Via the Seattle PI

Looking to bring more fresh, local, seasonally grown foods into your family? We have a challenge for you.

It’s the second annual Farm Fresh Family Challenge, sponsored by the Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance. The alliance is looking for a Seattle-area family willing to buy most of its fresh food from farmers markets between June and November this year, and to write a weekly P-I-sponsored blog during that time.

The first Farm Fresh blogger, Kathleen Whitson of West Seattle, found inspiration experimenting with farmstand eggs, debating when she would choose organic over conventionally grown produce, discovering the different body and taste of a pasture-raised Thanksgiving turkey, and figuring out how to tell her husband why it no longer felt right to make an apple pie in July.

If that’s your sort of food for thought — or if you have your own take on what a Farm Fresh Family should be — here are the details:

# Candidates must be willing to buy most fresh foods (vegetables, fruits, meats, shellfish, fish eggs, cheese, etc.) from one of the seven Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance markets (Broadway, University District, West Seattle, Phinney, Magnolia, Columbia City or Lake City).

# They must write a weekly P-I-sponsored blog, track the prices of the products they buy each week, and be willing to occasionally host a local chef in their home kitchen to share shopping and cooking tips.

To apply, send an e-mail to nfma@seattlefarmersmarkets.org with a description of your family (how many members, ages, etc.), where you normally shop for food, how much you spend on groceries in an average week, how often you cook at home, and what prompted your interest in buying local, sustainably grown foods. Deadline to apply is May 30.

The Alliance will provide the family with assistance, including personal market tours, introductions to farmers, canvas shopping bags, shopping tokens to get started, recipe ideas and more. Photos of the family will be featured in the alliance’s quarterly newsletter and will be posted at all market information booths.

I love farmers market season! Finally, there’s a weekday farmers market open! The Wallingford Farmers Market opens today!

From their website, it appears that they are really planning to expand the market this year. I always found it a very pleasant market, a little more laid back than the busy weekend markets like Ballard and the University District. Though the vendor list was definitely shorter last year. From cooking demonstrations to honey, meat, fish, and even garden art, the market appears to be going strong and growing steadily. I’ll be there today grabbing some fresh veggies for dinner. See you there!

Wallingford Farmers Market
Wallingford Center Parking Lot
3-7pm

Today from 4-8pm Haagen-Dazs is offering free 4oz samples (in a cup, sugar cone or cake cone) of their new Vanilla Honey Bee ice cream flavor.

I’ve checked with the University District location (4301 University Way NE) and they are indeed participating.

Apparently there is a honey bee crisis where honey bees are disappearing at an alarming rate, and Haagen-Dazs is trying to raise awareness. When you purchase a pint of any of their honey bee-dependent flavors they will donate funds to support sustainable pollination research. For more information check out Help The Honey Bees.

This past Saturday NOFX stopped off at the Showbox Sodo for their second to last show on the second leg of their 2008 tour. It’s nice to see NOFX doing some club type shows instead of big Warped Tour festivals like they normally do these days.

The doors opened at 8:30pm, and we showed up sometime after 10pm. Were able to catch No Use For A Name, however we missed the opening band American Steel. I’ve seen NUFAN a number of times and they’re not a bad band, however I’m not a fan. There’s just nothing about them that jumps out at me. The crowd was into them and they played their “hit” ‘Justified Black Eye’ that was on one of those Fat Wreck Chords compilations.

NOFX came on stage shortly after 11:30pm to the song ‘Welcome to Jamrock’ by Damian Marley. They opened with ‘Dinosaurs Will Die’, which was a bit of a surprise, but a good one for sure. Their set was a nice mix of old and new songs. They’ve been a band for over 20 years, so they have a lot of material. They also played my favorite cover of ‘Radio’ by Rancid ever. In fact, I have to say I like their cover version more than the original. It’s just a lot more fun. There was the typical NOFX chatter between every single song. Fat Mike spent a lot of time talking about his disdain for children, religion and the state of politics these days. They played ‘Murder The Government’ but not ‘Idiot Son of an Asshole’ (a song about our current president). They also dedicated ‘Whoops I OD’d’ to a local kid who was a big fan of theirs who died of an overdose. I saw one of the kid’s friends there holding up a memorial t-shirt during the song. It was pretty cool. They were only supposed to play until 1am, but ended up going over that by a bit and ended closer to 1:30.

