I’m broke. And, like a lot of people in New York, one reason I'm broke is because I sink a lot of money into my iPhone. So when I heard about the recently launched and revamped Gigwalk, the app that lets you make extra money by using your iPhone to find odd jobs that businesses need doing, I jumped at the chance to be a guinea pig. Basically, you open the app, tap the red dots around you on the map and do a small job for a few dollars. There are tons of these red dots all over the city, and most consist of just taking photos. Submitted gigs earn you “streetcred," or Gigwalk karma points. The more streetcred you have, the more those map dots pay. The app keeps track of what you earned, and you collect the money through PayPal. It sounded easy enough, so I set out to see if you could make enough on Gigwalk to have a solid supplement to a too-small paycheck. READ MORE

If you are concerned about the forecast that nearly half of the population will be obese by the year 2030, do not fret: By the year 2030 nearly half of the population will be dead, and the survivors will be so thin that the concept of obesity will become some kind of folk memory, a mythical story of an era almost impossible to conceive of, in which restaurants (another concept that will be difficult to grasp) competed against each other to see who could create the most calorie-laden gimmick sandwiches. Children's fever dreams of fried chicken used as bread will be so vivid and disturbing that they will fall out of the trees in which they are forced to sleep for protection from the fires below. So chins up, everyone, the obesity epidemic is not going to happen.

At the beginning of this month I spent about a week and a half of improbably beautiful, sunny, breezy, vacationing-in-New-York days huddled over my laptop in a borrowed apartment, hitting “refresh” over and over again. I would wake up in the mornings and instinctively reach for the phone (kept next to my pillow) and check my email to see whether anything had changed. I often didn’t shower until 3 or 4 p.m. I survived, largely, on coffee, and I slept at most a few hours a night. I didn’t read the news or even watch television except for that one night the stupor was so thick that I managed to get through four episodes of "True Blood" without actually suffering a brain hemorrhage brought on by excruciating dialogue. This, if I recall correctly, was what having a full-time, soul-destroying corporate lawyer job was like. But this past month I was not working. I was not getting paid. I was just trying to find a place to live in New York this September, in a rising market where the vacancy rate in July was well under 1%.

The wrinkle was that I was trying to do it without paying a broker’s fee. I have rented five apartments in the city, in three different boroughs, and not once have I paid a broker. It’s become a point of pride for me, though this time around I could have been accused of carrying the strength of my conviction to the point of lunacy. I certainly scraped up against the edge of it in August. READ MORE

"Tropical Storm Irene moved through New York City on Sunday knocking out power, causing flooding in some neighborhoods and knocking over many trees. In one corner of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, the storm also set off a fight — over bees. In a gale wind from the storm, a hollowed-out branch of an enormous tree was ripped off, exposing a hive of 30,000 to 40,000 honeybees. The hive’s discovery was a jackpot for the beekeeping community and word spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter that a feral hive was up for grabs. Two beekeepers jumped at the chance to claim the bees, unknowingly setting off a feud between two of the city’s main beekeeping groups."
—Of course it did.

The first in a series on collaborations that we now take for granted but initially made little sense.

Fans of David Lynch are accustomed, by now, to the half-decade wait. It took five years after Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me unjustly bombed out of theaters in 1992 before we received Lost Highway. Later, once Mulholland Drive completed its strange, tortured path to realization—from stillborn network teevee pilot for ABC to a New York Film Festival premiere!—Lynch’s IMDB page indulged another similar gap when it came to feature-length projects. That streak of inactivity was only broken when INLAND EMPIRE smeared its digital abstractions and idiosyncratic willfulness (all-caps title included) across screens on the festival circuit.

Now we’re five years on since that work—and we haven’t heard a whisper of a rumor about a new film. READ MORE

"Tuesday’s discovery marks the eighth foot to be found on the B.C. coast since August 2007. Three more have washed up in nearby Washington.... All of the feet discovered so far have been in running shoes."
—But who are missing the feet? Yeah, here's the Wikipedia page, Encyclopedia Brown. (via)

"Giant Pandas are well-loved for their distinctive appearance and sedentary nature. Now they will receive even greater adoration and attention for their bowel-based contribution to the development of a clean energy future. In a national meeting at the American Chemical Society, researchers presented a study identifying panda poop as a source of enzyme-producing bacteria that breaks down plant materials in a way that is useful for biofuel production." [Via]

Photo by Hung Chung Chih, via Shutterstock