I am on a very serious quest to find the Best Latkes in Binghamton.  Don’t mess.

When I moved to Johnson City 3 years ago, I knew a grand total of 1 other Jew in the Southern Tier.  Our first Chanukah together, we decided to make latkes.  Well, we decided to ATTEMPT to make latkes.  Important distinction.

He claimed he knew how.  He claimed he had the necessary skills.  He claimed he had made them before.

He lied.

I was betrayed.

Without going into too much detail, let’s just say we spent that evening shoveling half-cooked flour/egg/potato/dough-balls into our mouths like so much cookie dough.  While watching A Charlie Brown Christmas on TV.  *sigh*

Flash forward two years.  I’m utterly determined to find a decent latke in Binghamton.  With a new tool at my disposal:  Facebook.

I flip on over to Joshua Aurbach’s page (Kosher Black & White Cookie/Challah King of Broome County).  Surely, Josh must know where in Binghamton the potato pancake resides.  I tap out a message: “Doing a story on BingPop about latkes.  Wondering where I can get my hands on a good greasy potato pancake.”

His response: “The Jewish Community Center.  And my Mom.”

*sigh* Another dead end.  Being a 3-holiday-a-year Jew, I don’t have a membership at the JCC.  And I don’t have Josh’s Mom’s number.

(PS, Josh’s challah is now available in Weis markets.  All must try.  And if you’ve never had challah before, prepare to have your world rocked.)

In one final act of desperation, I post a status update: “Looking for latke’s in Binghamton.  Does ANYBODY know where I can find them.”  Lo and behold, the answer presents itself:  I am informed by uber-hip forward-thinking business-savvy shiksa restaurateur Marie McKenna—co-owner of the Lost Dog—that each year her café hosts a Latke night every year!

Well what else could I do? I cleared my schedule and prepared for a ravishing round of dreidel.

And dreidel there was.  Wooden dreidels, by the way.  In all my Jewish years, I’ve never once seen a clay dreidel.  That dreidel song is bullsh*t.  We were also given Chanuakah gelt—chocolate coins in tin wrapping. dreidel, you may not know, is a gambling game.  It’s no wonder my Grandma likes Bingo so much; we’re trained when we’re young.

(Yes, I know, dreidel can also be a drinking game.  I was in college once too.)

But let’s talk about the food!  Marie and her staff didn’t stop at latkes.  There were three Chanukah-themed entrees: a sweet and sour beef brisket, salmon in a tomato ginger sauce, and roast chicken with challah, apricot and pine-nut stuffing.  YUM.  Apparently, as news of Lost Dog’s annual Chanukah dinner spread, Marie’s Jewish friends began to come out of the woodwork with old family recipes.  She mixes it up every year.

I tried to brow-beat my table into ordering ALL of the holiday selections (by accusing them of hating Chanukah if they refused), but my ploy was only half effective.  One dinner-mate insisted on reliving the three-hundred and seventy other times she’d downed the restaurants famous penne a la vodka.  After all was said and done, we ordered 3 of the 4.  Our ratings are below…

The Brisket - 4 Dreidels!
 

The Chicken - 5 Dreidels!

The Latkes - 4 Dreidels!

A few words about the latkes themselves: They were utterly close to receiving five dreidels, but latkes, like chicken soup or mac & cheese, are only truly satisfying if they taste IDENTICAL to the way your parents made them when you were a child.

For me, that meant literally gallons of oil.  Seriously, I’m pretty sure Grandma ran down the block to McDonald’s and used their deep-fryer to make McLatkes.  Latkes weren’t latkes if the oil hadn’t soaked through the paper-plate, the paper towel beneath, the plastic placemat under that, and the oak wood table beneath them all to create a dripping puddle of fat on the tile floor below.  Not that it was only my Grandma—it was truly a family trait.  I remember enjoying my mother’s brownie recipe for YEARS before I found out that it involved 3 full sticks of butter.  Literally.  THREE STICKS.  It’s mind-boggling that there was room in the pan for any other ingredients.  It was butter with brown food coloring.

At this very moment, somewhere in North Jersey there is a 30-year-old clutching his chest as a result of artery plaque that can be traced back to the brownies he had on my birthday in our second grade homeroom class.

Anyway, everyone at my table had a fantastic time.  And something you’ll learn about latkes: they are served with either sour cream or apple sauce, rarely both.  You can spend an entire Chanukah meal arguing which is best—and I have; well, you can only play dreidel for so long…  Although we did spend time between latkes and the main course playing for pennies (and, for some reason, a drink chip worth $3.50… I think we were one penny short.)

My one and ONLY complaint about that fantastic Chanukah meal—are you listening Lost Dog—was the lack of a suitable wine pairing for the latkes… Take note: The San Francisco Chronicle recommends a good Chardonnay.

I’m a little bullsh*t about virtual reality.  Seriously.  I mean, come on, it’s been like 20 years.  Where is my VR mansion?  My virtual trip in an X-Wing?  Why aren’t I sleeping with virtual people that are way out of my virtual league?

