrator, (instead of Karen Black, who we saw Wednesday night), backed up by the live orchestra and the "the Aono Jikken Ensemble" sound engineers providing weird, old timey Maddinesque style sound effects. After tonight, the film will be shown at the NWFF with a recorded soundtrack. This is part......