Only at Le Cirque would you find a bar casually flanked by a flat-screen TV on one wall showing the 1956 musical High Society on and a computer screen on the other, ticking away U.S. treasury securities. But so it goes at the New York fixture's new wine lounge, where, as of Saturday, midtowners can revel -- sans sportscoat dress code -- in such bourgeois delights as, gasp, finger foods, like signature mini cheeseburgers (paired with a 2005 Bunyip Estates "Reserve" from Barossa Valley) and hamachi sashimi with green tea marinade (paired with saki) from executive chef Christophe Bellanca.

I popped in on Thursday to have a peek at the place, a very red space designed by Raphael Alberez of Design Elements. Le Cirque's call to the younger set seemed to be answered as a couple of pretty young brunettes on a low lying leather chaise chirped away in French beneath what appeared to be a suspended medicine cabinet with sliding glass doors. Perhaps unconvinced by the yoga-esque principle that has also been employed in the wine lounge -- that the more time one spends close to the earth the more relaxed one is -- the two ladies soon opted for big-girl seats at the bar.

Sirio Maccione

Perched on an orange leather ottoman waiting myself, I thought of the man who first told me about Le Cirque years ago. A friend's father, he was a slow-talking Nashville gentleman who favored silk pocket squares and in his younger days, Studio 54 and the Mud Club. He knew Le Cirque in its heyday of the late seventies and had described to me a magical place which I caught glimpses of here, in the Bloomberg Tower space they have occupied since 2006. In the wine lounge, it was the whimsical umbrella-like fixtures hanging from the ceiling and, in the dining room, there was the single perfect ravioli that punctuated my chicken consumee and the secret recipe revealed at the bottom of my crème brulee. But the imminent success of the latest addition sat at a table on the edge of the lounge, just outside the main dining room. The owner Sirio Maccione (who favors the Chicken Paillard with sautéed mushrooms and the Minute Steak with pommes frites and béarnaise) enjoyed lunch with his wife and dolled out double-cheek kisses to a bubbly young blonde, very much the duke of his newly extended domain. --LIZ MCDANIEL

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You know a home theater system has earned a place on the top-shelf when it's endorsed by Martin Scorsese. And so it is with Planar products. Thanks to the purchase of Runco International last May for nearly $40 million, Planar is far and away the industry leader when it comes to spine-tingling Plasmas, LCDs, and digital projectors.

Planar sets are sold only through licensed dealers so don't bother looking for one at Best Buy. Runco's systems range in price from $3,000 to $250,000 -- you might be able to buy a Best Buy for that. It might be difficult to justify every penny, but below are three worthy reasons to incur your wife's scorn.

Runco WP-42HD
When was the last time you watched the Masters from a Jacuzzi during a snowstorm? How about watching March Madness from under a coconut tree, margarita in hand, on a windswept beach? Exactly. $8,995.

Runco XP-103DHD
Next to Panasonic's 150-inch mountain of pixels, this 103-inch plasma looks like a malnourished younger brother. But when it comes down to it, do you really need more than 103-inches? $99,995.

Planar PD420 HD
If, for some bizarre reason, you wanted something smaller than 7-feet wide for the great indoors, you can't do any better than the Planar PD 420. The sleek design is as stunning as its technical wizardry--full 1080HP, Faroudja DCDi Cinema processing, DVI and HDMI hookups. And, compared to the others, it's highway robbery. $2,999. --MICHAEL MRAZ

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While modern air travel may not be as alluring as it once was, unlocking the mystique surrounding the well-manicured women (and men) in charge of our safety and comfort in the sky is still enticing, and now it's possible.

In the book Flight Attendants, photographer Brian Finke chronicles the lives of flight crews around the world. Finke began his work in the United States, flying numerous airlines domestically, from Delta to Southwest. He then moved on to Europe, boarding British Airways and Air France flights, among others. Later, he visited a flight attendant school where he photographed the flight crew practicing their emergency procedures -- giving safety demonstrations, putting out fires, and inflating slide rafts. He also visited Asia and ended the worldwide jaunt on Icelandair.

