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EverOut

Where to Celebrate Lunar New Year 2022 in Seattle

by EverOut Staff • Wednesday at 12:30 pm

Crowd favorite Dough Zone Dumpling House will offer half off select dumpling specials on February 1.
Crowd favorite Dough Zone Dumpling House will offer half off select dumpling specials on February 1.
Celebrated across many Asian cultures, Lunar New Year is a time of renewal, gathering with family, and enjoying festive foods. This year, the holiday falls on Tuesday, February 1, ushering in the Year of the Tiger, known for power, boldness, and doing it big! Celebrate the occasion with events from the Wing Luke Museum's Lunar New Year Fair to the Chinatown-ID Lunar New Year Celebration - Year of the Tiger (postponed until April), plus holiday food specials.

EVENTS


JANUARY 28–29


Lucky Envelope Brewing Lunar New Year
Cofounders Raymond Kwan and Barry Chan named their Ballard craft brewery Lucky Envelope for the colorful red envelopes traditionally stuffed with money and given out on Chinese New Year to bring good fortune. So it only makes sense that it's the perfect place to usher in the Year of the Tiger. As they've made a welcome habit of doing, they'll release some new beers for the holiday, including the Mijiaya Historic Chinese Beer and Lychee Thai Basil Sour on draft, plus a Water Tiger Cold IPA collaboration with Highland Brewing, and more. Other festivities include red envelope giveaways, daily food truck appearances, and Water Tiger merch.
(Lucky Envelope Brewing, Ballard)

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I, Anonymous

I, Anonymous: Entitled-Ass Test Takers

by Anonymous • Wednesday at 10:30 am

anon012522.jpeg
Steven Weissman

I’m sick of entitled-ass people coming to the COVID testing sites and throwing a fit when they can’t be seen as a walk-up. Everyone and their fucking mother are getting tested right now, and I have even less sympathy if you’re trying to get tested because you want to go travel for frivolous reasons. Fork out the money and go pay for a different service because people who are sick or have been exposed aren’t able to get in and get tested since you twats are taking so many spots, which is what the free testing was meant for in the first place.

Also, can everyone coming to the testing sites understand that the people swabbing and registering you have no control over the website, hours, set up of the sites, etc. So many of you fuckers come in and act like I personally was responsible for whatever the complaint of the day is. I know someone who got spit on for turning a person away who didn’t have an appointment. I’ve been screamed at for the same thing. People are acting like fucking animals and I’m sick of it.

Y’all suck,

Just One Exhausted Healthcare Worker of Many

Do you need to get something off your chest? To submit an unsigned rant, love letter, confession, or accusation, send an e-mail to ianonymous@thestranger.com. Please remember to change the names of the innocent and guilty.

Sponsored

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News • City

Seattle City Council Reverses Decision to End Hazard Pay

by Hannah Krieg • Wednesday at 9:00 am

TKTKTK
Grocers at Trader Joe's called the vote "the least the council can do" to help workers who get breathed on all day. Lester Black

On Tuesday, a somewhat narrow majority of the Seattle City Council voted against overturning former Mayor Jenny Durkan's veto of the council's attempt to end hazard pay for grocery workers last month, effectively extending the benefit for workers until the council says otherwise or the civil emergency ends. According to a Trader Joe's worker at public comment, the approval is “the least the council can do” for the workers who get breathed on by grocery shoppers for several hours a day.

Councilmembers Sara Nelson and Alex Pederson both voted yes to overturn the former mayor’s veto. Councilmembers Teresa Mosqueda and Dan Strauss were absent.

Back in December, the council voted 8 - 0 to end the mandate on Seattle grocery stores with 500+ employees to pay frontline workers an extra $4 an hour. At the time, grocery workers told The Stranger they felt “abandoned” by the council, who had given them, in some cases, a 20% raise.

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Slog AM/PM

Slog AM: N95s Are on the Way, Omicron May Have Peaked in King County, Justice Breyer to Retire!!!!!!!!

by Jas Keimig • Wednesday at 8:38 am

I think the government should give me more free shit. Like healthcare.
I think the government should give me more free shit. Like health care. naruecha jenthaisong/Getty

Free N95 masks coming this week: The Biden administration is making good on its promise to distribute 400 million of the high-quality masks across the country. Starting near the end of the week, N95s will likely be available at participating pharmacies and grocery stores like CVS, Walgreens, and Kroger (QFC's parent company). The Seattle Times also compiled a helpful list on where to get free masks and COVID tests from the federal and state government.

