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• Best Designer/Rockers (2 Comments)
  Photo by Renee McMahon Just back from six weeks on the road with their metalcore band Demon Hunter, having headlined a tour through 34 cities, brothers Don and Ryan Clark certainly look like young punks raised in the Sacramento hardcore scene. Dressed all in black, tight jeans, Vans, full... More >>
• Best Reason to Get 10-Gauge Knitting Needles
  Photo by Renee McMahon. Most of us don't have a smiling grandmother in a rocking chair, adept at creating mittens galore from balls of brightly-colored yarn, who can teach us to knit. But two local women are here to help. They own two very different shops operating under two distinct... More >>
• Best Barber to Talk Politics With (1 Comment)
  At Zero-Zero hair salon on Capitol Hill, politics and arguments go hand-in-glove with the haircut, especially if owner Todd Lucas is wielding the scissors. "I break the taboo with some of my conversations," he admits. "I'm actually working on not being so heated. But it's hard not to be... More >>
• Best Peak-Oil Fantasy-Car Shopping
  Photo by Peter Mumford Don't even read the EPA mileage stickers at Park Place Ltd. in Bellevue. If you have to look, you're at the wrong car lot. A new Aston Martin Vantage Roadster, for instance, priced at $148,000, gets about 13 mpg in city driving. For about the same price, a 2001... More >>
• Best Outfitters for Your 13- (and 30-) Year-Old Girls
  Photo by Laurie Pearman The owners of Fast Girl Skates found each other a little over two years ago when they were both new to the local roller-derby circuit—a large community of ladies committed to beating the snot out of each other, in the round, on roller skates, on a weekly basis.... More >>
• Best One-Mike Record Label (Tie)
  Lord knows it's not easy to keep a DIY record label afloat. The music business is unpredictable. You're obliged to spend money you don't have to make a record you're not sure more than a hundred people will buy. And even if you're lucky enough to break even (a rarity as a small label), you'll... More >>
• Best Sports Retiree at Leisure (1 Comment)
  Jeff Borowiak was an NCAA singles and doubles tennis champion and achieved a top-25 ranking as a professional in the 1970s. Today he lives modestly in a U-District boarding house and spends his days meditating; performing a wide array of homemade tennis, piano, and flute drills; teaching the... More >>
• Best Companion to Have During Your Brazilian
  When she was 21, Jane Chang was asked by her first boyfriend why she didn't take care of it. Until then, she hadn't known it was something to be taken care of. "I was so embarrassed," she recalls. "I thought everybody had a bush like me. I had no idea girls were taking hair off the whole... More >>
• Best Utilitarian Fetish-Modeling Glass Blower
  The furnaces inside Viscosity Studio are set at 2000°. Tomoko Yoshitake repeatedly wipes sweat away from her forehead and downs several bottles of water as she works. "Glass is tricky," she says as she grabs a blowtorch and accosts the shapeless material before her. "It's like a... More >>
• Best Place for “Platzas”
  John Goodfellow is quick to point out that Banya 5 is not, strictly speaking, a Russian spa. None of the owners of the four-year-old South Lake Union enterprise is Russian, including Goodfellow, a real-estate developer of Scotch extraction with a little Chinese thrown in. His experience with... More >>
• Best Recession-Resistant Entrepreneurial Venture
  Molly Moon's Homemade Ice Cream had not been open a full week before it was drawing lines of customers that wrapped around two corners of the block for several hours at a time. Within this first week, the slim little gourmet-ice-cream shop even had return customers. They ran out of every flavor... More >>
• Best Longtime Underground Coffee Roaster (1 Comment)
  The Good Coffee Company's Joseph Kittay. Audio & photo by Chris Kornelis. You'd think that as crowded as the coffee market is, Joe Kittay would stop at nothing to bring more customers through his door. Instead he's doing the opposite. There is no "open" sign. No welcome mat. No hours posted.... More >>
• Best Tea Aficionado to Pass an Afternoon With
  Photo by Kevin P. Casey If you're going to visit Shiuwen Tai, proprietor of Ballard's Floating Leaves Tea, make sure you've cleared your calendar and turned off your Blackberry. Tai is obsessed with all things tea, and she is more than happy to share her wealth of knowledge. Most of the teas... More >>
• Best Upholder of a Sweet Tradition
  Photo by Laurie Pearman Serving dessert is usually a reliable ticket to popularity. But at Tokara Japanese Confectionery, a small wholesale business in Phinney Ridge, Chika Tokara works hard to produce wagashi, traditional Japanese desserts, with the knowledge that she's got a limited... More >>
• Best Pro-Sports Time-Out Entertainment
