Do certain band's fans tip better than others? Sasha Frere-Jones does an uncontrolled study at Bowery Ballroom -- and Chromeo fans, you're busted.“When Chromeo played, their crowd drank house vodka and Budweiser. Didn’t tip. Some of them did what I’ll call the slide-backs. They put a dollar down on the bar, wait until you turn your back, then palm their buck and walk away. Classy. When your night starts out with “What’s your cheapest drink?”......

Members of the Park Slope Co-op are expected to vote to eliminate the sale of bottled water this spring. The proposal comes as the environmental costs of bottled water are being widely publicized, including a city advertising campaign encouraging people to forgo bottled water and drink from the tap. American consumption of bottled water results in more than 22 billion discarded plastic bottles and enormous energy expenditures associated with shipping the water, which is so......

DRINK: The raucous and ribald cabaret duo Kiki & Herb may be on semi-hiatus, but they’re resurfacing tonight for a very special ‘Eclectic Salon’ event at Bottlerocket, the “dog and child friendly” wine shop in the Flatiron district. It's not exactly clear what kind of performance is planned tonight, but the boozy surroundings are sure to provide ample inspiration. Playfully dubbed “The Year of Magical Drinking,” the evening features free wine tastings to wash......

FOOD: Drinking With the Professor: a Look at Jerry Thomas and His Liquid Legacy: Join cocktail maestro Dave Wondrich as he shares recipes from his latest book, Imbibe! plus a few that were cut in the editing process. Wondrich has an in-depth knowledge of nineteenth-century classic cocktails, so step up and taste the benefits. - Laren Spirer Friday // 6:30pm // Astor Culinary Center [399 Lafayette St] // $75, tickets available online THEATER: As you......

READING: It's another First Tuesday event at McNally Robinson, and this time around author and activist Mark Crispin Miller invites Anthony Lappe to center stage. The executive editor of the Guerilla News Network also produced an award-winning documentary on the war in Iraq for Showtime. More recently, he's created a graphic novel called Shooting War with illustrator Dan Goldman, which is "a spoof of the network news, the war in Iraq, and the burgeoning 'citizen......

Was your New Year's Eve a recipe for a hangover? Luckily there are a few recipes to cure what ails you, too. Last year we found some facts about hangovers, but learning isn't going to make that first headache of '08 go away. From the undoubtedly reputable site called RUPissed? come these hangover cures, and except for the Vegemite you can probably find most of these things in your apartment (or within a one block......

Salt & Samovar are a Brooklyn band that sound more like they're just visiting here from Upstate...or a Coen brothers film. Their live shows are described as "pentecostal revival-like performances that evoke the musical and spiritual heirlooms of a cherished American past." A simpler and simply transporting sound that'll have you pining for the past. Come check out their revival-rock this Friday at Mercury Lounge -- get your tickets here. Where did your band name......

The family and friend of the Minnesota tourist who took a fatal plunge from a Midtown hotel this past weekend are saying her death is not a suicide. Twenty-one-year-old Jennifer Olson fell 60 feet from a fire escape at the Night Hotel and earlier reports suggested she jumped, but her friend, Timothy O'Neill, told the Daily News, "I don't believe it was suicide. I believe it was accidental. After drinking six or seven hours, people......

Peter Braunstein really loves the New York Post. The fashion industry reporter-turned-prison inmate, after being recently convicted of the kidnapping, sex assault, armed robbery and burglary of a former co-worker on Halloween in 2005, gives his first interview since being locked up this past summer to the tabloid. He gives a number of choice quotes to the Post, who calls him "still-crazy." And how! Not only does he regret not killing his ex-girlfriend Jane......

A 21-year-old woman visiting New York City from a small town in Minnesota killed herself Friday evening by jumping from the fire escape of a midtown hotel. The suicide ended a weekend that was the result of winning tickets to Friday night's Z100 Jingle Ball concert at Madison Square Garden. Jennifer Olson was from the town of Eveleth, Minnesota, population: 3,000. She checked into the Night Hotel on 45th St. with her male friend Timothy......

