It seems that the very fabulous Reverend Billy (of the Church of Stop Shopping) has put in his hat for the NYC mayoral campaign. Should make for some good debates!

I'm not sure why i'm surprised, but there's a day for every food, pretty much. I remember dragging (well, I think they were all pretty willing, but going was my idea, anyway...) my work colleagues out to a hot dog place for lunch on national hot dog day. Now I've found out that my birthday falls on National Potato Chip day, and within National Chocolate Week. Mmmmm, salty and chocolate. Find your day of interest, there are many…

We went to see The Necks tonight at le poisson rouge. Great show - they played one song, and it was a hour long, so essentially they played the whole show without stopping. The music of this Australian trio is hard to describe - I'd say ambient avant-garde jazz is probably the closest. But their structures remind me of the post-rock bands (like Tortoise) that I like. They play repeating patterns that shift, progressions that build up to something resembling a crescendo and back. They were intense in concert, much more so than on their albums.

We all enjoy the NASCAR crashes, even though we don't really like watching people get hurt (in real life). That's why this special photo section of the NY Daily News is morbidly interesting: Accidents on Long Island

Well, the blog has a new look and is running on some new software. I switched to drupal for this and my photo galleries. I had been running the galleries on 4images (which I created an extension for to use the Google RSS Feed AJAX code to create a slideshow viewer) and my blog on MoveableType 3.2, but I wanted more features than 4images, and at some point I'd need to update the MT software. Drupal is great, flexible, content-management software, and it has a relatively easy to work with structure. I've already created my own custom module to list the galleries, and have been hacking away at the Brilliant Gallery module to customize how my pictures are actually shown. It also has user and access management, so I can now have some of the galleries public, and others only to registered users. Sorry for the inconvenience of having to register to my friends. If it helps, I'd recommend signing up for an OpenID login, a portable login identity which you can use at an increasing number of websites so you don't have to create a separate login for each one (and of course, this site takes OpenID). Please let me know if the layout looks strange, I don't get much chance to test on Windows. UPDATE: Now you can login using your facebook login.

Flickr has a great section of historical photos out of copyright called The Commons. Collections from the archives of the Brooklyn Museum (1893 Columbian Exposition), Smithsonian, National Archives... Just tons of great stuff to look at.

PBS has a good timeline of the stops and starts of the 2nd Avenue subway construction, with some links to historical New York Times articles.

Hope everyone is doing well!

The dude abides, and so much better with the white russian ('caucasian') in his hand. One of my favorites is apparently back in style. Maybe now I won't have to endure strange looks at various bars - or the hated phrase - 'we don't have any cream.'

By way of the Listening Post, I found out about Wolfgang's Vault. What a collection of live concert streams and downloads. Wolfgang was Bill Graham, the legendary convert promoter from San Francisco (originally the Bronx), and one big section of the archives is his concert recordings. Another big section is shows from the King Biscuit Flower Hour (seems to be another Wolfgang's site) for those of you old enough to remember that FM radio show. Much of the archives are classic rock, funk, and R&B, but they seem to have a good selection of recent rock/pop.