I recently took an adventurous walk with my friend and fellow blogger the Beehive Hairdresser with the intent of returning with some interesting things to share with you in this blog. This time around we headed down to Red Hook Brooklyn and ended up near the no longer new Ikea store and the park they helped build when taking over the property. The park is called Erie Basin Park and its right on the harbor and loaded with numerous industrial maritime sights. This is a largely photographic presentation and I hope it inspires you to visit sometime.
Continue reading An Adventure In Erie Basin Park (7/9/2012)
Totally Tubular Man (7/18/2012)
The things you sometimes see in New York City never cease to amaze me. This sight was in my direct path after I had left Duke’s Bar and was heading to see the Steel Panther show at Irving Plaza. I was not sure what the hell was going on but all of these giant tubes were hooked up to environmental control trucks, or something to that effect. I just had to show you the image of them as it was rather imposing to me (of course I had about three beers in me so a lot gives me pause at that point).
I had no idea what they were for until a gent walking next to me asked if I was a fan of the television show called “Smash”. I had to politely admit that I had no idea what he was talking about and it was then that I learned that it was a show featuring Debra Messing (from Will and Grace). You can learn more about the show by clicking HERE and please let me know if it is something that I should add to my Netflix or DVR programming. The tubes were funneling in the cool air since they were working in a building as a set and it was very likely hot in there. It had to be murder for them over these last couple of weeks as NYC was in the middle of a heat wave that was breaking records. OK, back to your regularly scheduled evening. That is all I have for you this time. Please stay tuned for more.
Integrating The PiercingMetal Pregaming Guides Into PiercingKen Blog
AND LO, A NEW HOME FOR THE PIERCINGMETAL PREGAMING GUIDES IS FOUND……
So what am I talking about this time? Well, to bring anyone new up to speed, it was back in the middle of 2010 that I had the idea about discussing the places that my friends and I would all meet up for food and drink before heading into the concerts that we were attending. A beer or three into the night that the idea first dawned on me found me initially wanting to present this to the readers as a lengthy posting that focused on a number of different places all in one easy narrative. After starting it, I realized that this would be something that would need a constant appending and that could prove to be a nightmare. By serializing them into unique posts, each existing place would remain special and each new one could get its own attention and comments. It made more sense at the end of the day and honestly speaking, this serialization premise was working very well for my Social Net Scoop narratives already so why not follow suit with this idea.
Looking back on them, I think that I did about a half dozen of them before I slowly found my time being consumed by the growing amount of concerts that I was attending and trying to keep up with for your Metal attention and with that being the case the topic kind of ended. Now as a very social person, and I don’t just mean in the online world, I really enjoyed bringing the readers of my sites blog these pregaming guides and decided that with the PiercingKen.com blog in full gear and discussing numerous adventures in food that I would move the topic here and start up once more. I feel that doing this lets me just share a decent place with you all whether I be hitting a show or not. Of course, I will be filing these under my Dining Adventures category as opposed to referring to them as pregaming adventures but I don’t think that will matter once the ball gets rolling.
I realize that some of you might be saying that I would be easily served by continuing to use my Yelp! account to line out the finer points of the places I go but I think it will be more fun to share my photos and ideas here as well for good measure. I’m easily found on Yelp! for those who wish to see some of the reviews I had posted and of course I am using Foursquare and Foodspotting now as well to tie all this kind of stuff together. Come find me on any of those if you like, the more the merrier I always say.
Check out my past narratives on this subject by clicking HERE. It will find the stuff that applies from our “Dining Adventures” category.
Thanks for listening to this little PiercingKen PSA 🙂
The Sad Saga Of The Beach Cat
I’m continuing along in my usage of some long unused photos that I snared while being in Atlantic City, NJ. These particular ones were shot in November of 2010 and it was a rather gloomy, doomish kind of afternoon but still I decided to wander on the Boardwalk a little bit. After a few minutes of walking I glanced down to the sand and noticed a stray cat sitting there pondering like he ran the place. Here are my visuals of The Beach Cat.
