“Pee all you can pee with Airpnp”

March 9, 2014 By Comments

When you gotta go, you gotta go- and now there is an app for that. Airpnp to the rescue! Similar to the travel rental website, residents and businesses can rent out bathrooms for public use, and patrons can then rate their commode experience.
The founders started the app as a way to prevent “rogue pee” during Mardi Gras this year, but it quickly caught on all over the world, with 208 toilet hosts in Europe. There are only four locations currently in NYC, one right here in Williamsburg. For a mere $5, you can visit a stranger’s W.C. at 167 N 6th Street!

 

Here’s the ad:

toilet2

Drop a load in our humble abode

We’ve got an excellent throne for your tush and its ready for use! You can rest assured it will be a holy matrimony because our apartment is in a reclaimed rectory in Williamsburg. Only three floors to walk up to take your caca. So park your fixie and rock your brightest flannel as you drop the kids off in our communal pool. We’ve even got free nail clippers!

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Urban sweat lodge and spa offering $150 toxic garbage facials from Newtown Creek

March 7, 2014 By 1 Comment

Have you ever wanted to slather poisonous, chemical-laced sludge all over your face and body? How does running an obstacle course made of jagged, sharp old car parts (“curated by some of Brooklyn’s best makers”) sound to you? Maybe you’d like to sit in a teepee made of old garbage and inhale the noxious fumes generated by burning whatever shit we’ve been dumping in one of America’s worst superfund sites for the previous century. Well, now you can! [Read more...]

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Spiderman with yellow cock removed from Bedford Avenue

March 7, 2014 By Comments
spidey-cock

Spidey with his yellow cock, via

With great dildo comes great outrage:

This Spider-Man figure, with dangling rubber penis, showed up on wire crossing the middle of Bedford Avenue at North 6th Street in Williamsburg at least six weeks ago.

The superhero and his friend were dangling about 15 feet in the air — too high to reach, but low enough to give an uncomfortably clear view to people crossing one of the neighborhood’s busiest intersections.

“There’s no art to this thing at all,” said John Sexton, 60, who passed the spectacle on his way to the L train earlier Thursday. “It’s just vulgar, and that’s all there is to it.”

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Oddly, the Daily News censored their image: [Read more...]

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Girl bus tour may be coming to Greenpoint, Williamsburg, and Bushwick

March 6, 2014 By 2 Comments

girls-bus-tour

This is just what Brooklyn needs! More tourists. Ugh. They should just shuttle them off to Brooklyn Heights:

The circuit would focus on everything from Greenpoint’s coffee outpost Café Grumpy, where Lena Dunham’s character Hannah Horvath once slung lattes, to a Bushwick warehouse where Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet) accidentally smokes crack.

But don’t expect a glitzy romp through the West Village to Sex and the City staple Magnolia Bakery, or past the Condé Nast building where Carrie Bradshaw once penned articles for Vogue, on a “Girls” tour — much of the hit show takes place far away from the bright lights of the big city. [Read more...]

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L Train signs at Metropolitan/Lorimer accidentally switched

March 6, 2014 By Comments

l switch

Look closely at the picture above. Notice anything…out of place? That’s the passage leading to the L train in the Metropolitan/Lorimer subway stop in Williamsburg. Most of us don’t need the signs telling us which train goes to Manhattan and which one barrels out into Canarsie.

Some people do need those signs, however, which is why it’s notable that they’re switched in the picture. The left passage actually leads to the Manhattan-bound track, and the right to Brooklyn. Who switched them? Unclear, but it caused some commuter consternation. According to the observant photographer, Astrid Anderson:

I took the train at 830 AM, but I think it was up until the late afternoon. I went to the actual Manhattan side and waited for the train. Everyone was looking extremely confused. When the train came on my side, a bunch of people on the other side started freaking out and tried to run back to the other side.
My friend took another photo around 4 PM & someone had simple stuck a post-it on one sign saying “this is wrong”.

Here’s Astrid’s friend’s photo with the post-it note:

wrong

The signs were fixed as of Tuesday evening.

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Listen to the new Mac DeMarco single: ‘Brother’

March 6, 2014 By Comments

mac-demarco-salad-daysHis new record Salad Days is out, appropriately, on April Fools’ Day. Check out the second single below:

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The Hipster Music Index: someone finally scientifically quantified which bands are hip

March 5, 2014 By 2 Comments

hipster-chart

Someone’s crunched the numbers! Now we know which bands we should be into and which ones are too popular to be hip. Who knew Boards of Canada was for the bros?

So, the first scientific criterion for identifying a hipster band is that Pitchfork likes them. Pitchfork reviewers like a lot of mainstream music, however, so that’s not enough. The second criterion is that not many people should like that band. The music must be obscure so that people can say, “My favorite band is X, you’ve probably never heard of them.”

To measure obscurity, we looked at the number of Facebook likes the Pitchfork review received. All else being equal, we expected a hipster band to get fewer Facebook shares than a non-hipster band with the same score.

For a given Pitchfork Review Score, the trend line uses a linear regression to predict how many Facebook likes you’d expect the album to receive given its critical acclaim.

By our criteria, the further below the line a blue dot is, the more hipster the band. (It’s high quality but obscure.) Dots above the line represent more mainstream (not hipster) bands.

See the full breakdown, band by band, below: [Read more...]

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Bushwick apartments set for development in converted church

March 5, 2014 By Comments
St. Mark's Evangelical Lutheran Church on Jefferson Street (2011). Credit: Heather Hartshorn

St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church on Jefferson Street (2011). Credit: Heather Hartshorn

In more real estate news, Cayuga Capital, the management company of several neighborhood residential buildings, including 44 Berry Street, acquired permits to begin transforming the former St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church into 99 rental apartments and a parking lot. The company purchased the property in 2012, and was originally denied permission to build. The church originally opened in 1892, and was designed by architect Theobald M. Engelhardt.

More from Brownstoner:

New permits have been issued at 626-628 Bushwick Avenue, the former St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church and school, pictured above, to convert the property into 99 rental apartments by developer Cayuga Capital. An Alt-1 permit to convert it to residential apartments was filed in February 2012 and disapproved the following month. There is a partial vacate order in effect on the property.

But a new permit using the address 616 Bushwick Avenue was granted in November. The three-story church will be turned into a four-story one, although the height will remain the same. There will also be horizontal additions, according to the permit.

A one-story scaffold that had covered the front of the buildings for years came down in 2012. In August, a new permit to erect scaffolding was granted, and now netting and pipe scaffolding covers the church all the way to the top of the steeple.

In October, Cayuga put a 90 percent interest stake in seven Bushwick properties on the market for $14,000,000 through MNS to raise funds to complete the Bushwick Avenue conversion, as we reportedat the time. The school and church were designed by architect Theobald M. Engelhardt and completed in 1885 and 1892, respectively. The church space has also been used for parties and a movie set. Click through to the jump to see the church in its scaffolding shroud.

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