A 63-year-old woman and her 34-year-old son were found dead in their Silver Lake home Tuesday morning. The Staten Island Advance reports that Doris Newsome and son Martin both had health issues and needed to use oxygen tanks. The pair seemed to die of natural causes at around the same time, but it's not clear what the exact cause was (the ME's report will take a while), so their simultaneous deaths seem mysterious and bizarre.......

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......

Seattlest has a talk with the photographer from last week's "Segway Mom" and then experiences some dissension in the ranks over the question of wine vs. beer. It's not West Side Story, but about as close as they'll get. They're also still waiting on some inbox relief after a spammer is arrested. As Chicagoist counts down the days to its third anniversary party, they found all-organic pizza to be underwhelming amidst the hoopla, tried......

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......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: A large fight at Heritage High School in Manhattan, a trench rescue in Queens, and a suspicious substance at Canal & 6th Avenue Aw, Hakan Yalincak, the NYU student who conned people out of millions, filed an ethics complaint against his lawyer; his lawyer's lawyer told Yalincak (who faces prison time), "You are the ultimate evil person. Have a good time in jail. Watch out for the bathrooms." Peter......

When The Fresh isn't playing some hip venue in the Silver Lake region (that's LA's answer to Williamsburg), we're betting he's locked up in an artificially dark room somewhere just south of Hollywood Blvd surrounded by keyboards and guitars. A virtual mad scientist of musical standards, the Fresh isn't just a musician, he's a performer. An award winning one at that, just ask the Malibu Film Festival. To learn more about the Fresh check......

Singer-songwriter Elliott Smith died yesterday of an apparent suicide. He was found in his Silver Lake, CA apartment and brought to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead an hour later. According to MTV News, there was a single knife wound that seemed to be self-inflicted but police are investigating. This is very sad to hear about this death because his songs, depressing and dark countered with his soft voice and lyrical guitar playing,......

According to Blender [Via NY Post], Williamsburg is the number one city in the country for rock 'n' roll. The Post cites Luxx and other venues like Pete's Candy Store as being critical for young bands getting launches, but warns to go to B-Burg sooner rather than later, as the "stroller brigade" is moving in. The rest of the list? Hamtramck, Mich.; Silver Lake, Calif.; Austin, Texas; and Oakland, Calif.......