One of the stranger Internet media stories in recent time: Boston.com, part of New York Times Digital, has acquired Red Sox fan site Boston Dirt Dogs. A blog in all but name, BDD traffics in innuendo, vulgarity, and unconfirmed news, so it will be interesting to watch how the marriage changes (or doesn't change) the site's content. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
· Boston.com Gives Boston Dirt Dogs a New Home [corporate-ir.net]
· Boston Dirt Dogs [bostondirtdogs.com]

Our favorite unmarriage activists are at it again, this week in the pages of Nerve. Writes Marshall, "According to the firsthand reports of my friends, wedding hook-ups are the new black."
· Marshall Miller: I Like to Watch [Nerve]
· Dorian Solot: On Not Saying "I Do" [Nerve]
· Alternatives to Marriage Project [unmarried.org]

Some people dream of making it into the Talk of the Town. (Unlike a certain agent we know, our deflowering in that department came thanks to a particularly insipid quote several years back.) However, I have long had another dream: to make it into The Villager. Those who know me well know of this obsession, this single dream. At last, awaken! On this, Wednesday, May 26, 2004, I am humbled and proud to announce that this dream has become a reality. Smelling salts, please!
· Blogger's 'Addiction' Hooks Many [The Villager]

Moneyball readers may recall the tale of Kevin Youkilis, the Red Sox minor league prospect dubbed "The Greek God of Walks" whom Billy Beane lusted after. Well, our boy Youks made his major league debut a few weeks back, homering in his first game. With yesterday's news that starting third baseman Bill Mueller will miss six weeks with surgery, Youkilis will get a chance to prove himself in the lineup every day. Last night? 1 for 2... with 2 walks.
· Mueller Will Have Knee Surgery [Boston.com]
· He Walks Away with a Dreamlike Debut [Boston.com]

When you've spent too many hours reading ephemera hither and yon, I recommend dropping by The Quantum Pontiff, easily the best quantum physics blog I've come across, uhm, today. Totally agree, by the way, that ion traps rock.
· The Quantum Pontiff [transformer.cs.caltech.edu]

Hiro and I were just IM'ing this morning: Remember when Phish was... good? Apparently the band felt the same way: they're officially over after this summer's tour. A moment of silence, please.
· An Announcement [Phish.com via whatevs, "the new Phish.com"]

I'm launching a new blog today. It's called Curbed, and it's about real estate in New York City. Okay, it's about some other things too, but I'll get to that. Meantime, I'd like to invite you to check it out.
· Curbed [Curbed]

Curbed is based on the idea that all conversation in New York eventually comes back to real estate, apartments, and the neighborhoods we inhabit. That means the site covers urban planning, and architecture, and new restaurants -- things that make the spaces we live in. But, given that the core of that space is real estate, and Curbed embraces that fact, I can say this with certainty: the site will bore some people shitless. If you're one of those people, and a reader of this site, you'll be happy to know there will be many fewer real estate posts here from now on.

But I think real estate in New York is interesting not because of the dollars and cents involved (although, yes, that can be interesting too) but rather because of what it means for the city, and in a more particular sense, what it means for the neighborhoods we call home.

In high school, a genius friend of mine who now lives a country away gave me a copy of a book and told me, "Read this." The book was The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin. It's a travel narrative of Chatwin's journey to meet the Aboriginals of Australia, who encode memory in song following "dreaming tracks" -- Songlines -- across the Outback.

What really grabbed me about the book was this: Chatwin's travel proceeds as narrative until about halfway through the book when the narrative flow suddenly stops and a page announces, "The Notebooks." And suddenly you're inside Chatwin's journal.

Chatwin was a traveler his entire life, and his notebooks are full of thoughts on transience, which to him was a necessity on par with breathing. The first entry in the Songlines Notebooks is a quote from Pascal: "Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death." Soon after, Baudelaire: "I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul."

