Friday, August 30, 2013

Long weekend

The broadcast is announcing rain follow for ...more rain... if it stops the place to be is williamsburg or lower east side for the art+food festivals on saturday, sunday is the brazil parade in 5th av and 45 th st, and monday the west indian ( similar customs than the brazilean one!) in Brooklyn. Furthermore, this weekend is the last chance to enjoy the beaches and the outdoor pools... so enjoy!

Thursday, August 29, 2013

cruel truth

New Yorkers Aren’t Rude. You Are. by Jhon Skylar And I mean that title with the utmost of respect. I’ve been a denizen of this fair[ly crappy] city my entire life, in one way or another. I spent some time in LA during college, but don’t worry, I got over it. The one thing, though, that I’ve consistently heard from around the US is that New York is a rude city. This is, I feel, based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what this place is. New York is a massive city where most people have high-pressure jobs and their time is very precious. That isn’t unique, though it’s to an extreme in New York that most people from other parts of the US haven’t experienced. It is also a city where the American infatuation with the combustion engine has been replaced by walking and public transportation. This is a small city, geographically, with an extensive system for getting you where you need to be without a car. Add to that tons of people, and it’s going to be one of the most crowded foot traffic experiences that most people have ever been a part of. This matters because it affects the basic rules of politeness within New York to a degree that you might not expect. Many people realize, when they enter a small town, that there are unwritten codes of conduct amongst the people there that have been arrived at by years of social interaction. One of the things that an outsider has to do if they wish to be accepted is learn and respect these rules. The same thing with foreign countries. The concept of rudeness in a foreign country will be alien to you. Many travelers wonder why they have a bad experience abroad; the answer is often that they didn’t learn the local rules for politeness and came off as total jerks. New York also has its unwritten code of conduct. Yet, for some reason, a huge number of tourists to New York seem to totally forget that when you are a guest somewhere, it behooves YOU to learn the unwritten rules of conduct so that you will not upset the delicate social balance of the place you are visiting. Because New York relies so much on foot traffic, these people often utterly disrupt the flow in the subway or on the street, and then complain that New Yorkers are “rude” when we do not accommodate their interference with our lives. Don’t understand what I’m talking about? At peak hours, there can be 150 people walking on a given avenue block trying to get to work. There can be 1000 or more people on a subway train. There can be 50 people trying to get off of a bus or a subway car. 100 people may be trying to go up or down a staircase or escalator at any given time. And yet, every day I see tourists and just general social malefactors who stop in the middle of sidewalks, who hold up entire subway trains because they try to force the doors open, who block a stairwell or who try to get on a subway car before they let anyone else off. This is a sense of entitlement that the pace of this city cannot abide. I assure you, you do not have an excuse for delaying 1000 people who are trying to get to work. If you do, you’d be in a job where you’d have a car with sirens, at the very least. Your trip to the bank or to the American Museum of Natural History is not something that should interfere with the professional lives of 1000 people. So when you hold that subway car, and people curse at you, or when you prevent them from getting off the train and they barrel right into you, there’s a simple lesson: this is your fault, as much as it would be your fault if you blocked three lanes of the highway so you could get out and look at your map. You’re not necessarily a bad person. You may just be unaware, you may have failed to learn about the city before you came to it, you may have forgotten to keep in mind that you’re inconveniencing a horde of other people. No doubt many of the times this happens, it’s just inconsiderate absentmindedness. That said, it’s still rude. And when someone is rude, they will be treated rudely in return. If you come to this city, and you wonder why everyone is rude to you, what you should be asking yourself is this: What am I doing wrong? In life in general, you will get farther with other people if you do not always blame them for the things that go wrong in your life. Asking yourself what you are doing to produce a certain response from others will take you far in reaching a greater harmony. And in the case of moving through New York City, it’ll help you get a long way on the road to not being rude.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

tips for citizens

new york magazine http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/08/10-nyc-subway-tricks-and-neighborhood-tips-gifs.html

