Photo courtesy NYC Scout

To quote Dr. Peter Venkman: I guess they just don’t make them like they use to, huh?

NYC Scout has an amazing set of photographs from the old Loew’s Valencia Theatre in Queens. According to Cinema Treasures, the theater opened originally in early 1929 and was the first of five “wonder theatres” that Loew’s built in NYC. It had over 3,500 seats. It closed in 1977 and has since served as the Tabernacle of Prayer for All People church.

The NYT has a couple articles about the other wonder theatres. Pretty fascinating stuff. Nice to see that one of them is well maintained and lives on. Hard to imagine going to a show or a movie in such an opulent setting. A far cry from today’s theater experience.

Thanks Anoop.

Fun times with Google Trends — this time featuring terms like Hurricane Sandy, Obama, Romney, and Presidential. More or less what you would expect — interesting to note Romney’s spike.

I should mentioned this before, but the values are all relative to some sort of Google-created Index. A bit hard to fully grasp what that means, but when/if I figure it out I’ll post an update here.

update:

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. They don’t represent absolute search volume numbers, because the data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. Each point on the graph is divided by the highest point, or 100. When we don’t have enough data, 0 is shown.

Looks like coverage of Sandy is on the decline, despite numerous stories out there describing the heretofore untold devastation, environmental degradation, and suffering that continues. In the shadow of Tuesday’s election, coverage is shifting back to typical election-time tropes (red state, blue state, statistics, winners, losers).

All the while, hundreds of thousands of people are without electricity — and potentially without food or safe drinking water. If you can afford it, donate to the ✚ Red Cross or another group on the ground.

NOAA’s GOES-13 satellite captured this visible image of the massive Hurricane Sandy on Oct. 28 at 1615 UTC (12:02 p.m. EDT). The line of clouds from the Gulf of Mexico north are associated with the cold front that Sandy is merging with. Sandy’s western cloud edge is already over the Mid-Atlantic and northeastern U.S.

NYC’s public transit hubs are closed in preparation for super-Hurricane Sandy. MTA has quite a few photos posted to their flickr account of emptied subways and workers preparing for the storm. An odd sight.

The pay wall at the NYT has been breached by the potential floodwaters.

Google.org has set up a “crisis” center for Hurricane Sandy. It worked until sometime on Oct 31. Then, it switched to the embed below.

Kottke.org has interesting (and typically amusing) coverage of all things NYC right now. He links to hint.fm’s wind map, which paints a near real-time picture of wind speeds across the US. The northeast portion of that windmap should be pretty terrifying for the next few days.

Stay safe, NYC.

Yes, this is a post about fried chicken.

Yes, it is expensive fried chicken.

Yes, it was delicious and totally worth it.

After a long Campus MovieFest Northern Regional Grand Finale, we slept a little and then descended on Momofuku Noodle Bar for their fried chicken dinner, which includes “two whole fried chickens, one southern style and one korean style - mu shu pancakes, bibb lettuce, four sauces and an assortment of seasonal vegetables.”

Sounded good. Had no idea how much of a treat it would be.

We kicked off the meal with a smattering of a la carte plates, including grilled asparagus salad (bearnaise, frisee, trout roe); fingerling potatoes (poached egg, scallions); sauteed bok choy (delicious, umami-laden pork broth; chili flakes); and grilled ramps (my favorite, with pickled chili, crispy fried shallots). The kitchen gave us a plate of three tamales, each different — two with pork, one with cheese and vegetables. All amazing flavor combinations.

I was particularly fond of the grilled ramps, which were garlicky, sharp, slightly green and wholly delicious. The addition of the trout roe to the asparagus was surprising and amazing, as well. Made for a beautiful presentation and a shocking flavor — the briny roe played off the bearnaise magically.

Then the chickens rolled out. I had no idea what to expect. We received a huge platter half full of “Korean-style” fried chicken (above), fried and slathered in a sweet, spicy bibim sauce — and then fried again. The other half of the platter was Southern-style — buttermilk batter and old bay. UNBELIEVABLE! I’m shocked to say it, but I preferred the southern-style — the batter was perfect and flavorful, thick, crispy and delicious. The platter of herbs and veggies included carrots, radishes, shiso, bibb lettuce, and basil. Four sauces came out, as well — hoison, bibim, ginger-scallion, and some sort of jalapeno garlic. All were great; the table seemed most partial towards the jalapeno garlic.

We ate. And we ate. And then we ate some more. Somewhere along the way, the kitchen blessed us with additional pancakes and a plate of glutinous rice flour formed into cylinders, fried, and coated with bibim. They were delicious and texturally amazing - the outside were crunchy, crispy, sweet and spicy; the insides were gooey-chewy-weird awesomeness. Good. We did pretty well, knocking out about 2/3 of the platter and almost all the sides.

All before 7p.

I can’t remember a meal that so well met and surpassed the anticipation surrounding it. I’ve blabbered on above mainly about the food, but it was that magical combination of the great eats and a large table full of old friends that killed it. It was such a treat to dine with you peeps.