Starbucks has a long history of getting people's names wrong on cups (just ask Pat Kiernan, who blogs about them nearly daily) but today Runnin' Scared offers a particularly egregious one. It isn't as bad as the time a barista wrote "The Black Guy" on one of Chad Ochocinco's cups, but it's not much better. more ›

Are you self-reliant or do you demand a more human touch? A study conducted by the Food Marketing Institute determined that customers are ditching the self-check-out machines at grocery stores in favor of flesh and blood. Only 16% of transactions were completed at the kiosks in 2010, down from 22% three years ago. "It's just more interactive," one shopper tells the AP, "You get someone who says hello; you get a person to talk to if there's a problem." While computers don't judge you when you stroll up with six cartons of Chubby Hubby and a case of Genesee, conversing with grocery store cashiers DOES count as human contact. more ›

Last week, a reader wrote us to relate her bedbug tale of woe—she claimed that a mattress protector pad from Sleepy's came with a side dish of two bedbugs, and that Sleepy's had been uncooperative with her appeals to pay for fumigating her apartment. But it seems the reader's attempts to "apply some external pressure" onto the company worked—as we heard straight from the mouth of Sleepy's COO, Adam Blank: "She has been taken care of completely, and now she's a happy Sleepy's customer." more ›

Guess what—waiting around for the cable guy to arrive has just gotten a little more interesting, because the city has just worked out a deal with the two major cable companies over their service technicians' tendency to be late. The NY Times reports, "Under the terms of a new contract that has been negotiated with City Hall, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision will have to pay a price for failing to honor appointments... The contract will make cable customers eligible for a credit amounting to full month’s bill if a technician does not arrive on time." more ›

Isn't is nice how airlines continue to come up with new ways to surprise us? Like, hey, your dog is dead! Or, hey, we're gonna make this trip take 10 extra hours, get to know your neighbor! Or that time they let you sleep on the empty plane. The latest: the luggage you carefully chose and packed for your trip has been inexplicably and utterly destroyed. more ›

The Brooklyn resident whose name caused him $2.1 million of trouble is still being held at Rikers, but a judge lowered his bail from $1 million to $10,000. more ›

After talk of flight caps to help ease airport congestion that leave many travelers very irritable, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced another policy to help ease airport woes. The DOT will let airports charge airlines based on the time of day and volume of traffic their planes are landing in. Previously, aircraft was only charged based on plane weight. more ›

On the heels of the recent fare increase approval, it has come out that the MTA has spent about $2.5 million on changing the uniforms of New York City Subway token booth clerks, or as the MTA calls them "station agents". That breaks down to $738 per employee for white shirts, grey pants or skirts, grey and black ties or ascots, and a burgundy vest, sweater and coat. more ›

A look at some noteworthy television this week: Art in the Twenty-First Century (Sunday, 10:00 p.m., WNET 13) Four artists - Robert Adams, Mark Dion , Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle Ursula von Rydingsvard – who explore the intersection between nature and culture. Billy Crystal: The Mark Twain Prize (Monday & Thursday, 9:00 p.m., WNET 13; Saturday, 7:30 p.m. WLIW 21) Billy Crystal receives the tenth annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the Kennedy Center in... more ›

, isn't the standard memoir. It's not about getting addicted to drugs and going to rehab or about living on the streets and selling her body. It's about what happens when you start doing stand up for ten minutes every night at the dinner table when you're eight because you don't want your adopted parents to send you back to the adoption agency because you didn't provide the "hours of entertainment" that they expected and never stopping, not when you're meeting Jon Stewart on your first day at the Daily Show, not when you're going through a divorce, and not when you meet the friends and family of your live in boyfriend for the first time after the death of his wife. For this reason, Weedman's memoir is non-stop funny and provides "hours of entertainment". And she'll be reading at McNally Robinson on October 10th and the UCB Theater on October 11th. more ›

Mayor Bloomberg announced that the city was prepared for the possible two-day taxi strike that some taxi driver groups have threatened for tomorrow morning, starting at 5AM. About 7,000 of the city's 44,000 taxi drivers (there are about 13,000 cabs in total) have reportedly promised to strike over new technology that the Taxi and Limousine Commission wants to install in all cabs. Some drivers' issues with the technology, which includes GPS tracking systems and credit card payment systems, are that (a) the GPS has no navigational capabilities and (b) when the technology breaks down, the taxi fare meter breaks down, too, costing them money. The city,though, views these measures as necessary customer service initiatives. more ›