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Calendar for free fun in NYC

check out the book: Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School

The Top 10 Worst Things About Working in a Lab By Adam Ruben January 27, 2012 Sure. That’s why you have no social life. It’s the lab work. I have found that, no matter what the context, I will click on nearly any article with a number and a superlative in the title. I don’t really need to know anything about cheeseburgers that I don’t already know, but call an article “The Eight Best Cheeseburgers You’ve Never Heard Of” or “The Five Largest Cheeseburgers That Appeared in Films,” and suddenly I’ve got a bit of required reading to do. And now, so do you. Maybe you’re an ordinary person, not a scientist (we call you “Non-scis” behind your backs), and you’ve just clicked here for some light lunchtime reading. But if you’re a scientist, perhaps you can relate as we identify … drumroll please … The top 10 worst aspects of working in a lab. 10. Your non-scientist friends don’t understand what you do. Even when talking about their jobs to outsiders, your friends in other professions can summarize their recent accomplishments in understandable ways. For example, they can say, “I built an object,” or “I pleased a client,” or, if your friend works on Wall Street, “I ate a peasant.” But what can you say? “I cured … um, well, I didn’t really cure it, but I discovered … well, ‘discovered’ is too strong a word, so let’s just say I tested … well, the tests are ongoing and are causing new questions to arise, so … yeah. Stop looking at me.” At least you’re doing better than your friends with Ph.D.s in the humanities, who would answer, “I put sheets on my mom’s basement couch.” 9. The scientist who is already the most successful gets credit for everything anyone does. If you discover something, your principal investigator (PI) gets credit. If you write a paper, your PI gets credit. If you submit a successful grant proposal, your PI gets credit (and money). And what do you get? If you’re lucky, you get to write more papers and grant proposals to bolster your PI’s curriculum vitae. 8. Lab equipment is expensive and delicate. And you, you’re not so coordinated. Nope. Not so much. Oops! You could pay to replace this one broken piece, or you could hire another postdoc. 7. Sometimes experiments fail for a reason. Sometimes experiments fail for no reason. As anyone who works in a lab knows, things that work perfectly for months or years can suddenly stop working, offering no explanation for the change. (In this way, lab experiments are like Internet Explorer®.) This abrupt and inexplicable failure changes your work to meta-work, as you stop asking questions about science and start asking questions about the consistency of your technique. You can waste years saying things like, “When I created the sample that worked, I flared my nostril in a weird way. So this week, I’ll try to repeat what I did last week but with more nostrils flarin’!” 6. Your schedule is dictated by intangible things. Freaking cell lines, needing to be tended on a regular basis regardless of your dinner plans. Freaking galaxies visible only in the middle of the night. If it weren’t for your lab work you’d have such a vivacious social life! Sure. That’s why you have no social life. It’s the lab work. 5. Science on television has conditioned you to expect daily or weekly breakthroughs. Have you ever had a breakthrough in the lab? Yeah, me neither. Sure, I’ve had successful experiments, which usually means that the controls worked and no one was injured. But a real, eureka, run-down-the-hallway-carrying-a-printout, burst-into-a-room-full-of-military-personnel-and-call-the-President-even-though-it’s-three-in-the-morning breakthrough? Not yet. Unless you count the programmable coffee maker that, after much cajoling, made decent coffee at the appropriate time. Maybe I should publish that. 4. Your work is dangerous. People say their jobs are killing them, but you work with things that could actually kill you -- things like caustic chemicals, infectious agents, highly electrified instruments, and angry PIs. CREDIT: Hal Mayforth Click image to enlarge 3. Labs are not conducive to sex. Unless you work in a sex lab, which may or may not be a real thing, it’s unlikely you can convince anyone to crawl under your lab bench with you (“Just ignore the discarded pipette tips, baby”) and, as protein biophysicists say, put their zinc fingers in your leucine zipper. But hey, prove me wrong, people. 2. You have to dress like a scientist. When I worked at an amusement park, I had to wear a purple polo shirt tucked into khaki shorts with giant white sneakers, so I suppose things could be worse. But some of our (scientists’) uniform choices are pretty unflattering. Disposable shoe covers look like you stepped in two shower caps. Safety goggles trap humidity as though you’re cultivating a rainforest on your face. And white lab coats with collars and lapels make men look like nerds and women look like men who look like nerds. 1. You can feel time creeping inexorably toward your own death. If you think I’m being melodramatic, you were obviously never a grad student or postdoc. As a grad student or postdoc, you spend longer than you’ve planned working on something less interesting than you’d believed, all while earning less money than you assumed reasonable with an endpoint that’s less tangible and less probable than you thought possible. If this was the kind of article with a “Comments” section, you’d scroll there and see people berating the spoiled scientist for complaining about his work when there are far worse jobs in the world. You’d also see anonymous nastiness, blatant ignorance, and a rant about Ron Paul. Luckily, there is no “Comments” section (thanks, Science!), so I can preemptively tell you that yes, I know there are worse jobs than “scientist” -- “baby thrower,” for example, or “cow exploder.” But this is Science, so if you want to read about the top 10 worst aspects of being a cow exploder, go borrow a copy of Cow Exploder Digest. And wash your hands after reading it. And yes, I know that there are great aspects of working in a lab as well. You get to work with your hands. You experience the beauty of a well-designed experiment. You can even ask questions about the universe and, occasionally, answer them. But since these last points were neither in list format nor preceded by an overreaching superlative, I’ll understand if you’ve already stopped reading. Adam Ruben, Ph.D., is a practicing scientist and the author of Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School. 10.1126/science.caredit.a1200012

