Jake Ellison

Above: The first of many thousands lined up early today to enter Hempfest, Seattle's mega pro-pot festival.

For more than 20 years, the Seattle Hempfest festival, rally and outdoor party has pushed for the decriminalization and mainstreaming of marijuana.

But as this year’s event gets underway today, with more than 300,000 expected over the weekend, regulations contained in an initiative that would legalize pot have split many advocates.

In the Seattle region, where we have few air conditioners, a string of 90-plus days can raise alarms:

• Official excessive heat warning
• Smog warnings 
• Wildfire warnings
• Opening cooling centers

But with the rest of the country melting under temperatures of 100 degrees or more for days in a row and drought striking the Midwest, we wonder if perhaps we in the Northwest are heat wimps.

The latest election results from Washington’s primary shows that more than 43 percent of Washington voters cast their ballots for a state supreme court justice candidate with no judicial experience, who raised no campaign funds and was a public no-show.

The biggest factor in the race appears to have been one candidate's last name - Gonzalez.

Election results published by the Washington Secretary of State’s office this afternoon showed Bruce O. Danielson pulled in 276,142 votes for, so far, 43.1 percent of voters.

The Mars rover Curiosity has landed ... on Mars! And it's having a pretty lonely but humorous time of it, according to the rover's mock Twitter feed. 

SarcasticRover: "HEY EVERYONE! Hope you kids have fun writing shitty memes on my HI-RES PICS! After all, THAT'S WHAT I'M HERE FOR!"

A new commercial featuring a regular-ol’-mom-type-person pitching the legalization of marijuana in Washington is about to kickoff a $1 million campaign.

The hotspot for "mysterious" crop circles in the Northwest is Wilbur, an eastern Washington town of about 1,000 humans surrounded by wheat fields.

This summer, you can add to the town’s stats: The best-kept secret – Who makes the crop circles showing up near Wilbur.

The Seattle City Council is facing a $1.1 billion shortfall in its pension fund, according to a report to the Government Performance and Finance Committee (first noted by the politics and government blog Publicola).

The King County Council approved an agreement with the investors who want to build an NBA arena in the SoDo district of Seattle. The council voted 6-3 to ratify the "memorandum of understanding" and "interlocal agreement," documents which define the terms of the arena deal.

"There is intrinsic value in this arena," said county councilmember Julia Patterson. She added that she had voted against Seattle's other sports arenas in the past, when she was in the Washington State Legislature, but voted yes on this deal.

In opposition, councilman Pete von Reichbauer said transportation issues had not been resolved. 

"If you build it, they will come – they can't come if they're stuck in traffic," he said.

If you cuss at work, 57 percent of bosses say they are less likely to promote you and 64 percent will at best think less of you for it, according to a survey by CareerBuilder.com.

So, Seattleites should be getting ahead in the world since we didn’t make the top ten cities in the U.S. for swearing at work.

When a chunk of I-5 flew up and smashed through the windshield of a car carrying a family of four, the dangers of Washington's crumbling roadways became all too real.

"The rock hit me so hard in the chest, it literally took my breath away," Henry Jessop, who was in the passenger seat, told KOMO. His son Ian and his daughter were in the back seat, and his wife was behind the wheel.

You know you’re in a first-world economy when … many of your metro areas have larger economies than whole countries.

The Wall Street Journal wanted to put into perspective just how big the gap is between the U.S. economy and much of the rest of the world and so created a ranked list.

Ichiro Suzuki is going to the Yankees, confirms KPLU sports commentator Art Thiel. 

“The Mariners have been spared huge ugliness,” Thiel said. "He wanted out of Seattle and Seattle fans wanted him gone, I think, largely because he was not productive for the salary he was making and was in the way of younger players."

On the Seattle section of Reddit, a user-generated content aggregator, the user poltergeister asked the question: What is something you wish Seattle had?

The responses have been interesting and got us to wondering the same thing. Here are 10 things Reddit users want. Vote for your favorite and share yours in the comments below.

To promote their new movie – “The Campaign” – actors Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis blazed into a Seattle cafe to stump for votes in their faux election campaign.

The two are touring the country as if mired in a real political race, though they are “campaigning” to represent a district in North Carolina. Below is a video of their event in Seattle.

For those of us who have not gotten around to it, don’t want to stand in line for it or are afraid of heights, we sent our online news intern, Evan Hoover, to video his ride on Seattle’s waterfront Great ‘Ferris’ Wheel.

Here’s the the ride in under 3 minutes: