No more mediocre meals cobbled together last minute. No more trolling recipe websites to figure out what side dish might work with steamed halibut. No more shopping fiascos — like when you arrived home without eggplant for the ratatouille. NoTakeOut.com helps you plan, prep and cook an entire meal, not just one dish. We provide a complete menu, a shopping list and a game plan – basically, we help you organize to go from kitchen to table with ease.

Just saying …

Claims by the MPAA that illegal downloads are killing the industry and causing billions in losses are once again being shredded. In 2009, the leading Hollywood studios made more films and generated more revenue than ever before, and for the first time in history the domestic box office grosses will surpass $10 billion.

As the year comes to a close, several social media companies decided to take a look back and reflect on the events, people, technologies that captured our interest this year. Twitter (Twitter) took the first crack when it revealed the most discussed topics of 2009. Facebook (Facebook) was next when it released its Facebook Memology for the year.

Both reports are interesting and have a lot of useful information, yet nobody’s really taken the time to analyze just what these trends mean. What did our society care about, and why? What scared the crap out of us? How were our tastes different this year than they were last year?

While I could take days analyzing trending topics (weeks if you give me the raw data), I only have so much time for this column. This is why I wanted to share with you some of my conclusions about this year’s trend data from Facebook and Twitter.

Great infographics on 20 things that happen in 1 minute!

PLEASE see my related post on last.fm 2009 data download!

Because nothing dulls your sense of indie cool quite like spending a few days in your childhood bedroom staring at some old ‘N Sync posters, we’ve got Last.fm’s handy month-by-month chart of listening trends in New York City vs. the world. It explains why you might want to leave NYC the next time you’re looking to score tickets to see Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, or Phoenix. It also reveals that New Yorkers are responsible for the year of the Gaga, intel which is either amazing or horrible depending on how you feel about her. After the jump, have your hipster superiority restored.

Welcome to Last.fm’s Best of 2009, the hottest and most popular artists of the year based on your scrobbles.

We compiled the list by looking at scrobbles for albums released between 1st October 2008 and 16th November 2009. We took out live albums, greatest hits collections, EP’s and singles before pulling them together into the lean, mean format you see before your eyes.

We’ve also looked up the top tracks, month-by-month scrobbles and event attendance for every artist in the Top 40, so you can see how you fit in with the global artist listens.

So sit back, turn the volume up to 11, and get ready to salute the Top 40 artists of 2009 based on your scrobbles.

A boat and related equipment are joined together in a welded metal frame. Everything is painted in a unifying plastic layer to resemble the surface of a model kit. The real boat is transformed into a model of itself, and its original purpose has given way to something else.

TOYS’R’US was made for the exhibition Besökarna (the Visitors) in a new part of Malmö, the Western Harbour, built for the housing fair Bo01 in 2001. The area was developed as a demonstration project to provide a model for future cities. Today, six years later, it still feels like a model. The artificial atmosphere still awaits to break loose from its surrounding plastic sticks.

20th Century Fox just said its big budget 3D technopic Avatar grossed $159.18M internationally from 106 territories (the six territories that have not opened are Japan, China, Italy, Poland, Argentina, and Uruguay). With North America's snow-slowed grosses of $73M, that's a worldwide total of $232.18M which the studio says is the "highest original content (non-sequel, non-franchise) opening weekend ever".

What is wrong with those people?

"You're assuming that there is some morally superior aspect to heatthcare than there is to a house in Hawai, there's not"

I really like Gonzales. he's canadian and a versatile artist. Just read he played piano for 27 hours straight: here he is playing DANCE from Justice at his 7th hour.

Singer, rapper, musician and producer Gonzales has beaten the world record for the longest solo concert.

The Canadian artist played for 27 hours, three minutes and 44 seconds at Paris's Ciné 13 Théâtre. The previous record, set by India's Prasanna Gudi, was 26 hours and 12 minutes.
The singer sleep-walked through some 300 songs, including originals, musical numbers, film scores, works by Gershwin and Beethoven, and songs by Britney Spears, Neil Young and the Bee Gees. Each song could be performed only once. Officials from Guinness World Records allowed Gonzales a 30-second pause between each song and a 15-minute break after each three-hour set.

Italian singer Adriano Celentano wrote this song in 1972 using a made up language designed to sound like English.

In time for the holidays, Peeps- the love ‘em or hate ‘em marshmallow holiday confection piece d’ resistance , has opened it’s first concept store in Oxon Hill, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Now the center of national power can also be a sugary mecca for fans of all ages to get Peep-related products, and remember all the wonderful sugar highs of childhood.

The first Peeps & Co. store is scheduled to open at National Harbor in Prince George's County in November in a prime 3,500-square-foot location that sits, according to a news release, directly in front of Seward Johnson's 100-foot statue "The Awakening" — an enormous giant crawling out of the earth. Milena DeLuca, a spokeswoman for Peeps parent company Just Born, said the store will sell a full complement of Peeps paraphernalia: T-shirts with Peeps dressed up as the Village People, plush Peeps in the traditional chick and bunny shapes, Peeps pillows, pens and key chains, and even Peeps china.

Earlier this year, Aabar – which is controlled by the Abu Dhabi government – announced it would take a 32 percent stake in Sir Richard Branson’s commercial space project for $280m.

Speaking to Arabian Business, Aabar chairman Al Qubaisi said: “The point here is to use Abu Dhabi and LA as a hub, or somewhere in the US, and to fly from Abu Dhabi and land in the other place in two or three hours.”

On the daily commute and the buzz around town, drivers in South Korea are using their GPS units to watch TV rather than guide them here and there. In this taxi the driver watched a news channel as he drove Team PSFK around town; and along the snarled up highway we saw drivers keeping one eye on the road and another on sports, movies and TV shows.

Swedish Stationary store Kikki.K has opened a new concept store in Sydney, Australia called White by kikki.K. The store stays true to its name by offering a variety of products all in white. The company takes the theme all the way by using white washed timber flooring, Swedish landscape imagery, an iconic white Skeppshult bicycle, and a even a sales force all dressed in white. The plan is to have the concept store be a permanent experience store in Sydney’s Strand Arcade and maybe leaving hope for other colors to make their appearance.

For the International Festival for the Post Digital Creation Culture, the design studio Cabracega has built a concept living environment for easy sharing between friends and house mates. The USB Sofa setup incorporates readily-accessible USB drives and 14GB of sharable space, giving users easy access to each others’ files.

For the holidays I want to disprove to the world the myth that New Yorkers are unfriendly. I’m going to do that by transporting myself from the southernmost end of Manhattan roughly 13.57 miles to the very most northern end of the island by only having people in New York physically carry me the entire way. I’m guessing it’ll take a day and a half.

"The sounds in this video are ACTUAL sounds from the Jeep. Everyone began rehearsing their parts 2 weeks before we shot the video. It took us 7 hours of filming to get a solid take. Enjoy!"