The NY Times has a slide show of assorted items that could be perfect wedding gifts for book lovers. Suggestions range from whimsical bookshelves to personalized book plates. more ›

The other day, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a new way the city will be able to monitor streets and make sure they are in good repair: The Street Conditions Observation Unit (SCOUT). SCOUT inspectors will "drive every City street once per month and report conditions that negatively impact quality of life to 311." The inspectors will use their Blackberrys to report things like graffiti, clogged sewers, potholes, damaged bus shelters, and more. more ›

The NYCLU and ACLU are suing the Transportation Security Administration and Jet Blue over an incident where a passenger was forced to cover/change his shirt, which had Arabic lettering. Last year, Reid Jarrar, an American resident of Iraqi descent, was taking a JetBlue flight at JFK when a TSA official asked him to over his shirt, which read "We Will Not Be Silent" in both English and Arabic. The shirt's message is taken from the motto of an anti-Nazi resistance group, the White Rose. more ›

The city continued clean-up at the site of Wednesday's Midtown steam pipe explosion at East 41st and Lexington Avenue. Vanderbilt Avenue has been reopened, and Third Avenue was scheduled to be reopened today. Clean up of 42nd Street between Third and Park should be done by Monday, while clean up of Lexington between 42nd and 43rd should be done by the end of the weekend. Here's what the city said about the asbestos samples:

The Department of Environmental Protection tests of 12 air samples showed none of them testing positive for asbestos. The steam, humidity, and rainfall probably helped the situation because it prevented asbestos particles from becoming airborne. more ›

As we know, Con Edison and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection have confirmed that asbestos was found in debris after the steam pipe explosion at 41st Street and Lexington, but that there is no airborne asbestos. If you were in the area of the explosion and have contaminated clothing, Con Ed is actually accepting clothes and will dispose of them:

Anyone who was in that area around 6 p.m. who has dust or debris on clothing or belongings should put them in a plastic bag and bring it to the Con Edison customer service van parked at the corner of Madison Avenue and 42nd Street. The van will be at that location for the next several days from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Con Edison will arrange for the safe disposal of these items. Customer care personnel will be available to help people fill out a reimbursement request.

We'd give you a review of the iPhone's capabilities - if we could get the damn thing activated. Yes, the ultimate irony: Activating the phone take much longer than waiting on line for one! Apparently AT&T underestimated the number of phones that would be bought - and the number of people who'd try to activate them - and various systems weren't able to handle activation requests. No, it's not the end of the world that it's not working yet. And yes, many people have working iPhones, so something must be working out there. But since some people might have similar, frustrating experiences, we decided to share. more ›

With lines of potential customers snaking around the block, New York's Apple Stores on Fifth Avenue and in SoHo opened their doors at 6PM for the launch of the iPhone, the unbelievably hyped multi-functioning personal accessory. more ›

Everyday at 5 PM EST, Peabody award winning journalist Gary Baumgarten sits down with the likes of Arianna Huffington, Dr. Keith Ablow, and Mia Farrow for a one on one discussion. But this isn't for TV or the Radio, it's for Paltalk's News Talk Online , a web based talk show that allows listeners from all over the world to get the answers they want by asking the questions themselves. more ›

In a town whose worst pork chop might come with a $75 price tag and a perfunctory heirloom vegetable, but whose best tamale might come from a guy in Sunset Park with an Igloo cooler tied to his BMX, it may also come as no surprise that food purveyors like to have as much control over their raw materials as possible. Long suffering menu copy words like fresh and house-made actually still mean something in some places. You know that testa at Babbo? Mario Batali boiled a pig’s head for a very, very long time, instead of buying it from someone else. Less exotically, the mozzarella at many pizza places is still hand-pulled and stretched from steeping hot hotel pans, sometimes twice a day. Meat and fish curing is hardly ever outsourced in restaurants anymore: tour any number of restaurant walk-in refrigerators and you’ll likely find spice-coated and air-dried duck prosciutto, or salmon pastrami suspended from the shelving with butcher twine. When it comes to the home cook, given space constraints and sanitation issues, it seems many food experiments are outside the reach of apartment kitchens, and at the very least, hazard the terms of even the most poorly written lease. more ›