And in King County: Coronavirus cases appeared to have peaked earlier this month on January 10 with 7,563 cases and have since dropped at least 43%. Though COVID-19 levels are still extremely high, King County health officer Dr. Jeff Duchin said that hospitalizations have showed signs of slowing. Now, eastern Washington hospitals are prepping for a case surge as Idaho starts to run out of open beds.

I wish to remain as beautiful, as whole, as this Roman bowl: In Nijmegen, Netherlands, archeologists have uncovered a completely intact blue glass bowl that they believe dates back 2,000 years, reports Hyperallergic. It has no chips or cracks on its surface and lead archeologist Pepjin van Geer said the find was "really special."

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Slog AM/PM

Slog PM: Shi Shi Is Dead, Elton John Is Not Dead, and Hazard Pay Stays in Place for Grocery Workers

by Chase Burns • Tuesday at 5:10 pm

Portland Mercury's Abe Asher added a few blurbs to this round-up.

Not dead. Just has COVID. Here he was last week performing at New Orleans Smoothie King Center.
Not dead. Just has COVID. Here he was last week performing at New Orleans' Smoothie King Center. Photo by Erika Goldring/Getty Images

I'm sorry if I'm the one to break the news to you: But Shi Shi is dead.

Who's Shi Shi? WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?

Noted Ballard High School graduate Jesse Harris, the founder of NFFTY, has a new movie out called Borrego. It's screening on Wednesday at SIFF. We're told Harris will be there. Say hey.

She's running: Nancy isn't retiring, reports everyone.

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News • Olympia

Washington Could Get European-Style Recycling. Lobbyists Are Mad About It

by Matt Baume • Tuesday at 2:00 pm

One of Recologys trash pits.
One of Recology's trash pits. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images Staff

So there you are, holding an empty milk carton and staring at your kitchen trash can and your recycling bag, hoping for some kind of clue.

You squeeze the milk carton a little. Seems like it’s made of paper on the outside, so it’s probably recyclable, right? But wait, does it have a foil lining on the inside? And what’s the rule about the plastic spout? Do you have to cut that part out before you recycle it? The words “please recycle” are printed on the back, but does that mean please recycle THIS CONTAINER, or is it just a general philosophy?

What the hell are you supposed to do with this thing and so many things like it? Why is getting rid of trash so hard? Isn’t there someone we can blame?

In fact, yes. In the US, manufacturers put food in complicated, hard-to-recycle packaging because those manufacturers aren’t on the hook for cleaning up after themselves — taxpayers are.

“We as consumers get stuck with decisions that we never made,” says Senator Mona Das, sponsor of a bill that would — hopefully — fix Washington’s lousy recycling rates by bringing us more in line with how things have worked for decades in Europe and Canada.

Lobbyists in the other Washington aren't thrilled about it.

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News • City • Labor

Sawant Wants the Council to at Least Pretend to Care About Starbucks Workers

by Hannah Krieg • Tuesday at 1:53 pm

Even though the resolution is symbolic, a Starbucks organizer said Sawant and the council’s support is important.
Even though her proposed resolution is symbolic, a Starbucks organizer said Sawant and the council’s support is important. Sydney Durkin

As organizing efforts heat up at Starbucks stores in the international coffee giant’s hometown, on Tuesday Councilmember Kshama Sawant and Starbucks workers gathered outside of the company’s headquarters to announce a resolution condemning Starbucks bosses for using union-busting tactics.

While Sawant and the workers were stoked on the nonbinding resolution, the council member also announced that she would give $10,000 from her Solidarity Fund to support the unionization effort.

The resolution will be something of a litmus test for the council, which recently ticked off some working people (if not labor leaders) in December when its members, led by labor champion Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, voted to end hazard pay for grocery workers. Seeing an opportunity for an apparent political victory, Mayor Jenny Durkan vetoed the bill and became a hero on that issue. In another labor battle, Sawant put forward a more material ordinance to realize striking carpenters' demand for free parking. Nothing came of the proposal.

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Film/TV • Sundance Comes to Seattle

Sundance Review: Regina Hall Is Divine in Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.

by Jas Keimig • Tuesday at 12:50 pm

You can guarantee they are prayin' on it.
You can guarantee they are prayin' on it. Courtesy of Sundance

This weekend, Northwest Film Forum is screening several films—including this one!—as part of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival's Satellite Screen program. Learn more about the program here.

Adamma and Adanne Ebo’s Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. is a riotous skewering of Southern megachurch culture in all its excesses, exploitations, and contradictions. Shot in a Guestian mockumentary style, the film switches between hilarious vignettes and high-emotion scenes, and at its center is a banner performance from Sundance all-star Regina Hall, who believably hits the movie’s odd beats to make it one of the best of the fest.

