When They Might Be Giants released their twelfth album, The Else, over the summer, The Village Voice called it “as tuneful and rockin' as all the rest, from the withering ‘I'm Impressed’ to the female-empowerment anthem ‘Take Out the Trash.’” Keeping it fresh is no small feat for a band with such an impressive body of work, accumulated over the course of the past 25-plus years. But a listen to The Else or, even better,......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: an unstable building at 37th Ave. and 31st St. in Queens, a stabbing on State St. and 3rd Ave. in Brooklyn, and an organ transport on the Cross Island Parkway in Queens. GrandOpening on the LES is following up its single-table storefront Ping Pong concept with another slice of Americana: the drive-in movie theater. $75 will secure all six passenger seats in a ragtop Ford Falcon. We recommend burning......

No more naming streets like Joey Ramone Place, Peter Jennings Way, Bob Marley Boulevard, or Jerry Orbach Way. If one City Council member gets his way, the commemorative naming of streets would stop because it's too much of a time waster for the council. James Oddo, the council's minority leader from Staten Island, wants to give the Department of Transportation the authority to approve new street names. Currently, the City Council has to approve the......

This might be the first time a British actor has played a Law & Order regular: Linus Roache will be playing the new Executive District Attorney. (Sam Waterston's Jack McCoy is getting a promotion to DA, since Fred Thompson has left the show to pursue a presidential campaign.) We foresee sexual tension between his character and Alana de la Garza's Connie Rubirosa! Is it a coincidence that Roache is the second star from short-lived NBC......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a water rescue at Emmons Ave. and Knapp St. in Brooklyn, a serious assault on West 37th St. and 11th Ave. in Manhattan, and a bank robbery on Flatlands Ave. in Queens. The body of the Ecuadorian man who was killed in a bar fight earlier this week will be returned home at the expense of a businessman, also from Ecuador, who appreciated the man's abbreviated attempt to support......

Now that Law & Order has been renewed for four more seasons, shakeups to the cast have been expected. And the most notable one is that Fred Thompson, who plays District Attorney Arthur Branch, is leaving the show to pursue a presidential campaign. We hope the writers work that in! Law & Order producer Dick Wolf said, "I've spoken to Fred today, and although he told me he has not made a firm decision about......

In the recent history of television, the people have been given three separate but still gritty police procedurals set in New York City: The police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders in Law & Order, the dedicated Special Victims Unit detectives who investigate especially heinous sexually based offenses in Law & Order Special Victims Unit, and the Major Case Squad detectives who chew scenery as well as they suss......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: A shooting in Brooklyn, a power outage in Queens, and scaffolding that fell on the 5 tracks - subway service on the 2 and 5 is messed up! A Bronx man pleaded guilty to terror plotting; Tarik Shah will serve no more than 15 years for offering to teach Al Qaeda operatives "how to wage jihad with hand-to-hand combat" New lawsuit to stop the Atlantic Yards lawsuit, on the......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: unusual fire at JFK, and more bank robberies in Brooklyn Heights and Carroll Gardens. The first proposals for connections between Brooklyn Heights and the new Brooklyn Bridge Park are in-- and they are ugly. Steven Johnson, the lunatic who tried to torch Bar Veloce back in 2002, drew 240 years from a judge at his sentencing today. Has it really come to this? The Hamptons Jitney will begin servicing......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: high-rise fire in Midtown and a bank robbery in Brooklyn Heights. Jon Brownstoner comes out to the New York Observer: he's 37, lightly-bearded, and lives in Clinton Hill. There's a protest against that huge Meatpacking District billboard tonight-- 8:30PM in front of the Hotel Gansevoort. The Army frequents Harlem high schools to recruit; a student says, "It's harassment because you can't walk through the hallway without them saying things......

Community Board 5 was not able to approve a street being named after the late, great Jerry Orbach at a meeting last Thursday. However, it was able to approve putting a public toilet in Madison Square Park! The Department of Transportation, which is in charge of street furniture, wants to get approval from community boards before placing the toilets, making sure the public is potty-pleased. (Some local pols don't want any in their neighborhoods, while......

With the sun out, the temperatures high, one can only think of one thing-- what's going on in the World of the -ist's? Bostonist dug deep to uncover Barack Obama's unpaid parking tickets, their Governor's latest ethical lapse, and a plagarizing sports writer. Chicagoist had everything in twos: two views on having the Olympics, losing two members of their Super Bowl team, and two music festivals. DCist put their noses in legal books as......

What a strange way for Community Board 5 to decide whether to name 53rd Street at 8th Avenue after Jerry Orbach. Last night, the board's notoriously difficult committee approved 3-2 in favor of naming the street after the great late actor. And then the full board voted in favor - 18-17 - as well. But, as the NY Times explains, "that slim margin was not enough to qualify as an approval because the votes......

There's Joey Ramone Place and Peter Jennings Way. But getting a street named after the city's arguably most famous TV detective who was also a Broadway legend is no easy task. The NY Times has the full story about the quest for Jerry Orbach's name to grace a street corner. Specifically the corner of West 53rd and 8th Avenue, where he and his wife Elaine Orbach lived. It turns out that Community Board 5,......

Fans of Late Night with Conan O'Brien are familiar with the hilarious Pale Force cartoons that feature comedian Jim Gaffigan and O'Brien as very pasty crime fighters. But recently, the series hit a new high with the Law & Order: Pale Face story arc. While Jim and Conan investigate tanning bed murders, they go to Dick Wolf's barbecue restaurant (picture, top right) to canvas witnesses. Later, we see Lieutenant Van Buren, Detective Lenny Briscoe,......

