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Our Flickr pool's shawnmebo is already back with snow day shots! That's fast!

UW meteorologist Cliff Mass has been putting out updates fast and furiously regarding the snow forecast for today, which is changing hourly as snow accumulates. Now he's concerned about "serious snow."

His latest post (titled "Humility") says we're pretty much guaranteed "2-4 inches south of the city, with roughly 1-2 inches on the north side. More as you head towards the Cascades and south." (Let's go to the radar!)

But looking at the way things are setting up, that might not be the worst in store:

The 11 AM surface map...just available shows a 1002-mb low over the NW tip of the Olympic Peninsula and the latest visible image show VERY unstable air offshore. If the low goes south of us and draws some of that cold, unstable air in...and it meets the cold stream from the north, we are talking about serious snow (6-12 inches).

Mass was earlier led astray by models which had the low farther south of Seattle, bringing us a blast of cold air but not much in the way of snow. ("Clearly, this was not a great success for the models--clearly more is getting farther north than forecast this morning.")

Might as well head home and fire up the hot chocolate, and wait to see what transpires. 

Billy Collins needs a new publicity photo.

As everyone who has lived in Seattle for more than one winter knows, when it snows, this city shuts down. Have you looked outside? That's not flour. Not that there is much reason to leave the house, at least on the literary front.

Billy Collins is at Town Hall tonight, which will be fun for those who got tickets before they sold out. Collins is an enthusiastic and entertaining speaker, so his appearances are always a pleasure. Tomorrow, Jared Duval will visit Town Hall to discuss open-sourcing in the context of activism, and if you're in U-Village on Saturday, doing that post-ritual sacrifice shopping thing, stop by the Barnes & Noble to unload your kids onto David, the B&N Assistant Manager who has been scapegoated to keep the wee bairns occupied for an hour or so.

11/22/10 4 p.m. Barnes & Noble U-Village
Carolyn Douglas
Storytime
An anchor-person will "share her favorite stories with you." Hm.

11/22/10 6 p.m. Pilot Books
Writer's Group
"New exercises every week. Come prepared to write and discuss." Aye, Cap'n!

11/22/10 7 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Billy Collins
Seattle Arts & Lectures
Collins served as Poet Laureate from 2001-2003, has published nine collections of poetry, and is a funny, funny guy. This might be a reason to leave the house, tonight. Alas, tickets sold out a month ago.

11/22/10 7 p.m. Elliott Bay Book Company
Elsie Hulsizer
Glaciers, Bears and Totems: Sailing in Search of the Real Southeast Alaska
The local author and her husband hit the American fjords. There may be a PowerPoint presentation. You've been warned.

11/22/10 7:30 p.m. Town Hall Seattle
Stephen L. Macknik & Susana Martinez-Conde
Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about our Everyday Deceptions
The founders of the field of "neuromagic" want to hack your brain.

11/22/10 8 p.m. Pilot Books
Jacqueline Suskin
The Collected
Poetry reading and signing.... (more)

We're going another way with Glimpses this morning. No snOMG pictures. Pure Kodachrome summer, courtesy of our Flickr pool's Great_Beyond, who writes:

"While summer '10 is all but dead and buried around town, thanks to the lag between me taking Kodachrome pictures and actually developing/posting them, we can still enjoy fragments of it.

Ah, summer...."

Over the next few cold and wintry days, it is definitely time to stay in and watch some of the latest new releases, care of our good friends at Scarecrow Video. But first, some sad movie news from this week: Queen Anne's Uptown Theater will soon be no more. After eighty-four years of showing films, the three-screen is set to close a week from today, November 28. Frowny face. Apparently, the theater "no longer competes effectively in the marketplace." In other words, MOAR 3D PLS.

Exhibit A of why more 3D is not always the answer is one of last week's new releases, the three-disc Blu-ray edition of Clash of the Titans, whose rejiggered post-production 3D ain't worth the money. Truly, the only good thing to come from that flick is the oft-used phrase "Release the Kraken."  That's more than Bow Wow's Lottery Ticket can claim. Instead, your best bet this week is Lisa Cholodenko's mature family dramedy The Kids are All Right, which will assuredly garner an Oscar nom or two.

