Cyanide Death Rocks Park Slope! Yes, it may be a slow news day, but a senior citizen died under mysterious, poison-y circumstances in a posh neighborhood of Brooklyn. With the Pope finally gone, this gives the tabs a pittance of material. [via Gothamist]

Gothamist, the most earnest blog in New York, got a little snarky with Top Chef judge Ted Allen yesterday. The site ran an open letter to the ex-Queer Eye, criticizing him for referring to a Waldorf Salad as coming from "Middle America" on Top Chef this week. Today Allen responds to the Gothamist letter, repeating his contention that the mayo and fruit-based salad is Middle American while admitting that it did indeed originate here. It's times like this when I love the internet. Oh, look, Gothamist has made me all earnesty too.

Talk about a reversal of fortunes! Instead of reblogging the New York Post's content, today Gothamist had its content lifted by the Post. The paper ran a Gothamist photoshopped picture of Eliot Spitzer without crediting the site. You may think, How sad, New York Post, stealing from a web site. Or how sad, Gothamist, crowing that the New York Post stole from you. Or even, how sad, Gawker, caring about any of this. But one thing is for sure, this Eliot Spitzer scandal has left blood on all our hands.

Baby Panda Glamour Shots Released [Gridskipper; Photo: AP]

Fox News' "Red Eye" host Greg Gutfeld consents to a rare interview today, and has some words of wisdom for the masses: "For anyone under the age of 30, absolute truth has lost to relativism—and now it's entirely inappropriate to judge any behavior, unless you yourself have done it at least three times. You work out don't you? The best thing for your workouts? Sports massage. I have a table." Noted: WOW we cannot believe that show is still on the air. [Gothamist]

Last night Gothamist, the 1010Wins of the blogosphere, held a dating event called "Check Out" at Whole Foods on the Bowery. Apparently (and, pretty predictably) the event was an unmitigated disaster. Our mole, Lauren, 23, reports.

Frankly, the Gothamist joke here is so easy, we're surprised they didn't make it themselves.

There's something so adorable about the Intel Blogger Challenge. For Intel, the "challenge" seems to be figuring out what they gave six bloggers free laptops for, exactly. For the bloggers — among them, Jen Chung from "The Gothamist," whose Duo Centrino presumably came with panda wallpaper preinstalled — the challenge is writing pithy little essays about "why I blog" (oh god) and smiling semisincerely in their glamorshots. But awesome as all of that sounds, there's an even more special extra layer of wonder and joy that Intel has yet to reveal: there's actually a seventh blogger participating in the "challenge," a "mystery blogger" who, according to Rohit Bhargava's Influential Internet Marketing blog, is "a person who many have considered to have defined the genre of blogging itself and continues to innovate and remain an inspiration to many other bloggers." OMG who IS IT?? We're scanning the room, and frankly, all of the laptops look kinda dinged up. We'll just have to wait until November 15 at noon EST, but frankly, we're not sure we can hold our breath that long.

Music promotion advertorial mishmashing is old news (and perpetually new news), but sib site Idolator steps up to the plate and points the j'accuse at Gothamist's Jen Carlson. Specifically, they're humbugging Carlson's habit of flogging bands in her Gothamist music coverage that she also happens to represent via her 5th Floor Artist Management. The little bit of multipurpose genius comes in when pull quotes from those same posts are recycled as press clips for the bands. Often no disclosure declarations where such would be inconvenient, of course. A perfectly closed system of mutually beneficial interests.

There's no small irony — that's right, you heard us, irony — in a regular column entitled "What's Fresh" turning out stale as a desiccated corn-cob. The very idea of not just one post, but an ongoing series of Gothamist blog posts dedicated to whatever greenmarket item comes to hand is deadly dull enough to make grandma's cat hack up a doily in disgust. But perhaps the column gives us a colorful, intrepid culinary adventurer who hunts down the most exotic and startling ingredients available in this cosmopolitan city? What exciting things have recently been fresh?

