Pure Essentials, the new pharmacy and drug store on Seventh Avenue and 2nd Street, where the 2nd Street Cafe used to be, is now open.

They opened on Thursday and OSFO and I went in around 5 p.m.

Frankly, I was surprised. It’s basically a drug store with an emphasis on high end hair products, skin care products, children’s hair and skin products, vitamins, herbals, and supplements. They do seem to have a good selection of products with an emphasis on the natural and organic.

Still, confusion. I thought it was going to be Kids Rx or something like a Back to the Land for kid’s health products.

It’s really a drug store with a lot of expensive health products, as well as kitchen items, stationery, cards, candles, etc.

No surprise, we managed to spend upwards of $30 on mouthwash, a new toothbrush for OSFO, Ricola cough drops, hair curlers for OSFO, hair scuncis, clips and more.

So it’s a bit of a mix. Could be a good thing to have nearby. And it’s not a national chain. Woo hoo.

Walking by this afternoon, I see there’s a mention of Kid Rx on one of the windows and a separate entrance. I am wondering if this is a coming attraction. Anyone know?

I got this in the old in box yesterday. It was like a little Halloween Haiku. But actually it was a question about a Prospect Heights restaurant. Do you know anything?

boo.

did noo na (korean on vanderbilt) close?

happy halloween

According to the New York State Board of Elections
(http://www.elections.state.ny.us/), for the General Election on
November 4, 2008, polls open at 6 am and close at 9 pm.

Expect lines and if you’re confused about where to vote or anything else go to the above mentioned site where you can look up your voter registration and your polling place.

On this site you can see the Rules and Regulations Part 6210 Routine Maintenance and Testing of Voting Systems,

I vote over at John  Jay High School. It should be plenty crowded over there. I’m hoping that around 11 am it won’t be too bad.

I am always moved by the NYC Marathon and generally make a point of watching it in Park Slope.

Here’s a nice marathon map from the Brooklyn Paper.  Brooklynites can see the runners run on Fourth Avenue starting in Bay Ridge.

I always think Third Street and Fourth is a great spot to watch (the lead runners will get there around 9:40 and the rest around 10:10).

It’s about 6 miles into the race and the runners still have a lot of energy and joie de vivre.

But the runners also run through Forth Greene, Williamsburg and Greenpoint.

Barbara Ensor, author of Cinderella (as if you didn’t already know the story) and Thumbalina, Tiny Runaway Bride, is offering clay animation classes for three age groups (6-8, 9-12, and 13 and up) at the Old Stone House in Park Slope

Sign up now for a group of five classes (4 plus a screening). The group will pool their talents and vision to collaborate on a short movie from start to closing credits.

These classes will be offered November 10 – December 19 except the week of Thanksgiving. $265 tuition includes materials and DVD.

Contact Barbara through littleschoolofmovingpictures.com or call Tiasha Ferme at 917-449-8542

The Where and When

Classes November 10 – December 19
The Old Stone House
Fifth Avenue and 3rd Street
Register now. littleschoolofmovingpictures.com

Some OTBKB readers wrote in with suggestions about volunteer opportunities in the Park Slope area. Benda Becker wrote in with this suggestion:

I’m sure tons of people will mention CHIPS
(Christian Help in Park Slope) on 4th Ave. but I can vouch that they’re a great
org. that serves people of every faith. Their soup kitchen gets a lot of
volunteers from church groups etc. around the holidays but undoubtedly needs
much more help at other times; they also run a transitional housing piece
upstairs called Frances House for moms of new babies (or about-to-be moms) who
would otherwise be homeless. I’ve done overnight ‘dorm mother’ duty for Frances
House and can vouch that they will not waste anyone’s time or money and have no
weird agendas. And they truly serve our immediate community.

Brooklyn Based sent a link to the post they did about good causes a few weeks ago.

I love the Park Slope Civic Council’s Halloween poster created by Gerardo Blumenkranz.

If pressed to label himself for marketing purposes he would say he’s an art director. But he’s also an illustrator and the man behind these fun/funny posters about trick or treating on Halloween, where the kids get tofu, Veggie Booy and Quinoa Puffs.

Check out his website, it’s a really good one.

