Photo by Andy Sternberg/LAist A posthumous tribute wall dedicated to singer/songwriter Elliot Smith sat defaced by graffiti for months on end -- LAist said enough, so did the fans and city council.SFist was surprised to learn that chronic presidential candidate Ralph Nader picked former San Francisco Supervisor Matt Gonzalez as his running mate.Phillyist explored the possibilities of green cleaning.In the latest edition of Reel Toronto, a bi-weekly feature looking at films shot in Toronto......

Unfortunately the world of vegan gourmet dining is a small one, with most restaurants concentrated in the Veg-friendly cities of New York, San Francisco, and Portland. While visiting San Francisco, Veggiest was able to dine at Millennium, which is consistently rated among the very best veg restaurants in the country. Everything about the experience was impeccable, the decor, staff, wine, and of course FOOD, were all top-notch. We dined on avocado and endive salad,......

From satire by the Upright Citizens Brigade (see video above) to Bob Ryan to editorials in the Boston Globe magazine, the media appears to be wailing on Patriots coach Bill Belichick after Spygate and the Super Bowl loss. So he lost, and so he might be a cheater, but would people be as angry if the Patriots won the Super Bowl? Maybe not. Doug Most writes in the Boston Globe Magazine, "But now it's......

Photo credit: sniderscion Torontoist spent its week uncovering who was behind mysterious ads for a drug called "Obay" that popped up across the country (Scientology? Frank Shepard Fairey?), first tracing them to an advocacy group called Colleges Ontario and then confirming their suspicions a few days later.Phillyist learned how to put on a puppet show – it's not as easy as you might think!Shanghaiist discovers that the average starting monthly pay for fresh graduates......

Books Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva follows a woman as she tries to find a life outside male expectations. Meera, a young woman in India, marries the man she desires, only to discover he's Mr. Wrong. Eventually, she throws all her hopes on her son, and the intensity of her feelings prompted the San Francisco Chronicle to call the work "a steamy, hot-out-of-the-oven offering of mother love." Whoa, there! Brookline Booksmith, 7:00 pm,......

Veggiest Quick Hits -- Happy Valentine's Day! For us being vegan is all about the love. We love our bodies and want to keep them healthy and strong and free of animal products. We love the environment and want to protect it from the extremely destructive practices of factory farming. We love animals and don't want to see them mistreated. You'll most certainly be doing your heart a favor. Heart disease is still one......

While in San Francisco this past week Veggiest was able to take a trip to the beautiful headquarters of VegNews magazine. For those of you unfamiliar, VegNews is the premier (and only completely vegan) vegetarian publication on the shelves right now. What sets VegNews apart, aside from their fabulous staff of course, is that they seek to promote the entire vegetarian lifestyle and offer informative stories on a wide variety of veg topics. The......

Bostonist's intrepid Veggiest is off this week--but never fear! Veggiest is dining in the finest vegan restaurants of San Francisco and meeting with the brains behind the magazine VegNews. Next week, Veggiest will be back with a full plate (nyuk, nyuk) of news, recipes, and advice on how not to subsist entirely on French Fries when you give up meat. Until then, here's "Store Wars," also known as "Star Wars With a Cast of......

A New England Patriots fan told Joe Fitzgerald at the Herald that some overzealous Pats fans beat up him, his friend, and his cousins, who happened to be Jaguars fans and who were wearing Jaguar gear, after the Pats-Jaguars game. Brian Wormstead recounts the appalling pummeling he received in the parking lot after a brief exchange with the Pats fans: "I just know I’ve got a punctured eardrum and lumps all over me; Chris has......

After the tiger attack and ensuing chaos at the San Francisco Zoo, here's some good zoo news, for a change. The New England Aquarium is welcoming many new arrivals. An anaconda celebrated the new year by giving birth to 14 little ones. WBZ explains how anaconda-birthing works: The pregnant 16-foot anaconda finished giving birth to all 14 babies around 5 a.m. Tuesday. While most snakes lay external eggs, anaconda eggs remains inside the mother's body......

SFist saw Christmas Day turn tragic after a Siberian tiger escaped from her pen at the San Francisco Zoo, killing a visitor and mauling two others. Phillyist counted down the top ten items on Philadelphia's New Year's wish list. Gothamist looked at the wooden bikes being offered for NYC's first bike share program on Governors Island. LAist received a Christmas present in the form of a drunk Santa Claus in a g-string. Bostonist launched......

Boston came in at number 10 in a recent list of America's most literate cities. What's surprising is that it didn't come in higher given the quality of the authors who come in to read, the top-notch bookstores, and the fact that good books help get us through the cold weather. Central Connecticut State University just released these figures and draws its findings based on "newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources,......

--A truck crashed on the Revere Beach Parkway last night. No one was hurt, but the incident shut down the parkway in both directions. According to WBZ, "State police officials said a truck went under the overpass on Route 107 North heading toward Chelsea and smashed into the top of the Route 16 bridge, bringing concrete down onto the roadway and damaging Route 16." The road has since been reopened. [WBZ, WHDH] --Two suspects......

Google Street View has been available in several cities but has now made its debut in Boston, according to the Globe. The process allows you to take a 360 view of an address. If you want to use it, just go to Google Maps, type in a Boston address, and click on the little yellow man that pops up at the address. A new window will appear with a street-level image of the area. You......

