Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti......

This week we'd like to congratulate the -ist network's Mother Hen, Gothamist's Jen Chung, who found herself a recipient of Wired Magazine's Wired Rave Award. If that doesn't sound terribly exciting, keep in mind another recipient was J.K. Rowling. Yep, that's right, the -ist network and Harry Potter now have something in common. Go us. Austinist has a chat with the ever-fashionable Golden Girl Rue McClanahan, and managed to catch some local fashionistas making......

David Streitfield in the LA Times (registration required, regrettably) notes a new experience for him at Amazon.com: books he adds to his shopping cart get more expensive if he doesn't buy them right away. On Nov. 6, seeking to boost my dubious culinary skills, I decided to buy "The Cast Iron Skillet Cookbook." I went to Amazon and placed the book in my electronic shopping cart but got distracted and never finished the transaction. The......

Monday, after posting our pro-lap dance response to Susan Paynter's PI column, we received an email from an anonymous local stripper: I just read your defense of your right to make women touch you sexually for pay and was wondering: 1. How does intimate sexual touching for payment not equal prostitution unless you're going by a very narrow, fundamentalist penis-in-vagina definition of sex? 2. Why can't you just be happy looking at us beautiful ladies......

Seattle-based Fortune 500 companies have been getting a lot of attention from Consumerist lately -- first Starbucks, now WaMu: Washington Mutual Inc. says it moved tellers out from behind counters to encourage "friendly customer service in a welcoming retail environment," a design it proudly patented. WaMu customer Jaime Quiroz Sanchez, a real estate agent and landlord from Lancaster, says the coffeehouse approach to banking got him robbed at knifepoint of $20,805. That's the opening of......

Celebrate Ben Franklin's 300th birthday with the Bikini Bandits and Phillyist! (NSFW). Speaking of Mr. Franklin, send in a picture of Ben (or Ed Rendell) with a red tongue and win a free t-shirt. And they might have the next YearlyKos in Philly. You know who's going to be upset about those Bikini Bandits? The Houston school system. Houstonist also reports on some redevelopment shenanigans over a landmark theater. LAist's sex advice column on......

Lots of people love Anne Lamott. Us? Well, we're big fans of Bird by Bird, and moderate fans of Operating Instructions. Then, around the time Traveling Mercies came out, we kind of burned out on Annie. We're not sure if she's gotten more precious as time goes on, or if we've just gotten more sensitive to it, but over the years, as we read more and more of her Salon.com columns, we became less and......

Ray Bradbury has written an editorial in the LA Times begging the city to build a monorail. In a year. A note from Seattlest to LAist: welcome to hell. Mr. Bradbury is renowned for writing some of the most imaginative and unpredictable science fiction ever. Here is one example of his prowess at constructing alternate realities: The monorail is extraordinary in that it can be built elsewhere and then carried in and installed in......

According to news stories via The Globe and Mail and The LA Times (registration required), an accused lawyer by the name of Jules Zalon representing Robert Crumb filed a lawsuit in a Seattle court December 21 against Amazon.com seeking compensation for an older case of copyright infringement whereby the online shopping behemoth allegedly made an unauthorized use of Crumb's keep on truckin' character on its website in 2003. Seattlest finds lawsuits like these kind of......

While anyone working under the title "former police chief" could reasonably be expected to endorce throwing the book at drug users, actual former Seattle chief of police Norm Stamper wrote a book entitled, "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop’s Exposé of the Dark Side of American Policing." Read an excerpt at AlterNet.com: I say it’s time to withdraw the troops in the war on drugs. For a jaw-dropping illustration of drug enforcement’s financial costs, take a......

The FBI is investigating a man who spent a signifigant amount of time in Seattle from 1999-2000 for possible connections to the London bombings. From the P-I: British police have identified Haroon Rashid Aswat as a possible source of logistical, financial and technical support to the four bombers, according to media reports. The question for federal agents in Seattle is whether the man named by Scotland Yard is the same man as Aswat Haroon Rashid......