Plenty of new films for the kids that came out last week, including creepy animated Jim Carrey in Disney's A Christmas Carol. There's also the very punny Cats and Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and the film that did just well enough to keep M. Night Shyamalan making movies, The Last Airbender.... (more)

Last Wednesday, Paul Taylor's Taylor 2 Dance Company visited Bellevue's Theatre at Meydenbauer Center with a three-piece evening. Established in 1993 by now-80-year-old choreographer and dance giant Paul Taylor, Taylor 2 is a touring group that travels all over the world.

His dances are often reworked for this six-person troupe, allowing for Taylor 2 to play in smaller houses with smaller budgets. The six-member company of young dancers is to Paul Taylor's main company as the Seattle Opera Young Artists Program is the Opera's mainstage performances. With this performance, you don't get technical precision, but you do get a youthful spirit of dancers emerging as artists.

The evening started (oddly, ten minutes early) with 3 Epitaphs. First performed in 1956, the piece begins as slouching figures lope onto the stage, covered head-to-toe in dark grey jumpsuits designed by the American abstract expressionist artist Robert Rauschenberg. With small mirrors over their eyes and on the palms of their hands, their knuckle-dragging treatise on posture--and playful sense of humor--brought to mind designer sock monkeys. (All right, they also reminded me of the back-up dancers for the Black Eyed Peas, circa "Boom Boom Pow.")

Paul Taylor (Photo: Maxine Hicks)

Taylor's focus on everyday movements, and their integration into his choreography, was revolutionary at the time--and so commonplace in dance today that it's hard for us now to see this piece as those who saw its premiere did. The lazy jazz music--an early form played, interestingly, at both weddings and funerals in NoLa--matches the intentionally lazy body movements of the dancers.

Taylor's brilliance was more in evidence in Duet from Roses. This balletic pas de deux featured dancers Justin Kahan and Madelyn Ho. Much of this piece is a pretty, standard duet from any story ballet. Even the music, Adagio for Clarinet and Strings by Heinrich Baermann, is reminiscent of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, making me wonder where the Taylor was in all of this.

But if you look closely, you see the small touches that are, for me, what makes his work a departure from Ballanchine. At one point, Kahan crouches down and places his hands, one above the other, gently on Ho's right hip. It's a tiny detail, lasting for only a few seconds and serving no purpose other than to convey an intimacy in a way deeper than your standard ballet vocabulary allows. Both danced with a graceful fluidity. Ho, whose bio mentions her recent graduation with a degree in Chemical and Physical Biology from Harvard, is charismatic. While some of the other dancers are clearly more accomplished, she has a magnetic quality that outshines them.

The last piece, Company B, subtly juxtaposes the innocence that was represented in the pop culture in the '40s with the realities faced by soldiers at the time. It begins quietly, with the full company emerging from a grayish fog-like light, as if they are stepping in from the past. The Andrews Sisters kick in with "Bei Mir Bist du Schön" and all are in high spirits. During the "Pennsylvania Polka," a couple whirls about the stage, while upstage, two soldiers act out war games in slow mo. In "The Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (of Company B)," Kahan is all brash exuberance until he's shot in the last moment of the piece. If you blink you miss it--and you see the piece completely differently. 

Having seen Taylor's work performed by ballet companies across the country--especially Company B--I can say that Taylor 2's performance lacks the cohesiveness that, say, a PNB would bring to Taylor's choreography. But Taylor interpreted by a ballet company is a different animal. Beautiful, but different. Taylor 2 brings a non-classical, everyday movement feel to the work that works. It's different, imperfect, and beautiful.

Michael Patten as Martin Luther, Connor Toms as Hamlet, and Chad Kelderman as Faustus in "Wittenberg" (Photo: John Ulman)

Playwright David Davalos may be responsible for the existence of the play Wittenberg (at Seattle Shakespeare Co. through December 5) but the set-up was just a matter of connecting the dots. As Davalos explains: "I’ve always been intrigued by the fact that Shakespeare identifies Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg, Marlowe cites Faustus as part of the faculty there, and history puts Luther there, teaching, preaching and launching the Protestant Reformation."

Thus, Wittenberg's biblio-porn slash-fic in which genial philosophy professor John Faustus (Chad Kelderman) and volatile theology instructor Martin Luther (Michael Patten) spar about the merits of faith and reason while "guiding" their undeclared-major head-case, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Connor Toms)--before he is called home for a family emergency. Like most prequels, it struggles to get to its dramatic feet, and in fact it works best when Hamlet is a bit part. (Hamlet gets enough attention as it is--on a multipurpose note, Wittenberg's set is Jennifer Zeyl's Hamlet set, gussied up with collegiate warmth.)

