Black Table writer, Gothamist interviewer and comedy series host Nichelle gave us a heads up on the Barbes Reading Series. Tonight.

Victoria writes: "… my husband and I read your site all the time. We’d love for a Trader Joes to move into Prospect or Crown Heights. There are all those warehouses on Dean, Bergen, and Sterling (past Washington). Any ideas about how to bring Trader Joe’s to our neighborhood?"

The story is that Trader Joe’s is looking for a storefront somewhere in Brooklyn but, a spokeswoman says, "we need to find a deal that makes sense for us."

According to the Daily News article, "Trader Joe’s is still considering how much parking it will need … ‘We’re trying to be open-minded’ …"

Tonight from 6-8 PM at Fermented Grapes (651 Vanderbilt Av,
    Brooklyn,
    NY 11238; 718-230-3216): "Laurent, from Baron Francois,
will be pouring three French wines. A white and a red from Costieres de Nimes (both
Grenache-based blends) and a delicious red blend from Gaillac
(southwest France)."

I already told you this site is for
your benefit. It turns out that I also had a selfish motive.

It all started
in 1998, when I discovered Slashdot and
convinced myself that every urban neighborhood needed a grassroots news site of
its own.

Then recently, the Newspaper
Association of America asked me to write an article about how “citizen
journalists” are starting to create “hyper-local” news for ridiculously small
readerships. I started playing around with a trial account with Typepad. Now, Prospect Heights has is own
“hyper-local” news outlet.

Why is this important now? For starters, those fancy
Inter-net “web-sites” that cost tens-of-thousands to develop back in the
dot-com days are now pretty much free for anybody to build, thanks largely to
bloghosts. So you can imagine what career newspaper people must be thinking.
And in terms of getting the word out, Google’s near-proletarian
indifference to the P/E ratio of your publisher’s stock must have some
chilling effect.

So, go take a look at my article, “My Neighborhood News”
and the sidebar, “Who
Says You Can’t Get Micro-Local News in Print?” in which I was able to give
shout-outs to some of your blogs, LiveJournal accounts, and other Internet
distractions (but not all, I’m afraid).

In this photo, a small subset of the record crowd of 12,000 attendees gets samba lessons. From Feb. 5. The New York Times interviewed Reginald Paul, 34, of Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, "who described his ritual journey through the museum on Saturdays as starting at the top floor, then working down to the music. He said that early on in his four years of attending the event, he had one romantic experience: ‘I kinda went on a date… It was the first, and last.’ … His friend, Charles Faxton, explained that the event was so popular because it was the sole gathering spot in Brooklyn for the creatively inclined … ‘This is just a precursor to Basquiat…’"