As we get to 4th and Pine, the woman sitting behind me notices a panhandling gutter punk with a sign that says “Kick me in the shins for $1.” She remarks:

“What have The Shins done? Their last album wasn’t so bad.”

For the third time in the last 13 years, Boeing machinists are going on strike. (Hat tip: Don Smith at the P-I — who posted it on Twitter)

Neighborhood blogging — or hyperlocal blogging, depending on which venture capitalist you’re pitching — has been a big deal in Seattle for a few years, to the point that we’re considered a hotbed for it. West Seattle Blog and Capitol Hill Seattle are now beyond blogs; they’re dominant news sources in their respective areas. MyBallard is covering Ballard (natch) and is expanding across into Wallingford and Fremont, up Phinney Ridge into Greenwood, and down to Magnolia. The P-I has had neighborhood blogs covering Queen Anne, Magnolia, Belltown, and Georgetown now or in the past. Even the Rainier Valley is covered by two blogs — Central District News and the Rainier Valley Post.

But once you cross 85th Street in north Seattle… what is there? Best I can tell, not much.

It looks like someone’s been attempting a Lake City reader blog over on the P-I. But Broadview? Northgate? Maple Leaf? Blue Ridge? Haller Lake?

It’s awfully quiet up that end of town. Why?

Is it that the North isn’t choc-a-bloc with twentysomethings living in condos? (Strange, considering how many condos there are up that way.) Is it lower density? (The density’s in line with West Seattle and higher than Magnolia.) Is it the transitory nature of residents thanks to a glut of apartments? (But Capitol Hill’s the same way.) Is it just too far from the core? (Rainier Beach is only a mile closer to downtown than Northgate Mall.)

Why is the Seattle north of 85th a blog wasteland? Anyone want to take a guess?

Monday, September 8th, the Planning, Land Use, & Neighborhoods Committee (yes, the acronym is PLUNC) of the city council will hold a public hearing about updating the neighborhood plans. It’s been 10 years since the current plans were developed and approved; Seattle has changed and the neighborhood plans need to reflect those changes. PLUNC is actively seeking input from neighborhood groups, local business owners, interested individuals, etc.

Not all neighborhoods are included in the proposed update, due to recent or current neighborhood improvement and development initiatives. These are:
 The Duwamish and Ballard-Interbay areas, due to the Industrial Jobs Initiative work program;
 Denny Triangle, due to 2006 zoning work;
 Pioneer Square and the International district, due to ongoing S. Downtown planning initiatives;
 South Lake Union, for the same reason;
 Roosevelt, because the neighborhood has already recently revised it’s plan;
 Northgate, due to ongoing planning initiatives;
 South Park, due to the new Neighborhood Action Agenda.

While the core goal is to update the original plan, PLUNC has committed to several new goals that reflect the increased diversity of Seattle’s population, such as: greater outreach to communities, especially underserved and minority groups; increased density and mixed-use development; “green, clean, safe, affordable, and healthy” neighborhoods; and encouraging local investment and character.

One of core principles behind the new goals is a stronger focus towards renewable and sustainable development that reduces Seattle’s carbon footprint. This ties in with the council’s Zero Waste initiative, the bag fee, and proposed (though somewhat vague) food waste initiatives.

The first neighborhood plans to be reviewed will be those with light rail stations: MLK @ Holly Street; North Beacon Hill; and North Rainier.

A full overview is available for viewing here and related topics can be surfed at http://www.seattle.gov/council/.

