Here's "Drink a wine before its time" from Chris Pirillo. It's about a wine aerator that would fit nicely in someone's holiday stocking (I've got one myself and I love it).

Then there's the Seattle Wine Blog with "Best holiday wine gifts for under twenty bucks," the headline of which pretty much sums up what it's about.

And, lastly, if you're dining out over the holidays, be sure to read "Ask the bartender: The price of whine," in which Maggie Savarino explains why that bottle of vino costs as much as it does at your local restaurant.

Cheers!

You can see a larger version here on VintageSeattle.org's site.

According to the description on the news photo, the project cost more than all of the assessed value of property in Seattle 50 years earlier. In today's terms, I wonder what the comparison would be for the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement project.

Now if it could do Swedish pancakes, it'd be a hit in Ballard. In any case, we gotta get one of those for our break room!

You can get it at the hotel, or make your own, as they were nice enough to supply the recipe:

The Bella Edward
"A Cullen Family Cocktail"
Balsamic reduction
1 teaspoon raspberry puree
2 ½ ounces raspberry vodka
½ ounce Krupnik Honey Liqueur

Line the inside rim of a well-chilled martini glass with
the balsamic reduction. Add a teaspoon of the raspberry puree
to the bottom of the glass. In a shaker, combine the raspberry vodka
and honey liqueur with ice. Shake well and pour into glass.
- Recipe from the Sorrento Hotel

From Publcola, to Horsesass.org to Sound Politics, options abound for getting a read on the local scene in the waning days of the Seattle Mayoral and King County Executive races. Scan the latest political coverage in our politics section.

They've quickly become a go-to source for up-to-the-minute local tech news, from the serious, to the quirky, like this one for the automatic pancake machine.

Love this bit from their anniversary post:

The past year has required lots of late nights and no shortage of humility. One of the most eye-opening moments involved showing up for an appointment at a well-known video-game company in the Seattle area to be handed a carefully prepared badge identifying our news outlet as "TechFlush." It was too funny to ask them to correct it.

Happy Birthday, TechFlush, er, TechFlash!

Attendees will be able to sample fine eats from local restaurants and get a glass of wine too. There'll even be a "speed networking" session with Julien Perry, "restaurant reporter for KOMO, the Food Editor for WINO Magazine, a producer for Urbanspoon, and a contributing writer for Seattle Weekly," according to the Foodportunity.com site.

If you want to go, you can get tickets via Foodportunity's site, or you can enter a drawing to win a pair of $30 tickets to the event by answering a simple question about who you'd like to meet in the Seattle food scene. To enter the drawing, go to former Seattle P-I food writer and restaurant critic Rebekah Denn's site, eatallaboutit.com.

I'd probably go with Dammeier as my pick if I had to choose, but it would be an agonizing decision because there are soooo many other excellent choices... After you enter on Rebekah's site, let us know who you chose.

The organization has a 320-bed hostel in Seattle, one on Vashon Island and another in Port Townsend. HI is holding a meeting in Bellingham Nov. 9 to form a hostel development committee that will explore the idea and look for potential sites. More info on the meeting and joining the committee can be found here.

For the unitiated, hostels are an inexpensive alternative to motels and hotels. Traditionally used by young travelers, more adults and families are taking advantage of this overnight lodging option.

The raft has an interesting history, which WSB describes and shows, with pictures from the raft's creator.

Now if only I could get back all the time I've spent typing "//" into my browser...

And, heck, if you have the $800k, you could start a new career in a happening neighborhood.

A Microsoft press release says in part:

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users' personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

Any Sidekick users out there? How do you feel about this whole thing? Are you keeping or cancelling your service?

Jordan uses photography to create fanciful imagery that looks stunning at a distance, but disturbing up close once you realize that the entire picture is made up of our culture's debris. One picture builds an image of a huge star field using 320,000 light bulbs, the amount "equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage," according to his Web site, where he has dozens of photos displayed. Others use packing peanuts, oil drums, plastic cups and even toothpicks.

"Exploring around our country's shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress," said Chris. "I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity."