Ah, what you don't realize is that it's ONLY been psychics that win the lottery*
They've all sworn an Oath at Psychics-Union Local#07 to keep their foul cheating method under wraps for the good of their trade.

Why else such reasonable prices to have your fortune told?

* (I mean, have you seen the typical winner? It's never a office-tower executive banker, it's ALWAYS someone who you KNOW has got a trailer trash / gypsy / new-age guru relative somewhere).

They're just too smart for that shit.

I can't believe nobody has pointed this out yet. Probably too obvious.

The reason? Psychics are full of crap.

Because they'd never have a moment's peace. That's what the money is for.

I feel as though you've mistaken Questionland for Jay Leno's monologue.

Because the psychics foresee that it would breed resentment.

I worked with Sarah and Marya on the Waxie movie as Art Director this summer.

Still designing 6-10 theatre sets per year. Some images at www.jenniferzeyl.com

In 2009, I started a club in Seattle for artists, organizers and scientists called Canoe Social Club. www.canoesocialclub.com

Is this only the Stranger's list of geniuses, or someone w/ a IQ over 132? :)

3) I keep a xanax (the same one, hopefully for a long time) in my left pocket, and a penny in my right. I can touch either at any time (the penny signifies G-d's love, hence the phrase, "pennies from heaven") to remind myself whatever it is, its covered.

1. Have a cocktail personally prescribed and handmade for you by the best bartender on the planet, Murray Stetson at Zig Zag.

2. The Life and Deadth of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again, by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols
http://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-American-Journalism-Revolution/dp/1568586051

3. Something lucky.

Aw, shucks. Our Genius issue hits the streets today, so you can read all of our profiles and shortlists. You can find the list of Geniuses online right here:

http://www.thestranger.com/genius?view=geniuses

Let us know what you think!

Hey Wannabe,

For a list of all the past Geniuses, here you go:

http://www.thestranger.com/genius?view=geniuses

But a "Where are they now"-type profile of past geniuses is a really great idea that I will pass along right now.

Hey Qland Char:

Thanks for your interest in It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper, the first “edition” produced by NewsWrights United, telling the stories of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer as it lived for over 100 years in our community and died, at least in print, back in March of 2009.

Soon after we closed that show, the founding NewsWrights: Dawson Nichols, Tom Paulson and myself, sat down to decide whether we would a attempt a remount of It’s Not in the P-I, or instead, shoot for an entirely new edition covering an entirely new subject. We ultimately chose the latter, believing that our audience was more interested in fresh stories rather than rehashes.

In February of 2011 we will be staging the second edition, titled The New New News: A Living Newspaper. In it we will cover the current systemic crisis in journalism, through stories from the Puget Sound region. We’re still investigating and writing, so I can’t tell you everything, but I will say that The Seattle Times novel coverage of the Maurice Clemmons case is something we are looking at, along with the explosion of Pacific Northwest on-line news services and their struggle to monetize their work in a brand new and ever-shifting landscape.

I hope you’ll keep an eye out for the show and not miss it this time. Elvis Costello once sang, “Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.” And the same might be said for our living newspaper shows: best to get ‘em while their fresh.

Cheers!
Paul Mullin

PS We're still developing our official web presence, so for now you can keep track of our doings by "liking" our Face Book page here:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NewsWrights-United/135314369814647?ref=search

You can see the new theatre Genius winner Marya Sea Kaminski in a film with me next year entitled Waxie Moon: Fallen Jewel. David Russo directed an incredible film called "The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle" that I think is still available on Comcast locally and on Netflix- great film, super imaginative. Susan Robb has done a "Parking Squid", a gorgeous squid/bike rack that can be seen around the city all through the year.

I am singing a bunch of Led Zeppelin with Houses of Thee Unholy at the Triple door for 5 shows-Burlesque and Led Zeppelin tunes: Here's a link: http://bit.ly/b2pOKN.

I am here too.. Just had a minute to check-in. Ask away. Hi Paul.

Because it's difficult to live up to the allegation of being a genius when you're taking questions.

I'm here. Whaddya wanna know? How's that for an answer? Pure genius, I'm thinking.

Heh. Fair enough. (Though I'm removed from the promo side of the paper, I don't think ticket sales are a concern, and if even if they were, I could think of a few better ways of getting butts in the seats than a theme week on Questionland. If you see Cienna Madrid passing out pamphlets on Broadway and John dressed in a giant foam brain costume, you know we're worried.)

But you're missing the whole other part of that introductory paragraph: "...any questions you may have about this year's winners and their work." When the paper hits the streets tomorrow, our Genius shortlists will be published, and I expect that people might have one or two questions about those. And other questions, like "What is the single best work from your Genius?" come to mind, too.

And I'm still waiting for someone to complain about the fact that the Literature Genius's most recent book has no words in it. Maybe Questionland will make that dream come true.

We make a joke about this every year--last year we said we conducted our deliberations by sparring in a boxing gym, the year before that we "conducted them in a hot-air balloon careening dangerously toward a melting glacier on Mount Rainier, because Jen Graves can't steer"--but the truth is we just sit around our filthy office and talk about all the stuff we've looked at and thought about in the city in the last year and try to figure out what made the good stuff so good.

For the first couple years (2003 and 2004), we had a mission—conceived by the arts editor at the time, Emily Hall—to call attention to "unknown, undershown, underfunded, underpraised" artists. At the time, what this meant was that it wouldn't make sense to give, say, the literature award to someone like Rebecca Brown, because Rebecca Brown has a huge following in town and lots of books already. But you know what? Rebecca Brown is fucking good. Her name had come up almost every time we'd discussed the literature category, but we'd dismissed her out of fealty to the "unknown, undershown, underfunded, underpraised" thing.

So we cast that criteria aside and, in the third year, gave the literature award to Rebecca Brown. That's the moment when the award evolved into what it is now: We give the award to people at different stages of their careers. We give it to people whose work genuinely blows us away the most. The reason it blows us away is different every year, and we explain our reasoning in the profiles we write of the winners in the Genius issue. We also have a shortlist, with shorter descriptions of other people we considered in each category.

This year, the awards evolved again: We replaced the arts organization award with a music award. (Organizations are still on the table, but for an organization to win, it would have to win in one of the five categories--theater, film, literature, visual art, music--instead of an individual.) This is the first year we've given a Genius Award to a musician. But it feels right, and we're going to keep doing it.

All of us arts editors lock ourselves in a room sometime around April. Then, we put forth a list of Genius candidates in our respective fields, (frequently, but not always, you'll see the other candidates on that year's Genius Shortlist) and then we argue. A lot.

Over the course of three or four months, we meet every so often to discuss the merits and demerits of each candidate, and we try to talk each other out of our choices. Finally, we all try to come to an agreement. We don't have a formal vote, but if anyone had a serious disagreement with a Genius choice, I don't think we'd move forward with it.

As to how we choose the candidates in our respective disciplines: Speaking for myself, it's not that complex of a system. I just keep a mental list of the awesome books by local authors I've read that year.

Hopefully, the other arts editors will come on and offer some insight into their processes, too.

An extended game of spin the bottle. Best kisser wins.