London-based solo musician Yoav is a singer/songwriter who works hard to go beyond the usual “man with a guitar” conventions. By looping beats created with his voice and acoustic guitar, his songs are often inflected with an unusual drum 'n' bass flavor. His debut album Charmed & Strange crystallizes this aesthetic with an effect he describes as “DJ-ing with my guitar.” Yoav plays Mercury Lounge Saturday night at 7:30; tickets cost $10. You recently toured......

In exchange for guilty pleas on a number of charges including assault of a fan, assault of his chauffer, driving with a suspended license and DUI, rap star Busta Rhymes avoided jail time and was sentenced yesterday to 10 days of community service. Sadly, we’ll be denied the publicity circus that swirled around Boy George and Naomi Campbell during their very public community services; Rhymes will have the privilege of choosing his own method......

For the second year running, the Food Bank for New York City and the Lunchbox Fund of South Africa have enlisted over 100 celebrities in their holiday fundraiser. Boldface names like Kanye West, Elton John, Cameron Diaz, Mike Meyers, William Wegman and, um, Urban Outfitters, have created personalized, autographed lunchboxes that are now onsale via online auction. At Thursday night's kick-off event at Saatchi & Saatchi, a lunchbox by Michael Stipe was snatched up......

Photograph the 2006 New York City Marathon finish line by CraigsPage on flickr Marathon fans, your time is here because this weekend, there are two 26.2 mile races in the city. In addition to the New York City Marathon on Sunday, Saturday is the USA Olympic Trials for the 2008 Olympic Men's Marathon. Saturday's Olympic Trials will feature the country's best long distance runners as they contend for the first spots on the 2008......

A look at some of this week's noteworthy television: The Next Iron Chef (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., Food Network) Alton brown hosts this new reality series which searches for the chef for the next season of Iron Chef America. Life Is Wild (Sunday, 8:00 p.m., WPIX 11) A widowed doctor moves his family to South Africa and family friendly programming ensues. Mystery!: Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Series 6: Chinese Walls (Sunday, 9:00 p.m., WNET 13; Tuesday, 9:00......

The Daily News and NY Times both look at the life of Carol Anne Gotbaum, the New Yorker who died while in police custody at Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport over a week ago. She is portrayed as a vibrant woman and loving mother to three children who had become depressed in recent years. On Friday, September 28, Gotbaum missed a connection to Tucson (where she would check into alcohol rehabilitation) and become very upset......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting at Quincy St. and Classon Ave. in Brooklyn, a homicide on 76th St. in Queens, and a missing child on East 174th St. in the Bronx. Martin Scorsese sold his four-story, five-bedroom townhouse on Manhattan's Upper East Side for $6.15 million, after cutting $500K off the price. Someone at Fox News is allegedly fooling around with Wikipedia entries to make itself look better and competitors worse. The......

The police have charged Michael Cordero in the murder of his girlfriend, Boitumelo McCallum. Police sources tell the Daily News and Post that Cordero admitted to confronting McCallum on Friday. From the Post:Cordero told cops he visited McCallum, 20, a day after she threw a party there without inviting him, authorities said. After his arrival, the two lay on her bed and watched a movie he had brought - but Cordero was in a foul......

Last night, the police found the boyfriend of the 20-year-old woman whose dead body was discovered wrapped in bedding in a Greenwich Village apartment. Police say Michael Cordero, 23, tried to slit his wrists on the roof of a building at West 62nd and Amsterdam; the Daily News reports that a family member tried to stop him, but Cordero "fled down the block, trailing blood, to a Western Beef supermarket on West End Ave." where......

MOVIE: The new Hairspray has set up special Sing-A-Long screenings! They begin nationwide today, and there will be three right here in New York. If you don't like rowdy theaters, skip this one! All Weekend // Various Times // Regal Union Sq 14; Clearview Chelsea 9; AMC Empire 42nd 25 MUSIC: Head down to the Seaport for an evening of Billie Holiday tunes. Turntables on the Hudson will be celebrating the release of Billie Holiday......