Hall embodies Trinitie Childs, the flustered first lady of Georgia's "Wander to Greater Pathways" megachurch. She wants to get her life back on track after a scandal causes a mass exodus of congregants, forcing the church to close down temporarily. See, word got out that young men accused her God-fearin’ self-involved pastor-husband Lee-Curtis (a pitch-perfect Sterling K. Brown) of sexual misconduct. And in an ill-advised attempt to stage their comeback, the cursed couple invites a documentary crew to follow them as they prepare for the church's first Sunday back.

Predictably, things go south.

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Savage Love

New Savage Lovecast: It’s Cuck Week! It’s Cuck Week!

by The Stranger • Tuesday at 12:45 pm

savage-lovecast.jpeg

That’s right, all of you who enjoy watching your partners sleep with others now are officially celebrated ALL WEEK LONG. And here at the Savage Lovecast, we’re delighted to take part.

Venus Cuckoldress is on to talk about her podcast, and to advise a woman about her plan to have a gang bang on her wedding night. And there’s more on the big ole Magnum version of the show.

Then, also on the Magnum, Dan chats with David Ley, who literally wrote the book on cuckolding: “Insatiable Wives: Women Who Stray and the Men Who Love Them.” He and Rose Caraway (who narrates the audiobook, and came up with the idea for Cuck Week) are on to talk about what a relief it is to finally have the practice of cuckolding out in the open. But do we need just a little bit of shame to enhance that erotic charge? They discuss.

And now. What is the next sexual practice to get its own week-long celebration?

Listen here:

Savage Love

Savage Love: Rooting Around

by Dan Savage • Tuesday at 11:45 am

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Joe Newton

I’m a heterosexual cisgender male who loves prostate stimulation. I discovered it later in life, but it's been a staple for the last fifteen years. I'm worried I'm pushing the envelope too much and need your advice. Lately, the last six months or so, I will have an orgasm that’s so intense I have pain just to the right of the base of my penis & balls immediately afterwards. If I push a finger in toward the center of my body, it's tender. It goes away after a few minutes, but sometimes my right ball remains sensitive. I've even taken an ibuprofen to lessen the pain and I've had a prostate exam when it's happening and I do self-exams of my testicles regularly, and I've noticed no changes. Usually my next orgasm is normal, and there’s no pain or sensitivity afterwards. As I said, though, it happens after intense sessions with a lot of prostate stimulation. While I've been practicing butt stuff for a long time, I feel as I've only perfected it in the last year or so. I should also state that my sessions last up to two hours, and I'm erect during most of that time. I obviously don't want to hurt myself, and I don't think I am, but it's a concern. It's very hard to stop something that feels so incredibly good. I'm a little uncomfortable talking with my urologist because he treats me like a long-lost uncle. At our first visit, I told him very directly that my father had prostate cancer and I really wanted him to take his time with the exam and to really make sure all is well with my prostate. I added that the last exam I got from my primary care physician didn't last long enough to feel very accurate and encouraged my urologist to take as much time as he wanted up there. He did not. Hoping you can help me out.

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News • Olympia

Washington Lawmakers Throw a Bunch of Data Privacy Bills at the Wall to See What Sticks

by Rich Smith • Tuesday at 10:15 am

One of the bills is actually very good!
One of the bills is actually very good! MF3d / GETTY

With the pandemic moving much of life online, we've never had less of a chance to escape the corporate Eye of Sauron. (If you want to break out in hives, read Business Insider's nightmare list of all the data that companies and governments collect from you on an hourly basis.)

And now, as Steven Soderbergh's forthcoming Seattle-based Zoë Kravitz vehicle correctly warns us, our "smart" devices are gathering up an alarming amount of information about what we do in real life. To give one creepy example, Cambridge researcher Alina Utrata recently tweeted out some of the data Amazon keeps on her as a former Alexa user and Whole Foods shopper:

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Slog AM/PM

Slog AM: Another Car Vanishes After a Hit-and-Run, Microsoft Says Bellevue Is Damn Expensive, Expect a Foggy Seattle This Week

by Charles Mudede • Tuesday at 8:48 am

All I can see are a bunch of buildings, clouds, and the street signs for 4th and Jackson. What else is there?
All I can see are a bunch of buildings, clouds, and the street signs for 4th and Jackson. What else is there? Charles Mudede

Where did a whole car go? Like that glimmering trout-girl in Yeats's most enchanting poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," the car, which is not at all little, just vanished like that in downtown Seattle after hitting "two pedestrians who were in a crosswalk, including a 10-year-old boy," who "was sent airborne during the collision and landed on the hood of the car before being thrown onto a nearby sidewalk." The boy will, it is believed, live to remember this horrible experience. But how can a whole huge fucking car just hit and run and not be found anywhere right away? What made this at all possible in a society that has internet companies that know when you put even one foot into a store? Should I play dumb like the cops at the scene and much of the press and use the words of the 1980s R&B trio Loose Ends: "It's such a mystery to me?" Though the incident was seen by numerous eyes (the leading form of surveillance when it comes to cars, it seems), the police, according to SPD's public relations office, has yet to find the driver.

