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On Gothamist the other day, I was a bit sad to see how this post on Slice was credited to Serious Eats instead.

Sure, they’re from the same “family” of blogs, and, sure, “The Food Lab” posts generally live on the Serious Eats homepage, so maybe this isn’t the best example to whine about, but it seems like more and more these days, Slice is referred to as “Serious Eats.”

In the end, I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. It’s good that people are viewing what Slice does as part of the Serious Eats mission. But when something you’ve worked on for six years (and that predates Serious Eats by three years and was in fact among the first wave of food blogs) is sort of overlooked, it kinda blows.

Oh well, it’s from some dude whose name I don’t even recognize on Gothamist. Probably some new young turk there.

Hello,
How much does it cost to eat out in florence?
There are so many factors to consider. Would you be kind enough as to give me some pointers as what to look for or avoid?
Any help appreciated. Thank you very much. yours truly, Fred

The first time I got one, I got snookered and ended up posting it as a Dear Slice letter on Slice.

But then I started getting more, all from the email address petrov.gazprom@gmail.com, all signed with different names:

Hello,
How much is the cost of a cheap meal in italy? Before I go ahead, is there any pointers you might have?
A little advice would go a long way right now.
I really appreciate your help. Thank you,
James

Hi,
How much would a greece fantasy vacation cost?
There are so many factors to consider. Would you be kind enough as to give me some pointers as what to look for or avoid? Any help appreciated. Thank you so much.
Terry

Hi,
How much does schooling cost to go to johnson and wales culinary school? I am trying to figure out what is important. I was hoping you might be able to give me some insight. Any info much appreciated.
I am very grateful for your help.
Thankyou,
James

How many euros for a sandwich in italy? There are so many factors to consider. Would you be kind enough as to give me some pointers as what to look for or avoid? Any info much appreciated. Thank you so much. Kind Regards,
Lacey

What is the cost to eat in italy in dollars?
It has become obvious I need help with this. Any ideas you have would be very much appreciated.
Please help me.
I really appreciate your help.
Sincerely,
Janet

Hello,
How much cost breakfast ny?  Your insight into what would be the best way to proceed would be much appreciated.  Please point me in the right direction.
Thank you very much.
Warmest Regards,
Terry

I have no idea what kind of spam this is or what the purpose or desired result would be. Figured I’d post them here if anyone else is getting them.

Update: Commenters here suggested as much, and The Spamhaus Project confirms it—if you respond, your answer will appear on one or more websites that appear to be using the Q&A content as fodder to serve up Google ads against. So it’s a cheap way for the spammers to try to generate content for their pageview farm. —8/4/2009

This kinda makes me sad. Brownstoner says that “Serious Eats checked in on the place …” when in fact it was Slice that did the checkin’ in.

I know that Slice is now a part of Serious Eats, but it still sort of hurts seeing your baby get sat on by a big ol’ elephant.

If people are starting to lose sight of Slice and perceive it as merely Serious Eats, it seems like we might as well close down the separate Slice branding and just fold any pizza stuff into Serious Eats and Serious Eats New York.

I suppose blogs sort of have life cycles. I remember a bunch of blogs that seemed unstoppable back in the day and that are now defunct. Perhaps Slice has reached yet another trough in the sine wave of pizza blogging. Who knows.

This bad Russian food styling item on Serious Eats was probably my favorite weird-ass thing on the site all day. I only wish more people would have been into it. I mean, look at it. WTF?!?

saw your wing comparsion….you are sooooooo STUPID and clue-less when it comes to chicken wings….comparing kfc and other stupid places. Your an idiot….try BWW or wing stop or some where “real”! Gives a lot of credibility to your serious eats place….doesn’t it?!

Sometimes I wish we didn’t have a contact page.

For the past couple of weeks in Serious Eats Talk, I’ve been meddling with Talk topic titles, trying to help make them more precise and reflective of what’s being asked in the thread.

In some cases, I truly think my meddling is helpful. For instance, “Need a butcher in Phoenix” is a better title than “Need a butcher.”

Well, the Serious Eats community is sharp, and they’ve noticed. I’ve been called out a couple times now on it, the latest in this thread that SE member PerkyMac started early Tuesday morning.

I’ve been following the conversation and commenting there over the last two days and have realized that maybe a large part of my headline meddling had to do with some of the recent off-topicality in Talk. We’ve gotten more than a few emails in the last couple months about threads going off-topic and becoming too filled with chit chat. And now I’m wondering if my playing with Talk titles was a way to try to correct that and steer things in a more serious direction.

Anyway, I have more to say about it in this comment on that thread. What I’m blabbing about here is my Style Bites site, which I’ve now taken out from behind its privacy wall.

