All stories about "John Rambow"

Hunter, Alisa, and I have been posting from a front table at that hoary blogger watering hole, Schiller's, and some of us have been drinking -- I won't tell you who. What I can say is that it's been a great two months, in large part because I entered a site left in such great shape by its current editor-at-large, and one with such dedicated and witty writers and contributors installed.

What will I miss? I'll miss the fine brick ceiling of the Gawker HQ, and I'll miss a good majority of the people working underneath. I'll also miss working on a site that provided a needy world with so many pertinent details about strippers, needlessly cute animals, drugs, and restaurants.

I wish Curbed lots of luck with their newly envisioned site -- I think I speak for all of us when I say I'm looking forward to seeing exactly what that is. I also wish we could be working together longer, but it's not going to happen with my rent being what it is. Job offers, whether in earnest or not, will be entertained as they never have before.

photo credit

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". . . walking through Williamsburg several years ago, I was stopped in my tracks by the haunting face of a young girl peering out at me from within a doorframe. Pasted on a door was a beautifully detailed woodcut print I would later learn had been crafted by the street artist Swoon. Down the street, I discovered what looked like a cover of a tawdry pulp fiction novel stenciled on some wooden scaffolding by a collective known as Faile . . . from that moment on, I was hooked. With a little patience, you too can develop a street art habit."

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Above is a falling-apart hotel from Shreveport, Louisiana. Fifteen more "abandoned and decaying" specimens are on view at Protraveller

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"Le Grand Véfour. Maxim's. La Table de Joël Robuchon. None of these venerated restaurants are on Alexander Lobrano's list of the 102 best in Paris. And that's one of the reasons I love his new paperback Hungry for Paris: The Ultimate Guide to the City's 102 Best Restaurants. Lobrano, the European correspondent for Gourmet magazine, has lived here and written about food for 22 years, so he's qualified to call those behemoths overrated. Which establishments do hit the mark?"

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"Continental Airlines Inc. said Sunday it would not pursue a combination with another carrier right away, a surprising move after weeks of growing speculation that it would join with United Airlines to create the world's biggest airline."

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". . . the popular conception of the travel writer is a myth. We do not run around the world with limitless corporate credit cards getting free spa packages and business-class upgrades. How does it happen?" Gridskipper writer Andrew Evans explains how the sausage gets made, along with good tips on getting the best travel guide for your needs. (gorriti/flickr)

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"On Wednesday, Germans [marked] their own contribution to the history of beer, the Reinheitsgebot, or purity law, which strictly regulated the price and ingredients of beer at the start of the 16th century. . . . The vast majority of German breweries -- there are around 1,300 of them -- say they adhere to the original Reinheitsgebot. This helps with marketing, but it tends to be not quite true: Breweries now use yeast, an ingredient not found in beer production prior to Louis Pasteur's 19th century discovery of the function of microorganisms in the process of fermentation." (a4gpa/flickr)

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"Given the Islamic dress code, how do Persian prostitutes signal their trade? Location, location, location . . . in contemporary Iran, the holy city of Qom is known (unofficially) as a place of "both pilgrimage and pleasure." There, prostitutes wearing veils and even chadors mill about temples or sit together in public courtyards where men can inspect them. Sometimes a male go-between offers "introductions," at which point the prostitutes pull aside their headgear so the potential client can get a glimpse, but the whole process is fairly subtle. For an outsider, it's difficult to pick a street girl out of a crowd."

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This Friday and Saturday, the annual Found Footage Festival will be held at New York's Anthology Film Archives. One highlight, at least for me, will be the 17 videos about sexual harassment in the workplace -- these have been edited down to 3 minutes of the best bits. If only I'd seem it just a few weeks earlier -- we could have all avoided so much unpleasantness in the secretarial pool. After the jump, the festival's official trailer.

