Food shows are all the rage, at least in my household. The DVR is chock full of regular cooking shows, reality cooking shows, and everything in between. I do so like to cook and eat.

Thus, I was both excited and dismayed at the announcement that Anthony Bourdain would be returning to the Seattle area for his most recent book tour. Excited because, hello, Anthony Bourdain! Not just a celebrity chef, but one that can write and entertain as well. Dismayed because, holy shit $125! Okay, okay, there are $30 seats, but if you could stand around and shoot the shit with Bourdain, wouldn’t you? Aparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so, since there’s some crazy auction wherein you can have dinner with him via Sitka and Spruce. Crazy because the minimum bid is now $810. Holy cow, Batman! Anyway, for us folks who spend their $810 on all their meals for the month, I guess we’ll be getting those cheap seats at the Moore on June 8th [$].

In other, slightly less spendy and slightly less celebrity news, Tre Wilcox from season 3 of Top Chef will also be making a stop in Seattle [localwineevents]. The wine dinner at the Columbia Tower Club is a benefit for the James Beard Foundation and will also be hosted by Columbia Tower Executive Chef James Hassell. Tickets are $175.

Wilcox actually won one of the Top Chef mini-games on the show when Bourdain was judging. The prize being a stack of Bourdain’s books and a promise to share some booze. Now that, maybe I’d pay some dough to see.

Perhaps it’s due to the increased patrols on 3rd and Pine that pushed these kids up the Downtown corridor a bit. My friend Gabriel posted this on his blog moments ago:

Anyone else witness this?

I volunteer through the Big Brothers Big Sisters Program of Puget Sound and I received some “BIG” news this morning via email.

There are two types of mentoring: community-based and school-based. Both require a few hours a month. I’ve talked to quite a few people who went through this or similar programs as a “Little” and the impact it had on their lives was phenomenal. If you have the time, I highly recommend participating.

Did you hear the joke about the college students who want to carry concealed weapons on campus?

Oh yeah, that’s not a joke. [m-b, p-i]

Hey, UW students who want to carry concealed weapons on campus, listen carefully:

You’re huge dorks. Gigantic. What you should really be focused on concealing is your profound castration anxiety and your inability to keep your fantasies of omnipotence contained to your 6 hours a day spent playing the latest first-person shooter.

Most of the time I’m a tolerant guy. Come one, come all, no matter race, creed, religion, orientation, or nerdiness. But when you want to carry a loaded handgun into my biology lab or my English Lit class, that’s when I draw the line and you become what you are: Unbelievable, humongous, gigantic dorks.

Cite your laws, split hairs with your statistics, call me un-American, and dream up wild fantasies where you save a classroom full of students from a lone gunman and end up rehashing the incident on Larry King Live and The O’Reilly Factor, you’re still just dorks with a surprising inability to reason.

See, the last thing I want to worry about when I embarrass you in our Poly Sci class is that you’ll feel so bad that your finger will start twitching on your carpal tunnel-riddled hand and you’ll begin to imagine what it would be like to shut my ass up with a bullet to the face. Because, guess what, the means to do that will be strapped to your hip and that’s not good for your coming to terms with just how huge of a dork you are.

I think someday you’ll come to really regret that picture in the P-I, too. Because now you’ve pigeon-holed yourselves and even if you wanted to change your mind, you can’t without losing face. Besides what would your Counter-Strike clan think of you then?

But don’t shoot me! I’m just the messenger.

_{photo courtesy of Jasmine Restaurant & Lounge}

The SeattleTimes‘ food writer, Nancy Leson, was one of many local restaurant critics who received a mass email from local foodie and designer Scott Surdyk. In his scathing message, Surdyk chastised them for not heaping praise on local restaurants who aim for a more contemporary design. [times]

I’m an acolyte design geek and am distracted to annoyance by overwrought decor. Classically designed restaurants like Fremont’s 35th Street Bistro seem perfect to me.

I’ve been off walking around in Italy for the last two weeks, and I was curious to find out what it was going to be like being a young female traveling alone there now that Amanda Knox has made us famous for more than rain and a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan movie. It’s gotten a lot of media attention here, and likely in Padova, but does the rest of the country care?

In the weeks leading up to the trip, people recommended that I not tell anyone that I was from Seattle, in the same way that they often recommend telling people that you come from Canada instead of the USA. I thought that was silly. No one was going to run me out of town at pitchfork-point for being from Seattle.

