OK so now Oprah wants her own network and she's going to get it. Remember that she is one of the four founders of the Oxygen Network, you know, that paragon of programming that now includes: The Bad Girls Club, Snapped, and the Oxygen Original movie Husband for Hire. Now she's distancing herself from that loathsome swamp of bad TV because of her new altruistic endeavor, the modestly named OWN (The Oprah Winfrey Network) which......

In other news, a desperate NBC has ordered a pilot of the BBC's cars & celebs series, Top Gear. The show has been running on BBC America for a couple years now, I've seen a few episodes, notably one with Ewan McGregor. The show may be amusing depending upon which celebrities they line up, but it's no American Idol. Again, instead of coming up with something original, we're forced to watch rebranded concepts from overseas.......

Happy New Year from LAist and your brand new Food Editor! I've arrived home refreshed from a fantastic vacation in the Philly/New Jersey area, and now I'm revved up and ready for the New Food Year. It was difficult to leave Philadelphia and its fabulous dining options behind (cheesesteaks are only the tip of the iceberg), but nothing beats Los Angeles for its range of offerings. Here's my wish list for places to go,......

Philly native, Beanie Sigel hit the road for Los Angeles to promote his new album, The Solution which dropped yesterday. The Rocafella representative took a little time in between radio interviews and a late night run to Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles to chat with LAist about his latest effort, his time locked up and the current state of hip hop music. How’s the response for the album been so far? Good, you know the album......

Don't know what to get for the gun toting rifleman who has everything? In San Francisco, turning that rifle in to authorities will net you a cool $100 gift card. Eh, you say? OK, how about $200 for AK-47s? I wonder how that conversation might go at home: Honey, where is my gun? Oh, I turned it in sweety, for $100 worth of movie rentals. You did what? Guns don't kill people, gift cards......

1. The Obvious- My parents and sister are the most important people in the world to me. They support me in every boneheaded endeavor I partake in, and believe me, there are tons. It's astonishing how many, actually. 2. My friends. Once again, totally obvious. Once again, they're totally awesome. Much love to Porter House, SLC, Shalhevet, AU, and everyone who fits into all, some, or none of those categories. World rockers, each and every......

If you saw last night's Dallas - Philly game during "Football Night in America" you saw NBC dim the studio lights of the Costas set because it would allegedly save enough electricity to power the homes of 1,000 American households for a year or some nonsense. If only they would do us all a favor and cut Costas' mic. Some of us would live in the dark for a week if such a deal......

Mayor Tony stood before a media gaggle at 7th & Fig in February and announced the birth of "LA Version 2.0." Free citywide Wi-Fi for all within two years, he proclaimed, momentarily appeasing critics and activists who have called for municipal funds and programs to help bridge the digital divide. But the skeptics among us are well aware of the extensive headaches and limited progress of the once-supposed trailblazing municipal Wi-Fi proposals in Philadelphia and......

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......

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......

- Jonathan Gold pays tribute to the late, great Al Langer in this week's LA Weekly. - Losanjealous interviews Palms Thai's Thai Elvis: um, does he put fish sauce on his peanut-butter and banana sandwiches? -EaterLA is totally representing our Tom Colicchio obsession; here they're peepin' on the continued progress of Craft over in Century City. - Go see Rescue Dawn: and sneak in a bottle of Baron Herzog wine in honor of the......

Audrey Kitching is a model, Internet personality, and phenomenon. Next month you will see her in issues of Alternative Press, Vice magazine and Misbehave. Currently she's on tour with the Warped Tour driving in an Audrey Kitching/Buzznet.com car that’s pink and green leopard print and writing about it on her Buzznet journal. LAist was lucky enough to conduct an email interview with her as the Warped Tour takes off today in Pomona and tomorrow......

It's Wednesday. The 14-inch Philly cheesesteak we took down at lunch is starting to sit heavy. Be a glutton like us and check out these links to all the food news that matters this week. - The LA Times explores the cuisine of Shanghai: and where to find it in the Southland. - Awww, those crappy cheap wines grow up SO FAST! Buy a bottle of two-dollar merlot and drink it all tonight in......

Oh when the saints, go over there... Oh when the saints go over there... Bonde do Role - With Lasers (Domino) The Afghan Whigs - Unbreakable: A Retrospective (Rhino) Disco Deutschland Disco: Disco, Funk & Philly Anthems From Germany 1975-1980 (Marina) Rjd2 - Third Hand [Instrumental] [LIMITED EDITION](XL Recordings) Paul McCartney - Memory Almost Full [Bonus CD] (Hear Music) The Aggrolites - Reggae Hit L.A. (Hellcat) Elvis Presley - Elvis at the Movies [REMASTERED](RCA)......

