Photo of One Be Lo by Kyle Johnson. One Be Lo, a nationally acclaimed independent hiphop artist hailing from Pontiac, Michigan, is fond of our city. "In Seattle, I get an epiphany every day," he says, recounting his insights gleaned from dining with local Vietnamese families and browsing through the shelves of the Emerald City’s bookstores. The emcee leans in closer. "Seattle’s giving me my second wind." An avid learner and frequent public speaker,......

No, Seattlest is not just a fan of alliteration and 80's slang, as the headline might suggest. Burying the beef, is the current plan of the Seattle Public School District to rid itself of 230 cases of possibly contaminated beef. The beef, provided to school districts through a USDA lunch program, came from a California slaughterhouse in the center of the largest beef recall in USDA history. Nearly two-thirds of the school districts in......

"The Next Slum" is the name of the article in the March Atlantic (not online yet), and Seattle gets lots of mentions. Author Christopher Leinberger, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, argues that as demographics and energy use changes over the next 15-20 years, there will be a growing surplus of large-lot homes that no one wants, decaying on the market. While there should be about four million more households with kids in 2025......

Stealing Seattle's basketball team apparently isn't keeping Sonics owner Aubrey McClendon busy, so he's found another community to screw over: tiny Saugatuck, Michigan. That's the Denison Dunes--413 acres of pristine shoreline where the Kalamazoo River meets Lake Michigan. Saugatuck's citizens have long wanted to add the land to an adjacent state park, but McClendon has other plans--building a gated community for millionaires. The Concerned Citizens for Saugatuck State Park lament:Mr. McClendon, with the resources of......

Eaten: An onion burger and brick of fries. Do you see that whiteboard to the right there? That’s the straw poll that the Republican booth in an exhibition hall at the Puyallup Fair has been conducting during the event. Fred Thompson by a landslide. He has more than twice the votes of Rudy G., his closest challenger, and three times the votes of Romney who just won a Michigan straw poll, yet we barely know......

The Seattle Times has a quickie little snippet about some ski resort ownership swapping, namely that Boyne USA has bought the Summit at Snoqualmie from Booth Creek. At first we were a little concerned, namely because Booth Creek has a great track record from a customer service perspective, especially when they extended our season's pass for free after the disastrous winter of 05-06. But after a little more research, we're very excited because this is......

At work the other day, Seattlest was talking to a coworker and friend who originally hails from Minnesota. Naturally, we talked of the bridge collapse. As one would expect these sorts of conversations to go, the conversation logically ended with us looking up the coordinates for the northernmost point in Maine. Just how did this happen? In the course of conversion, it came up that Minnesota, not Maine, is the northernmost contiguous United State. So......

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......

We were delighted to find out that offerings from Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales have hit the shelves in your better beer stores around Seattle. We would not be surprised if very few people in Seattle have heard of this small brewery out of Dexter, Michigan; let alone tried their beer. Jolly Pumpkin takes pride in producing small batches of Belgian inspired beers, which are all aged in oak barrels and bottle conditioned (Except for......

Yes, this story about some sad sack of a cop and his wife in Michigan is a few days old, but the really enjoyable aspect of this news item comes to you courtesy of Seattle's own Q13 Fox news. Enjoy.......

Seattlest is too cool for the Gap and too busy for thrift. How's a thirty-something guy to dress himself, then? We handle it by wearing the same two pairs of jeans and the same four shirts in different configurations every day. Then, once a year, when we're in Chicago to visit family and friends we make a point to get to H&M downtown to replace two of our shirts. Right now we're kind of hurting--the......

More snow--today's games are postponed. they'll play a doubleheader on Sunday, and try to make the third game up during an off day later in the season. Geoff Baker reports that a Cleveland paper described Hargrove's heroics last night thusly: "Hargrove pulled an invisible rabbit from his cap and somehow persuaded the umpires to feed it carrots." In other news: --Oregon State isn't OSU anymore, they are OS. It's an attempt to trick recruits into......

Monday THAT STARBUCKS "I WAS A CHILD SOLDIER" GUY: At twelve, Ishmael Beah found himself fleeing rebels, wandering from village to village. At thirteen, he was a soldier in Sierra Leone, hooked on drugs and capable of things he would never have imagined. Now, rehabilitated and living in the U.S., he tells his story in A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, in an attempt to raise awareness of the child soldier......

This week the Washington State Senate is deciding whether to make Washington to the first state in the nation to ban the fire retardant deca-BDE [ESHB 1024]. (The House, where Jamie Pedersen was a sponsor, passed the bill this February.) [UPDATE: Rep. Ross Hunter writes to point out that he's the bill's primary sponsor -- there are over 50 "We're with ya, Ross" sponsors, including Pedersen and some guy named Upthegrove. In Ross's honor,......

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:......

President Gerald Ford's memorial service is today, we thought we'd present these remarks Ford (shown here with George Harrison) made about Seattle upon his visit here as president on September 4th, 1975. Not the most interesting reading, but they seem extemporaneous and are perhaps a good snapshot of what one president thought when he thought of Seattle in the 70s: fish, Boeing, and international trade:It is really wonderful to be in Seattle, and I......

