Decide How the $1 Million Participatory Budget Gets Spent

The City Council has a thing called the Participatory Budget, an allocation of $14 million that gets spent on projects proposed and voted on by citizens. District 39, which includes Park Slope as well as Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Gowanus, Windsor Terrace, Kensington and parts of Borough Park, has $1 million of that cash and no shortage of citizen-initiated projects on which to spend it.

Presenting their proposals on science fair-style poster board (in what appears to be gym, no less), the finalists are now vying for your vote to get a piece of the action. Among the finalists are street safety improvements for 4th Ave, laptops for the students of PS 130, 230 and 321, solar panels for a local firehouse, security improvements and repairs to the Ennis Playground basketball court. Watch the finalists talk about their proposals and, if you feel moved to do your civic duty, go vote for them this weekend. Polls will be open on Saturday, April 5 and Sunday, April 6 at various locations throughout the district.

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Guinness Drops Support for St. Paddy's Parade Over LGBT Ban

Image via telegraph.co.ukThe St. Patrick's Day parade will be short on Guinness this year, thanks to its organizers xenophobic exclusion of the LGBT community. The grand daddy of Irish beer pulled its support from the NYC and Boston parades because of their ban on openly gay groups.

"Guinness has a strong history of supporting diversity and being an advocate for equality for all," the company said in a statement released yesterday. "We were hopeful that the policy of exclusion would be reversed for this year’s parade. As this has not come to pass, Guinness has withdrawn its participation."

Guinness joins Sam Adams and Heineken who dropped their financial support of the parades last week. “Hopefully, as parade organizers realize that anti-LGBT discrimination is not supported by sponsors, or many Irish New Yorkers, they'll see that families like mine should be part of the celebration," said GLAAD CEO & President Sarah Kate Ellis in response to the news.

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Coney Island's Thunderbolt Roller Coaster Gets Rebooted!

Quick, name a Coney Island roller coaster that isn’t the Cyclone! You probably said Thunderbolt because it’s in the headline of this post. No one really remembers the Thunderbolt but, like everything that’s ever existed, it’s being rebooted this summer at Luna Park in Coney Island.

The original Thunderbolt roller coaster operated from 1925 to 1982 and met its end, by way of demolition, in 2000. While not mentioned by name (because it was standing in for the Cyclone, I’m assuming), this Thunderbolt made a brief appearance in Annie Hall. All good reason to try and give it a fresh do-over in 2014 and, hopefully, get it right this time.

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Anthony Mackie Has Thoughts About Spike Lee's Gentrification Rant

Image via Lee Bailey's EurWebAnthony Mackie, actor and Brooklyn restaurateur, was recently asked about Spike Lee’s epic rant about the gentrification of the borough. Mackie, in case you couldn’t have guessed, is black and starred in the Spike Lee joint She Hate Me.

While never being direct, he essentially makes two points:

* Spike Lee moved out of Brooklyn the minute he got a serious check, so what the fuck does he know.

* The word “gentrification” has nothing to do with average income and everything to do with color. His chief examples are that some people call Spike Lee taking his paycheck to Manhattan “reverse gentrification,” while the average income in Brooklyn has remained steady during this period of gentrification.

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[My Favorite Park Slope...] Tree

Images via GoogleMaps

I like a tree in Prospect Park that’s by the path from the 9th Street entrance, to the Bandshell. I drank my first 40 in a park under this tree. It made a great home base in little-little league (i.e., too old for tee-ball, too young for real ball fields). It was a tree I could--and, under duress, hopefully still can--climb. When all is said and done, it’s a pretty clutch tree. I think I’d call it my favorite Park Slope tree.

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