Anyone here into climbing? Here’s something you maybe didn’t know about Tim: he is. Always going on about Brooklyn Boulders and how it keeps him in shape and it’s fun and once there was a whole squad of vegan climbers there just like his dreams. We usually don’t listen because, ugh, exercise. But, if you want to see for yourself what it’s all about without paying full price, well buddy, today’s your lucky day. (more…)

Quick! What do you think Gowanus is really missing at the moment? If you answered “a magical PCB-destroying fairy,” you’re technically correct. But since Mike Bloomberg cut the city’s Department of Magick research budget to almost nothing, Gowanus isn’t getting one of those. How about a luxury hotel developed by a guy that hangs out with Chloe Sevigny’s brother? Because that’s what it’s getting. (more…)

It’s hard to remember after a long winter, but New York can get really pretty once it warms up. And not just in Prospect Park and other parks. There are trees and flowers on every block you walk down that add color and life to an otherwise concrete-dominated landscape. If you want to help keep things pretty, you can grab a tree from Gowanus this weekend. Just try not to get any canal water on it once you have it. (more…)

Ah yes, spring is almost here, which means it’s nearly cotillion season, in which the young ladies of polite society don their kid gloves, helmets, and roller skates and prepare for an evening of drinking, elbowing, and general mayhem. If this doesn’t sound quite like the polite society our antebellum predecessors had in mind, that’s of course because it’s not. This is 21st century Brooklyn, after all. And tonight is the Gotham Girls Roller Derby Derbytaunt Ball, at Littlefield. (more…)

Beer, we all love beer here, right? Right. And we’re all also, if not pet owners or animal lovers per se, not into needless cruelty towards animals, right? Right. Ordinarily, it would be hard to find a way to combine these two passions outside of drinking a six pack and wrestling with your friend’s dog. But BeerAdvocate and Sixpoint have a way to combine them that can also make you look good: their annual Beer for Beasts fundraiser for the Human Society of New York. And if you can’t afford/don’t want to pay the $65 ticket price to have access to the goodies inside, good news: they also need volunteers. (more…)

Valentine’s Day. You have to laugh to keep from crying/breaking your toe in a drunken rampage against Brooklyn’s newspaper boxes. Why stay at home with a bottle of Night Train when you can head to the Bell House and laugh with some awesome Brooklyn comics, including Hannibal Burress and Todd Barry, at the Fifth Annual Tell Your Friends With Benefits? Just sneak the Night Train in with you in your bag. (more…)

There’s nothing like a good cat lady joke, but behind the laughter, there can be a terrible truth: hoarding cats isn’t just gross and weird, it’s cruel to the cats. How is a a person supposed to legitimately take care of ten, fifteen, thirty cats in even the best conditions? You can’t, and it only gets worse when something like Hurricane Sandy comes along. The ASPCA rescued thirty cats from a hoarder in the wake of Sandy, and after giving them the proper medical care, the cats are ready for someone nice like you to take them home this weekend. Won’t you help? (more…)

For a day that’s allegedly a holiday, Groundhog Day is pretty lame. Everyone just waiting around for their local groundhog to pop up and either cast a shadow or not to do that. And the king of all groundhogs is in backwater Pennsylvania. No thank you. People around here can make a party out of anything though, so it makes sense that there’s a free Groundhog Day party tonight in Gowanus. With beer. And tacos. And rock and roll. (more…)

If you’re a resident of Boerum Hill, you have an even better reason to lock your damn doors now: you live in the most expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn. According to Property Shark [h/t Brownstoner], the median sale price of a home in Boerum Hill was $950,000, dethroning DUMBO, which clocked in at a pathetic $869,256. Of course, now you should probably start telling your friends you live in Downtown Brooklyn or Brooklyn Heights, because otherwise they’re going to keep asking you to cover the tab when you go out for drinks. (more…)

To say we were all captivated by the story of the Gowanus Canal dolphin last week would be a massive understatement. What really concerned people during the saga was the fact that the dolphin was swimming in a soup of PCBs, heavy metals and oil slicks, which no one thought was good for the dolphin. But now initial test results on the dolphin’s corpse show that the Gowanus Canal didn’t poison Brooklyn’s temporary community pet, wasting all our jokes about the situation. (more…)