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Speakeasy bars in NYC and rooftops with a great view

Fig. 19 is a secret one room Cocktail Bar, behind an art gallery entry revealing a cozy, chandelier-lit hideaway spotlighting craft cocktails. Address: 131 Chrystie St, New York, NY 10002, USA
Next to Fig.19, better to said under it, you can also check out "Home sweet home" more like an "under" bar with pop/hiphop music and a vintage lounge look.

Bathtub Gin Bar, New York Eighty years ago, America's short-lived flirtation with a ban on alcohol came to an end. With no Prohibition, gone was the thrill of secret passwords, false storefronts and a bit of lawlessness. But in the last decade, New York has enjoyed a harkening back to those days of excess – unmarked bars on streets that deviate from the gridiron and stiff cocktails prepared into the late hours. Bars like PDT (Please Don't Tell) which is accessed through a vintage phone booth in an East Village hot dog joint, and the Campbell Apartment, a former mogul's office with towering stained-glass windows and an enormous fireplace in Grand Central station, are well-known despite their 'secret' entrances, but there are other equally glam, more under-the-radar bars. For your own taste of Jazz Age New York, here are a series of gin joints and back-alley speakeasies celebrating the underground culture of the 1920s.

Apotheke, New York Sundown on Doyers Street, you can hear the wind whistle it's so empty. Pass the signs for foot-rub storefronts and the smells of pungent fish markets and you might end up at the barely marked door of Apotheke, a former Chinatown opium den. It's a cure-all for the well-worn soul: order a "Pain Killer", such as Mezcal Mayan Summer, or a "Euphoric Enhancer", such as the Rum Opium Uplifter. Over 250 speciality cocktails (most in the range of $14-16) are prescribed from the bar. Ask the waiting staff and they might tell you about the house absinthe, made from a secret 200-year-old recipe with fermented sugarcane juice. There's a weekly line-up of live music on Mondays, Tuesdays and Sundays. "Prohibition Wednesdays" feature a house jazz band and require a password for entrance (follow @apothekenyc on Twitter for the month's equivalent of "open sesame"). • 9 Doyers St, +1 212 406 0400, apothekenyc.com. Mon-Sat 6.30pm-2am, Sun 8pm-2am