Last week, the virtues of organ donation were extolled with news that actor Jerry Orbach had made sure to donate his eyes to two New Yorkers. But making sure that people know you would be a willing organ donor is not so easy. The Daily News points out the license format is not very donation-permission friendly. The surface quality of the licenses which is meant to prevent counterfeiting does a good job of not registering......

We don't know about you, but it's friggin cold out there. Well, not for some of you. It seems as though places that are supposed to be cold are warm and places that are supposed to be warm are cold. Or maybe that's just us. Either way, we're freezing. Austinist said goodbye to their co-editor (sell-out) and played rumor monger ">on the SXSW lineup. And when dozens of dead birds littered downtown Austin, it's......

This morning's subway commute made us do a double take. Because we saw Jerry Orbach looking at us and the other riders from an ad! The Eye Bank for Sight Restoration has launched an advertising campaign to encourage people to become eye donors. As it happens, today, the Daily News has a story about the Orbach donation:The Broadway and TV star donated his eyes when he died in December 2004, giving sight to two......

A look at some noteworthy programs this week: Identity (WNBC 4 Monday, 9:00 p.m., Tuesday-Friday 8:00 p.m.) Penn Jillette of Penn and Teller hosts this 21st century remix of What's My Line. Yet another of NBC-Universal's NBC 2.0 budget saving measures, which focus on cheap bad programming like this. Ten years ago NBC was promoting the quality shows they had; now it is this retread schlock. NBC would do better by putting MSNBC's Countdown with......

Have you taken Time Out New York's Essential New Yorker? It's a mammoth, challenging exercise that tests people's knowledge of the city and its people. Naturally, there was a Law & Order question (page 5 of the quiz) that challenged whether you could sift through, oh, about 100 names or so to find the needle in the haystack: "Which one of the following actors has never appeared on New York’s quintessential cop show?" [Spoiler......

Alan at Amy's Robot rules! He uploaded this clip of Jerry Orbach in 42nd Street to YouTube. This scene is when Orbach, as director Julian Marsh, tells Peggy Sawyer (played by Wanda Richert) to star in his musical and he sings "The Lullaby of Broadway" (yes, it was a song in 42nd Street before it was a Milford Plaza commercial!). Jerry was a Broadway man before he made it to TV - let us......

If there is one thing we here at Gothamist love it is Pandas. We may not all agree on the merits of procedural dramas like L&O but who doesn't love a good panda? So we have to admit we were kinda excited to stumble onto the above video on Google Video. We've written about the above "Panda Dog" before (it's a poodle/Maltese hybrid and also a dye job) but we hadn't seen it live......

Ex-Gawker editor Jesse Oxfeld joins New York just in time for the magazine's big story on where celebs are in the city! Well, he's only quoted (as is current Gawker editor Jessica Coen), but given that yesterday's Post went ga-ga over Brooklyn celebs and where you might see them, forget the locusts, it's the day of the celebs. For the record, Gothamist's favorite star-sighting is not seeing Harrison Ford (with, ugh, that earring!) have dinner......

- The NY Times says that WiFi in some city parks will come by the end of the month (and Nokia is a sponsor) - and amNew York is also providing some free wireless news and entertainment as well - Did the Metropolitan Museum spend $45 million for a fake? - On the upside of the Emmy nominations, both Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay were nominated for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, making......

We hope you had a good time at Movable Hype 6.0 last night, which also served as a third birthday party for Gothamist (we really turn three next week, but details!). Thank you (and "Oh, hello!") to hosts Nick Kroll and John Mulaney, and thank you to the great lineup of bands, Burnside Project, Metal Hearts, and Slowlands. And big thank yous to Amelia and Loreal for making us wonderful birthday cakes. We enjoyed......

Holy cow - these might be the best TV-inspired Valentines since the "I Choo-Choo-Choose You!" Brandon Bird, a favorite artist of ours, has created SVUtines, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit Valentines. You can see where Bird's affections are, with the inclusion of Stephanie March - and not Diane Neal - and with an amazing BD Wong card. There are ten cards in a pack, with each pack costing $10 (plus $5 shipping). Buy......

We're always promoting the native photographers and painters of New York City-- but we've been remiss in not giving enough attention to another indigenous art form: cake decoration. Check out this set of cakes decorated by Ameliaaah on Flickr-- our favorites include the Spycake, the TaurusCake, and the FishCake. Her cakes make Fudgie the Whale look like a pile of poo! Our third birthday is coming up on February 8th-- maybe we should commission......

People, this is yooge: Donald Trump is being sued by a trifecta of real estate brokers over $1.3 million in unpaid brokers' fees. The brokers, Barbara Corcoran, Carrie Chiang, and SusanCara-Madden, claim they were promised $4 million in total for helping broker the $1.8 billion dollar sale of some of his Trump Place/Riverside South buildings to Extell earlier this year, but that Trump has only paid $2.7 million. Clearly, these Corcoran brokers need some more......

Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes sure does have a lot of enemies. One of his rivals is pointing out many of his top assistant DA's don't live in Kings County, which might violate their "duty as public servants to live in the city where they work," as the Post puts it. John O'Hara filed a complaint with the Conflict of Interest Board; the Post notes that O'Hara has been "prosecuted three times for the felony crime......

Yesterday, people from TV, film, and Broadway, as well as the public, gathered to pay tribute to the dearly missed Jerry Orbach. The attendees included Angela Lansbury, Al Pacino, Benjamin Bratt, Chris Noth, Jill Hennessy, Jane Alexander, Karen Ziemba, and Dick Wolf, plus many regular New Yorkers who cherished Orbach's contribution as an actor. Former Mayor David Dinkins was there, and Mayor Bloomberg spoke to the crowd, saying, "Briscoe exuded the life of the city......