I'm going to be cooking a dinner featuring locally-produced honey at canelé restaurant in LA next Tuesday, February 19.  The restaurant has a program called "Friends Cook", where they invite neighborhood pals to cook a special menu at the restaurant. Here's how they describe it:

Every so often on a Tuesday night we share our kitchen with some special folks for our popular "friends cook at canelé." These pals, ranging from experienced chefs to absolute newbies, conceive, prep, and cook to order a 3 course prix-fixe menu with the advice and assistance of our chef, cooks, and servers.

Here's the menu:

I'll be curing the salmon next Sunday morning, then cold-smoking it with alder wood that night. We'll slow roast it to order at Canelé on Tuesday. It's a long process, but with a super-delicious result.

It'll be really fun and a great opportunity to watch me burn myself. I'd love to see you there if you happen to be in LA!

Last week, deejay Jimmy O'Neill died at his home in West Hollywood at age 73. O'Neill was a central figure in hippie culture, and he got a pretty raw deal from The Man for his efforts. O'Neill was host of the enormously popular teen music show Shindig!, then used his clout to open a nightclub called Pandora's Box on the Sunset Strip and book his favorite acts. This led to massive throngs of teens and traffic on the strip, and soon the killjoys descended. The city hastily enacted a series of loitering and curfew laws targeting teenagers. The footage in this clip from November 12, 1966 shows what happened next.

In what would become a template for youth resistance, young people gathered at Pandora's Box to defy the 10pm curfew. The riots kept growing, and the panicked L.A. City Council quickly moved to condemn and demolish Pandora's Box, which they ultimately did in 1967. The incident inspired many songs, including Buffalo Springfield's anthem “For What It's Worth," often interpreted as an anti-war song. The young people who witnessed this injustice, including Peter Fonda, Phil Proctor, and Jack Nicholson, came away with renewed resolve to fight even bigger political battes.

Art by Dave Kloc for Meltdown Comics

I'll be hosting an event with our friends at Meltdown Comics tomorrow night, Tuesday November 13, 2012: an evening with Ninja and Yo-Landi of the South African band Die Antwoord.

The zef ones will be present, signing a beautiful limited-edition Die Antwoord/Meltdown poster by artist Dave Kloc (9-10pm), and screening a bunch of their videos and short films (10-1130pm, this part is sold out).

More details here.

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I admire artist gerG Maclaurin's work. His Ghost Phones exhibition at Maker Faire 2008 was one of my favorite attractions that year. This year, gerG is building a walk-through diorama experience in his backyard. Admission is going to be free. The project was fully funded on Kickstarter, but he is still accepting donations.

You'll walk thru my back yard which has been transformed into an abandoned field, then peer thru branches and weeds at the little buildings of the pumpkin people. Inside the buildings 2' tall pumpkins will be sitting and working, others will be waiting in the pumpkin health clinic, nursing their unfortunate wounds. One will be sitting at her boudoir, staring at a shattered mirror. There's dozens more scenes, and each is unique... the surgery suite... the knife sharpening shop…

Suzanne Paulson, UCLA professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, saw "Carmageddon" as an opportunity to make use of a "natural experiment." She and a colleague "measured pollutants in the air during the LA freeway shutdown last year, and have now released their findings.

Air quality near the normally busy highway improved by 83 percent that day last July, relative to comparable weekends. Elsewhere in West Los Angeles, the improvement was equally dramatic. Air quality improved by 75 percent on that side of the city and in Santa Monica, and by 25 percent throughout the entire region, as a measure of the drop in ultrafine particulate matter associated with tailpipe emissions.

"We saw what we expected: you take motor vehicles away, the air gets really, really clean," Paulson says, "which tells us that most of the pollution is from motor vehicles from one type or another in this area."

More: L.A.'s 'Carmageddon' Produced Dramatic, Instantaneous Air Quality Improvements (The Atlantic).

(Image: Dallas Traffic 10/19/11 1227pm, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike (2.0) image from nffcnnr's photostream)

I've never publicly shared my story about The Worst Meeting In The History Of Show Business, but this seems like an appropriate time, for reasons I'll get to in a minute. 

In the late '90s I was working as a sitcom writer, and in the spring of 1998 I was between jobs and needed one. My agent lined up a meeting for me with Al Franken, who was then running a show called "Lateline," a behind-the-scenes comedy about a TV news program. Franken wanted to meet me, my agent told me, because I had a news background, having been a writer for Newsweek before I moved to Los Angeles. My recollection is that "Lateline" was produced out of New York; Franken would fly out to Los Angeles to hold a few days' meetings with prospective hires at a hotel in West Hollywood. And so the meeting got set, for breakfast a week or so later. I arrived a little early and found Franken in the hotel restaurant, where he was meeting with another writer. He asked me if I'd mind waiting for a few minutes, so I took a seat in the lobby.

After a few moments the telephone rang at the host's station, which sat in the lobby, a few feet outside the dining room entrance, and about 20 feet from where I was sitting. The host answered the call, listened for a moment, then went inside and came back with Franken. The writer with whom Franken had just met, their meeting now concluded, continued through the lobby and left. Franken picked up the phone. Here's what I heard him say:

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