• In Destry Ride Again, James Stewart is a deputy of the old Wild West who doesn’t like guns and Marlene Dietrich is a sultry showgirl who catches his eye when he reluctantly rides to town to clean up corruption. A comedy that pokes fun at the cowpoke genre in a lovi8ng way, Destry Rides Again is witty, charming, and great fun, further enlivened by Dietrich’s impressive musical numbers. At the Grand Illusion.
• Late night at the Grand Illusion: Who needs good acting, quality camera work or even a coherent plot when you’ve got the delightfully atrocious 70s teen sex comedy Hollywood High?
• Even though I’m not exactly a big fan of baseball itself, one of my favorite film genres is the baseball film, in part because they’re never really about baseball. The best of them use the sport an excellent metaphor to examine various aspects of the human condition. One of the best of them is Bull Durham, starring Kevin Costner as an aging player sent in to help prepare rookie Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon as the baseball groupie who serves as the third point of their romantic triangle. At the Central Cinema; see if they’ll give you some peanuts with your beer for the full baseball fan experience.
• The Human Condition is the title of Masaki Kobayashi’s epic film about Kaji, a WWII socialist soldier in Japan struggling with issues of patriotism and injustice. The director’s full vision takes over nine hours of film; SIFF is allowing film goers the opportunity to see the whole movie without spending an entire day in the theater by splitting it up in the three parts. Part One plays Friday through Thursday and shows Kaji’s attempts to improve the miserable conditions of the forced labor camp he is charged with supervising. His attempts to make life better for the prisoners earn him torture and other punishments, including being forced into the army of a nation he is not sure he is able to defend.
• Saturday morning’s Films4Families selection is one of the most charming and likable movies for children ever filmed, The Secret of Roan Inish. Fiona is a young girl living with her depressed widower father in a bleak Irish industrial city sent for the sake of her health to live with her grandparents in a fishing village on the ocean. Her grandfather tells her stories of the family’s history and their departure from their previous home, the tiny island of Roan Inish. As she makes her way through town, Fiona hears other stories, too: how one of her ancestors married a Selkie, a magical half-seal, half-woman and how the sea stole away her own baby brother, Jamie. The young girl, masterfully brought to vivid and realistic life by young actor Jeni Courtney, plots her way out to Roan Inish where she spies what she believes to be her young brother, living wild with the seals. A brave and hard-working girl, with the help of her cousin she undertakes a quest designed to reunite her family with the child they all believe to be dead. The Secret of Roan Inish is visually stunning and emotionally engaging in a sincere, truthful way. I recommend it for all children and anyone with a love of good stories with strong characters.
• NWFF presents a strange fairy tale of a film, La France. After Camile’s husband disappears in the chaos of WWI, she disguises herself as a man and sets up to find him, along the way joining a troupe of soldiers holding their own secrets.
• Midnight at the Egyptian: a group of young performers pursue their love of acting, singing and dancing at Camp.

~ Samuel Green, from ‘Breaking Ground’

* Originally self-published back in 2000, Brunonia Barry’s semi-historical mystery/suspense novel The Lace Reader sold to William Morrow for a rumored 2.4 million. Morrow is pushing the novel as their big summer sleeper hit, with a first print run of as many as 200,000 copies, spurring a minor kerfuffle and some public sniping from the novel’s initial publicists, Kelly & Hall Book Publicity. That said, reviews have been excellent, and libraries and bookstores around the country report brisk trade. SPL, itself, currently has 143 active holds on 32 copies (I’m currently in queue at #65. HA!). If you want to know what the hype is all about, Barry is expected to be signing at Seattle Mystery Bookshop tomorrow, Saturday, September 6th. She is scheduled to appear at the Ballard SPL Branch on Sunday, September 7th at 2:00 PM, as well. UPDATE: Ms. Barry is having some transportation issues, so her appearance at Seattle Mystery Bookshop has been rescheduled to noon on Monday, September 8th. Then she’s off to Bellingham, and the rest of a really massive book tour.

* Book-It Theatre is bringing their “Danger: Books!” show to the Ballard Branch of SPL on Saturday, September 6th. Actors read and perform selections from banned books. The show starts at 2:00 PM and runs about an hour. Book-It’s website is currently under construction, so there is no way to confirm precisely how dangerous the performance will be.

* Also on Saturday, September 6th, Mr. Sam Green, Washington’s Poet Laureate, will read at SPL’s Fremont Branch, along with Richard Wakefield and Kathleen Flenniken. Wakefield teaches writing and AmLit; Flenniken’s collection “Famous” was named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association. 2:00 – 3:30 PM.