All in all the show was great. NOFX had an insane amount of energy, even though Fat Mike kept going on about how drunk he was and how he felt like he was cheating the audience because he couldn’t play so well. The only thing is, I don’t like Showbox Sodo very much. The place was packed and when there are hundreds of people jammed in there it gets really gross as the night goes on. For a rather large, open space it gets really hot and damp and at the end of the night the floor is all wet and there is condensation dripping from the pipes in the ceiling. Not to mention, if you’re on the shorter side, it’s hard to find a good vantage point to watch the show.

*Special thanks to Shawn for the crappy camera phone picture.

I was beginning to think we’d never see warm, sunny days again. Do we dare hope that this portends good things for Memorial Day Weekend?

A few additions to Jeffrey’s comic convention coverage:

A shy, middle-aged woman walked up to me with her partner as I was standing in a long line waiting for an autograph. “Excuse me, can I ask a question?” she said in a near-whisper.

Sure, I said.

She looked around for a moment before she spoke again. “Who is Wil Wheaton?”

Well, I said, he’s an actor who played a very annoying character on a Star Trek show, but later got into blogging. Turns out he’s an amazing writer and a very nice guy.

“Oh,” she said. “Thanks very much.”

I didn’t add: also, his patience is legendary. I’m sure today wasn’t the first time somebody else has walked up, looked over the line, and yelled loudly WESLEY CRUSHER? WHAT THE HELL IS WITH WESLEY CRUSHER? THAT GUY QUIT STAR TREK EARLY, THE WIMP!

—

“The thing about comics these days,” somebody said, “is that the comics industry used to assume that they’d get complete turnover in a few years. The teenagers would grow up, they’d stop buying comics, new kids would start. You could run the same storylines every five years or so and it wouldn’t matter. Now you have people like me who have been following comics for twenty or thirty years, and they remember Amazing Spider-Man #121 or whatever. I think the industry is still trying to catch up.”

—

More and more web comics people are showing up at the comic conventions. The Penny Arcade guys are local, of course, but there were many others: Scott Kurtz (PVP), Jeph Jacques (Questionable Content), David Malki (Wondermark), Sam Logan (Sam and Fuzzy), and many more.

(Jeph, by the way, is one of the sweetest guys in the world. Say hi. Just don’t ask him about his bird tattoos.)

—

The cos-players — people in full costume — weren’t as plentiful or imaginative as they are for Sakuracon or Norwescon, but they were around. Several stormtroopers, a few Princess Leia-wannabes. One really good Mara Jade. One really bad Hitler-mustached Imperial admiral.

For the most part, though, it was a relief: unlike some other cons I’ve been to, nobody looked at you funny if you wore a normal shirt and jeans.

—

J. Michael Straczynski is giving a talk tomorrow. You might want to go see it if you can. Geeks know him as the creator/writer of the TV series Babylon 5 and a writer of comic books for Marvel, but the rest of you are about to hear a lot about this guy: he wrote a movie called Changeling. Clint Eastwood directed it; it’s up for the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, coming soon to a theater near you. Since then he’s sold movies with directors like Ron Howard, Wolfgang Petersen, the Wachowski Brothers, and quite a few more.

How they talked him into coming to this convention, I have no idea. For fans and people interested in writing, it’s an opportunity not to be missed.

What follows after the jump may include some inside baseball, and if you’re not into comic books you might not catch all of it. What is important though is that today was the first day of this year’s Emerald City Comic Convention. Comic creators, fans and press gathered in the Washington State Convention & Trade Center to celebrate this thing we call comics books.

