Results tagged “vancouver”

Thank the gods of Olympus! Amtrak's twice-a-day Seattle-Vancouver train service starts a week from today, on August 19, 2009. (UPDATE: Seattle Transit Blog says Thursday the 20th. Here's the current train schedule.) Seattle rail passengers will be able to depart at 7:40 a.m. or 6:40 p.m. and arrive in Vancouver, B.C., at about 11:35 a.m. or 10:45 p.m, respectively. From Vancouver, the southbound Amtrak Cascades train will leave at 6:40 a.m., hitting Seattle four-ish hours later, and arriving in Portland at 2:45 p.m. We get the train to help us get to the 2010 Olympic and Paralympics Winter Games, with no promises for after the Games are done.

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.

Do not have any other blogs before Seattlest. You shall not make for yourself another blog, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth, or cobbled together from bits upon the internet. You shall not subscribe to their RSS feeds or comment on their posts; for we Seattlest are a jealous blog, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject us, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love us and hit that little "recommended" button after our posts.

Auto thieves of Clark County Washington: it is time to find a new place to ditch your stolen goods. A dive team sent to explore Lacamas Lake after reports of a spotted stolen vehicle, were astonished to find not one, but five stolen vehicles submerged in the lake. Below the surface, divers found two Hondas, two Acuras, and a Chevrolet SUV. This is not the first time multiple vehicles have ended up in Lacamas Lake; in 2003 five vehicles were also recovered from the lake--just not all at once.

Tonight, head to the Sunset for the shoegaze stylings of Film School.

Tonight, Das Llamas celebrate their new album Class Wars: K-12 at the Comet. The local rock fourpiece stomp out a little bit of everything, from synthy no-wave punk to dirty electro rock, offering up "a platypus of sound that is a new noise in a new era."

Our lovely neighbors to the north have been having a rough go at it. Locals have been discovering all kinds of unpleasant things you'd rather not find in your back-yard. First five severed feet washed ashore on area beaches, and now a new case of mad cow disease has been confirmed at a B.C. farm.

Now that a sixth foot has washed ashore in British Columbia and the mainstream media has picked up the story (because, five severed feet washing ashore—not national news; but half a dozen—now that's a headline!), the theories on the source of the severed feet are coming in.

As the news of a sixth human foot appearing in the waters around Vancouver, B.C. percolates through the Interweb, we're reminded of another troubling and--we can only hope--wholly unrelated story we caught on CBC the other night. Apparently, for the last year, athletically built young men have been mysteriously disappearing around Vancouver, B.C. While the police have yet to suggest any relationship--or even foul play--between the disappearances, family members increasing see links. They've created a Facebook page (here) amongst other efforts to promote the cause of tracking these men down. But with the constant influx of feet found in coastal waters, it was inevitable that people would start trying to link the two.

You're headed to Vancouver for the weekend, excited because Canada is like almost a foreign country. Visions of staring at Belugas and spending your wad of rapidly-depreciating USD's on Robson Street bounce loosely around your head when suddenly a border patrol agent is directing you to a special lane at the Peace Arch. There's a problem and you've got to get out of the car. "Sir, this is aboot your iPod and the copyright infringements that reside on it."

          

Before last night's screening of SIFF's opening film Battle in Seattle, amidst all the self-congratulatory speeches, Mayor Nickels remarked that the 1999 WTO riots are "strongly rooted in the fabric of our city" and that every Seattleite would be well-served to have their feelings of the events "validated by an outside perspective." We'd be apt to agree---if only the outside perspective that followed wasn't such ham-handed dreck.

Maybe we've seen Outbreak too many times, but this does not sound good:

Seattlest was in Vancouver this weekend, and, on a whim, made our first foray into a Tim Hortons. We'd heard good things -- "the apex of Canadian cuisine," for example -- and as lifelong doughnut fans we were happy to test that claim.