“There’s always more than one way in. Come. Stay
long enough to know what brought you here,
what you leave behind, and what you take away.”
-from “Home Town Park” by Samuel Green

* It seems to be Poetry Weekend in Seattle. Elliott Bay Books is hosting Steven Nightingale on Saturday at 2:00 PM. Nightingale will read selections from Cinnamon Theologies, his third collection of sonnets.

* On Sunday, the theme continues with Poetry in the Park. Kerry Cox, Vivienne Inman, Dobbie Norris, and Herb Sundvall will read at Victor Steinbrueck Park from 4:00 – 6:00 PM. There will be a limited open mike, so bring your best doggerel and worst verse to the Northwest corner, and get in line.

I have been sure of this since I was a little girl, and now the evidence is finally backing me up–eating alfalfa sprouts can kill you.

Sprouts Northwest in Kent is recalling everything that contains alfalfa sprouts because they’re tied to an outbreak of salmonella that has gotten to at least 13 people in Washington and Oregon. At least two of those people have had to be hospitalized. You should probably get rid of any of their sprouts and, just the be on the safe side, any sprouts from anyone at all. (What? They’re gross.)

Most people recover from salmonella poisoning on their own, but the elderly, very young, and those with compromised immune systems are at a higher risk for hospitalization and death. Groceries and delis in the area are being urged to check the origin of their sprouts, but for now be careful of what you’re putting on your salads [Times].

Via Capitol Hill Seattle [#] comes the amazing news that Molly Moon Ice Cream, which has been keeping lines of people spilling out onto the sidewalks of Wallingford all summer with their delicious and inventive flavors, is planning to open a second location in the Oddfellows building early next year. [urbnlivn] With deep fried goodness from the Pike Street Fish fry and a delightful urban park just steps away, this makes some sort of productivity-stalling trifecta for any marginally pleasant day.

Just imagine the possibilities if someone could figure out a way to open an actual beer garden in Cal Anderson.

The real Presidential election is serious business, but the mock-election that forms the framework of The Election Show is anything but. The improvised political spoof presents a condensed version of the election process in two acts. In the first act, the audience is introduced by the “non-partisan, non-biased moderator” to the incumbent President facing re-election. The President addresses the “nation” in a speech detailing the highlights of the previous four years. In Thursday’s opening night show, President Sean Patella-Buckley (cast members take turns playing the different roles on different nights), an RPG-loving leader spoke of his many accomplishments which included surgically enhancing all cats with wings and dogs with laser vision. The President is then sent away in order and the stage becomes home to the opposing party’s nominating convention. Three candidates make their cases for why they should receive the party’s nomination by presenting platforms based on themes brought up in pre-show conversation with audience members. As the first act ends, audience members are sent into intermission with ballots to choose the candidate they prefer to face the incumbent in act two’s election, during which the two contenders square off in a debate that is almost frighteningly realistic in points despite the utter ridiculousness of the campaigns.

Throughout the show, the on-stage action covers all the key components of a real election: recurring bits included portrayals of candidate stumping, attack ads, and a sharp-witted parody of political talk shows. The opposing pundits in the talk show segment, portrayed this night by Justin Sund and Ben Piper, were particularly amusing, providing some of the biggest laughs of the night with their spot-on portrayals of party propaganda hacks. After a solid round of campaigning and the selection of Vice President candidates from the audience–”Your job,” moderator John Boyle tels them, “is to sit down and say nothing”–the audience votes again and the show concludes with the announcement of the election’s winner. For this show, the winner was Jon Axell who responded to a pre-show complaint about not having enough time to get thing done by proposing to build a second sun so that there would always be enough hours in the day, a conceit that is unimpressive in the describing but made extremely funny by Axell’s performance.