This year the Park Slope Civic Council is sponsoring a Costume Contest for big and little
kids!  There are a load of categories to choose from, so get out your
thinking caps and get started making your homemade costumes.  Winners
will be presented with a winner’s banner to carry at the beginning of
the Parade.

    * 4:00 Free Photos by Roberto Falck Photograpy
    * 4:00-4:55 Contest Registration
    * 5:00-6:00 Costume Contes

And then it’s time for the Park Slope Halloween Parade, which starts at 6:30

7th Avenue and 12th Street is the starting point (continuing to Union Street). This year’s parade will feature large-scale
puppets built by the Park Slope Parents’ Puppet Team with the help of
Theresa Linnihan from the Puppeteer’s Coooperative.

Make way for these new additions and join the parade at the back so you
can see it all before participating in the biggest childen’s parade in
the United States!

Good Head makes good hats. Good Head loves to knit, and especially to design interesting hats.

I bought one of her hats at Bar Reis where she works the bar (that’s me at left). I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on my hat. Hepcat says I look like Princess Leia from Star Wars. Teen Spirit said I look like Eeyore. A random friend of OSFO’s said I look like a Muppet.

It’s a great hat and so so warm. I’ve been wearing it almost constantly. I also get a lot of compliments. Plus it has ears, which is an especially good idea for a New York winters.

Good Head is making these hats constantly and her stock at her Etsy site is growing and growing. So check out the hats and gloves she has there. If you like my hat she’ll make you one. Or you can pick one of the hats she has in stock.

Good Head writes:

"I can’t keep everything I make, so I thought I’d give you an
opportunity to get some great winter-wear, and I’ll use your money to
invest in new yarn, to make more stuff! I support yarn companies that
use environmentally sustainable practices, are careful with their
animals, and as often as I can, I use fibers that are made by women at
coops in under-developed parts of the world. I guarantee everything I
make for life, but so far my products have turned out to be
unbelievably durable. Just don’t put ’em in the washing machine!"

Good  Head also makes fingerless gloves that are very sexy. Good Head writes: "These are fingerless gloves that stretch out long, or accordion to
short wristlets. They have an interesting shape, and they are not
itchy. They’re good for people who play music outside." The hat on the below is called the Soda Pop Jones. She writes, "The Soda Pop Jones is super warm hat, it comes in a ton of colors, and I will post more
pictures soon, but for now, this is the only pic I have. It is
basically a skully with a cute little brim. It’s a unisex hat named for
my bestie, who drinks a LOT of sodi, and wears one of these."

Check out Jeff Scher’s special Halloween animation, Remains To Be Seen, which was filmed in Green-Wood Cemetery. It is part of the NY Times series, The Animated LIfe. Here’s Jeff on the cemetery of his inspiration:

"A great cemetery feels like a world
unto itself: a kind of theme park of the departed, where everyday life
is left behind at the gate. A certain mood overtakes you when you
visit. You are simultaneously overwhelmed by the sense of being
surrounded by the dead, and seduced by the beauty of the place. This
creates a special flavor of melancholy, the inevitable feels present
and one’s own life all the more fleeting — as in Memento mori, “Remember that you are mortal.”

"Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where this was filmed, is home
to approximately 600,000 former (or permanent) New Yorkers, and was a
popular tourist attraction in the 19th century. Wherever you turn, you
are confronted by bigger-than-life angels, huge pillars topped with
stone carved urns or orbs representing departed souls, and countless
carved headstones and elaborate mausoleums (many bigger than apartments
I’ve lived in). Confronted by so many lives that have been lived,
speaking to you in memorial marble and granite, you feel the presence
of human history. It is a stunning oasis of timeless green and
Victorian dreams of eternity in the heart of Brooklyn. Only the passing
planes remind you what century you’re in.

"With this film, I tried to capture that special cemetery mood in the
form and spirit of a Danse Macabre. Shay Lynch composed the
appropriately haunting score. I wanted my cast to consist exclusively
of the memorial statuary. The over-the-top quality of these realistic
representations of grief and faith ultimately inspired me to make this
Halloween Valentine to them."

Marty Markowitz’s office sent this. I guess he figured out that I just turned 50.

    On Thursday, October 30, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz will host a free Baby Boomer Retirement Fair at Borough Hall, with representatives on hand to answer questions on everything from Medicare, Social Security and reverse mortgages to money management, foreclosures and planning for the future in these uncertain financial times. Hard to believe, but the earliest baby boomers, defined as anyone born between 1946 and 1964, are beginning to retire.

