Month: March 2003

Buffalo’s NHL team, the Sabres, fell into serious trouble when their previous owner, John Rigas, fell into serious legal trouble of his own when his company, Adelphia, went bankrupt after one of those accounting-scandals of a year ago. Adelphia was once to be Buffalo’s corporate savior, not just of the Sabres but of the city as a whole: there was going to be a big office tower built in downtown Buffalo to house the Adelphia corporate HQ, a construction project that was shrunk from forty stories to twelve and then canceled altogether. (The most recent developments have Adelphia jilting Buffalo altogether, in favor of moving to Denver.)

The Sabres were taken over by the NHL itself as a new buyer was sought; a guy named Mark Hamister was the front-runner but he wanted the city and state to pony up money for improvements to HSBC Arena, where the Sabres play. (This would have been mostly for parking, since the Arena is less than ten years old itself.) The city and state balked, and it looked as if potential owners from outside the Buffalo area — who would likely have moved the team — were going to be allowed to make offers.

However, in the last couple of days a deal for the Sabres’ ownership was finally put together with B. Thomas Golisano, a billionaire from Rochester, NY whose main claim to fame is his quadrennial independent run for Governor of New York State. He has pledged to keep the Sabres in Buffalo, and he provides the franchise with financial footing that it hasn’t enjoyed in a long time. I haven’t followed the whole thing much, so I’m not sure why Golisano wasn’t the front-runner in the first place. I’m also annoyed that Buffalo, through mismanagement, put itself in a position of having to keep the Sabres there — because Buffalo owns and runs HSBC Arena, an expensive facility that would almost certainly have failed without the NHL team’s presence on its calendar. For some reason, the Arena doesn’t host nearly enough events. I find myself wondering why Buffalo, with this beautiful arena (and it is a fine facility), can’t put together a bid to host, say, the NCAA Final Four, or perhaps the Figure Skating National Championships (or maybe even the World’s). Part of Buffalo’s problem is that they just seem too ready to settle for small, as opposed to thinking BIG once in a while.

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Random notes on maintenance issues and such:

:: I updated “Other Journeys” at left to replace a couple of blogs that haven’t been updated in many moons, and to add a few of the more heavily-frequented members of the left-wing blogosphere. I also added a link to my evil twin.

:: It strikes me as weird that I can walk into Wal-Mart or Target and, for the price of a single new, full-price music CD buy two movies on DVD, complete with extras and widescreen presentation. No wonder the music industry is in the toilet….and further evidence, from the classical world: Naxos, whose discs retail for around seven bucks, is really starting to outsell the bigger labels.

:: I’m not sure why, but I’m supposed to say Hello to a person named “Mieke”. OK, here goes: Hi, Mieke. (By the way, I like the name “Mieke” and have every intention of stealing it for a future book or story.)

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It’s supposed to hit fifty degrees today in Syracuse. Wow. We’ve melted enough snow that brown patches of grass are beginning to show up.

My question is: how much snow must melt before the golf-freaks start using the course across the street?

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It turns out that SDB is a one-time fan of the show Emergency!, that terrific 70s drama about the adventures of a pair of paramedics and their fire department, as well as the tribulations of some of the doctors at Rampart General. That was a great show, and I distinctly remember hustling home each day the year I was in second grade to catch the 4:00 re-run of the show on TV. (Which was followed at 5:00 by Star Trek.) Being that age, I had no idea that the show was partly mainstreaming the idea of paramedics. Who says TV is useless?

One of my favorite bits of Emergency! lore comes in the film Wayne’s World, which many people assume to be just a dumb teen-type comedy — but it’s full of jokes that only people of a certain age could possibly get, such as when the perpetually-drunk background character is about to “spew”, and Wayne yells, “We’ve got to get him to Rampart!” When I saw that movie in the theater, at that moment everyone over the age of twenty laughed, and the kids just kind of tittered along, the way they do when they’re in the presence of something funny but they don’t get it.

For some reason, the episode of Emergency! that always sticks out in my brain is one where the guys respond to a call where a person who has eaten something like nineteen hamburgers for a contest has passed out. One of the guys says, “Well, I guess he won”, whereupon another guy standing nearby says, “Nah, I did. I ate twenty.” The paramedic asks, “OK, how do you feel?” and the guy kind of shrugs and says, “Kind of full.”

