Originally ran on January 3, 2007, and updated for January 2008. Since 2002 Seattleites have spent the first week of January asking themselves if this is the year a decision will finally be made on the Viaduct. When the governor announced last in March of 2006 that she would be making a decision by December, it looked like 2006 might finally be the year. Well, it took ten months for her to announce that we......

The Seattle Times is reporting, way at the top in an unlikable breaking news sentence (read: cub reporter with a police scanner), that there has been an accident involving the Mercer Streetcar. According to the bolded sentence paragraph, an SUV ran an intersection and collided with an empty streetcar at the corner of Mercer and Terry. If this is true every anti-streetcar hippie just got their second morning wood of the…morning. Exclusive Seattlest Video of......

You recall the other day we were mad as hell at the Washington State Ferries for running their boats until they rusted through, leaving everyone high and dry while new ones can be built. WSF is still dead to us, but Governor Gregoire could make our "holiday card" list if she keeps it up. First the viaduct course correction, now she's scrounged up $100 million to pay for three new ferries. Budget, schmudget! She's......

This Seattlest started his carpet-bagging campaign here about ten years ago, so maybe we have an imperfect understanding of the Fun Forest and it's cultural baggage. When we heard that the City Council had elected to raze the Fun Forest in 2009 our first reaction was "What?! They're clear-cutting the Wenatchee National Forest?!" But then we caught on, as we occasionally do, and realized they were talking about the little carnivalette that lives in Seattle......

Since this week's storm didn’t claim any lives in Seattle, most of us tend to think of the damage in terms of washed out images of I-5 and that Subaru in Golden Gardens. The cost of reconstruction and flood repair will surely be depressing but not as depressing as the quotes from some of the farmers that had to watch hundreds of their own animals die. "I saved as many as I could," Osborn said.......

The Seattle School District paid some education Ph.Ds to assess the district's gifted program, the Advanced Placement Program (APP). [Full Disclosure: We were in APP (then called "IPP") from 1st-8th grade.] The Ph.Ds produced a report containing a bunch of observations that are incomprehensible to anyone that isn't a Ph.D., such as the need for "socio-emotional counseling" and "overall curricular vision." [Full Disclosure: In IPP we had this goofy slogan that went "You pee-pee, I......

Ah, football. We love it. It’s easily our favorite sport to watch as it gets our usual docile selves all fired up and yelling at the television every week. Basketball, even with its fast pace and high scoring, is a bore. And baseball? Baseball is almost as fun to watch as golf or the Lifetime channel. But for all of football’s glory, there remains its biggest upset. Which is that it’s one of those high-testosterone......

We don't claim to be an expert on male attractiveness, but if forced to rank television personalities by hotness or notness--well, let's just say that Bill Nye, "The Science Guy", would be closer to Willard Scott than to Matt Lauer. Nevertheless, women--even intelligent, attractive ones--are not immune to Nye's charms (whatever they may be). Take the case of Grammy-nominated oboist, former Stanford professor, and author Blair Tindall (at right). Tindall and Nye were married in......

From the PI this morning: "Three shot inside Capitol Hill club." Apparently, a fight broke out on Sugar's dance floor around 1:30am; three people were injured, and police aren't saying much more than that. Someone was firing a gun inside the club, so this isn't one of those ambiguous cases of violence within fifty feet of the club doors. The night's event was Sin Sunday, an 18/21+ weekly event featuring a DJ spinning hip-hop and......

Is a new front opening up in the Culture Wars? Seattle school officials say no, but King 5's producers not-so-subtly imply yes. "A letter from the Seattle School District is raising some eyebrows about Thanksgiving and how it should be handled in the classroom," writes King 5 News' Eric Wilkinson. "The letter tells school district staff that the holiday is seen by many Native Americans as a 'time of mourning.'" Specifically, the letter cites this......

The protests being staged at the port down in Olympia by the Port Militarization Resistance seem like a huge operation when you read the papers: Police wearing riot gear fired pepper spray projectiles into a crowd of more than 150 protesters Tuesday night at the Port of Olympia, and several military convoys eventually moved out. Olympia police spokesman Dick Machlan said 43 people were arrested and then released while prosecutors decide whether to charge them.......

We were rushing between shows on Capitol Hill and Fremont last night when we pulled up to the Fremont Bridge and saw the big detour and BRIDGE CLOSED signs and our heart sank. The detour route meant driving across the Ballard Bridge, and if we'd known that, we'd have taken Eastlake to the University Bridge, instead of Westlake. Had we but known! Anyway, here's the schedule for the closings, so that you know:Tuesday, November 13......

We hear the insults. Bloggers are no-names. We are malcontents. We live in our parents' basements, practicing onanism like Tiger Woods practices putting. Well we have news for you, blogger-haters. Laugh no more, because a man who has the earned respect of many for his political activism and musical genius is joining our growing club. Krist Novoselic has started a blog. This hero of the 1990s, a man who had the courage to throw his......

Last week we mentioned that Seattle's WaMu was accused of colluding in a appraisal-inflation scheme. Today, Bloomberg reports that the fall-out has fallen: "Washington Mutual fell $4.04, or 17 percent, to $20.19 at 1:15 p.m. in composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest decline since the stock market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987." As a result, significant bets are being made:The risk of Washington Mutual defaulting on its debt soared to the......

In an oh-so-scientific survey, a "national emerging health care discount service" we'll decline to name (take that, PR flacks!) discovered that the most caffeinated city in the country out of 20 is ... Chicago! We don't make the top 5 there, but Seattle/Tacoma is number one in coffee consumption -- apparently we've mastered Starbucks lingo enough to order decaf on a regular basis. "58 percent of residents surveyed [said] this elixir of alertness would be......

