Three weeks late! So what!? Hi! My birthday = Tues 6/19, party was on Wednesday. Original invite called for a dance party on the upstairs terrace at Professor Thoms, but due to a technical error in the reservation process (er, I never called to confirm - oops) and the factthat Prof Thom's was hosting some Wednesday night BINGO, we dragged everyone a few blocks east over to Heathers.

Hey, and thanks to everyone who came out as bday #31 was pretty slamming. For the sake of comparison (and procrastination) I offer you recaps of bday #30, #29, #28, #27 on this lazy Friday afternoon. ps: No real narrative here, but please enjoy these randomly strung together images.



Looks dirty. Blindfold came from K2's Pin The Tail on the Donkey party kit...



Which is kind of like Pin the Tail on the Oil Painting of JJ.



Are you really going to argue?

Alex just forwaded me Chris Shott's "Blog Ghetto" piece which appeared in the NY Observer today. Thanks for the tdrama + dball shoutout, but Mr. Shott...

Verbal spats are common, particularly when the neighborhood’s most argumentative old-school blogger, Andrew Krucoff, is involved. But no blogger could recall an actual fistfight.

Still, a new blogger-centric faction has emerged. A number of prominent bloggers use Dodgeball, a social-networking service for your cell phone, created by Lower East Side denizen and Teendrama blogger Dennis Crowley, that alerts subscribers to your whereabouts and vice versa.

"I’d say it’s more the Dodgeball scene that now rules L.E.S., not the bloggers per se,” said Mr. Steele, himself a Dodgeball member, “but the difference between the two scenes might take an anthropologist to sort out."

Happy post Thanksgiving... and I'm 10 days behind again. Before I left town to drown myself in Zelda, I survived Kevin K's bday throwdown at Lorley Saturday night. Me + Alex + Kevin dj'ed.



Remeber a few weeks ago - that bender of an evening @ Marshall Stack - when Katie's bf Matt spilled a glass of wine all over Kevin? Katie swore she had the technology to fix it (hough we all said it was impossible). Come Saturday though she wrapped up KK's most favoritist shirt and brought it along. Clean as a whistle!



Best. Birthday. Present. Ever? He had to hold it up to Loreley's Playmobile terrarium to double check. Well done, Shoops!



Oh, and besides the slamming hip hop dance party, the other big news of the evening was that Jonathan and Jackie got engaged (!!!). Word spread quickly via the magic of text messaging. Not to be outdone, I reinacted the scene with a face-blacked-out-to-protect-the-innocent Caroline...



... and sub'ed in this awesome lava-rock thing.



Oh, hello there Jill and Steve. Jill was whispering sweet nothings in my ear - sweet nothings along the lines of "nobody wants to hear Def Lepard! Play more Michael Jackson!" (SHUT UP!)

I feel kind of dumb for never posting anything about watching the World Cup in NYC this year. More so because I don't have any kind of recap from the last World Cup (2002, Korea) when the games were at 3am and I'd set my alarm, wake up and ride my bike across town to watch the gamesat Nevada Smiths or Krucoff's.

Anyway, this year was rad. For the first round of games, I tagged along with Grellan (who was writing a story for ESPN on experiencing the games in someplace as culturaly diverse as NYC) which brought me to an AppleBee's clone way out in Jamaica, Queens run by natives of Trinidad and Tobago, dualing Argentian / Brazilian bars in Soho (and one sorry TV with a 5-second delay), not to mention the dipolmatic estate of the U.N. Ambassador to Angola (er, more on this in a minute). If you haven't read Grellan's piece, you really should.

So, but back to last Sunday - World Cup Finals between France and Italy. Me + Kevin.K made a solid effort to get to Slainte early enough to snag a seat for the final game, but showing up an hour early left us with standing room early. We searched around for a backup plan - 288 (packed), Pioneer (closed), 4th St. Bar (sent McD and his crutches to scope it out), before we got Youngna's dodgeball message about a block party down in Soho. So we headed down...



