Results tagged “nationalgeographic”

It's time for your annual subway reef moment of zen. Last November the Today Show gave us an up-close look at the watery graves that some subways will meet. Now the NY Times points out that tonight's National Geographic Ultimate Factories program visits a plant that produces the new subway cars, "telling us for almost an hour about all the welding and wiring and safety inspections that go into making the things." That's right, see the subway car that will inevitably cause you to be late for something, before it even hits the track, and way before it hits the surf.

The man who found the abandoned trolley tunnel under Atlantic Avenue thirty years ago, Bob Diamond, is now hoping to find some historical booty down there. The Brooklyn Paper's got a serious skeptical tone in their report, but even National Geographic is interested enough to finance, produce and staff an archeological dig that might go down this coming January.

          

Modern Mechanix has an old National Geographic from 1965 with a huge spread on the World's Fair in New York. Step back to the atomic era and see the now-endangered Tent of Tomorrow in its glory days. Not many of these structures and rides exist today, at least not in New York; the giant tire is alive and well in Detroit, and of course, the Walt Disney-created ride, "It's a Small World" is still going -- check out some video of it here.

The February edition of the MTA’s monthly television show, Transit Transit (Saturdays, 3:30 p.m., WNYE 25) , has a segment about Marvin Franklin, the NYC Transit Authority track inspector who was killed last year in an on the job accident in Brooklyn. The piece talks with some artists who knew Franklin and his co-workers and covers the opening of an exhibition of his work at the New York City Transit Museum in December.

A look at some of this week's noteworthy television:

The New Yorker was actually shut out, not garnering a single award for any of its nine nominations; it was the most-nominated publication in 2007. New York's five awards were for General Excellence (250,000 to 500,000 circulation), Profile Writing, Magazine Section, and Design. The magazine's online site nymag.com won an award for Interactive Feature. Other big winners last night were National Geographic and Vanity Fair, with two awards each. Rolling Stone, Wired, Foreign Policy, and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists were other winners of General Excellence awards. If you'd like to judge for yourself, links to all of the nominated and winning articles are available here.

Puppy Bowl III (Sunday, 3:00 p.m., 6:00 p.m., 9:00 p.m. Animal Planet) Puppies from shelters drink water, pee, and play for three hours is someone's idea of something to go up against the Super Bowl.

It's been a long time since we've visited with our black-and-white (and a little dirty brown) friends, the panda. National Geographic's cover story this month is Panda, Inc., the million dollar industry behind having pandas on U.S. soil. It focuses mostly on Tai Shan, the adorable, nearly year old scamp in DC, and has many cute pictures and video. Of course, Gothamist hopes that panda leasing prices come down (China charges $2 million now), as we dream that a pair can come and breed in NYC.

Malcolm Gladwell profiles Cesar Millan, the "Dog Whisperer," in the New Yorker this week (the article is not online, but this Q&A; Gladwell did with Ben Greenman about Millan is), and Gothamist cannot wait to get our issue from the mailbox. If you don't know who Cesar Millan is (like, you watched the South Park episode and thought he was made up), he's a total phenomenon. He communes with dogs, is able to walk huge packs of them, and even has a the Dog Psychology Center to study dogs who seem violent are really aren't (it's the humans' fault, Millan says). Everyone wants to know how to manage their dogs, so Millan is the go to man because of the way he speaks to them.

Tsk tsk. It seems that young Americans are more Americentric (self-absorbed) than we thought. A report in National Geographic shows that 63% of Americans aged 18-24 could could not correctly locate Iraq on a map of the Middle East. Other stunning facts revealed in the report:

Listen up! Just because Gothamist is about to be stuck in a two-hour meeting doesn't mean you have to be inside. Get out and enjoy the beautiful weather. Daffodils, forsythia and magnolias are all in bloom. Today will be oh so nice and slightly warmer than yesterday, with highs around 70. A cold front is bringing rain our way tomorrow. We can expect showers, and possibly thundershowers, off and on for much of Saturday. The rain will be out of here by tomorrow night. Sunday will be a stunningly gorgeous spring day. Next week will be cooler but let's worry that on Monday.

Ixtayul has an insane set of construction pictures over at Metroplus today-- "Remove a few layers of black top, concrete and a little soil and you get some idea of what it takes to service the Wall street area with electricity, gas, water, sewer and communications." Jesus-- it looks like a game of pickup sticks.

People didn't really seem to like yesterday's cute so much, so today we ditched our original idea (pigeon chickie!) and instead went with this meerkat. Don't ya'll just want to feed the little bugger?