The Raines Law Room, West 17th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in the Flatiron District is the kind of New York street you walk by without paying much attention. But if you notice a black door at the bottom of some subterranean stairs, ring the doorbell – someone will be right with you. The Raines Law Room is named after an 1896 New York State law prohibiting the sale of alcohol on Sundays … except in hotels. The idea was to stop workmen from spending their days off in a saloon-stool stupor. But this is New York; if there's a loophole, there's a way. Saloons added makeshift rooms to qualify as hotels (rampant prostitution, of course, following soon after). Today, cocktails provide a more licit thrill. Take a seat in your train compartment-like room and tug the pull-chain for the waiting staff to take your order. Make it a Mamie Taylor ($14), a classic whiskey concoction. And while you wait, look closely at the wallpaper, which provides a twist on the ubiquitous damask in most modern speakeasies. • 48 W 17th St, raineslawroom.com. Mon-Thur 5pm-2am, Fri 5pm-3am, Sun 8pm-1am

The Richardson, New York In 1920, the 18th Amendment theoretically turned New York into a dry town, but authorities who enjoyed a nip themselves quickly turned a blind eye to drinking establishments. So rather than password-protected peepholes, bars often opened their doors and poured without fear or pretence. The Richardson echoes the feel of those forebears. The capably poured cocktails are reasonably priced ($9-11), the snacks are spot on (devilled eggs for $5; a "beer drinker's plate" of pretzels, pickles, and cheddar for $8), and a laid-back crowd of locals who aren't looking to see or be seen. • 451 Graham Ave, Brooklyn, +1 718 389 0839, therichardsonnyc.com. Open daily 12pm-4am

Angel's Share, New York Long before absinthe spoons, hand-cracked ice and tight-vested mixologists found new life in the NYC bar scene, Angel's Share was speakeasy-cool. The owners and managers of trend-setting bars like Milk & Honey and PDT freely pay homage to this East Village staple that opened in the mid 1990s. Make your way through a Japanese comfort food joint and head upstairs for delicious drinks and a view of the scuttling street below. Maybe it's the jazz, maybe it's the Suntory whiskey cocktails ($15-16), but this is Prohibition with a Tokyo-noir twist. Angel's Share is perfect for couples – no standing and no parties greater than four admitted. • 8 Stuyvesant St,+1 212 777 5415. Sun-Wed 6pm-1.30am, Thu 6pm-2am, Fri-Sat 6pm-2.30am

Death and Company, New York Death + Company's ominous entrance. Cocktails were popularised in the 1920s when speakeasy patrons needed something sweet to make the bathtub gin go down a little easier. Concoctions involving lemon juice, simple syrup and anything fizzy were basic, but did the trick. These days cocktail experts at Death + Company have nothing to disguise. Their craft spirits could no doubt stand on their own, but why leave a liquor lonely? A drink like the Javanese Daiquiri ($14) packs enough rum to satisfy a privateer, but the addition of a lime cordial and fresh curry leaves transforms it into a drink to savour. The bar doesn't accept reservations and operates on a first-come, first-served basis. If the place is full, however, they'll take your number and call when room becomes available. Waiting time on a recent Monday night was about 20-30 minutes. • 433 E 6th St, +1 212 388 0882, Sun-Thu 6pm-1am, Fri-Sat 6pm-2am

Manderley Bar at the McKittrick Hotel
An invitation to Please Don't Tell at the McKittrick Hotel An invitation to Sleep No More, the Punchdrunk show at the McKittrick Hotel. The Manderley Bar first rose to prominence as the pre-show departure point and post-show decompression zone for the sensationally immersive 2011 theatre production Sleep No More. These days you can enjoy a cocktail and a musical act whether or not you've attended the evening's main performance. With an abundance of red velvet and some help from literal smoke and mirrors, the environs handily recreate the feel of a Jazz Age venue. Manderley regulars the Candy Shop Boys, featuring chanteuse Sophia Urista, perform tunes that were hot back in the 1920s and continue to sizzle. • 532 W 27th St, manderleybar.com . Sun-Thu doors open at 10pm, Fri-Sat doors open at 2am

