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). While the total number of cycling fatalities......

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. Mammographers lump patients into four broad categories depending on how dense their breasts are: extremely dense, heterogeneously dense,......

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......

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,......

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. Krens gets blasted for bungling what......

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. After cooling down from a hot weekend of many badass Sunset Junction Street Fair photo dispatches, LAist asked......

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......

"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. How did the open......

July 15: Bastille Day at Bar Tabac 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......

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,......

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......

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......

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......

Jagshemash! Borat is a hit. It's getting rave reviews, grossing millions, and definitely the most quotable thing we've seen in ages. But Borat seems to have missed most of the -ist cities, and we were all wondering how the film would have been different if he'd made his way around the world on the -ist tour. In Shanghai, Borat would be observing Inane Learnings of Penis Photos for Make Benefit Glorious Flat World of......

- 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......

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,......

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. LAist has finally come around to purchasing tickets for Clipper Train. Hyper local dating sites are spamming L.A. neighborhoods and the fascinating Dame Darcy talks with LAist about art, the city and earthquakes.......

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: Floorball is one of the fastest growing sports in North America. It started as a recreational alternative to ice hockey and floor hockey in Sweden during the 1970s. It is played with......

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. The moisture will be swept out of here by a cold front tomorrow night. The end of......

August 19 - 26: A Celebration of Corn 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. August 22 - 26: Partage Tasting Menus -- Provence & the Cote d'Azur......

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......

KP's post reminded me that there is another related, but lesser-known, ocean phenomenon known as La Niña: La Niña is characterized by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific, compared to El Niño, which is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific. From my amateur point of view, it sounds like the Pacific Ocean temperature is constantly either in, or moving toward, a warm-water high (El Niño) or a cold-water low......

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.You can buy yours in at Urban Fare in Vancouver, which touts itself as the only place in North America which sells......

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......

Julie Atlas Muz, Burlesque Star/Mermaid...

Sensing a pattern? Scattered thunderstorms today and tonight. High of 78. One of the sites we link to in our middle column is the Old Farmer's Almanac. They have an interesting and informative weather area that includes an historical weather look-up for any day going back to 1973 (and most of North America). For example, last year in the city our weather was pretty much the same, if a bit colder. The day Gothamist was......

Oh, those sensitive Canucks. Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Conan O'Brien are public enemies number one after Triumph did what he does best: Insult the hell out of people. Conan's trip to Toronto ruffled Canadian politico's feathers, as evinced by this Times' article, An Insolent Puppet Roils Canadian Politics: On a taped segment on Thursday night's "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" on NBC, the puppet Triumph the Insult Comic Dog visited the Winter Carnival......

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. The official centennial will be October 27, 2004, with a re-enactment of the first subway ride from City Hall to Broadway and 145th Street station; former MTA Chairman......