A Brooklyn woman who had traveled down to her home country of Guyana to spread the ashes of her late brother ended up in the throes of an incredible near-death experience along the Corentyne River. For 36-hours, Sherry Haynes clenched onto a 5-gallon bucket after the capsizing of a water taxi that would take the lives of a friend, her sister and in all likelihood her nephew. Besides the bucket, the Crown Heights woman says......

A recent op-ed in the New York Times explained the limits of "food miles," the concept that one's dinner plate should be measured via the amount of carbon dioxide emissions (and other pollution) produced by the modes of transportation required to literally bring home the bacon. A study done at Lincoln University in New Zealand indicates that other variables complicate the equations of food production and transport, and that emissions calculations aren't necessarily so straightforward.......

Like the rest of the city yesterday, Brooklyn was recovering from an angry summer squall that shut down the subways and even had its own tornado. While all this was going on Gothamist learned from Porkchop Express that the fate of a Brooklyn institution hung in the balance. Namely, the pan-Latin paradise known as the Red Hook Ballfields. Yesterday Cesar Fuentes, the Executive Director of the Food Vendors Committee of Red Hook Park, met with......

Emergency newswires are reporting that Port Authority cops requested that the Emergency Services Unit hustle over to Laguardia's main terminal this afternoon - and with a cage - because there was a monkey on the loose inside the airport. The animal apparently arrived at Gate B6 on Spirit Airlines' Flight 180. We have so many questions about this incident. Was the monkey traveling as a passenger? Was it a helper monkey like Homer Simpson's Mojo?......

A ship built of reeds and using stone age technology is being equipped at Liberty Harbor, NJ in preparation for a transatlantic journey to Spain that will begin in a few days. In the tradition of Thor Heyerdahl, who completed a similar task by sailing a balsa wood raft from South America to Polynesia in 1947, a German botanist named Dominic Gorlitz is attempting to prove that trans-oceanic travel was possible 14,000 years ago. From......

Fake gold, dinosaur bones, and pictures of Attila the Hun are no longer the only objects you can take home from the American Museum of Natural History. Now, scholars can be awarded a Ph.D. in comparative biology from the Museum’s newly created Richard Gilder Graduate School, America's first doctoral program at a museum. The first class of students will enroll in the fall 2008. John Flynn, the lead curator at the AMNH who recently......

In less than shocking news, New York City had the worst airport delays in the whole country. Not only are Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports very crowded, bad weather was also a factor making 2006 a record year for airport delays. At LaGuardia, planes were delayed at least 15 minutes 31.6% of the time (between January and November 2006); JFK flights were delayed 27.7% of the time; and Newark had 33.5% delays - making it......

Before the house lights dim, ¡El Conquistador! begins with a breezy prologue by the play’s sole live performer, Thaddeus Phillips, who introduces the audience to the quirky world they are about to visit. His story is set in an upscale condo in Bogota, where apartment dwellers are never issued keys to their buildings. Phillips tells us that for security reasons, metropolitan Columbians are usually at the mercy of their doormen who, in ¡El Conquistador! at......

Maria Bamford is in town to tape her second Comedy Central Presents special. She discusses her years doing mall openings as a Star Trek character, her forthcoming CD and DVD, and putting on comedy shows in her house. What sort of place is Duluth, Minnesota? It's like Canada, but without the metric system. What sort of role did comedy play in your life growing up? My dad, sister, and I used to listen to Steve......

Last summer, audiences fell hard for Owen Wilson's aging frat boy with a heart of gold routine in The Wedding Crashers. This weekend, he brings his lunkhead prat falls to the comedy You, Me and Dupree with co-stars Matt Dillon, Kate Hudson and Michael Douglas. From the previews it looks like most of the humor is scatological in nature but do you really need anything more complex in an A/C-tastic cineplex? Another movie up that......

Just as the weather gets hotter here, the Gothamist family of city blogs welcomes one from one of the hottest places on earth: Sampaist, the Sao Paolo blog. We welcome our staff of paulistanos, led by editor Leandro M. Pinto. While we need to brush up on our Portuguese, we have learned that it's the start of winter down there (!!), subway service is being changed because of the World Cup schedule, and there's even......

