The elevators, painted completely black with the exception of a mirror on the back wall, have two oval windows cut out of the side, which have a large LCD panel behind them. Playing on the screen, is this video dubbed “Civilization”  by Marco Brambilia, which is a photshopped montage of various movie scenes all mashed together. You can watch the video below, but it doesn’t do it justice when you’re riding in a black elevator with creepy music and this video playing.

Instead, though, they were asking this of the hotel guests because the hotel was participating in a Target Fashion show called the “Target Kaleidoscopic Fashion Spectacular“. The show featured dancers and colored lights in all of the rooms on the south side of the building all choreographed to dance music. It was incredible. You can check out some video I shot of the event below:

Let’s not forget the amazing rooftop-bar or the amazing rooms featuring a glass shower smack-dab in the middle of the bedroom.

All-told, I have to say that I’ve enjoyed my stay here at this un standard hotel. While it’s a bit on the pricey side, if you can afford a night or two while you’re here in Manhattan, I highly recommend it. You won’t be disappointed!

Since last Monday, I’ve been in Boston for the festivities and work, but as much as it’s fun to be here I’m very glad to have gotten to New York this afternoon. For me, the city of Boston is an amusement park except most of the people that are there with you aren’t very pleasant. I love the city: Running along the esplanade, Copley Square, the MBTA, Somerville/Cambridge, and even the taxi drivers (and the town taxi rule). I am not, however, such a fan of the people.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my family and friends that live there. It’s a good portion of the remaining people in the city that I don’t really like. Take for example yesterday afternoon while I was running down the stairs at Park Street station from upstairs at the Green Line downstairs to the Red Line. People were disembarking the train downstairs and I knew that it was likely my train. I politely (and clearly) said excuse me to two girls walking side-by-side down the steps and hurried by. The girls, who looked to be in their early twenties, replied “You are excused!”

Is it wrong to rush by someone to grab a train, if you say ‘Excuse me?’ _I_ don’t think so, but maybe I’m the one in the wrong. Perhaps this can only be explained by the other strange phenomenon that Cool Jesus had witnessed at the Park Street stop. Personally, I feel it’s the city as a whole and I will attest that even some of my other Bostonian friends have been starting to experience it as well.

So here I am in NYC with 4 days left to see a Thunderstorm, the weather is looking very promising. Especially with highs in the upper 90′s tomorrow. Yikes! Welcome to New York City in August.

I soon found myself in hysterics, as they recounted a tale of flight attendant that berated a passenger over the intercom, grabbed some beer and used the emergency slide to exit the plane. At this point my row-mate finally found the channel, but only managed to hear the second half — leaving him fairly baffled.

Moments later, one of our own flight attendants walks by and noticed that a few people were watching this story on the news, so she had stopped to ask what was going on. The gentleman in row 16 re-told the story to the crew, to which they couldn’t believe it.

I love the media coverage of this incredibly bizarre story (which just seems to get even more bizarre every day). Everyone seems to know all of the strange facts about the story and freely shares their thoughts on the situation. But what I’ve found to be the most entertaining is JetBlue’s response to the ordeal, which came earlier today in the form of a blog post entitled “Sometimes the weird news is about us”:

“It wouldn’t be fair for us to point out absurdities in other corners of the industry without acknowledging when it’s about us. Well, this week’s news certainly falls into that category. Perhaps you heard a little story about one of our flight attendants? While we can’t discuss the details of what is an ongoing investigation, plenty of others have already formed opinions on the matter. Like, the entire Internet…”

It took JetBlue about 2 full days before they commented on the event and according to a New York Times article, that’s unheard of in PR land. They could’ve chosen from a dozen different ways with how to handle this story, though I feel they completely did the right thing. By admitting the truth about how they found the story just as humorous and strange as the next person, it fits so perfectly with the personality of the JetBlue brand.

Personally, I like JetBlue. When it comes to choosing an airline, they’re my second choice, but only because Richard Branson’s Virgin Empire will never cease to amaze me. But honestly, I try to fly them whenever possible and have always had a great experience. I applaud JetBlue for the way that they have dealt with this situation.. it’s the rest of those rude airline passengers that started this whole situation in the first place that I’m starting to lose respect for.

My heart goes out to you, Jorge.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook — or more specifically — I love how Facebook has allowed me to connect with friends (new and old) and share ideas, content, photos and more in a clean and easy-to-use format. I stress those two points, because MySpace and Friendster were the first pioneers into this space, however Facebook took it a step further by using web 2.0 technologies and cleaning up the mess.

At this point, though, the company has made so many privacy blunders that I really want to close my account — if it weren’t for all the people I still want to keep in touch with. So, first and foremost, I recommend going through your privacy settings with a fine-toothed comb and making sure that everything is set the way you want it to be. There’s a great article over at PC World that walks through what everything means and their recommendations of how to set things up.  I strongly encourage every Facebook user to check it out.

As a next step, I also donated $10 to the new open source social network project known as Diaspora. The concept is that you host your own “seed” of the social network, which can then communicate with other “seeds” rather than having all of the data stored on one master web site. Think of it like peer-to-peer networking, where each person has a small chunk of the entire data — and each peer communicates with eachother. In this model, you host and store all the data you want to share — and you decide what level of privacy you want (how novel!). For $5, you can get a starter CD to host your own seed once it’s available. For $10, you can get the starter CD and some stickers — and I’m all about stickers. It goes up from there, with each level getting an additional perk.