It's the argument between colleagues Faustus and Luther that animates the play, but Davalos has also overstuffed the proceedings with historical and literary in-jokes. Imagine if Airplane! was written by a post-doc, or better yet, imagine The Simpsons Harvard writers taking a crack at "theatre." From the opening scene of Dr. Faustus nailing papers to a bulletin board, to Hamlet's strange dream of a black obelisk on the moon, the play is a cyclonic mingling of esoteric and happily random references. ... (more)

In fact, Capitol Hill superheroes really drive a Kia. See CHS story below.

• 'Only in Ballard' campaign launches (My Ballard)
• North Beacon Hill Council protests closure of Neighborhood Service Center (Beacon Hill Blog)
• U-Needa Burger! (Belltown Messenger)
• BelltownPeople.com Holiday Special/ Entrepreneur Highlight! (belltownpeople)
• With police violence as backdrop, cops say superheroes at work in Seattle, patrolling Hill by Kia (Capitol Hill Seattle)
• Big rock stalls Madison Valley Stormwater project (Central District News)
• Eastlake weekly police reports: Burglars hit commercial building (Eastlake Ave)
• The New Guy In The Universe (Fremont Universe)
• City presents overview of Nickelsville in SoDo, addresses concerns (Blogging Georgetown)
• Councilmember Conlin: City Council is still working to prevent offices from moving into Green Lake Community Center (My Green Lake)
• Big crowd at meeting with FAA but few answers (Magnolia Voice)
• MORE Maple Leaf burglaries this month (cars, too) (Maple Leaf Life)
• Man confronts woman about pushing child in stroller (PhinneyWood)
• Uptown Theatre closing November 28 (Queen Anne View)
• South Seattle Cop on “Are Seattle Police Out of Control? Community Reacts to Recent Incident Caught on Tape” (Rainier Valley Post)

• 15th Avenue NE Reconstruction Open House Scheduled (Ravenna Blog)
• Neighbors get a few answers at crime prevention meeting (Roosiehood)
• Rainy Gardening (Southend Seattle)
• Local artist 'without a medium' finds calling in graphic novels (South Seattle Beacon)
• (The Southlake)
• Husky Stadium renovation plan gets green light (U District Daily)
• Help Seattle Public Schools plan 2011-2012 budget (My Wallingford)
• 7th grader at Eckstein attacked, robbed on his way to school (Wedgwood View)
• ‘The Hole’ followups: Read the ruling; see who’s tracking its safety (West Seattle Blog)

A lot of bandwidth has been given to the Culture War over the past few years. Pundits divide the country into red and blue, by state and by district, urban versus rural, argumentum ad nauseam. There is a lot of truth to the meme: the demographics of the country are changing, technology has had a profound impact on the culture with unknown results, and economic instability often leads to social conservatism.

But recently the Obama administration found a way to bridge the divide via an unexpected, but wildly successful method.

I'm speaking, of course, of the TSA. Or, more accurately, the Department of Homeland Security's directive that TSA agents will either x-ray everyone who takes a commercial flight in the U.S. or, quite literally, feel them up. Liberal or conservative, Tea-Party or tin-hat, the entire American political spectrum seems to feel that the new airport security procedures are invasive, pointless, and a violation of our civil liberties.

But reading the online chatter about the new procedures, I found myself feeling less outraged at the procedures themselves, than amused--even a little smug--at the outrage of others. I've been increasingly outraged at airport security procedures since 9/11. Personally, I don't fly anymore, if I can possibly avoid it. TSA agents invariably ask me to step aside from security for a wanding, a pat-down, and a quick peek at my panties. Not an auspicious way to begin a trip, unless preceded by candlelight and a nice dinner.

I wasn't quite sure what I thought about the current TSA kerfuffle until I saw this video from the New Jersey state legislature:... (more)

"Under" from Manifold Motion (Photo: Divide)

After having yearned for immersive performance experiences a couple of weeks ago, I had my wish granted a second time by Manifold Motion's Under (through November 28, tickets $12-$30).