... to find a few thousand people crowded onto Spring Street btw Bowery & Elizabeth watching this ad hoc jumbotron (sponsord by Adidas? Where did this thing come from?)



We grabbed some bagels + vitamin water from the bodega next door (disaster, btw) and sm.ooshed in (hi, sm!) with the masses to watch the game.

Two things that sucked:

1. The screen was about 10 feet too low. Meaning that for anyone, say, 5'9" or shorter I could barely see. Who invited all the mf'ing tall people anyway. Oh, and I was standing on the high part of the curb.



2. The cops CUT THE POWER TO THE JUMBOTRON with about 15 mins to go in the first half. What the heck! I have expected a rioting crowd to start looting to Jen Bekman Gallery.

This is soooo last week, but I'd be done a serious disservice to the teendrama community if I didn't post the pics from the "in penthouse hottub @ hotel on rivington" dodgeball shouts.

Vox (the blogging service) had a party. Krissy (works for LiveJournal / Vox + who I met out in Seattle) invited me. I met a bunch of other A-list (yeah, I said it) blogger folk up in the Hotel on Rivington's penthouse triplex (pow!) last Thursday.

The view is pretty stellar (er, $5000/night). Sarah and Kevin (MAKE OUT!) looking off the north side of the roof. Jake.D took a rad pic looking off the south side.



There were bloggers. And free drinks. And little sandwiches to snack on. And a hot tub. [video]



... of which Jake.D was brave enough to tear into. Let it be known that while a bunch of use sat around disucssing the logistics of how to carefully remove the aformentioned jacuzzi cover as to avoid making enemies / getting in trouble / kicked out, Jake.D had the lid ripped off (and, er, stripped down to his boxers) in less than 10 seconds.

Jake on the bottom. Lock on the top. Topless girl on the midddle. Sounds filthy!



Speical thanks to Xtina + Kevin.K for unlimited free drinks and learning how to turn the mf'bubbles on.



Items that I believe fell over the 20th story railing and onto the street below: my lucky blue t-shirt.

Items I grabbed so I didn't have to go home shirtless-style: free-bee Vox shirt. Thanks guys!

Last week I got an email from Will that said:

December 17th
Sing Sing on St. Marks
2-5 pm
Egg nog, holiday punch, food and Total Eclipse of the Heart

Last Thursday = the follow-up to last year's slamming No Data Holiday Party @ 12". This time around? Eh, not so crowded (it was wicked cold out + threat of transit strike), no video crew in tow (last year that French video crew was filming a piece on dodgeball)...



... and the PowerPoint was a little last minute (er, I made it like an hour before we started playing music), but still the whole scene was a pretty good time. [video, 9mb]

Thursday @ midnight was also when the transit strike was supposed to hit (it got postponed till, er, today). Joe had the teevee on so we could watch the strike countdown. I cued up some Quad City DJs (Choo Choo Train!). It really was something special.

(btw, video lifted from Katie Mc.K's wedding)



Grellan, occupied with his company holiday's party, didn't roll in till around midnight... crunked (like, crunked) and empty handed (after lots of talk about showing up w/ 800 company holiday party girls).

Dianne sent me this pic of me trying to copy Grell's signature dance maneuvers ("either THE cutest thing I've ever seen or the FUNNIeST thing I've ever seen"). Btw, not sure who's hat that this (Becca?)...

This is our pal Nate Tate. He spent the summer in China travelling around collecting recipes for a cookbook he's writing. On Saturday he offered to cook us up some dinner so he could beta test his instructions.

(ps: check out them nuts on that goat)



Jen.D and Nate Tate were cooking it up in my kitchen, breaking out all sorts of mystery ingredients such as potatos, green stuff and lotus roots.

(JJ says: "You just know you're a nasty cook when you bring your own lotus root.")



Special sauce was prepared pre-dinner, but most everything else was just thrown in the hotpot.

ps: Nate just emailed in with the menu: Mongolian Hotpot with peanut sauce, Sichuan spicy green beans, and fried bananas (with Mrs. Butterworth syrup).

