Despite the preponderance of cheesy fence expressions, we were really into them this week on Flickr. We will forgive the photographers for quoting “Desperado” hundreds and hundreds of times and forget the miserly cracks about sturdy fences making good neighbors (in fact, we accept that our own title might be a little corny). The pictures were cool enough that we stopped looking at their titles…

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The week is still young, but it’s already been pretty rough in terms of foodie news…

Agribusiness Strikes Again: Just in case bird flu, Salmonella, E.Coli, mass meat recalls, and melamine scares didn’t convince you that industrial food production was a very bad thing, two words: swine flu. But, hey, let’s not point fingers. According to an article in Science Magazine, the CDC only found out that “after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus…jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack” six years ago. Maybe they lost the memo… [via Guardian] Read More »

We’re starting to think that The Flavor Bible was a gentle introduction to James Beard-nominated cookbooks. Maybe it threw us a couple of times by suggesting that we pair lobster with vanilla beans, but we understood it well enough to avoid poisoning friends and family. We’ve even continued to experiment with very positive results. At its suggestion, we made broccoli with anchovies and roasted red peppers the other night. Our family loved it. So, we told them that we invented the recipe using only our deep culinary intuition. Afterward, we felt a little guilty. Read More »

LOL Grey Gardens [via Jezebel] Read More »

This week’s found photos come from a weirdly perceptive suggestion left by one of our readers: Chimneys. Who knew there were so many different ways to release smoke from your fireplace? We saw industrial stacks, tin pipes, Victorian brick numbers, stucco Greek chimneys — there were even some ancient stone ones that we assume were used in prehistorical druid ceremonies (not to sound like nerdy fantasy novel enthusiast or anything…). In short, our exploration of the word “chimney” opened our eyes. Plus, we added the Library of Congress’ photo page to our ever growing pool of random Flickr awesomeness. After the jump, you’ll never see chimneys in the same light again. And leave more suggestions please!

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The James Beard Awards are the self-proclaimed “Oscars of the Food World”. This is true, except they aren’t televised (that we know of), there is no promise of high-profile celebrity face offs (although the relationship between Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain can get volatile sometimes), and the media-coverage they receive is typically limited to culinary mags and foodie blogs. If you’ve never heard of them, don’t beat yourself up. A lot of the honors they bestow don’t translate to gastro-civilians. Best Restaurant Architect? Clearly, an insider award. But one category that did catch our eye, however, was Best Cookbook. Read More »

When Compass in Hand opens today at MoMA it will introduce the public to a vast selection of works on paper from the 2,500 piece collection. Formed by the foundation’s sole trustee Harvey Shipley Miller in only two years (during which Miller presumably slept for no more than two hours a night), it features works that date from the ’30s to the present with an emphasis on the past two decades. There are big names like Jeff Koons, Elizabeth Peyton and Donald Judd, but the show also includes a fair share of up and comers as well as outsider artists like Henry Darger and James Castle. Read More »

This week, things in the virtual world were a little wilder than usual. First, we had the misfortune of coming across this horrifying image of a hairless chimpanzee in the Mysore Zoo in India. It made us laugh really hard. Then, we started to wonder if our laughter was a little inappropriate given the obviously unfortunate circumstances of the chimp. This made us laugh harder, but in a kind of nervous, adolescent way. Now we’re confused. Read More »

1. A  shoebox in the closet speaks volumes of your repression and the bedside drawer is just so…obvious. [Via Fast Company]
2. Somewhere deep in this fanny pack of tools to survive a terrorist attack we see a screenplay for the next Will Smith vehicle. [Via Boing Boing]
3. This DIY Segway should be no problem to build provided you understand the sentence “Drill holes for the flanges with the correct offset from the center as measured in the pedal shaft step.” [Via Instructables] Read More »

Just when we were starting to put this season of Top Chef behind us: “A tipster caught quite the virtual tickle-fight between everyone’s local favorite Top Chef alums Stefan Richter and Fabio Viviani, and it seems that the Team Euro love that started on the television has now extended to the realm of Facebook. From what we gather, Stefan thinks Fabio — aka ‘prince of sandwiches and ice cream’ — has been lifting friends from his profile so he’s returned the favor in effort to win Top Facebook.” Whatever it is about social networking that makes us sad, reality TV stars exacerbate it. [via Eater] Read More »