Did any of you catch Bobby Flay's Throwdown the other night? It's the show where he goes to different cities across the world and challenges some legendary food purveyor that his version of whatever traditional city food they're making will win a blind taste test. Usually, he loses, cause I mean COME ON: can anybody really make a cheese steak better than a Philly native? What about fish n' chips from some grotty bar......

Lakers? Out. Clipper? Out. Hometown hero Baron Davis? Out. What's an NBA fan from Los Angeles to do? Go to the Santa Monica Pier. NBA Nation is on tour and they're here for the weekend. You never know who might show up. Rumor has it the Laker's Andrew Bynum and Kwame Brown were spotted on Saturday. On Sunday the Clip's Cuttino Mobley is scheduled to be there from 2:00pm-3:00pm. Among the hoops themed activities, the......

There's so much going on across the Ist-a-Verse that it's almost impossible to keep track these days. Fortunately, we do it so you don't have to! Londonist took a walk through Oliver Twist's London, thanks to a gorgeous map layer for Google Earth. They also caught up with modern-day fictional London, with the Fantastic Four and 28 Weeks Later. It was a week of insanity over at DCist. They started the week off with......

As a product of the ’80s and growing up outside Philly, this particular LAist poster never got into Bon Jovi. Maybe it was the big hair. We don’t know. But we preferred the skinny, pasty guys from England. Think John Taylor from Duran Duran or Martin Gore from Depeche Mode. So we were really, really not excited to cover tonight’s American Idol. By 8:03 PM, we were having flashbacks and could already smell the......

Suns 126, Lakers 98 - Phoenix had lost game two in each of their past five playoff series. Not this time. The Suns burnt the Lakers so badly that Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire both sat out the entire fourth quarter and each only saw 24 minutes of action. Kobe Bryant made just five of 13 and was held to 15 points. Unlike game one of the series, Kobe tried to set up his teammates......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

You know that you're in for a great show when the crowd is packed shoulder-to-shoulder even before the opening band goes on. And that's exactly how it went down at the Knitting Factory last Friday. The show took place in the Knitting Factory's front room, which has to be one of my favorite venues in LA. Small enough to give you that front row feeling, but large enough to hold a crap-ton of people......

I’m not picky when it comes to most street foods. Being a happy New York-to-Los Angeles transplant, I’ve learned not to stress over our lack of a Papaya King or a Grimaldi’s. Instead, I simply bask in the fast food glory of LA stalwarts like In-N-Out and Mashti Malone’s. Philly cheesesteaks are the exception. Ever since my first weekend trip down to Philadelphia to grab a cheesesteak “wid” (with onions) from Pat’s, I noticed......

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur,......

Current Record: 25-26, 3rd Pacific, 8th West Last Week: Just when you thought it was safe to support the Clippers again, they go and turn in a series of unwatchable performances to raise up all of the questions that were seemingly answered during the team’s hot streak over the previous three weeks. Not sure if the team just doesn’t sleep well in hotel rooms, but the Clips continued their year-long habit of sleepwalking on......

Alexandra Le Tellier is the Managing Editor of LA.com, the swanky, chic, stylin' website about LA. LA.com just delivered a five-part Best Of guide to LA's newest and retooled hot spots of everywhere from spas to Philly cheese steak spring rolls. But we wanted to know more. We wanted to get inside the head of Alexandra. To where she lives. What she's passionate about personally. You know, the dirt! What we discovered is that......

Peter Boyle (favorite role: Chief Orman in the Nic Cage/SJP masterpiece Honeymoon in Vegas) died last night in New York after suffering from heart disease and a bone marrow cancer called multiple myeloma. Boyle, who rose to fame as Gene Wilder’s dancing protégé in Young Frankenstein, spent the better part of the last decade starring along side Ray Romano in Everybody Loves Raymond. He was a Philly-born, LA-working, NY-living comic curmudgeon whose presence on......

First off, I have to give a shout-out to sharky over at drunkenaudible, author of The Terry Teagle Rundown, since the previous title of the Clipper Weekly inadvertently mimicked the title of his Laker report. Current Record: 5-1, 1st Pacific Last Week: Three home games, three double digit victories. Legendary broadcaster Ralph Lawler perhaps said it best during yesterday’s telecast against the Hornets, calling the Clippers’ performance “workman-like”, playing just well enough to escape......

As we sat down to write this week's Best of the -ists post, a car blaring "21 Questions'" passed by our house. And that started us thinking about how some of the best -ist posts out there have at their hearts questions, some of which are answered, and some of which are left open. Check out the Best of the -ists from this week, and see if you agree. Londonist answers the questions "How much......

Even though we are way way past school age, we still get a little melancholy at the close of summer. Fortunately, our friends across the -ist network know that the shenanigans don't need to end just because the big yellow buses are back on the roads. So, grab your sunscreen and your favorite hangover cure, as we take a tour of end of summer fun from -ist cities all over the damn place. SFist Tourist......