You can find out more into on the cookbook at http://feedingthedragon.blogs.com

This past Saturday was Stacey & Dave's wedding - two friends from back in the Jupiter days who fell in love under the spell of dot com magic. They left NYC a while back, moved out to Seattle and (I think) are planning a triumphant return to NYC soon. I've been looking forwardto the wedding forever - many of the best dot com stories (e.g. featuring events hosted by Pets.com, Dealtime.com, uBid.com, Boo.com, Flooz.com, Luke McG.com, etc) included the old Jup crew that were all part of the weddding entourage.



Oh, here's Stacey and Dave. Together = cute like kittens. The wedding was held out at Frankie's 457, a restaurant in Carol Gardens, Brooklyn. Big backyard for the cermeony and an old coach house in back for the reception / hip hop dance party.



The weather this whole weekend was wicked crappy - Saturday included. Pat Kiernan from NY1 told me this morning that we got more rain this weekend than in the entire month of August.

Anyway, so around 4pm, I put on my bestest (read: only) suit and met up w/ Andy + Rina + Gage over at The Krucoff's apt. Cab ride to Brooklyn was a stoopid 40 minutes long (bridge traffic). We should have taken the F.

Ugh. This was the most crunked up weekend ever with two back-to-back 6am nights (I am only slightly of proud of that). Let's start on Friday for Alex's 29th (34th!!) bday throwdown. Dinner + drinks + karaoke (this pic is from like 2am, but we'll get to that).



First up = dinner. Six of us @ Gyu-Kaku, a grill-yer-own-meats type of place near Astor Place. Little corns, little hot dogs, little meats. That bag of foil contains a bunch of mushrooms marinating in butter. Verdict: delicious.



Manlio and Kevin prepare to battle the meats. Beware of Kevin's patented Devil Eyes(tm).



Post dinner we hit up Porch Bar on Avenue C. About 20 people stopped by x 4-5 drinks each (or so it seemed) and the tab only came to like $150 = a birthday gift from the waitress?

It was all Randy's idea. He sent the email asking everyone to meet at Loreley - this German place with an outdoor garden down on Rivington. I walked in to find Randy + Krucoff drinking out of mugs the size of coffee pots. Come'on!



Then everyone showed up. Cinco de Mayo? + nice weather? + dodgeball? + random Razorfish reunion party? - I dunno what it was, but everyone was there.



Jill rolled in around (ha - I have no idea what time) with Sweet Sweet Kate and Sweet Sweet Juila. Both look this blurry in real life.

You know, this bender I've been on for 6 days or so has been buckets of fun. Starting with the loft party last weekend, then the 12" anniversary party, followed by the Jest magazine launch party and late night at Apt 5C to No Data on Friday and then again on Saturday, every night seems to be an exponentially better time then then last. I think it all kind of peaks tonight with the LVHRD Dance Off. After tonight, we should all just retire (if our heads don't explode first).

Anyway, Friday we DJ'ed at Epsteins, a kind-of new bar on Stanton and Allen. It was our first time DJ'ing at a bar not called "12 inch". The evening was slow to start. Really slow. Like 10-people-there-until-like-1am slow.

(ps: Jill and Steve earned their +1 teendrama point for just for showing up in this photo. Booooo!)



That's around when we hit the Tipping Point(tm) - when Jen.D rolled in with Youngna + crew sporting oddly-placed stamps from the Local Magazine launch party.

Saturday = Dianne's bday party at the No Data Loft(tm) (aka Steve's apt). Seriously, Steve was nice enough to let Dianne throw her birthday party at his Tribeca loft (sound familiar?) and Dianne was nice enough to invite Team No Data (me + Randy + Grellan) to DJ.



Dianne was also kind enough to make 800 cupcakes.

These pics are all over the place. I have almost nothing of the pre-party. The night was slow starting, even around 12:30 the place was looking empty.



We got there are 9:30. I snapped this pic at the bodega downstairs at 9:34p. Taking inventory.

Good pals from Jupiter Stacey and Dave are packing up and moving to Seattle.

This pic makes me want to pour out a little of my 40oz. R.I.P.