There is something seriously wrong in this city right now. The fight between drivers and bicyclists has been brewing for years, but recently it seems to be reaching a boiling-over point. It pushes what we consider to be sane people, on both sides of the argument, into a state of rage that we honestly find a bit frightening. It needs to stop (and by stop we don't mean that we want to see a bunch......

Starring Michael Caine as Clay Bennett Steve Martin as the Seattle SuperSonics and Sonic Fans as Uncle Ted.......

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo claims a subsidiary of First American Corp., eAppraiseIT, has been generating inflated appraisals for First American and Seattle mortgage-lender WAMU. This would represent collusion and would be what's technically known as "illegal." Unfortunately for everyone involved who wanted to keep their job, Cuomo has emails that say things like: eAppraiseIT's president told First American: "We view this as a violation of the OCC, OTS, FDIC and USPAP influencing regulation."And:......

David Copperfield may think he can make the word "no" disappear, but it's going to be for a grand jury to decide. A federal grand jury is looking into a 21-year-old Washington woman's claim that Copperfield raped her at his private, 150-acre resort in the Bahamas. The story she tells is pretty amazing...we hesitate to use the word "incredible," because if it's true she's endured something terrifying. She says she was approached almost immediately after......

The sale of Capitol Hill's Odd Fellows Hall is to close in early January 2008. The 4-story building at 915 East Pine Street has been home to a number of Seattle arts groups, including Velocity Dance and Freehold, and the Century Ballroom. The memo from Redside Partners says:Our intent is to update the building systems while retaining and/or restoring much of the original charm the Odd Fellows intended almost 100 years ago. Significant changes in......

So we all know the world is going to hell in a hand basket, right? The climate's changing, San Diego is burning to the ground and we're at war because the president lied to Congress. Things are bad. But every once in awhile you come across someone who is doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do. Dan Freeman is one of those guys. He runs Dr. Dan's Alternative Fuelwerks and sells......

Did you know that there's only one credible real-estate industry voice in Seattle? It's a marketing firm in town that works with real estate developers. We've learned this from reading Aubrey Cohen's real estate reporting in the Seattle P-I. Here's a search on articles containing the exact phrase "Williams Marketing" -- they're quoted in at least one article per month since last November. (Who are the schmoes paying the P-I for ads when there's so......

One way not to get Seattlest's vote is to endanger our life, like city council candidate Venus Velazquez did on Wednesday night while she was giving a whole new meaning to "Ballard drivers." We, like Velazquez, were driving in Ballard that night. After leaving a show at the Tractor, we got in our trusty Saturn and rolled up 20th N.W. to Market, where we hung a right. Thank Jesus, we hung our right about 15......

Peter Steinbrueck, a soon-to-be--former City Council member, announced legislation today that would require all city departments that review the environmental impacts of projects to take greenhouse gas emissions into account. Besides the fact that it's kind of crazy that they don't already do that, we think this is a great idea. It's great because it's an attempt to take into account and limit all of those emissions that are usually ignored as too hard to......

Seattlest likes parks. Especially the big ones with plenty of room for family picnics, Frisbee, flag football and lots and lots of gay sex. Seriously, Mr. Need-It-Now, can you not find another, less child-scarring place for business time? Seattle is home to a number of wonderful hotels. And what about camping? That's romantic, right? Okay, maybe it's not romance you're after. Maybe it's just fucking. That's cool. But why a public park? The outdoor thing?......

In New York, a place where we once lived, recycling does not--despite being mandatory--actually happen. Example--in our office building in the Flatiron District, we had, as mandated by law, little blue waste receptacles where you deposited only paper. But when the janitor came around, he emptied those blue receptacles into the same garbage bag where he dumped all the other trash. So perhaps it was to inspire the locals The New York Times ran a......

We failed to notice yesterday, among all the hubub over Councilman Richard McIver's arrest on domestic violence charges, a post from Seattle Weekly political reporter Aimee Curl. McIver remains in jail and has claimed he'll be pleading "not guilty" to the charges. Columnist Robert Jamieson Jr. is taking him to task in today's P-I stating, "For his sake, that stance had better just be a legal formality before coming clean -- or a typo. Otherwise,......

Rich vs. Poor, Renters vs. Homeowners, developers vs. locals, Kenny G. vs. Afropop: this blog from High Point has got every one of Seattle's little conflicts all crammed into one tiny teacup. High Point in West Seattle was redeveloped recently to include some moderately priced homes along with a bunch of rent-control-type lower-income housing. We all get along when we live on the same street, right? Well, not quite, of course. Danny Westneat gave......

Seattlest's favorite crime (just edging Identity Theft) strikes again, this time in one of Seattlest's favorite places. A copper theft at Snoqualmie Pass temporarily disabled highway signs and safety lighting, which had to suck for people navigating the pass in the middle of the night. Don't mistake the fact that copper theft is Seattlest's favorite crime with Seattlest being in favor of the crime. It's bad and dangerous and taxpayers lose. Why is it our......

Remember SimCity? Seattlest had some incredible towns built in that game, with commercial and residential districts packed full of shiny, tall towers and trains and street traffic all flowing as effortlessly as rivers. Scroll way over to the left to the edge of the city grid; now that is a healthy industrial district, perfectly bisected by a pollution-eating green belt. The landmarks sprouted everywhere and the money and accolades poured in. Of course, it took......