1. Professor William Hammer has been traveling to Antarctica to dig up theropods and sauropodomorphs since 1977, and tonight he'll showcase his expertise with a lecture at the UW called: "Dinosaurs on Ice: Jurassic Dinosaurs from Antarctica."

In specific, he'll be showing off fossils and photos from his trips to the Central Transantartic Mountains.

Hammer—who has led six expeditions to Antarctica—teaches geology at Augustana College in Illinois, specializing in dinosaurs.

It's free, at the University of Washington's Burke Museum, on NE 45th Street and 17 Ave N. It starts at 7 pm.

2. The City Council 's Planning and Land Use Committee is holding a public hearing this evening about a proposed amendment to the municipal code, extending building height limits in the South Lake Union neighborhood.

The extension would only accommodate a single building—a cancer research center the University of Washington wants to build on Denny and Westlake. The university wants the height limit bumped up from 65 feet to 125 feet.

The hearing will allow the public to debate the amendment before the committee. It's at City Hall, 5th and Columbia, tonight at 5:30.

3. The Pixies are playing show at the Paramount Theater tonight. It's not something I would typically hype—the Pixies were great and everything, but that was, like, 20 years ago—but Rain Machine is opening, and that alone is worth the $55 ticket.

Rain Machine played at Neumo's last month, and the show's best moment was when the band left the stage and frontman/falsettoist Kyp Malone, basically a Brooklyn-hipster version of Richie Havens, performed a weird Appalachian soul poem, yodeling and thumping on his guitar. The thought of hearing the same song—and the full band's electro-funk anthems—echo through the Paramount rafters is what makes the show a must see.

The show starts at the Paramount at 7:30.



Kyp Malone: Yodeling & Thumping

4. There's a YouthSpeaks poetry slam tonight. Seattle poetry slams get a bad rap, mostly because they're bad, but YouthSpeaks is different, and not just because the slammers in this case are teenagers. Of course, that does make them much more fun to watch—spilling raw teenage emotion about their parents' divorce, or being gay in high school, or the time they wrecked their BMW in the grocery store parking lot.

It's that the poetry is refreshing and awesome, even by adult standards. I've been to several YouthSpeaks slams before, and they always kill it. It's the kind of show that makes you want to stop and buy a journal on your way home.

The slam is at the Electric Teagarden, above the Artificial Limb Company on 14th and Madison, at 7:30. Admission is $5.