Imma hustler baby.

I won’t even pretend to know anything about strip clubs, so let’s turn again to Yelp for guidance on Larry Flint’s Huster Club: “There were some ‘ladies’ who were definitely questionable. I felt it as a evil joke by Larry to throw in some men in dresses pre-op for his own kicks. There was even this one woman working the pole who had to be at least 50 – was fairly gross…she worked it out though – work it sista!” Sounds awesome! This Craigslister is giving away about 500 passes to the club, with no expiration date. While admission is usually $20-$25, it should be noted that you can also print a free pass from the club’s site. If the Hustler Club is too Manhattan for you, you could always keep it local with BK strip clubs.
[via Gothamist]

Eva Dreams underwear: $0.99, on special

If you can’t turn your girlfriend into an object when you’re having sex on Valentine’s Day, when can you do it? Sure can you stare and ask yourself how and why something like this exists, but maybe it’s actually just a misprint and the target should be on the front? You know, for people who want to get pregnant but can’t remember that it happens through the vagina? Not pictured: the button clasp in the front, for easy access.

Milwaukee Bucks branded basketball shorts: $6.99

Ladies, is your man a fan of the Bucks? Haha, no, of course not, they don’t have any fans. Just tell him you got them for him because the green matches his eyes. 

Branded, Eau de Parfum: $2.99

"...especially the early episodes, was truly a source of inspiration."

I can’t decide what’s best about this. Is it that the box states: “Branded is not associated with the makers of Ed Hardy Christian Audigier”? Is it that that would affect someone’s decision to buy it? Is it that learning that the knockoff is $2.99 means the actual Ed Hardy perfume most be 10 times the price? Oh, no, I just remembered. My favorite thing about this is that your boyfriend bought it for you. 

Panda Trash can: $4.99

Aside from the fact that I’d be freaked out about the face just staring at me all the time, this doesn’t seem like such a bad gift. But how do you buy someone a garbage on Valentine’s Day? 

I (Heart) Me bathrobe: $12.99

Technically, Valentine’s Day is supposed to be about showing appreciation for the other person in your life. What if they’re a delusional narcissist? Fat Albet’s (“Alberto El Gordo” in Spanish) can help you out.

Black and Decker “Gizmo”: $3.99

Your girlfriend (or boyfriend!) does a damn good job in the kitchen and you’ve never really bothered to appreciate it. Coincidentally, Black and Decker didn’t even bother to give this thing a real name. I think it is some kind of salad dressing mixer. It feels like it might fall apart if you breathe on it, much less mix up a honey mustard dressing.

Dr. Sheffield’s Personal Lubricant: .99

“Wait, honey! Where are you going? Is it the lube? I’m sure the old man on the box won’t be watching us or anything!”

Confidential, by O, nightie: $6.99

I could talk about the ridiculous name or how it’s 98 percent polyester. Screw it, you know, I’ll just be honest here. Someone, sometime, is going to buy this, and they’re going to wear it, and they’re going to have sex. And while that happens, I’ll probably just be jerking off or looking at hockey highlights.

Follow David: @herbertharper.

Etsy represents the best and worst of the world’s creativity, or lack thereof (old doesn’t equal kitschy). With the magic of the internet, you can buy original handmade crafts and vintage treasures from all over the world. It’s a beautiful thing, but we at Brokelyn want to support our local artisans—especially those who go beyond the Scrabble tile cufflinks, things with owls on them, and stuff made out of tree bark that have become ubiquitous at craft fairs everywhere. With V-Day a week away, but really just because, we scoured Etsy for some Brooklyn-made merch that caught our fancy.

Papercraft bike model kit: These model bikes have a really neat geometrical look to them, which makes for a model-building project that you DON’T want to leave at your dad’s house. They come in a few sizes, and they would probably look pretty spiffy with some acrylic paint!

Half Moon Sculptured Gold Earring
These unique, yet yet refined earrings make us want to create an outfit around them. Probably with a tee-shirt that has pictures of recently deceased celebrities on it. They would be appropriate for the hipster who thinks she has everything cool already to your aunt who still keeps it funky.

