Results tagged “olympics”

It is Vancouver, our international neighbor to the North, that has been smelling the garbage piles filling up their region's landfills. To deal with the looming garbage issue, Vancouver's Metro voted to export its overflowing garbage to the U.S. (including Washington State). With easy access to rail transportation, it's no wonder why select Washington landfills are being considered as one of Canada's newest contracted dumping sites. Now will our landfills feel the brunt of Vancouver's 2010 Olympics waste, too? Here in the U.S. we have enough trash to deal with, including the nation's reported 64.5 percent of garbage which ends up into landfills--and we recycle.

Seattlest needed a brief reprieve from the city, so we headed east on Highway 2 for three hours to the Bavarian-themed tourist mecca of Leavenworth: a perma-Christmas wonderland of knickknack shops featuring more dipping sauce stores than actual tax-paying residents.

Don't get us wrong. We like the Olympics, even though we're a lady. We enjoy watching sports. We loved seeing Sue Bird smack Lauren Jackson down on Saturday. That was hott. Jackson played her unfortunate ankle off (we'll miss her for the rest of the season!), but the rest of her team just didn't deliver. The U.S. team was too in charge of the court—whether playing defense or offense—and wound up winning by almost 30 points. BAM!

Storm forward Lauren Jackson has opted for surgery on her right ankle immediately after she finishes play in the Olympics, effectively ending her season with the WNBA franchise. The Storm are 17-9 heading into the final weeks of play in the 2008 season. League play was halted due to the Olympics. Jackson will be out 4-6 weeks and has an outside chance of returning for the playoffs.

• Torontoist featured video of an absolutely insane series of explosions at a propane facility in the north end of the city last weekend.
• Despite an eventful week at the Olympics, Phillyist focused on local, Philadelphia teams.
• Seattlest, freshly aware of their "Junior High Readability Level," implemented a new weekly feature spotlighting a local they’re totes crushing on. First up, a guy they met at the Seattle Tattoo Expo.

Seattlest’s Olympic correspondent Mark Siano has been hard at work in Beijing getting the stories that you won’t hear about anywhere else.

Every four years, Seattlest settles in on the first Sunday evening of the Olympics for a heart-warming few hours in front of the TV with our female gymnastics team. It's tradition, like apple pie and hot dogs. These girls ooze America, with their ponytails, cherubic smiles, and noses like buttons.

Since the Olympics have eschewed nudity to the point that even male swimmers are wearing unitards now, this weekend's "Shorts vs. Shirts" game at Cal Anderson Park will have to satisfy your nude athletics craving. The gist of this soccer game is that one team will be wearing just shorts and another team will be wearing just shirts. You must wear one, but you can't wear both. Men on the Shirts only team can wear underwear or thongs, but it must show skin. The match starts tomorrow at 10 a.m., where we imagine early risers will be rewarded...either with good views or eager cheering fans.

That feeling of oppression, smog, and soy sauce in the air can only mean one thing; the Beijing Olympics are underway.

As if Blayne wasn't enough for us, Project Runway is kicking up the Seattle street cred tonight when the gayest reality show on God's green earth crams both West Seattle's pride and joy and our own Olympic® hero Apollo Ohno together in one big gay hour. (To be fair and to avoid lawsuits, we'll admit that Ohno is not gay.) We imagine the designers will have to design something for the ice rink—appropriate, given crazy high temperatures across the nation and the start of the summer Olympics® coming up this Friday. But, any excuse to see muscle-clad men in high fashion unitards is fine by us.

If this sounds snarky and needlessly mean-spirited, just blame the Chinese. In any event, the marketing wizards at McCormick & Schmick decreed that there would be cocktails with an Olympics theme, so the "Red White & Blue Martini" came into being.

dogs.

• Gothamist was shocked when someone scaled the 52-story New York Times building's exterior on Thursday. And then Gothamist was shocked again when a second person scaled the building six hours later.

• Continue reading "Week Around the Ists"

Seattlest keeps waiting and waiting for the right weekend to head out for our inaugural hike of 2008. There are few things we love more than hiking through the cool misty forests of Cedars and Doug Firs; the monotony of one-foot-in-front-of-the-other up a mountain brings us a zen calm. After driving through the mountains for Memorial Day weekend, we were feeling especially itchy to head out on the trail. But we are going to have to wait, just like every other eager would-be hiker.