The kids at Gothamist provide some of the most comprehensive metro coverage of our fair city, and so it is not at all surprising that we learn from them — and only from them — that we are apparently headed for imminent annihilation. Seems some folks in London have deciphered the "true bible code" — mind you, "not the Da Vinci Code of Dan Brown," but the real bible code — and they have now put out a press release, which Gothamist got hold of, predicting with 98 percent certainty that "the UN Plaza in Midtown Manhattan will be hit by a terrorist nuclear bomb between Thursday evening June 29th and Tuesday evening July 4th, 2006." Which really sucks, because we just made drinks plans for the 5th.

We'd like to take a moment to wish the happiest of third birthdays to our delightfully unjaded crosstown friends at Gothamist. The actual anniversary isn't till next week, the Gisters report, but last night's Moveable Hype concert apparently served as a celebration. We congratulate them on their longevity, but mostly we envy them their readers, who, apparently, take it upon themselves to whip up Gothamist-themed birthday cakes. (No one ever makes us baked goods. Sigh.) And while we could not have designed a more perfect Gothamist cake than one featuring both Jerry Orbach and a panda — well, OK, we might have put some weather in the background, too — we also admit we're a little confused: We don't quite understand why Jerry would be going undercover in a panda suit, and we don't quite understand why Jerry looks so much like a vampire. But, then, we're always OK with not quite understanding Gothamist, and we're pretty sure they're OK with it, too. Have a happy, if mildly confusing, birthday, guys.

Thanks for bearing with me today. I wasn't fully prepared when I agreed to take a stab at producing 12-odd items (I think "odd" turned into the operative word) but my stay here is a brief one. I swear I'll be using as many of the tips everyone has sent as possible, even if I have to space them out over several gigantic link-dump posts. Here are a few to hold you over.

Our metro-minded friends at Gothamist were kind enough to let us know about a fire in Chelsea parking garage this morning. As always, the 'Ists provided some useful service journalism, pointing out related disruptions on the Eighth Avenue IND lines. Unfortunately, they neglected to mention the news that folks like us would find most exciting: A bevy of socialites were attending the conflagration.

The Gothamist on the death of Lyric Benson, the Balthazar waiter/aspiring actress who was shot by her ex-boyfriend last week: "While some might say the reason that Lyric Benson's murder is striking a chord in New Yorkers' hearts is because she was young and beautiful, Gothamist argues that the scary thing is that she was on the verge of making it, after all her hard work."
Lyric Benson: almost famous [Gothamist]

The Gothamist is starting a campaign against The Devil Wears Prada author and former Vogue employee, Lauren Weisberger. "Gothamist thinks that Weisberger is dumb as a brick for thinking that she'd have a byline right out of school. And, Christ, you can't wake up to get to work early and make a good impression in order to try and move higher in the pecking order? At a competitive, cutthroat company?" Our take is a slight variation on that theme: How naive do you have to be to sign up to work for [Vogue Editor] Anna Wintour, expecting that she's going to be nice to you? She's Anna Wintour, for god's sake! Of course she's going to abuse you! It's her job!
Gothamist hates Lauren Weisberger [Gothamist]

The Gothamist also reviewed Kate Betts' review. Their take: "Weisberger suffers from young-New-Yorker's-syndrome: thinking she's the first person to have a shitty boss."
Wintour of her discontent [Gothamist]

The Gothamist's Jake Dobkin takes Lockhart Steele up on his challenge and reviews Rice to Riches in excruciating detail. Jake's description of the interior: "do you remember that place Bot that opened next to Rice on Mott Street? Well, if that place got into a threesome with the Remote Lounge on Bowery and a Haagen Daas, this is the mutant child that would result." Another Gawker reader writes, "I have, along with my friend who lives on Bowery and Spring, decided to do a box contest on when Rice to Riches will go down in flames and then be rebuilt into the seed bodega it should be. For 5 dollars you can buy a box - the X axis will be month and the Y axis will be day. I expect the X axis to be no more than two rows deep."
Rice to Riches reviewed [Gothamist]