Yeah, I’m bullsh*t about VR.

Technology moves too slowly; Who’d have thought the most exciting development in the last five years would basically be a stylish pocket protector that makes phone calls and tells you which Britney Spears song you’re listening to on the radio.

PS, I don’t know what it says about modern-day songwriting that you need a decoder device to figure out the name of the song you’re listening.

Anyway, that’s why I got so excited when I found out the next BIG step in virtual reality is happening right here in Bingo.

And it’s not the giant hamster ball it looks like.

It’s a helluvalot more.

The VirtuSphere, or as I prefer to think of it, your next birthday gift to me, is a Virtual Reality interface that can allow you to immerse yourself in just about any environment you can think of.

It’s a bit like Star Trek’s Holodeck.  Only significantly less likely to malfunction, develop an artificial intelligence, and try and kill you.

What makes VirtuSphere DIFFERENT from the VR tech you’ve already seen is that you can actually walk in the thing.  Like, put one foot in front of the other.  You know, like people in big cities used to do before they had Segways.

OK, that may not SEEM like that big a deal, but when Nintendo Wii’s single-biggest selling point has become that it’ll make your kids be a little less fat and lazy, a VR environment that requires honest-to-God locomotion seems like a good idea.

And it IS exercise.  Or at least, it can be if you try hard enough.  Jim DiMascio, Virtusphere’s COO, demonstrated that with a little practice, you can run your ass off in the thing.  After 2 or 3 minutes, he had to stop, a bit breathless, and grab a glass of water.

The applications are pretty much limitless.  Jim and his partners see a military use; Units could be trained in a virtual Afghanistan so they have a sense of what it’s like to move around a real Middle Eastern city before they head overseas.  Army doctors could use a virtual re-enactment of psychologically scaring events to treat Post Traumatic Stress.  The VirtuSphere folks are teaming up with third-party software developers to make all that happen.  It’s pretty fantastic that the effort is being led right here in Binghamton.

Plus, I got to use it to play a Russian video game that involved blowing up killer pumpkins from outer space.  Or they might have been mutant radioactive pumpkins from a nuclear waste site.  Or they might have been killer mutant radioactive pumpkins from a nuclear waste site in outer space.

I’m not entirely certain.  But pumpkins were involved.

And there’s something that’s just more exciting about being able to use your entire body to move around in a game.  For the first few moments, I stood in place blasting pumpkins.  But after a little while, I started running after them.  And the game was somehow immediately more… fun.  Can’t explain why; it just was.
 
That’s not to say moving inside VirtuSphere isn’t a bit disconcerting in the beginning—like the first time you pick up a 37-button PlayStation controller.  There’s an adjustment period.  Just to practice, Jim asked me to walk in the sphere without the headset.  It’s pretty weird to be walking and not actually moving anyplace.  It got better when I put the head gear on.  As I took steps inside the sphere, it rotated around me, moving me through the virtual world in my headset.  Very cool.

Stopping took some getting used to as well.  When I stop in real life, the ground tends to stop at pretty much the same time.  But the momentum of the sphere creates a delay when you stop moving in VirtuSphere—the ball continues for a second on its own.  You learn to slow down first.

So after getting my first little taste of Binghamton-born Virtual Reality, I wanted to know when the masses would get a shot.  Jim DiMascio and I sat down for a serious chat about exploding radioactive pumpkins…

We’ve been promised cool virtual reality tech for soooooooooooo long; why isn’t it really here yet and when will we all have it in our houses?

Virtual Reality simulation is here and Virtusphere is a locomotion interface that allows users to become an avatar and play INSIDE a video game. One of the renown professors of Virtual Reality, Dr. Thomas Furness of the University of Washington was quoted, “Virtusphere comes closer than most to the Holodeck of Star Trek fame”. We are currently marketing Virtusphere to the entertainment market which include major theme parks, Las Vegas hotels & resorts, malls and other related entertainment centers globally.  Virtusphere can also provide combat simulation training for the US Army and Marines infantry soldiers, we would never send a pilot into combat without simulation training and we now have the first locomotion simulator for the soldiers on the ground. It will be a few more years but it our goal to eventually make Virtusphere affordable for home use.
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Let me make you hate yourself for not living in downtown Binghamton for just a sec, K?  In addition to the ever-increasing restaurant options, the free wi-fi, the variety of bar (cocktail) choices, and the obscenely low urban rent, it’s home to the best housing (and more importantly, house parties) in Binghamton.  Seriously.  Just because you haven’t gotten an invite yet, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Still don’t believe me?  Come out this Friday.

Three living spaces that are going to make you “uber-jealous” (as Bruno might say) will be open to the Southern Tier Young Professionals, and through them, the public.  The event is a progressive dinner that will weave from downtown to Riverside and back again over the course of 4 hours.