- Holy smack-- people in Paris really love to get their riot on! - Apparently molester signs are the new black-- especially in Park Slope - Silverstein might be getting a big buyout to turn Freedom Tower over to the Port Authority. - Today's entry in the New York culture on the Skids contest: theater douchebaggery - The main "number one suspect" in the Sarah Fox murder was sentenced to jail for an unrelated......

Today is Historical Map day at Gothamist-- starting with this great map of the Manhattan Coastline from PBS' Center of the World show. Check out how skinny Manhattan was back in the 1650s! Doesn't it look exactly like South America? We haven't been able to track down any New Amsterdam Google Map Mashups, so we've had to hit the archives: check out the maps at Fordham's library, this cute tour of New Netherland, and......

Guerrilla Girls On Tour...

First it was Australia, then it was New Zealand . . . now the next New World wine region to capture the hearts and taste buds of New Yorkers is South America. What makes this region so spectacular for easy to drink, plush, fruity wines is the perfect climate. Grapes get to bask in the warm Latin sun – enjoying a particularly long ripening season. Kind of like the holiday we wish we could take.......

There’s been much debate about Old World vs. New World wines - which wines are better, the role of tradition, the opportunity for scientific advancements – Gothamist could go on forever, but we will not. To us it’s not a choice and either style can be fabulous based on what we are looking for at any moment in time. What interests us is the back story, the untold story of how the two worlds came......

For New York to realize its Olympic dreams in 2012, NYC2012 is looking to divide European votes and curry favor with the governing bodies for different sports. Despite coming in fourth in an analysis by of the five competing cities competing for the 2012 Games, insiders say New York may only trail Paris now. According to Mayor Bloomberg, the plan for NYC2012 depends on the construction of a stadium for the Jets and construction on......

A "radical environmentalist" kidnapped his baby from the maternal grandmother in Brooklyn after feeling the grandmother wasn't feeding the baby on a vegan diet. Raphael Spindell and Alexandra Watterson lost custody of 14 month Andre to Watterson's mother Zoya, after Andre was hopspitalized with too little iron in his diet; the couple took the child out of the hospital early and Children's Services intervened. The Post paints Raphael Spindell as a sort of Svenghali -......

Rob Sacher, Co-owner Luna Lounge...

Andrew Krucoff, Rhythm Guitar...

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......

In news that puts the sexual revolution back a few paces, Gothamist was surprised to hear that there's a re-virginization surgery for those desperate to seem "virginal" to their future husbands. The Post reports on a Queens clinic that helps what seem mostly to be a Latina clientele reattach their hymens to "pass for virgins again." The surgery, "hymenoplasty," is popular in South America and the Middle East, but with role models like Britney Spears......

Of all the continents that people say they want to visit, Antarctica gets the shaft. It's always "South America" or "Africa" or "Australia" first. But Beth Bartel's Iceblog! might change that. Bartel is part of a group studying Mt. Erebus, one of the world's most active volcanoes (that happens to be located on Antarctica). Her entries and great photographs of life on the South Pole are like getting a fabulous tour from your best, brainy......

Apparently the stinky mass in Little Egg Harbor's lagoon was not some rotting carcass or a mass of sewage, it was just algae or vegetative waste. With the blob at about 8-feet by 10-feet and smelling like rotten egg (and it's Little Egg! ha!), the NJ township called in the state's Department of Environmental Protection to remove it, and the Times detailed the team's efforts, including one intrepid man's lassoing of the blob. Gothamist guesses......

Off-beat Soho celebrity sighting- Federico Castelluccio standing on the corner of Thompson Street and Spring, outside Famous Ben's pizza. He was wearing a long black trenchcoat and looked like he was about six and half feet tall. Federico played Furio on the Sopranos. More on Federico Castelluccio and the The Sopranos. Surprisingly, Federico is also a painter: "Castelluccio's paintings are in private and public collections in the U.S., South America and Europe and he......