DRINKING GAMES: It's too predictable at this point to use the word "maverick" for your drinking game. Considering McCain's newly announced strategy of character smears and trying to make the country hate their savior, we would suggest going into tonight's debate with a list of drinking game terms that includes "Ayers," "palling around," "that's not true, John." Just a thought. Oh, did we bury the lead? The second presidential debate is happening tonight at Washington......

Okay, friends and neighbors. December is a huge month for local hip-hop, and not just because of Blue Scholars' The Program. This week, Chop Suey's got you covered for Monday and Tuesday with the Parker Brothaz tonight (GMK will be there! We love that guy!) and freestyle master Eyedea & DJ Abilities tomorrow night. Over in Fremont, Nectar's offering Waves of the Mind and Gabriel Teodros/Abyssinian Creole on the 13th (there are nine acts......

library by mraaronmorris, a favored shot of our favored spot (yeah, we know it's a cliché, but we love all the angles!), as found in the Seattlest Flickr Pool. If you aren't adding your pics, you should be. We'll love you (even more) for it.......

The Friends of the Seattle Public Library are trying to get people to write to members of the City Council in support of funding collections before the council meets to discuss the budget Tuesday, October, 30. Seriously, a $2.5 million shortfall this year, and a shortfall every year since 2000 when Libraries For All funded a bunch of building upgrades (including the Central Library)? That's really lame, particularly here where we get all proud......

Tell him there's about a 1 in 6 chance he'll appear on Jeopardy! in the next couple of years. He'll obsessively check his phone messages the whole time. That's right: we passed the recent in-person Jeopardy! audition held in Seattle, which means we're officially in the applicant pool. 400 contestants appear in a season, the applicant pool is 2000-2500 people--voila! One in six. What next? The waiting game. Oh, and studying like a mofo. Ken......

The next time you take a sip of a clear, golden pilsner, you should thank a man named Josef Groll. No, he's not the guy that sold you the beer. He's the man that invented it. Before October 5, 1842, the world drank beer that was dark and cloudy. On that day 165 years ago, a group of brewers tasted the world's first pilsner and things were never the same. Josef had come to......

Magritte references aside, can we catch a break in the 2500 block of Fourth Avenue, please? (See previous post about a sidewalk sale across the street.) Early in our Seattlest career, we opined that Boulangerie Nantaise bakes Seattle's best-tasting baguettes. Still true. But it turns out they don't know squat about sandwiches, whether it's how to spell 'em or how to make 'em. Shoulda gone online, where they've at least posted a picture of......

We're trying to test Amazon's new MP3 download service because we hate CDs and iTunes and we love DRM-free music files and compensating artists for their work. Hang out with us a minute here while we try this... Local band Kinski has a new album out and since we felt the last time they released something they were finally on the right track we definitely want to check this one out. Their label is Sub......

Somehow, in between day jobs, practices, live shows, and recording their second album Beehive Sessions (produced by the Posies' Jon Auer), everybody's favorite performance group/art collective/pop band "Awesome" has found the time to put together a new theater extravaganza for all ages. And though it's kid-tested mother-approved, there's still scads of local talent involved: Here's What Happened is directed by WET's Jennifer Zeyl and has a different guest narrator each night--actor Charles Leggett, Almost......

So we'll begin, the guy at the podium said, the huge black blast door in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Downtown Library eased down its track, slowly cutting off our view of the lobby, and we shivered. "I wish the P-I were here," said the Stranger's Josh Feit at one point. "This is what they do really well." Oddly enough, the Seattle P-I, the hands-down leader in news on the web around here, wasn't on......

"Neighbors fear development" has become the Seattle equivalent of "dog bites man." Of course neighbors fear development. That's what they do. The latest brouhaha: Wedgwood is getting a four-story condo/retail complex in the middle of their one-story residential neighborhood. Hands are being wrung, meetings are being called, nimbyism is being denied, blogs are being written. We wouldn't have it any other way, really. It's Seattle. Neighbors fret. Since we left Wedgwood, we don't really have......

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 we were young, our parents bought a house in Craftsbury Common, a tiny town in the Northeast corner of Vermont. There's a post office, a general store, a church, a library and frankly, not much else. The isolation of this place was troubling in former years (at sixteen, for example), but now it is to us, a tonic: a place where there is no coffee shop directly below our apartment, no cell phone reception......

We want to know where's the scariest place to live or hang out within Seattle city limits. (Sorry, Skyway and White Center. Check again after annexation.) Recent news stories have pushed several neighborhoods into contention: Rainier Beach: The Safeway parking lot is "plagued by thugs", disgruntled patrons firebomb a video store, and gangs patronize the library. Broadway: From Slog today: "Broadway has turned into a 1st Class GHETTO. Why is nothing being done about it?......

We've been trying to keep abreast of the latest strike news via the networks as well as our singular Canadian television channel down here but both the quantity and quality of coverage has been most unsatisfying. So we took matters into our own hands. (Confidential to Metroblogging Vancouver: If you don't provide any sort of contact address, we cannot reach you for guest/expert commentary.) We contacted The Vancouverite because we believe in their attractive......

The Central Library played host last night to a host of concerned citizens and Thomas E. Ricks, author of the best-selling Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. They put Ricks in the big auditorium for good reason. Fiasco was a #1 New York Times best-seller, finalist for the Pulitzer, winner of the Gelber Prize, etc., etc. Plus it plays to the liberal instincts of Seattle's finest. The room was crammed full of business suits......

