A new website, Subway Crush, could mark the end of romantic quests like the one undertaken by Patrick Moberg last fall, when he created a website to find a cute girl he spotted on the subway. His efforts won him international fame, book and movie offers, and, yes, a date with the young lady. Oh, and plenty of derision. In the Subway Crush dating scene, no such creativity is required. The site basically takes......

Dating and eating converge in a new Brooklyn-based program called the Feed Me Show...and it looks like the producers need some Brooklyn singles to heat things up in their kitchen:We're looking for a few attractive Brooklyn singles who have it where it counts -- in the kitchen. No acting experience necessary, but you must have an exhibitionistic streak, cause we're going to get up close and personal on video, in a series that hits the......

ART: Art, fashion and blogs meet tonight at the Met. In an exhibition entitled blog.mode: addressing fashion, viewers will be able to comment on what they see. It's "the first in a series of shows designed to promote critical and creative dialogues about fashion. The exhibition presents some forty costumes and accessories dating from the eighteenth century to the present." Visitors are then encouraged to share their reactions online or from a "blogbar" of computer......

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......

Retired football great Jim Brown is the president of a new snack food and beverage company and City Councilman Leroy Comrie is not happy about it. Brown's company is called OG Nation, which Comrie says stands for "original gangster." The company currently markets "King Pin" lager and a line of mixed drinks under the brand "Party Dogg." According to Newsday, Arizona-based OG Nation is also developing a line of potato chips, pretzels, pork rinds, and......

At 6:30AM yesterday morning, federal agents delivered "wake-up" subpoenas to the Reverend Al Shaprton and four of his employees at the National Action Network. The FBI and IRS are looking for financial and corporate records, some dating back to 2001, as part of an investigation into Sharpton's financing of his 2004 presidential campaign as well as allegations of tax fraud. Ten people in total were subpoenaed, including a former chief of staff who left in......

Mayor Bloomberg, our very own billionaire mayor, is asking state lawmakers to keep the sales tax at 8.375%. Apparently the sales tax, per "Rules dating back to the city's fiscal crisis of the 1970s" (thanks for the history lesson, NY Sun!), would have dropped 1 percentage point to 7.375% on July 1, 2008, but Bloomberg wants to keep it at its current level. That extra 1 percent tax means about $1 billion in revenue for......

Tim Russert has invited all the presidential candidates to appear on Meet the Press, and yesterday former Mayor Rudy Giuliani appeared. We imagine many New Yorkers watching the program gnashed their teeth and/or swore at the TV (we happened to do both), as Giuliani tried to answer questions ranging from the straightforward (Giuliani's Iowa poll numbers, Russert asked, "Fifth place, is that a problem?") to the interesting (Russert on Giuliani's consulting business: "A Las......

Filmmaker Ethan Coen has left his big brother behind and written three short plays all by himself. Called Almost an Evening, the triptych will be produced by the Atlantic Theater Company with a terrific cast that includes Elizabeth Marvel, who was riveting in Ivo van Hove’s unforgettable revival of Hedda Gabler, and Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham. The plays “unsuccessfully tackle important questions. In Waiting, someone waits somewhere for quite some time. In Four......

Just in time for last night's Republican debate, political website Politico broke a story claiming that former mayor Rudy Giuliani billed "obscured city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses" for extra-marital Hamptons trips with future wife Judith Nathan. When Giuliani would travel outside the city, he would be accompanied by a police detail. And if he stayed overnight, the police would also need lodging and other expenses taken care of. Politico......

Todd P is known around town as one of the hardest working men in D.I.Y. show biz. He created a scene out of avant garde bands, old buildings and some plywood -- and has given plenty of music lovers a place to hear good music for cheap, while sipping on a $2 beers and sweating in barely ventilated (or legal) venues. But what's this...Todd P is going on hiatus? To work on a print 'zine?......

Yesterday morning's hostage standoff in the Bronx turned out to stem from an apparent love-triangle killing. Police had wanted to speak to Marlon Sanders, about a Monday night shooting in Queens. Jamal Leavy was fatally shot in South Jamaica, and police soon discovered that he and Sanders were both dating Shante Dalton, a city corrections officer. When police arrived at Dalton's Bronxdale apartment in their search for Sanders, she refused to let them in, prompting......

A 23-year-old Queens woman was saved from a disease that was destroying her kidneys by a most-willing donor: her fiancé. Jarena Bates and Tye Johnson met when Johnson was delivering a couch in Queens and Bates answered the door. They began dating soon after and have been together for five years, getting engaged in January. Bates, who was diagnosed with a kidney disorder when she was 14 years old was diagnosed with nephrotic syndrome shortly......

The current New York Magazine dives deep inside the navel with seven sprawling pages on Gawker. The rather tame procedural is conducted by Vanessa Grigoriadis, who's up front with the disclosures: Her NY Times wedding announcement was savaged by Gawker, New York Magazine currently employs two former Gawker editors, and Grigoriadis peeped managing editor Choire Sicha’s underwear. So have the hunters become the hunted? Not really. The article is not so much a take-down as......

Yet more proof Ann Coulter likes to hear herself talk - and that talk shows like that! She appeared on The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch, and talks about how Jews need perfecting - "we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say" - to the point of being Christians. Deutsch was shocked, argued with her, and went to commercial by saying, "Ann Coulter, author of If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans,......

A 29-year-old Chinatown resident was charged with murdering his new girlfriend in the apartment he shares with his grandmother. Michael Chin Lenahan allegedly called his brother in NJ to say "I screwed up." His mother later went to the apartment and found a woman's body on her son's bed, under clothes. Police say Lenahan and Lorna Santiago had a date on Saturday night. They started at a restaurant on Third Avenue and then went to......

