Twittering Through American History
Posted on 17. May, 2009 by Ben Fractenberg in Offbeat
By Ben Fractenberg
“The British are coming! OMG! Wake up the militia! Sound the church bells! Update your Facebook status!”
Amid the flutter over Twitter, it’s a reasonable question: What if people had been Tweeting for the past 300 years? How differently might we have experienced American history? What could be said about the American character in 140 characters?
Snickering at Puns: A Rewording Experience
Posted on 15. May, 2009 by Sergey Kadinsky in Offbeat
By Sergey Kadinsky
“Would you like to save cold cash on heating bills?”
“Dogs who drink bottled water prefer Scottish Perrier.”
“Nudist colonies are usually clothed until May.”
Yes, those puns were intended. Did you groan? If you had come up with them, would you have said, “No pun intended,” beforehand?
Fortune Tellers Talking Money, Not Love
Posted on 22. Apr, 2009 by Damiano Beltrami in Business & Economics, Offbeat
Eileen Rivera, a 24-year-old receptionist from Long Island, is a longtime believer in fortune telling. But lately she has changed her questions.
“My focus used to be 90 per cent love and relationships and 10 per cent economical,” Rivera said. “Now it’s about 20 per cent love and relationships and 80 per cent economical.”
Rivera’s fortuneteller Karin Marcello, 29, also from Long Island, says that this switch in interest from love to money is a growing trend among her eclectic clientele, which includes top managers, cashiers and lap dancers. (more…)
A Hazy Haven (Hack, Hack) of Legal Smoking
Posted on 20. Apr, 2009 by Lois DeSocio in Offbeat, Travel
By Lois DeSocio
When people hang out at Hudson Bar and Books in Manhattan, they’re not flipping pages—they’re flicking ashes. It’s a place where the non-smokers are milling around outside the front door as they decide if a face-full of tobacco smoke is worth a step inside a place where smokers rule.
“Is this legal?” a passerby yells from the street outside the front door of this Greenwich Village cigar bar on a recent Saturday evening.
Six years after Mayor Bloomberg’s statewide anti-smoking law took effect, the patrons of Hudson Bar and Books puff away in a perpetual haze of toxic smoke. It’s one of a handful of cigar bars left in Manhattan under a “grandfather” clause that protected cigar bars that opened before December 31, 2001.
