Happy Father's Day! For those of you who have dads, are dads, or know dads, this one's for you, from all of us at the Gothamist network." It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by......

A psychiatrist who treated Peter Braunstein at Bellevue after the police arrested him for the October 21, 2005 sexual assault and kidnapping of a former colleague testified in court yesterday. Dr. Li-Wen Lee said that Braunstein, who is on trial for assault, kidnapping, said she believed he was exaggerating his symptoms. Lee also said that Braunstein has bipolar mood swings and a narcissistic personality disorder - not paranoid schizophrenia as a defense witness said -......

Workers crammed into small spaces and contending with oppressive heat on the Lower East Side. Thank goodness for the labor movement of the early 20th Century. Or are the very people who commemorate those days enduring the same conditions? The Villager reports that workers at The Lower East Side Tenemant Museum are taking a page out of their own history books and forming a union. Their complaints include extreme temperatures and cramped workspaces. They want......

Everybody wants to be a rock star, perhaps none more ardently than theater folk, some of whom have been prodding the form toward rock since the sixties. Sam Shepard famously insisted that he wanted to be a rock and roll star, not a playwright; recently the likes of theater company Les Freres Corbusier and playwright Adam Rapp (who moonlights in a band) have expressed a sensible desire to tap into the Bowery Ballroom demographic.......

Some of our earliest literary friends like Christopher Robin, Amelia Bedelia and Ramona Quimby stay in our consciousness our entire lives. That’s why the job of “children’s book writer” is such an important one, and not to be undertaken lightly. Author and Brooklyn resident Lisa Graff tackles that set of responsibilities with both wit and gravity in her recently released first novel for young adults called The Thing About Georgie. Graff introduces us to Georgie......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a pedestrian was hit by a truck and killed in Chelsea and a bank robbery was foiled in Brooklyn Heights (more pix at Flickr). Most meta-muttonchop shot ever! Can't get enough? Fine, here's one more. A manager at the Park Slope Barnes & Nobles had a great idea for reducing crowding: banning strollers. What could go wrong? Dante's Inferno, Queens edition: "screeching elevated trains serving two lines roar overhead......

Subway special on the Gothamist Newsmap: a person struck by an A train in Brooklyn, a stabbing on the J train in Queens, and a "train job" (?) at Newkirk Avenue. Rosie's Trump beef now extends to Barbara Walters, who appears to have been stabbing her in the back in private conversations with Donald Trump: "Are you looking me in the face and denying you didn't tell him you didn't say this? You're a......

We're really digging Dalton Rooney's "Hello My Name Is.." project-- he's making these stickers of various Brooklyn landmarks, and then photographing them right in front of the landmarks. So deliciously meta! What landmark should he do next? Our vote: The Williamsburgh Savings Bank. Bonus: Dalton runs the seriously good Seriously Excited photoblog-- one of the current bright lights of the NYC photoblogging scene.......

Let’s start with some birth announcements. - Savoy is set to get its first offspring early next winter (think March/April). We can’t share too much on the location since the deal is still not done, but expect it to be east of the current location. Look for the menu to be in the vein of the approachable, sandwich/salad/mezze lunch program that followed the Savoy's renovation a couple of years ago. Entrée plates will be more......

THEATER: A.R. Gurney’s new meta-play, Post Mortem, takes place in a future tyrannical America where a college student discovers a lost “masterpiece” by the largely forgotten playwright A.R. Gurney. In Post Mortem's cowardly new world, many believe Dick Cheney to be responsible for Gurney’s death, and the discovery of an unpublished memoir reveals Gurney affairs with Cameron Diaz, Katherine Hepburn and Katrina Kerns. (Okay, that last one's from our own meta-memoir.) The student’s willingness to......

It’s fair to assume a certain amount of healthy caution in approaching Dave Eggers’ new oeuvre. It is, after all, coated in a thin outer layer of the meta-tastic postmodernism for which Eggers is (in?)famous. Who else would you expect to produce a novel entitled What Is the What: An Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, A Novel by Dave Eggers? So, that healthy dose of skepticism is well-founded. Eggers’ foray into the book world was......

Last week, we were walking down Lafayette Street and saw this well-timed display in a store window. The store, Moonlight Graham, has locations in LA and Chicago and sells "'modern vintage' clothing" (they have licenses from different organizations and companies, including MLB and Cadbury-Schweppes. Moonlight Graham isn't open yet - perhaps Friday - but when we peeked in, we saw lots of retro Mets gear to take advantage of Mr. Met enthusiasts. And "modern......

We'll be keeping a running list of nominees for this year's most inappropriate morning coverage of the fifth anniversary of 9/11-- around noon we'll crown a winner. 1. In a devious bit of counter-programming, Gawker kicks off their day's coverage with a club-kid party crash, featuring a girl named "Baby Sinead" getting a vodka shower and showing some boob. Nice! 2. The Post decides that today is the perfect time to advertise its new......

READINGS: Jennifer Paddock will be at the Borders to read from her sophomore novel, Point Clear, which follows a young writer, Caroline, as she leaves her MFA program and seeks out stories in the devastated wake of Hurricane Ivan. Paddock combines her story with Caroline's writing, which is an interesting technique, if not a little meta. - Krissa Corbett Cavouras 7 PM // Borders [461 Park Ave at 57th St] // Free THEATER: "Hilarious" and......

Preserving preservation history? The concept made us a little nervous, too, but, when we heard about the New York Preservation Archive Project's plan for an online database, we knew we'd have to overcome our fear of all things meta. Like a Who's Who in Preservation, the digital database, still a work in progress, draws attention to the pols, housewives, planners, architects, lawyers and others who fought to save some of the city's most unusual......