Under, (previewed by The SunBreak here, including an interview with Manifold Motion's artistic director Keely Isaak Meehan), is an ambitious cross-disciplinary work inspired by "lichens, fungi, mosses, and molds".  You might think that sounds like a challenging concept to build an engaging performance from, and you would be right. Manifold Motion rises (or perhaps lowers?) to the challenge.

This is a performance that surrounds you with sights, textures, sounds, and the smell of soil. Built at Inscape in SoDo, Under features one of the most impressive dance solos I've seen in quite some time, by the amazing Elizabeth Rose.  Inspired by a man with a rare condition that made his appendages look like tree roots, Rose plants her hands on the floor and doesn't remove them for the entire length of her performance. It's an incredible display of agility, strength, and grace.

The greatest achievement of Under, though, is the lush and living space that Manifold has built for the performances to occupy. The walls breathe, ooze, and wriggle. From the ceilings to the floors, the attention to detail is what makes this a performance worth seeing. The installation spans across three rooms. I wished it were ten. Even though there were a couple of moments in the choreography where I started to feel a little restless, there were so many more moments of hey-look-at-that! that if there are shortcomings in the choreography itself, they're easily overlooked and quickly forgotten.... (more)

I confess, I'm having a hard time with this update. What can I say? Seattle is a juggernaut. It's kind of embarrassing; I'm not used to having a home team that wins. And yet, the Hydroponic Ducks are blowing the competition out of the water. What precisely is the proper etiquette for a beatdown?

As of this writing, the Word Count Scoreboard looks like so:
1. Seattle, Washington: 33,567,417
2. Los Angeles, California: 27,867,290
3. Germany, Europe: 26,704,975
4. London, England: 24,139,001
5. New York City, New York: 23,919,028

In our battle with Atlanta, Seattle continues to trounce A-Town, with an average word-count of 16,279 per Duck. The Atlanta Pandas trail at 14,057 each, giving Seattle a comfortable lead of 2,222. Seattle's still leading in donations, as well, pulling in about $2,500 over New York City's donors.

Of course, there are 11 days left in November, plenty of time for L.A. to catch up. In theory. It's possible, is all I'm saying. Los Angeles currently has 4,067 WriMos active and homed. Surely, they can produce more words than 3,319 Ducks? All those screenwriters? Oh. Um. Nevermind. [Ed.: See, this is where our terrible weather pays off! Enjoy the beach, losers!]

[UPDATE: Giveaway is over.] "Due to the large volume of visitors we are experiencing--since our "World's Best" Mac & Cheese became a favorite of a certain TV talkshow diva--we are currently offering a limited version of our website," explains Beechershandmadecheese.com. 

Turns out the "World's Best" Mac & Cheese from Beecher's is a claim Oprah might stand behind. To celebrate the sudden fame, Beecher's is giving away--that's free, folks!--hot dishes of mac & cheese until close of business (6 p.m.) today, November 19. You have three locations to choose from: their Pike Place store, Pasta & Co. at University Village, and Bennett's Pure Food Bistro on Mercer Island.

'Scuse us. Gotta run.

Regina Spektor's Live in London concert movie gets screened in just 15 U.S. cities this weekend, and the Northwest Film Forum is the Seattle venue, with just one showing on Sunday at 8 p.m. It's just $5, so if you missed her Paramount show--All night, between songs, it had been "Regina, I love you!", "Regina, I love you more than that first girl!", and a baritone howl of "Regina, I want to have your babies!" Spektor, in contrast, traveled imperturbably from song to song, though the "babies" brought her up short. "All tour," she said, "it's been babies. I guess...thanks?"--you can make up for lost time. The live album hits on November 22. Consequence of Sound has the track lists.

Wang Huaiqing (left) and SAM's associate curator of Asian Art, Josh Yiu (Photo: SAM)

You could call him an éminence grise if his hair wasn't so white, but he's not that well known in the U.S., as evidenced by this inaugural-yet-retrospective exhibition. Wang Huaiqing was born in Beijing in 1944, and thanks to his artistic talent was enjoying government-sponsored art education by the age of 12. Later, he studied folk art, architecture, and Western painting, and earned his Master's Degree with his painting "Wind with Aroma."

Now in his mid-60s, Huaiqing is an established master. In the 1990s, if you were in the right place at the right time, you could pick up a Huaiqing for between $3,000 and $10,000. Today, his paintings can sell for over a million dollars.