Finke spent two-years traversing the globe to capture both public and private moments, from preparing food in the galley to applying make up, shooting pool and smoking cigarettes. Finke, with his eye for fashion, captures an image of air travel that is unlike what some may imagine in the days of low-fare cattle cars and few amenities in the sky. In one image reminiscent of a runway show, Tiger Airways crewmembers descend the roll-up stairs onto the tarmac, proudly displaying their white blouses, black pencil skirts and black and orange Tiger Airways scarves.

Finke's past work has covered a wide range of subjects but he focuses on team dynamics in much of his photography. Some of his past work has included photos of baseball and football players, cheerleaders and fraternity brothers. Along with the release of the monograph, an exhibition of Finke's work from Flight Attendants opened at ClampArt in New York on Thursday, February 21.

With Alix Browne, deputy style editor of The New York Times Magazine, and Alison Nordström, Curator of Photographs at George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York, contributing, Flight Attendants is sure to be good reading material the next time you're at a cruising altitude of 35,000 ft and may be the best way to recall the romance of air travel. --BRANDON FELDMAN

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With Hurricane Oscar finally leaving Los Angeles, it's time for a brief dispatch from the center of the storm. The weekend kicked into high gear on Saturday night with the Audi-sponsored Miramax party for its nominees -- best pic No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Gone Baby Gone -- at the new Soho House on the Sunset Strip. As a few hundred guests, including Russell Simmons, Julian Schnabel, Stephen Gaghan, and literary ghost Cormac McCarthy, sprawled on pillows bearing stills from the nominated films, Javier Bardem led Penelope Cruz around the room, occasionally stepping out on the balcony overlooking West Hollywood to smoke and steal kisses like teenagers. For Disney CEO Bob Iger -- whose Pixar and Miramax divisions helped reel in the company's 31 nominations -- the party was a well-deserved victory lap, and I asked him if he thought the Academy acclaim might help silence those occasionally pesky critics of the Mouse House. "Yes," he said with a smile, "And that's always a good thing."

Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz (Photo: Getty)

Well after midnight I decamped for a party at ex-Microsoft poobah Paul Allen's house tucked way up in Beverly Hills. The fortress-like manse (which I'll expand on -- along with more Oscarama -- in our May issue) looked kind of like a James Bond villain's lair... reimagined by Lindsay Lohan. Which is appropriate given her furtive appearance around 3 a.m. with media mogul spawn Courtenay Semel. True to form, our 55-year-old billionaire host took the stage with his guitar and back-up band -- not to mention Courtney Love for a couple songs -- to entertain the likes of Josh Hartnett, Jennifer Aniston, and P. Diddy into the wee hours.

Marion Cotillard (Photo: Getty)

Yesterday's festivities began even earlier, at In Style's viewing party at STK. It was like the junior prom of the weekend: Huge jars of candy, prizes for the best Oscar poolers, a crowd that included Leighton Meester, Benjamin McKenzie, and Karolina Kurkova, and an eruption of cheers when Diablo Cody won best original screenplay for Juno. Before long it was time for Elton John's AIDS Foundation benefit at the Pacific Design Center, the Antony Todd-curated gala that supplanted Vanity Fair this year as the most slippery ticket in town. While I don't have the attention span to relay everyone I saw, here's a colorful cross section: Marion Cotillard, clinging endearingly to her best actress statue, Sean Penn and Petra Nemcová, Harrison Ford and Calista Flockhart, Sharon Stone, Rupert Murdoch, Heidi Klum, Larry King, and Prince, who were all treated to roof-raising performances by Sir Elton (holla "Tiny Dancer"!), Mary J. Blige, and Jake Shears. Afterward, pretty much everyone who knew how to use text messaging decamped for Prince's house in Beverly Hills, and as of 4 a.m. this morning, His Purpleness was still cooking breakfast in his kitchen for the hundreds of pie-eyed revelers who refused to acknowledge Monday. -- HUDSON MORGAN

