34

The following three songs were the soundtrack to my morning commute, in random shuffled iPod order: Snow, "Informer" Salt and Pepa, "Shoop" Bel Biv Devoe, "Do Me" My 7th grade spirit is hovering over me today, apparently.

Gothamist posted someone's High Dynamic Range image of Brooklyn Heights , and it's very striking. You can see my office in the background all the way on the left, with the lamppost in the foreground. A good deal of the Brooklyn Heights waterfront is owned by the Mirer family. I don't fully understand the concept of High Dynamic Range imaging, and the Wikipedia article is a bit too heavy on digit imaging terminology to be illuminating (or luminescent, or whatever). Flickr's full of more HDR images (6000+ at last count). They range from the highly stylized to the semi-stylized to the not-that-stylized , and then 6000 more in between. I used to play around with KPT Bryce back in the day–it was one of the few things that could tax the PowerPC chip on my then state-of-the-art PowerMac 6100. I've always had a copy of Photoshop and would play with the filters and color adjustments as well, even if I was never the most qualified to do so. I'm very close to taking ...

I've been going to the donut shop on 86th & Lexington for four years now (and blogging about it, frequently , for almost three ), though my visits have tailed off since Ryan and Sarahs moved out of the Upper East Side. The last donut I had there was a glazed marble, with Sheryl, and as it turns out it's the last donut I'll ever eat there. Blognut broke the story : Old Fashioned Donuts has closed . This comes just about a week after news of the West End's demise , which, if the Spec is to be believed , might not be the end of the world.

Deborah Solomon (so dumb that she persistently misspells her own name) is an easy target for ridicule . And rightfully so. This week's Times magazine Q & A was with George Saunders, and here are the highlights: But some product names double as verbs. Like Bounce. Or Shout, the stain remover. Or Pampers. What about Swiffers? That sounds like a verb. What are Swiffers? I like how Deborah qualifies Shout as "the stain remover" (Shout? The hearing aid?) and has no idea what a Swiffer is. That's just darling. Kudos for knowing her parts of speech, though. It's true that "The Brady Bunch" creates its own imaginative universe, somewhat like fiction or any art form. You cannot say that about today's reality shows. She obviously isn't familiar with America's Next Top Model , which is set in an imaginative universe in which unattractive people are told they're a few applications of Cover Girl away from being a supermodel. These days you...

I remember when I became a food writing junkie. I picked up The Best of Food Writing 2001 at the Coop in Harvard Square because it had a pretty, colorful cover and hey, I like food. I remember cozing up with a cup of chai at Diesel Café and closing the place down that evening, because goddamn, that was interesting stuff. Home cooking gone bad (and good), restaurant critics reviewing gourmet meals, stories of recipes passed between generations…I learned the obvious that day – food brings out the warmth and love in people. You can tell a life through its meals. Four more compilations and a bookshelf of Jeffrey Steingarten, Ruth Reichl, (the much hated) Amanda Hesser, Anthony Bourdain, and Calvin Trillin later, I’m pretty much obsessed. So I was excited when I heard about the book based on the Julie/Julia Project. What I knew: A woman in Long Island City named Julie Powell had decided to cook her way through Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking , all 524 recipes, in one year...

Apparently I'm not the only one who can't grok CAPTCHAs : KittenAuth has arrived!

The Amateur Gourmet is my favorite food blog. ( Eat, Drink and Be Miriam being my favorite food blog written by someone who used to page me at 1am to sort of font issues.) I used to like Cooking for Engineers , mainly because of its innovative recipe card format , but there haven't been many posts recently (shame on them!) and the site was recently redesigned for the worse. Blognut is the blog about donuts. A Hamburger Today is the blog about hamburgers. While A Hamburger Today has blogged about my favorite New York burgers (and my second favorite ), Blognut has yet to blog about the best donuts to be had in the metro area.

The "web update" that the Spec published on April 1 about the West End closing seemed a bit too obvious as an April Fool's article; didn't we run something along those lines in our April Fool's issue? But when there's another article in today's edition, you have to wonder whether the current Managing Board really knows how to sell a joke or whether the West End's proprietress really knows how to sell a belovèd institution. I've got to go to work now, but I thought those who hadn't seen the news should know...