The rugged terrain surrounding Ross Lake, courtesy of Flickr User Rich Sobel Usually, when we hear about people dying trying to cross the border, it is the other border being discussed. However, North Cascade National Park employees recently discovered the body of a man who died trying to walk across the Canadian border this winter. The body of 37-year-old Peter Kim was found on Friday by park employees who were clearing trails near Ross Lake.......

Seattlest is quaking in their boots (bought especially for the occasion) with excitement for this years SXSW in Austin, Tex. We're making our initial sojourn to the festival and are so pleased to see there will be a strong Seattle contingent joining us in Austin this year. There are, to our calculations, 29 Seattle bands officially associated with the festival this year. These bands will be playing sanctioned showcases, what we will call "the......

Sometimes, there is a local headline that brings us so much strange delight, that we must share it with you. Today's example comes from King 5.com: Owners of Rogue Monkey in Spokane Could Face Jail Time We are quite certain that we will never read such a headline again in a Pacific Northwest newspaper or website, so we're enjoying it tremendously. This is the monkey we told you about earlier this week, who went......

The Tacoma soldier who is accused of killing a fellow army couple and kidnapping their infant has been transferred to the custody of the United States Army. The Army will prosecute Specialist Ivette Gonzalez Davila for the murders of Army medics Timothy and Randi Miller, who were doused in acid after being shot. Davila was transferred yesterday from Pierce County Jail to the brig at Bangor's sub base. The Army is expected to charge......

A Seattle personal injury attorney became the first woman to set a world boomerang record for time aloft. Betsylew Miale-Gix shattered the previous record--her boomerang was airborne for 3 minutes and 49 seconds. Betsylew broke the record at a United States Boomerang Association (USBA) tournament in Tuscon, AZ. This summer, Seattle will host the 2008 World Boomerang Championships at the University of Washington. You better believe Seattlest will be there with their own stop-watch......

Hillary Clinton's conviction that our next president must be a "fighter" now has literal representation: Fighter of Foo Dave Grohl has announced his candidacy as an Independent. HARP magazine's new issue showcases the "worldwide exclusive" scoop; the online version of the piece highlights the former Nirvana drummer's "politics" and electability likability. A few snipped-up snippets: On why he’s the right candidate for the job: “Every night when I’m on tour, I bring my message......

Forbes Magazine must have gotten tired of making the same "Richest People in the World" list, because the magazine has moved on to ranking the "Nation's Most Sinful Cities." In order to do so, Forbes came up with measurable methods to rank the proclivity for each of the seven deadly sins in America's urban populations. (For example to measure the sin of "wrath" the magazine used murder rates for cities.) Of course, you're curious, just......

photo from Seattlest Flickr Contributor, artvortice The Washington State Chapter of the ACLU and local travel guide guru Rick Steves have joined forces to reform marijuana laws in the United States. Steves has long been an outspoken advocate of marijuana reformation. He sits on the board of the National Organization for the Reformation of Marijuana Laws (NORML), and has been a featured speaker at Seattle's annual Hempfest. Steves and The ACLU are comparing the......

Moving Under Sea-Tac by Seattlest Flickr Contributor, Grundlepuck We have a theory that all of the statisticians in America are employed either by Major League Baseball, Consumer Reports, or U.S. News & World Report. This week it was U.S. News & World Report statisticians watching their hard work come to fruition, with the release of the magazine's "Airport Misery Index." Seattle-Tacoma International Airport ranked 10th among 47 of the nation's airports in what the......

The only thing more sad and lame than a cover band is a tribute band. (Usually.) Well, even worse is a tribute band that plays the music of an another band that still exists. No, wait—a tribute band that plays songs from a one-off band’s one-off album … whose members live on. That’s truly scraping the musical barrel-bottom. Okay, okay. Worser yet is a national tour of three tribute bands that run this lamentable......

Tony Harris was a star basketball player at Garfield High School and Washington State University. After college, he played in a variety of international pro leagues: The Philippines, South Korea, Brazil. He was in his second stint in Brazil this fall, having left his pregnant wife behind in Seattle, when he disappeared, claiming that his life was in danger. He was later found dead. What went wrong? Possibly, it was Harris' own mind. ESPN's Wright......

When ever someone takes the time to type up an email to Seattlest we're prejudiced from the start to believe its contents (Seattlest readers being an unusually truthful and informed bunch), but this one is hard to swallow: I work next to the Sunset Bowl and just found out it's closing in April. The loss of yet another bowling alley is sad, but I won't miss their prices. Anyway, just thought I'd let you guys......

The past few months have seen Mr. “Wes C. Addle”—Eddie Vedder—looking more like Mr. Tinseltown than just another (incredibly talented) Easy Street customer. Times don’t look like they’ll be a-changin’ in 2008. Vedder recorded a song for the Cate Blanchett Bob Dylan study I’m Not There, penned two for the documentary Body of War, then a whole soundtrack for Sean Penn’s Into the Wild. He’ll appear in the upcoming singer-biopic spoof Walk Hard. He’s just......

While trolling through today's Floor Proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives for our other job (it's an exciting one), we noticed something that will probably get no coverage anywhere else. However, we think it is important to note when Congress singles out one faith as important. We think it's doubly important to note when the vote is taken while Congress fights with the Bush Administration over funding the government for the next year, haggles......