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When you've decided to order a bottle of Bordeaux, but are trying to choose between a Lynch-Bages from 1998 and one from 2000, you could have an elaborate tete-a-tete with the Sommelier. Or, in the case of the wine bar at Adour, Alain Ducasse's new restaurant in the St. Regis Hotel, you can read about the differences on an interactive menu projected onto the surface of the bar itself. It's like having a discreet private expert on hand at all times, which helps when you're coming to terms with a wine cellar stocked with 12,000 bottles.

The four-seat bar offers exquisite small dishes -- glazed pork belly, seasonal vegetables, even osetra caviar -- which are carefully conceived to be matched with the wine. On a recent visit, the knowledgeable barman recommended to me a bargain white from Greece of all places -- a crisp Domaine Sigalas 2006 -- to go with a cucumber-marinated hamachi. Should you wish to wade into the deep end of four-figure bottles, Adour can happily accommodate you.

The interactive menu takes a moment to get used to (apparently women are faster adapters than men), but once you've settled in you can scroll through the wine list, which describes qualities of each wine -- from the provenance to tasting notes to geographical facts ("lying on a large hillside of deep gravel in the Plateau de Bages") and other details ("the estate has remained practically unchanged since the 16th century"). After a glass or two you feel like quite the expert.

The system is also available in the private dining room, so your guests can know the details of the winning bottles you've chosen. Does this all this render the sommelier obsolete? Not quite. Adour's wine director, Thomas Combescot, told me, "The more people learn, the more they want to know. And that's why we're here." --DAVID COGGINS

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In 1999, Alfred Brendel -- a supreme master of the classical piano -- published a collection of poetry called One Finger Too Many.  In this book of brief verses, Brendel shows off his quiet wit, and sneaky sense of humor.  One of the poems, "The Coughers of Cologne" -- published on his website -- pokes gentle fun at audience members who cough "distinctly during expressive silences."

Thankfully, the coughers were few and far between when the 77-year-old piano maestro played his final concert at Carnegie Hall on February 20.  Brendel is retiring from the concert stage at the end of 2008, after 60 years in the business.  According to his publicist, he wanted to stop performing while "still at the peak of his powers."  And so, for the coughers and clappers of New York, this was a treasured last chance to see the great pianist in recital.

In his white tie and tails, the professorial Brendel started his final programme with such casual fluency, the audience had barely settled.  He zeroed in on pieces by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and his beloved Schubert, playing the composer's last, great sonata in B flat major, D960. He rendered the piece with such simple tenderness, without any grandstanding or unnecessary pathos, that Carnegie Hall's grand space was converted into an intimate salon. The audience was listening, with nary a cough.

Brendel will continue his tour in the U.S. and Europe this year.  He will give his final concert in Vienna on December 18, performing Mozart's Piano Concerto No.9 in E flat K271, nicknamed the "jeunehomme," written by Mozart at the age of 21.  Maybe Brendel chose the piece because he considers it Mozart's first great masterpiece, one of the wonders of the world.  But maybe he's also hinting at something else, that in the end it's music that trumps mortality. --DAMIAN FOWLER

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(Burckhardt, "Astor Place" 1947, gelatin-silver print, 7 3⁄8 x 7 1⁄2 inches)

Rudy Burckhardt moved from Switzerland to New York in 1935, when he was 21, and liked what he found.  He befriended leading artists and poets and his photographs of New York serve as a history of his adapted city.  A new exhibition at Museum of the City of New York reminds us that he combined careful social observation with a powerful sense of formalism. 

(Burckhardt, "Flat Iron in Summer" 1947, gelatin-silver print, 11 x 9 inches)

His black and white photographs are small, usually around the size of a book, yet they are exceptionally engrossing -- every inch of a print is revealing.  Today's New Yorkers may be surprised to find that the city once contained subways with upholstered seats, barbers offering shaves for less than a quarter, and tobacconists selling Cuban cigars. But some things remain the same: The Flatiron Building still looks great, women everywhere wear smart shoes, and the views down the canyons of buildings towards the Hudson River are still inspiring. 

