"Measuring about 11 inches — allowing for shrinkage caused by pickling — Rasputin’s penis displayed in a tall glass bottle is, to put it delicately, a big attraction at the museum." (photo here; viewer discretion advised.)

Ask me where in the world I most want to be right now and I'll probably tell you Buenos Aires in the '50s. A projected Argentina trip in November will hopefully get me to the right part of the globe, but I'm still having some trouble putting together the time machine.

Chinese Democracy may never happen, but Guns 'n' Roses fan art is a constant. (Related: Rolling Stone, who also did that great Rodney Dangerfield "where is he now?" story I linked to a few weeks ago, ran a similarly not-so-cheerful Axl update called What Happened To Axl Rose - The inside story of rock's most famous recluse in 2000. God only knows what the four subsequent years have wrought.)

The NYC Department of Environmental Protection on the 32 peregrine falcons in the city. And 55 Water Street's peregrine falcon site (includes a blog and a live webcam), featuring information and regular updates on the building's most famous occupants.

"The public library in Worcester, Mass., with a main library and two branches, received 150 copies of 'Nastradamus', a 1999 album by the rapper Nas, and 148 copies of 'Entertainment Weekly’s Greatest Hits of 1971'."

Vote for Kerry this November: The future of American theater depends on it!

(First thing that came to mind when I saw this was one of the vignettes in Paul Rudnick's 2001 production Rude Entertainment, in which the ghosts of Paul Lynde and Eleanor Roosevelt welcome the recently deceased Matthew Shepard to the afterlife.)

New address for your spamming needs: theundergroundhome at gmail dot com.

Finally, New York gets some visually appealing 21st-century architecture, with attractively dreary Deco signage to match. It's like an early '60s midtown investment bank gone to the World's Fair!

More on SITE Environmental Architecture and a "where are they now?" article on some of their projects. (via Curbed and Chris, respectively.)

Hi, I'm back. Images will be down for the next day or two because of dumbness involving remembering to renew my domain name before the expiration date. I'm tired and disgruntled again upon returning to the east coast, but the weekend of r&r did help tremendously.

One more thang: this Morning News piece in which writer Geoff Badner keeps a photolog of everything he eats for a week and ponders the musical questions "If there were a pill that eliminated your appetite forever, would you take it?" and "Food: Would I really miss it?"

You know what? Fuck that and read Robert Sietsema's 100 Best Italian Restaurants instead.

I'm off to the coast tomorrow for a few days, but I wanted to get in a blog about the David Byrne show I saw with Geeta last night at Carnegie Hall. Byrne is 52 now and he looks like a million bucks, with that same distinguished-older-guy look that Morrissey is sporting these days, but Byrne looks healthier and more youthful (even with the white hair). Dude can dance like a lost Menudo; we've known that for decades, but he's suaver than I've ever seen him. I love him when he indulges his latent Vegas ham (I wish he'd chuck the small stuffy chamber orchestras and get some big gloopy glittery disco strings and replace the trusta hi-I-study-Javanese-gamelan-at-the-New-School percussionist with some Sheila E. action) and it seems like to some extent he realizes how well-suited he is for this. At least a third of the set was Talking Heads songs (this is good and bad: Byrne's such an outstanding performer that it reinforces how packed to the gills those songs are with groove and melody and good ideas, and yet there was something really lacking about the band and its name was Tina Weymouth). Heads songs played: "I Zimbra," "This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)" (my favorite!), "Blind," "Heaven," "Road to Nowhere," "Once In a Lifetime," "Psycho Killer," and "Life During Wartime." The crowd was all "DAVID I LOVE YOU! THANK YOU!" and he was positively beaming during the 5-minute standing ovation but he possibly seemed a little embarrassed by the attention too. Which is the difference between him and, oh, Sting, who would have a Jumbotron overhead goading on the applause while he went backstage for a shiatsu.

Here come the first burbles of organized revolt against the proposed MTA photo ban. Satan's Laundromat sez: "Meet at 1pm Sunday, June 6 at the information kiosk at Grand Central Terminal. Bring your camera."

If you're shy (and I am, sometimes), the ever-vigilant Straphanger's Campaign can help you file a complaint with the MTA.

Wizard People, Dear Readers, Brad Neely's "dark and bizarre re-envisioning" of the first Harry Potter movie, is screening Friday night at the NEST in DUMBO. Or, you can save yourself $7, grab the narrative portion from illegal-art.org and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone from wherever such a thing might be distributed digitally, and play along at home. (If you've gotten this far, you've probably already seen Jeff Krulik's Harry Potter Parking Lot, but now's as good a time as any for me to bring it up.)