Everybody knows The New York Times' newly-erected skyscraper home has been plagued by falling glass, ice and vermin. In December, the Department of Buildings dropped by the place to investigate after what we thought was the third time debris was reported to have fallen from the building. Not so! A look at records kept by the Department of Buildings shows that people have been complaining about flotsam and jetsam raining from the Renzo Piano building since construction began in 2005-18 of the 33 complaints on record about the building are related to material flying off of it. Screwdrivers, bolts, steel, glass, i-beams, what have you. There was the time that wet concrete fell on to some NYPD cars below. Oopsies! And the time an entire window fell from the sky onto a car below. Then there's the succinct complaint from July 31, 2007: "Something fell off the building." You don't say? Yikes. After the jump, peruse the records.

You're pretty glad you work at a newspaper or a network that doesn't have mice running every which way, like the New York Times does, aren't you? Not so fast! We took a look at Department of Health inspection records available for employee cafeterias at media companies over the last year, and some of you better lift up your feet, quick. The chart above shows the combined number of violation points each organization earned in 2007. Time, CBS and NBC all earned a failing score of over 28 on one inspection, which triggered at least one additional inspection, which they all passed. Eventually. Interestingly enough, though the Bloomberg cafeteria reportedly earned a disgusting 55 on its February inspection, the record available through the DOH's website says it landed itself a flying-colors score of 2! Now we wouldn't accuse Mayor Bloomberg of screwing with statistics on the city's website to favor his own ginormous company. Nor would we suggest it might be easy to get a mulligan on that nasty inspection if the company's CEO happened to also be the city's mayor. Someone else might suggest that, but certainly not us.

Easily the biggest news that came out of Wednesday's mass return to the airwaves by late-night's long-sidelined talk-show hosts was the unexpected appearance of David Letterman and Conan O'Brien's competing Strike Beards, a solidarity-signifying facial hair trend so hot that the clean-shaven visages of Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel now seem to indicate a conspicuous lack of support for the hosts' still-picketing writing staffs. (The embattled Carson Daly, we've been told, plans to smash his trusty Norelco electric shaver on his next show in an attempt to prove his commitment to the WGA cause, no matter how unflattering the resulting patchy growth may be.)

This pie chart of Anthony Tommasini's Times review of the Met's new production of Prokofiev's War and Peace really makes the review look more awesome than it actually is. And the production too probably, though we can't really speak to that. [parterre box]