Just the other day I witnessed something strange, beautiful, sad, and, if I didn’t know any better, completely out of a movie scene.

The forecast has been hot and humid the past week here in New York City, and I’m pretty sure I left a substantial trail of sweat on my way to air-conditioned coffeeshop down the road for some iced caffeine. And of course I wasn’t the only one with that bright idea, even though I managed to get a free table in a room almost filled to capacity. I sipped my iced coffee slowly, in a heat-induced daze, thinking about things like, ‘I wonder how many establishments are playing a Bob Dylan song right now,” when a man entered and began passing out photos to each table. (He didn’t give me one, possibly because my table was furthest from the door, and due to the heat I was still wearing a significantly unapproachable scowl.)

I’ve seen this kind of thing before, though usually in airports and mall-type food courts. Someone would pass around pictures, usually of mangled or diseased children from third-world countries, and then ask for money. Almost always, these things are scams; the pictures were printed from the internet, and the collector used whatever money received for his/her own personal use.

Normally I would call this kind of scam pathetic, lazy even, if it didn’t work on me some years back. I was young and on my own in the world for the first time (and, perhaps not shockingly, inside a bookstore) when a girl about my age who didn’t speak much English approached me with a photo of sweatshop children. She held a sheet of paper, presumably with information about whatever cause she represented, but she didn’t refer to it once. All she did was point to the picture and say, ‘Please.’ To my embarrassment, it worked all too easily on me, and I gave her five dollars, thinking this is what a good person would do.

Needless to say, I haven’t fallen for such scams since. In the coffeeshop, I watched as the man went back to each table to retrieve his photos and attempt to get some money. To his credit, he had a speech prepared. Mostly he was cut off and shooed away, which of course was what I would have done to him.

At the last table sat a man, possibly in his late thirties, feeding ice cream to his infant child. I figured the last thing he’d want is be bothered by a scammer, insulting his intelligence and begging for money. When the scammer approached his table, he began his speech, but he stopped when the man with the child held out a five dollar bill for him to take. I watched in disbelief. You got took, I thought. But then this happened. After the scammer accepted the money, the man with the child said, ‘Sorry.’ He was, of course, referring to the photo of mangled children. Perhaps the scammer was caught off-guard, in which he briefly broke character with an automatic response, ‘It’s okay.’ Then, the man with the child looked right at him and said, ‘It’s not okay. It’s horrible.’ The scammer didn’t know what to say to that and left without another word.

One of my favourite things about vegan recipe wizards Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero is their use of simple, natural vegan substitutes in their recipes. This was something of a revelation to me when I was introduced to their books a few years ago, because the first things new vegans usually gravitate towards are pre-packaged, processed ‘fakes.’ While it can be comforting and exciting to find things like Ener-G Egg Replacer and Daiya vegan cheese, I soon learned they’re not always the healthiest or most natural options.

I first felt the absence of animal byproducts in baking. I love to bake. I also love to eat baked goods. When I became vegan, both activities suddenly turned into scary, fear-inducing no-go zones. Imagine my relief, then, when I came across Ener-G Egg Replacer. Suddenly I could make all of my favorite sweet treats again, and the solution came in a pre-packaged, ready-to-go box. I started baking again and didn’t look back until nearly two years later when I was perusing my new copy of Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. I noticed that Ener-G Egg Replacer was nowhere to be found and that nearly all of their recipes called instead for flax meal. I immediately ran to the kitchen and took my box of Egg Replacer out of the cupboard to check the ingredients list. Maybe it was just flax meal in fancy packaging? Nope. Potato Starch, tapioca starch flour, leavening (calcium lactate [not derived from dairy], calcium carbonate, citric acid), sodium carboxymethylcellulose, and methylcellulose.

All 150 of these chocolate chip cookies were made using flax meal instead of eggs. They were very popular.

I felt confused, sad, and skeptical. I know the good people at Ener-G Egg Replacer are probably just trying to make life easier for people who don’t or can’t eat eggs, but I still felt like either I had been taken for a ride or was a fool for not realising sooner that there was a much easier and more natural alternative. I couldn’t believe that something so basic could produce such an amazing result. But it was true. From that moment forward, I began baking everything from cookies to cupcakes to banana breads using flax meal as my egg substitute, and the result has been some of the best baked goods I’ve ever had. Plus, flax is high in both dietary fibre and omega-3 fatty acids, adding a bit of healthfulness to recipes like Monster Chocolate Attack, the Sequel (not a real recipe…yet.)

If you want to give flax meal a try, here’s the recipe for one ‘egg.’ If a recipe calls for more than one egg, just increase the amounts below accordingly.