When The Villager broke the news that fancy East Village cocktail lounge Death & Co. would be temporarily shut down by the State Liquor Authority, no one was as publicly dismayed as Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni. In a blog homage to the elegantly dark nightspot, Bruni gushed:There’s a drink on Death & Co.’s latest cocktail menu with bourbon and rye, along with Courvoisier and bitters. I may in fact have had it – or......

Hello, Lovers! Last night we received the first Sex and the City trailer...finally! We sat down with a Flirtini, called our girlfriends and pressed play to find out what Carrie & Co. have been up to all these months while they weren't busy clogging up the sidewalks and becoming New York's biggest tourist attraction. Turns out we'll be seeing a lot of the same 'ol shenanigans in theaters as on TV: clothes, shoes, talking, drinking...because,......

This isn’t goodbye. Well, actually it kind of is. I’m moving to London for a year to work on depleting their wine and beer supplies. Over the past three and a half years I’ve been lucky to gain thousands of new drinking buddies, including you. We’ve shared countless bottles of wine, glasses of scotch and enough cocktails to inebriate the lower half of Manhattan and parts of Queens. And then, of course, there were the......

Tonight striking writers and friends will take the stage again for a 2nd Strike Night! Joining John Oliver (The Daily Show), Liz Cackowski (Saturday Night Live), Andy Secunda (Conan) and Maggie Carey, Joe Grossman (Letterman) is John Mulaney -- possibly one of our favorite young comedians today. Mulaney helped host one of our Movable Hype shows last year and currently can be seen on stages around town and on screen at Best Week Ever. Buy......

MUSIC: If you aren't at your local hometown bar this Thanksgiving-eve, drinking with old high school buddies -- we suggest a sonic alternative. Tonight The Hold Steady and Art Brut do their best at making Terminal 5 feel a little bit cozier this holiday season. Buy tickets here. 7:30pm // Terminal 5 [610 W 56th St] // $30 MUSIC MOVIES: If you're sick and tired of the bands playing around town, go check out two......

You know a story is going to be good (as in crazy) when it starts "It's a story as old as the drinking laws: A teenage girl convinces a man to buy her a bottle of alcohol." And that's how an article in the Staten Island Advance starts - and it keeps getting better. The leader of a S.I. civic association! Her 21-year-old son! A drunk 14-year-old - and the girl's angry mother! Frank Ammirato,......

Oktoberfest has been over for quite sometime now, but that's never stopped us from enjoying good German beer and sausages. Which is exactly how we wound up at Austrian newcomer Cafe Katja last night. There's also something to be said for such hearty meat-laden fare as the mercury drops. And judging by how crowded the small dining room was when we left, a lot of New Yorkers felt the same way last night. While......

The bicyclist who died while riding on the Manhattan Bridge Friday night was identified as 27-year-old Brooklyn resident Sam Hindy. Hindy's father Stephen, a former Middle East correspondent for the AP and Newsday reporter who later co-founded the Brooklyn Brewery, said, "We're just devastated. This is the worst thing that could happen to any parent. It's any parent's worst nightmare." Sam Hindy and a friend were riding back from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the upper......

It's no shock that many drivers aren't totally on the ball when driving, but it turns out that one in three New York drivers multi-task in their cars. According to a Hunter College study (PDF) conducted at 50 intersections in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, of the over 3,000 drivers observed, 23% were talking on a cellphone, 5.7% were smoking, 4.5% were drinking, 3.1% were drinking, and 1.7% were grooming. Time to quote Rihanna:......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on Nostrand Ave. in Brooklyn, an overturned auto on the LIE and Oceania St. in Queens, and a fall victim on 170th St. and University Ave. in the Bronx. Two NJ teenagers attempted to escape the wrath of a parent, who caught them drinking alcohol last week, by tieing together bedsheets in order to rappel down the side of their highrise building. The incident ended badly, although......

