The ever-changing Next restaurant is currently in the middle of its meat-heavy menu, The Hunt, which will end April 28, to be replaced by its antithesis, Vegan, beginning May 8.

Those of us who love Next are all wondering what form that new menu will take, and this week, Ulterior Epicure, at the start of The Hunt, was lucky enough to be presented with a single Vegan dish as an amuse-bouche.

And it sure was beautiful.

Wish I didn’t have to wait until my May reservation to find out how it tastes!

I’m about as non-Vegan an eater as you’re likely to find (because everything tastes better with bacon, right?), but when it comes to food cooked at the level that Next can provide—I’m counting down the days.

Back when I was on staff at Marvel Comics and writing the Bullpen Bulletins pages (well, all of it save Stan’s Soapbox), I kept a suggestion box on my desk in which people could drop notes with things they thought worthy of mention.

One day, I opened the box to find this card from Mirthful Marie Severin …

Oh, Marie … I love you!

I was in Blackpool last weekend for the George Formby Society convention, where I met in the flesh friends who’d previously only been virtual, saw some amazing uke players, got a tutorial in Formby-style strumming, and even had a chance to get up and bumble my way through a song in the “Up and Comers” session meant for beginners.

Plus I added a third uke to my collection, on top of the Mitchell concert you’ve seen in all my videos up until now and the Kala pocket uke which I’ve carried as far as Machu Picchu.

But to play George Formby, you need a banjolele, so I headed off to Blackpool hoping to find one I could fall in love with, that fit my budget, and that my friends at the convention would feel delivered both good sound and value. (Believe me, without their advice, I’d never have had the confidence to make a decision.) I was hoping to find a pre-war ukulele, but instead ended up with something as far from vintage as you can get—a new uke completed just a week before the con, handmade by a man named Steve Helme.

Since it was built by a person rather than a company, it doesn’t have a brand name to go with it, but my friends in Blackpool who advised me it was a good deal told me it’s basically a replica of a UB-2.

Check it out below.

(more…)

I miss my Dad. And as it turns out, the rest of the Internet misses their Dads, too.

I was checking the search strings that have led people to this blog, and discovered that several hundred people a month have been getting here as a result of looking for words to say when a father passes away.

Here are some examples.

Who knew there were so many variations on that sentiment? I’m amazed. (And there were dozens more.)

I’m not sure whether what people found when they got here helped. But I’d like to think it did. At least a little.

Yesterday, I shared my ragged performance of “When I’m Cleaning Windows” at the George Formby Society convention in Blackpool, and promised that as a reward for enduring it, you’d get to see how the banjo uke is really meant to be played. And so here are eight performers I managed to record before the battery on my Flip camera decided it had done quite enough.

There were multiple concert sessions throughout the weekend, and these performances were all from the first on Saturday.

John Walley started us off in the ballroom of the Imperial Hotel with “Sitting on the Top of Blackpool Tower” and “Mr. Wu’s An Air Raid Warden Now.”

(more…)

I returned late Monday afternoon from a magical weekend at the Imperial Hotel in Blackpool, where I attended one of the George Formby Society’s quarterly conventions. I met in the flesh many friends I’d already made through Facebook and Twitter, made many new friends, sung with a group atop the famous Blackpool Tower, bought my first banjolele (which I’ll tell you more about another day), saw some of the best live ukulele performances of my life, and was generally filled with so much joy that my face hurt from smiling so much.

Oh, and I performed “When I’m Cleaning Windows” in public for the first time.

Those who’ve been following my brief ukulele career (it’s only been about 15 months, remember) will have seen my overwrought thrashing out of that song early last year. But playing in front of others was going to be a lot different, even though the folks in Blackpool were about the kindest, gentlest, least judgmental bunch you’ll ever meet.

I didn’t dare do it on the big stage—that will come in the future once I’ve gotten my brain and fingers around the Formby style of playing—but luckily, the convention holds what’s called an Up and Comers session so that those of us who are still trying to figure out what the heck we’re doing can perform just for each other, rather than in front of the uke masters, who can be intimidating even though they don’t mean to be.

(more…)

I’ve occasionally left a restaurant miffed with a chef. But Saturday was the first time I’d ever left a restaurant miffed at a food critic.

Back in September, Pete Wells of the New York Times reviewed the reinvented menu at Eleven Madison Park.

In front of Eleven Madison Park, currently ranked the #10 restaurant in the world.

The restaurant, which currently ranks #10 on the list of top 50 restaurants in the world, had recently assembled a tasting menu meant as a tribute to New York and its culinary history. Which meant that the servers kept up a running narrative in order to put each course in context.

