My New Tattoo

Apologies to E.B. White and career criminals. Thanks to Daniel Santoro of Smith Street Tattoo Parlor.

The Stereotype is True: Bloggers are Cat-Friendly

The other week on Eater I put together a poll in response to the overwhelming stereotype that bloggers have more cats than non-bloggers. That — along with the idea that they a) live in their mother's basements and b) live in a fly-over state and c) never get dressed — form the base coat of most blogger stereotypes. I thought I would debunk that once and for all. Well, I didn't.

It turns out, according to The Humane Society, 33% of American households own at least one cat. However, our study found 66.4% of bloggers own at least one cat with a slightly higher percentage of those owning multiple cats. Sadly, the cats-owning editor of Eater, Raphael Brion decided against publishing these shocking revelations. However, the truth shall not be swept under the litter box, no matter how uncomfortable or allergic it might be.

WIKILEAKS: The Culinary Conspiracy of The Food Network

Much has been made and with good cause over Wikileak's data dump of diplomatic cables. But overlooked in the 250,000 thick pile is this one, from Robert Tuschman, of the Food Network, to his minders back at the CIA. In it Tuschman reveals the strangely altruistic plan he and his fellow masterminds have developed. In short, Tuschman et al have determinedly undermined the reality television drama by offering shows of sub par quality in an effort to turn Americans away from the television and towards locavorism. Weird.

Roald Dahl: I CAN HAS BFG

Inspired by Big Sometimes Friendly Giant [NYM]

The Strange Uneasy Return of Boxing to Yankee Stadium

Ha venido par aver la turbia sangre.

[I came to see the river of blood.]

‑-Federico Garcia Lorca, Poet in New York

The last time boxing came to Yankee Stadium it was on a Tuesday night nearly a quarter century ago. On a hot September night in 1976, Muhammad Ali beat Ken Norton. The Bay City Rollers’ Saturday Night was at the top of the charts and the Bronx was one year away from burning. Last Saturday night, boxing again descended upon the Bronx as the Puerto Rican superstar Miguel Cotto faced the underdog, Israeli fighter Yuri Foreman. Legions of boxing fans materialized like baseball players in Field of Dreams. Reggaeton’s insistent dem bow riddim, syncopated with the rolling clatter of the 4 train passing, poured from every open orifice of the Escalades, shiny water buffalo looking for a sign to park.

The Bronx being the Bronx-like, Cotto’s fans were preponderant and, on the whole, more colorful and exuberant in their affiliation. The Puerto Rican flag was draped like fondant across backs and atop heads, used as a stencil and shaved into hair, wrapped up into little beads and made into necklaces. As the stands filled and daylight faded, large Puerto Rican flags unfurled in the nosebleed sections. Chants of Cotto crescendoed and evaporated. Surprisingly good Philly cheese steaks and predictably bad Bud Lights were ingested on the 100 level. Yuri Foreman fans were there too but they were rather assimilated and smaller in number. Foreman—who was born in Belarus, grew up in Israel, trains in DUMBO and attends rabbinical school in Gowanus—fights under an Israeli flag yet from a reporter’s unofficial survey, only one Israeli flag was evident outside the stadium. [It was held by a Muslim Kosovar and an Armenian Jew outside of Gate 4.] The Foreman fans had the Yankee pinstripes on their side, chromatically at least. But the red, white and blue lights of police cars—and lo, were there lots!—were firmly belonged in the Puerto Rican color scheme.

As the night progressed, Puerto Rican fighters on the undercard consistently beat their opponents, the crowd grew increasingly impatient for the main event. I sat behind an old AK named Myron “Suge” Sugermann who told me, “I’m the last of the Jewish gangsters,” which shockingly proved to be correct and next to Bert “Randolph” Sugar, the famous boxing raconteur. I was the youthful savory in an old man sugar sandwich. Sugermann—who greets everybody with a “Shalom Aleichem, baby”—told me about how the Jewish mob used to crack Nazi heads in Newark in the 30s. Bert “Randolph” Sugar wore sunglasses, gnawed Churchill-like at a fresh cigar, cussed and grumbled his way through the undercard. Finally, Cotto emerged to wild whoops, looking so focused he seemed sad. A dull roar filled the stadium like rolling thunder. Daddy Yankee reached an insurmountable pitch. Then Foreman emerged, called to the ring by a shofar and his rebbe’s chanting. The crowd booed (naturally) and I felt uneasy (also, naturally).