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Some people want to build the item pictured here as a shrine to the Virgin Mary on Buffalo’s waterfront. This arch would become the tallest structure in Buffalo, dwarfing the current tallest building — the HSBC center — by more than one hundred feet.

Politics and the abortion debate aside (this arch is intended as a shrine for pro-life Catholics), on aesthetic grounds I oppose this thing. I can’t think of something more garish and dumb-looking than this item, looming over Lake Erie and the entire city. I don’t expect it to ever get built, but then, I don’t expect a lot of things.

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I’m going to allow my Ebay auctions to lapse until our impending move is complete. But it will be the same batch of books, so if for some unknown reason the teeming masses of Byzantium’s Shores readers are waiting to pick up one of these volumes, well, they’ll be back.

(EDIT: Actually, I’ll keep them going because I’ve just learned that the move isn’t to take place for a couple of weeks yet.)

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Of all the various human behaviors that one can observe in the great spectrum of activity that our species has to offer, one of the most awe-inspiring is the ability of some to, when they see one group of people acting like idiots, respond with a hearty “Hey, I can be an even bigger idiot than them folks!”.

So if we’re going to use government funds for this, hell, let’s just track down Doc Brown and his Delorean so we can go back in time and keep those soldiers from dying over there in the first place. Or, failing that (since Doc’s a fictional character and all), maybe we can take some government money and use it to melt this minor token of France’s onetime affection down and use the metal to make bullets for use in Iraq.

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(On Screen): One of SDB‘s favorite past-times is to examine a left-wing, generally anti-war, argument and identify what he perceives to be a commission of one of the “informal logical fallacies” within the argument’s construction — Tu quoque, perhaps, or more usually a “strawman”, wherein one argues against a formulation of an opponent’s view that isn’t entirely accurate, in hopes that the terms can be shifted. So it’s interesting to look down to his “Updates” that follow the article, where he links to various people who have commented on this particular post. Grouping several left-wing comments together, SDB says this:

Update: Ted Barlow and Kieran Healy and Tom Bogg comment. (Bottom line: I’m a raving paranoid. The French are really our best friends; they’re actually better friends than the Brits.) Atrios, too. And Kevin Drum.

That snarky comment of his in the middle is intriguing. Following each of these links, I find that each of these bloggers does, in fact, think that SDB is, to put it mildly, a bit off his rocker in this post. (I tend to agree. I mean, he actually wonders here about the possibility of France launching a nuclear strike against the United States, for God’s sake.) But, not one of the linked bloggers says anything at all defending France’s status as an ally, or comes within a San Diego mile of suggesting, in even the most veiled terms, that France is a better ally than the British. Talk about a Strawman.

(By the way, I find it interesting that warbloggers of every stripe will engage in just about any kind of conspiracy-theory they can concoct in their attempts to explain France’s opposition to the upcoming war — France is secretly allied with Saddam! France has given Saddam the raw materials for his weapons! Chirac and Saddam are genetic twins! France may nuke us to keep their complicity in Iraq secret! — but if anyone on the left suggests that maybe, just maybe, the Bush Administration’s motivation for war in Iraq isn’t solely based on Goodness and Virtue and Striking A Blow For All That Is Good In The World, well, that’s just crazy talk!!!

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An almost-certain war, deficits spiraling to scary levels, millions of citizens without health insurance, homeland security concerns, rising unemployment (including yours truly), an economy that is teetering on the edge of plopping right back into recession….

….and yet, it seems that some of our Congressmen need something better with which to occupy their stress-addled brains.

Instead of “Freedom Fries” and “Liberty Toast”, I propose more accurate names: “Stupid-and-useless-measure-by-a-mental-midget Fries” and “Twits-with-entirely-too-much-responsibility-and-time-on-their-hands Toast”.

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Fort Drum, New York, is about seventy miles north of Syracuse. Nearly everything that happens there makes the local news, including each time a large number of men stationed there has shipped out for the Middle East. I even had to stop at a railroad crossing twice while living here while long trains carrying military equipment rolled by, no doubt heading northward for Fort Drum. Somehow, having a fairly large military base nearby makes the reality of impending war all the more real.

Yesterday, a Blackhawk helicopter — like the one picture above — carrying thirteen men out of Fort Drum crashed.

As I write this, the number of dead has not been released.

The military is a dangerous business, no matter how far away you are from the front lines. These were men who chose to serve their country, and that they died in a patch of Upstate New York woods as opposed to the sands of Iraq in no way changes this.

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