What people think about your Seattle school

The Stranger (a free weekly newspaper in Seattle), recently had a special "back to school" issue.
For my foreign readers, I should clarify that in the USA "school" is a synonym for college and university, so the issue focused on the issues 18+ year-olds face when going to college/uni.

The funniest section was the guide to "what people think about your school" - perhaps useful information for people like my brother-in-law that are trying to pick good teaching jobs :) I've had a few conversations recently with family, trying to clear up the difference between Seattle Pacific University and Seattle University... So here is an extract from the article that makes it clear:

If you're attending Seattle Pacific University, people will assume you're either celibate or a closet case or both. If you're attending Seattle University, people will think you're relatively intelligent and maybe Catholic but nothing special.

New Trader Joe's open!

Yay! The new Trader Joe's in "downtown" Redmond officially opens today!

A Confederacy of Dunces

{A} and I saw the Seattle world-premier production of A Confederacy of Dunces at the Book-it Repertory this past weekend.

I was a little nervous - this book is full of zany characters and a takes place in several locations around 1960s New Orleans, a place with a unique culture. Capturing all that on stage would be hard... The good news is I think the production mostly did a great job - the leads were fantastic, Brandon Whitehead as Ignatius Reilly, and Ellen McLain as his mother were pretty much perfect and just as I imagined the characters.

Todd Licea made a great Mr. Levy and Kevin McKeon was great as Mr. Clyde, the proprietor of Paradise Hot Dogs. (His portrayal of Claude Robichaux was a bit too old and doddering for me...)
Charles Norris was good as Burma Jones - perhaps not as towering a figure as I had imagined when I read the book, but he played him with a nice "cool cat" attitude.

The ending felt a bit rushed and too hard to follow for people that didn't have the book freshly in their memory. The play probably will be most appealing to people that know and love the book and can put up with the minor flaws in the script, set or performances. People that have never read the book will have fun most of the way through, and hopefully will get their curiosity piqued enough to want to check out the book.

I leave you with a link to the Ignatius' Ghost blog, which takes you on a tour of modern New Orleans looking for the locations mentioned in the book.

Happy Hour in an Irish pub

You'd think happy hour in an Irish pub would be a great time to get some cheap(er) Irish beer, right? Nope, that's not the case at Bellevue's Paddy Coyne's.

Instead of discounts on Guinness or Smithwick's, they offer cheap Bud and Bud Light. A pint of Irish beer will set you back the regular price of $6. Somehow that just strikes me as lame - they'd be better off not having any beer specials during happy hour.

The next Iron Chef America could be from Seattle!

I spotted an interesting blog post today on the "Eat All About It" blog:

The Food Network released the names of contestents for The Next Iron Chef, and Holly Smith is on the list. Smith, of Cafe Juanita and Poco Carretto, joined nine other top chefs in five weeks of worldwide taping, flying ‘from Los Angeles to Japan to New York to compete in the food fight of their professional lives.’

What's Sue McCown been up to?

It turns out Sue McCown of Coco La Ti Da and Earht & Ocean dessert fame has not been hiding under a rock for the past few months. This blog post describes her work with Seattle's Cupcake Royale to help them improve the texture and longevity of their cupcakes. (They noticed that many people bought them to eat the next day, and they tended to dry out overnight...)

For some reason when I read the description of Sue making batch after batch of cake mix, tweaking one variable each time, I picture a female Alton Brown doing a "food science is fun" routine. I'm not sure Sue would like to be labeled "the female Alton Brown", though :)

Ladysmith Black Mambazo in Seattle

A quick add-on to the previous post about summer concerts:
Ladysmith Black Mambazo (from South Africa) will be playing at the Woodland Park Zoo. More info here.