The party starts at Sylvia/Wayne Kerber’s gorgeous 4-floor loft.  You will drool; you will covet; it will make you reconsider your career choices.  This pad is so fab, in fact, that it was covered over on HGTV—which is not to say they did a good job of covering it; the editors over at HG have managed to imbue a compelling story of urban renewal with all the energy of a 7-part Ken Burns miniseries on the history of the ball-point pen.  The reality, however, is much more interesting.  And you should join STYP there on Friday for appetizers, a chance to meet the (extremely warm and creative) Kerbers, and to take in this modern designer’s wet dream.

Now I haven’t been to home of Robin Alpaugh OR Doug Camin, but I’ve heard good things.  Robin’s home is described on the invite as a classic Riverside mansion, and you’re invited to munch noodles on the porch smothered in homemade sauces.  Doug Camin, for those of you who haven’t met him, does all sorts fancypants things with computers—that afford him a State Street loft right above state-of-the art recording studio On Point Productions.  He’ll be the final destination—the place where you hopefully still have enough room to scarf down some dessert without losing everything else you’ve been consuming till then.

Personally, I’m looking forward to collapsing shortly after that.  But I expect there’ll still be plenty looking to party downtown.

I asked Dawn Lanouette, social chair of the Young Professionals to give me just a few more details…

Well look, I’ve never been to a progressive dinner.  And I can guess what one is.  But why do all that work when you could just explain….

Progressive dinners come in all shapes and sizes. Since this one involves such a large group, we try to keep it simple. We start at the first home on Court St.  and eat appetizers and drink wine. At about 7 pm, we’ll leave and (weather permitting) walk to riverside drive for dinner and more beverages.  Then about 9, we’ll walk back to another loft on Court St for dessert and beverages.  So, it’s a meal, a home tour, and an evening stroll all in one!

I see from Facebook that people are invited to bring an app or desert.  Is it free otherwise?

A dessert or appetizer is the price of admission so to speak. We provide the main course and some wine and non-alcoholic beverage. People are encouraged to bring their favorite beverage, too, as you may not like what we serve, but it is otherwise free.  You don’t have to worry about carrying things, either.  We’ll have a car for transporting food and wine from place to place.

OK, this is important:  I see there’s a pasta bar for dinner.  Rottini, sphaghetti, elbows, penne?  What are we talking here?  Will there be a variety of shapes?  And sauces.. talk to me about my options.  I’m serious about my pasta.

We use penne because its easier to eat. So far, we’ve got three sauces-a bolognese, a vodka sauce, and an alfredo. I’d love to add one more, but we’ll have to see if we get a volunteer.  There will also be salad and garlic bread. The sauces are homemade. I’m told the bolognese is her grandmother’s secret recipe and I know the other two have won awards. I think you’ll be duly impressed.  But, since you’re the expert, maybe you want to show off your skill.

The venues look like fun; describe the "vibe" of each: the Kerber house, the Alpaugh mansion, and the Camin loft…

The Kerber place is simply awesome. It’s been featured on HGTV. Essentially, they took this store front type building in downtown and turned it into their home. Since they designed it themselves, they give great tours.  It is very modern. Robin Alpaugh’s Riverside Drive house is the complete opposite.  You step inside and feel like you’ve gone back in time.  He has a photograph of what it used to look like and has worked very hard to restore it.  He just added a garden out back, so we’ll be eating on the huge front porch and in the back garden.  It’s beautiful.  Doug and Kim’s loft has a younger, hipper feel to it.  It has a great view of downtown, and is just this huge space for people to mix mingle, eat and drink. 

Seriously, though, don’t you think you should have included somebody’s dirty, overcrowded studio just for grit and realism?

Um, yeah, I used to live in one of those, so, no.  Though, we are walking through downtown twice, that should provide enough grit and realism for everyone, or you could walk downtown after the event–it’s only a block away.
 
Your invite fails to mention the drinking opportunities.  I can only assume this is an oversight.  So let’s talk booze.  Being that all the venues are within walking distance…

You are correct, that was an oversight.  So, here’s the deal–we’ll have wine at each venue and some non-alcoholic beverage, BUT as you pointed out, this is a great chance to drink without having to drive, so people are welcome (even encouraged) to bring their favorite beverage, and there are already several people bringing their favorites to share.  Hey, you want to enjoy this night, and who knows if you’ll like the wine we’re serving?  Again, we’ll have a car to put wine in to take from place to place.  Oh, and Doug and Kim have a nice bar, so wine probably isn’t the only thing on the menu at that stop.
 
So do we bring our fancy party dress?  How should we fit in; nobody wants to be the only dope in cargo shorts and a "Bing Crosby + Ham + 1-Ton Weight" T-shirt…

Common sense is key to dressing for this event.  Remember, we’re walking from Court to Riverside and back again, so save the 3 inch heels for another night.  That said, there will be all types of dress.  Some of us will be coming straight from work, so that means, losing a jacket, taking off a tie and rolling up the sleeves.  Most people, though, will be very casual.  Shorts are fine–ripped t-shirts probably will make you feel underdressed.  Unless, of course, it’s a BingPop T-Shirt, then it’s welcome everywhere, right?