Any Angeleno worth their salt knows this city can be both bright and happy or sinister and dark by quick turns or subtle steps or shameless spirals. There is much to celebrate about LA and much to shy away from - which makes it the ideal city-as-character in many a writer's novel. A few new books are out that feature LA and they're on our radar to check out this month. Latinos in Lotusland: An......

Pinkberry Pinkberry, the most hated and revered fro-yo chain. Are you pinkberry or are you stinkberry? Are you good for me or bad? There's been so much Pinkberry news lately, it's tough to keep track of it all. Here's the timeline of events:Pinkberry becomes wildly popular - so popular, many begin to wonder about its oddly addictive qualities and the big question finally gets asked: just what the hell is this I'm eating?Pinkberry is slapped......

Pinkberry, CeFiore, Red Mango, Lime Light, etc., etc., etc., have nothing on Menchie's Frozen Yogurt in Valley Village off Laurel Canyon between Magnolia and Chandler. At Menchie's, there's not just two flavors, there's ten. At Menchie's, you don't get served, you serve yourself. At Menchie's, there's not just a handful of toppings, there's more than thirty-five. Ranging from chocolate to cake batter to fruit flavors, the Valley yogurt shop let's you serve yourself, pay by......

Have you had enough of $5 coffee? $99 burgers? $125 martinis? I know I am -- doesn't anybody in this city want to find the cheapest drinks, meals, and booze? Los Angeles Magazine comes through this month with a feature on great deals and bargain finds on everything from martinis to furniture to underpants. We went straight for the food section, of course -- and here are our top food bargain picks from the......

Photograph of memorial outside Heath Ledger's NYC apartment Gothamist learned that actor Heath Ledger was found dead in his SoHo apartment, cause of death unknown so far (but apparently the masseuse who found him called Mary-Kate Olsen before 911).Bostonist considered sending a link about the Super Bowl, but damn! The New Kids are reuniting!Although Sylvester Stallone is a native of New York City, his Rocky character lets many Philadelphians consider him a native son......

I should hate Pinkberry for a million different reasons: what it does to neighborhoods, the mom & pops it shuts down in its wake, its fake-yogurty ingredients that are likely very, very bad for me and its off-putting, sour flavor that foodies abhor and I, strangely, adore. I know and I agree and I held out as long as I could....

Farm Boy Palms (probably also known as Farm Boy Culver City) is finally open. With a pretty substantial workload, I haven't had time to go there a lot, but I did manage to take some pictures. They have loads of fruits and vegetables, all described on their handwritten cards as "sweet and fresh." The sushi looks about on par with Ralphs, and they have fruit flavored yogurts with all the Pinkberry trimmings.......

For 36 years, The Wiener Factory has been serving hot dogs out of their Sherman Oaks stand to loyal and new customers alike. Good for hot dog lovers, bad for residents craving Pinkberry:Officials with Pinkberry, a nonfat frozen-yogurt chain, were expected to tell a Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council panel Monday night that they wanted to raze the small hot-dog restaurant and build another Pinkberry store. "Historically, many things come and go. But we have......

Some are considering it "if you can't beat em - invest in em", but any good judge of fads know that the worst thing that Starbucks could have ever done to Pinkberry is fork over $27.5 million to the local frozen yogurt chain so they can continue to multiply at a rapid pace. Why would Starbucks want people eating a quasi-yogurt treat next summer at Pberry instead of slurping down a freshly made Frappuchino at......

Sure, all over the country the kids are back in school, the temperatures are beginning to dip down, and Starbucks has begun to shill its autumnal fare, but here in Sunny So Cal we are still sweating out our eternal summer, gorging on frozen dairy product treats of often questionable origin. Try as we might, the world of fro-yo is too mighty to ignore, which is why we feel compelled to bring you This Week......

- David Garcia, KNBC's environmental reporter died of liver failure yesterday in Palm Desert at 63. Adios, Earthman! - KNBC - If you are an illegal alien and you got pulled over, and the LAPD discovered that you didn't have a drivers license, your car would be immediately impounded. That practice might be illegal, somehow, so the LAPD are stopping that. The Sheriff's Dept., however, is a different story - LAT - Frisco man......