(Burckhardt, "Times Building" ca. 1948, gelatin-silver print, 9 x 7 inches)

During his six decades in the Big Apple, Burckhardt accepted how the city and its people changed remarkably.  And ultimately it's his humanity that makes him, even almost a decade after his death, very much an artist of our time. -- DAVID COGGINS

(All photos courtesy of the Estate of Rudy Burckhardt and the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York)

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In the The Spy Who Loved Me, Roger Moore speeds underwater in his Lotus to elude a villain. That kind of amphibious dexterity might soon be a reality. The Swiss car developer Rinspeed has created the world's first submersible car, the sQuba, and will unveil the modern marvel at the Geneva Auto Show, which begins on March 6. 

Rinspeed CEO Frank Rinderknecht says his obsession with James Bond inspired the sQuba concept car. In fact, he'd wanted to create it ever since the film came out in 1977. The sQuba's chassis is even modeled after the Lotus.

The carmaker removed the vehicle's combustion engine and replaced it with three electric motors. One propels the car on land and the other two are for underwater driving. The car will float if driven into water, with two rear propellers thrusting it forward. But when a door is opened (there are no windows), it submerges itself. The engines take in water through the car's front grill and push it out through side vents. Two jets, mounted on swiveling heads in the front of the vehicle, maneuver the car. Lithium-Ion batteries power the sQuba, which can stay underwater for up to two hours. On land, the car can even drive itself with its high-tech laser sensor system.

Since the car is roofless, occupants should expect to get a little wet. Rinspeed built it to be open-topped so that occupants could exit the vehicle quickly in an emergency. Passengers will breathe underwater through a tank of compressed air similar to what scuba divers use. The sQuba has a top speed of 77 miles per hour on land, as a boat it moves at 3 mph, and underwater it slows down to 1.8 mph.

Rinderknecht said that the only sQuba in existence cost more than $1.5 million to create. Making a car watertight and pressure-resistant enough to be maneuverable underwater was difficult, he said. Rinspeed is in talks with commercial car manufacturers about making a limited number of sQubas. It'll be cheaper than a Rolls Royce, according to Rinderknecht; A 2008 Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupe is going for more than $400,000.

Rinspeed, a concept car company, has made glass, flying and expandable cars in past auto shows. Rinderknecht and other 007 fanatics would probably agree that this is their best yet. There's not better way to arrive at the Monte Carlo in style.  -- BRANDON FELDMAN

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Box Elder County, Utah, has become the latest oil battleground -- this time pitting art enthusiasts against local officials. A proposed drilling area less than 5 miles from American sculptor Robert Smithson's massive Spiral Jetty (1970) threatens the serene open landscape integral to this work, not to mention noise pollution and the effect of toxic chemicals on the surrounding wetlands. The protection of Smithson's earthworks masterpiece -- a 1,500-foot-long coil made of basalt rocks and earth that winds into the Great Lake -- is championed by Dia Art Foundation, a nonprofit organization, as well as The National Trust for Historic Preservation. What's their plan of action? A letter-writing campaign directed at the Utah Public Lands Policy Coordination Office. If dissenting words escape you, a letter template is available at diaart.org; start stamp licking. --TASHA GREEN

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Visitors to the Kentucky Derby have to choose more than just the winners of the races -- they also have to decide whether to drink mint juleps or go for straight bourbon. (Perhaps the julep during the race and the bourbon once you lose your bets.) What do these imbibers eat when they're suffering a hangover the next day? Most likely the Hot Brown, the sandwich that has been an institution since its inception at Louisville's Brown Hotel in 1926.

