Dead Baby Bike Race after-party photo by Sea Kay My Ballard and Phinney Wood shared a post on the annual Dead Baby Bike Race. With the recent fear-mongering regarding bicyclists in the local media--the bike race could likely have not come at a worse time. We're sure already freaked out Subaru drivers, aren't thrilled to think of the idea of a crudely named (see: hilarious) bike race that celebrates "Mutant Bike Culture."Rejoice Francophiles and hipsters......

Today there is an extra skip in our step, and song in our whistle. All across Arizona pitchers and catchers are reporting to work, which means Spring Training is underway. [Large sigh of happiness] The Seattle Times’ Geoff Baker has this glorious day covered on his blog, including the news that Eric Bedard has been named the Opening Day starter. Larry Stone can catch you up on what you have may have missed during......

The February performance of Eve Ensler's Vagina Monologues is commonplace in cities across America. In Seattle, "V-Day" will be celebrated with a performance on February 24th at The Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI). Sponsoring the event is the Seattle Office of The National Council of Jewish Women. To advertise the performance, The Council produced the colorful print you see to the right. The advertisement is running in The Seattle Weekly and JT News,......

Today SIFF hosts the Seattle opening of the documentary The Rape of Europa, about the efforts to save art stolen and/or desecrated by the Nazis in the runup to and during WWII. The Stranger loves it. The Seattle Times loves it. By all accounts, Seattlest shouldn't be as excited by this movie as we are, but we find something poetic about the preservation of culture in the face of war. For now we'll leave you......

Are you guys watching this race? Incredible! Super Tuesday has officially come and gone, delegates divided, $250 million in campaign money spent, and still no Democratic frontrunner in sight. We at Seattlest are beside ourselves and while we may never understand the logic behind superdelegates we do know this: Washington is going to have a big say in how this race is decided. This Saturday, Washingtonians will caucus with 80 Democratic delegates up for......

Seattle Police have another guy in custody in regards to the killing of Shannon Harps, and this time it seems like it's actually the guy who did it. The Seattle Times says that his DNA matches that found at the scene. Perhaps the scariest detail is that it seems like the two were complete strangers. "They had no previous contact to our knowledge," said Deputy Chief Clark Kimerer. He was found already in jail on......

The Seattle Times' Jim Brunner points out a head-exploding irony in the Sonics' legal case to escape their Key Arena lease. For a lifetime, we've heard professional sports owners trot out the argument that we ought to pay for their arenas because they provide an economic benefit to the community. Think of the waiters, the parking attendants, the ushers and all the people that make money when the team plays. Or don't--they'd be getting their......

We're not actually gloating over WaMu's travails -- there are too many lives involved likely to be disrupted. But there's no denying the majesty with which its home loan mortgage unit steered into the subprime iceberg. The Seattle Times headline reads: "WaMu posts first quarterly loss in a decade," thanks to a $1.78 billion writedown by the home loaners. Oddly, the bigger news -- "For the full year, WaMu reported a $67 million loss —......

The Seattle Times breaks the story of just how diseased college sports fans have become. The newspaper got about 1,000 emails that Husky fans sent to University of Washington president Mark Emmert, athletic director Todd Turner, and coach Ty Willingham through a public records request. At least 100 emails, say Times reporters Nick Perry, Bob Condotta, and Ken Armstrong, included threats of withholding financial support. But an email from Ed Hansen, founder of Frontier......

The snow started to fall in earnest around 4 o'clock yesterday, so we cut the family visit short and headed back up toward Seattle -- it was slow going but eventually the snow changed to sleet and then to rain. Up around Federal Way, traffic came to a halt, though the road was clear. We searched on "I-5 traffic" from our phone, and right away the KOMO story on the shooting came up. We were......

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......

When have you gotten your money back on a ferry purchase? After 20 years? 40? 60? How about 80? Washington State Ferries still had plans to fix at least three 80-year-old ferries before the magnitude of their decay was uncovered. Now, because WSF never imagined the day would come when the ferries would have to be replaced, it'll be a year or more before new ferries can be built and car-ferry service returned. Our favorite......

Husky football coach Ty Willingham--who's status as coach was the focal point of heated debate--will be back the Huskies in 2008, reports The Seattle Times via "a source." We highly recommend reading the Dawgman football message board for the rest of the afternoon, it should be extremely entertaining. Just a sample: "Have fun with Ty, maybe I'll check a box score or two as we have our 6th straight losing season and Ty puts......

All mass transit is not created equal; here in Seattle, a city with buses and, well, nothing else, unless you're specifically talking with someone about monorail or lightrail or streetcars (you know, theoretical mass transit), when you're talking about supporting mass transit, you're talking about supporting buses. And buses suck. Last week, Erica C. Barnett had a column in The Stranger that spoke to our experience riding the bus to and from work daily: It's......

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......

This afternoon at two o'clock the city council will vote on proposed new nightclub regulations, bitterly opposed by Seattle's entertainment industry. Yet even as the council prepares for the vote, controversy continues to swirl over SPD's nightclub sting op from Saturday, Sept. 8. This morning, The Seattle Times reported on inaccuracies in its article from a week age today on elements of the sting operation, including the disputed claim that a gun made it......