1 tablespoon flax meal
3 tablespoons warm water

Add the warm water to the flax meal and beat until mixed. Set aside for about five minutes, or until the mixture has congealed. It will be about the same texture as a beaten egg.

Stay tuned Friday for more of my favourite substitutes!

At risk of an incredibly cheesy, but I promise unintentional, play on its frigid-sounding name: Iceland is cool. From musical exports like Björk, Sigur Rós, Jónsi, Emilíana Torrini, and mum to the fact that nearly all of their electricity and energy are from renewable sources (geothermal and hydropower), Iceland is one progressive country of 318,452 people. They boast the world’s highest number of bookstores per capita, as well as the world’s highest publication of books and magazines per capita. Add universal health care and tertiary education, some eerily beautiful scenery, and outdoor geothermal spas that can be enjoyed even in freezing weather, and Iceland is a shoo-in for my travel wish list.

Great Barrington, Massachusetts

I still don’t know the American small town. I’ve lived in big cities all my life, only with occasional trips to smaller towns for holidays. After spending the past ten months absorbing the noise and general magnitude of New York City, I long for a trip that’s completely different from my current surroundings – one with fresh air and a peace and quiet largely absent of car engines.

A good friend of mine hails from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and even though she’s since moved, she’s always spoken highly of her hometown. She reported proudly to me that Great Barrington was voted the Best Small Town in America this year by Smithsonian Magazine, which sounds like no small thing to me.

Sweden

Maybe it’s because I just witnessed the glory of Ikea (please take that with a grain of salt) or I just like really salty fish (please take that with… never mind)… so I want to go to Sweden. Known for their horrible, socialist healthcare in which everyone (all 9.5 million people) have equal access to medical care, Sweden is the third largest country in western Europe. Naturally, I want to visit the most touristy attraction possible: The Ice Hotel in Lapland. There’s also the possibility of exploring the arctic alongside reindeer, seeing the Northern Lights, and Stockholm, of course! Sweden will officially be the farthest north I’ve ever been.

Geo

Whatever it is that this pipe is ashamed of, he definitely doesn’t want you to see it.

Sarah

Chocolate egg casket to go with the Easter death theme? I see what you did there, Cadbury.

Margaret

The poop inspector takes his duty very seriously.

Next week: Pie in the Sky

I haven’t got any illusions about anything. Having said that, I still want to try to change things.

—Joe Strummer

That chronic travel bug inside me has awakened from its dormant slumber and as of late re-emerged to make itself known again. Shockingly, if you exclude my move to New York and my brief week-long return to Los Angeles a few months ago, I haven’t travelled since October 2010. Goodness, can that be? Surely, I’m forgetting something…

To be fair to myself, I suppose, moving to a new city does satisfy the travel bug, but only as much as any travel jaunt would anyway, so here I am again, and here it is again. It has even manifested itself in my subconscious – last week I dreamt I was moving to Philadelphia. When asked why, my response was ‘Why not?’

But to feel this way, still inside of a year in New York City, seems absurd. Absurd and alarmingly true. If New York City still doesn’t feel like home to me yet, then the routes I walk to work everyday, the bar around the block, and the cafe I visit on my days off, certainly do.

Because I am fortunate enough to be committed to a full-time job right now, it is difficult for me to travel to other cities or countries. My restlessness defaults to the desire to leave, even if just for a short while. But I realised not too long ago that I can easily achieve that meditative, instinctual quality of travelling right here in New York City, seeing as how much of my first year had been spent ‘regularising’ parts of the city.

So one day I went on a long walk. Walking is the best way to know a city intimately – with a city this large and diverse, I figured I’d explore just one part at a time. Rather arbitrarily, I chose to wander around Lower Manhattan. I know the East Village quite well, but other than how to get to Babycakes from my friend’s apartment, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Alphabet City, and Two Bridges were largely alien to me.

So I took to getting lost, which for me is sometimes quite difficult. Even though I loathe this age’s GPS-ing of everyday life, I’m actually just as concerned as the next person, about knowing where I am. The last long wander I took was through Boerum Hill and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn, but I eventually found myself walking back to Fort Greene, my neighbourhood of employ, for that free cup of coffee I can always count on.

I did better this time, focusing more on my immediate surroundings and my other senses rather than picturing myself on a Google Map. It was a hot Saturday, so everyone was out. Chinatown in particular was crowded with sounds, voices, and smells. The heat seemed to heighten everything, and for a second I felt myself in a paragraph of a New York novel, since everything seemed so highly descriptive.