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Washington, D.C., is moving forward with its plan to require meters in all taxicabs by June 1, with the month of May given over to warnings for those who haven't yet installed them. From June, cab pricing will no longer be determined by the current system, made up of 22 concentric zones, but instead with a more straightforward distance method. The initial cost will be $3, plus $0.25 for each sixth of a mile driven; each additional rider will cost $1.50. What will May be like, with the potential for two systems to be operating at the same time? Confusing. [WaPo; non-DC meter: aleksejs.busarovs/flickr]

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Last week the Washington City Paper came out with its annual Best of, with a multitude of categories both essential (Best Burger, Best Bikini Wax, Best Place to Have Your Mom Buy You Slacks) and arbitrary (Best Front Desk Operators, Best Remnant of the Liberal Media, Best Wonk). Some highlights after the jump. (Holzer sculpture: afagen/flickr)

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As you'd expect, we get lots and lots of random mail through our tipsline. We like almost all of it, even if we don't always have time to write back. But since it is our special happy day, I thought I'd put down a few words that drive me up the wall. Please don't send these words to us anymore. If you must use them, please use asterisks. For instance: cur***. See, that wasn't so hard, was it? After the jump, a surprisingly short list of Words (and Phrases!) to Avoid.

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Idiot Toys ("Tech Reviews for the Bored") is working on a competition for the most "Expensive Kit Kats." His current contender is from EasyJet, "where the budget airline was sneakily subsiding its rock-bottom prices by charging poor women [and men, presumably] a quid [$2] for a standard four-finger f***ing Kit Kat." The bile-filled comments that follow are all entertaining, although not all of them are on topic. If you're curious, Airlinemeals.net has pix of Kit Kats and loads of other EasyComestibles, including one breakfast of wrapped EasyStuff that somehow ended up costing £26. Isn't that more than the price of many tickets?

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It's the accompanying slideshow that really makes Details' list of the Best Barbecue in America come alive. My first choice to make a visit out of this plenty would probably be Chicago's Lem's, which has no less an expert than Ed Levine's approval. (agilitynut/flickr)

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If you had to print out all the listings and web sites about "packing light" and take them with you on your travels, there'd be no room for the standard issue Moleskine notebook, copy of Eat Pray Love, and two pair of underwear -- you know, the stuff you really need to truly experience a place. There's no end to the making of packing tips, but luckily the internet will always have enough room to hold them all. A recent post from Go Green Travel Green has an assortment of the good ones -- and lots more of them besides.

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As part of its special China issue, National Geographic has reprinted Heinrich Harrer's 1955 article, My Life in Forbidden Lhasa. An Austrian POW who in 1943 escaped his British internment camp in India, Harrar was one of a handful of foreigners in this isolated kingdom -- he actually ended up becoming the Dalai Lama's tutor. His memoir, "Seven Years in Tibet," was the basis for the 1997 Brad Pitt movie.

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Initially, the British film director Peter Greenaway's latest multimedia piece was meant to be projected over Da Vinci's Last Supper. When the Italian government vetoed the production somewhat late in the game, organizers instead substituted a high-res digital photo that was then mounted in the Palazzo Reale, near Milan's Duomo.

After the jump, a clip filmed by Nicole Martinelli of a portion of the experience. The show is running today through 4 May. (Image: Monsters and Critics)

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The Washington Post has a great map compiling the hundreds of farmers markets in the metro area. What makes it most useful is the ability to filter by day as well as by area. Trending up at most of these markets are outlets selling meat and dairy -- "People are treating their trip to the farmers market as one-stop shopping," says one of the co-directors for a group of the markets. (Carly & Art/flickr)

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Two Muslim business partners have given a defunct Lancashire pub a twist by renaming it the "Halal Inn" and keeping everything except the liquor. What the Daily Mail bills the "first alcohol-free Islamic pub" has been open since December, doing steady business to a primarily male clientele (women are not, however, banned). As you might expect, some of the Daily Mail commenters go predictably wild with overblown fears.

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Want a map of NYC bars showing major-league baseball games? L Magazine has one here.