The glorious fall sunsets have disappeared along with the mouldering husks of Halloween pumpkins, and according the weather report, we can all expect a long, cold, wet weekend. But this being the Northwest, that's never stopped us from getting out and about; here's the weekend plans of your intrepid Seattlest contributors: By the time this hits the digital newsstands, Jeremy is going to be on his way to Fadó for post-work cocktails; after that......

This Friday and Saturday, for the eleventh year running, the Pyramid Alehouse will host the "Get Snowed In Party" in celebration of Pyramid's flagship winter ale, Snow Cap. Snow Cap turns 21 this year, and in honor of this ale finally coming of age, ticket prices for each night of the event are only $21. Hosted in a frosty cold revival tent behind Pyramid Alehouse, last year the two-night party was fantastic: beer gardens, hot......

There are a lot of things we can see being seized at the border between Canada and the United States: handguns with the serial number filed off, bricks of heroin, briefcases with the radioactivity sign on the side. Hard drives we'd expect to make it through, but unfortunately we'd be wrong. The guy bringing the masters of the songs Chris Walla recorded in Vancouver back down to Seattle had the drive containing them yanked by......

We were first turned onto Susan Werner back in our New York days when she played a free show at the World Trade Center. We were broke and all about free things, and we had a nice healthy respect for the sort of music the show sponsor WFUV felt like sharing with the world. We were impressed then by her candid poetics and a particularly lovely tune called "Time Between Trains" that stuck with......

Everyone is jumping on the reunion tour bandwagon these days, and the paleontologists greedy museum directors of the world are not to be left out of the mix. Lucy, the famous (if you prefer science over Hollywood) 3.2-million-year-old fossil, is going on tour too. She's got some contentious bones. The original set of fossils--representing the oldest, most intact human ancestor--has been swept out of Ethiopia, where she was supposed to stay in perpetuity, and is......

What is the Download Festival? First and foremost, it's a music festival consisting of eight bands on two stages. Now in its fifth year, Download 2007 will be happening in Boston, Chicago, San Fransisco and here, at our own Gorge Amphitheatre. Tickets are $60. The Music: Modest Mouse Incubus The Presidents of the United States of America Nada Surf The Thermals The Heavenly States Arthur & Yu Back Door Slam The Other: According to......

One of the great things about Seattle is that it's the gateway to the United States for lots of foreigners. Alaskans, for example, regularly show up at Sea-Tac, wild-eyed and ready to reach for a knife at the first sign of a bear. They've been fleeing the wilderness and arriving on the shores of Seattle since way before regular air service was established. However, last week a particularly 21st century chain of events led one......

Pike Place Market’s very public Centennial Celebration wraps up this Friday, the 100th anniversary of its onion-borne existence. As with any freshly-minted centenarian, the Market will dawdle obliviously amid the avid attention of family, friends, and Willard Scott the press. To commemorate the milestone, there will be stage performances, special presentations and, as we noted earlier this week, other activities taking place from 9am on. But the candles won’t truly be lit until around......

Local comic journalist (that's a journalist working in the medium of comics, not a journalist covering comics) Peter Bagge made the cover of Reason magazine this month. Bagge is on staff at the magazine and routinely does hilarious/horrifying cartoons about life in Seattle through Libertarian eyes (and if there's a ground zero for material for a Libertarian cartoonist it could very well be Seattle). The cover image is, of course, a self portrait. The Washington......

Last week, Seattlest Kim wrote a post about New York City that pissed off New Yorkers. The angry comments to said post were oddly familiar because we got similar comments on a post about Seaside, Oregon that Seattlest Tom wrote in May. You'd think that the large cultural gap between people living in the arts/media capitol of the United States and those living in the second-largest town in Clatsop County, Oregon, would prevent any striking......

There's a kind of folktale Polish wedding tradition that Seattlest has always thought was cool. It says that when your daughter is born you fire up the still and produce a barrel of vodka which you then bury somewhere on your farm. Twelve years later when that daughter is getting married you dig up the barrel and drink it at the wedding, the vodka having been infused with the flavors, and, more ephemerally, the spirit......

Last week's high-profile, faux low-profile United States of Electronica show at the Comet should convince you to check them out at the Firehouse in Ballard Old Fire House in Redmond this weekend. Maybe this was supposed to be a Lashes show but now is an ersatz Lashes benefit due to Eric Howk's injury. How funny would it be if Blake Lewis showed up at one of the Blue Scholars' record release shows at the Showbox......

Everything we know about dodging the draft by heading to Canada we learned from The Brothers K and popular mythology. So, we don't know much. Little before our time, there. Despite the fact that today's army is all volunteer (and today's Canada is more Conservative) there are still some soldiers waiting out Iraq up north. Almost everyone that this Salon article mentions seems to have already pulled a shift in the Middle East and is......

--Much to our surprise, the father of Anna Nicole Smith's baby is not Shawn Kemp. --Adam Morrison gets a fine handed to him, Warren Moon gets a breathalyser handed to him, and Jeff Weaver gets his ass handed to him. --Little Nemo in the dead letter office. --There was a bench-clearing altercation in today's otherwise-awful M's game. --Turns out the military doesn't always want to hear about toxic gas. M-4 tank crews of the......

A Poem Collected From Press Materials on the Topic of Mark Strand Being Tonight's Poet in the Seattle Arts & Lectures Series at Intiman Theatre, 7:30pm, Tickets $20/$10 Students and Under 25 “Mark Strand has chosen the negative path, with loss as the first step towards fullness: it is also the opening to a transparent verbal perfection," murmurs Octavio Paz. “I seem to be a tourist on planet Earth,” Strand has said -- born......

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:......