Back in Emeril's pre-Katrina heyday, chefs and serious foodies used to dismiss it as the Bam! network. Now it's disdained as All-Rachael, All-The-Time. You know, the Food Network, not about cooking so much as lifestyle (travel, glitz), weaponry (knife-wielding, cake-frosting) and tours of candy factories. Deliberate programming choices, made to draw viewers too sedate for Housewives and too chicken for Survivor. more ›

How easy it is to poke mean-spirited fun at Silverman Festivals, aka Bite of Seattle. The family-owned commercial enterprise, enabled by the City of Seattle in the guise of a community festival, symbolizes so much of what's wrong with America today: greed, exploitation, overweening appetite and tons of just plain crappy food. A cheap and easy target for the smug and self-satisfied. (For one such potshot, see Cornichon's "Blah of Seattle" post a year ago.) more ›

Before we begin, we'd like to extend our deepest sympathies to the family of James Kim. We are not, by any means, trying to discount that tragedy by juxtaposing posts about the Kims with more light-hearted posts. It's the nature of doing a compilation such as this one: we're trying to give a full slice of the goings-on in the Ist-a-Verse: the good, the bad, and the ugly. more ›

Suddenly a couple of council members aren't so sure it would be a good idea to have Summer Nights concerts in Gas Works park after all. Maybe it's better to have them at South Lake Union where the views suck, but at least there's no entrenched ninja NIMBYs chucking lawsuits like chinese stars. Licata and McIver are asking the parks department to take another look at South Lake Union, and although events the size of Summer Nights weren't originally in the plan for the park there we're gonna go ahead and say that Vulcan probably owes the city council a few and things can be arranged. more ›

The workers of a third New York Starbucks unionized recently, continuing what has to be an uncomfortable trend for our caffienated giant. The employees of the Union Square Starbucks store are joining two other Manhattan locations in The Starbucks Workers Union (aka IWW, aka IU-660) chiefly because of concerns regarding the low number of hours available to part-time employees. more ›