One Ring Zero is an unusual Brooklyn band headed up by Michael Hearst and Joshua Camp, with a troupe of musicians and lyricists filling out their ever-morphing sonic tribe. Their lyrics have been written by some familiar names: Jonathan Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Paul Auster and Dave Eggers are amongst them. This year they enter their 10th year of making music, and this Friday they'll be at Joe's Pub celebrating on stage. Join in on the......

Part of the NBC 2.0 philosophy has been to put cheap programming on air as a measure to cut corners and save money. Even before the writers' strike this has meant a string of programs that are “unscripted,” such as cheesy game shows and of course the requisite fakeality nonsense. So taking quarterlife, a Web 2.0 based online show/online community from the creators of thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, and Once and Again, and sticking it......

The New Decade: Hong Kong Film BAM Cinématek A pervasive theme in the films coming out of the prolific national cinema of Hong Kong has been their transfer over to China in 1997. The Brooklyn Academy of Music is putting a spotlight on this preoccupation in their current series The New Decade: Hong Kong Film. Running through the end of next weekend, the series offers a number of intriguing prospects made in the last 10......

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.......

A look at some noteworthy programs this week: Mystery: Foyle’s War: Invasion (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., WNET 13, Tuesday, 9:00 p.m., WLIW 21) The fourth series of this great British World War II period mystery drama makes its way to this side of the pond. The first of four episodes has Detective Foyle and his team investigation a murder on an American base. The 4400 (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., USA) This sci-fi series about people who were......

Bright Eyes Shows Off His Friends Okay Conor, we get it: you have cool friends. This week, during the Bright Eyes 7-night run at Town Hall, the band promised a special guest each night. So far he's brought out the likes of Lou Reed, Steve Earle, Jenny Lewis, Norah Jones and Ben Kweller. Each played a few songs of their own mid set before joining in jamming with the rest of the group. On the......

As the Virginia Tech story broke last Monday, cable news, as always, took the lead with their normal oversaturated speculative coverage transferring the energy and resources normally reserved for non-story stories like the Anna Nicole Smith saga into covering a real story. Some observers complained that the broadcast networks didn’t go with wall to wall coverage of the story. It is good that they did not last Monday afternoon, since all it does is......

For anyone turned on by lists, then have we got a list for you! The Economist's Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has published the EIU Worldwide Cost of Living for 2007. What's the WCOL, you say?The Worldwide Cost of Living survey enables human resources line managers and expatriate executives to compare the cost of living in over 130 cities in nearly 90 countries and calculate fair compensation policies for relocating employees. The survey gathers detailed......

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......

September 3: Outstanding in the Field Join guest chef Gabrielle Hamilton of Prune for a five-course al fresco dinner featuring produce harvested from the surrounding fields and from farms in all five boroughs and paired with wines from Long Island's Lenz Winery. A portion of the proceeds will benefit Just Food, helping support family farmers and providing city folks in low-income neighborhoods with access to high-quality, locally grown and affordable food. The New York dinner,......

Last week the Times anointed their official summer cocktail of 2006. It’s called The Cuke and consists of limes, mint, and cucumbers muddled with sugar, steeped in gin, and strained over ice with a splash of seltzer. It sounds stunning and we have every intention of mixing up a batch for our next get-together. But what if you’re less the garden party thrower and more just a garden variety boozer? What about those nights when......

Sampaist is on the scene in São Paulo beginning this week to become the only ist south of the Equator. Editor Leandro M. Pinto leads the paulistanos down there. You can protest someone at his office, sure, but when the whistle blows at the end of the day can you follow him home? D.C. has sports fans, apparently, and elephants aren't really cut out for zoos. There's this trick where you can read information from......

Happy Seward's Day! According to Gothamist's Alaska weather calendar the purchase of Alaska in 1867 by Secretary of State William H. Seward is celebrated on the last day of March. Coincidentally, today is also the anniversary of the 1964 Good Friday earthquake, the most powerful modern North American earthquake. The earthquake and resulting tsunami destroyed much of Seward, Alaska and many other coastal Alaskan towns. What's that got to do with New York? Seward was......