In 1979, Curtis Sliwa founded The Guardian Angels with the goal of making the streets and subways of New York safe. Now, 28 years later The Guardian Angels have 86 chapters worldwide in 9 different countries, are providing schools with anti-bully, anti-violence, anti-gang, and anti-drug programs, and educating people about the Internet. Gothamist sat down with Curtis to learn more about what the Guardian Angels have been up to... How involved are you in the......

Now that Tiki Barber is working for the Today show, it looks like the producers are all up in his business. Well, at least when Tiki's bags get lost. On his way to South Africa for the show's "Where in the World" gimmick, Barber missed a connecting flight and his bags got lost in the shuffle. And since the former NY Giant was traveling with just "essential toiletries," Sean Reis, producer for Today, purchased almost......

A public school is facing a mini-crisis because students and a teacher went to Cuba for spring break. The Beacon School on West 61st Street has had a tradition of "extravagant overseas trips with complementary semester-long classes," involving places like France, South Africa, and Venezula, but a trip headed by history teacher Nathan Turner may have violated travel restrictions - the group of kids was detained by customs officials on the return! The Post reports......

EVENT: As the Sopranos prepares to reach its end, creator David Chase will discussing "the fine art of whacking". Joining him will be many of the characters who have been whacked on the show, including: Steve Buscemi, “Tony Blundetto”, Drea de Matteo, “Adriana La Cerva”, Vincent Pastore, “Salvatore ‘Big Pussy’ Bonpensiero” and many more. 6pm // Museum of TV and Radio [25 West 52 St] // $15 COMEDY: Aziz Ansari will be at Union......

Leaving our local Key Food this morning, for the first time we heard the spare change guy's rendition of "Bad to the Bone" and then we turned to one of our weekend rituals: Reading the The Brooklyn Paper. Why do we love the Brooklyn Paper? Because it covers stories here way before the dailies get to them, if ever. Because of the NY Post-style headlines ("Fowl play: Fairway ducks foie gras flap" comes from today's......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: "injured police dog" (oh no!) on Bedford in Williamsburg, a double stabbing at Landmark High School on 58th Street, and a 2nd alarm fire in Fort Greene. A bill in the New Jersey legislature would set up a $1m voting lottery: "any registered voter who cast a ballot that year in a primary or general election eligible for the $1 million prize." Sadly, the bill doesn't look like it's......

Tomorrow is the annual Corduroy Appreciation Club meeting on the auspicious day, November 11, also known as the day that most resembles corduroy (11/11). We spoke to founder and president Miles Rohan about corduroyizing New Yorkers and the world at large. First things first, how can corduroy unite us? People, I think, are actually seeking unification in one form or another. You can look to the success of sites like Friendster and MySpace as evidence.......

With Halloween coming next week and the fall chill in the air, this is the perfect weekend to curl up with a good scary movie. The Shining or The Nightmare on Elm Street make for good rentals but if you must see a new release, the third installment in the psycho serial trickster movies, Saw III is out. This time ailing Jigsaw kidnaps a doctor and forces her to tend to him while also trying......

Andrew Friedman is co-director of Make the Road by Walking, a Brooklyn-based community-based organization founded in 1997 on the belief that the center of leadership must be within the community. Since then, the organization has grown dramatically and now includes over 600 members, a member-elected board composed of low-income community residents, and a staff of twelve. Over the past 5 years, MRBW has achieved many improvements to the lives of Bushwick residents. They pushed New......

There are few birthdays we look towards with dread (ok, maybe our 30th). But as AIDS hits its 25th year since being discovered in the 1980s, detection, treatment, and understanding of the disease has come a long way yet has miles to go. There were 25 million new infections in the past 5 years with 15 million deaths over the same period. Currently 38.6 million people worldwide are infected (which is up from 37.3......

