Everyone. Stop what you are doing right now. Gather about 3-4 people from work/school/unemployment line and go outside to a grassy area. Start making snowballs and separate out into teams. This snow is perfect for snowballing baby! Enjoy it while it lasts – and please be safe.

Remember that throwing snowballs is for fun, not for violence.

If you’re looking for a fun place to go on a Monday night, I know the perfect spot. This bar has it all: gorgeous guys, great music, everyone dancing. Of course, the guys are all gay, the music is Broadway showtunes, and the dancing involves jazz hands.

Splash, a gay bar in Chelsea, holds “Musical Mondays”, at which they play scenes from various musicals on their many tv screens and serve 2 for 1 drinks. The bar has nice atmosphere with decent seating, pretty lighting, and, of course, hot bartenders in their underwear. Splash also hosts other special events and deals for those not into the musical theatre thing.

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Isn’t it just like crazy ol’ liberal Hollywood to FINALLY award that New York staple, Martin Scorsese, an Oscar for a film which he did NOT set in New York City (let’s pretend “the Passion of the Christ” doesn’t count).
That reeks of town-envy, if you ask me.
The Oscars were held last night, in case some of you are living under a rock and looking to the New York Metblog as your sole source of news.

I must say, did anyone think Jennifer Hudson got just a tiny little dig in that last-minute shout-out to Jennifer Holliday? I was, frankly, getting tired of all the media coverage of Holliday, who appears to be willing to talk about how slighted she’s been by the fact that she won a Tony for portraying Effie in the original Broadway production to anyone with a microphone and a scone.
Al Gore, wooden as always, showed surprising humor, however, and has increasingly left me with feelings of, “why didn’t you show this side of yourself during your campaign so YOU could be the 2nd term president we have right now?”
I must confess, I saw not one of the 5 Best Picture nominees this year and yet, hosting a little impromptu Oscar party in my home for the very first time ever, I realized just how much darn fun it is to be the host; when the party’s over, everyone else leaves and you get to go to bed! It might be 12:30 and you have to be up in three and a half hours, but you still have the privilege of not traveling on the subways.

[photo from Newsday.com]

After having a six year, epic love/hate relationship with the L train, I’m finding myself loving it more and more with the new automated signs and clear, easy to understand announcements. Welcome to the 1990’s MTA! It’s better late than never. And what better way for me to express my love than with haiku?

Back in the day, this is how I felt about the train:

Weekend has arrived
More Service interruptions
Let’s stay in Brooklyn

Oh! The train is down
Seventh weekend in a row
It’s par for the course

Now with the electronic message boards in place, even still in testing mode until April, my train experiences have done a total 180. In the past week I’ve had occasion to ride the train 8 times and each time the boards were accurate and I never had to wait longer than 4 minutes. A few of those rides were off hours and on weekends as well, so that’s really saying something.

Ode to the newly automated train, also in haiku:

Slow, erratic train
Now fully automated
I love you again

Lovely LED
Four minutes is not so long
Thanks for the info

Have you got a haiku about your train riding experiences, positive or negative? If so, post in the comments! Don’t know how to write a haiku? It’s easy…

How To Write a Haiku Poem [Wikihow]
20th Century Technology in the 21st Century [thelexiphane's Flickr photostream]

Sunday Brunch is a beautiful thing. The wonderful leisure of a slow meal on a Sunday morning (or afternoon, rather). With plenty of tasty brunch places in my neighborhood of Astoria, my favorite for years has been Igloo, which serves good omelets and has a nice courtyard in the back. But I’ve found a new favorite: Fatty’s Cafe.

A unique brunch experience, Fatty’s Cafe is a Caribbean restaurant with brightly colored walls and lively music playing. There’s a bar and a courtyard (which I’ll have to check out when the weather warms up). The menu ranges from the traditional (pancakes and omelets) to Caribbean specialties like polenta cakes and mofongo. Most dishes are served with a mesculin salad. Brunch comes with your choice of mimosa or fruit beverage. I highly recommend getting the cafe con leche, which is deliciously smooth and tasty.
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For the last couple of days, I have spent some time gallery-hopping like the super awesome hipster that I’m not. On Friday night, we headed over to an opening at the Charles Cowles Gallery, where my friend Oliver Arms had a show, which was inexplicably not on the gallery’s website until today. Since we only got there with about 20 minutes to spare, I only looked at Oliver’s paintings, which were fucking awesome. This was the first time I’d been over to the West Chelsea gallery area since, well, before it was an area full of galleries. In case you haven’t been, there are lots of galleries and one or two pretentious people. And also some auto body shops.