So while his Seattle Asian Art Museum exhibit is called Wang Huaiqing: A Painter’s Painter in Contemporary China (through April 10, 2011), that's more a reference to his artistic focus than his artworks' general appeal. You can view 25 of the 26 pieces at SAAM; a large scale piece is being shown downtown at SAM. (I'm told the lack of larger pieces is due to the artist's residence not being very large, so no canvases more than about six feet would fit.) That may account over one-quarter of his life's work. 

What people tend to see in Huaiqing's work, at first, is what's not there: Much of the recent art from China has been in understandably belated public dialogue with the Cultural Revolution and Chairman Mao. But Wang Huaiqing's foremost association is with a now-disbanded group of artists called "The Contemporaries," whose manifesto called for, in the classical Confucian mode, "brushing away the ugliness, perversity, and deception, and preserving beauty, warmth, and candor."... (more)

If you felt an outpouring of lovingkindness while walking past the Convention Center yesterday, it was likely because over 1,000 people were gathered inside to celebrate National Philanthropy Day, hosted by AFP Washington. I was glad to attend, because on a day when unemployment cut-offs and ballooning deficits were in the news, it was particularly good to hear about Seattle's pathbreaking philanthropic engagement. 

Enrique Cerna

Former Mayor Norm Rice

The lunch was emceed by KCTS's Enrique Cerna, and former Mayor Norm Rice spoke as well, but both men knew that the stars of the afternoon were the honorees, and said as much. In fact, the theme of the day was the "faces of philanthropy"--Seattle's populist spirit emerging even when it comes to what you'd imagine would be a wealthy-elbow-rubbing affair. 

In a town where you can run into a sweater-and-khaki-wearing Bill Gates catching a matinée at the Harvard Exit, it makes sense that Matt Griffin (a commercial real estate developer) and Evelyne Rozner (founder of her business consultancy, The Rozner Co.) were low-key about their Outstanding Philanthropists award, given because they "have not only contributed substantially to local and national nonprofits, they have also led efforts that raised more than $250 million for causes they support."

Rozner won applause for warning that an obsession with efficiency and short-term fiscal prudence (as measured by cents per dollar that go to administration "versus" operations) is harmful to non-profits, who need to be allowed to experiment and test out new practices.

The Whatcom Community Foundation was honored for Outstanding Philanthropy Organization (President Mauri Ingram's wry sense of humor won her a "She'll be here all week, folks" from Cerna), and the Moles family was recognized in the Outstanding Philanthropic Family category. For your family's reference, here's the contribution benchmark you should aim for: ... (more)

I've been on a bit of a burger binge lately.

Part of the reason: USA Today asked me to pick a best (though not necessarily the best) burger in Washington for a national feature. So I ate a few from around the state, and even sampled what turned out to be the best in our adjoining state of Idaho, and you can find my pick here.

In the midst of this, Kidd Valley asked me to judge their 35th Anniversary Burger Battle. It was a fun event, featuring six local firefighters serving up their specialties in a friendly competition to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association.

Our judging panel picked a clear winner: Mike "Suey" Sulak's Blazin' Flashover Bacon Burger.... (more)

1972 "was a bad year if you hate snow," writes our Flickr pool's shawnmebo. "Let's see what Steve Pool has to say about it." Today a bunch of Canadian cold air heads our way, bringing lots of snow in the mountains. Cliff Mass waves off concerns of Snowpocalypse 2010...mostly, noting that tomorrow we see something "close to a pattern that brings snow...but the models are emphatic that it is too warm over most of the lowlands for snow. The freezing level is at around 2000 ft and the snow level is around 1000 ft. This is close."

Dr. Arun Raha

When I arrived this afternoon to interview Remy Trupin, executive director of the Washington State Budget & Policy Center, about the nuts-and-bolts of state budget allocation, he was still shellshocked from this morning's state revenue forecast.

The short story is that the projected deficit for the 2009-2011 and 2011-13 budget cycles has grown by $1.2 billion, to $5.7 billion, since September's forecast. The Hopper (the Senate Democrats blog) live-blogged the announcement, and that's where the following quotes come from:

Revenue for the remainder of the current budget cycle is projected to fall by $385 million to $28 billion. Revenue for the next cycle is projected to fall by $809 million to $33 billion.

