Kevin White

pr1nceshawn:

One time, when I was drunk…

This summer's Met Roof Garden features an installation by Pierre Huyghe, which consists of a rock in a tank, and pulled-up flooring that is sure to trip up a few visitors. At least one woman fell at the press preview yesterday—while she sat on the ground for a while and asked for ice, she ultimately declared she was "fine." So this art will not kill you, it will just make you FEEL. [ more › ]

In the latest instance of a wild critter appearing in foodstuffs where it doesn’t belong, a viper hitched a ride from Spain to Austria via a box of bananas, much to the shock of the Austrian woman who was innocently…

The post Woman Discovers Viper Inside Box of Bananas from the Grocery Store appeared first on First We Feast.

Could be as early as Wednesday.

Some time next week, the young hot shots behind Contra will open their second restaurant, Wildair, right down the block on Orchard Street. The goal right now is Wednesday, although that could turn out to be more like Thursday or Friday depending on how things go.

As chefs/co-owners Jeremiah Stone and Fabian von Hauske have already explained, their sophomore effort will be more casual than their tasting menu-only neo-bistro Contra. The menu will be a la carte, and though it's still a work in progress, some of that progress is being documented on Instagram. For the most part, it seems like the dishes here will be a little simpler than the ones at Contra – the latest updates show a pork chop Milanese with sauce gribiche, and a plump little chocolate hazelnut tart. More info as it becomes available.

It's taken a long time settle on a restaurateur, and the restaurant itself is still a year away.

Two years after the Hudson River Park Trust put out a request for proposals to New York's "experienced restaurateurs" to fill an insane indoor/outdoor restaurant space on Pier 26, they've finally announced their choice. The restaurant, which is enclosed mostly in glass and crowned with an enormous terrace, will be run by Michael Dorf, the owner of Soho's sprawling restaurant/bar/music venue City Winery. It will be called, reasonably enough, City Vineyard.

Unlike City Winery, there will be no live music or performances at Pier 26 – City Vineyard is a restaurant/bar only. Nonetheless, it's a big one, with seating for 300 to 350, and 1,600 square feet of indoor dining space alone. Though construction has already been going on for at least two years, and the building looks pretty much done, City Vineyard supposedly still won't open until May of next year.

[Photo by Mike Wolf]

Spotted in the trash on East 10th Street and Avenue B… a $20 value!

As the island of Manhattan continues its inexorable slide below sea level, the NYPD's classic wooden barricades are becoming a crucial addition to city infrastructure. This photo, taken today at 22nd Street and Third Avenue, shows how resourceful New Yorkers are MacGyvering their way through this flash flooding situation. Either that or we're looking at an interpretive dance piece about the thin blue line, brought to you by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. [ more › ]

“Mommy, I swear I wasn’t doing anything bad.”

Mary Meriam

Biography
More poems by this author

Photo by @WaggytailRescue via Slum Goddess…

The New York Public Library today unveiled OldNYC.org, an interactive map that brings its digitized collection of vintage photos to life by street/avenue/neighborhoods.

Per OldNYC:

This site provides an alternative way of browsing the NYPL's incredible Photographic Views of New York City, 1870s-1970s collection. Its goal is to help you discover the history behind the places you see every day.

And, if you're lucky, maybe you'll even discover something about New York's rich past that you never knew before!

Where did these images come from?
The images all come from the New York Public Library's Milstein Collection. While many photographers contributed to the collection, the majority of its images are the work of Percy Loomis Sperr, who documented changes to the city from the late 1920s to the early 1940s.

We clicked on Avenue A and East 10th Street...



... and found this shot (and more) from 1934...



Enjoy your Memorial Weekend. (And if you don't like historical photos, then....)

A con man was busted after he allegedly charged a pair of tourists $200 each for tickets on the Staten Island Ferry, which as far as we can recall, is free (mostly free). But hey, it is the perfect date spot to eat a $30 hot dog, clean your teeth with a $40 artisanal toothpick, and wash it down with an overpriced bottle of water. [ more › ]

Because you would pay someone to not break up with you, check out today's mid-day links: Woodstock shows, dino art, NASA climate-change on UWS, chasing bears with hatchets, war against rats, honeybees dying, and husky temper-tantrum. Don't forget to follow Gothamist on Twitter and Instagram, and like us on Facebook. [ more › ]

For a man who just ate his first slice two years ago, Patrick Stewart has some deeply philosophical questions about pizza. The actor, urban explorer and mirth-giver took to Twitter—as he does in times of deep moral quandary—to try and settle one of life's great pizza debates: to crust or not to crust? [ more › ]

This past weekend, my wife and I headed up north to visit her family, who live way (way!) upstate. As we were driving along, I found myself playing around with the GPS map, and happened to notice something unusual: if you zoom-in on the northwestern tip of Vermont…

…you’ll find an insanely small bit of land that looks like it should belong to Canada. But! Because of the way the border falls, it’s technically part of the United States.

