of Montreal at the Showbox SoDo last night. Slideshow [flickr].

The main mistake of Montreal made was kickng off their Skeletal Lamping tour with a setpiece featuring Kevin Barnes trotting onto the stage astride a LIVE HORSE. Because, as far as expectations games go, that’s a tough one to beat even when you know that no band, no matter their level of sanity, is going to take a horse with them on the road. Still, every show after that will be measured by an equine yardstick and no matter how much spectacle there is (and there will be a whole lot of it), a certain segment of the audience will await the moment of the horse’s arrival.

As far as I could tell, though, the show had everything but that stallion. Pigs and ninjas. So many sexy ninjas. Death and rebirth. Guitar playing tigers and crowd-warming cowboys. The air filled with pig-launched flying feathers. Covers of “Take Me Out” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as encore. The song about Antarctica left unblemished by crass commercialism. Too many costume changes to track, and bizarre scenes of buddhas, the old west, blasphemous nuns, and animal tableaus. Silver-faced John McCains staging a hanging. Body paint, centauric transformation, and a resurrection in shaving cream. This two-plus hour dance party left the expansive room hungry for more, jittery from too many energy drinks, and coughing up feathers and glitter in awe when it was all over.

Even people who aren’t into baseball at all are aware that the Seattle Mariners weren’t exactly looking like champs in their last season. In true sports club form, this meant that it was time for a new coach.

Today the M’s announced their new coach: Hood River, Oregon, native Don Wakamatsu who now becomes the fourteenth full-time manager for the Mariners and the first ever Asian American to manage a Major League ball team.

Wakamastu’s most recent past job was bench coach for the Oakland A’s; his career history includes a stint as catcher for the 1991 White Sox and six years of coaching in the American League West. He spent seven years as a player after four years of college ball and has coached since then. [For an excellent summary of his career check out this story by Doug Miller of MLB.com.]

Wakamatsu will be wearing number 16 on his uniform but hopes to turn the M’s into a number one team.

You know, if I ever decide to start a brothel, I am not going to use something like a massage parlor as my front, because everyone does that and they keep getting caught. I’ll have to use an accountant’s office or something. No one would suspect that.

Yesterday the authorities raided three “tanning salons”–one on Aurora (obviously), one in Tukwila, and one in Renton–and arrested a bunch of people on prostitution and money laundering charges [PI]. “Federal prosecutors say that Nguyen booked more than 70 flights in 2006, 2007 and 2008, allegedly carrying prostitutes to work at these brothels. The prostitutes were shuttled between Seattle and California or Seattle and Texas, Woo said. Woo said the women are from various Asian countries and that some are in the United States legally and others are not.”

The neighbors appear to be thrilled. If convinced, the two main main masterminds face up to 25 years each in jail for the two charges: 5 for prostitution and 20 for money laundering.

Hospitals in Washington State will adopt federal standards for tracking MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), thought to be one of the most widespread illnesses spread in hospitals. The Seattle Times wrote an in-depth three part article documenting the situation, and apparently it made an impact.

The state’s initiatives follow a Seattle Times investigation, “Culture of Resistance,” which reported this week that MRSA infection rates have soared as hospitals often ignored steps to control the threat.

In the first comprehensive tracking of the germ, The Times found that the number of hospitalized Washington patients infected with MRSA escalated over the past decade from 141 a year to 4,723 last year.

This will take a year or more to fully implement the new regulations, but there should be a noticeable drop in the spread of MRSA in the years to come. If you haven’t read the series yet, you should.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3.

Shakespeare’s King Lear is widely considered one of the finest works in all of Western literature, but until I went to see it, all I knew about it was that it somehow involved a king and his daughters. Perhaps if I had known more than that I might have been intimidated by it, as King Lear features a complex plot with a large number of characters all engaged in a series of schemes against one another in subplots of various sizes to embroirder the rich, dense narrative. It would have been needless worry, however, as in the capable hands of director Paul Budraitis, Rough Play Productions‘ rendition of King Lear is completely accessible and a real pleasure to watch.

King Lear (Richard Clairmont) and Cordelia (Nicole Fierstein)

For those of you who may be as ignorant as I previously was, the basic story of King Lear revolves around the titular character, a once supremely powerful ruler who begins the play by abdicating from his throne to divide his authority and lands between his three daughters. Over the course of the play, King Lear will go from ferocious tyrant who deserves every bit of trouble (which is plenty) that he gets to a sad wretch who inspires pity even though he really did dig most of the hole in which he finds himself. Richard Clairmont does a fine job of capturing all of the moods of King Lear, a challenging role which requires the actor to portray a vast number of attitudes and emotions, often conflicting and sometimes changing within each minute.

