Mine was a huge open space, which a previous tenant had put up a few walls in and built a (for want of a better word) loft to put the kitchen and bathroom on.

I took another stab at the site, and I have a better idea of what pods are but I still don't get why. Just to hide the kitchen and bathroom?

To have a big shiny box in the middle of your apartment, silly!

The loft moniker is more marketing than anything else in that condo building. I mean, some of the space is convertible but I don't think it's a traditional loft. Anticipating the question, I'm talking about a particularly open floor plan. They'd look more like lofts without those things in the middle! ETA: I forgot when I posted this that some of the floorplans actually were lofts.

Admittedly, however, lots of Manhattan renters don't use their kitchens and would like to reclaim that floor/wall space. I still think a big lacquer closet in the middle of the house looks silly and overbearing, rather than freeing.

Before I clicked, I assumed they were Japanese-style pod hotel rooms. But just a kitchen/bathroom in the middle of your apartment? Why? (They remind me of one of our cabins in Canada, which my grandmother renovated about 40 years ago, putting a bathroom more or less in the middle of the living room with cheap drywall around it. My family is currently re-renovating it, and getting around that godawful bathroom is one of our biggest problems.)

[eta: Okay, and the penthouse apartment have free-standing bathtubs right in front of the balcony! So you completely enclose your bathroom/kitchen in a box in the middle of the room, but have a freestanding tub facing a window? WTF?]

Well, I do like the shiny.

So, according to Biblical prophecy, New York City is gonna get nuked this weekend:

We are now 98% confident that the UN Plaza will be hit by a terrorist nuclear bomb between Thursday evening June 29th and Tuesday evening July 4th, 2006

It is certainly true that: No nukes is good nukes! But just because we got the date wrong (3 times) does not mean that the scriptural threat has evaporated. It is still there in black and white in bible symbolism. So we still have the almost impossible task of persuading a typical New Yorker with faith in God, that the Bible predicts the very day and place of the first terrorist nuke. There is obviously a massive credibility gap between: "Here endeth the lesson" and "Here endeth NYC". But every journey, however long, begins with one small step. So here is our attempt to fill that gap.

Firstly we again strongly advise anyone in New York City with any faith in God, whatever his religion or whatever his distrust of organised religion, to take the last Thursday in June off and to get out of NYC for that weekend and not come back until the evening of July 4 if nothing happens.

I like how they admit to being wrong three times before....

[link]

I like how they admit to being wrong three times before....

And they're only "98% confident" this time, so as to leave themselves some wiggle room.

Huh. Maybe I should have gone to my parents' house for the 4th after all...

There is obviously a massive credibility gap between: "Here endeth the lesson" and "Here endeth NYC"

And that's not the only place.

And they're not all lofts

I wasn't going from the floor plans listed, just from the explanation of what a pod was.

It's an interminably irritating site. Why hasn't Flash found its rightful niche yet? If you don't need to be interactive, if it seems simple that you might benefit from someone sending a link to a page in your site to a friend, or bookmarking or printing said page--for god's sake, don't use Flash.

On some of the tech blogs they link to nifty concept gadgets...no, they link to the web sites that contain them, and you have to navigate flash to find what they were talking about. Instead of impressing me with sliding and sound, or even bumping into more product than I might have seen if I went right in, I often just bail a click or two in.

Now, when I get a link right to something particularly nifty, I do backtrack on that site to see what else they have is cool.

Mandating one true path to content is anti-web. I deem it so.

OMG, SHOCKING!!!

Men may be from Mars and women from Venus, but when it comes to our favorite foods, there's no battle of the sexes.

Lunch: it’s the meal ladies like best. You know, that time to order a light salad. Think again.

It turns out ladies prefer French fries.

Harry Balzer, Vice President of the NPD Group, says, "French fries are the number one food ordered by women in restaurants in America."