Doing some research, I learned that this is an extremely rare example of a “practical exclave” – a piece of land requiring travel through a foreign country to access, but not being surrounded entirely by that country. The United States has about four, including Point Roberts, Washington, whose middle and high school-age children must travel 40 minutes through Canada to get to school each day in Blaine, Washington:

Province Point is probably the most obscure, and so I decided it might be interesting to pay a visit to this oft-overlooked bit of American homeland.

With my brother-in-law-to-be Justin along for the ride, we headed through the Champlain border crossing. Unfortunately, the border guard wouldn’t accept a simple “sight-seeing” as the reason for our visit, and so I proceeded to give a full dissertation on the nature of enclaves, exclaves, and practical exclaves. Eventually, he got bored and let us through.

I’d never been to this section of Quebec before, and was amazed at how much it reminded me of the midwest…

…from vast stretches of flat farmland…

…to houses straight out of a John Steinbeck novel.

Of course, there were occasional reminders that we were in a different world. The road signs were the most obvious…

…though I think the most distinctly we-must-be-in-Canada oddity we came across was this very quaint, charming and wholesome antique shop selling all sorts of timeworn knickknacks located just a few feet from from the Chez Dianne strip club.

After 20 minutes of driving toward Province Point, we passed a trailer park…

…and then found ourselves on a dirt road.

We parked, but I wasn’t sure if we were in the right place. I noticed a man working on his lawn, and politely asked if he spoke English. “As you wish,” was his reply (which is how I’m going to answer all questions in the affirmative from now on). Unfortunately, we had unknowingly passed onto a private road (though I think we could be forgiven; see that sign in the above picture that’s folded in half? I realize looking at it now that it might say PRIVATE ROAD…though I’m not 100% sure). Luckily, he graciously allowed us to park, and pointed us in the direction of the marker. Alas, for anyone hoping to recreate this trip, you’ve now been warned that this road is indeed private, so please respect that!

As we followed a dirt path a little ways out, I started to wonder if there might be a fence or a DO NOT ENTER sign or something along the border. Nope, though in retrospect, this might actually have been an undercover border guard:

And then, we arrived at America’s least famous practical exclave: Province Point!

The dividing line is marked by this monument, one of roughly 900 that line the American-Canadian border from coast to coast. Laid out in the mid-1800s long before the magic of GPS, most of these monuments are, on average, about 200-300 feet away from the 49th parallel they should be following.

On one side is the “Boundary” date: August, 9th, 1842, referring to the Webster-Ashburton treaty which solidified the border. The remaining three sides read: “Treaty of Washington,” “Albert Smith, US Commissioner,” and “I. B. B. Estcourt, H.B.M. Commissioner” (who I can only assume were responsible for the border marking project).

A note on the base says “Renewed: 1964.” No clue what this refers to – other border monuments have differing dates.

As for Province Point itself? I’m happy to report back to my fellow Americans that it’s a perfectly nice parcel of land…

…with some rather gorgeous views of its technical homeland.

And…that’s about it.

We would’ve stayed longer, but it was about that time that the border patrol turtle asked us to kindly return to our vehicle and proceed out the way we’d entered.

-SCOUT

PS – For anyone hoping to recreate our perilous adventure, I have to advise against. The road leading in is indeed private, and I got the sense from my short conversation I’m not the first annoying American to wander in.

Some numbers just pop.

In the sports world, for example, Alex Rodriguez has long been a detestable figure due in part to gaudy salary figures that once equated to nearly $60,000 per at bat (not to mention the performance enhancing drugs, of course). But the VC world has some heavy hitters of its own, so we used the PitchBook Platform to look up some head-spinning valuation increases from the industry’s biggest players.

Take Uber. Did you know the ridesharing giant effectively increased its value by $120 million per day between financing rounds in June and December last year?

$120 million. Per. Day.

Take a look.

Say what you will about the justifiability of soaring valuations, but Uber isn’t alone. Several other tech companies have seen historic rates of increasing value, and you’ll notice in the table of select companies below that many of the financings have been raised within the past year or so.

It’s worth noting that the graphics above only take into account absolute value increase and not relative value increase. When measuring the rate of the company’s growth against its previous post-valuation, the numbers look much different. The best example is Twitter, which saw roughly 32,000% annualized growth between its Series A ($127,500 valuation) and Series B ($22.75 million valuation) in just a matter of months.

To see how our 20,000+ VC valuations can help uncover findings valuable to you, contact us here.

Light in the Dark

Photograph by Mel Kevin Jumangit, National Geographic Your Shot

Dancers pause during the Sinulog Festival in Cebu City, the capital of the Philippine province of Cebu. The large festival of cultural and religious pageantry honors the Santo Nio, or child Jesus, whose statue is held aloft here by a colorfully costumed queen.

