Today's PubliCalendar pick:

1. Greendrinks is a monthly meetup group/highbrow discussion session for people who work in the environmental field or have a special burning interest in environmental affairs. Tonight’s meetup features a representative from Oikocredit, a global microfinance nonprofit.

I’m not sure what the direct green connection is, but microfinance is rad—essentially, it involves providing small loans to people, usually in developing countries, who wouldn’t ordinarily have enough money to secure their own business loans. The result is a lift in local economic development and a better quality of life.

In the spirit of global awareness, the Greendrinks folks ask that you bring your own mugs or glasses.

Tonight, at 5:30 pm. At Evo (122 Northwest 36th Street) in Fremont. $5 suggested donation

On tomorrow's calendar:

1. As far as cartoonist-journalists go, Joe Sacco is pretty much the primary innovator—his 2000 book Safe Area Gorazde documents the lone Bosnian-Muslim town of Gorazde, besieged by Serbs throughout the Bosnian War but largely spared the Serbian ethnic cleansing that characterized the conflict. Part oral history, part first-hand dispatch, it's a serious step forward for the comics medium, even ten years on.

Footnotes in Gaza, Sacco's newest book, is a hard inquiry into the 1956 killings of 111 Palestinian refugees living in Israel. Like last year's animated film/graphic novel combo Waltz with Bashir , Sacco's new book consists of interviews with survivors and riffs on themes of memory and historical reconstruction, as Sacco attempts to use his subjects' recollections to (literally) paint a picture, and thus subsume a forgotten event.



Tomorrow night at Town Hall, 7:30. Tickets are $5.

2. Two advisory committees are meeting at Seattle Municipal Tower tomorrow night. First, Seattle Public Utilities' Water System Advisory Commission and its Creeks, Drainage and Wastewater Commission--both are essentially small groups of citizen advisors who meet with a two-person delegation from Seattle Public Utilities, in this case to talk mostly about things like drinking water quality and plumbing issues in SPU systems. Come with your most pressing aquatic concerns, as well as pedestrian-friendly development.

Tomorrow night, Seattle Municipal Tower, Room 4096, from 5 pm to 7 pm.

The other committee meeting tomorrow night is the pedestrian advisory board—a group of citizens who advise the mayor and City Council on the pedestrian master plan.

Tomorrow, Seattle City Hall, 600 Fourth Avenue, Boards and Commissions Room, Room L280, 6 pm to 8 pm.

3. Terry Gilliam's best movies are like battleships: huge, meticulously constructed feats of engineering, that, ideally, still manage to float (see Brazil). The crappy ones, on the other hand, sink like rocks, weighed down by Gilliam's bloated concepts or their plodding storylines (see The Brothers Grimm).

Hopefully, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Gilliam's latest (and the late actor Heath Ledger's last) will strike some of Brazil 's magic balance. The movie is receiving an unusual amount of attention since Ledger died halfway through the filming .Gilliam solved the problem by hiring Jude Law, Johnny Depp, and Colin Farrell to play various incarnations of Ledger's character "Tony," the leader of a traveling theater troupe who makes a deal with the Devil/Tom Waits.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus plays every hour or two in Seattle at the downtown Meridian 16 and Metro Cinema in the U District.

4. Tay Yoshitani, the CEO of the Port of Seattle, is speaking at Seattle University tomorrow night. Yoshitani's going to be talking about his management style to a crowd made up mostly of SU business school students, and it'll be interesting to hear what he tells them. After all, Yoshitani stepped into the CEO role at time when the Port was drawing an unusual amount of negative attention, both for an ongoing investigation into a handful of port police officers who sent inappropriate emails on work computers, and for the $200,000-plus severance bonus the Port Commission issued outgoing CEO Mic Dinsmore upon his departure.

Tomorrow, at Seattle University's Pigott Auditorium, at 5:30 p.m. Free.