Keith and Kevin Roessler are the twin towers behind restaurants in town that you love like Savoy, Seasons, and Zinc Wine Bar (home of the best freakin’ brunch menu in town – I kid you not – where you can get the Elvis Waffle and drown your walk of shame sorrows in peanut butter and whipped cream).

But they are also huge winos.  I mean, wine freaks.  I mean, fermented grape hounds.  Yeah, that’s it.  Jillian Oaks of the Local IQ has a great profile on them and their plans to take their uncle Roger and father Richard’s Roessler Cellars to a new level with a second venture called R2.   This focus will bring even more varietals of wine to the restaurants and making dining all the better.  Salud!

What happens when you are thinking of visiting a restaurant and you are just a little picky about what you eat?

You go to their website to look at the menu, of course.

But what if they have a page on their site that says, “We update our menu frequently, so CLICK HERE to see our latest menu”, and the menu link is from 2008?

Do you still go? Do you call them and ask them to update their site? Do you email them and threaten to boycott? Post a list of all offending restaurant sites to try to get them to sharpen up, or post a list of GOOD sites as motivation? Embark on a campaign of blogging about the problem?

I’m considering a few of these options – using my “evil powers” for good, as it were. I know a lot of non-picky eaters who could care less about the menu, but what if it were the HOURS of operation from 2008? That’s a bit more serious. Or a note that if your posted hours are until 5 but you close your kitchen at 4:30? In my mind, your “hours of operation” are the hours during which you will SEAT and SERVE any customer.

Your feedback is wanted – let’s make restaurant websites better!

Don’t let Russ Feingold go.

I spent my very first vote at the wee age of 18 bringing in one local guy that seemed appealing – he used his hand to indicate which part of the state he was from. Such an uber-dork with his ads, they are still cute:

Watch Russ’ early campaign video

But then, he turned out to be not only “appealing” but rather one of the best examples of the Wisconsin ethic of pragmatism while still getting important stuff done of the last generation: Russ Feingold. Please don’t let him go, my fellow Cheeseheads. I beg of you, take a look at the amazing things he has done to set things right in a corrupt system and go out and vote.

Clean water, education initiatives, OPPOSING THE WAR, campaign finance reform, transparent government, OPPOSING PATRIOT ACT (which allows the feds access to ALL of your electronic communications without a warrant), Wisconsin jobs bills for small businesses, and ON and ON and ON….

Feingold’s Voting Record
NY Times predicts Feingold will lose. Don’t let it happen.

YES, he is the incumbent now. I don’t give a bloody flying frap about that. He has been in office LONG ENOUGH to know what he is doing. Throwing out the incumbents is not always the best thing to do – the crazy mechanics of Washington makes it so that an ambitious new legislator needs to work their ass off for YEARS before they can get much done or have much influence. Russ is there, and if I had a Wisconsin voting card I would happily keep him in office over his new challenger.

Eater.com basically wants to get rid of a lot of the fluff out in the food blogging world by offering to pay bloggers $25 to shut down and post a (big yellow) notice why.

That notice?  Points back to Eater.com, of course.

I actually think this is brilliant on their part, both if it succeeds in closing down some of the excess blogs out there, AND as a publicity stunt.

If I had a food blog (um, I used to . . .) where I just posted my boring daily kitchen experiments, I’d consider it.  But this is FOR Albuquerque diners.  I want ya’ll to find the good spots, hear about the gossip, and spread the word about where to eat and where not to eat.

So, nice work, Eater, but you ain’t getting DukeCityFood.

That classic job description, spoken from the lips of a true 80′s kid.

But being processed is what we are?  The latest in one-sided movies (otherwise known as documentaries) wants to show us that we are all processed and that’s a BAD thing.