Which turned out to be true. I’m not sure anyone even owns a pitchfork. On the other hand, it did come up the majority of times I had any sort of conversation with an Italian. I heard a lot of, “Oh, Seattle? Amanda Knox, yes? Do you know Amanda Knox? Ha ha, I am very scared of you now!” As it happens, we have indeed turned into the sort of town recognized for our latest alleged international murderer. No one seemed particularly fussed about it, or like they had gained any amount of animosity because of it, but if they know anything about Seattle it seems that they know about Amanda Knox, from Venice to Naples. (Except for the one guy who wanted to talk about the Mariners, which is a little bit like wanting to talk to a shark about having knees, since I don’t know from baseball.)

Honestly, I would rather have talked about the rain, or Sleepless in Seattle.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who’s a football fan, but Seahawks general manager Tim Ruskell made the announcement yesterday that former MVP running back Shaun Alexander had been released.

“I started my NFL career in Seattle and hoped I could remain with the team through the rest of my days as a player,” Alexander said in a statement released after the announcement. “That said, things change.”

Though it was definitely time for our boy to move on after suffering two straight injury-laden seasons since setting a then-NFL record for touchdowns in 2005, I’m not alone when I say we’ll miss Shaun. He’s one of the NFL’s classiest players, has a great attitude on and off the field, and helped lead this team to the ill-fated Super Bowl XL in February 2006.

Bon voyage, Shaun. Thanks for the memories.

So, readers, do you remember back at the beginning of the year when I posted about how the Seattle Parks Department was running a contest to name the trail they’re building around Lake Union?  Don’t feel bad if you don’t.  Ironically, considering that naming a park has been a dream of mine for years now and this was about as close as I was likely to get, even though I’d entered the contest with a name about which I cared very much, I’d somehow forgotten all about the contest until I got a call yesterday from a City of Seattle employee asking me to come to a press conference today where the winning name would be announced.

Chodops (sometimes Chudups) John, also known as Lake Union John, also known as Cheslahud (spelled a variety of ways) was one of the very few Duwamish people who stayed in Seattle after most of them had been driven out of the city and relocated to the Port Madison reservation.   “Lake Union John” and his family lived on Portage Bay and were good friends with the Denny family.  He had a very colorful and interesting life.  There’s a photo of him on Lake Union on display at the Museum of History and Industry–you can see the photo online here. 

Seattle recognizes its history with names like “Blaine” and “Mercer” but I think it’s only fair that we recognize the history of the people who were here thousands of years before anyone in the Denny party was even born whenever we can, which is why I suggested naming the trail after Chudups John.  I wasn’t the only one with this idea–in fact, all four “finalists” suggested the same thing.  The only difference in the entries was the version of his name chosen.

Today Mayor Nickels announced that the new trail will be called Cheslahud.  At a ceremony held on the side of the road on Westlake North, the Mayor also announced that the Parks Department will be completing the new trail in stages. This year they’re working on Westlake.  When the trail is done it’ll be 6.6 miles long and connect over 30 different green spaces, including street end parks, Gas Works and the South Lake Union Park.  One of the really cool things about the conference was that the great-great-great grandson and granddaughter of Cheslahud were there to represent their family and talk about their history. 

I’m really looking forward to this trail; I think it’ll be an exciting and fun addition to our existing greenspace.

Photo by Steve Schwartz

Food prices are rising worldwide. Locally, Seattle has seen the cost of food rise 4% in 2007 and it’s estimated to rise again 4.5% this year.

Coscto has recently seen an upswing in the sale of food staples such as rice, flour, and cooking oil as people stock up.

Food shortages are growing worldwide. It’s not just the price of a barrel of oil anymore that is pushing prices up. Wheat shortages and the loss of crops worldwide are causing many people to panic.

Are you cutting back on food purchases due to rising prices? Stocking up on pantry items like dried beans and flour? Should we be alarmed?

Got a note from Derek down at Exit133.com, Tacoma’s local community blog that leaves most of us Seattle bloggers to shame. (They write well and don’t spend their time in pissy political catfights with each other, which puts them light years ahead of some blog that dropped us from their Enemies List this week.)

They’re bringing in James Howard Kunstler to speak tonight down there. Kunstler is one of those doom-and-gloom sorts who writes about the world post-oil in The Long Emergency. He’d easily pack out Town Hall with our cadres of earnest Prius-driving liberals. Instead, though, they got him to come to Tacoma. If you’re in the south end, it’s worth your time to go hear this guy.

James Howard Kunstler
Tonight, 7:00pm, at the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts’ Theatre on the Square (9th and Broadway). Tickets available from the Broadway Center website or box office.