Any improv show, particularly one so audience-driven, relies on two key factors to be successful: the performing talents of the cast and their ability to form a bond with the audience. The Election Show’s experienced and skilled cast are all veterans of the comedy and improv scene and put their skills to use in amusing and inventive ways and managed to get the audience so engaged in the show that at several points spontaneous chants related to the on-stage action broke out in the audience. The audience is an important part of this show and everyone in the theater rose to the occasion, although it should be noted that the two weakest parts of the show came when the audience was required to invent a political crisis facing the nation and the opposing candidate’s scandal. As it happened, the ideas thrown out weren’t terribly funny on their own. To the cast’s credit, they made the best of them and still managed to earn appreciative laughter.

If real life campaigns were as entertaining as those in The Election Show, we’d never have a low-turnout election again.

The Election Show runs through October 24 at the University Theater on the Ave and concludes with a special election night show on November 4th.

English Breakfast at Voxx by culinaryfool [flickr] via our group pool [#]

The Seattle P-I, along with City Club, hosted a panel tonight on neighborhood blogging. Panelists included Tracy Record of West Seattle Blog, Cory Bergman of MyBallard, Amber Campbell of Rainier Valley Post, Scott Schaefer of B-Town Blog, and Heather McLeland-Wieser with the Seattle Public Library’s Shelftalk.

Moderator Monica Guzman of the The Big Blog asked the panelists a number of questions involving how they generated readership, moderated comments, used advertising, worked with the local media, and how local blogs have been able to cover local neighborhood issues in ways that traditional media is unable to cover.

Many of the panelists shared different stories about how their blogs are engaging their community. Campbell mentioned that Rainier Valley Post was recently able to contribute to a fund for the funeral of a local child that was killed in their neighborhood through PayPal donations, and Record shared her passion for the pets section of West Seattle Blog. The amount of information available through these local (and sometimes hyperlocal) blogs is amazing, and many of the bloggers, like Record, Bergman and Campbell have devoted a lot of hours and lost sleep to their neighborhoods.

As Record mentioned, neighborhood or place-blogging has become a kind of ‘calling’ for some Seattleites. If you’re out and about on the Internet, be sure to check out your local blogs- a lot of them are doing some really amazing things in their communities, and if there’s not one in your neighborhood, there probably will be soon (or hey, you could start one yourself- many panelists stayed afterwards to lead a workshop on creating your own blog). Happy reading- and be sure to mention any neighborhood blogs you think are worth reading in our comments- the more, the merrier!

What more could you possibly want?

Tonight, at Aster Coffee Lounge in Ballard, you can participate in their most excellent beer tasting. I was lucky enough to attend their last beer and cheese tasting and let me tell you… for $7, it is an incredible value.

You get 5 tastes of beer, and they are generous tastes. Each is at least 2-3 ounces of beer.

Along with the beer, you get cheese samples and at least one chocolate sample. The beer tonight is all from Unibroue.

They will have a live DJ, and of course, their excellent coffee and snacks. The tasting runs from 4pm to 8pm.

Aster Coffee Lounge
5615 24th Ave NW

I hope to see you all at the Seattle Tilth Harvest Fair on Saturday, but that’s not all that’s going on this weekend. There’s plenty to do for kids and grownups alike:

Go Swimming

This is your last chance to hit the public outdoor pools before they close for the season. Mounger pool in Magnolia has family swim (and a corkscrew slide!) from 5:30-7 pm on Saturday and Sunday. Or for the little ones they have gentle swim from 11am - noon. Colman pool in West Seattle is a heated salt water pool and has family swim from 5-7pm, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Colman Pool - 8603 Fauntleroy Way SW; $2.75 - $3.75 admission

Mounger Pool - 2535 32^nd Ave. W, $2.75 - $3.75 admission; corkscrew slide is $1 extra

Aki Matsuri (Japanese Fall Festival)

This celebration of Japanese culture has all things Japanese, including a Japanese flea market, Japanese arts and crafts vendors, and plenty of performances, like Japanese drumming, a tea ceremony demonstration, and puppet shows.

