Hey girl, hey! Make way for Mr. Gay. This Friday marks the second annual Mr. Gay Philadelphia contest, brought to you by the illustrious Bruce Yelk of Nightlifegay.com. This year's contest (don't call it a pageant) is hosted in conjunction with Buckmonkey.net and promises to be a spectacular evening of entertainment and heated competition as Philly's hottest men strut their stuff and show some brotherly love for appreciative audience members. Hosts for this year's event......

And we mean that literally. Tonight, for one night only, Zamora the Torture King brings his amazing sideshow stunts to 941 Theater in Northern Liberties with the Zombie Sideshow. If you didn't get enough of the undead at the Philly Zombie Crawl, now's your chance to rectify the situation while sitting slack-jawed in amazement, no zombie makeup required. But wait—that's not all! The hookers will be out in full force... Disgraceland Hook Squad, that is.......

Perhaps we're a little biased, given our close proximity to the Italian Market and our obsession with delicious things like cheese, sausage, pasta, and cannoli. Still, we think this is pretty much the best weekend of the entire year. There's food, beer and wine as far as the eye can see, plus music, games, crafts, a kitschy-yet-serious parade of saints and plenty of great people watching. 9th Street will be closed from Fitzwater to......

Fun around town, for $10 or less: Puppets!: Doug and Mike’s Adult Entertainment at the Institute of Contemporary Art (118 S. 36th), 6PM. $6 Further Afield—But Worth It: The Best of Black Lily Film and Music Festival 2007 at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute (824 W. Lancaster), 7PM. $9.25 It’s Just a Flesh Wound: Fred Is Dead and Joe Jordan’s Experiment at Tritone (1508 South), 10PM. $5 Quizzo Mania: Get your Quizzo on at 12......

A tall, icy glass of our favorite internet junk, just for you. Yet another thing you can do with the all-purpose food that is bacon: make vodka out of it! (Via Sarah) Cool pics of a new stage in Super Smash Bros. Brawl that re-imagines the first level of Super Mario Bros. And every once in a while, it will randomly load up the second, underground level instead. (Via) Scott Adams got his readers to......

To say we like puppets is probably an understatement. What’s there not to like about talking pieces of wood? Or, for that matter, watching humans channel their emotions and desires through a manipulate-able avatar? Twilight Zone aside, it sounds like a surefire recipe for fun. The Institute for Contemporary Art obviously agrees: their new exhibit The Puppet Show, which looks at the imagery of puppets in contemporary art, opens tonight at ICA’s Winter Opening Reception......

The best of the internet, chopped into tiny bits and grilled for your enjoyment. Have you heard about a little thing called the Consumer Electronics Show? No? Well, don't worry, Shiny Shiny has the story so far, and Wired was liveblogging the Sony press conference, and the Bill Gates opening keynote speech. From Sony, we learn that a GPS receiver for the Sony PSP, already available in Japan, will be coming to America. Microsoft announced......

The best of the internet, squirted out in flavorful neon globules, just for you. We've still got quite a few year-end lists and awards to get through, so settle in, people! First The Movie Blog points out that a Moviefone poll has selected the worst performances of 2007, with Lindsay Lohan "winning" for her role in I Know Who Killed Me. Meanwhile, Slate has a different kind of top ten list for us: the Bush......

Every weekday of December (except for December 25, that is), Phillyist will be counting down to 2008 with our highlights from the past year and our predictions for the next. If you have a list you'd like to submit, let us know! As I've mentioned once or twice before on Phillyist, this year I went from being distantly fascinated by comic books to being a seriously obsessive weekly comic book collector. So here are my......

The Holiday season is in full swing in NYC, with holiday lights in Brooklyn, a giant snow globe in Bryan Park and Chanukah specials for ham. One citizen decided to go vigilante on annoying car alarms, a murder suspect used a fake Asian accent on the stand and a video of a man being beaten up by teenage girls on a subway shocked the city. And we interviewed soon-to-be-leaving-Gawker editor Choire Sicha, who said,......