In theater, as in television, summer is an opportunity for producers and creative teams to try ideas that may be a little wackier than main-season fare – off- and off-off Broadway, that’s what all the play festivals that are currently on and coming up are about. But the theater world also has its version of summer TV’s ubiquitous reruns, only there we like to think the phenomenon of show extensions and brief revivals is weighted......

ART: On the Couch: Cartoons From the New Yorker is a collection of cartoons from the magazine which Bob Mankoff (the cartoon editor) says focuses on “the shrink and the shrunk, the practitioner and the practiced upon.” So we're sure you'll all be able to relate, somehow. 10am to 5pm // The Museum of New York [1220 5th Ave] // $9 YOGA: Just reading the words "sunset yoga" is relaxing. Tonight you can actually head......

- Mafia cops get life sentences! - DMX is arrested for speeding in White Plains - and what's more, he wasn't even wearing a seatbelt - Fed Chairman Bernanke causes another 200 dip on Wall Street - Baby Trump's daddy doesn't change his diapers; instead, The Donald is busy finding more hyperboles to describe his empire - Jossip has double vision over the tizzy New York Magazine's twins cover story causes (and we guess......

In Team's final exhibition at their Chelsea gallery space (before relocating to SoHo), Dawn Mellor's We Hope You Choke takes a small sidestep from her brashly acidic, satirical portrayals of celebrity-dom to inject vitriolic political and social anger into a messy amalgam of abstract allegory. The resulting paintings avoid easy interpretation, but ooze rebellious punktitude, landing somewhere in between a sophisticated painterly take on topical issues and an adolescent outpouring of teen angst at......

We’ll probably jinx it by saying this, but spring does finally seem to be inching into the city, and we’re eagerly speculating about how many days until the little leafbuds on the tree outside our window pop open. With arboreal imagery in our minds, and since it’s almost Passover, we’ll start off this week with Jake Ehrenreich’s one-man memoir-in-a-musical comedy, A Jew Grows in Brooklyn. Ehrenreich, who has had success on and off Broadway as......

On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author. Walking around in New York, it’s frequently possible to catch at least fleeting glimpses of a long-ago past – the carvings on the cornices of an elegant building, perhaps, or a seemingly eternal Italian restaurant, or even just the dark view up a subway tunnel, if......

There are tons of meta-property maps these days that pull results from all the local real estate companies, but Trulia has a really nice looking interface, so it's definitely worth checking out. The site also has some cool features, like an email notification for properties that meet your specifications, and a great NYC fact sheet chock full of data links. Also worth a looksie: Trulia Brooklyn! Deep-thought of the day: Trulia seems to be......

Baby, it's cold outside. Though Gothamist thinks it's always a good time to go to the movies, this time of year is particularly perfect for cozying up at the cineplex. Hot cocoa goes great with popcorn. This week there's the option of a hunky officer in training (Annapolis), a magical nanny with a freaky nose (Nanny McPhee), a Dane's further impressions of Americana (Manderlay), and a film distribution experiment at work (Bubble). We're anticipating that......

Like you, we assumed that the Lazy Sunday meme died about two weeks ago, but it turns out it was just waiting for us to look away, and then SNACK ATTACK, M0TH3RFCUCKER! It simply doesn't get any more meta-licious and web-overloaded than Andy Baio's niece and nephew performing their own version of the Lazy Sunday rap (direct link to MP3 here.) This proves there's no such thing as jumping the shark. Lazy Sunday will live......

Speaking of vomit-inducing real estate prices (aren't we always talking about those these days?), check out the StreetEasy real estate mashup-- another meta-search of the city's broker sites. Anyone have $12.945 million to lend us?......

Unbelievably, it's the last week of the year! How time flies! We'll be assembling our own Best of 2005 lists (Most Interesting News Stories, Best Shots of Pandas, Most Poorly Thought Out Gothamist Posts, etc. etc.) But until we can get the Gothamist supercomputer to spit those out, here are some lists from our friends (and one enemy!) in and around the city: Morning News Top 10 Albums Best of MUG 2005 Best Books by......

Our pals over at Curbed have been pretty good at rounding up all the Real Estate mashups-- yesterday that pointed out the Real Estate Advisor Map and Natefind. And then there is the granddaddy of this type of map: HousingMaps (select NYC in the dropdown), with results from Craigslist. There's also Oodle Housing-- which gloms from a bunch of services. Maybe someone should do a meta-meta-mashup of all of these maps! That would be......

Here we go: it's a huge weekend for year-end Oscar-bait and questions abound. Will audiences flock to see the "forbidden" love of Brokeback Mountain? (And was anybody else as disturbed at Focus Features' obvious attempts to downplay the male love story as much as possible and feature the relationships with the respective wives in every trailer?) Will fans who made worshipped the bestselling novel approve of Chicago director Rob Marshall's retelling of Memoirs of a......

Walking down in SoHo this morning we spotted this fresh Momo piece on the corner of Wooster and Grand. The piece is amazing-- check out the details-- like the paper flapping in the wind. Best of all, it's totally meta, since it depicts Momo putting up posters on the corner of Wooster and Grand. That reminds us of the time we got a tattoo of a butt on our butt, with a butt on......

If all has gone as planned, the Alamo cube should have returned to Astor Place at precisely 8am today. Has anyone been by to see it in person? Update: mystery! Word is that the cube has not yet arrived! Where could it be? Developing... Update: Matt Levy, who was planning on throwing an absurdly meta-party at the cube at 4pm (with people dressing up as Mexicans, Cowboys, and Cubist painters... you know, b/c it's......