Wells didn’t care for this, and wrote, in part:

While people come to Eleven Madison from all over the world, those who live in the city may have to fight back the impatience and urge to interrupt that come with the keys to every New Yorker’s first apartment. The narrative tone isn’t sharp, it isn’t quick, it isn’t wised up, and it assumes the listener knows nothing: in other words, it’s not a New York voice. By the end of the four hours, I felt as if I’d gone to a Seder hosted by Presbyterians.

Ouch!

(more…)

Irene was going to New York to catch two performances at the Metropolitan Opera last weekend, so I decided to head north with her. Not because I also wanted to see Parsifal, but because the NYC ukulele contingent gathers the second Friday of every month for an open mic and jam session, which meant I’d be able to join them. So I tagged along, not wanting to miss a chance to strum with others.

We met for four hours Friday night at the Sage Theater on Seventh Avenue between 47th and 48th Streets, where each of us was to be given a shot at performing one song, and if time permitted after everyone had a turn, a second.

I chose “Makin’ Whoopee” and “Happy Go Lucky Me,” because I’d committed both songs to memory and had played each several times a day for the past few weeks. (I already shared “Makin’ Whoopee” with you here.) But I soon discovered that there’s a big difference between performing a song under your own roof with an audience consisting of your spouse and performing it in a theater on a stage under a spotlight in front of rows of strangers.

When I got on stage, I suddenly found that my fingers were stiffer than they ever were at home, my voice betrayed my nervousness, and the chords and lyrics I thought I had memorized occasionally fled. Regardless of that, I’m going to share those performances with you.

(more…)

February is long over, but March has been so busy, I’ve been unable until now to gather together the month’s dreams to see what kind of surreal sense they make when rubbing up against each other in one place. So here they are, including guess appearances from Barack Obama, Jim Parsons, Chip Delany, William Shatner, Justin Timberlake, and more.

February 2013


I found this note next to my bed — WORKING ON FILE FOR DEATH ROW GUY — but I have zero memory of the dream it represents. It’s lost!

 Feb 28

I dreamt I was at a zoo where the animals could wander freely, which seemed OK at first, but when the elephant got near, I thought … no.

 Feb 27 


I dreamt I got into a weird debate about eyewear in pop culture, which ended when I won the conversation by saying two words: Swifty Lazar. Feb 26 


I dreamt I was having dinner at ‪@NextRestaurant, talking to ‪@NickKokonas about my upcoming (really happening) lunch at Eleven Madison Park. Feb 26 


I dreamt I was heading to pick up a pig for a pig roast, only when I got there, I worried it was far too big to fit in the back of my Jeep.

 Feb 25 


I dreamt I rode a bus with my friend Allan, heading to deal with an inheritance of his. We arrived at a sunny beach in Miami … and I woke.

 Feb 25 


I dreamt that as I drove home in a stolen car, I stopped to have the oil changed and worried I’d get found out. But … why’d I stop then?

 Feb 25 


I dreamt I ran a publishing company and was addressing the troops, holding up one of Russ Cochran’s EC reprint books to explain a project.Feb 25 
 



I’ve lost one of my dreams, as my hastily scrawled middle-of-the-night note sparks no memory. What can DEPENDS ON HOW EVIL DECISION IS mean?

 Feb 24 


I dreamt Irene and I were watching Star Trek 2 live on TV on opening night, when she quickly shut it, saying “I know crap when I see it.”

 Feb 24 


(more…)

Since I just told you of the passing of Angel Arango, I thought I’d share my thoughts on first meeting him, and why it was a crime I hadn’t learned of him earlier.

The following originally appeared in the December 9, 2002 Science Fiction Weekly (issue #294), which merged with SCI FI Wire in 2009 and morphed into Blastr in 2010. (FYI—I’ve been editing sites for Syfy since—gulp!—2000.)

90 Miles and a Million Light-Years From Home

I just got back from a visit—a visit which a year ago I would have said was impossible—to Cuba. For citizens of the United States, such legal visits are not an easy thing to pull off. Travel under a General License is limited to six very narrow categories, and I was lucky enough to fall into one of them. So during the week of Thanksgiving, I—along with Locus publisher Charles N. Brown and Locus executive editor Jennifer A. Hall—went to Havana to research the current state of Cuban science fiction. We timed our trip to coincide with the conference Cubaficción 2002, so that we’d be able to meet with as many Cuban writers, artists, editors and fans as possible.

Modern science fiction started out as an American invention, but now that over three-quarters of a century has passed, it has developed a presence throughout the world. Listening to the international voices of SF can change the way we feel about all SF. Last year, for instance, I visited Chengdu, the capital city of the Szechuan province, to visit the headquarters of Science Fiction World magazine and discover how things are done in China. That experience was so enlightening that this year I decided to reach out to yet another foreign community of the fantastic to learn more about its unique flavor of SF. As it turns out, though Cuba is only 90 miles off our shores, compared to China it is a far more distant country.

(more…)