It's Idol Gives Back week on American Idol this week, which means tonight's theme is "Songs That Inspire You." We know it's too late for Kristy Lee Cook to choose a song—if she doesn't have a good one in the pocket already, she loses. But, we have a brilliant idea for her, even though we know Randy "The Dawg" Jackson wouldn't be too thrilled with us. Here's our suggestion for what our local cutie can pull off tonight and save herself a place in the Top 7:

Clinton is up by a smidge in Texas, it's neck and neck in Ohio, and Rush Limbaugh fans are going big for Hillary.

"Calyx forgle snapshot," said MacGowan. "Ember dunk Seattle?" He heaved out a dry, wheezy conniption of a laugh, sounding like that evil little animal on the Laff-Olympics. "Gorgon hoodle Pearl Jam." How old is he, whispered a young woman to her date, who shrugged. "I'm a free born man of the USA!" screamed the crowd when the song came around, hysteria crackling in their voices. Some just wailed out wordless emphasis.

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 excellent news for mountain bikers.

Today is "BC Day" in Canada, commemorating the moment of victory when Canadians finally liberated themselves from the Indians. Because of this unfair "three day weekend" tactical advantage, Canadian surfer and skateboard punks swarmed Westport to such a degree that the Seattle contingent was pitifully outnumbered and forced to surrender their beaches like Germans on D-Day.

Our transit eggs are currently in one basket, and here it is:

Through June 10 // McCaw Hall // Tickets $18-$145

We've seen a lot of dangerous places in Seattle to ride a bike (Dexter, 15th, the Burke-Gilman) and at each of those we've either come close to clipping bikes with our car or nearly rode straight over them with our bus. There's only one place in the city that Seattlest can never remember a near miss with a bicycle, or ever even considered that someone on a bike might be a potential road hazard we'd have to deal with. Other cars, potholes, the too-close-for-comfort guard rails, the fantastic view of the Olympics, cataclysmic seismic activity: those we've successfully navigated on this route, but never a dude on a bike. Certainly never a peloton of death-defiers in the middle of the night, whooping it up and mugging for the camera...

Wonder why we need to spend $100 million to renovate Garfield High? Because Garfield gives the world things like this:

Trail Blazers guard Brandon Roy was chosen as the NBA's Rookie of the Year on Wednesday after leading all rookies with averages of 16.8 points, 4.0 assists and 35.4 minutes in 57 games.

Continue reading "Brandon is ROY"

With the sun out, the temperatures high, one can only think of one thing-- what's going on in the World of the -ist's?

There's another "Pineapple Express" coming--that means heavy rain and warmth, as well as potential flooding as high-elevation rain washes newly-melted melted snow into lakes and streams. It also means that if you are a total pussy like us, you'll cancel your weekly Sunday morning trip to the zoo.

Spring appears to have, er, sprung, at least temporarily, in most of the Ist-A-Verse, so naturally, we're all feeling pretty good. (Yes, we know that spring doesn't start till later this month. Just let us enjoy our weather!) And that makes us that much more eager to share all of the nifty things we're up to...

BEE: Re-Bar's spelling bee is back after last month's finals. Seattle Weekly writer Gavin Borchert won last time around, spelling words like "festschrift," "cockalorum," and "samadhi" correctly.

We don't often attend sporting events voluntarily. But when a blood relation is competing, we not only decide to show up, we figure we'll plug the event. Especially because it's free sports for spectators.

The air is incredible today. If we were at all competent we'd put up a picture that shows shockingly clear Olympics to the west, but get outside and see for yourself. Yeah, it's kinda cold, but the air is so clean and sharp we're about to take a long walk just for the sake of the breathing. We don't really know if this is scientifically accurate or if the cold just feels good on the lungs, but the Air Quality Index lists today as a good day in Seattle and ranks Aberdeen, Washington as one of the best places in the country to breath right now. Is this Alaskan air? Is this what it's like in Alaska all the time? Because this is nice.