EV Grieve's Twitter pic.

Today is a special day. One of our favorite neighborhood blogs (and Village Voice Web Awards judge), the excellent EV Grieve, turns four today. We've seen other local blogs come and go, but Grieve has stuck around and become an indispensable source for anyone interested in the rapidly changing East Village. We read the site every day and it's led us to some of our favorite local stories.

On the blog today, Grieve explains how the sausage gets made:

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Fox 17 Morning News in Grand Rapids, Michigan looks like a fun place to work. In the above clip, the camera operator swings to the anchor desk about 20 seconds too early. Instead of freaking out, Tamara Johnson finishes her report and Anchor Mike Avery smiles and waves at the misguided camera. People have reacted worse to technical difficulties before.

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A local blog that we like, Bushwick-centered Bushwick BK, has come to an end after years on the neighborhood blogging scene. Its editor Jeremy Sapienza posted a letter explaining his decision to end the site yesterday:

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via @Newyorkist

The above picture is via Newyorkist and it was tweeted with the accompanying message, "The Village Voice has been occupied." Does a single copy of The Occupied Wall Street Journal in one of our boxes count as a full-fledged occupation? That's not rhetorical, we really aren't sure.

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We've long wondered about the dapper gentlemen we always see on our way to and from Voice Headquarters, standing outside the gentrified hotels of the Bowery. What must they think? What must they see? We took to the streets to ask a few questions of the bellmen of the Cooper Square Hotel and the Bowery Hotel. Due to some job security related issues, they decided to keep it anonymous.

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Our man Randy Cohen

It's been six months since the New York Times Magazine replaced Randy Cohen, the four-time Emmy Award winner who wrote the Ethicist column for 12 years and made the rounds as a congenial moral-principle purveyor everywhere from NPR to Oprah. Since his winter departure, the former Letterman writer has been trying to develop A Question of Ethics, a call-in audio show of "moral advice without a lot of damn moralizing." The long-term goal appears to be shaping the project into something public radio would sponsor, but in the short-term, Cohen's taken to crowdsourced-fundraising site Kickstarter in the hopes of financing a kind of radio-show demo, three-months' worth of weekly 10-minute podcasts.

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Longshot Magazine, the insane attempt to put together a glossy magazine from start to finish in 48 hours over a single weekend (undertaken, obviously, by masochists who don't spend their weeks the same way we do), just announced the theme for their new issue: debt.

Per their email a few minutes ago, "Debt is the condition of owing. It can be bad; ask anyone with too much credit card debt. But it can be good, too, like when Public Enemy sampled Isaac Hayes on 'Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos' or when you got your mother's curly hair. It's the other side of credit."

How can you participate, if you have so little debt you can afford to spend tomorrow working for free?

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ANIMAL New York's Bucky Turco is taking a stand against the apparently rampant ripping-off of local blog stories by the New York Post. In a post today, Turco explains how a reporter from the Post basically out-and-out copied sections of an ANIMAL post about the mural on Bowery and Houston. It's pretty bad.

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Crazy kids!

NYU, apparently, feels bad about something. Direct from the Office of Community Standards and Compliance and the Office of Residential Life & Housing Services, there is this e-mail, sent today, entitled "Respecting our NYC neighbors," which alludes to "reports of incidents in which New York University resident students have failed to embrace their inherent civic responsibility." Knocking over garbage containers and public intoxication? Sounds like someone was Lokoed!

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This is not the beginning of a joke. Late Saturday night, a taxi cab SUV drove directly into a crowd outside of the East Village coffee shop, The Bean. To hear the New York Post tell it, the cab was like a heat-seeking missile: "the cab swerved to avoid an SUV that may have run a red light at First Avenue and East 3rd Street, around 1:30 a.m. The cab then hit two bicyclists and crashed into the Bean Coffee Shop, where it mowed down another man." The Daily News has a similar story, but includes details about the five injured, including a 71-year-old customer inside "the java shop." The city's top two tabloids, along with a handful of local blogs, combine to create a very detailed picture of a wild Saturday night.

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