To mark Stevie Wonder’s first tour in a decade and his stop at the Chateau Ste Michelle Winery down the road in Woodland, our compadres over at The Seattle Times invited its readers take their "Stevie Wonder Quiz" in their Monday edition. Having fond memories of one Stevland Hardaway Judkins as this funky white blog’s first introduction to Motown, funk and the ever –ambiguous “R&B”, Seattlest curiously accepted The Times’ challenge to find out just......

The cold wind of actual necessity is blowing up Seattle's skirt. Much like our childhood erector-set constructions, the Viaduct has a certain amount of "give" in it (though hopefully not due to the same reason: our dislike of tightening every single nut on things we were just going to take apart anyway), but the news last week that it has sunk 5 inches at its saggiest point has bells going off because 6 inches is......

There was a lot of talk on the blogs last week about newly-released census data that highlighted the 23% of Washington residents that get to work by means other than riding in a car alone. Seattle is in the top ten US cities in walking to work, taking the bus to work and biking to work (although not in carpooling) all of which are impressive and encouraging. There is an element of spin to all......

So, the saga of the University of Washington's emergency medicine tests--conducted on patients in emergency situations, without informed consent--continues. Since Carol Ostrom published a story on the subject on June 3 in The Seattle Times, a quiet storm has been brewing. On June 6, Ostrom followed up with a report on the overwhelming number of requests for "opt-out" bracelets researchers had received following her story (the Resuscitation Outcomes Consortium, the parent organization running the study......

We knew Bremerton residents were the step-chilins of the Washington State Ferry System, but now that wireless access for the 55-minute run has been delayed again we're starting to suspect a conspiracy. Bainbridge has been happily browsing away on their 30-minute jog since like the mid-nineties or something, but can Bremerton catch any of that wifi gold? Hell no. At least not until July at the earliest. Of course, the Rich Passage is the......

Hollywood's fascination with all the terrible things Westerners do in Africa has always been a little cloying. Did anyone actually need to see Blood Diamond to get the point? Then there was The Constant Gardener, which melodramatized the all too real phenomenon of American and European drug companies finding it more expedient (if more ethically questionable) to do research on poorly educated and ill informed Third World subjects. Turns out, Hollywood could just as well......

SonicsCentral pointed us to this story from the Daily Oklahoman, where Clay Bennett is as explicit as ever about his desire to move the Sonics:"For now, without a building solution, it's our intent to play in Seattle and apply for relocation immediately after the (Oct. 31) deadline."It's good that Bennett's finally declared his intentions, NBA-backers can now prepare for the big fight. The Sonics' lease, signed after we taxpayers remodeled the Coliseum for them, runs......

The Seattle Times tries to put a happy face on the news that the Seattle Symphony is projecting an accumulated $5.5 million deficit by pointing out that ticket sales are up. But the troubling fact remains that over the past three years the deficit has grown from $1 million, to $3.2 million, to $5.5 million. For an annual budget of around $21 million, a deficit of $5.5 million is remarkable. It's true that the......

Seattle will continue to have two daily newspapers, at least for the immediate future. It sounds like both papers were unwilling to leave things entirely in the hands of the arbitrator who was set to deliver a binding verdict on the dispute: They settled with each other and the terms include the Times buying the P-I out of JOA stipulation that the smaller paper would continue to receive revenue in the event that that paper......

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,......

According to our inbox, Norsemen have taken our local broadband/VoIP provider! Minnesota's Best Buy just announced it dropped $97 million on the purchase of Speakeasy. But as Speakeasy CEO Bruce Chatterley says in the email to us loyal Speakeasy customers: It is important to note that though Speakeasy will now be a wholly owned subsidiary of Best Buy, we will continue to operate as a standalone, independent operating division with headquarters in Seattle. That's......

MUSICALS: Camelot opens with previews tonight--the barely-recognizable celebrity they've pressganged into the production is Michael York, who you know from Austin Powers. 7:30pm // 5th Avenue Theatre // $20-63 BOOKS: Speaking of barely-recognizable celebrities, ex-MASH star Mike Farrell reads tonight from his memoir Just Call Me Mike: A Journey from Actor to Activist--it's a sequel to his disappointing first memoir, The Name Is *Mister* Farrell, You Disgusting Little Toad: A Journey from Actor to Activist......

The advisory vote on the Viaduct is in and a crushing defeat has been issued to the “No and Hell No” campaign by write-in candidate “Hell No and No.” With strong turnouts in West Seattle, Magnolia and Capitol Hill, voters voiced their opinion on the mayor’s tunnel: as of 11:30pm, 69.88% responded in the negative to a tunnel-surface hybrid--a dramatic “Hell No” in our book. And voters rejected the elevated structure alternative with a less......

Starbucks CEO and former Sonics owner Howard Schultz is memorandizing about "the watering down of the Starbucks experience." We'd like to hear what he has to say about the bigoting up of the Seattle experience. He and his ownership group refused to accept the responsibility of owning a municipal institution like the Sonics and Storm. Instead of ponying up money for the arena he said he needed, Schultz sold the basketball team of the city......