Paul Quitoriano

​ Whenever we tell people what we do for a living we always get the same thing: "You must know what's going on in the city all the time," and "You must get invited to the best events." Well, yes and yes. But recommending events every freaking day of the year to you eccentric New Yorkers is not as easy as it sounds. We go to great lengths to preview the funniest comedy shows, weirdest art exhibitions, and craziest parties, which means we do end up going out a lot, and if that means taking off our pants in public, then so be it. More >>

​Tomorrow is World AIDS Day, which is neither a celebration of AIDS nor the day everyone in the world gets AIDS, but a day dedicated to AIDS awareness, which there will never be enough of. Like AIDS tests. Which are going to be given away for free in Washington Square Park tomorrow.

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​Sometimes life seems hard here -- the crowds, the expense, the 24-hour-living-and-working lifestyle...But then there are days, like yesterday, when we're ever so glad we live in New York City. Like when much of the rest of the nation goes a reddish color of Tea Party, and we stick to coffee and stay (largely) blue. Like when Andrew Cuomo wins against Carl Paladino. And like when the Aeropostale at Times Square institutes an "AERO Dance Cam" to keep the young folks away from the East Village on weekends and allow us to mock them via the Internet...

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​4Chan, if you aren't already familiar, is a series of anonymous message boards. The most infamous of the 4Chan boards is the notorious "/b" -- commonly known in tech circles as "the a**hole of the internet" -- the members of whom are known to be relentless, often dangerous pranksters. Reminder: These are the guys who brought Gawker.com to a stop after blogger Adrian Chen decided to take them on, and that's the least of their deviousness (but a good starting point for how impressive in scale it can be).

Well, sometimes, 4Chan and its various boards -- many of which are starting points for some of the internet's most widespread memes -- produce something wonderful. This is one of them.

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Pictured: a figurative portrait of New York Observer senior editor Christian Lorentzen.

​Press Clips has returned to the roost, and we're starting the week off with great news, great media squabbles, hypocrisy, and self-awareness. In other words, your Monday Media Proctology Exam has arrived. 200 people who care about these kinds of things, do enjoy:

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​Blip.TV CEO Mike Hudack just posted on his blog one of the better things you're going to see today: WNYC has a movie to go with their Radiolab episode on words (entitled, of course, "Words") that's really, really smart and really, really wonderful. It'll take up a little under three minutes of your day, and make it better.

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​Yesterday, The Business Insider's chief Henry Blodget announced a new round of funding to the world in a blog post explaining that the company just scored a cool $3M in the form of backing from a venture capital firm, RRE Ventures. That's more than the company's had since they started. TBI and Blodget get the news on a wave of decent publicity stemming from a Bloomberg BusinessWeek profile of Blodget, after having had their fair share of staffing changes and loud public criticism and crazies literally screaming at them on the internet -- along with my relentless bullshit -- but the often unspoken truth is that TBI's bloggers are some of the hardest working in New York City, and maybe the country. More >>

​Remember when we saw that LOST DUCK sign plastered over a mailbox outside our office last week? Well! The quacktastic [Ed.: "Quacktastic?" Jesus.] mystery has been beginning to untangle itself.

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​Sorry to interrupt you from your daily reading about the boring-ass Supreme Court or the boring-ass Rolling Stone or the boring-ass BP oil spill or whatever other boring-ass "important" non-magical thing you read about today, but, um, THE NEW HARRY POTTER TRAILER IS HERE! Click the "More > > >" button! You know you want to. No, really. If you're one of those terribly sad and unfortunate people who wrote off Harry Potter books as "for kids" or whatever, it's probably because you're insecure about not having any magic in your life, and you're projecting your anger about being non-magical on the most magical franchise in the history of literary/movie/theme-park/lunchbox history, or you enjoy The Lord of the Rings and justify it to people by explaining that Led Zeppelin liked The Lord of the Rings and that "Ramble On" is totally about Frodo, but honestly, we don't care, I don't care, nobody cares. The new Harry Potter trailer is here.

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​We've come a long way from Talk Magazine, back when a bunch of writers doing something new meant a Robert Isbell-planned party on Liberty Island and George Plimpton drunkenly screaming at Salman Rushdie while he was busy trying to close on Padma. Yet, now, in an era when "editorial launch" means The New York Times finally gets on Tumblr, it's not that there isn't any excitement. No! It's that there simply isn't much new stuff out there to get excited about. And that changes today.

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