The sandwich was originally conceived as an alternative to the ham and eggs that the hotel's kitchen served to dancers in the wee hours of morning. It's described on the menu as roast turkey, toast points, Mornay sauce, Parmesan, finished with bacon and tomatoes. Sounds simple enough. That may not prepare you for what arrives: strips of bacon crossed on an open face sandwich, with a shocking amount of creamy sauce, all served in a brown pot that's straight from the broiler. It's quite something: intensely rich and almost impossible to finish. The menu doesn't mention the amount of butter and eggs they use -- which is wise, once you see the recipe. Yet somehow one still finds room for Derby Pie. -- DAVID COGGINS

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The talk-of-the-town at this year's Sundance festival was Polanski: Wanted and Desired, produced by Steven Sodergergh and directed and written by documentarian Marina Zenovich. Thorough and thought provoking, the film details what happened the night Polanski allegedly had sex with Samantha Geimer, a 13-year-old girl, and pieces together the events leading up to February 1, 1978 -- when the famed director hopped on a plane from California to France and never returned. The film specifically focuses on the judge on the case, Laurence J. Rittenband, painting him as a press-hungry monster. Although Polanski was not interviewed for the documentary, his attorney Douglas Dalton and close friends were. Others who were interviewed include: the bailiff, the district attorney Roger Gunson and Samantha Geimer, now in her early 40s. The film also includes some incredibly stylish archival footage of Polanski and Sharon Tate. It won the Sundance "Documentary Editing Award," and was nominated for "The Grand Jury Prize." The documentary also kicked off the limited bidding wars this year, and was acquired domestically by HBO and internationally by Weinstein Company. --EMILY CREED

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The first thing you realize when you sit down to race at Grand Prix NY, opening today in Mount Kisko, is how little vehicle there is between you and the road. Three inches off the ground in a Sodi RX7 Kart at 40 mph gives a rush of speed and acceleration that is as close to Formula 1 racing as many of us are ever likely to get.

GPNY is an indoor, all-season all-weather facility. The courses were designed by the owners, kart racers themselves, to capture the experience of open wheel driving in Europe. Unlike the oval tracks used in NASCAR, the courses at GPNY feature S curves, changes in elevation, and even replicas of famous turns, like The Carousel from Germany's Nueburgring.

Gearing up at GPNY was straightforward. I signed away life and limb at the desk, got a laminated license and entered a locker room beside the track. After a quick safety talk I was given a tracksuit and black balaclava. A foam brace went under my helmet. After the first race I realized why. As soon as we finished and I took my helmet off my neck felt like a used rubber band, a result of the G force generated in the turns.

The SODI Karts at GPNY are an embryonic version of their F1 brothers. Lewis Hamilton, Formula 1's current wunderkind, got his start racing karts at age eight, taking world champ in 2000. Driving a kart, powered by a Honda GX 200 4-stroke engine, requires quick reflexes and strong nerves. It took me the whole first race to coordinate the wheel, gas and brakes, the last piece of which I learned not to use except in emergencies.

One of the best features of the GPNY is that all the karts come with built in sensors that measure your performance during each lap. At the end of a race you get a diagnostic of all your times, where you placed against other racers and a chart comparing performance in each individual lap.

GPNY is open to the public and also offers catered corporate events. GPNY has plans to add a number of amenities: a club lounge where you can shower and relax and an elevated restaurant, where your co-workers can watch the races as the wash away the bitter taste of your victory. --BEN POPPER

(Photos: Ben Duchac)

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When the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) was established in 1991 inside the grand, gray confines of Dublin's seventeenth-century Royal Hospital Kilmainham, perhaps no one predicted that 17 years later, a major retrospective of two contemporary artists would call into question the entire notion of modernity and contemporaneity -- not to mention of installing white-cube spaces in a building founded during the reign of Charles II.  But with the February 5 opening of An Amusing Experience of Chemistry: Photographs 1990-1890 by the American-born art duo McDermott and McGough, IMMA seemed to be inching back toward its pre-modern roots:  Four seldom-used rooms, complete with period detail, fireplaces, and wall and floor treatments rigged up by the artists were filled with McDermott and McGough's startling photographs from the late 1980s and early 1990s.  These could just as easily have been, as the show's subtitle suggests, from the 1880s and 1890s, having been taken with huge, antiquated cameras (some of which were parked liked parlor curiosities in the exhibition rooms) and processed by extremely old-school means:  palladium, cyanotype, salt, and gum-bichromate printing.