The smaller man and smaller draw, Foreman needed only to put on a good show to impress. He did but the end of the fight, nine rounds later, was controversial and sad. Foreman’s knee, already injured, was completely gone, his leg immobilized, the man beaten, his face red. His wife begged for the match to end. A white towel was thrown into the ring—a cliché that actually happens—but angrily thrown out again by the referee. The fight continued but Foreman limped like a club-footed pigeon around the ring, skittering like a sandcrab each time Cotto punched him. The crowd, unsettled by Foreman’s futile and valiant effort, was largely silent. It was Satyagraha in the ring. From behind me, a row of Puerto Rican boxing journalists agreed, “El tiene muy corazon.” He has heart, that kid. After a few more minutes of that beating, the fight ended in yet it still felt unresolved. The streams that flowed—currents of Cotto’s red, white and blue, eddies of Foreman’s blue and white—from Yankee Stadium into the Bronx, onto trains and into cars, were slow, brooding and uneasy. By 4am, the tide had ebbed again and Yankee Stadium was a silent sentinel, lambent in, what Garcia Lorca once called, the alma mentido de New York, the counterfeit dawn of New York.

Could This Possibly Be the World's Worst Music Video?

Final Placement is a Christian Rock band from Midland Texas. The motto of Final Placement, according to the band's Facebook page is "The world is gone but not lost it can still be saved, all it takes is the people to listen. Maybe if they will hear the message and change." Though their hearts may have been in the right place, this video is the indisputable herald for the coming of the Dark Lord Satan.

The Guilt of Quitting Facebook

Facebook, why are you so clingy and why do you remind me of a Jewish mother? I'm pretty sure none of these people will miss me. And if they can, they can email. [Or, since one is my wife, she can just talk to me.]

I Love Nwe Yrok

Illiteracy at the base of the Williamsburg Bridge.

Quite Possibly The Most Hilarious Consecutive 100 Seconds Caught on Film

Holiday Gift Ideas from OUT

Are you looking for gifts for your loved ones? You don't have to be a 'mo to like these gifts, this guide or, apparently, to star in the videos. Check out more of them in

Out's Annual Gift Guide

Awesomely Passive Aggressive Illustrations

The New York Times opens a review of the most annoying vegetarian book by the most annoying vegetarian author with an "illustration" by carnivorous designer Paul Sahre of a pig's decapitated head with the book in it's craw. You can read my even less enthusiastic review of the book at Boldtype.

Update: Confirmed: A real pig's head was used.

A Thing I Am Looking Forward To

Gainsbourg - Vie Héroïque - Trailer HD [VF]

FergusStock: The Lost Illustrations

On Friday I headed over to The Breslin for night two of FergusStock 2009. I wrote about it for The Moment but here are some extra illustrations. Enjoy.

Typos I'd Like To See

[NYT]

The Saddest Washer Review In The World

The saddest washing machine review ever. Click to enlarge. [via]

Spotted at the Minetta Tavern 9:30pm

Standing by the pedestal: Sick fuck Simon Hammerstein, with his beard Jessica Joffe. Take that as you will. In the back, scruffy Serge Becker. Floating from table to table, Keith McNally. Let it be said: There was a higher incidence of pocket squares tucked squarely in the pockets of gentlemen's blazers than any other room in New York City at a commensurate time except perhaps the 21 Club. And also that that Black Label Burger is highly but not over rated.

Meet The West Village Monster

Remember the Montauk Monster of last year? In the West Village yesterday, its cousin washed up in a trash bin on the corner of Greenwich Avenue and Charles Street. I tried to take him home but his tail was gone. Monster.

I Dated Jenny Petherbridge

I read the following passage the other day and it so strongly reminded me of an ex-girlfriend of mine I began to believe in time machines, that Djuna Barnes somehow travelled to New York a couple of years ago, studied this woman then said, "Fuck this," hopped back in her tin-foil space craft and headed back to 1920's Paris.

Her walls, her cupboards, her bureaux, were teeming with the second-hand dealings with life. It takes a bold and authentic robber to get first-hand plunder. Someone else's marriage ring was on her finger; the photograph taken of Robin for Nora say upon her table. The books in her library were other people's selections. She lived among her own things like a visitor to a room kept "exactly like it was when--"

...