I realize that I might be misleading with my title of course, but as a cat lover, I felt that perhaps he was just a little bit sad if nothing else. He was observing the goings on and the passer by on the Boardwalk and I kept some distance since I didn’t want to spook him in the event he was hunting for a mouse or something.
I liked the perspective that I got from this next one. He was far enough away from the water to not get wet, but the air was very damp today and a storm was heading in our direction.
This is pretty much the same shot as a couple above, but with a slightly different perspective so I could get more of the tide as it rolled closer and closer up toward the shore. Our new friend would scurry away after a few minutes. As a cat owner I hoped that he was heading for some food and some kind of shelter.
About a month after I took the photos above I saw this sign which made me feel a little more comfortable about the stray cat that I saw. Apparently their is a program in place to take care of the various cats that wander on and around the Boardwalk.
Remember if you ever think about getting a cat for your home that you should try and have it be a rescue. There are so many of them out there and they all need good places to live out their lives. That’s all I have for now. See you again soon.
Do More Here: http://www.alleycat.org/
PiercingKen & Social Networking: Foodspotting
I’m taking a page out of my PiercingMetal Musings Blog once again to share with my readers the news about my noodling around on a particular social network. I did this with Instagram a couple of months ago because not only was the ID the same as this here website, but the overall use of something like Instagram would be more for the kinds of things that you read about here on PiercingKen.com anyway. The same applies to this one which is the dining-centric network known as “Foodspotting”. You might be thinking that it relates to food and you would be correct in that assumption. Foodspotting is cited as being a “visual food guide” and as I had mentioned in my Musings site posting about this, seems to be something that works well with those folks who are using Foursquare and Yelp! a lot in their adventuring.
I met some of the people involved in this service when I was at the Comic Con back in 2011 and it sounded kind of cool and was surely a little more interesting than some of the stuff that we find ourselves telling friends on Facebook and Twitter at every given second. With Foodspotting you can not only recommend places to eat to your friends and the network at large, but you can also take a photograph of your order and post it while at the same time offering up some information about it. For instance, I recently visited a bar/restaurant called Interstate Food & Liquor and I LOVED it. I was there with Skeleton Pete on the night we were hitting the Lez Zeppelin show and their menu was outstanding. With that being the case, I took a snap of my burger and our appetizer and loaded it up onto the Foodspotting site with a couple of words about it. My hope was to spin up extra interest in the offerings because it was so damned good. I plan to be doing this a lot more often as I find an interesting place worth speaking about. I can be found on the site via my real name of Ken Pierce or via the PiercingKen Twitter as I didn’t use the pen name of PiercingKen for this one as my actual ID. Closer friends can just add me via my Facebook Page which the service lets you check to see who you might know.
After losing two places that I really liked to stop into for a bite to eat, I hope that my using this kind of social network will help keep business coming in to the new haunts that I find and like. I am getting really tired of losing places like Acme Restaurant and Nice Guy Eddies that is for sure.
Should you wish to delve into the whole gamut of the Social Networking overviews and how I apply their use as a music journalist in today’s ever changing realm, just click HERE to bring up the list over on the PiercingMetal Musings Blog. Topical comments are always welcome from people who have some awesome thoughts to bring to the table, especially if they are doing similar adventures and can compare notes.
UPDATE: May 2, 2018 – I’m updating this post to share the news about the ending of Foodspotting. Back in 2013, the company was acquired in full by OpenTable and at the time of this sale, company founder Alexa Andrzejewski maintained that the purchase would not find the resource going away but here we are some years later and that has indeed happened. My post about Foodspottings end can be reader HERE if you’d like to check it out. I am going to miss this one because it was fun to load up the images into and it drove my non-Foodie friends bonkers.
Official Website: http://www.foodspotting.com/