Linda Stein's daughter says that her mother had been recently diagnosed with a brain tumor and was, according to the Daily News, "taking medication that caused severe mood swings." Stein was found bludgeoned to death on October 30, and her personal assistant Natavia Lowery was arrested for her murder on Friday. Samantha Stein-Wells said, "My mother didn't deserve this.... They had just found a brain tumor a couple of weeks before she was killed. Everyone......

The Maricopa County medical examiner found that the death of a New Yorker in police custody at the Phoenix airport was an accident. Carol Gotbaum, who was flying from NYC to Tucson with a stopover in Phoenix, died of "asphyxia by hanging" on September 28. Gotbaum, stepdaughter-in-law of Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum, had been traveling alone to check into alcohol rehabilitation. When she missed her connection to Tucson, she became upset and disruptive, and......

Want to just watch it on TV? Too bad -- unless you're willing to haul ass over to a college campus that gets mtvU. Ummmm, if you want to know about live performances from Rilo Kiley, Lupe Fiasco, Tokyo Police Club, The Academy Is… and Spank Rock, you're going to have to come crawling to our MAD EXCLUSIVE livebloggery! 9:55pm: Damn, kids are punctual these days! Show's over!?!?! What happened to being late for......

We’re probably not alone in the fact that we love wines from Burgundy but really can’t afford them. A great 1er (premiere) cru Gevrey Chambertain could cost us around $35 - $50, and while on special occasions they can be worth every cent, the reality is that we don’t get to have them as much as we like. But there is good news. Perhaps we owe a shout out to mother nature or maybe we......

As more cases of staph infections are being reported (a Newark public school security guard has MRSA, leading the school to be disinfected), parents are growing increasingly concerned about how schools are responding to the epidemic. Yesterday, school officials held a meeting at IS 211 in Brooklyn, the school Omar Rivera Jr. attended before dying from MRSA two weeks ago, to explain how it is dealing with the potentially deadly disease. The Post reports the......

Jose Rivera, who shot at a car full of undercover cops, hitting one of them, was sentenced to 16 years in jail. In February, while driving in Park Slope-Prospect Heights, Rivera thought that the cops were giving him a dirty looks and yelled at them, "You got a beef?" and then fired. The police fired back and later, Rivera's police officer wife seemed to try to cover up the shooting by parking their bullet-ridden car......

Police officer Sean Sawyer was released and not charged after confessing to shooting an unarmed man in Harlem during a road argument early Sunday morning. The Manhattan DA's office claimed that Sawyer could have been acting in self-defense, because the other driver, Jayson Tirado, suggested he had a gun when he gestured and yelled at Sawyer. DA Robert Morgenthau said the "case is under investigation and is going to go to a grand jury. When......

An off-duty police officer turned himself in for Sunday's fatal road rage-related shooting in Harlem. Sean Sawyer, who joined the NYPD and worked as an undercover officer, approached a police cruiser yesterday morning, "I think you guys are looking for me for the shooting last night on the FDR [Drive]...This is the gun I used...I thought the guy was armed - make a sign like a gun. I think I'm having a heart attack; please......

A 25-year-old driver was shot and killed at First Avenue and East 117th Street. Police believe that Jayson Tirado and the driver of an SUV got into an argument when an accident on the FDR (a motorcyclist hit a light pole after trying to switch lanes and died) prompted them to exit onto the streets. The Sun reports that the two drivers started arguing before turning onto First Avenue and the SUV's driver started shooting......

Here are some numbers for you today. The warmest October on record was in 1947, when it was 7.1 degrees above average. Through yesterday this October has been 7.3 degrees above normal. The next 5-6 days are expected to be average 10 degrees warmer than normal. So, although AccuWeather says some unseasonably cold air will arrive at the end of the month, it looks like this will become the warmest October ever recorded in Central......