The Antlers‘ Peter Silberman — Feb. 5, 2010 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House

I discovered these guys completely by accident last year when they opened for another group at a show in Brooklyn, and they quickly became one of my favorites.

“Hospice,” their latest album, is great from start to finish, if a bit on the sad side. (Just $7.99 right now on Amazon MP3.)

And they put on an awesome live show. Check out live audio and video of The Antlers from NPR.

Reminder: Purchases made through these Amazon links help support this site.

One of my favorite email newsletters is from the Federal government. It’s the U.S. Department of Agriculture food recalls list, and it’s both eye-opening and frightening. The companies that make the food we eat screw up all the time.

Sure, there’s a lot of recalls for scary stuff, like millions of pounds of ground beef exposed to E.coli O157:H7, the kind of bug that can kill you if your burger isn’t cooked. But the reason I subscribe is for the rare hilarious recall.

By far my favorite: On Jan. 28, 2004, Hormel Foods recalled 104,000 pounds of canned Stagg Chili, “Hearty Beef with a Kick of Green Chilies” variety. Why? Because they were “contaminated with plastic and other parts of a handheld calculator.”

“The company discovered that the contamination had occurred after receiving complaints from consumers who found a calculator button and a piece of plastic in chili they had purchased,” the email read. Awesome!

I first found out about the USDA recall newsletter from Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation. You can sign up here.

Olave is the first olive oil I’ve ever sought out by name, after tasting it on the deviled eggs at the Spotted Pig.

It has a unique, memorable flavor — a hint of lemon — and a bright, almost neon green color. I tend to drizzle it on everything.

Olave is from Chile, of all places, and a bit hard to find. (Whole Foods stocks it, and some specialty stores. You can also buy it from Amazon through this link, which helps support this site.)

My friend Dan and some other folks just opened up a new bar called Destination at 13th St. and Avenue A in the East Village. It’s loosely travel-themed, and nice and unpretentious. Check it out.

Thanks to the huge community of airplane photographers, it’s easy to find photos of the same plane all over the world. So after I found out the tail number of the US Airways jet that crashed into the Hudson River last week — N106US — my first stop was Airliners.net, an airplane photo site.

That’s where you can find 21 photos of the Airbus A320 from before the crash — dating back to 1999, shot in places ranging from Boston to Costa Rica. Here’s a few; click on the thumbnails to view full-size with metadata.

Photo credits: Andres Meneses, Mark Garfinkel, Ben Wang and Konstantin von Wedelstaedt.

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