Results tagged “northamerica”

The League of American Bicyclists has awarded New York City a bronze medal for bicycle friendliness. League representatives met with Mayor Bloomberg and DOT commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who sometimes cycles to work, at City Hall yesterday to present the award. Though bronze is the lowest rung on the friendliness ladder, New York City is the only community in the region to be designated a Bike Friendly Community (BFC).

Looks like everything's bigger in the city, including your risk of getting breast cancer. After analyzing about 1,000 mammograms, researchers found that women who lived in the city of London had denser breasts than their suburban or rural compatriots. Their findings were presented at the Radiologic Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting in Chicago this week.

EVENT: White Castle is sponsoring an "over the top" (heh) event today at Port Authority...it's the 30th Annual White Castle Empire State Golden Arm Tournament of Champions. Over 100 ladies and gents will face off to become the arm wrestling champ! The event starts at 12:30 and the finals begin at 3:30pm. More info here. 12:30 and 3:30pm // Port Authority Bus Terminal [North Wing/Main Concourse at 625 8th Ave] // Free MUSIC: The Scotland...

The Giants are fortunate that Sunday’s game will be played in London. Fortunate because the venue should help them avoid taking the week off against a team that has nothing going for it. The Dolphins are winless and last week lost their best offensive player, Ronnie Brown, for the season. Brown’s injury came two weeks after the Dolphins lost their starting quarterback for the year and to make matters worse, one of their top defensive players, Zach Thomas, was hurt in a car crash and will miss this week’s game.

Our friends from the Great White North are feeling flush from the strengthening of the Canadian dollar versus its US counterpart, and New York is apparently ready to relieve them of their excess cash. The Loonie, or Canadian dollar, is even with the US dollar for the first time since 1976. If you've ever wondered why the backs of paperback books usually have a second, more expensive, price printed on them them for Canadians, it's not because we don't want our northern neighbors to read inexpensively. It's because the Canadian dollar has traditionally been weaker than the US dollar and the exchange rate necessitated dual pricing in North America.

This week NY Mag has a scathing analysis of Thomas Krens' tenure at the Guggenheim, calling the air around the museum during his 17-year reign "distorted and toxic." Writer Jerry Saltz says the museum is beginning to recover only now, two years after Lisa Dennison, who is now leaving to become executive vice president for Sotheby's North America, replaced him when he left to run the Guggenheim Foundation.

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to.

Frank Bruni, in the Diner's Journal, waxes poetic about the oysters at Wild Salmon and Aquagrill, and discusses the reasons why he often disobeys the "rule" that one is not supposed to eat oysters in months that don’t have an ‘r’ in them. We're with Frank on this one. We love oysters in the summer. The platter above was from a recent oyster happy our at P.J. Clarke's downtown. They were cheap, but didn't hold a candle to ones we've had at Aquagrill, Blue Ribbon or Pearl Oyster Bar.

"I've seen bizarre sex acts followed by gentle poetry followed by very perplexed wannabe stand-up comics." Francis "Faceboy" Hall has been hosting Faceboyz Open Mike for just over 13 years, with its 666th weekly performance coming up on July 15th. His stage has been graced by countless comedians, musicians, performing artists, and everyone in between, making it an institution of what it means to aspire to entertain in New York City.

If you've never played petanque, head on down to Smith Street for North America's largest petanque tournament -- the two block stretch betweeen Bergen and Pacific will be shut down and covered with sand just for the occasion. While your'e watching the action, enjoy special cocktails from Ricard and other drink specials ($5-6), nibble on grilled merguez and chicken sandwiches ($5) and groove to Jazz band Blue Orchid will provide the entertainment throughout the day. 11:30am - 8pm, free admission, sponsored by Bar Tabac, Robin des Bois, Ricard and the South Brooklyn Local Development Corporation. 128 Smith Street at Dean Street, 718-923-0918.

If you went by Trinity Church this past weekend you probably would have never guessed that there were bells ringing and that the tower was hosting a North American Guild of Change Ringers event with bell ringers from throughout North America and the United Kingdom. Thanks to special sound controls, the work of the ten to twelve bell ringers was muffled to those who weren’t actually in the bell tower.

Languishing in cardboard boxes near the mushroom sections in local Fairway stores these next few weeks are Sea Beans, mysterious short stalks of a dark green vegetable, looking like something you might find washed up on the beach, but maybe a bit more edible. According to Elizabeth Schneider’s Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini, Sea Beans (aka Salicornia) grow wild in warmer months all over- in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. “Salicornia is not seaweed, as it is often described,” she writes, “nor is it a cactus, which it slightly resembles.” Eaten raw or cooked, its flavor can best be described as sea salty intense, with a sort of grassy asparagus aftertaste. When fresh, Sea Beans are crunchy like snap peas. At the tail end of their one-week refrigerator shelf life, older sea beans can be revived with a five-minute soak in ice water. In addition to their current availability at Fairway (a pricey $8.99 per ½ pound), farm-raised boxes of the vegetable show up every June at NY greenmarkets, often leaving perplexed customers headed for more conventional items like pretty garlic scapes, or local strawberries.