We would like to take a moment to thank this week's advertisers on Phillyist. UWISHUNU, because you wish you knew. Love is a Mix Tape, Rob Sheffield's book about women, music, and love. Sony Card, because you'll get a free MP3 player if you apply. American Express' Urban Adventures-- for information about shopping, dining, and entertainment. Busted Tees, where they've got naughty holiday-themed shirts. If you're interested in advertising on Phillyist or any other site......

Although The Golden Compass is being compared to the Narnia Chronicles in some of the ads, the series that the book it's based on is a part of - Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - is really the anti-Narnia: equal but exactly opposite to C.S. Lewis' saga of Christian allegory. Some people are saying that The Golden Compass is anti-Catholic - and they're right. The movie doesn't emphasize it as much as the book......

The shapeless dough of the internet, formed into tasty pellets and baked to perfection, just for you. You know what your cat needs? A wig! Ah, the internet and its fascination with doing strange and terrible things to cats... (Via) Dude, a dinosaur mummy. Scientists have found the remains of a hadrosaur that have been mummified by a natural fluke of time and chemistry. It's one of only five dinosaurs to be found in this......

The best of the internet, squirted out in flavorful neon globules, just for you. This is one of the most awesome news stories we've ever read: a ring of guerrilla restorers spent a year secretly fixing an antique clock inside the Pantheon, only revealing themselves and their work to officials when they were done. They were cleared on Friday of breaking in. They are totally our heroes now. (Via Mike V.) Wired takes a look......

The shapeless dough of the internet, formed into tasty pellets and baked to perfection, just for you. Here's the fascinating story of how amateur sleuths solved the mystery of the missing remains of Czar Nicholas II's family members. (Via Jill) Just because the Thanksgiving holiday weekend is over doesn't mean we're out of fun Thanksgiving-related links for you. First of all, turns out it's probably not the turkey itself that makes you sleepy after the......

In Los Angeles, LAist most definitely celebrated Thanksgiving like no other. After all, one has to keep up all the energy to keep on walking the line at the Writers Strike and fighting the unfortunate return of the wildfires in Malibu, which single handedly destroyed over fifty homes within the first 24 hours. National outlets may be covering the fires, but CNN also found it is easier to buy a gun than fruit and......

The shapeless dough of the internet, formed into tasty pellets and baked to perfection, just for you. Game|Life managed to get their hands on some early screenshots from the upcoming Ghostbusters video game. The winner of the Doritos Unlock Xbox Contest is Mike Borland's Dash of Destruction, the game where you run around as a T-Rex chasing a Doritos truck. And while we're talking contests, Scott Adams had one on his blog recently to choose......

Love in the Time of Cholera is a good example of a bad adaptation. Garcia Marquez fans realize, I hope, that the man’s strengths don’t easily translate to film, so you shouldn’t be shocked to learn that the film Love in the Time of Cholera feels more like an adaptation of a GGM-inspired Saturday morning cartoon than of the novel itself. Cholera the film is a fairly ordinary Hollywood period piece; it’s the sort of......

Paris Hilton, former celebutante/party girl/homemade video star and now alcoholic elephant advocate (thanks to Jim, Ross, and Sarah for that one) is releasing a new perfume called CAN CAN. (Get it? Because that's something they do in Paris. But then, so is this.) To celebrate, the formerly constipated jailbird will be at Macy's Center City today – and you can meet her! All you have to do is be one of the first 200......

Local student Dan Magro wears many hats. He is (as mentioned) a student, at the University of the Arts. He is a Starbucks employee in Southampton. He is a writer/filmmaker. And tonight, he will add to that hat-list "philanthropist." Magro's movie, Portraits of Sari, premieres tonight at Gershman Hall (corner of Broad and Pine), but you'll be getting more than just a movie with your attendance. It turns out that the lead actor in Portraits,......