I walked farther south to Two Bridges, where it is quite difficult to notice anything other than the massive Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges stretching over the East River. From Manhattan’s side, I located the tops of the buildings in Downtown Brooklyn so I could at least think to myself, ‘I can see my house from here!’ I walked along South Street, just under the roaring motorway of FDR Drive, reading traffic signs like ‘Right Lane Manhattan Bridge’ and suddenly something hit me.

No, not a car. A thought. Something about reading the place-name, in my momentary state of proposed self-exile, took my mind back to the first time I visited New York City. I was in a car with Sarah and we were gazing at the buildings of the city in the distance, and though we were driving toward them, it felt more like the city was coming at us, and it never felt quite real.

So much of my moving to New York City was about grounding its myth in some sort of reality. I knew people lived here but I never gave it much realistic thought. Part of me was aimed to prove, to myself as well as to others, that it was possible to move to the Big Apple; after all, people did it all the time. Yet another part of me felt like a child preparing himself for a trip to Disneyland. In the child’s rational brain, he most likely knows what’s real and what isn’t, but what the child chooses instead to focus on is that the entire place is magical.

I remember going to Disneyland one time about six months too old. In many ways, I was still straddling the line between innocent acceptance and questioning suspicion, but deep down I knew exactly what was going on; if anything, I chose to pretend like I didn’t. I happened to spend my first year in New York straddling a similar line, one between optimistic idealism and responsible practicality. And one thing I learned during this tightrope act is that it feels much safer to lean more on the side of practicality, regardless of the fact that an equal balance is all it takes to get you safely to your destined goal.

Many people I’ve come to know have told me that the first year is the hardest. Generally speaking, and situational circumstances aside, I believe this. But I know that each year will offer a different kind of lesson to be learned. So much of my first year was spent grounding the city’s myth into reality; really, just pulverizing it into the dirt. Perhaps this second year will be about trying to dig it up again.

Support a ban on the trade of polar bear parts. Photo courtesy of NRDC.

By Margaret Hedderman

NRDC recently sent out an email from Robert F Kennedy, Jr. highlighting the polar bear’s latest threat in an ever growing slew of dangers: the legal trade of polar bear skins, teeth, and claws in the international market.

“If you agree that the world doesn’t have polar bears to spare — certainly not to end up as rugs — then please help NRDC end this gruesome trade once and for all,” Kennedy says.

The NRDC is urging us to support a proposal to ban the trade of polar bear parts at the 2013 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Two years ago, a similar ban that would have protected both polar bears and blue fin tuna was rejected despite support from the United States. The NRDC is hoping to galvanise enough support ahead of time to see the ban through successfully.

Support a ban on the international trade of polar bear parts. Photo courtesy of NRDC.

Two-thirds of the world’s polar bear population is estimated to be lost by 2050 due to climate change and habitat loss. Currently Shell is on its way to begin drilling test wells off the coast of northern Alaska, as recently approved by the Obama Administration, and will greatly endanger already threatened polar bears – along with many other plants and animals.

NRDC is currently a year into their two-year campaign to protect polar bears from trophy trade. To read Kennedy’s letter, click here. To urge the Obama Administration to support the proposed ban, click here.

When the Urchins lived in London several years ago, we developed a nearly crippling addiction to the television show Frasier. As a child, I despised the series (which I had never actually seen, yet somehow knew was sleep-inducing adult humor) for consistently winning Emmys while my favourite shows were overlooked. Appalled at the injustice being committed against such fine works of art as Sister, Sister and Full House, I harboured a hateful vendetta against Frasier and its stars for years.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that it actually is one of the best television shows ever made, and deserved not only every Emmy it ever won, but probably many, many more. Luckily, our local library carried the entire series and we dutifully made our way through them. Our enjoyment of the show’s smart, dry, pun-filled wit was only amplified by our current immersion in similarly humoured British culture.

As we progressed through the series, it became clear the David Hyde Pierce’s portrayal of Niles was the show’s true comedic goldmine. The writing was, of course, almost unbelievably brilliant, but the producers were incredibly lucky to find such immense talent as Pierce and Kelsey Grammer  to do it justice.

Pierce began his acting career in the theatre in New York City, appearing in productions of Hamlet and Christopher Durang’s Beyond Therapy. Since Frasier‘s 2004 finale, Pierce has returned to the stage in productions of Spamalot, La Bête, and Curtains, for which he won a Tony Award.

Considering Pierce’s near-absence from Hollywood over the past eight years, I was thrilled to come across a trailer for a film in which he starred. This was nearly two years ago now, and due to the film’s limited release and my travels, I was just finally able to see Pierce’s somewhat disturbing and decidedly brilliant turn in The Perfect Host.