Imagine that you're stuck on the Green Line, wedged in between two people yammering away on their cell phones, and one of them is stinky. Each stop seems to last for an hour. When you reach your destination, you think to yourself, "I could have walked there in half the time." You were probably right. The Brookings Institution has declared Boston America's second-most walkable city, second only to DC, and Beacon Hill as one of......

COLLISIONtwelve (12) Art Opening Tonight Friday, November 30th MIT Stata Center Balcony Gallery 32 Vassar Street, 3rd Floor Cambridge, MA 6p - 9p / FREE / All Ages COLLISIONcollective is a group of artists from MIT and the surrounding Boston area that explore new technologies through the filters of art. Founded in 2002, their intentions have been to showcase art that incorporates technology, but has since expanded into some of the most innovative and......

SFist witnessed a new apartment building tszuj the skyline with spectacular, gaudy turquoise aplomb, the (informal) renaming of the Mission/SOMA neighborhood border, the return of the Maltese Falcon, the Mayor Gavin Newsom mea culpa-ing over his Hawaiian getaway during the oil spill, and double-decker buses hitting the streets of San Francisco. Oh, and some baseball player named Barry Bonds is a liar whose pants, it seems, are totally on fire. LAist continues to cover the......

Fun Fun Fun Fest 2007 Recap from Super!Alright! on Vimeo. Austinist attended a town hall meeting about proposed noise ordinances that could undermine the city's future as the Live Music Capital of the World, and lamented the possible loss of Texas's only feminist bookstore. Throughout the week, they interviewed a bunch of indie fashion designers and D-I-Y websites—Etsy, Ornamental Things, 31 Corn Lane, and Aorta Designs—for the upcoming Stitch Fashion Show. They also did......

Online dating is becoming as big of a commitment as a serious relationship. The applications and endless profile-building keep you chained to your computer when you could be out meeting The One or at least adding to your repertoire of Hell-Date stories. Crazyblinddate.com, which is launching today in Boston, New York, and San Francisco, strips the online-dating process down to its bare bones. Crazyblinddate.com promises to get you interacting with as many people as......

Are you a sci-fi kid who spent last night in Las Cruces Jail? Then saddle up and mosey down to the Middle East tonight as Two Gallants and Blitzen Trapper take the Middle East out west and down south for some down-home tunes that mix up AM radio, Old West swagger, and a modern hippie/hipster vibe to create loud and laid-back jams. You can almost hear sixguns cocking behind the rough guitars of San Francisco's......

Dare we say things are starting to click at the right time? The Red Sox finished off Oakland with an 11-6 win. Now only a monumental collapse (look upward; no lightning) will keep the Red Sox from celebrating an AL East clinchin' party in the next day or two. The Sox smacked Oakland largely due to the bat of Mike Lowell, who collected five of his 116 RBIs (a Red Sox 3B record) on a......

Yo La Tengo Presents "The Sounds of Science" Tuesday, September 25, 8:00 pm Coolidge Corner Theatre $25 Introduction by Fabien Cousteau The third-annual Muddy River Environmental Film Series is running at Coolidge Corner Theatre. The series covers wine, global warming, and Tuvalu. Closing night features a screening of several works by Jean Painlevé, a nature filmmaker who sounds like a real-life Steve Zissou, only without the silly outfits. Painlevé's images shocked the scientist crowd, not......

Seattlest watches as a S.L.U.T. is born and Seattle Flickr users go nuts over a local art installation. A restaurant critic demands a Diner's Bill of Rights over a gnat next to her drink, and, in lieu of a Portlandist, Seattlest debates with itself over the identity of the Northwest's crown jewel. Seattlest also joins the guys from Fantagraphics for an ill-fated gun party in the woods. LAist saw national headlines soar this week with......

Revenge of the Book Eaters will take place on Wednesday, September 26th, at the Berklee Performance Center. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. For ticket info, visit 826 Boston's website. This fall, the latest branch of 826 National, the series of fantasy stores/writing centers created by author Dave Eggers and Nínive Calegari, will open in Egleston Square. Students will be able to explore the wonders of cryptozoology at the Greater Boston Bigfoot Research Institute, and then......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

Happy first weekend of September - and happy Labor Day weekend, too, for our American cities! Let's take a look at what's been happening around the Ist-a-verse. The deaths of two firefighters shook Bostonist this week. Boston's firefighters bent over backwards all week long - first, they fought flames pouring from the Boston Tea Party museum, and then a restaurant fire killed two and injured many more. Their efforts make everything else - like Tom......

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked......

Story time. It's early 2001 at a snowy New England college campus. Collegiate-Aged Bostonist takes in a set by San Francisco-based Matt Nathanson in the campus student center. It is Nathanson's birthday and Sister Helen Prejean (of "Dead Man Walking" fame) is also appearing on campus. Did we mention that this is a Catholic college? Nathanson winds up performing a very, very intimate two sets and, we imagine, having a pretty sucky birthday. But Bostonist......

Londonist are starting to think their city is getting just a little bit too expensive, when even Christian Slater can't afford to go out there. And there's no escaping, as local singer Lily Allen discovered when she was barred entry to the US. The British mapping agency caused further bad karma, by blocking a 3-D representation of London in Google Earth. But the smiles returned to Londonist's faces as they interviewed Baroness von Reichardt,......