Appropriately, the well-attended opening was kicked off by a few words from the Hon. Desmond Guinness, the 76-year-old brewing scion, son of Lady Diana Mitford, and founder, in 1958, of the robust Irish Georgian Society, one of the premier historic preservation organizations in the world.  As he impishly sounded alarm bells about the appearance of giant mechanical cranes on the horizon surrounding IMMA -- "skeletons" he called them, harbingers of deathly visual pollution in the form of encroaching modernity -- he was ringed by an amused international crowd that included the likes of Paris gallerist Jerome de Noirmont; Zurich art dealer Andrea Caratsch; writer Tom Sykes and his wife, the designer Sasha Sykes; New York gallerist Nicholas Robinson; William Burlington, the son of the Duke of Devonshire; and David McDermott and Peter McGough themselves, dressed, as is their custom, in evening wear that would not have caused any second looks in the first-class dining room of the Titanic.  Concluding his inaugural remarks, Guinness turned toward the artists (who first moved from New York to Dublin in the early nineties, although McGough has since moved back) and sized up the improbable, 21st-century-defying figures they cut:  "I want to... be you," he said.

McDermott, top hat, spats, and all, belted out a response that seemed to reflect not only the feelings of two artists enjoying a big show in their adopted city, but the collective yearnings of the Dublin crowd:  "We love you!  You're our hero!  We want to be you!"

An Amusing Experience of Chemistry: Photographs 1990-1890 is on view until April 27. Irish Museum of Modern Art, Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, Ireland; +353-1-6129900 www.modernart.ie. --MARK ROZZO

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Designer Thom Browne can be a very polarizing figure within our readership. Love him or hate him, he certainly has had an impact on proportion and how men dress today...Which leads me to my first person experience with the Black Fleece collection at Brooks Brothers.

I was recently in the market for a new suit and stopped by the main Brooks Brothers Madison Ave. location to check out Black Fleece for myself. Never did I ever think that a Thom Browne designed suit was for me, and I would imagine that most guys feel the same way. The tiny jackets, the short pants, and heavy shoes all seem a bit tricky -- even for a fashion editor. Its also pretty safe to say that I am probably not the ideal physique of what Thom has in mind when designing a collection (I am 5'4").

The decision to size the Black Fleece collection "1 to 5" is a bit bewildering, but fairly easy to manage with the help of very informed salespeople. Fearing the worst, I tried on a size 4 -- it was way too big. I went down to a 3 and it fit perfectly. The trousers are thoughtfully un-hemmed and all set to go from flood height to shoe skimming to every length in between. I must also add the proportions are quite good on someone vertically challenged like myself.

I left the store with a new suit, three shirts, and sweater ($2100, with the 50% off sale price). I am a total Black Fleece convert, and believe me, a very tough customer at that. I'm looking forward to seeing how this line will evolve for Brooks Brothers in the future...here is a sneak peek at spring Black Fleece. Let the debates begin.--STEPHEN WATSON

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Finally, Las Vegas will have it all: this Friday the first wine auction ever in Sin City will be held at Alex, the flagship restaurant in the Wynn Hotel. Zachy's is putting 367 lots under the hammer, an inventory culled from different sellers that mostly includes Bordeaux, Burgundies and Champagnes.