This afternoon, we headed to the Pulse Contemporary Art Fair at the Armory on Lexington and 26th. While it was completely surreal seeing military personnel snaking their way through the crowds of art school hipsters and wealthy collectors standing outside, the show was pretty interesting. My friends and Metblog rockstars from L.A., sixspace, have a booth at the show, and I accidentally bought another piece from them. Whoopsie. After that, we walked around and looked at many of the other galleries’ exhibitions, which ranged from completely amazing to godawful, but overall, the show had good, fresh, interesting work. It’s open from 12-5 tomorrow, so you can still go check it out. Admission is $15, and they have a bar. Nothing says “lazy Sunday” like wandering around looking at art while drinking away your hangover!

After all that art, you’d think we’d be arted out, but we headed back over to Chelsea to go to David LaChapelle’s show. It was completely fucking packed, and the photos were great, but the people-watching was the real story. I’m sure some photos from the opening will show up online soon, since everyone but David seemed to have a camera out and pointed at someone who I’m sure I should have recognized. You can still see the show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery until April 28, but I’m not sure if it’ll be quite as fascinating without Amanda Lepore there standing in front of her own portrait.

Yes, sounds strange, but it’s true. Tonight, I headed over to Village Pourhouse for a Tequila tasting event sponsored by Sauza.

OK, I’ll admit, my first instinct was that there was NO way this could be a good thing. I’m an avid fan of Herradura, and I was skeptical about going to a Tequila tasting at a bar that has a giant beer menu, but hell, I’m open to anything and I figured I had nothing to lose but the $20 charge for the event.

I was pleasantly surprised. Our host, Jaime Salas did an impressive job – kept us entertained, was quite informative, didn’t miss a beat with the loud crowd in the next room and even handled the obnoxious members of the group QUITE well. There was this one guy that showed up late and decided to start shit with me. Of ALL the people in the room, this asshole decides to pick on me. Poor guy had no idea what he was getting himself into, but he learned his lesson real quick. My response on his last comment to me kept him quiet the rest of the time. You had to see his face when I stood up next to him at the end of the event.
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In one of the more bizarre municipal marketing moves in recent times, the city recently released a line of condoms that bare the route names of the various NY subway lines. The prophylactics have stirred up much “condom-nation” in the various local religious communities, but mayor Michael Bloomberg insists that the condoms were created solely to improve municipal health and decrease city-wide occurrences of sexually transmitted diseases, and are not a religious matter.

The condoms are being distributed at a number of local retailers, bars and lounges, and city offices throughout the boroughs. The lubricated rubbers were made by brand Lifestyles. While NYC was the first city to go this route, Washington DC followed suit.

I have yet to hear word on the… err…. “usability” of the new items. Anyone have any experiences yet? Do the packages differentiate between “Local” and “Express?”

Thanks to DC Metroblogging’s own Tom Bridge for the tip!

There’s another great exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum (in addition to their well laid out permanent collection) following on the heels of their Annie Leibovitz exhibit. Devorah Sperber has created an interesting installation called “The Eye of the Artist”. She uses thousands of spools of thread to recreate well known masterpieces, such as DaVinci’s Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. Here is her version of van Eyck’s Man in a Red Turban:
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After the relatively warm winter we had so far, when the weather finally decided to dump foot upon foot of snow upstate, snow sports was all I had on my mind. I keep on getting jolted out of my nightmares on the subway about me falling through a crevasse that stays hidden in ice and snow. That was when I realised that I had developed this mental block against skiing, after my fall 2 winters back, on the Blue Mountain, PA.
I am an intermediate in skiing and I was just starting to come off the bigger slopes, back in ‘05. Then it had to happen. A fellow snow boarder, also from NYC, slipped and crashed into me. He had a broken knee and I ended up tearing a lot of stuff in my knees, but thanks to therapy, after 6 months, I am more fitter than ever.
That put the age old saying in mind – “Skiing is easy to learn, but tough to master” and “Snow Boarding is tough to learn but easy to master”. So I decided to give snow boarding a try last season and I did feel it was tough to board…but once you had the hang of it, that pretty much was it.
I am raring to snow board this season, which is suddenly in full swing. There is a wonderful sale price going on at most of the resorts in the Catskill Moutains, hardly 2 hrs drive from NYC. I am opting for the Windham Mountain….lets see how that goes!