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......

The Red Hook ballfields are back in action, and Eat for Victory was there to give us a report. Eater lists the James Beard Foundation Media Award winners, including the SF Chronicle which picked up the Best Newspaper Food Section and Leite's Culinaria for Best Website Focusing on Food, Beverage, Restaurant, or Nutrition. The remainder of the awards will be announced at tonight's gala. Top Chef season one winner Harold Dieterle officially opens his......

If you haven't heard about Christina Ricci, Samuel L. Jackson and Justin Timberlake's Southern Gothic exploitation movie, Black Snake Moan, you may have been living under a movie-free rock. Ricci plays a bad, bad girl who must learn to mend her ways under the racially and sexually fraught tutelage of jazz musician Jackson. How shall he do that? Why chain her to the radiator until she repents of course. One of this movie's key words......

Reasons to support Arnold's run for Governor of California: - Will probably support Austrian pastries. Mmm...pastries. - Terminator, Predator, Kindergarten Cop (he got those kids in line - he can do it with Sacramento bureaucracy) - Only political candidate Gothamist has seen naked. But that doesn't mean we want to see Arianna or Gray naked. Lord no. - Admitted he got a bikini wax. Metrosexual, yes, but then again, he's man enough to own up......

The Post says that New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. denies that his family made him ask Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd to resign. He had, famously, right after the Jayson Blair scandal emerged, said that he would not accept Raines' and Boyd's resignations. "Towards the end of last week, and even more towards the beginning of this week, it became clear to them, and in turn to me, that the best thing......

Kevin Sites, a CNN reporter, keeps his own blog at kevinsites.net (not affiliated with CNN in anyway). He tells SF Chronicle: "This experience has really made me rethink my rather orthodox views of reaching folks via mass media. "Blogging is an incredible tool, with amazing potential. The feedback readers are posting motivates me to provide as much as I can for all of these folks hungry for firsthand info." [Via Romenesko's Media News]......