You've got to be carefully taught. Not how to hate (that comes naturally) but how to love. The love of shopping, the love of getting and spending, this requires arduous training. Something few parents have time for these days because they're doing so much getting and spending themselves. Enter the Children's Museum, a 30-year-old institution for the families of Seattle's youngest, with over 20,000 square feet of exhibits at Seattle Center. Hands-on learning, open-ended......

Seattle fashionistas, get ready because your H&M prayers are being answered. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, in addition to its Southcenter location, ever-popular H&M will open two new stores in Seattle proper next month. A 19,000-square-foot, two-story location will open in University Village on Sept. 12 and a 16,000-square-foot location will open at 520 Pike St. in downtown Seattle one little week later, on Sept. 18.......

We've been doing our fair share of gushing over the new H&M store, but there's fashion doings to report closer to home (i.e., Capitol Hill), too. Under4Men is the name of the new men's underwear store that's opened up in the Loveless building at the north end of Broadway (on Broadway East, as a matter of geographic fact). We were walking by so we popped in to confirm that it is just the kind of......

"Here" meaning "Southcenter," but we'll take what we can get. The first (and largest) of three stores planned to open in the Seattle area this year, the Southcenter H&M opens at 10 a.m. today. It's part of the mall's big expansion, which features a whole mess of new stores and restaurants, making the Tukwila shopping center the largest indoor mall in Washington and Oregon. Recession be damned. Employees are anticipating a madhouse at the......

In one of those mysterious black-is-white, up-is-down occurrences, Mayor Greg Nickels and the City Council's Richard Conlin have in unison agreed to push for a $0.20 per paper-or-plastic bag fee at grocery and convenience stores and drugstores. While we're still trying to figure out what the vision is, we're aware that paying for bags bugs the hell out of a lot of people. Unsurprisingly, a new fee isn't popular except with people who already share......

Poets in particular seem to struggle with a bipolar mind, as discussed in Touched with Fire. But perhaps that visibility is just because they're poets, and inclined to make terrific material out of any experience. The new poetry anthology from Eastern Washington University, Living in Storms, shows no let-up to the harsh weather:Schramm has collected more than a hundred poems by some four-score contemporary poets whose lives have been affected in various ways by bipolar......

George Zimmer would not have liked what went down at the Tukwila Men's Wearhouse Wednesday evening. We guarantee it. Seattlest walked in with our fiancée. We knew we'd be accosted by a sales clerk, but our plan was to rebuff them and browse. Maybe ask about fit and fabrics. (We don't know suits from fine china.) Our plan fell apart when a female clerk—we'll call her Bitchy—pounced before the door closed behind us. (Reading......

It's a season of sales in Seattle's fabulous boutiques, making it a perfectly dreary, who-wants-to-be-outside-anyways month to break your assumption that boutiques are only for skinny, rich women. Deals are ready for the reaping, so grab your girls and head north of the Ship Canal, where some of our favorite boutiques reside. Here is a short selection of a few where you can find money-smart steals right now. FREMONT Dream (3427 Fremont) This "dreamy" place......

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......

Bellevue is entertaining its crazed shoppers and downtown urbanites with daily holiday drum lines, snowflake lights and snow (yes, fake snow). We have seen it with our own eyes, and it is as if you chasséd on stage of a live performance of the Nutcracker. Snowflake Lane is a Bellevue tradition and is going on now until December 24, beginning at 7 p.m. daily. If shopping under fake snow doesn’t get you excited, you......

This is the end, the end of free movies, care of Scion. Single tear. Via their Route film series, the youth-oriented car company has already tackled the true-to-life topics of blood diamonds in hip hop and nightclubbing in the late '80s NYC queer community. Now for something completely different: Daft Punk's Electroma is an odyssey of two robots who journey across a mythic American landscape of haunting, surreal beauty on a quest to become......

"You can't reinvent how to write a song," Robin Pecknold once said in an interview. "I don't listen to too much new music unless it adheres to tradition." Generally we might take that to mean Neil Young or Fleetwood Mac, but the polyphonic choral intros and sense of space to newer Fleet Foxes songs pull from early American hymns, maybe even monastic chants. The complicated multi-part harmonies have prompted Pecknold to start air conducting --......

Sometimes the world really is a beautiful place. Specifically when there's beer involved. Jack's meeting friends on Saturday for a session of oak-aged beer tasting at Brouwer's Big Wood Fest. He'll then spend the rest of the day rubbing his tum tum and smiling a lot. Thrilled about the possibility of the year's first snow fall, Kim will spend as much of the weekend as possible getting over the cold that's been lingering for a......

Ski season is, thankfully, here and Seattlest couldn't be more excited. In fact, even though our friends are completely lame and won't go with us, we're off to Crystal tomorrow to take advantage of cheap lift-ticket prices (and cause we're jonesing). For a variety of reasons though, we don't own any of our own equipment and are not yet ready to buy our own stuff. So before heading out to catch some early-season slope action,......

We're not going to fault Nordstrom's for their decision to ax the piano players in some stores. Instead, we'll blame Nordstrom customers, and their preference for new-fangled pop music. From the Seattle Times: Some Nordstrom department stores are discontinuing their live piano notes in favor of commercially recorded music piped in over speakers. Nordstrom's store at Bellevue Square recently did away with its pianist, and the Alderwood mall store in Lynnwood will soon follow suit,......

This weekend Mr. and Mrs. Seattlest drove out to North Bend to cut a Christmas tree down and haul it back to Seattle. No, we didn't hike up Si with an ax and harvest a sapling, although that does sound fun. There's a tree farm out there by the name of Crown Tree Farm. It was our first time getting a tree from anywhere other than those road-side dealies or the enclosures that pop......

