Thank goodness the weather is warming up this week - who knows how many kids will decide to see if their tongues will really stick to a frozen flagpole? Because that's what two boys in Indiana did. It's unclear if double-dog-dares were involved. According to the AP, fourth graders Gavin Dempsey and James Alexander in Chesterton, Indiana (where it's cold) were on flag duty and decided to tempt the gods of thermal conductivity. Dempsey said,......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a residential high-rise fire on upper Broadway, a "church robbery" (! - those robbers took from the poor box!) in Queens, and a shooting in Bed-Stuy. Have you lost the Christmas spirit? If you have, read "Auggie Wren's Christmas Story", by Paul Auster-- it'll cheer you up. [Via OTBKB] James Forbes, the controversial pastor of Riverside Church, has delivered his last sermon there. He'll be embarking on a farewell......

A look at some noteworthy programs this week: The Investigators: Riker’s Island (CourtTV , Monday, 8 p.m.) CourtTV’s law enforcement documentary series takes a look at Rikers The Year Without a Santa Claus (WNBC 4, Monday, 9 p.m.) A new version of some Christmas cheese from NBC. If anyone cares Santa decides to take a year off and the elves have to cope. Sounds like hard hitting drama. Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole......

Imagine if Law & Order had a Christmas themed episode where instead of searching for killers they were searching for a Jesus statue that went missing from a church. We can only theorize that Detective Briscoe would say something like, “Great we’re now going to have to find Jesus.” However, something close exists, a Christmas episode of the mother of all television police procedurals – Dragnet. It will not be the controversial episode about the......

Ooh - the owners of an East 18th Street Manhattan brownstone are under fire for their wacky Christmas display. The Post puts the Krupnik-Castellanos display - "a skinny, bloody-bearded Santa holds a knife in his left hand and the severed head of a doll - blood gushing from its eye sockets in the other" - on its cover. The owners, Joel Krupnik and Mildred Castellanos, explain its their protest against Christmas's commercialization. Well, it's not......

There are so many holiday theatre offerings right now, many of them closing when Christmas is still a week or more away, so we are going to be ornery and focus on non-seasonal stuff, of which there is plenty, as usual. One show that just caught our eye is Under a Montana Moon, performed by the mime Bill Bowers. We get a lot of puppetry on stages here, but miming, not so much, and Bowers......

The NY Times looks at how people feel when Christmas is on a Saturday and its repurcussions. Many service workers feel they miss out on another day they could be making money, while some employees feel they should get another day off. Of course, there are the people who like the fact that Christmas (and New Year's) falls on a Saturday, but we were amused by the fact that Jews would suffer because the Saturday......