This morning, starting at 6:00 a.m. WABC radio (770 AM) is tossing out its right-leaning talk format for WABC Rewound - twelve hours in favor of how it sounded in its music radio top 40 glory days of the 1960s and 1970s for the eighth straight year. We always loved the retro sound, even though we weren’t around to hear it when it was new, so we definitely will enjoy hearing how radio sounded back when mono AM radio was king – complete with jingles, news, and commercials.

It is a day for rodents, that's for sure. To the excitement of Big Apple animal lovers, the NY Times reported the first beaver in 200 years has been spotted in the city. A 2- or 3-year-old beaver has been seen in the Bronx River, doing one of two very New York things: Looking for a mate or trying to make his home better (the Times says he was spotted "looking for more material to insulate its home").

If you ever thought that military spending was ill-advised, think again. NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command is tracking Santa with the NORAD Tracks Santa 2006 website. There's a live map of Santa's whereabouts, as well as videos at some places he stops. And how do they do this?

Detecting Santa all starts with the NORAD radar system called the North Warning System. This powerful radar system has 47 installations strung across the northern border of North America. NORAD makes a point of checking the radar closely for indications of Santa Claus leaving the North Pole on Christmas Eve.

Continue reading "Map of the Day: Norad Santa Tracking"

Jagshemash!

- And NJ reaches a budget deal, but it means a 1% sales tax hike

Gothamist has never had a taste for foie gras (although, some of us do) as we can't get past the fact that we're eating liver, but animal rights activists are trying to get the delicacy banned entirely. In an appeal to the state legislature, groups including the Humane Society asked the state's Department of Agriculture and Markets to label foie gras as an "adulterated" food, which is defined as food that is "diseased, contaminated, filthy, putrid or decomposed." This would give the agriculture commissioner the option of banning foie gras. The Times gets what could be the best quote regarding this issue from Eric Ripert, the executive chef and co-owner of Le Bernardin who sighs and then says:

We can criticize how foie gras is produced and be concerned about the health of the duck and blah, blah, blah, O.K., fine.

Londonist prepares a Happy Birthday bath for Buddah this week and then things get all cliched. A madman goes on a rampage while axe-wiedling and London's mayor warns an American diplomat to avoid the kitchen if the heat bothers him so much.

Did you know that New York has one of the top floorball teams in the world? Okay, maybe not-- let's start with an easier question: did you know that floorball exists? It does-- as this very informative website for NYC Floorball explains:

What's left of Hurricane Katrina is expected to move up the Ohio and St. Lawrence Valleys, well west of New York. That doesn't mean we'll be spared the last gasps of her fury. Today's humidity has been pulled up from the tropics by the hurricane. Showers and thunderstorms are likely. Isolated today, more widespread tomorrow into tomorrow night.

Zocalo is featuring one of our summer favorites with corn specials throughout the menu for one week: Mexican Popcorn at the bar, corn-on-the-cob with chipotle mayo, lime and queso fresco, quesadilla de huitlacoche, and a blue corn cake with roasted pork, tomatillo salsa and fava beans, among others. Zocalo, 174 E. 82nd St., 212-717-7772.

There's a really strange case about two 16 year-old girls being held because the federal authorities are suspicious that they might be suicide bombers. First reported in the NY Times yesterday, there are very few details, just that the two girls, one Bangladeshi, the other Guineanese, were arrested last month and have been held at a Pennsylvania detention center, and that they girls were Muslim and sympathetic to Islamic culture and causes. The Daily News reports that one FBI official says, "We've got a lot of dots that people shouldn't be connecting," but other officials say that when the Bangladeshi girl's parents filed a complaint against her (they were worried she was running away to get married), the girls were already under investigation.

KP's post reminded me that there is another related, but lesser-known, ocean phenomenon known as La Ni�a:

These space-savers are grown in Japan, and were even featured in an episode of The Simpsons. The BBC describes how they are made:

To make it happen, farmers grew the melons in glass boxes and the fruit then naturally assumed the same shape. Today the cuboid watermelons are hand-picked and shipped all over Japan.

Look! Up in the sky! It's Superman, no wait, it's Spiderman, no wait, it's Underdog, no wait, it's a whole lot of dust and aerosols! Led by scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, research has shown that the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface decreased by 1.3% from 1960-1990. The cause of this dimming is the ever increasing amount of made-made aerosol particles in the atmosphere. The aerosols reflect and absorb incoming solar radiation. They also alter the optical properties of clouds, making them more reflective. The cooling effect of the aerosols is counteracting the warming effect of increased greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. In other words, were it not for the aerosols the climate would be warming faster than it currently is.

Julie Atlas Muz, Burlesque Star/Mermaid

Sensing a pattern? Scattered thunderstorms today and tonight. High of 78.

Watch some Triumph clips for yourself.

The MTA has announced plans for 100th anniversary of the NY subway system, and as the Post reports, things get started with some commemorative Metrocards in January. But it's not just marketing tie-ins, there will be exhibits and classic trains on display at the MTA Transit Museum.