Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse

By Chuck Sudo on Aug 5, 2007 6:00PM

We at the Gothamist network would like to express our heartfelt
wishes to the people of Minnesota in the days after their tragic bridge collapse. We're not trying to discount the severity of the accident by making note of it in opposition to our usual -Ist lightheartedness - we just wanted to take a moment and recognize those affected last week.

After the Minneapolis bridge collapse, Bostonist did a little research and found that Massachusetts bridges could use a little help. But Bostonist brightened up considerably when they discovered they could drink themselves silly on the Amtrak booze ride and at the Sam Adams brewery. And, if they're not boarding the party train, they can think about their much-improved sports teams. Thanks to the arrival of basketball stars Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen, Bostonist is finally feeling some Celtic pride. They had to exercise that pride when a certain blog attempted to talk trash about their fair city. Oh, and the Red Sox got pitcher Eric Gagne, too!

With hot weather forecast in the Midwest, Chicagoist offered its readers a survival guide to Lollapalooza. That isn't the only major event happening in the City of Broad Shoulders. The YearlyKos convention rolled into town, as well. Meanwhile, changes are afoot at the city's largest weekly newspaper after a change in ownership, more women are talking on their cell phones as a means of discouraging assaults, readers disagreed with a Dunkin' Donuts franchisee's decision not to serve pork breakfast sandwiches, and a retired machinist thought he won a million dollars until a Miller Lite girl took his winning ticket away.

DCist was a little testy this week: to start with, they called for a ban on Crocs after discovering that the ugly shoes are destroying the city's escalators, they gave another popular blog a hard time for ripping on their fair city for no reason, and they begrudgingly gave San Diego their best wishes after that city beat D.C. in the race to create more adorable panda cubs. Finally DCist Senior Editor Martin Austermuhle traveled to Chicago for the YearlyKos convention to speak on a panel about the struggle for District Voting Rights.

This week, Houstonist checked in on a series of fallen icons: an animatronic gorilla from their youth singing bad hip-hop, the virtuous halls of government invaded by a mysterious pink dildo, and a flamboyantly white-haired, blue-spectacled local news icon gone to the big TV studio in the sky. It all gives you something to think about while making late-night grocery runs in your PJs - which is totally acceptable, considering that Houston once annexed the city of New Orleans. And we all know what that means: drinks all around!

Gothamist was amazed when it turned out that Mayor Bloomberg, who always talked up his subway riding habits, gets driven in an SUV to a subway station twenty-two blocks away--when there's a station just four blocks away--and totally confused when a weird submarine-like vessel was found in the Buttermilk Channel . The Big Apple blog also chatted with the former senior editor of Playgirl and ran into JJ Abrams' mysterious movie taking over the Lower East Side. Finally, Gothamist decided that a blog tracking the movements of a shirtless He-Man could only be a good thing.

SFist's fatality-free news: Mayor Newsom's innocuous non-joke bruised the delicate feelings of several Castro bar patrons; SFist Jeremy went slapstick and spilled hot coffee on himself while riding a MUNI line, sparking a public-transit etiquette debate; the sibling rivalry between LA and SF got gastronomic; and evangelical preachers in Dolores Park need to shut the hell up, volume-wise. Now the bad news: Former 49er's football coach Bill Walsh succumbed to leukemia; and police/SWAT teams raided Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery in connection with the execution of Oakland Post's editor, Chauncey Bailey. RIP, gentlemen.

LAist got stoked that the LA Times snagged two of their writers to write for them. Those new jobs can mean new commutes, but in LA where they say traffic is terrible, one photographer has found empty freeways at rush hour through his camera lens. And who cares if Dodger baseball traffic sucks, Sporting News gave Los Angeles the title of "Best Baseball City" (Go Dodgers!). It should also win Best City to be Surrounded by Other Best Cities -- 'cause, come on, visiting Comic-Con is a hop and skip down the coast to San Diego. However, there's one downside from the past week: the apartment complex where Charles Bukowski wrote "Post Office" is for sale and it could be leveled.

Finally, Phillyist had the dubious honor of interviewing some of the young stars (starz?) of Bratz: The Movie - girls of an age at which it's important to know how not to dress in public. Phillyist writers pondered celebrity self-awareness and how you can misspell a word when it's printed on your t-shirt. But at the end of the week, they got a little serious and took a close look at the city's shocking murder rate.

Curious about what's going on across the rest of the Ist-A-Verse? Check out this week's favorites on Austinist, Londonist, Sampaist, Seattlest, Shanghaiist, and Torontoist.

Images: Flickr user sklose on Gothamist, tien mao on Gothamist, and Flickr user ananzi on Phillyist.