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Slog AM/PM

Slog PM: Carlyle Won't Run for Reelection in 2022, Mugler Is Dead, Bothell Is NOT Better Than Seattle!

by Jas Keimig • Monday at 5:55 pm

Everyone cool is leaving.
Everyone cool is leaving. Doug Benc/Getty

OK, let's get one thing STRAIGHT before I dig into this edition of Slog PM: This morning, Matt Baume posited a question—"Is Bothell better than Seattle?"—in reference to the city's mayor posting an urbanist-friendly job listing for City Manager. As someone whose family decided to maroon themselves in Bothell—which is the textbook definition of unwalkable, suburban sprawl with absolutely nothing to do and not very good transit service—I have to respond with a forceful HELL NO.

When I brought this up in a meeting today, Stranger philosopher-in-residence Charles Mudede (who is back from vacation, welcome back Charles; what better way for you to return than with a take on Boeing) chimed in that he believed the city had "more crows than people." Mudede recounted when he guest lectured at UW-Bothell and gazed out the campus building's windows to see a "city of crows" numbering in the thousands. I guess this is a thing? Another reason why Bothell isn't better than Seattle!

Anyway, on to the news... Washington AG Bob Ferguson is filing a lawsuit against Google over the company's alleged "deceptive and unfair practices" when it comes to how it tracks and stores customers' data. According to GeekWire, the lawsuit claims "Google misled consumers about storing location information even after the 'Location History' setting is disabled." Attorneys general from Indiana, Texas, and the other Washington are filing separate lawsuits about the same thing.

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Film/TV • Transportation • Sundance Comes to Seattle

The Netflix Documentary Downfall Shows I Was Right About Boeing's 737 MAX Crises, Seattle Times Was Totally Wrong

by Charles Mudede • Monday at 4:20 pm

Seattle will never forget September 4.
Seattle will never forget September 4. Netflix/Sundance

You live in Seattle. You know the undoing of Boeing that began when its new and very popular 737 MAX, operated by Lion Air, plunged, not long after takeoff, into the Java Sea, killing all passengers and crew. Five months later, another 737 MAX fell out of the sky, this one operated by Ethiopia Airlines. Its passengers and crew met the same fate as those on Lion Air. But this time the crash was an explosion of earth rather than water.

A new documentary, Downfall: The Case Against Boeing, directed by Rory Kennedy (and, yes, she is a Kennedy—the youngest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy), begins with the story of the first crash. It features journalists, industry experts, and an Indonesian woman whose husband was a pilot on Lion Air Flight 610. It also examines Boeing's response to the crash—blame the pilots for not being American. The doc then covers the second crash in Kenya. This story features an American man whose daughter's life came to an end on Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, footage of American pilots who defended the safety record of Ethiopian Airlines, and Boeing's PR push to, once again, blame the crash on non-white pilots. They were not American enough. They were black. They came from a poor country.

This excuse might have worked well enough in the USA, but not in China. That government saw what was what and grounded the 737 MAX. As Boeing gassed up America with shameless racism, the rest of the world followed the leading capitalist power of the 21st century, the Chinese Communist Party. Eventually, all 737 MAX were pulled out of the sky and the US's press and government began searching for answers in the right place, Chicago.

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EverOut

The Top 42 Events in Seattle This Week

by EverOut Staff • Monday at 1:40 pm

Teller of jokes, writer of plays, sister of David, and actress Amy Sedaris takes the Moore Theatre stage this Saturday.
Teller of jokes, writer of plays, sister of David, and actress Amy Sedaris takes the Moore Theatre stage this Saturday.
The last full week of January is here, and the month is going out with a bang. Whether you'd rather hear sharp observations from Amy Sedaris and Cathy Park Hong or concerts from Remi Wolf and Washed Out, read on for this week's top picks. 

MONDAY


MUSIC


D Smoke
You may know Inglewood, CA-based rapper D Smoke if you binge-watched Netflix’s Rhythm + Flow in 2019. Since becoming the show's main breakout star, he has received a Grammy nomination for his debut album and a NAACP Image Award Nomination for Outstanding New Artist. He will take the stage just after the release of his sophomore album War & Wonders.
(Neumos, Capitol Hill)

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