Two hour or more delay = full credit for return flight. more ›

- The components of each bus shelter are made from recyclable materials that are free from pollutants and will have minimal impact on the environment.We can't wait to see one ourselves, but what we really like is the illuminated map inside the shelter - that's much better than the ones outside that get faded and are hard to read because they are facing the street and you basically have to step into the street to laugh at the schedule. more ›

December 7: Alex Prud’homme at O&CO. more ›

You might envy the charm of brownstone life, but apparently one pitfall is that the some mail carriers don't like to deliver the mail to them. The NY Sun examines the situation after some Brooklyn residents realized their mail wasn't coming. Mail carriers feel stoops are dangerous especially in winter weather, and lately some residents' mail has been "rained upon, blown away, and destroyed." You'd think the mail would have to be delivered at the house, but:

The U.S. Postal Service wants the ongoing tiffs between brownstone residents and their letter carriers to soon be a thing of the past. The Postal Service is attempting to phase out door delivery in Brooklyn and other cities across the country. more ›

There's a bizarre, perhaps "only in the skies," story in this New Yorker's Talk of the Town. During aan American Airlines filght from Paris' Charles de Gaulle to JFK Airport, a gay couple was asked to stop kissing/touching by a stewardess. The stewardess claimed that the purser wanted George Tsikhiseli and Stephan Varnier to stop "the touching and the kissing." The couple was shocked, as were neighboring passengers and fellow New Yorkers. Tsikhiseli and Varnier, joined by the passengers sitting behind them and who heard the exchange, Ralph Jackson and David Leisner, asked the purser, who then said she didn't make any such request.

The purser asked the men to describe what they’d been doing, and she acknowledged that their behavior had not been inappropriate. Tsikhiseli then asked if the stewardess would have made the request if the kissers had been a man and a woman. Suddenly, Leisner said, the purser “became very rigid.” Contradicting what she’d told them before, she stiffly said, “Kissing is inappropriate behavior on an airplane.” She then said that she was busy with the meal service and promised to come back. more ›

The government is asking Americans not to eat spinach as it continues to investigate the E.coli outbreak related to the leafy green. Spinach - and other vegetable - supplier Natural Selection has been cleared of contamination, but the FDA hasn't lifted the recalls on Natural Selection brands. But some restaurants and grocery stores are still featuring spinach, as the Post reports seeing "spinach soups, spinach pizzas and even bunches of fresh spinach." Now, spinach soups and pizzas might be passable, because the spinach could have been long frozen (how does E.coli do in the freezing temps, though?), but we'd think most customers would avoid spinach. more ›

Ooh - NY1 got "exclusive" access to 311 telephone records and found that thousands of calls were made complaining about the Queens blackout. Which seems to fly in the face of City Hall's claim that they had no idea of the severity of the blackout. From NY1:

Beginning on Monday, July 17, 819 calls were placed, and calls spiked at 3,497 on Wednesday the 19th, with residents reporting power problems in Queens and other parts of the city. more ›

British intellgience says they have stopped a plot involving bombing flights bound for the U.S. today. British authorities have arrested over twenty people connected to the plot. Apparently the bombs would be carried in "hand luggage," leading airports to cancel flights and start screening passengers by hand. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security has raised the aviation sector's threat level for flights between the US and UK; further, "Due to the nature of the threat revealed by this investigation, we are prohibiting any liquids, including beverages, hair gels, and lotions from being carried on the airplane." more ›

Most of the city got to enjoy yesterday's cooler weather - except for Queens residents and business owners. For the second day in a row, homes and businesses had little or no power and subway service was limited, with many commutes that would take 30 minutes tops taking 90 minutes. The MTA blamed Con Ed, saying, "Because of the low-voltage problem, not enough power is available to power subway signals in the area." And Con Ed blamed Queens residents, essentially telling one of our readers when she asked what the ETA for power would be, "maybe if our neighbors actually listened to them, the load would go down and then we'd have power." more ›

According to our friends at Curbed, Broadway Panhandler will be moving to 8th Street (at Mercer) in August. It's one of Gothamist's favorite kitchen supply stores. You can't beat their Le Creuset sale every January, their customer service is terrific and they offer knife sharpening each weekend (call in advance to confirm times: 866-266-5927). more ›