    Exhibitors and workshops available to help boomers navigate this new phase of their lives will include New York City Department for the Aging; Social Security Administration; Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; SCORE; Grimaldi & Yeung, LLP; Henry Street Settlement; Parodneck Foundation; Mass Mutual Financial Group; Brooklyn Public Library; MetLife Bank, N.A.; AARP Foundation Bill Payer Program; Citibank; Joint Public Affairs Committee for Older Adults (JPAC) and more

Great piece in the Atlantic Monthly by Andrew Sullivan called Why I Blog. Here’s an excerpt.
 

From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple
experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers
was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation
of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the
alternative meant. I’d edited a weekly print magazine, The New Republic,
for five years, and written countless columns and essays for a variety
of traditional outlets. And in all this, I’d often chafed, as most
writers do, at the endless delays, revisions, office politics,
editorial fights, and last-minute cuts for space that dead-tree
publishing entails. Blogging—even to an audience of a few hundred in
the early days—was intoxicatingly free in comparison. Like taking a
narcotic.

It was obvious from the start that it was revolutionary. Every
writer since the printing press has longed for a means to publish
himself and reach—instantly—any reader on Earth. Every professional
writer has paid some dues waiting for an editor’s nod, or enduring a
publisher’s incompetence, or being ground to literary dust by a legion
of fact-checkers and copy editors. If you added up the time a writer
once had to spend finding an outlet, impressing editors, sucking up to
proprietors, and proofreading edits, you’d find another lifetime buried
in the interstices. But with one click of the Publish Now button, all
these troubles evaporated.

Alas, as I soon discovered, this sudden freedom from above was
immediately replaced by insurrection from below. Within minutes of my
posting something, even in the earliest days, readers responded. E-mail
seemed to unleash their inner beast. They were more brutal than any
editor, more persnickety than any copy editor, and more emotionally
unstable than any colleague.

Again, it’s hard to overrate how different this is. Writers can be
sensitive, vain souls, requiring gentle nurturing from editors, and
oddly susceptible to the blows delivered by reviewers. They survive,
for the most part, but the thinness of their skins is legendary.
Moreover, before the blogosphere, reporters and columnists were largely
shielded from this kind of direct hazing. Yes, letters to the editor
would arrive in due course and subscriptions would be canceled. But
reporters and columnists tended to operate in a relative sanctuary,
answerable mainly to their editors, not readers. For a long time,
columns were essentially monologues published to applause, muffled
murmurs, silence, or a distant heckle. I’d gotten blowback from pieces
before—but in an amorphous, time-delayed, distant way. Now the feedback
was instant, personal, and brutal.

 

A Kensington shopkeeper stands knee-deep in floodwater to
clear a blocked drainage grate.                        Photo: Tom Martinez

Trick-or-treat at Babeland on Friday, October 31, 6-8pm, Free

Babeland Brooklyn, 462 Bergen Street
Tricks and Treats at Babeland are not for kids! Be one of the first 50
people to show off your costume and get a very sexy surprise.

And starting today: Sexy Jack-O-Lantern Contest, October 29 – 31

Have some naughty fun with a Halloween tradition and carve a sexy scene into your pumpkin! Bring your erotic pumpkin to Babeland SoHo to enter it in our 1st annual Sexy Jack-O-lantern contest. First place winner receives a $100 Babeland gift bag.  Second and third place winners receive Babeland gift bags worth $50 and $25, respectively. Jack-O-Lanterns are judged on creativity and craftsmanship. Drop off your entry at the SoHo store during business hours Wednesday, October 29th – Friday, October 31st

Looks like the Feldman’s have a a Fab New Feature on their weather blog. A live video taken from their rooftop.

How cool. Check out Current Weather in Park Slope and see the video.

They also have a 36-hour time lapse video of weather. It’s gorgeous. Watch it.

36 Hour Time-Lapse Park Slope Weather Movie

Some students in front of PS 321 were doing a survey. "Obama or McCain?" they asked as I walked by. When I said Obama one of the little girls jumped up and down, "We’re not getting any McCain’s."

Question: Does anyone know anyone voting for the John McCain/Sarah Palin ticket in Park Slope? Just wondering.