I love to travel, but in all that a life in New York City entails, chunks of time are hard to find; I last got away for more than a month in the summer of 2001. It was right after I moved into my current apartment, on a relatively quiet block with an old Mexican food place and a hardware store that inexplicably closes on Sundays across the street. Since then, this block -- this tiny, one block block -- has had a bar named after a French poet move in downstairs; an art gallery open a few doors down that a major newspaper immediately declared profoundly important; a hip clothing boutique for women take over an old garment store; a giant Mondrian-clad monolith rise from nothing to tower over the street; and, perhaps most fitting of all, a candy store that has been there forever become enshrined as an unparalleled tourist destination -- a place, in other words, where the travelers to our city believe they must go.

I think New York is a city for travelers. I don't mean the tourists; I mean the residents. A subway ride could take me in minutes to any one of a hundred neighborhoods I've never seen. That I can feel a stranger in a place that also feels so comfortable is at the core of why I love New York, and why I like blogging about it.

A close friend observed to me after I'd been doing this site for some time, "What you're really doing is micro-travel writing." I've enjoyed getting to know a small patch of this city so well, and hope to have the same fun getting to know parts of a bigger whole. And as I type these words in a small window that only shows about ten lines of what I've written at a time, I think that Chatwin's Notebooks happen to remind me of weblog posts, and that that is a happy symmetry.

After I post this, today, like most every Monday since I got back from that trip three years ago, I'll leave my apartment on Rivington Street and walk towards the 6 Train at Spring. It's a long walk, but I don't mind it. I'll cross Allen Street, then the park at Forsyth, where on rainy days the light refracts off the water pooling on the tiles in the most sublime way, and then to Bowery, where I'll look straight up at the Empire State Building, checking that it's still there, because in a city that has always been impermanent, this is a time when impermanence looms larger.

And then I'll turn down Bowery, and see again the sinewy steel frame rising on the east side of the street, a crazy vertical building that in just a month is already the tallest thing in the area. And I'm as fascinated by it as I am the Empire State Building, because this is new, and there is something about the new that is entrancing; the steel frame could be anything. I don't yet know what the building will be, which heightens the fascination. Maybe today is the day something will reveal itself.

The comparison of walking the streets of New York City to walking aboriginal songlines is not unique; you may know a wonderful site called New York Songlines run by Jim Naureckas that chronicles, in its own way, exactly that.

That's what Curbed wants to do too: map the city as it changes, in a different way and a different spirit, but with the same goal, that of understanding the neighborhoods we inhabit a little better.

Today's first post at Curbed talks more about that site, if that interests you. Now, though, I get to hit reset on this space, which is just as exciting.

Commence the merrymaking, and the linkage: ICM's own Kate Lee is the Talk of the Town.
· A Book In You [New Yorker]

It is sad, but telling, that Below 14th exits this world with a whimper, not a bang. Coming this afternoon, our fond farewell. Monday, something new—and, we hope—fun. Meantime, this space will resume its normal idiocy next week.

Regular readers of Below 14th, the downtown food-and-drink sidebar that appears to the left of this space (and, indeed, on its very special own page), have perhaps noticed a relative pittance of posts as of late. Well, so have we.

We can, at last, confirm the rumors: this will be Below 14th's final week of operation. As such, we're planning a gala retrospective of the highs and lows of downtown dining and nightlife from the past two years. And, as a special bonus, there also will be at least one new B14 post every day this week as we clear our backlog of things we really should have posted two months ago.

The passing of Below 14th, though bittersweet, heralds a new weblog undertaking for its proprietor, details of which will follow soon. Meantime, join us in bidding goodbye to an old friend, as we say fare and fare the well—food poisonings and all.
· Below 14th: Eat | Drink | Nightlife in Downtown Manhattan [LS.com]

We have no idea what they were filming, but kudos to whatever genius director was filming inside Rice to Riches two nights ago. We've always believed Hollywood needs more rice pudding.
· Rice to Riches Opening [LS.com]

Crazy weekend on tap for streets of the Lower East Side. Last night, this year's psy.geo.CONFLUX kicked off with a gathering at Participant (95 Rivington Street), which is serving as homebase for events including WiFiKu ("A drift through New York City neighborhoods to discover the names people give to their WiFi nodes and to construct haiku using these found SSID names") and New Copen York Hagen ("a walk through Copenhagen as seen superimposed on a map of New York, with Danish souvenirs installed at various New York tourist attractions").

