Techie office accoutrements like razor scooters and free food faced mass extinction at the end of the last dot-com boom nine years ago. Google brought them back in full force, judging from pictures of its New York office.
Now that the city is planning to move forward with a ban on smoking in public parks, a new battleground has opened up in the war on tobacco. Several NYC landlords are now planning to ban smoking in their buildings and are informing tenants that if they smoke inside their apartments, they may be subject to eviction. If you happen to live in one of those buildings and you're a smoker, perhaps you could try and work out an exemption by pretending you have chronic back pain? Hey, you never know. [NYT]
Here is how cities work: Seedy neighborhood+Gentrification= Only a faint romantic halo of former seediness, which is used for real estate marketing purposes. Any attempt at neighborhood reversion to pre-gentrification standards will be terminated with extreme affluence.
Jumping off at over 2,000 meters in the air and soaring in the sky for over three minutes, Dean Potter gets as close as humanly possible to achieving human flight.
It's great that Google has contests awarding money and computers to schoolchildren. Less great: It gives the victor in India 1/20th of what an American kid gets for winning the same contest.
Saturday's auction of assorted jewelry, clothing, and housewares that once belonged to Bernie and Ruth Madoff was far more successful than anyone suspected. The sale brought in just under a million dollars, or nearly double what had been anticipated in advance. (That satin Mets jacket with "Madoff" on it? It sold for $14,500, although the pre-bid estimate had only been $500.) But if you missed Saturday's proceedings, there's still time to grab a piece of the Ponzi king's spoils: Three of his boats go up for sale tomorrow. [NYT, NYP]
You would have been delusional to think that the president didn't use a ghostwriter to update his Twitter account, @BarackObama. Still, it's now been confirmed that he didn't write any of his 418 tweets. Geeks are scandalized.
Meg Ryan and Nora Ephron leaving Esca after having lunch on Friday ... Marc Jacobs and Lorenzo Martone walking in the West Village ... Celine Dion and Rene Angelil leaving their hotel en route to lunch at Da Tommaso on Eighth Avenue ... Alex Rodriguez walking in Midtown ... Jessica Stam hanging with boyfriend Austin Cregg and friends downtown ... Shia LaBeouf listening to music on the set of Wall Street 2 ... Nicole Kidman getting out of a car with daughter ... Taylor Momsen walking to the set of Gossip Girl ... James Gandolfini signing autographs outside the Bernard Jacobs Theatre ... Ruben Studdard arriving at JFK ... Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts pushing son Samuel in a stroller ... and Sienna Miller getting out of a cab.
Cats always enjoy getting into places where they don't belong. Here a cat attempts to run and dive into a twelve pack... and it kinda succeeds!
Sometimes a blind item comes along that is more like a Dickens novel then something out of the gossip pages. Rumors, betrayal, affairs, mistaken identity, raising another man's child—this one has it all. Enjoy, ye olde scamps.
Family Guy's cut scenes are hit and miss a lot of times. This one, however, was brilliant.
Unflappable (except by geese, ha) hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger is not sitting idly by while fancy writer William Langewiesche (pron. "Lain-guh-wees-chay-guevara") offers up his trashy "scientific theories" about Sully's famous crashed plane. Everyone listen, Sully is saying something confrontational!