Downtown at 6th & Pine we spotted Santa's Castle abutting Nordstrom's and an elf standing around with nothing to do, so we thought we'd point you to the web page with the hours of operation and photo costs, but the downtown Nordstrom's store site doesn't believe in Santa. He doesn't show up on their events list, which doesn't seem right. We mean, Santa didn't just build an extremely faux Bavarian castle-hut next to Nordstrom's without......

In the lobby of the ACT Theater, 25 minutes before curtain of A Christmas Carol, a pretty 20-something girl wearing a cute holiday sweater surveys the scene. Four Dickens Carolers are singing in lovely harmony. Children toddle by, then look back at the carolers, their eyes wide with wonder. Garland and lights are everywhere. The 20-something's face spreads into a wide smile. She turns to her boyfriend and stage-whispers: "I love this!" What's not to......

Today is the last day of the Evo Barnstorm Ski and Snowboard Sale. Seattlest went yesterday, and if we had not recently purchased our gear at full price at another store, (can we say refund?), we would have walked out with a trundle of supplies. Don’t worry about missing the goods because you are shopping the sale on the last day because from the looks of it yesterday, Evo has plenty of merchandise. From......

Thanksgiving doesn't allow for us Seattlesters to partake in our usual rock and roll lifestyles. Instead it's friends and family and mellow times about the house. Our drinking's liable to be more restrained and coordinated with a heavy meal of rich food. (Seattlest Geoff offered some choice beer recommendations earlier this week for those who've got a pit-stop planned on the way to grandmother's house tomorrow.) And according to the weather report, it's going to......

On our walk back up from the Pike Street Victrola the other day, we noticed a new store has arrived in the space that used to be a...what?...ethnic foods, was it? We always meant to go in and see. But we didn't. Not even during the "Going Out of Business" sale. God, it was awful. Some days the owner would come out and stand there, looking downhearted. Eventually we started looking for reasons to cut......

We're not yet convinced that the current War on Plastic Shopping Bags/Global Warming will stand the test of time, but we sure are intrigued that everyone everywhere seems to be trying to make the eco-friendly message stick (do you really think NBC's "Green Week" is destined for the history books? Neither do we.). We're feeling equally ambivalent about "Geography," the latest piece from local choreographer/composer duo Scott/Powell Production, premiering this weekend at On the Boards.......

Outfit called Not For Tourists has just published a guide to Seattle. It's a handsome book, looks just like Moleskine journal, complete with oilcloth cover, fat elastic closure, gorgeous paper. The Seattle version is tenth in a series, cobbled together by a design staff in faraway Noo Yawk with input by a locally based "city editor" named Fred Beldin, who contributes occasional music reviews to The Stranger. NFT Seattle starts out with a grid of......

Foul weather holds off until Sunday afternoon, leaving plenty of time under cool gray skies for Seattlest & friends to launch a Flexcar and sail out to the farm. Once we get past Redmond, the familiar trappings fall off: shopping malls, housing developments, the last Whole Foods, the last gas station & mini-mart. We ford the Tolt River at Carnation and sail into a vast theme park called Remlinger Farms. Indoors, a country market......

We're not very strong on commas -- maybe that should be "Our Post About Lunch, With Elizabeth Hurley"? Oh well! We had the chicken ciabatta ($9.95) at the Nordstrom's Grill. That's the lunch part. Wait, we had a cup of decaf, too. On our way in, we noticed all these people standing around the cosmetics department, not moving, which annoyed us because we were a little hypoglycemic and they were between us and our food.......

It seems Puget Sound Business Journal writer Jeanne Lang Jones might be a bit upset as she writes, “Now there's a further blow to Seattle fashionistas. The Bellevue Square Nordstrom is getting Prada (designer clothes as part of its remodel; the Seattle flagship store is not).” Jimmy Choo and Neiman Marcus will also be squatting in Bellevue, Jones notes. Honestly, do Prada, Jimmy Choo and Neiman Marcus really feel like Seattle brands? Does Seattle want......

The Mariners announced yesterday that Manager John McLaren and General Manager Bill Bavasi will both be back next year. McLaren took over in mid-season, the team was 40-41 under his guidance. 2008 will be Bavasi's fourth year as Mariners GM. Out in blogland, they've been calling for McLaren's head since the M's went on a 15 of 17 losing jag, one of the biggest collapses by a contending team in baseball history. The main complaint:......

For those (like Seattlest) who are too lazy to actually visit in person the South Lake Union coffee shop Kapow! to get their S.L.U.T. tee shirts (which they may or may not even have), they are now available online. Remember a week ago when the SLUT poster first appeared on Seattlest? A few days later the P-I, King5, the AP caught on. Joe Whatshisnuts from forty miles east of Boise is going to crack his......

Chicken broth-based soups are some of the ultimate comfort foods, and are especially good when sick. We love them all, from matzo ball soup (a.k.a. “Jewish penicillin”) to tortilla soup to good ol’ Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup (or, better yet, Chicken & Stars – our childhood favorite, though we shudder to think about the sodium content). Last week, Dishin’ lamented the lack of good xiao long bao in Seattle. This week, we decided to go......

It's the custom in Seattle to eschew the umbrella in favor of some kind of REI space-age jacket with a hood and bunch of rubberized and velcroed pockets, or maybe a hoodie if you're too cool for the North Face, but never an umbrella. "Umbrellas are for tourists" and all that, right? WRONG. Seattlest was dying for our umbrella this morning, picturing it fondly in the drawer of our desk at work where it's been......