This week Inside Edition aired footage of rats in some of New York's more popular restaurants. The statement we received from the program states: "In middle to late August, Inside Edition’s 'Rat Patrol' took to the streets of Manhattan between 1am and 4am peering their cameras and flashlights into the windows of a wide variety of eateries from fast food places to fine dining establishments." In total they found 22 restaurants harboring the urban......

A NY Post reporter is the latest to cover a dog being killed by a Con Ed shock. This time the dog, Mushy, was her own. My dog, Mushy, a 100-pound Italian mastiff, died yesterday after an encounter with an electrified light pole - and I'm confronted with official bumbling and denials over what happened. It was dark and damp at around 6:30 a.m., when I was walking Mushy in Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem.......

We doubt they'll be paying livery cab drivers to park over dangerous-looking grates until they can be checked, but Con Edison is promising to check all 18,000 of its sidewalk grates after a woman plunged through one Thursday morning, landing close to a potentially lethal source of electricity. She was eventually rescued by two firefighters. The regional electric utility is still in the process of identifying electrical "hot spots" that have killed at least one......

Have you wondered why a livery cab has been parked in the same spot for days? It may be that Con Ed is behind it! The Daily News explains that Con Ed has "come up with a bizarre way to protect the public from stray-voltage hot spots throughout the city - it's hiring livery cab drivers to guard them until crews can fix the problem." The drivers sit in their cars - and sometimes......

Well, maybe not. But parts of it are radioactive. AM New York tells of a secret program conducted by the Department of Energy which had federal helicopters surveying the city to look for areas with abnormal radiation activity. This was in order to help the NYPD prepare in case a "dirty bomb" or other radiation-based weapon was ever deployed in New York. The survey discovered 80 radiological "hot spots" around the city with a particularly......

Time Out New York came out with their Cheap Eats issue this week and they certainly took no shame in taunting New York Magazine. Time Out's cover is virtually identical to NY Mag's, with reversed colors, down to the box highlighting their star rating system, except that Time Out calls it's issue "The Real Cheap Eats." TONY gleefully notes that "absolutely everything" on their list is under $20, clearly taking a stab at NY Mag's......

According to the New York Times, the new new in Tokyo is spending 8 to 10 hours in a tiny cubicle, binging on media: ON a recent afternoon, at around 5:30, I visited the Gran Cyber Café in the Shinjuku neighborhood for the first time, to read e-mail and visit a news site or two. Checking in, I was assigned to pod 16-A. I loved 16-A the instant I saw it. I closed the door,......

October 12 & 13: London's "Cocktail King" at Pegu Club Douglas Ankrah of LAB and Townhouse, London's cocktail hot spots, and author of Cocktails: Shaken & Stirred will be holding a special residency at Pegu Club this week. Douglas is going to be behind the bar, making drinks himself, tonight and tomorrow night until 8:30/9pm, but they'll be serving his specialty cocktails all night. 77 W. Houston St., near W. Broadway. October 13: First Annual......

Wi-Fi Salon is installing Wi-Fi into 10 city parks over the next few months. Central Park will have eight hot spots (including the zoo, Delacorte Theater, and Boathouse), as will Orchard Beach, Flushing Meadows, Van Cortlandt, Pelham Bay, Prospect, Riverside, Union Square, and Washington Square Parks. The Daily News says that Battery Park's hotspot, near Battery Gardens, is already running and that Wi-Fi Salon is paying the Parks Department for the right to install the......

It seems like the five boroughs have gone slap happy mad for smokin', spicy barbecue. Is all of it up to snuff? Gothamist thinks not. But goodness knows, the selection has increased more than two-fold within the past year or so. New hot spots include R.U.B., Spanky's BBQ, Smoked and Bone Lick Park, among others. And, then there are the BBQ standbys like Danny Meyer's Blue Smoke, Virgil's, Brother Jimmy's, Daisy May's, Pearson's and Dallas......

If you are unfamiliar with the oft-used term "feh" it is defined by one Yiddish-to-English dictionary as: "It stinks! No good." Suffice to say, "feh" is most certainly not what Gothamist looks for in a dining experience. But we can't help but notice that one Brooklyn restauranteur, Nando Ghorchian, has perfected the artform of the middling meal with a string of mediocre haunts in Brooklyn Heights, ranging from Montague Street's Caffe Buon Gusto to the......

The Department of Informational Technology and Telecommunications announced that different telecom providers will "fit about 18,000 lampposts...with cellular and high speed Internet antennaes" in a $25 million/year franchise agreement, according to the Post, which would mean more WiFi hot spots, faster rollout of 3G technology. Of course, there's some opposition, like Councilman Vallone who worries about health issues from cell antennaes and wants radiation inspection paid for by the telcom companies. ITT Commissioner Gino Menchini......

After two dogs were shocked by a store's cellar doors on First Avenue and St. Mark's Place on Tuesday night, Con Ed is being questioned again. The incident, not too far from where East Village resident Jodie Lane was fatally electrocuted, raises questions about Con Ed's crackdown on fixing "hot spots" last month. The Utility Workers Union is saying the crackdown was a "con job," as accusations will stary to fly once again that shoddy......

Con Ed finally reveals where the dangerously electrified lampposts and metal plates are located in the city, and the Times puts together a useful and scary Excel chart of all the electrified lampposts and plates (XLS) in the city. Whether it was faulty work or just a terrible combination of events during this past cold and snowy winter, Jodie Lane's death from an electrocuted metal plate in the East Village spurred Con Ed to look......

East Village residents have identified areas that might cause electrical shocks to dogs in the wake of the Jodie Lane's death last week. They are the northwest corner of E. Seventh St. and Avenue A, right in front of 114 Ridge St. and the northeast corner of E. Seventh St. and Avenue B. Con Ed says there's no way to tell if the metal plate/grating is electrified. Residents feel the chemical compound used to melt......