"I would conclude that our forecast in September was more optimistic than it needed to be," said state chief economist Arun Raha, a qualification that should be immediately registered in a collection of classic understatements. Almost $300 million of the shortfall comes from the passage of I-1107, which rolled back taxes on bottled water, soda, and candy. 

To balance the budget for the current budget cycle with cuts, the budget would need to be reduced by almost eleven percent across the board. To meet this year's shortfall, said Marty Brown, director of the state's Office of Financial Management, "We're going to be talking about Basic Health soon, Disability Lifeline soon, levy equalization. School districts are going to get nailed." ... (more)

Longtime punk band Bad Religion rocked the Showbox SoDo last night as part of their 30th anniversary tour. Thirty years as a band and fifteen studio albums later, they can still deliver one of the best punk shows you will likely see. If you were among the very packed (the show was sold out!) crowd last night, you know what I'm talking about. If you weren't there, well, you will just have to make do with these photos from the show. Enjoy!... (more)

Q: Is it already time to start thinking about the next Sasquatch Festival, at the Gorge Memorial Day weekend, 2011?

A: Yes, it is already time to start thinking about the next Sasquatch Festival, at the Gorge Memorial Day weekend, 2011.  And while you're at, you might want to begin preparations for 2012.

Next year's fest marks the 10th (!) anniversary of Sasquatch, and to celebrate the occasion, it's back to being a four-day event, with the Foo Fighters headlining Friday.  To which I say: BLERGH.  One day at the Gorge is enough for me, and the thought of four days, with the camping and the filth and the port-a-potties approaches the territory of welcome to my hellscape.  But I'm sure some people are excited at the prospect, and lucky for them, "all-in" tickets, which include all four days of admission, along with parking and camping fees ($285-295), go on sale this Saturday at 10 a.m. PST. 

You'll have to wait till February 7 for the complete Sasquatch lineup, and tickets by day should be available right around then too.  Full press release after the jump.... (more)

On November 30, two federal unemployment programs are set to expire: Emergency Unemployment Compensation and Extended Benefits. HuffPo notes that while the House has a vote coming up on an extension, the Senate has nothing on its schedule, so it is likely that--across the country--hundreds of thousands will no longer get unemployment checks. 

Here in Washington State, the Employment Security Department's Jeff Robinson told me that the high-end estimate is that some 50,000 to 55,000 workers will have exhausted their emergency, longterm benefits by the end of the month. (That's a cumulative number, counting since Congress implemented Emergency Unemployment Compensation in July 2008. "More than 25,000 already had exhausted their benefits as of Oct. 31," the ESD told legislative committees yesterday.) 

There are tiers to unemployment payments these days, after the unemployed worker has exhausted the state's typical 13 to 26 weeks of unemployment insurance. Federal emergency extensions have created four tiers totaling 53 additional weeks of benefits. ESD has created an "Impending Storm Workgroup," to help deal with the thousands of people losing a weekly income and to explain to people counting on those "extra" weeks that things have changed: Anyone who files a new claim after November 27 will be limited to 46 weeks of benefits.

What has not changed is Washington's unemployment rate, which refuses to budge from nine percent (9.1 percent if you want to enjoy an imaginary granularity; a year ago, the rate was 9.2 percent). Perhaps because this month is my birthday, the Seattle Times put Sanjay Bhatt to the task of surveying the state's unemployment situation, and the result is grim--18 percent of state residents are "underemployed"--but more inclusive in context, and accurate, than the Times has been inclined to dish up previously. ... (more)

Felix Hernandez is the winner of the 2010 American League Cy Young Award, given to the league's best pitcher. And he has nerds to thank.

Felix's candidacy for the Cy Young award turned into a referendum on statistical analysis. Traditionally, the Cy Young Award has gone to the pitcher with the gaudiest record, like Randy Johnson's 18-2 mark in 1995. Hernandez's record was just 13-12, but he led the league in ERA and fewest hits per nine innings. The stats community, growing in influence in baseball circles, championed Hernandez's candidacy as a break from the hegemony of wins, which naturally are dependent on how good your team is. (The Mariners aren't good).