After two years in service and almost as long as media gossip fodder, Times Select, NYTimes.com's service that offered access to the rich archives of the New York Times through a paid subscription modeled, is officially dead. The service put certain current online content behind the Times Select wall, such as columns by Op-Ed writers, and there was much criticism, even from within the Times, about restricting access the paper. There had been rumors about......

MUSIC: Last week Craig Finn made a solo appearance amongst the books at Barnes & Noble, tonight he's with his rock band, The Hold Steady, playing another free show. Joining them are the Old 97’s, and newer band, Illinois. A triple-threat lineup with a can't-be-beat pricetag. 5:30pm // 7 World Trade Center [250 Greenwich St] // Free READING: Possibly known more for her role on Project Runway than her fashion direction with ELLE magazine, Nina......

This week's NY Times Weddings & Celebrations announcements include: Forty-five weddings announcements, one civil union announcements, and the Vows column Twenty-five photographs of couples The youngest bride is 24, the oldest bride is 64 The youngest groom is 25, the oldest groom is 70 One couple had corresponded via an online dating website but never set up a date...only to meet randomly at a party and not realize their online connection until two months later.......

An argument escalated into arson and then a murder-suicide, all in front of a small child, in Borough Park early yesterday morning. After setting their apartment on fire, police say that Christopher Flynn shot his girlfriend Christina Scarabaggio and then turned the gun on himself. Scarabaggio's 4-year-old daughter Bianca Perez was found crying over her mother's body outside. Flynn, who had a history of drug arrests, and Scarabaggio, a nursing student, had been dating for......

THEATER: We like our comedy like we like our women: black and absurd. So it’s promising that the press release for a new play by Kevin Mandel uses those two irresistible words to describe A New Television Arrives, Finally. The strange story concerns “an American couple visited by a charismatic man presenting himself as a television set. Is the handsome stranger a charlatan or a guru?” Emmy award-winning actor Tom Pelphrey [Guiding Light] leads the......

The NY Times has a slide show of assorted items that could be perfect wedding gifts for book lovers. Suggestions range from whimsical bookshelves to personalized book plates. We were most intrigued by Levenger's Thai Book Rest - we suppose you could get a pair of two for a wedding couple. Or one, plus some massage oils and a copy of the Kama Sutra as a cheeky bridal/bachelorette party shower gift. Anyway, on with this......

Clarence Dean, a registered sex offender in Florida and Alabama, was charged in the murder of a young woman whose body was found at a Times Square hotel. While cleaning a room on Thursday, a housekeeper at the Hotel Carter, on West 43rd Street near 8th Avenue, noticed some plastic bags under a bed and realized there was a body inside. Dean had checked out of the room on Wednesday. Dean reportedly told the police......

The police are questioning a man who had been registered a room in a West 43rd Street hotel where a woman's body was found on Thursday. Clarence Dean, a 35-year-old "fugitive" sex offender from Alabama, had checked out of the room 608 at the Hotel Carter, an inexpensive hotel near 8th Avenue popular with tourists. He was not charged with any crime, but police picked him up after seeing him at Park Avenue and East......

We suppose that if you're a UN inspector who just investigated an Iraqi chemical weapons facility, you might be too tired to store poisonous chemicals properly and might just throw them into storage. Last week, archivists at the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission discovered phosgene, a hazardous material that was "used during World War I as a choking agent" in files dating back to the 1990s, prompting the FBI and NYPD to head......

Forbes has released the results of their 7th annual Best Cities for Singles poll, and unlike last year...NYC is in the top 3, ranking #2 overall. An unprecedented rating for us! According to their results, out of 14,104,498 -- 33% of us are unmarried. Add that to the fact that we're (apparently) the 32nd drunkest city...and voilà! We're a top city for attracting the single class. This island is not unlike Neverland, so it's not......

MUSIC: Ever wonder what former Weezer bassist Matt Sharp has been up to? Well, he's back fronting his other old band, The Rentals. With a long list of former members, amongst them Maya Rudolph and Petra Haden, the group is now six-strong, and playing Nokia Theater tonight in support of their new EP, The Last Little Life. 8pm // Nokia Theatre [1515 Broadway] // $22.50 Over at Sound Fix Camera Obscura will be serving a......

Buddhists looking to increase their spiritual merit by rescuing soup-bound turtles, those turtles' rescuers, and the natural ecosystem of Central Park are all coming into conflict in New York. The New York Sun reported yesterday on the practice of fangsheng, which is a Buddhist practice dating back to the 6th century and involves setting turtles or other animals free and supposedly improves the circumstances of one's rebirth. Unfortunately, the species of turtle most frequently......

Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a bank robbery on 5th Ave. in Brooklyn, an electric shock at 25th Ave. and 49th St. in Queens, and a shooting on 101st St. and Columbus Ave. in Manhattan. Chazz Palminteri's stage and screen bildungsroman A Bronx Tale will appear again onstage this fall. The off-Broadway play was adapted to a 1993 movie featuring Palminteri, Robert De Niro, and screen newcomer Lillo Brancato. The latter is now facing......

American Express developed an interesting promotional tool that combines good press and good works with a dash of American Idol-style competition thrown in for good measure. The Members Project has been a winnowing contest where AmEx cardholders (or "members") have selected five charitable causes from a large number of entries. The single charitable project that then receives the most votes among the five will receive as much as $5 million from American Express to continue......