Every year, the West Village's Perry Street Block Association throws an open-air block party, which is more of a down-at-the-heels flea market that a peddler of tube socks and mozzarepa cakes. If you're looking to equip a kitchen with half-broken housewares from the 1960s, this is your place. Here are some of the best and worst potential purchases Fork in the Road found this year, most of them in a foodistic vein.

Although not much celebrated in Mexico, Cinco de Mayo is a holiday that commemorates an 1862 victory of Mexico over France at the Battle of Puebla. In New York City, the recently hyped holiday commemorates the importation of inexpensive tequila to the United States. And expensive tequila, too, come to think of it. With one of the city's greatest concentration of Mexican resetaurants, the West Village is the site of severe thronging on the holiday. Restaurateurs rejoice; residents try to get some sleep by putting their pillows over their heads. Here are some West Village Cinco de Mayo scenes.

I went to the Mets' third game of the season, versus the Atlanta Braves, yesterday afternoon. The baseball was entertaining (Mets won 7-5, after almost blowing a seven-run lead late in the game), but what blew me away was the food.

In the last 10 years or so, lots of subway stations have been revamped, many with mosaics intended to reflect some associations with what's above the station on the street. Some of these motifs involve food and entertainment -- there are fish in the Delancey Street station, for example, and New Year's revelers at the Times Square stop. Somewhat more inscrutable are the coffee cups and slippers in the 59th Street express stop on the IRT and BMT lines.

National burger chains are flying into town and running up their numbers so fast we can't keep up with them. One of the latest to arrive -- along with Smashburger, Fatburger (which tried twice in the last two decades, failed, and is trying again), and Five Guys (which had a big head start) -- is Cheeburger Cheeburger.

With all the rain and general dampness, It's been the best year in memory for hunting wild mushrooms upstate and in the fungus-friendly areas of New England. Not only are the varieties more profuse, but the specimens are bigger -- even reaching humongous in some cases.

People without imagination find the last day of summer on Labor Day, when they lament the return to the routine of school, or the last summer-hour schedules at work. More poetic souls see signs in the first day you put on a jacket in the morning, the minute pumpkins arrive in the farmers' markets, or when the first leaf on the gingko right in front of your tenement window turns from dark green to pale yellow.

Call it what you will, a Secretly Temporary Restaurant (STP) or maybe a Pop-Down, but the disappearance of Imperial Woodpecker Sno-Balls at this juncture in time -- after the shank of the summer, but before Indian summer furnishes a sweltering late September and early October -- makes us think "conspiracy."

Though its antecedents can be traced to Carnival parties in Harlem in the 1920s, the Caribbean-American Labor Day Parade (there is no official name) began in the mid-'60s. It resembles in almost all respects the Mardi-Gras celebrations held in New Orleans and Trinidad, which occur 40 days before Easter, at the beginning of Lent in the Christian calendar.