So not that I am lazy or anything, I have just been quite busy lately.  With that said, I have decided to restart DartOut with some help from friends.  Hopefully I will have a few guest writers engaging in random exploits and reporting back here.  To that end, I have decided to start using the FaceBook app I built last year.  It reads all of the events from TimeOut and stores them in a database each week.  Not only is this easier to access than throwing an actual dart at an actual magazine, but it also weights each event equally.  Poetry readings do not take out full page ads while hot shows do, so we’d have been much more likely to hit the show with a dart.

At any rate, my most recent virtual "dart" hit 5 Shorts by Rohmer.  This looks very interesting to me, but unfortunately I will be out of town this weekend.  Hopefully a guest writer can fill in (or go do any other random event).  Instead, I took my Mulligan and will be going to Good Peoples Summer Sail Disco Cruise!  Anyone who knows me may recognize that this is not my scene in the least.  However, I am committed to enjoying it as much as I can, so I have already purchased tickets at TicketFly.  I’ll be there.  Care to join me?

 Hello devoted fans of random event attending… It has been too long and there has been too much going on to keep up this blog.  However, we do hope to have it up and running consistently again, possibly with guest authors and reviewers.  Stay tuned for more random madness!

 So I threw my dart for this week last night.  I landed on page 115, the back of the magazine.  If you are unfamiliar with TimeOut New York, then you may not know that the final pages of listings are where you will find the Off-Off Broadway plays… and the burlesque shows.  My dart happened to hit The GLoBes Invitational Championship of the World, a burlesque show going on last night.  Unfortunately, it was a one night only event and I could not make it last night.  I promise to go to a random burlesque show soon.

As recompense, I will not only go see the much-awaited Kaspar Hauser, but I am also going to a Jonathan Coulton concert, the Gotham Girls Roller Derby, and Tearing the Veil of Maya at Union Hall in Brooklyn.  It is going to be a very busy weekend, but I will be sure to write up all of this.

The Kaspar Hauser show was sold out for this weekend.  I’ll be going next weekend, so stay tuned for the review.

I have been a bit derelict lately.  I owe you a review of Paddy Reilly’s pub.  I will get that up and running shortly but first wanted to share the latest dart hit.. I will be going to the Off-OFF Broadway production of Kaspar Hauser: a foundling’s opera.  It is based on the legend of Kaspar Hauser.  It is quite a fascinating Wikipedia read, I recommend it.  I’ll have three reviews up by the end of the weekend: This one, Paddy Reilly’s, and World Water Day.

OK, so I might have hit something else before hitting the pub with my most recent dart.  See, page 31 was mostly an article about gardening and a few ads.  First, I threw the dart and hit a half-page ad for World Water Day at the American Museum of Natural History.  Unfortunately, this event is next weekend.  So I threw the dart again and hit an article about how to care for your outdoor window box garden.  I could get a garden, but that is not really the spirit of the experiment.  So I threw a dart for a new page and got page 43.  That is where I hit the pub.  To avoid this kind of thing in the future, I am going to wait until I get the magazine and then make sure I dart a page that has listings on it.  I’ll just make a grid that has only the page numbers that have listings.  Again, remember… there is no such thing as breaking the rules if you make the rules.  So shut your pie hole.  Speaking of pie, today is also Pi Day.

The idea for DartOut came to me while watching a ballet with my wife. It occurred to me that it would never had occurred to me to go to a ballet on my own… and I actually enjoyed the ballet. Of course, that led me to wonder what other activities might be lurking out there that I would enjoy as well.
 
But how to find them? Given the massive array of things to do in the city of New York, where would I start, what should I choose? Well, being a data nerd, I decided random was the way to go. Rather than let my biases and petty preferences creep in at the edges and flavor my decisions, I would randomize what I choose. Since I suck at darts, so that is about as random as it gets.
 
For the next 52 weeks, I will engage in one random activity per week and eat at one random restaurant per week. I’ll report on the results here on DartOut. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I am looking forward to it.