SE member dbcurrie, who works at a newspaper, brought up AP style in the abovementioned thread, and it reminded me that I had been keeping Style Bites to myself. I really love talking about copy-editing and blogging and writing for the web (which is also why that Talk topic has been so fun to participate in). And now that I’m sharing the Style Bites blog, I hope to do more of it on Kublog/Style Bites.

You may wonder if some of the stuff that goes on in SE Talk drives me batty as a copy editor. And I have to admit that, yes, yes, it does. When people don’t put spaces between sentences—or between a comma and the following word—it just burns my eyeballs to look at it. When people use five exclamation points where one will do. Or five question marks. Or ALL CAPS.

We’ve always corrected excessive punctuation in titles and have lowercased ALL CAPS, but I think I’ve gone overboard with setting Talk titles in title casing and in changing them. But for the most part, I do try to leave the body of the Talk threads alone. I don’t expect that everyone has had the same copy-edit training that I have, so it’s sort of a live and let live thing. (Although if I do see obvious typos, I will fix them (“peal onions” to “pearl onions” in SE Talk is a recent example I can think of).

Anyway, for anyone not working for/with Serious Eats, Style Bites is more a behind-the-scenes look at what we do. For SE staff/contributors, it’s strongly suggested reading. And for other foodbloggers, it might be a helpful resource.

I’ll have to play around with the templates behind Style Bites to tweak some functionality, but I hope to add some more entries sooner rather than later.

The interregnum between Christmas and New Year’s is a slow one for most daily and weekly news outlets. So’s the case on Serious Eats. We planned an onslaught of year-in-review posts, but readers grew tired of it before I could post about my favorite new (or new-to-me) food blogs of 2008. So I’ll just do it on Kublog.

Grocery Eats: Serious Eats New York editor Zach Brooks discovered DJ Grocery’s General Tso’s Philly cheesesteak on a message board, posted about it, and not long after, the good DJ was inspired to start a blog documenting his (and, later, his contributors’) insane experiments with extreme food mashups. His first post was titled “Fuck, Yes,” and pretty much set the tone for the site. With plenty of cursing and craziness, it’s a great antidote to all the too-precious food blogs out there.

So Good: Though D.C.-based Jon Eick started his blog in August 2007, it really seemed to blow up in 2008, with his coverage of the Papa John’s/LeBron James/”Crybaby” T-shirt controversy. He was totally one top of crazy food-related current events. Thank you, Jon, for highlighting the Shawn Johnson “Makes My Taco Pop” commercial.

Fast Food Critic: Timothy appeared out of nowhere in March with a concept that seemed easily dismissable—reviews of fast food meals. Who is not familiar with the stuff the major chains put out? I thought. But FFC manages to take a seeingly common subject and find great nuggets of wisdom and humor in it. He’s tempermental and has threatened to quit blogging at least once, but we’re glad he’s back. I’m looking forward to more in 2009, Timothy.

Eat Me Daily: This blog popped on the scene in in October, with a smart, funny, wry take on food culture. Lots of great posts about cookbooks, food-related art, food media, and video snippets from popular TV shows. Too often food sites tend to all go echo-chamber on you, covering the same stories in the same way, but the anonymous staff of Eat Me Daily often finds a great new angle on the stories everyone is talking about.

Ugh. Seriously. I get this message in my inbox and I’m like WTF!?

We’re using Movable Type Enterprise Version 1.53 to run Serious Eats, and since I’ve been using MT for almost five years, I’m familiar with its quirks and what not. But for a multiuser affair like SE, trying to telegraph all its quirks to the various contributors (all with varying levels of blog- and web-savviness) is tedious.

Here, the problem is that the File Uploader (right) allows a user to upload images into the root directory, where all the index files and MT guts live. That directory needs to be as clean as possible so our web developer can work in there quickly and efficiently. It’s a constant battle to keep everyone uploading images into the seriousats.com/images directory.

This should not even be a possibility, first, because why would you want to crowd your root-level directory with file uploads and second, because there should be an easy way to set up a default directory for all images to upload to. As far as I know, there is no way to do this.

Furthermore, even if a user does know to upload to the “images” directory but misspells “images” (say, “imags” or “imaegs,” I have have been known to do), the system sees no problem with creating a new typoed directory instead of returning an error: “Sorry, ‘imaegs’ is not a directory on this server. Are you sure you’re uploading to the correct place?”

Serious Eats is in the process of moving to MT4, and I can only hope that these issues are addressed in that package.

he sings, originally uploaded by raphael_brion.

Robyn’s friends from Norway arranged to have her rickrolled via singing telegram for her birthday. The guy showed up at Serious Eats HQ just a little bit ago. Unfortunately, I am working from home and missed it. Fortunately, Raphael shot video of the craziness, so we all will get to see that soon enough. (And by “we all,” I mean me and my one reader.)

UPDATE
Here’s the vid:

[Serious Eats's YouTube]