Back before college football got completely screwed up, the Huskies were a national power. You laugh, but it's true. They even won a National Championship in 1991, and the greatest player on that team was Steve Emtman. In fact, he was the probably the best player in college football that season. However, since defensive lineman don’t win Heismans, he settled for the Outland Trophy and Lombardi Award. Emtman was the overall first pick in the......

How is that these one-man-play guys are so good at building sets? Are they really as good as it seems or is it Seattlest's imagination? Set designers bust ass for weeks to put something together and/or spend thousands of dollars and guys like Mark Pinkosh of Balagan Theater's "A Dangerous Age" just pull something out of the air from their perch on a blank stage. One minute on Saturday we were adjusting our drink on......

Local indie comics publisher Fantagraphics Books revealed last week that they'd be opening a brand-new company store in Seattle this Saturday. The new-car-smell storefront shares a space with Georgetown Records at 1201 South Vale Street, which is way, way, down there in the middle of nowhere near Michigan. The store will carry all of Fantagraphics in-print materials and have space for exhibitions. They've still got some empty space on the walls, but it appears......

Has Seattlest mentioned that we are in love with Sufjan Stevens? Yes, we love him, but it's totally not in a sexual way. Though we certainly appreciate his boyish good looks (and nicely toned arms), for us to touch someone with such wide-eyed childlike wonder would surely make us a pedophile. More than anything, we'd love to hold him close to our bosom, thereby protecting him from the cold, cruel world. Still, when a......

Reference help from the Seattle Public Library is going 24/7/365.25: The Seattle Public Library now has live online reference services around the clock. For anyone up after midnight cramming for a test, stuck at home and unable to get to a library branch or even on vacation with a laptop, the library is available. All that's needed is to go to www.spl.org, select "Ask a Librarian" and choose "Chat with a Librarian." The service is......

For some reason our collegiate system places very few demands on the time of its participants. Undergrads may not believe this, aspiring undergrads couldn't be convinced of it, but post-college types generally admit that those five years were scheduled pretty lightly. Not that there weren't commitments. Parties had to be attended. Frisbees had to be thrown. Bongs have evolved, but they have yet to smoke themselves. And there's no better environment for game playing than......

It seems that everyone in town is buzzing about Maya Lin's new exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery. Personally, we only really know Lin through her premiere memorial in DC, and, really, there is no denying the power and simplicity of that work. There is, however, great scope to her work. The Vietnam Memorial launched her career, but she is also responsible for another simple, powerful monument--the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Creating......

What can you say about the Seahawks yesterday? They dominated the Panthers on offense and defense. They held Steve Smith to 33 yards receiving and a disputed return touchdown. They didn't turn the ball over and they took the ball four times. All in all, their 34-14 win was the best performance by a local team in a big game since, well, since the Huskies' 34-14 win over Michigan in the 1992 Rose Bowl. 34-14......

The emerging storyline of Sunday's NFC Championship game is whether the Seahawks defense can stop the Panthers' Steve Smith. The buzz about Smith strikes us as familiar--he's a small-statured receiver who is the focal point of his team's offense--a brash, competitive player who runs reverses, breakout screens, and catches long passes. It's just what the undefeated Huskies heard before the 1992 Rose Bowl about Michigan's Heisman Trophy winner, Desmond Howard. Husky corner Dana Hall, we......

Here in Seattle, it's a slow sports day. The only major local team in action is the Husky women's basketball team, who host Michigan tonight. It's high school basketball night, but there aren't any particularly compelling matchups. It's such a slow day, in fact, that the P-I's Jim Moore decided to fill his column space speculating on who Seattle's Sexiest Athletes are. Included with the article--a staggeringly unflattering picture of the Seattle Storm's Sue Bird......

The Huskies beat #6 Gonzaga last night, ending a seven-game losing streak to the Zags and proving that, despite losing three top scorers from last year, this year's Husky team is worthy of national attention. No thanks to the Husky student section, however. The rabid students, some of whom camped out for two days to get tickets to this in-state rivalry, chanted "take a shower" and "shave your moustache" at Gonzaga's funny-looking junior forward Adam......

When this week began, wrestler Eddie Guerrero and TV pioneer Ralph Edwards were both alive. No one outside Steel Country had heard of Rep. John Murtha, and Bob Woodward still had credibility. Next week is really only three days, so probably nothing will happen. Thus, we at Seattlest intend to enjoy ourselves over the weekend. Seth's going to the Ballard JazzWalk tonight. Two performers he's looking forward to seeing: Dawn Clement, an inventive young pianist,......

After playing poorly in the Sonics' first two games, fourth-year guard Ronald "Flip" Murray is going to be getting considerably more pine time. But, with Rick Brunson out with what could be a chronic injury, the Sonics need a point guard to spell Luke Ridnour. Friday, coach Bob Weiss plumbed the depths of his bench and brought Mateen Cleaves into the game during prime time. Yes, that's the same Mateen Cleaves that led Michigan State......

This weekend, for the first time in a month, the Mariners played like a good baseball team, winning a series from NL-West leading San Diego. On Saturday, the stars led the way. On defense, Ichiro stole a home run from Ryan Klesko with a leaping grap at the rightfield wall. On offense, Adrian Beltre and Richie Sexson hit 440+ foot home runs on consecutive pitches in the sixth inning. On Sunday, Aaron Sele threw a......