We can't get enough of this short time lapse video of Grand Central-- check out the tiny woman standing still at the center of the frame. Good work, DiHard! [Related: did anyone else catch the National Geographic two-hour documentary about Grand Central? It's been playing all week, and trust us-- it's well worth checking out.]

When we hear things like, "and there...a city lies within a city" we get pretty excited. When the city within the city is Grand Central Terminal, we set the DVR right away. Tonight on the National Geographic Channel, Inside Grand Central airs at 8pm.

We've been obsessed with Con Edison's NYC steam system ever since we discovered that National Geographic diagram last month and Evan sent in that informative email. We decided to do some more research, and stumbled across this great article on steam power from the Gotham Gazette:

National Geographic has the most informative New York diagram that we've seen in lo these many years we've been working on Gothamist. It shows what is under the city streets-- both in a compressed, annotated form, and in a full-scale version (who knew the water tunnel was so deep underground? Stop lying, you totally didn't!) Definitely click around the diagram-- there's lots of delicious NYC facts embedded in the descriptions. For instance:

Consolidated Edison has 80,500 miles (129,524 kilometers) of underground cable that run virtually everything electrical in the city.

Continue reading "Most! Informative! Diagram! Ever!"

White truffle season is upon us, so get our your wallets. It may not look like much more than an unappetizing lump, but according to National Geographic, "During the peak of the white truffle season, which typically runs from late October to early December, the tubers can fetch U.S. $1,200 to $2,300 a pound." Yes, they're expensive, but if you like black truffles, you'll absolutely flip over the white ones. Their earthy flavor permeates throughout any dish to which they're added, even in small quantities. Although in the wild, truffles are usually only found by trifolau, people who search with their trained truffle-sniffing dogs (there's actually a University of Truffle Hunting Dogs in Piedmont) to find the treasures in the woods of Italy, we've cut out the middleman and discovered several spots in New York where white truffles will be served. New York Magazine rounds up a few, including Italian grocery Sapori D’Ischia in Woodside, Queens, which is offering a $50 multi-course menu, each course featuring fresh white truffles, every Tuesday from October 18 through November 15, and Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, featuring a five couse menu for $290.

10. National Geographic – June 1985 – Afghan girl – “Haunted eyes of an Afghan refugee’s fears”Based on own magazine reading experience, Gothamist would have to say that Fabien Baron's Harper's Bazaar cover ranks at the top, though we're very fond of the two September 11th-related covers (#6 Art Spiegelman's black on black World Trade Center and Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz's New Yorkistan, #14). There are high-res images of the covers here, but nowhere are there credits for who designed, illustrated or photographed the cover; we hope ASME releases that next. [Via AdFreak]

On Wednesday, the polar bear Gus and Ida at the Central Park Zoo held a press conference, with some help from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The point was to announce that the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace would take legal action against the government for further endangering the already-endangered polar bears: Global warming is leading to polar bears' natural habitats to melt out. And the press conference's location was to drive home the fact that zoos may be the only place where you can see polar bears if things keep going as they have. We love the idea that polar bears would hold a press conference, concerned about their wild relatives, and in fact, we hope the NRDC can get the penguins to give a press conference next.

There are days when we feel bad for the city kitties we know, stuck in the apartment, without a window to a yard with squirrels and birds to peer out of - all they get are the noises from construction sites. But then a friend sent us a photograph of his cats, Oliver and Dodger, enraptured with the "Kitty Goes Hunting" DVD. Apparently Oliver and Dodger will sit on the couch for an hour and just follow Kitty's adventures with various animals. An hour! And we thought cats would only sit still if they were on top of the bills we were trying to pay! Sure, sometimes cats will bat at the TV when we're watching National Geographic, but now Gothamist wants to know about the world of cat video products. If not "Kitty Goes Hunting," then should we be showing the cats Winged Migration or Microcosmos? Born Free, maybe?

Alexis Rockman, Painter

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid;=573&ncid;=757&e;=1&u;=/nm/20030924/od_nm/environment_australia_snakes_dc">charged after smuggling snakes - strapped to his legs - to Australia. Four of the snakes were deadly king cobras, who were dead by the time the man got to Australia. Ew, but they were "found dead in containers strapped to the man's calves." The other snakes were emerald tree boas (pictured). The 28 year-old was charged under Australia's Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act. Containers with snakes in them strapped to your calves. This is like a Fear Factor stunt, as Reuters points out, "."

Panda Passion Play
Yesterday, Gothamist decided to see what the National Zoo pandas were up to...

National Geographic has gone into the business of providing digital images for use in websites and media stuff: NG Image Collection: Search Results