One thing I noticed over the weekend is how much more variety there is in the media universe up in the NYC area. Thursday night driving up to N Island I surfed across a radio station playing west African music. I listened for about 45 min. It was completely awesome stuff but I never heard a DJ say anything so I have no idea what any of it was. This morning on a couple of other stations I heard an all polka program, with DJs speaking both English and some Eastern European language. At various other points of the weekend I also caught parts of a 2 hour radio show focusing on Greek music, Schoenberg on the radio, two different TV shows playing Bollywood videos, a Serie A futbol match (broadcast in Italian), a leased-time TV program by atheists, oldschool hiphop videos and a interview with Afrika Bambaataa, a call-in program about cricket. And that's just the stuff you can get w/o leaving the house (I'm fudging a bit since some of that was on radio I heard driving in and out thru NJ and you might or might not be able to get in in all parts of NYC)
The other thing I noticed is how much I didn't like driving around SI. There are, I know, nice parts of the Island but most of the parts I saw the last few days were aggressively ugly -- overdeveloped, under-planned, crowded, congested, dirty... It all seems to have become an exurban mess where you're crammed in and spread out. At least in an urban environment, you have the congestion offset by the fact that most everything's fairly accessible. But on SI, it's congested sprawl -- not enough space but you still have to drive almost everywhere.