“Who is Nick Beef?” For years, that question – relating to the mysterious, capitalized ground-gravestone next to the one in Fort Worth, Texas that reads OSWALD – has mystified both the media and JFK historians. No longer.

Dan Barry, who writes the “This Land” column for the New York Times, laid it all out over the weekend. His findings are deservedly being picked up left, right and center, although he frames it somewhat more modestly:

This scoop may not definitively link Castro, the mob and the Central Intelligence Agency to the Kennedy assassination, but, hey, it’s something. And to prove that he is who he says he is, Mr. Beef reaches into a small satchel and pulls out a contract from 1975 for Burial Plot 258 in the Fairlawn section of Rose Hill ($175), as well as a receipt from 1996 for the purchase and installation of a granite stone to be engraved NICK BEEF ($987.19).

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Is this a slice of brilliantly engineered reverse PR? Or just a laughable indictment of travel website mass-computed city rankings?

Because that’s the key here; Newtown, MA based TripAdvisor is just the messenger. It’s not the staff that voted Chicago out of the Top 10 U.S. Cities for Pizza and New York fourth; rather, it’s Jo and Julie Schmo and all the other travelers who inputted the sampled “reviews and opinions” that “determined [top spots] based on the highest average rating by city for all restaurants that serve pizza.”

The New York Daily News duo of Ryan Sit and Stephen Rex Brown put a  call into one of the winning city’s establishments. It took very little time for Peter Canora of San Diego’s Bronx Pizza to set the record straight:

When asked if San Diego had better pies, Canora, who grew up in Howard Beach, didn’t mince words.

“It’s a tough question, but I know the answer: No!” he said while taking a break from his duties in the wildly popular pizzeria that recreates New York’s ubiquitous “slice and a coke” joints.

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What the hell is wrong with people?! That is the universal reaction around town and in the media this week to a despicable Brooklyn vandalism act:

Photos of the defaced Jackie Robinson statue obtained by the Daily News show an image of a swastika above a Hitler reference and the word “N—–s” scrawled twice on the base, just above the inscription detailing the monument’s significance.

That’s right. The memory of a man whose #42 jersey has been retired by every MLB team gets defaced in Brooklyn by one or more full-fledged idiots. To the News‘ credit, they have thrown in a $10,000 reward for anyone who tips police as to who did this.

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Today at 5 p.m. ET, the latest episode of Ora TV’s Larry King Now will be posted. It features King in conversation with Oprah Winfrey.

In the teaser segment below, she recalls an incident in the late 1990s on Madison Ave. She and hairdresser Andre Walker (also there, off-camera, for the King interview) were denied entrance to a department store. As they called from across the street to make sure the store was open, they saw a pair of white women get let in. And yet, when they walked back across the street, they still were not admitted.

A week later, Winfrey spoke to someone at the store, who explained why she and Walker were spurned. “The fact that they actually admitted that [fear of black people after a recent robbery] was actually quite striking,” Winfrey explains.

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Have you seen this vintage shopping bag design from New York’s Bonwit Teller department store, the establishment located until 1990 at Fifth Avenue and 56th street?

An item featuring the above photo is currently the most popular artifact at the Bagatelle Museum, an online collection curated by lifelong shopping bag and box collector Courtney Lichterman. After growing up in New York City and attending college in Ohio, this future travel writer moved to the west coast and has over her lifetime amassed a huge personal collection.

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