In fact, the entire cast was excellent, always believeable and engaging. Their appealing performances were a major part of what made the play so exciting. I was most impressed with the acting of Gina Marie Russell as Regan and Daniel Brockley as Edmund. Each of these roles contains elements that could easily turn cartoonish in the hands of an unskilled performer but both Russell and Brockley keep their characters tragically and entirely human.

The very simple set design, centered around a single focus point, works well with the story and there are a myriad of small touches in the costuming and make up that emphasize the story without detracting from it. The simple but lush sound effects, music and lighting are all excellent and definitely add to the quality of the performance. This King Lear is a thrilling experience and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in a good story well acted.

King Lear at Theater Puget Sound
Thursday through Sunday at 8 pm/7 pm Sunday
Theater Puget Sound at Seattle Center
4th Floor, Center House (take north elevator to 4th floor)
Tickets: $12 advance, $15 at door

photo by Brittney Bush Bollay [flickr] via our group pool [#]

• On a day with other big pirate news comes another story of grand theft in the form of a half dozen parking meters being stolen from beneath the crumbling viaduct. [seattlest]
• Speaking of disappearances, all of the Sound Transit artwork has been cleared out of Broadway storefront to make way for demolition. [capitolhillseattle]
• WiFi in the Ferries still won’t be free, but it might be cheaper under a new contract. [westseattleblog]
• As the Stranger and its blogs start to look more and more like a locally-owned nationally-focused publication (confusing ANTM handicapping [tc] aside, the converse is happening at Seattle Weekly ), I was pretty excited to learn that you can subscribe to category-specific RSS feeds from the Slog. Maybe this has been around forever or maybe it’s part of the URL upgrade that irked Dylan last week? Those who want to keep Seattle news at the top of the heap would do well to plug the “City” archives into their RSS readers. [slog]

photos tagged “blogsgiving” click for slideshow. [flickr]

Thanks to all of you who came out for Blogsgiving last night at Grey Gallery! Readers, bloggers, and do-gooders coming together for drinks, cupcakes, meeting, greeting, swooning at ball point pen drawings of animals in uniforms on pieces of wood, and making hand turkey drawings was indeed a beautiful sight that put the singles club upstairs to shame. Together we raised about $400 for Northwest Harvest and met a lot of cool people and learned about a bunch of blogs along the way. Special appreciation, of course, to co-organizers at Capitol Hill Seattle, Neighborlogs, and Seattlest.

If you took pictures last night, how about posting them to flickr with the tag “blogsgiving” to keep the current collection of inspired drawings company?

presumably this dog has a real name.

The University of Washington’s football team has yet to win a game this season. Perhaps sensing the shape of things to come, the official Husky mascot (an Alaskan Malamute called Whitepaw’s Arlut Spirit of Gold Dust, a.k.a. “Spirit”) suffered a “shoulder injury” and has avoided leading the team out of the tunnel, wandering the sidelines, feigning interest in the game, and napping under the bench. Maybe his absence is the cause of the team’s ill fortunes or perhaps he simply couldn’t bear bear to spend his sunset years watching a losing team.

Either way, the school was already on the lookout for a replacement to replace Spirit upon his retirement at the end of the season. In parallel with the search to select a new dog, the athletics department has been polling fans to choose its new name. My assumption that the name should reflect the actual dog just shows how little of collegiate mascotry I comprehend.

The field has been narrowed down to three names: Spirit, Sundodger, and Dubs. [gohuskies] Although it’s very “the king is dead, long live the king” / “Snowball Two” I have to say that given the options rechristening this new dog with the old one’s name is the least objectionable.

I haven’t lived here long enough to know whether this is an anomaly or not, but the weather yesterday was fascinating. I love the fog, and how it was hazy for most of the day, but not enough to obscure the mountains in the distance. Yesterday had a very ethereal quality to it, and it was exactly how I want winter in Seattle to look all the time.

Seattle in November

Friends, the day you have all been awaiting has finally arrived! Tonight is, of course, Blogsgiving. If you haven’t already done so, add yourself to the RSVP list and plan to see Seattle’s bloggingest at Grey Gallery tonight.

Blogsgiving 2008
Monday 17 November from 5p-8p
Grey Gallery (11th Ave btwn Pine and Pike)
Goal: Give Seattle bloggers a chance to co-mingle.
Giving: $5 suggested donation at door to benefit Northwest Harvest. Also feel free to bring non-perishable food items!

Arrive early for cupcakes and happy hour drink specials. Stay throughout the evening for pumpkiny concoctions, arts & crafts, and general fundraising / networking / mingling /watching bloggers interact in the real world. See you there!