Written, directed, and edited by Nick Tomnay, The Perfect Host is both original and interesting, if not perfectly executed. The dialogue is at times forced and unnatural, and the cinematography could have benefitted from some more abstract choices. Yet, both the concept and the acting create a truly absorbing film. Clayne Crawford gives an authentic and skilled performance as John Taylor, while Pierce intrigues and delights as Warwick Wilson.

Aside from the enjoyably original story, the highlight of the film is watching Pierce’s masterfully nuanced performance. With a character a far cry from Niles Crane, Pierce’s chameleonic artistry is apparent. This suspenseful thriller would be spoilt by any discussion of the plot, but it is worth seeing for both Pierce’s performance and the originality of the screenplay.

Pierce is currently participating in the Vineyard Theatre’s lab production of Chicago and Cabaret composer John Kander’s new musical The Landing.

The Canterville Ghost

British comedians Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry first met as student members of the Cambridge University Footlights Dramatic Club. After 13 years of focusing on solo projects, two of England’s finest comedians are set to collaborate on an animated adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost. The wit and farce of Wilde alone would have put this film on my ‘to see’ list, but the addition of Laurie and Fry rocketed it right to the top. It is a comfort to known that Wilde’s genius rests safely in the most competent of comedic hands. Unfortunately, the film isn’t scheduled for release until Christmas 2014. Fortunately, this is the kind of thing the Urchins undoubtedly need to experience together, and that gives us plenty of time to coordinate travel plans.

The Master

After viewing Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love, I knew that I enjoyed the films of Paul Thomas Anderson but also felt that he was in dangerous territory of soon caricaturing his style. Then, in a grown-ass move, the young filmmaker followed up his first four irreverent, auteur-establishing films with There Will Be Blood, a film unlike any of them. If Anderson’s career before that movie was a flashy car speeding recklessly down the road, There Will Be Blood was Anderson lifting his foot off the pedal and regaining control of his vehicle before the thrill ride ended in a violent crash. And that’s when I really, really started to like him.

An intriguing first clip of his next film, The Master, was just released on the internet about a day ago. There is actually nothing to say about it. If the clip leaves me speechless, who knows what the rest of the film will do.

Hyde Park on Hudson

I’ll just throw this out there: I am extremely skeptical of Hyde Park on Hudson. It’s a skepticism based upon cynicism, of course. Bill Murray stars as FDR in this ‘based upon true events’ in which he strikes up an affair with his distant cousin (played by Laura Linney) just as King George and Queen Elizabeth visit his home in upstate New York. Based solely upon the trailer, my first impression is that this is a very light take on very serious events (at the time, England was on the verge of war with Germany.)

However, I am intrigued by this story being told from the POV of FDR’s mistress, Margaret Suckley (a very unfortunate name.) Also, Bill Murray as FDR? Yet another intrigue. How does one make a feel-good movie about diplomatic relations? I’m curious to see!

[Urchin Dad, Bobby Hedderman has recently written and recorded his first song in 45-years. Now, he's using that song to help benefit the Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch in Medina, TX.]

Well, it took longer than I thought it would and it was a much harder effort on everyone’s part than anyone anticipated. But, after almost three months, the song, video and website is finished. What started, as a simple poem written on a whim, has become a major project involving nine people and bunch of dogs, cats and farm animals.

Today, I launched Going All In. The lyrics I wrote, with me singing all the vocal parts, were put to music created by Gary Bolen and Andrew Fowler of Lake Tahoe – not a bad place to go and sing a song.  This is my first recording since I became old enough to drink and it was more fun than anything I’ve done in a very long time.  And I have to admit, none to abashedly, by far the best artistic effort I have ever put forth.

Every one loves Miranda Lambert! She is approximately 10 years old and she is highly intelligent, sweet as she can be and does not want to retire.

I wanted something good to come out of this effort, so I’ve partnered up with the good people at Kinky Friedman’s Utopia Animal Rescue Ranch to help raise funds to maintain the effort to save as many abandoned, abused and otherwise helpless amimals as possible.  The Ranch is a “no-kill shelter” that takes in the condemned off of “death row” from other shelters as well as caring for other needy animals.  The song will be available online as a free MP3 download.  If you love animals as I do and you care to help, donations can be made via Paypal or US Mail. Either way, Going All In is available to download for free.

I’m getting some special attention since Margaret is my daughter.  She also edited the video. After you have watched the video and listened to my song, please feel free to share this, repost, email to anyone and everyone you can think of. I hope you enjoy listening to Going All In and are inspired to make a difference.

- Bobby Hedderman