A percentage of the proceeds will go to support the new Frank Ghery-designed Lou Ruvo Brain Institute. But more glittering than a titanium-clad research center is the auction's setting in Las Vegas. It could mark the westward shift of auctions from New York, which snatched the industry from London ten years ago. Las Vegas buyers are a force in wine auctions – who else but hoteliers and high rollers can afford runaway Bordeaux prices, like the jeroboam of Petrus 1982, estimated at $45,000-$80,000? And what's sold in Vegas might stay in Vegas.

The showstopper is the final lot in the auction, 30 bottles of Screaming Eagle 1996, estimated at $75,000-$100,000. But the record-breakers to watch right now are from Champagne. Take the two half-cases of Krug 1995 Clos d'Ambonnay, estimated at $20,000-$40,000 each, or to press the divide button, over $6,000 for a single bottle. The price is justified: 1995 is the inaugural vintage of Clos d'Ambonnay, only 250 cases were made, and the cases themselves are mahogany. But still, this sets a new standard, allowing other Champagnes, like a case of Roederer Crystal Rose 1996, estimated at $5000 to $7500, to punch above their weight.

And it makes a wine that could be cellared for another 50 years, like the Methuselah of Domaine de la Romanée Conti 1988, estimated at $40,000-$70,000, seem like a bargain.-- OLIVER SCHWANER-ALBRIGHT

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Greg Brier's new restaurant in Manhattan's Flatiron district, Aspen, attempts to span the dual worlds of city chic and country cool. If this were the real Aspen, of course, you'd hobble in the joint in your ski boots for an apres-ski toddy a la the Jerome Hotel Bar in days of old. Instead you're greeted by a Manhattan version of mountain cool: Lucite deer heads and antlers hang above the bar and the DJ booth; photorealist birch-tree murals line the spare dining room (complete with a central fire pit), and bison sliders kick off a menu of gourmet comfort food. Best of all, though, is the private Gonzo Room, a detailed tribute to Aspen's late and infamous resident, Hunter S. Thompson, rendered vaguely in the style of his favorite hangout after the J-Bar, the Woody Creek Tavern. It's got its own bathroom and its own bartender; what it doesn't have (yet) is Thompson's favorite Tavern beverage, the Biff. Tell the bartender and order your own: It's a shot of half Bailey's and half Jameson's. 30 West 22nd Street, New York NY (212-645-5040) www.aspen-nyc.com --COREY SEYMOUR

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If Steve Nash makes it onto the court in the NBA All Star game on February 17, be sure to check out his kicks. The Phoenix Suns guard and reserve player for the All Star west conference team will be wearing Nike's latest attempt to reduce the company's monolithic carbon footprint: a pair of recycled athletic shoes made from old sneaker scraps. (The genesis is excess materials from the factory floor, not previously worn shoes.) Following the game, the swoosh brand plans to sell 192 limited edition pairs of the heavily quilted sneaks on April 22, or Earth Day for the green-illiterate. --SARA JAMES

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White shorts would never be the same after Björn Borg

MV STAT: The priciest sneakers to date are owned by Outkast's Big Boi (real name: Antwan Patton) -- diamond-studded Nike Air Force 1 "So Cals" worth a reported $50,000 ...

Founded in 2003 by a duo of design heavyweights, the blog Design Observer has distinguished itself with a balance of intelligence and levity. The editors--Michael Bierut, William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand--are accomplished as both craftsmen and critics: Bierut is a partner at the design firm Pentagram in NY, while Drenttel and Helfand work at Winterhouse, a design studio in northwest Connecticut. The blog's charm is its mix of in-depth essays and pop culture ruminations. A recent piece on a prominent German logo designer, for example, reads well against a video clip of two drug dealers, heatedly discussing the value of brand names. Winner of a 2007 Webbie award, it was also highlighted in the Wall Street Journal's round-up of best blogs, picked by Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker, who probably knows a thing or two about what makes for good blog reading. --BEN POPPER

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Bill Massie creates a futuristic upstate retreat
Winka Dubbeldam--an architect for the digital age

MV STAT: Superbowl fans are expected to consume more avocados during Sunday's game than on any other day of the year--almost 50 million pounds...