Vancouver Police have arrested a 52-year-old man on suspicion of third-degree assault of an officer and malicious mischief, after he terrorized a neighborhood and led police on a slow speed chase on his lawn mower. A very slow speed chase, indeed. Police reported approximate speeds between 3 and 5 mph.

When we used to work at the Starbucks in the Bank of America building (nee: Columbia Center), one of our duties was to bring up boxes of cups, napkins and other sundries from the storeroom located in the garage on level E, five stories below ground.

What with his recent Into the Wild success, it's not a huge surprise that Eddie Vedder's embarking on his first solo tour—announced today—up and down the West coast. What is surprising is that he's not playing Seattle.

Unlike our beloved baseball All Star Game, we’ve tended to skip the NBA's version in recent years. However, with our hero Brandon Roy, in Sunday's game we can’t wait to watch our fellow ex-Bulldog cram some FANtastic™ action down the East’s face. However, we’ll be in Vancouver--sorry TNT.

Last night we made up for our dumb-assedness last week and caught episode 2 of Douglas Coupland's , and damn if that weren't a strange beast. Coupland's surreal, self-referential, novelistic discourse on globalism has been transformed into an odd-ball, dry-humored, dramedy miniseries that's strangely addictive.

In case you missed it on Monday, British Columbia Liberals announced a $14 billion transit upgrade plan.

Could we be any vaguer? No, but that doesn't mean there's still not any reason to get excited. With In Rainbows making its formal debut atop the Billboard charts, Radiohead is set to cover North America in two tour legs, one prior to and one following their recently announced European summer tour (June 6 in Dublin through July 8 in Berlin).

Things always die down right around the holidays, so not much is going on tonight, except local noise mavens X-Ray Press will be celebrating their CD release (and the addition of their new keyboardist) at Jules Maes in Georgetown.

Already (as of 8:35 am):

The Program (Dec. 18-22) will be way cooler than we initially thought, folks. Not only will some of the biggest names in NW hip-hop be on stage for your entertainment five nights in a row, but the latest news is that there are all kinds of technological tie-ins that will make this event very, very 21st-century.

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 be cold but clear tomorrow, with morning to afternoon sunshine to make that drive a little more pleasant.

The snow is falling, our dear Seattle friends, it simply isn't falling here. Whistler just announced it is open for business, bagging the ultimate ski resort coup of cutting powder before we cut the turkey. Of course you want to go, but in fondly recalling the days of 1998 when the US-CA exchange rate swung wildly the other way, you fear you can really only afford to stay home and play Ski Resort Extreme Halo 3. We've learned a thing or six going back and forth with our neighbors to the north for many a year now, and so we offer you our quick and dirty guide to saving at least a wee bit of money and time in your BC powder-chasing adventures.

Seattlest has found a reason for everyone to welcome bicycles on the city's streets. The origins lie in Virgin Vacations' (has anyone asked The Name Inspector to do a write up on Richard Branson's desire to cater to virgins?) naming of the world's 11 most bike-friendly cities. Unfortunately, Seattle didn't make the list (Portland came in at number 2), which uses five criteria created by The Bicycle Friendly Communities Campaign to judge a community's bike...

There's nothing like the prospect of a smart hip-hop show to build up our anticipation on a Saturday night. One where we know that the act we're going to see can't fail to deliver, cranks that up a little higher than we can generally handle when we're forced to first stop by a friend's party before the show. To all those in Shoreline that we bored with excited chatter about Lyrics Born and Blackalicious at The Showbox, we're so sorry.

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 Homeland Security.

The operative word, of course, is "considering," because by no means is a bike park at Stevens Pass a done deal. But the plans are surprisingly detailed and specific, which gives Seattlest hope. The local biking community is all a-twitter about the prospects. Each year we trek up to Whistler repeatedly for our downhill biking fix (that's a friend pictured on a black diamond Whistler trail at the right), and we'd much rather spend less time in the car and more time on our bike. No, the sad irony of driving long distances to ride bikes is not lost on us.