9/6 from 10am-6pm and 9/7 from 11am-5pm
Bellevue Community College Main Campus - 3000 Landerholm Circle SE, Bellevue

Morning Movie and Pajama Party

Watch the Jungle Movie in your pajamas at this benefit for Morningsong Early Learning Center, the only child care center in Seattle serving homeless toddlers and preschoolers. $15 gets you a seat at the movie, popcorn, and a drink. Note that tickets must be purchased in advance.

9/6, 9am - 11:30am at the The Majestic Bay Theatres in Ballard

Star Party at Greenlake
View the stars through telescopes provided by the Seattle Astronomical Society. Held on the north shore of the lake at a grassy area west of the Bathhouse Theater, near the fishing piers.

9/6 at 7pm (unless it’s raining or completely cloudy, in which case it’s canceled)

Alki Statue of Liberty Dedication Ceremony

Celebrate the return of Lady Liberty to Alki beach with food, arts and crafts, music and dancing. Formal dedication ceremony at 1:30pm and luminaria lighting by the Girl Scouts at 7:30pm.

9/6/08, 11am to dusk, 61st Ave SW & Alki Ave SW

~ H.L. Mencken

If you happen to be near City Hall (600 4th Ave.) around lunch-time, today, interactive chamber music group Simple Measures will be performing an hour long sneak preview of their first concert series, With Strings Attached: the Political Dimension. The group will perform in the lobby, as part of the Seattle Presents free concert series.

Today’s concert is Votes for Notes, an exploration of democracy and decision making: the group will play a composition by Francis Hopkins, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and excerpts from Beethoven’s quartet for strings, “The Difficult Decision.” The audience can vote to determine what music will close the concert. September 4th, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Working in the wine world for many years I have been exposed to insufferable bores (and boors) whose lack of humor and love of exclusivity even make me content to put aside the Chateaneuf-du-Pape and crack open a tallboy of High Life. After meeting Josh and Doug, the near-decade long drinking buddies behind WINO magazine (which is free), I am convinced that wine and its consumption can be approachable, fun, and sometimes a little dumb. Just like beer.

So how did Josh and Doug come up with the name? Well they were having a smoke, half-drunk, and decided, “Let’s call it WINO.” They thought the name irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, and it certainly breaks the ice among the wine-phobic.

Probably my favorite feature of the magazine is a column called “Cheapskate” where a round table spares no feelings as they sample the Washington wines that have a stronghold on the bottom shelf at your local grocery store. The results range from the predictably awful to the shockingly gulpable.

Since these guys have visited so many wineries and tasted so many wines, here is their advice and recommendations:

On the intimidation factor when visiting tasting rooms:
Ask questions! People love to answer questions.

Up-and-coming wine regions:
Chelan. It will be one of the premier destinations for wine in the next five years, and the wines are produced with all estate (that is, on-site) fruit.

Cheapskate Wine Picks:
Columbia Crest H3 Cabernet
Hollywood Hill Rosé
Airfield Estate Rosé
Foot Stomp Rosé
(These guys like their dry rosé!)

Nonprofit They Would Like You to Know About
Make the Dash Count Foundation

Where You Can Get Wino
Click here for locations

Have you seen WINO? What do you think?

photo by photo coyote [flickr] via our group pool [#]

• If you’re not still in a Bumbershoot hangover [soundonthesound], you might be superhuman. And/or ready to head down to Portland for another multi-day music fest. If I ever recover: car/trainpool anyone? [mfnw]
• Microblog Tycoons Geeky Sweedes turn off their cloaking devices. [myballard], spin-off yet another neighborhood ‘blog [fremontuniverse], and are scheduled to appear on a panel tomorrow at the Central Library [cityclub] hosted by Monica Guzman. [bigblog]
• the Stranger is having a contest to pick your favorite Bumbershoot photo. Not that I’m telling you how to vote or anything, but if I must lose, let’s make it to Kyle’s picture of Saul Williams, which is stunning even before you consider how challenging the lighting was on that stage. [lineout]