Most intriguing, however, is tomorrow's One Block Radius, a hyperinteractive walking tour of the one-block area on the Bowery where the new NewMuseum breaks ground this fall. Though the tour is a one day only affair (it kicks off at 2pm), the One Block Radius website is an ongoing project with 422 items of note already registered. It's a mind-boggling, must-visit site.
· psy.geo.CONFLUX [glowlab.blogs.com]
· One Block Radius [oneblockradius.org]
· Young Manhattanite interview with psy.geo organizers [Gothamist]

Is there a hotter trend in NYC right now than the restaurant weblog? Uh, probably, but don't sweat the small stuff, okay? Following on the heels of Schnäck Blog, from a Brooklyn eatery, neighbor Margit tips us off that Etsuko, the proprietor of Suffolk Street Asian eatery Soy, has her own blog. Much as we enjoy the food at Soy, the site might be even better.
· Soy Diary [soynyc.com]
· Soy [Citysearch]

Need a place to hang your hat in Manhattan, but lack the necessary means (like, you know, income?) to make it happen? Two residents of an East Village apartment are conducting a 350-word essay contest on the subject "Why I want to live in New York City." The prize: six months of rent-free living in their East 6th Street walkup. Now, some may doubt the veracity of the contest—notably the fact that the winner also receives $5,000 to "defray the costs of living in New York for six months" (hey, everyone knows it's going to cost at least six times that)—but I believe such fears to be unfounded. Even the most cursory glance of the apartment photo gallery reveals this to be a real-deal East Village apartment. (Brooding hipster guy... hipster chick with guitar... malnourished black lab... patina of one too many nights spent licking the couch pillows.) If you're still unsure, check out the description of the apartment's "hallway," surely one of the most honest real estate ads ever penned: "This hall separates the bath and kitchen from the living and bed rooms. Most Manhattan apartments are not fortunate enough to have such an addition. The hallway not only creates the illusion of more room it also contains a closet which is another luxury not afforded most City spaces."
· Rent Free NYC [rentfreenyc]
· My 1br Apartment: Up for Grabs [Gothamist Forum]
UPDATE: Ooops, did we forget to mention the $69 entry fee per application? You'd almost think we were complicit in this thing. Anyhula, Gawker does the math on the potential haul for your new landlords: $207,069
UPDATE II: Uh, well, so much for that.

The developer of the proposed monolithic dorm on Avenue B blames the community activists for his decision to go ahead with the project, "accusing them of frustrating his efforts to develop the old P.S. 64 building on the site, leaving him no choice but to come up with the idea of a mega-dorm project." Clearly, this man is a genius.
· Dorm developer: Lopez and community board left me no other choice [The Villager]

We plugged them last week, but in our honorable opinion, there is not a better weblog going right now than Soxaholix. Every day, the guy puts together a full comic strip about the Red Sox that manages genuine humor. As a bonus, each strip's dialogue is hyperlinked to Sox new stories, message boards, and the like. Bad times never hurt so good.
· Soxaholix [Soxaholix]

Forget Starbucks. The LES retail news of the week, courtesy of today's unlinkable "Between the Bricks" column in the Post: überorganics retailer Whole Foods has leased a whopping 87,000 square feet in Houston Street/LES megoid development Avalon Chrystie Place. (By comparison, Whole Food's store in Time Warner Center is 58,000 sq. ft.) What dark plans might the company have for this ludicrous amount of space at its new LES outpost? Who knows—we've been too busy playing with the downloadable Excel spreadsheets that Whole Foods makes available on its site.
· New Stores [Whole Foods] no confirmation yet...

Just days after the owner is killed in the basement of terminally untrendy East Village restaurant Pop, the place shows up as one of the most popular restaurant searches at Citysearch. Yes, it's almost as classy as Pop's own website plugging its new "plush lounge." Honestly, we can't think of a more romantic getaway.
· Pop [popny.com]
· Citysearch Search [Citysearch]

This was probably inevitable.
· JVG: The Comic Strip, Episode 85 [jvg.com]