If you’d like to help make a more open (but private) social networking system, head on over to Kickstarter and donate a few bucks towards Diaspora. It’s it time to start telling Facebook enough is enough?

For whatever reason, though, I have made every attempt to hide the fact that it is my birthday this year. I have hidden this information from my Facebook page, I’ve intentionally avoided any birthday-related activities, and, quite frankly, would love for this week to be over as quickly as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with getting older — it’s all clearly laid out in life’s rule book. For what its worth, we get older every day, it’s just that we just use one calendar day of the year to represent the point at which your age becomes age+1. But, again, I hide.

Being 31 wasn’t that exciting, but only the Great Sea of Life (N.S.) knows what I have in store during my thirty-third year of life which officially begins today. Perhaps this is the direction that I need to take.

Perhaps that’s the purpose of this writing… An opportunity for me to re-evaluate the perspective that I bring to birthdays. Rather than focusing on being another year older, I should instead celebrate the clean slate which I am now given to work with. Similar to the Jewish Holiday of Rosh Hashanah , this is my opportunity to start anew.. a fresh start. Celebrate endings and new beginnings.

Regardless, I don’t have the luxury to go into complete hiding this week — and chances are by the time next weekend rolls around, I’ll want to go out and party once again. So I’ll stop my complaining and just suck it up like I do any other week — this one just happens to have an annoying milestone in the middle of it.

The moment I arrived, I felt at home with my classy friends. Blake, the owner of the house, was the most gracious host I’ve ever had the pleasure to stay with  and everyone else was so welcoming into their group of friends. Early in the night we headed over to the Howlin’ Wolf for the megalomaniac’s ball featuring a 2AM set by Garage a Trois.

Thursday night, we had a minor detour known as “Project OPP’ — but ended up seeing about half of the Galactic Show, snuck in the back door of an art gallery to meet up with my friends The Joker, Rhonda & Leslie and saw a bit of the Dirty Dozen. Late night, featured Big Galactic and DJ Ruscoe at Republic. Dub isn’t exactly my thing, but somehow I ended up having an absolute blast! The crowd (and venue) was a lot of fun. Plus — this was my first opportunity to party TOC’er Lauren from Philly, a Professional Party Princess! Would’ve been nice to see Marc, too, but that’ll have to wait for the boat!

We managed to scrape together a badass crawfish boil on Friday — but soon learned that not nearly enough people came over to pre-party which left many many pounds of boiled crawfish to be savored at a later date. Friday night, I went back to the Howlin’ Wolf the Bayou Rendezvous. I managed to check out George Porter’s Runnin’ Pardners and Col. Bruce’s band before the craziness began. And by craziness, I mean running to the Dragon’s Den to see Gravity-A from 12-2 followed by a trip to Tipitina’s in the Quarter to check out Some Cat from Japan and get a shout-out by Nigel Hall!) then to head back at 4am to see the second Gravity-A Set.

Saturday evening was the only night that was a little questionable. We were disappointed by the Greyboy set on the riverboat — they just couldn’t keep up the energy of the show, I felt. I later headed over to One Eye’d Jack’s to see BreakScience considering how much I enjoyed the dubstep from earlier in the week. I was sadly disappointed to learn that I really dislike BreakScience. Oh well, so it goes. I partied late night with the crew at Snake & Jake’s and all was right with the world again… or was it?

Sunday night was the night I had been most looking forward to of the trip. An evening at the Howlin’ Wolf  for the Royal Family Ball and JamCruise reunion. Soulive was awesome — I don’t think I’ve seen them since Bonnaroo 2004 and Lettuce simply blew my mind. I am pretty sure that they tried to kill me with the Funk.

The trip home was relatively uneventful, except for the police action that took place on my bus at the station in New Orleans that involved one drunk homeless guy claiming to another drunk homeless guy stole his cell phone. The end of the trip was fairly entertaining as well, when I realized that my car keys were in my checked luggage — which arrived 4 hours later than I did because I finagled myself an earlier flight. Nice.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering.. yes, I did make it to the actual festival, too. The food and music were amazing, but the late night club sets were so much more impressive!

I hate to be passed and when I know there’s someone behind me, I’ll keep a careful watch on them and their pace — and monitor mine accordingly. The same holds true when I spy someone in front of me: evaluating my energy levels, my pace, their pace. With some quick back-of-the-envelope math, I decide whether or not I can overtake them — and I often push myself to try.

It’s definitely something in the male competitive spirit, but it’s refreshing to know that I’m not the only one. All this means, though, is if you hear someone following you somewhere between Noe Valley and Golden Gate Park: Beware, I won’t give up. Unless, of course, it’s the way back from the park and we’re looking up at those giant hills… then it’s a team effort.

People who think they must avoid all dairy products may not need to, the researchers said in their report.

“The available evidence suggests that adults and adolescents who have been diagnosed with lactose malabsorption could ingest at least 12 grams of lactose (equivalent to the lactose content found in 1 cup of milk or 1 cup of yogurt) with no or minor symptoms,” the report reads.

I would like to invite the researchers that worked on this report to stay with me for a few days after I have consumed 1 cup of milk to experience the disastrous toll it takes on my life.