When anyone was witty about a contemporary event, she would look perplexed and a little dismayed, as if someone had done something that really shout not have been done; therefore her attention had been narrowed down to listening for faux pas She frequently talked about something being the "death of her" and certainly anything could have been had she been the first to suffer it...Hovering, trembling, tip-toeing, she would unwind anecdote after anecdote in a light rapid lisping voice which one always expected to change, to drop and to become the "every day" voice,; but it never did. The stories were humorous, well told. She would smile, toss her hands up, widen her eyes; immediatey everyone in the room had a certain feeling of something lost, sensing that there was one person who was missing the omporance of the moment, who had not heard the story; the teller herself.

...

No one could intrude upon her because there was no place for intrusion. This inadequacy made her insubordinate--she could not participate in a great love, she could only report it. Since her emotional reactions were without distinction, she had to fall back on the emotions of the past, great loves already lived and reated, and over those she seemed to suffer and grow glad.

When she fell in love it was with a perfect fury of accumulated dishonesty; she became instantly a dealer in second-hand and therefore incalculable emotions. As, from the solid archives of usage, she had stolen or appropriated the dignity of speech, so she appropriated the most passionate love that she knew, Nora's for Robin, She was a "squatter" by instinct.

Bad News: Toby Young In On Next Season of Top Chef

Bald viscous piece of shit Toby Young has, says a well-placed tipster, been confirmed as a judge in next season's Top Chef. Fucking Bravo piece of shit idiot producers. Padma's beauty can't sustain Young's shittiness for another season. It barely did this last one.

Everything that is Wrong With a Certain Type of Woman and Vanity Fair in Two Paragraphs

Hello. Look this Vanity Fair blog post and you'll see why, despite Graydon Carter being a fucker par excellence, the magazine is despised. It is also why young Harvard-educated writers who write for Vanity Fair and live in the UES are also despised. (Above right) If you are like me, when you read any sentence in bold you'll spit out, "You Fucking Fuck, Fuck You!" Why so angry? Though so clear it obviates the need for explanation, here it goes. Kate Ahlborn, Harvard 07, insists on adopting this inane exoticization of Brooklyn which is not funny and makes her look like an asshole. She also makes the obligatory Bard reference and Feist-drops as if she is the only finishing school twat to have liked the video. They all did. They all spent time at Bard! Argh! But equally infuriating is the entire tone of the piece which boils down to, "I went to an art performance. It made me uncomfortable. It was weird. I didn't like it." People like this should not write things down and certainly not anywhere where anyone must read it.

Somehow it happened that in all the years I’ve lived in New York City, I’d never been to Brooklyn. But when I heard that choreographer Noémie Lafrance had a new show opening in Williamsburg, I decided it was as good an occasion as any to venture beyond Manhattan for the first time. I loved the music video she choreographed for Feist’s “1234” in 2007, and “Rapture”—her piece for aerialists staged on the side of a Frank Gehry building at Bard College—was undeniably awesome. So on Tuesday night, I boarded theL train (heading away from the West Village) and made my way to hipsterville. I’d heard from my more global friends that Brooklyn is a charming borough inhabited by cool young families, gourmet cheese shops, and creative intellectuals. It has parks! And trees! And slow walkers aren’t mowed down on the sidewalk!But I’m what you might call a bona fide Manhattanite. Or, to be more precise, a bona fide Upper East Sider. I’ve traveled the world, I said to myself—how exotic could Brooklyn really be?

Perhaps my tweed J. Crew jacket and Tory Burch ballet flatsweren’t the best wardrobe choice for that day, but I overcame the fact that I was a total Williamsburg misfit and hoped my foreigner status wouldn’t be glaringly obvious to the natives. (It was.) After narrowly escaping death by skateboard on the Bedford subway platform, I made my way to a rickety building in what felt to me like Brooklyn’s outer banks. (It wasn’t.) A sign instructed people heading to Lafrance’s performance to go up to the second floor, where I was warmly greeted, asked to surrender my coat and bag, and told to wash my hands.

Kate Ahlborn, go back to the Upper East Side. Watch Scrubs. Listen to Feist. Stay the fuck out of Brooklyn.
[Photo: Nick McGlynn]