I spent much of Saturday buying a kitchen over at Ikea — the Long Island one; if you live here, you’ve got to be crazy even to set foot in the more-popular, headache-inducing Jersey location. Yes, I’m buying a kitchen from Ikea, the store that made wobbly fashionable, but hey, they’re highly recommended and super, super cheap. I was wearing my favorite Forest Hills Neighborhoodie, blue and gold with a zip-up front and “FOREST HILLS” in big bold letters in the middle. As I was filling out the form, one of Ikea’s fine “kitchen planning specialists” piped up:

IKEA GUY: Hey, Forest Hills! We do a lot of kitchens in Forest Hills.
ME: Really?
IKEA GUY: Yeah, seriously, practically half the kitchens we sell go to Forest Hills.
ME: That’s really interesting. I actually wouldn’t have expected that.
IKEA GUY: I don’t know why. It used to be Williamsburg, but now it’s all Forest Hills.

Williamsburg and Forest Hills in the same sentence? Be still, my beating heart! My theory: Just as once happened in Williamsburg, as younger, budget-minded people buy places in Forest Hills, they find their kitchens to be hideous and run to their beloved Ikea to purchase a new one. So there you have it: proof positive, courtesy of no less an authority than some guy working at Ikea, that Forest Hills is younger and hipper than ever before! Why, we’re practically East East East Williamsburg. Now where’s our independent record store?

… as long as Brooklyn has “the most blog-rich areas of the United States,” according to no less than The New York Times — so blog-rich, in fact, that the Brooklyn Blogfest just convened for the second whizbang-successful year. After all, what’s cooler than sitting in front of a computer all day obsessively poring over press releases from Borough Hall? I’d love to do a Queens Blogfest, but at this point, I fear it’d be me, the Queens Crapper, the Forest Hills 72 guy, the LICNYC guy, the OuterB crew and a couple of teenage LiveJournalers from Bayside sitting around a big table at The Family Restaurant over a communal tureen of puttanesca. Can you imagine The Times referring to any of the attendees as “quite well-known”? We need more blogging around here — if you build it, they will come. Queens Blogfest ‘08?

I gained a certain amount of local blog notoriety some time back by openly wondering why grungy, desolate, inaccessible Red Hook was suddenly considered “hip” while lovely, safe, thriving Forest Hills was terminally uncool. My conclusion: Hipsters like to feel like they’re slumming it. Red Hook is hip precisely because it’s so scary and ugly, whereas FoHi doesn’t get a second look largely because it’s so nice. Trust-fund punkers don’t want nice, Joey Ramone’s hometown or not.

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