Kitchen Conversions Poster: Never get your precious Apple product dirty again when, while mid-kneadning, you realize that you don’t know how many teaspoons are in ¼ of a cup. The convergence of elegance and practicality will rival any Google-channeling digital platform.

Faces of Death 2011 Tee-shirt Now you don’t have to choose which celebrity who died last year will grace your tee-shirt! Everyone from Andy Rooney to Osama Bin Laden to Nate Dog is beautifully illustrated on a tasteful cream-colored background. Yes, there is also a 2010 edition.

New York State Cutting Board: This cutting board serves the dual purpose of giving you a surface to cut veggies that isn’t your kitchen table, and reminding you that most of New York is taken up by places that are not Brooklyn.

Passion Necklace: Earrings too understated? For your own artistic inspiration rather than, say, your shopping list, we present to you a $2,800 necklace that apparently functions as a shirt. If this doesn’t want to make you want to tangle up all of your jewelry with your mom’s and sell it for enough money to to settle your credit card debt, it’s hard to say what will.

Does anyone have anything Brooklyn-made to add to the mix? Don’t forget to check out Etsy’s FREE Valentine-making party tonight, from 5-8pm at their HQ on 55 Washington St. (Suite 712). The first 25 people to check in get an Etsy totebag!

Girl Scout taste-alikes at Family Dollar, photo by Tom Sullivan.

If you love Girl Scouts as much as this ex-fat kid, you know that nothing quite beats the anticipation of that first bite of Thin Mints or Samoas, fueled in part by their only-once-a-year availability/hairy-nosed wombat level of rarity in our fair borough. (As of this writing, they go on sale exactly 27 days from now, according to this cookie countdown stopwatch.)

Enter Family Dollar. A few days ago, an Instagram photo of several boxes of cookies from everyone’s favorite discount store chain went around Twitter (Thank you @KateHarding.) While not legit Girl Scout cookies per se, the cookies on the box looked an awful lot like the Tagalongs, Thin Mints, and Samoas that I have an inappropriate obsession with/hoard shamelessly in my kitchen pantry/stress eat on a regular basis.

Available year round, “identical,” and only $1.75 a box, as opposed to $4 – $5 or more when the real things come down the pike in March? Don’t mind if I do. I immediately hauled ass from my Ditmas Park apartment down to Family Dollar’s Clarendon Road location, the closest of the chain’s 24 Brooklyn stores.

While these aren’t explicitly Girl Scout cookies, they certainly look the same. When I got home–and perhaps while strolling back up picturesque Flatbush Ave.–I tore them open for a test. Turns out the imposters taste the same too–so much so that it’s even possible that they’re made by the same bakery.

Aside from costing third of the price, the only real difference is that by cheaping out, you’re giving money to a national chain store instead of supporting a $760 million girl-led enterprise that teaches girls entrepreneurial skills, subsidizes summer camps, helps make Girl Scouts available to low income families and supports trans inclusivity, among other worthy pursuits.

Ugh. So how about if someone ONLY buys Dollar Scout cookies when the real ones aren’t available. Is that wrong?

Not the actual tree.

Screw it, we’ll just go all out for Valentine’s Day stuff today, even though us singles think it’s about as real a holiday as the Verdukian Holiday of Mouth Pleasures: You could spend tons on an overrated restaurant, followed by weak cocktails, followed by, I don’t know what you couples are into these days, flowers or something? Lame. Step up the game this year by putting all that money in one place and dedicating a whole tree in Prospect Park to your lurver, which will help replace all the ones destroyed by storms last year. For $75, you can plant a sapling as part of the restoration project; for $100, you can contribute to a communal Arbor Day Tree, which also gets you an invite to a special planting ceremony on April 27. Each one gets you a special Valentine’s Day certificate, but orders have to be in by noon on Feb. 9 to ensure you get it in time. Visit the park’s site for ordering details. Then maybe your partner will make like a tree and … oh never mind.

[via Windsor Terrace blog]

Are you good enough to make Sam's Choice?