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The Post's foaming-at-the-mouth, spoiler-rich coverage ("Everything is bigger") of the upcoming Sex and the City movie includes an interactive map that isn't any less fun despite the fact that you could probably cook its locations up yourself ("677 5th Ave.: the gang goes shopping at Fendi"; "147 Mercer St.: Brunch at the Mercer Hotel"). (Jossip)

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The Brooklyn Paper has the goods on the Park Slope hotels near the better-than-ever but still dirty Gowanus Canal. Because land in this industrially zoned area is relatively cheap, it's a good place for hotels to take advantage of increased tourist demand for Brooklyn, especially for the restaurants hot zones of Smith Street and 5th Avenue. But if you're inclined to head here for a room, don't expect that your immediate surroundings will be the gracious brownstones and parks elsewhere in the Slope. Fourth Avenue's Hotel Le Bleu, may very well be not "just a hotel, [but] a haven," as its web site has it. But it shares its block with a taxi garage, dialysis clinic, and an auto parts store and repair center. Rooms at this boutique hotel, as well as a Holiday Inn nearby, hover around $230 a night.

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Billing itself at a "spiritual Spinal Tap," Tantric Tourists is a faux* documentary covering a guru and her 10 students as they travel for two weeks through India, treating the hard-to-simplify country as one big ashram. Its premiere this Friday as part of London's East End Festival even includes a pre-screening tantic warm-up. Wear something slouchy.

The movie trailer's after the jump; the official site is down at the moment.

* The director writes us that there's nothing faux here: "Nothing was staged, these are real people going through their first experience in India . . . The trip portrayed in the film, would have happened just as it did if there had been no cameras there whatsoever."

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Made in Brazil has a fun review up of São Paulo's new gay club Megga Fun. And judging by his Flip-enabled shots of the gogo boys, it more than lives up to its name. One sample after the jump. (photo: Megga Fun)

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Two ships have been fined by the United Arab Emirates for allegedly damaging underwater internet cables earlier this year, an incident that handicapped Rick-rolling and Scrabulous play for several weeks. One ship, which has Korean owners, has paid an estimated $60,000 fine to one of the internet companies whose bandwidth was affected. The others, owned by an Iraqi company, may have to pay much more. The ships evidently came under suspicion through the use of satelite images that helped trace their routes -- they probably damaged the cables by dropping their anchor. (daquelleamanera/flickr)

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The American Family Association and other conservative, "pro-family" groups are asking the Marriott Hotel chain to stop allowing pay-per-view porn movies to be bought in its rooms. This may be an action linked to another recent controversy, when Mitt Romney was criticized by similar groups for the 10 years he was on Marriott's board and did nothing to get rid of such movies.

Of course, such issues are nothing new, popping up periodically as they do. (topless robot]

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Tomorrow: The New-York Historical Society's show "Woven Splendor From Timbuktu to Tibet: Exotic Rugs and Textiles from New York Collectors" opens. On display will be costly items you only wish your grandparents would have started collecting -- instead of all that "Painter of Light" stuff. Everything's on loan from members of the "Hajji Baba Club, the nation's oldest and most prestigious rug collecting club." This macrame-free zone runs through 11 August. (Above: a woman's velvet robe from central Asia)

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Marko Kulju, the 26-year-old Finnish tourist who chipped off the ear of one of the 900 Easter Island statues, has been fined $17,000 USD by authorities in Chile, which holds the island as a territory. He's also been told he can't visit the country for three years. Kulju, who called his act "the worst mistake of my life," faced up to seven years in prison. [BBC; riggott/flickr]

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Time to find that single glove and that red and black jacket in the back of the closet, either yours or your parents'. On April 24, the director of Michael Jackson's pioneering long-length video "Thriller, " John Landis, will be showing the work along with the Making of Thriller documentary. This celebration of the video's 25th anniversary, part of the Tribeca Film Festival, will also include what's being billed as the "world's largest zombie disco" [could not fact-check this at press time] as well as a Michael Jackson look-alike contest. I'm hoping there are entrants from the cute Jackson 5 years as well as the grotesque-but-fascinating wraith of today and everything in between. [TFF]

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Washington's Citypaper has a cool photo-essay with a slideshow of some well framed store windows, bus shelters, and other glass structures throughout the city.

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