By any measure, Hernandez, who is still just 24 years old, had an incredible season. My favorite memory will be his September 17 start against Texas, when he came within six outs of no-hitting the eventual AL champion Texas Rangers. For a few brief innings, Hernandez reminded us what it means to care about a baseball game--the tension and release of every pitch, the brief moment of hope (or terror) when the ball is hit and you aren't sure yet how hard or where, and the ongoing, pit-of-the-stomach nervousness. (Trust us, non-sports-fans, it's worth it.)

Congrats to King Felix. Recognition well-deserved. And thanks for caring, when the Mariners' record gave you every reason not to.

Husky fans that lapsed into a coma shortly after the 2002 Sun Bowl may awaken to find that they didn’t miss anything.

The team has not been close to a bowl game since, and need three wins in their final three games in order to become bowl eligible in this, Jake Locker's final season. The first of these three games is tonight vs. UCLA, and you're likely currently stuck in traffic as a result.

Since getting to a bowl will take wins, we asked a group of award-winning Husky fans to discuss how they think the season will play out:

Do you think the Huskies will win their final three games and become bowl eligible?

Frank (Mr. Anderson News Quiz Champion, 5/23/1995): Ehh, maybe if we didn't have to play Cal at Berkeley--the Bears have been sick at home.

Drew (Parking Spot Award Runner-Up the Last Four Months*): No, primarily because the week-on, week-off inconsistency of this team will mean likely one or two losses in these last three games. Even if the bye week helps them rest and prepare for UCLA this week, and UW gets a win, you have two tough road games against Cal, who plays really well at home and almost upset Oregon, and WSU where it'll probably be snowing and bitch-ass-cold. The Cougs are probably the most improved team in the Pac-10 this season, or at least the past 3-5 games.

Ansley (Funplex Pop-a-Shot Champion): I don't think they are going to get the three wins they need, but it hurts me so much to type it that I might just take it back.

Dusty (2002 Nobel Prize in Physics): Yes, they will become bowl eligible because there are now 60 bowl games, so every FBS school is required to play in the post-season.  That said, we will finish 3-9, so pack your bags for the Poodle Dog "Good Food" Bowl in beautiful Fife, WA!... (more)

"We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it." --Don Delillo, White Noise (Photo by troyjmorris, on SoCal sabbatical, in our Flickr pool.)

The University of Washington (UW) Huskies will play the University of California Los Angeles Bruins at 5 p.m. on Thursday, November 18, in Husky Stadium. As a result of this unusual game time, traffic will likely be most congested on I-5, SR 520, NE 45th Street, and Montlake Boulevard which will be closed from 6:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.  Peak traffic is expected to occur between 2 to 5 p.m., but increased congestion could remain throughout the evening.

Most of the standard traffic routing for Husky games will be in place for this game in the area surrounding the stadium. There will be two exceptions: From 6:30 to 10:30 p.m. Montlake Boulevard will be closed from NE Pacific Avenue to NE 44th  to accommodate bus traffic; and the normal game-day one-way pattern on 25th Avenue NE from the E-1 parking lot up to NE 75th Street will not be in effect.

King County Metro Transit will continue normal p.m. peak weekday service with reroutes starting at 2:30 p.m. for many of the bus routes that serve that area including both... (more)

Bronze Fawn crafts amazingly layered and expansive sounds with merely a power trio and more guitar effects pedals than seem reasonable. Their live show is accompanied by video edited on the fly to match up with the music. I've seen them four or five times of the past couple years, and their first full length, Lumber, is in heavy rotation on my various music devices.

Thursday will be, barring any future reunions, Bronze Fawn's final live performance. Guitarist Bryce Shoemaker is apparently off to post-graduate work, and the band has decided they have reached the end of their era. To be honest, it feels a little bit like the end of an era for all of us. Progressive and challenging music seems to be on the way out while vapid, electronic pop music is surfing a neon 1980s nightmare straight back into our social consciousness.

Luckily, Bronze Fawn are bringing friends along to their farewell party. The Kindness Kind are gathering acclaim playing enchanting electronic-tinged indie with soulful female vocals.  Eighteen Individual Eyes are an upcoming girl band headed by Jamie Hellgate that plays dark indie reminiscent of Denali, but with guitars. Blue Light Curtain have been shoegazing for fans of The Cure since 2004.

It all goes down at Neumo's this Thursday, November 18. Doors at 8 p.m., 21+, tickets are $8, available at the door.