Let’s say you’ve got some awesome handmade product or clever new invention and you’ve been trying to figure out which Brooklyn craft market is the best place to introduce it. That’s a lot of work, right? Wouldn’t it be better to skip that whole process of finding a local fanbase and go right to the hyperglobalmegacorp level? Mega retailer Walmart (currently the only thing still more controversial here than “shit ____ say” videos) is offering to give your product the American Idol treatment with its “Get on the Shelf” online campaign. The top three most popular things will be sold through its website, and the grand prize winner gets carried in physical stores. Perhaps you’re thinking, “but Tim, if I win, does that mean I’ll be staying up all night making batch after batch of home-brewed salsa to meet Walmart’s demand like some sort of artisanal sweatshop?” No! They’ll give you help scaling up production, which means you can ship that crap off to China and watch the fat profits of a hyperglobal economy roll in! Last day to enter is Feb. 22.

Buy a home and like it or not, before long you’re going to find yourself darkening the automatic doors at Lowe’s or Home Depot. With one of each within a mile of my South Slope home, I’ve made many a grudging trip to both. And given my natural gift for parsimony (though gift is maybe not the word Mrs. Brokavore would use), having two competing big-box behemoths within easy reach led me to wonder: which is cheaper?
My scattered visits offered no ready answer, so to settle the matter I put the pair to a test, matching the price tags on a hypothetical shopping list of 16 home-repair items.

Given the Tweedle Dee-Tweedle Dum competition between the two, it was no surprise to find a tight race. Prices on many items lined up to the penny. So a pound of drywall screws costs the exact same $6.47 at either place, a sheet of half-inch drywall $8.25.

Where there was a discrepancy, though, Lowe’s more often had the edge. Home Depot had a big nine-cent advantage on a quart of Minwax stain; more notably it won on a four-pack of fluorescent bulbs (60 watt equivalent), which ran $6.97 to Lowe’s $8.78. But Lowe’s undercut Home Depot slightly on five different items, including a combo smoke/carbon monoxide alarm, contractor trash bags, epoxy wood filler and caulk. The total saved was $3.24.

Which, I’ll grant you, is not a huge deal on a shopping list running close to $400. But Lowe’s gets the edge in other ways as well: it’s more pleasant and easier to navigate, it’s easier to find a staffer, and it lacks an infantile orange color scheme that makes you want to gouge your eyeballs out with a spackling knife. So we’re giving Lowe’s the nod, with one notable exception.

That has to do with paint. Being both a tree-hugger and someone in full need of all his remaining brain cells, I’m a fan of low-VOC paints, but the steep price tags tend to make me consider whether huffing benzene fumes is so bad after all. I was surprised to find, though, that while they don’t make a big deal out of it, the Behr Premium Plus Ultra paint stocked by Home Depot is all low VOC — in fact, the specs are comparable to Benjamin Moore’s Aura paints, which cost about $20 more a gallon.

And it’s really good paint, lately rated No. 1 by Consumer Reports. So that’s a win for Home Depot, and a reason to endure the place when it’s time for a new coat of eggshell in the bedroom.

But I’ve got a more important lesson to impart based on hard-won experience: whenever possible, skip them both. As I’ve learned, the true hero in any match-up is my neighborhood hardware store: the narrow, cramped Leopoldi Hardware on Fifth Avenue. Run by a pair of brothers whose father started the store 46 years ago, it’s staffed by three generations of Leopoldis, who can point you toward whatever obscure item you need and don’t have a name for.

Here’s a typical visit to Home Depot: Get in the car and spend ten minutes driving there. Park, enter the store and spend 25 minutes searching in vain for the item I want or for anyone who can tell me where it is. If lucky, finally find it. Take it to the front, where there’s one register operating with a 15-minute line. Cursing, opt for self-checkout. Find that one out of three of the machines is down. Wait ten minutes for working machine, spend another five minutes trying in vain to get it to scan my item. Finally toss it aside and leave empty-handed, cursing with frustration.

Leopoldi’s: Walk in, describe what I need (“you know those, uh, twisty metal things that . . .”) to a staffer who walks ten feet, swings open a cabinet, pulls out a drawer, retrieves what I need and puts it in a paper bag. Pay and leave.

And the sweetener is, often their price is just as good, and sometimes it’s even better. For example, the Minwax wood epoxy I paid $14 for at Home Depot was $11 at Leopoldi. So instead of choosing between saving money and supporting a local business, you can have your cake and eat it too.