As we all know by now, Staten Island Chuck, Gothamist's favorite rodent (he's bigger and cuter than a rat!), did not see his shadow yesterday morning, meaning an early spring. While Chuck was not seeing his shadow, Gothamist was photographing these snowdrops emerging from the ground in Morningside Park. By our recollection they were coming out a couple of weeks earlier than last year, which one might assume is another sign of an early spring.......

A few times a week, Gothamist publishes music reviews by our contributor Jeff Baum. The opinions below belong entirely to the author. I had read about The Earlies a few months back, when Arctic Monkeys fever was sweeping through downtown Manhattan. Some had claimed that these guys would be the next "band of the month" that everyone would go balls out crazy for once the hype had moved on. They certainly have the set up......

Antony and the Johnsons will play their first NYC show since winning the UK's Mercury Music Prize last month. The past year has seen Antony rise from a relatively unknown eccentric NYC club performer to an international superstar. His headlining show at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, and his upcoming appearance on Letterman, are two signs of his well deserved success. Those attending the Carnegie show will also be treated to a rare opening set......

It's not like it matters at this point, but if you care, the National Hockey League cancelled their 2004-05 season yesterday after five months of locking out their players. Gothamist can only think of a few losers, none of which are a team owner or a member of the player's union. Fans, employees for the teams, vendors, small businesses, those are the people that lose from this. To us, things like a disagreement over $6.5......

Gothamist crossed the pond last week with the beta launch of Londonist, and this week, we go north to a country that's been looking better and better to some of our readers: Welcome, Torontoist. Edited by Joshua Errett and Sarah Lazarovic, Torontoist is our first endeavor to truly make Gothamist a North American operation. Recent posts have included how Jersey boy Kevin Smith is filming in town and how Canada's Health Minister doesn't want Internet......

New York's Sea Ray have been around since the late nineties, becoming increasingly popular in recent years, finding success by complimenting layers of lush guitar with rich cello. This chamber-pop sextet have shared the stage with a wide range of great bands, including a North American tour with indie godfathers, The Church. Sea Ray are Anne Brewster (cello), Colin Brooks (drums), I-Huei Go (bass), Jeff Sheinkopf (keyboards), Jordan Warner (vocals, guitar) and Greg Zinman......

Same old same old (not that I'm complaining). Partly cloudy, high of 78. This time of year is peak butterfly-counting season. The North American Butterfly Association sponsors a yearly butterfly census, where butterfly enthusiasts are encouraged to pick a circle with a 15-mile diameter and record all butterflies found within. The catch is, butterflies are very picky about being seen. As a South Carolina census-taking group learned this weekend, if weather conditions aren't just right,......

Gothamist would like to thank the New York Times for giving us a mini anxiety attack with an New York Region > New York Utilities Recall '03 Blackout With Fingers Crossed" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/31/nyregion/31power.html">article about last year's blackout that begins, "As the New York region looks toward summer and the first anniversary of the biggest blackout in North American history, two things are clear. There is enough electricity to survive the heat. And yet, the lights......

The curious Gothamist reader may have noticed a seeming contradiction in the recent entry about the forthcoming movie "The Day After Tomorrow". No, not allegations that NASA may have wanted to silence its scientists, but that one consequence of global warming will be a sudden deep freeze. The earth gets cold when it warms? WTF? There is a bit of truth to that contradiction, though not so fast as in the movie. The reason......

Europe decides to take a cue from the United States by Italy having a massive even-bigger-than-our-August-14-blackout power outage that affected about 57 million this past weekend. In another delicious parallel, the AP reports, "As in the North American blackout, the early hours of Italy's power outage were filled with confusion as to the cause and finger-pointing among neighboring countries. Italy blamed France; France denied responsibility. Eventually, it emerged that a chain reaction that started......