Well-known alterna-librarian Jessamyn West came to town recently, and finally had a chance to check out our flagship library. Her verdict? I saw a real disconnect beween the lovely outside and grand entry spaces to the library, plus a few other very design-y areas, and the rest of the building. Materials were hard to find. VERY hard to find. Signage was abysmal, often just laserprinted pieces of paper, sometimes laminated and sometimes not. Doors to......

Rachel Hynes is a former barista and yet still enjoys spending time in espresso places. She will review them. This is her third such review. It's 8:45am on a Sunday morning when we stroll into Katy's Corner Cafe and the gal behind the counter is cheerful in a way that's totally disarming. Our early Sunday crabbiness disappears as she explains that a veggie quiche is about to come out of the oven. She serves our......

Back when Seattlest lived in Wallingford, we went to the Fremont branch of the library once a week. We got to know the staff there very well -- hi, Carl! Hi, Joan! Hi, Betty! We served as one of two citizens on the committee that picked the architectural firm that handled the branch's remodel. While Fremont was closed for construction, we switched our regular patronage to the University branch. It's bigger than Fremont, and worked......

One Saturday a few weeks ago, we went to the Rainier Beach library with Little Miss Seattlest. After picking out several books, we were making our way to the circulation desk when one of the librarians behind the public service desk spoke. "Excuse me," she said. "Have you heard about the summer reading program?" We were, of course, familiar with the concept of a summer reading program, but we hadn't really thought about enrolling our......

Jesus, this is embarrassing. Bastille Day celebrates the liberation of a particularly pungent batch of cheese from the dungeons of the old prison in 1789 (along with seven prisoners) on the 14th of July (le Quatorze). Except here -- where as usual we're a day late and a euro short -- the Seattle Bastille Day festivities are being held on Sunday the 15th at the Seattle Center. What fun is that? The ideal would be......

You may recall that Seattlest recently moved to Rainier Beach. The house we're renting came complete with a mystery: a newspaper box posted next to our mailbox. We haven't subscribed to a newspaper for over a decade but, we know what a newspaper box is for. What we don't know is anything about the newspaper advertising on our delivery receptacle: the Western Sun. Google? Nothing. Wikipedia? Nothing, unless it's an unmentioned alternate name for......

Oh, snap! That should read "The Big Harry and the Potters News This Week." The authors of songs such as "Save Ginny Weasley" and "Gryffindor Rocks" are touring the Northwest, and Friday they end up in Seattle for a performance we hear will be "AMAZING!" Hear more of their indie-HP geek stylings MySpace, then make plans to catch them live. Seriously. A friend of our says they really do rock. July 11th, Wednesday Tacoma Armory......

Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Nintendo, The Robot Co-Op; the list of big name tech companies in the Puget Sound region includes some of the biggest, which is why we were surprised by the recent bandwidth report that ranked Washington 18th among U.S. states in high-speed internet access. Illinois is 17th, Michigan is 19th. Two fine states but what tech shops do they have? Rhode Island is number one, Kansas 2 and Jersey 3. Apparently the presence......

Tonight at the Central Seattle Public Library, Tim Westergren, founder of music software company/massive audio archive/internet radio service Pandora, hosts a public forum on his business model and the state of digital music as a whole. This get-together is a free event, open to everyone. It's a chance for me to share our story with you and hear what you have to say. I'll tell you about the Music Genome Project's beginnings, living through......

This past weekend turned out to be the perfect time to head to The Methow Valley, which is way out east of North Cascades National Park. The crowds were thin after Memorial Day weekend, the weather was beautiful (but hot) and the drive was amazing. Any trip Seattlest takes usually involves checking out local brewpubs, and often some wineries (gasp!). With that in mind, we made sure to look up directions to Winthrop Brewing......

It's not only the anniversary of Mt. St. Helens exploding, it's also the event of a much more unexpected event: On May 18, 1992, for the very first time, a girl allowed 15-year-old Seattlest Seth to kiss her. If that isn't a shameless excuse for a Seattlest roundtable, what is? And so we present...Seattlest's first kiss: Seattlest Seth It was a high school bike trip to Lopez Island. The girl and I and some of......

It seems every blogger in the Pacific Northwest is singing the praises of the Seattle Art Museum after their reopening. It'd be fun to be the contrary voice that slams the whole affair but really, we don't have it in us - we loved the SAM this weekend as well, so chalk this one up in the "yay" column. As soon as we heard about the fact that SAM was staying open 24 hours, we......

Pretend for a moment that you work the circulation desk at a Seattle branch library. A patron asks you to change the information on his account. He's moving, so you change the address. And he asks you to change his default pickup branch to a new, rather distant location. From, say, North East to Rainier Beach. While you're doing this, you notice that he's got 18 hold requests already placed in the system. Pop quiz:......

Monday BOOK CRUSH: Librarian Nancy Pearl´s latest book is Book Crush, a guide to books you loved when you were growing up. How does she know? Head over to the launch party and find out. 7-8:30pm // Seattle Central Public Library Microsoft Auditorium // FREE PETER BEAGLE SPEAKS: For the Fantastic Fiction Salon, fantasy author Peter Beagle (The Last Unicorn, Tamsin, and The Innkeeper's Song) teaches "Dialogue Says it All." 7pm // Hugo House......