Welcome to Big Apple Blog Festival (BABF), a representative roundup of this week’s posts by NYC bloggers.
NY blog party on Friday, September 30, 2005 … Evite here …

• dailyheights.com, in “Call 311, Get a Fine” … reprints a report from Dr. F … “A few weeks ago we called 311 because rats are nesting in our front yard … and then a few weeks later we got a citation in the mail from the Department of Health claiming that we had a garbage situation which violated the health code, causing the rat problem. The problem … was the apartment building next door …” …
• Jolie in NYC has tips if you want to get into the fashion biz … “How Do I Break Into the Industry?” …
• Dead Programmer’s Cafe bought a 13-year old can of “New Coke” on eBay … “decade old New Coke _did_ taste a bit like Diet Coke With Splenda.” …
• jewschool has an “Anatomy Of An Air Strike” … and has a brief review of a Yiddish “Pirates of Penzance, Di Yam Gazlonim, at the 92nd St. Y” …
• Harleys, Cars, Girls & Guitars discusses “Marketing to Women Riders” … “Eleven percent of all Harley riders are now women.” …
• A Guy In New York had his weekly roundup of NYC restaurant reviews … “This Week in Reviews – September 23, 2005” …
• gothamist, in “Faulty Tours?” comments on the Daily News article “Takin’ tourists for a ride: News puts city’s tourist guides to the truth test – and guess what?” … “to be fair the News doesn’t quite take into account just how difficult it can be to jabber on for three hours and not make a mistake or two” …
• Third Avenue attended opening night of The Met … “Metropolitan Opera – opening gala night” … and we love this description of NYC weather: “Summer clings on to New York. September is on the wane, yet the temperatures still think it’s July. Every afternoon the thermometer climbs to 30C and beyond, and refuses to dip below 20C at night. Autumn waits in the wings, like an impatient tenor waiting for the self-obsessed soprano to finally stop taking curtain calls.” …
• Manhattan User’s Guide has an interesting roundup of web sites in “Hump Day” … we liked … Ukrainian Bus Shelters … World Beard Championships …
• A Stitch in Haste has some thoughts on China … “‘China is Still a Dictatorship’ Fact of the Day” …
• NYC Metblog links to the TranStrap … “a company selling these personal straps you carry with you to attach to the subway bars so you don’t have to touch them.” …
• The Wonkster … “Public Toilets Hooray — Maybe” …
• LittleViews on New York City lists 4 places where you can try small samples of many different beers … “Beer Tasting at New York City’s Microbreweries”
• The Urban Grind is one-year old …
• greg.org gave us the link to the NYT piece on the floating “Gate” chasing the floating “Central Park” … “Water, Gate” …
• The New SteveSilver.net links to a site “posting free versions of NYT op-ed columns” …
• the dawn patrol comments on an article in The Telegraph of London “that women are trying to get pregnant via in vitro fertilization because they don’t want to do it the old-fashioned way” … “I look at the practicing Catholic families I know, and say what you will, no doctor warns them that they’re missing out on sex.” …
• Stay Free! proposes a new unit of measurement … the Walt … “the Walt Scale of Crass Commercialization.” .. we’ll just call it Walts, as in “Disney World is 100 Walts, Isle Royale National Park is 0 Walts” …
• ForgottenNY is running a Katrina Relief Tour Saturday, October 2, 2005, … donating all proceeds to the Red Cross … and has a new page up about Sunnyside, in Queens …
• The Apiary says check out the New York Musical Theatre Festival site … “They give you a chance to say ‘I saw that when…’ and most notably you get to see future Broadway hits for CHEAP CHEAP ticket prices.” … sounds good to us frugal types …
• BounceFM has news about “Benefit for MusiCares Hurricane Relief Fund and North Shore Animal League Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescue Fund” … Sunday, October 2, 2005 …
• rion.nu published a photographic “Ode to Summer’s End” …
• anguswit cites a report showing … “Hartford, CT, is actually poorer than New Orleans” …
• liberteaser “thought it would be entertaining to check out some psychic predictions about the 2005 hurricane season, and compare them to what we’ve seen.” … we like the other questions, too: “why aren’t you rich enough that you don’t have to peddle your abilities in this strip mall, and why do you let so many people die in events like Katrina and 9/11?” …
• express train has a photo of a “human avalanche” in a subway station …
• Englishman in New York says “all information—from the New York Times to BoingBoing—should be treated as suspect. It’s called weighing information; making your own decisions; having a brain.” …
• mister snitch! links to a report on the “startlingly similar images of a library in Dublin and Star Wars’ Jedi Archives.”
• NewYorkology reports that “Carnival Cruise Lines’ Oriana docked at Red Hook’s Pier 11 this morning [Sept. 24, 2005], making it the first ship to dock at the future home of Brooklyn’s Cruise Ship Terminal, which is expected to open in April 2006.” …
• A small victory went to a classic car show at Point Lookout … “when you look at cars as a works of art rather than just a machine that gets you from A to B, you see them in a totally different way” … links to 37 pics …
• Ace of Spades also went to a vehicle show, “Weekend Geek Confession” … “Rochester Robot Rampage, sponsored by the Battlebots folks. Two days of robot carnage.” …

Listed on the ÜberCarnival page and in Carnival News.
If you have a NYC blog and want to see something in the next BABF … or you have a NYC blog and would like to host an upcoming BABF … send us a short write up and a permalink to aguyinnewyork [at] gmail.com … see you next week …
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