  As the Storm plotted their strategy against the Washington Mystics and the time-out clock ticked down, a group of kids decked out in mini–Storm jerseys and baggy shorts ran onto the KeyArena court. For the uninitiated, the first reaction to seeing the Storm Dance Troupe is often a... More >>
• Best Friend to Emerging Artists
  Fledgling arts groups always have two attributes: great enthusiasm and an inability to deal with forms and record-keeping of any kind. Enthusiasm can keep a company going for years, but sooner or later, someone is going to look in that overstuffed desk drawer that serves as the group’s filing... More >>
• Best Ferry Godfather
  While its ridership levels continue to increase with every passing year, the Elliott Bay Water Taxi remains more a cute leisure-time gimmick than a reliable rush-hour transportation alternative. Even the Argosy-run ferry's biggest booster, King County Council member Dow Constantine, concedes... More >>
• Best Shakespeare for the People
  What's a man to do when he's adapting a Shakespearean tragedy to a modern war zone and it's a felony to make the guns look too real? If that man is George Mount of Wooden O Shakespeare, he gives a wry grin, gets on with rehearsal, and deals with the government later. (See this week's... More >>
• Best Innovator in Tights
  Photo by Renee McMahon After a decade with the Pacific Northwest Ballet, Olivier Wevers is still looking for new variations on the traditions. "I try to find a twist," he says. "I'm sick of seeing the same basic ballet steps, just in a new sequence." One of the ways he's branched out is with a... More >>
• Best Dreamy Puget Sound Politician
  Photo by Renee McMahon Strong jaw, cut arms, and a love for working a tight budget in an economic recession: Aaron Reardon is a political wunderkind straight out of central casting. He's even got a touching and funny personal story to boot. His political life began with a single mom, living... More >>
• Best Reason to Drop Your Business Major for English
  Photo by Kevin P. Casey "Brilliant and inspirational." "An incredible woman." "Amazing": just a few of the things former students have written about the tiny, quiet, and very pregnant woman sitting at a Lake City bakery table. Dr. Anu Taranath is the highest-rated member of the University of... More >>
• Best Friend to Returning Vets
  Photo by Harley Soltes Mike Colson calls Mondays his "milk run." At 8 a.m. he hits the Everett Naval Station. After that he drives to the Naval Air Station on Whidbey Island. And by 11:30 a.m. he's on a ferry, headed for the Navy's Bangor base on the Kitsap Peninsula. With such runs, and... More >>
• Best Panhandling Gimmick
  Last spring Jonas Stone had a seizure at the intersection of First Avenue and Marion Street. He hit his head on a slab of concrete when he fell, which required 14 sutures and several days of rest. When Stone reappeared downtown, strangers inquired about his absence. "Whenever I take a day off,... More >>
• Best Political Badass
  Photo by Kevin P. Casey "What have I done wrong?" deputy mayor Tim Ceis says, wondering aloud about the reason for the interview—and grinning that Cheshire-cat smile. His faux-defensive posture belies an almost boyish contentment in knowing his role as the bad guy. "The mayor makes... More >>
• Best Expert at Getting Kids Off the Street (2 Comments)
  Photo by Kevin P. Casey Gabe Morales was 5, living in Yakima, when he saw his first murder. "Boom! Head splattered all over. Man, the nightmares I had." He was 14 when his brother, a gang member, was shot in the head. "He survived, though." And he was 21 when, for the third time, the Mexican... More >>
• Best Friend of the Enemy
  Photo by Kevin P. Casey If they know him at all, most Seattleites know Brad Keller as the uncannily effective lawyer who represented Clay Bennett and his People's Basketball Club (PBC, owners of the franchise formerly known as the Seattle SuperSonics) in their lawsuit with the city of Seattle.... More >>
• Best Ways to One-Up Your Fellow Obama Supporters
  Of course, everyone in your neighborhood already has an Obama sticker on their MacBook lid and a sunrise-O logo on the back of their Subaru. Everyone's already given the maximum campaign contribution and lobbied their relatives in less-enlightened areas of the country to see the possibility of... More >>
• Best Violin Masters of the Seattle Universe
  Photo by Laurie Pearman There were no musicians in Mikhail Shmidt's Moscow family. But they began to suspect he had talent when, as a toddler, he started singing along—in tune—to the family's reel-to-reel player. At age 6 he passed the entrance tests for Moscow's highly-regarded,... More >>
• Best Expander of Cultural Boundaries
  Renee McMahon Stephanie Ellis-Smith was studying retroviruses as a researcher at the University of Washington when she came across a notice asking for a volunteer coordinator to head the Jacob Lawrence Catalogue Raisonné Project, the first-ever attempt to document an African-American... More >>