Two huge, gigantic developments in the Naomi Campbell maid-assault case. First, the Daily News has a much more detailed account of the incident, and reveals that the weapon was not in fact a cellphone: Smiling for the cameras, Naomi Campbell glided along a sidewalk shortly after allegedly bashing a crystal-encrusted BlackBerry against the head of her housekeeper. "You f------ b----!" the cantankerous catwalker shrieked yesterday inside her Park Ave. penthouse apartment, accusing her maid,......

When Japan advanced to play Cuba in the finals of the World Baseball Classic, the matchup was not what Major League Baseball commissioner had envisioned or set up the tournament to produce. On Monday, Japan won the game 10-6 and the first championship of the World Baseball Classic. As they celebrated, Gothamist was left to wonder whether the tournament can become a fixture in the United States. Several problems exist. Although fans of other nations......

It’s a good thing they put the mercy rule into the WBC because if they hadn’t, the U.S. would probably still be hitting. Fired up from their defeat at the hands of Canada, the U.S. squad demolished South Africa 17-0 in a game that was shortened to five innings. Ken Griffey exploded for two homers and seven RBI’s while Roger Clemens gave up 1 hit while striking out six over 4 1/3 innings. The win......

Dude-- we were in LA for five days and when we returned everything was different! The temperature dropped like 50 degrees, and according to this poster we saw outside the Prince Street N/R station, the Catholic church is now cool with BOTH gay sex and condoms. Way to go guys-- keep reaching for that rainbow! UPDATE: apparently the campaign isn't being sponsored by the Catholic Church! How could we be so stupid? It's being......

February 22: From Disaster to Dessert – the Fate of New Orleans Food Slow Food NYC and the Project for Public Spaces will host a panel discussion on the impact of hurricanes Katrina and Rita on food production in New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf region. Panelists include: Clara Gerica, an independent Gulf Coast shrimper; Richard McCarthy, founder of the New Orleans Crescent City Farmers Market; Poppy Tooker, the leader of Slow Food New Orleans;......

Yesterday, Dimitri Sheinman, a former Inwood resident, was convicted of assaulting a man - and his dog - while in Inwood Hill Park. Usually a story like this wouldn't be newsworthy, but Sheinman has actually been the "number 1" suspect in the May 2004 murder of Juilliard student Sarah Fox since December 2004. Fox's body was found in the Inwood Hill Park after she had been jogging, and her death sparked an massive police search......

Seventh! Not even the top five! The Anholt-GMI City Brands Index was released yesterday, and NYC ranks seventh out of thirty cities surveyed. Clearly, something must be amiss. We're trying to get our hands on the actual survey, but let's talk about what we do know. The components of the survey included: Presence (contribution to culture/science), Place (physical aspects), Potential (job/education opportunities), Pulse (urban lifestyle), People (welcome/diversity), and Prerequisites (basic qualities). Well, there you go:......

Variety (subscription required, sadly) reports that the new Chapelle's Show segments that were meant to be for season three (you know, the season that was supposed to air earlier this year, only to crumble amidst production delays, rumors of a mental hospital stay, and Chappelle in South Africa) will be shown online first (on the Motherload) and then on cable in 2006. And Comedy Central is calling it season three. At a taping of Last......

- Paris Commune, the West Village eatery that moved into new space at 99 Bank Street last year, is celebrating its anniversary by opening the Rouge Wine Bar. Quaff wines from France, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, and Chile while you wait for a table upstairs, or finish off your night by sipping on a glass of cognac while you gaze at the original fresco covering two walls. Look closely and you might see Marc......

Pinot Noir has captured the hearts and tastebuds of all of us. The soft velvet texture, the bright raspberry fruit, a touch of earthy notes – it’s pretty much perfection. Some may ask, how could you ever improve on Pinot? Perhaps the answer is you can’t, but South Africa has found a way to kick it up a notch. (We promise, no more Emeril references). Pinotage is a grape that is made by crossing the......