The first thing that a non-comics person would notice when stepping onto the convention floor is the complete range of totally inappropriate style choices for facial hair. We are not as a people a fashionable lot, and while I think most everyone can agree that a t-shirt and jeans is a fine casual clothing option when you start replacing that with a pair of too small shorts and shirt that barely covers the belly button then there are issues, at least when that’s on a guy.

This is not for the faint of heart, I’m glad that I left my fiancee at home, she can deal with me enjoying comics as a hobby, but I don’t know if she could deal with the full force of comic fandom. Can you?

(more…)

I mean the term “geeks” lovingly of course, especially since I’m one of them. That’s right I’m heading down south from my home in (currently) sunny Vancouver [mbv] to attend the Emerald City Comic Convention [eccc] this weekend at the Washington State Convention & Trade Center.  For the next few days I’ll be a guest blogger on the site, and one of the several of Metblog types at the convention.

If you’ve not yet considered going to the convention this weekend I’d certainly have another think on that one. It promises to be a really cool show, with lots of top name comic book creators there such as Ed Brubaker (he killed Captain America), Dan Didio, Gail Simone and Scott Kurtz.

If you don’t like reading, or looking at colour picture pages, then there’s television stars there to including Julie Benz (Buffy/Angel), Wil Wheaton [wwdn] (from Stand By Me & Star Trek: The Next Generation) and whatever science fiction actors could be coaxed down from Vancouver for the weekend.

All in all it should be a great time. This is the third year in a row I’ll have come down for the show, so that’s just not idle speculation.

Some time next week I’ll be getting a new bicycle and I couldn’t be more excited about it, but I’m a little bit nervous, too.  The last time I was on a bicycle was circa 1979, so obviously I’m a little out of practice.  I’m not worried about being able to get on the bike and ride–there’s got to be a reason “it’s like riding a bike” is the cliche that means something’s easy, right?–but I am concerned about where I’ll be riding my bike.  At least until I’ve got some quality practice riding time in, I really don’t want to be out on the streets with a bunch of cars.

 That’s why I am so glad to hear about Seattle Parks’ “Group Health Bicycle Saturday and Sundays“.  Co-sponsored by Group Health Cooperative and the Cascade Bicycle Club, Bicycle Saturdays & Sundays allow bike riders to ride Lake Washington Boulevard south of Mount Baker Beach and around Seward Park free of motorized vehicles from 9 am to 6 pm on selected weekends in the summer. 

 The first Bicycle Saturday is this very weekend on May 10; later in the month on May 18 is the Sunday date.  The remaining dates are June 14 & 29, July 12 & 20, August 9 & 17 and September 13 & 21.

If you are looking for things to do this month in Seattle, and author readings and speaking engagements top your list of preferred activities, Seattle’s got a lot going on this month (and every month really). Here are a few of your MetBloggers favorite venues and some of their activities for the month.

Town Hall Seattle
Town Hall Seattle has a wide variety of events. You can hear the Lake Union Civic Orchestra on Friday and the Puget Sound Symphony Orchestra on Saturday. Next week, there’s a talk about memory loss and what is normal as we age by Sue Halpern. Arianna Huffington discusses her new book, Right is Wrong on May 20th, and on Thursday, May 29th, attend Quiz Show: You’re On the List. For a complete list, see their website.

Elliott Bay Bookstore
Elliott Bay has a variety of literary events this, and every month. Some of the notable activities this month include: Lisa Garrigues on Writing Motherhood, Will Durst with The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing, Cory Doctorow of bOINGbOING! fame with Little Brother, and what is sure to be an interesting if not confrontational event ofJames Frey and Josh Kilmer-Purcell withBright Shiny Morning. For a complete list of events, see their website.

University Bookstore
The University of Washington Bookstore offers their own set of events and readings including: Charlaine Harris, David Rothenberg, and Andrew Sean Greer. There are also plenty of kids events including story time at the University District, Mill Creek, and Bellevue locations. See their website for a complete list.

If you’re at all interested in author readings, book signings, and events such as these, it’s worth signing up for the mailing lists for the University Bookstore, Town Hall Seattle, and Elliott Bay Books.

Do you have other favorite event venues? Tell us about them in the comments!