Phillyist still isn't used to it being pitch black when the work day is over, but the folks at the Center City District are giving us a night light, for this evening at least. Five buildings along the Avenue of the Arts (from City Hall down to Pine) will be lit up like a movie starlet's makeup mirror. These "murals of art" aren't all though: there will be entertainment on the Avenue as well......

The shapeless dough of the internet, formed into tasty pellets and baked to perfection, just for you. The only true history of lolcats. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll want to has a cheezburger. (Via) Oh woe unto the entertainment industry, for the writers strike has begun! Cinematical has pics from the picket lines in NYC, while Kung Fu Monkey offers us an explanation of the strike from a writer's perspective. At the urging of fans,......

What's new and/or interesting in Philly theaters this weekend My Kid Could Paint That - A documentary about child painter Marla Olmstead, and the questions about aesthetics that her story brings to the forefront. She and her family went on a rollercoaster ride of fame and infamy. Her paintings were hailed as great works of abstract expressionism by some, and started selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. She appeared on many national news programs.......

The best of the internet, squirted out in flavorful neon globules, just for you. Holy crap, people! Stephen Colbert is running for president! He announced his candidacy on his show last night. Colbert has said he'll run as both a Republican and a Democrat, so he can lose twice, and that he will run in South Carolina, and South Carolina alone (that being his home state - and the home to one of the key,......

Michael Clayton is a wonderful example of learning to walk before you can crawl. Tony Gilroy, as a writer/director, evinces an offhand sense of authenticity and cool intelligence that has served the Bourne franchise well. It feels very much like the sort of old-Hollywood adult entertainment that, according to cranky movie critics (like, um, me), They Just Don’t Make Anymore. The title character, played by George Clooney, is a complex mixture of nobility, cynicism, and......

The best of the internet, chopped into tiny bits and grilled for your enjoyment. Let's get some "old," but still exciting, entertainment news out of the way first: the possibility of a Doctor Who movie, the official confirmation of the rumor that Microsoft and Bungie are breaking up (but they'll still be BFFs), and the official confirmation of the rumor about the cheaper PS3 model - at least in Europe. We were considering getting a......

We'd like to take a brief moment to thank this week's advertisers on Phillyist. AMEX Urban Adventures, because there's shopping, dining, and entertainment destinations to be discovered. UWISHUNU, about Philly from the inside out. The Next Iron Chef, starting Sunday in its quest to find...the next Iron Chef. The Darjeeling Limited, in theaters now. PRAVDA, because who really wants an aftertaste to their vodka? Busted Tees, where they have some shirts on sale for $9.99!......

A steaming hot pile of our favorite things from around the internets. Dueling Philly cheesesteaks as political metaphor. Thank you, Comedy Central. (Via Debbie) Dude: new trailer for Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. It will rock your face off. Cross your fingers, folks! A new Entertainment Weekly article suggests a Peter Jackson-directed movie of The Hobbit is closer to becoming a reality. We think the Scream movies made up a great trilogy, and that they should......

Every Tuesday and Thursday, we'll be posting events that are going on sale during the current week. This Tuesday post only collects the early announcements, so definitely check back on Thursday for the latest ticket news. Good Faeries Ball The Troc Fri, 10/12/07, 8PM $27.50 On sale: Today, 12PM, Ticketmaster Bad Faeries Ball The Troc Sat, 10/13/07, 8PM $27.50 On sale: Today, 12PM, Ticketmaster Concerts First "Next Big Thing" featuring Houston Calls The Troc Sat,......

A tall, icy glass of our favorite internet junk, just for you. The Wall Street Journal has a video and an article about horse riders in Strawberry Mansion. We're not sure we like the tone, but at least they are putting a spotlight on a positive thing happening in an inner-city Philadelphia neighborhood. You've probably heard about the skeletons of Hobbit-like, near-human creatures found in Indonesia. If not, Scott Adams will fill you in on......