Jumangits image was recently featured in Your Shots Daily Dozen.

This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our storytelling community. Check out the new book Getting Your Shot for more photos, plus tips and creative insights from Nat Geo experts.

[Photo from Union Square last July by James and Karla Murray]

Manhattanhenge — "when the setting sun aligns precisely with the Manhattan street grid and you line up to Instagram the shit out of it" — returns this weekend.

Here are the particulars via Gothamist:

Half Sun on the Grid
Friday, May 29 8:12 P.M. EDT
Monday, July 13 8:21 P.M. EDT

Full Sun on the Grid
Saturday, May 30 8:12 P.M. EDT
Sunday, July 12 8:20 P.M. EDT

The weather promises to be quite lovely this evening, so the Manhattanhenging should go well. Had a good practice run last evening... via ‏@WonderlandNYC...

buy this comic as a print!
Or share on: facebookreddit
If you enjoy the comic, please consider supporting A Softer World on Patreon

Bird Feeders

Photograph by Abderazak Tissoukai, National Geographic Your Shot

Your Shot member Abderazak Tissoukai was near Xingping in Chinas Guanxi region when he captured this picture of a cormorant fisherman at sunset. Xingping is definitely one the most beautiful places in China, with its scenic karst landscapes [and] traditional and genuine people, he writes. Curious to learn more about the local practice of cormorant fishingin which trained birds with snared throats capture fish theyre unable to swallowTissoukai took a high-speed train from Zhuhai to Xingping to shoot fishermen on the Li River. I wanted a complete, iconic definition of cormorant fishing, he writes.

This photo was submitted to Your Shot, our storytelling community. Check out the new book Getting Your Shot for more photos, plus tips and creative insights from Nat Geo experts.

Outdoor movie season is upon us, and soon there will be free flicks screening all over the city. Today, the Central Park Conservancy announced its lineup, which will run Tuesday, August 25th through Saturday, August 29th. This year all the films are 35 years old—to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the conservancy's founding. [ more › ]

The Smallest Penis in Brooklyn Pageant is a few short weeks away, and it looks like the hosts are still in search for eligible micropeen—they just put out a blast calling for more "exemplary small penises," so now's as good a time as any to get back at that dude who dumped you via Snapchat. [ more › ]

The post Thanks, Norepinephrine appeared first on Beatrice the Biologist.

Whether you think they produce vapid listicles or real journalism, it’s indisputable that BuzzFeed and Business Insider have garnered some serious VC interest. Each call Lerer Hippeau and RRE Ventures investors, while the likes of NEA, Jeff Bezos and Mark Andreessen have all chosen sides. The two digital media companies started off on a similar path when they raised their respective Series A rounds in July 2008; however, BuzzFeed’s valuation has since swelled close to Unicorn status at $850 million, while Business Insider’s is less than $200 million.

Is it the reader demographics? The cat pictures? The lists and quizzes? We’ve paired their financing histories along with social metrics to shed some light on the differences. Here is how the two stack up:

*To learn how PitchBook calculates social media growth, click here.

After raising Series A rounds less than a week apart, BuzzFeed jumped in the fast lane and started raising much larger rounds. AOL reportedly tried to buy Business Insider in 2013, but no dice. Given the facts that BuzzFeed has raised a Series E and Business Insider a Series G, we expect to see more acquisition (IPO?) rumors circulating.

 

While many painters chase the character of light in the landscape, French painter Nicolas Martin more often seeks out the elusive qualities of artificial light in night-darkened streets and filtered sunlight in curtained interiors.

His figures are revealed in the light, either as direct portraits or smaller within the context of the composition.

Martin studied at the Auguste Renoir School in Paris and the University laval in Quebec, Canada.

His subtle play of light and color contrasts wonderfully with his richly textural paint application, which is more evident in the images on his website than in the smaller example images shown above.

You can also find Martin’s work, often reproduced a bit larger, on the site of the L’Oeil du Prince Gallery, Paris; in which he is regularly represented, and through which his work will be featured in a solo exhibition from 4 June to 23 June 2015 at the Cardinet location and from 25 June to 9 July 2015 at the Odeon venue.

[Via Yann Deshoulières]

Circus imagery isn't one commonly associated with steahouses—unless you count over-the-top decor with prices to match. And yet, here comes Carnem Prime Steakhouse, which opened in the blurred line between Gowanus and Park Slope yesterday. Inside you'll find a vivid purple accent wall coupled with metallic gold chairs and colorful, abstract paintings. Though more Vieux Carre than Big Top, the Pork Belly Cotton Candy ($3) lollipops swings us in whimsical dining territory—though the rest of the menu stays closer to the ground. [ more › ]