Gee, I wonder what tipped them off: California transportation officials will immediately inspect 69 of the state's most vulnerable steel-deck bridges. And the frozen yogurt wars rage on... A man, believed to be a property caretaker, was fatally mauled by a dog on Ving Rhames' property. How desperate can you get? Fox News is offering Republicans $15 to attend an upcoming taping of the "Half Hour News Hour" - a right-wing (and shoddy) version......

The summer before last, I ran a series called Ice Cream Summer, whereupon I undertook the dreadful, nasty, difficult, and troublesome task of tasting the wares of many of our fair city's many ice creameries. I crowned the victor as Gelato Paradiso, a then-new gelato bar located smack dab in the heart of all the dressed-up character melee of Hollywood Boulevard. But so much has happened in the world of frozen dairy (or non-dairy,......

Call it overpriced. Call it overrated. Call it crappy, sour-priced crud. But call it deceptive? Bryan Williams thinks so, and that's why the West Hollywood "legal recruiter" is suing Pinkberry, the newest craze in frozen dessert treats. Williams' lawsuit does not ask for punitive damages. He simply wants the wildly successful yogurt chain to tone down its claims that the product is frozen yogurt. A statement from a California Department of Food and Agriculture......

Pinkberry, the chain that is to frozen desserts what Starbucks is to coffee, is bringing its brand of overpriced, pseudo-healthy, weirdly sour frozen yogurt to Silver Lake with a new outlet that's set to open at the corner of Hyperion and Rowena. I know a lot of people love this place, but I just don't care for Pinkberry. And as long as Pazzo Gelato is a mere 1.4 miles away, I doubt I could......

We're guessing most of you are hungover from St. Patrick's Day. We are too. But still, we're going to muddle on through our green haze and give you (drum roll please...) this Week In -ists. We start with SFist which broke the -ist record for comments with nearly 500 comments on a post about our Mayor's girlfriend. She responded back on charges that she's not a "girl's girl" and, whoo boy-- the floodgates? They......

With news of more locations poised to serve, it's about damn time we did a little investigative journalism. Pinkberry: Come on, now, really? Isn't it just frozen yogurt? What's the big deal? Pinkberry is the little yogurt shop that could--and has--bloomed into a behemoth of local franchises, and with all the hype, they seem set to convert you to be one of their kind. Every trend loves its skeptics, and we count ourselves among the......

One of our favorite local food blogs is Eating LA, which is helmed by Pat Saperstein, a senior editor at Variety. LAist asked her to put together her own Best of 2006, which she has so kindly shared with us; we can't help but notice that she likes pork and--if we may interpret--dislikes the deluge of Pinkberry frozen yogurt shops. Is it coincidence, we wonder, that she, too links the year to the pig, like......

"It [Pinkberry] was perfectly fine, I don't get the hype, and if you're looking for me on a 'normal' fro-yo night you can still find me at Studio Yogurt." ~ Das Ubergeek Studio City's staple yogurt shop, Studio Yogurt, has found its competition in the form of a 2-minute walk around the corner dashed with mangoes and Cap'n Crunch. LA's latest obsession has found itself in the Valley at the same spot where we......

Very much like the vanilla-and-chocolate frozen yogurt swirl, when a dj combines two different records together to make a new tune, that's a mashup. Sometimes the results are horrible, like peanut butter and fish, sometimes the results are beautiful, like The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" with the Beastie Boys "Body Movin'" (sped up really fast). Because Indie 103 rules, they've given DJ Paul V. the "Mashup Of The Day" feature and his own......

It's happening already. With Thanksgiving literally hours away and Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa mere days from occuring, the normally dedicated attitudes of workers citywide has slowly been overtaken by a strange blank stare some may have seen in the movie Day of the Dead in which oblivious zombies take over a town and start eating each other. The same goes for Los Angeles during the holidays. Being a town filled with transplants from all over the country......

According to the L.A. Daily News, a German study funded partly by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has determined that people prone to a heart attack face triple their usual risk as a result of traffic whether they are in cars, on bicycles or on mass transit. Here at LAist, we did a little bit of our own research, taking the German study one step further in talking to Los Angeles residents. Our goal......