Bathtub Gin bar, New York The back wall inside the Stone Street Coffee Company pulls out: a trick door opening to Bathtub Gin, a hopping Chelsea gin joint harkening back to the days of false store fronts. Since there's no hooch steeping in any tubs, order a round of the good stuff (gin shaken, stirred, or on the rocks). There is a copper bathtub in the middle of the place, and you're welcome to hop in if the spirit moves you. The Martinez ($14) is nice and stiff (made with junipero gin, dolin rouge, maraschino liqueur, bokers bitters and lemon oils). Raise a glass to the end of prohibition. • 132 Ninth Ave. +1 646 559 1671, bathtubginnyc.com. Sun-Wed 6pm-2am, Thu-Sat 6pm-4am

Hotel Delmano, New York in Williamsburg needs no password (and, for those in the area, no introduction, as it was one of the early joints to kick start the speakeasies' return). The ceilings are high and big shop windows let in the setting sun, dappled light bouncing from bar mirror to whiskey bottle to cocktail glass. The cops aren't breaking this party up. But you come for the old-timey feel. At the marble topped bar, ask for an Old Fashioned or one of the bartender's speciality concoctions (drinks range between $9-14). This is a social club, so order oysters or a cheese board to share in one of the two rooms in the back. And while you can't actually spend the night, it's a fine place to linger until last call. • 82 Berry St, Brooklyn, +1 718 387 1945, hoteldelmano.com. Mon-Thu 5pm-1.30am, Fri 5pm-2.30am, Sat 2pm-2.30am, Sun 2pm-1.30am •



124 Old Rabbit Club 124 MacDougal St, New York, NY 10012 Though the vibe is more punk rock than prohibition (the owner once managed CBGB), Rabbit is a speakeasy in the truest sense, a secretive escape from the accepted norms of frat-heavy Greenwich Village. Descend the stairs beneath the number “124” and ring the buzzer. Rabbit is a beer-lover’s speakeasy, with an impressive list of rare European imports and American crafts. Take a date who appreciates beer and ask the expert behind the bar for recommendations.



Back Room 102 Norfolk St., New York, NY 10002 Down a dark subterranean alley in the Lower East Side you’ll find a warm living room of plush velvet chairs where the cocktails are served in teacups and beers hidden in brown paper bags. Towering paintings of voluptuous maidens look down on the bi-level space. Go on a weeknight and find a pair of chairs in the back by the fireplace for an illicitly romantic evening. On Mondays Svetlana & The Delancey Five
play swing and jazz.

Please don't tell. PDT. Call in advance to reserve your place, then enter through a phone booth in Crif Dogs, next door sip novel cocktails in a dark space.
Address: 113 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009, USA
Opens 6PM
Menu: places.singleplatform.com
Phone: +1 212-614-0386


Rooftops:
Rooftop Season, that is. So, come on up for cocktails under the stars…

Le Bain in the Standar hotel. ( mandatory visit tot he restrooms :), you are welcome) 13th st and 11 th av.


Rare view. With outside flat-screens, summer cocktails, DJ's & those stunning 360-degree NYC Views, Summertime at RARE View is one for the books. 303 Lexington Ave, Manhattan, NY 10016

The Kimberly hotel, for a classy romantic night. 145 E 50th St, New York, NY 10022


Ava Lounge. You’ll need to make yourself presentable to gain entry to the roof terrace of the Dream Hotel—no hats, sneakers or ripped jeans here; you’d only ruin the chic, palm-tree-studded decor. Come for sunset and gaze at the neon dream of Times Square. 210 W 55th St between Broadway and Seventh Ave

Empire hotel. with live jazz music, in front of the Lincoln center.