You can also save by buying small: when I needed a few four-inch masonry spikes, the guy at Leopoldi pointed me to a dusty bin and charged me fifty cents for a handful. When I needed some metal lathe, one of the brothers cut me half a sheet using tin snips, chuckling to himself as the jagged edges scraped his knuckles and he literally bled for a customer.

Apparently, they haven't heard of Fox's.

So there’s this site called Xpatulator that runs cost of living comparisons of the 950 cities/regions worldwide where someone might move to from somewhere else. They just came out with a worldwide cost of living report, and there is one especially curious data point about Brooklyn.

Our borough is not only home to the Man Bun, but the world’s fifth most expensive place for clothing. It is pricier to buy clothes only in Minsk, Manhattan, Belarus (all areas) and Sao Paolo. Paris is #39. London is #82. Moscow, where they wear fur socks and underwear (don’t they?)  is #21. And sorry, Giorgio, lowly Milan is way down there at #264.

Clothing on Xpatulator is described as “clothing and footwear products, business suits, casual clothing, childrens clothing and footwear, coats and hats, evening wear, shoe repairs, and underwear.” Sounds reasonable enough. But how is this possible?

Brooklyn of the Kurt Cobain sweaters and stoop-sale jeans? We have gobs of Bobby’s, Cookies, Rainbows, all of Church Avenue, and those places with the pink bags (not Conran’s, but… help us out… Conway). But there’s only one Barneys — and it’s a Coop. The J. Crew creative director lives here, but she’s selling her place. Is there a boutique in Bay Ridge selling diamond-encrusted thongs that we don’t know about?

We wrote to the site for clarification, but their offices are in Cyprus. (Maybe they’re factoring travel time to Hayden Harnett?)

In the meantime, here’s a link to Xpatulator’s overall cost of living index for Brooklyn, and our rankings in other categories below. At least our subways count for something:

Overall Cost of Living rank: 29
Clothing: 5
Restaurants, Meals Out and Hotel: 11
Personal care: 27
Furniture and appliances: 34
Household accomodation: 37
Recreation and culture: 37
Food: 39
Alcohol & Tobacco costs: 60
Education: 102
Healthcare: 142
Communications: 350
Transportation: 388

Also, Brooklyn’s overall hardship ranking is only 10 percent, which is relative good news. But don’t they know SOUTHPAW IS CLOSING?

How much does it cost to make this? Sketch by Brad Pearson.

Pearl Paint is widely held as the artist’s go-to retailer for supplies at decent prices, but that store is in Manhattan, and we are not. I wanted to find the best art supply stores here in our very own borough, so I decided to do a cost comparison of the items I use most myself, from five local shops. The products were Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph technical pens (individual), Prismacolor markers (individual), Higgins India ink (1 oz.), and the cheapest, crappiest pencils and brushes each store carried. 

The five stores were:

• Utrecht Art Supplies, 536 Myrtle Ave. (between Emerson and Steuben)
• The Pratt Store, 550 Myrtle Ave. (between Emerson and Steuben)
• Apple Art, 321 Dekalb Ave. (between Hall and Washington)
• W C Art & Drafting Supply Co, 351 Jay St. (at Smith)
• Artist & Craftsman Supply, 761 Metropolitan Ave. (between Humboldt and Graham)

And the results went like this:

The results: Utrecht (total: $35.85) and Pratt (total: $34.88) win the price check by a polyester hair and are literally next door to each other. Both have a good selection, competent staff and typically good music playing. Next comes Artist & Craftsman Supply (total: $37.03). Apple Art (total: $39.16) is the smallest, cutest, most mom-and-pop kind of place and is also one of the more expensive, but also offers an excellent selection for fine arts supplies, (painting, wood carving, etc.)

If your projects lean more towards the crafty end of the arts and crafts spectrum, WC Art & Drafting Supply is your best bet, thought  art and illustration supplies are more expensive here (total: $43.06)

If you’re a college student (or if you have your old college ID or, probably if you just look like you go to college) each of these stores throw in an additional !0% off.  With Artists & Craftsman Supply, it has to be a current ID for a school in the tri-state area. God, I know right? IT’S SO UNFAIR.