Month: August 2007

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Walkability

I’ve seen this walkability test in a number of places, and I finally was able to get my neighborhood’s score: 42 out of 100. Oh well.

Of course, this doesn’t imply that there aren’t places to walk. I’ve been walking nearly every day this summer, roughly for an hour at a time, in part of an attempt to start living more healthily. There are plenty of places to walk about. If “walkability” denotes being able to walk to conduct normal errands, then yeah, I don’t live in the most walkable of locales. But walking for the sake of walking? I’ve got it made.

(Well, almost. One of the only great flaws I can see in Buffalo’s Southtowns region, which I love dearly and never want to leave, is the lack of a nice paved bike and walking path down here. The River Path in Tonawanda and the Ellicott Creek paths are nice, but they’re at least ten miles away from Casa Jaquandor. West Seneca has a wonderful soccer field facility that’s ringed by a mile-long paved path, but for change-of-scenery, it gets a little old — and when the soccer tournaments get going, the place gets incredibly congested. (Which reminds me, people: the path is a path, not a place to set up your folding chairs. Grrr.))

Several days a week, if I want to get my walking in, I’ve had to get up at five in the morning to do it. I detest getting out of bed that early, really and truly, but I love the way the world looks in the hour just before dawn. This past Monday, when I got up it had finished raining just minutes before and was then clearing off, so everything was slightly damp, and mist was rising from the lawns and fields. To the East, the sky was reddening with the approaching dawn, and to the West, the full moon — now red and hazy — was sinking toward the horizon. One way the Sun, the other way the Moon.

Forty-two out of one hundred? On that morning, I gave my neighborhood a perfect walkability score.

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Good thing the Devil didn’t go to Carnegie Hall….

For some reason, the local country station — which I hear occasionally at work — plays “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” daily, which drives me nuts because I consider it to be one of the worst songs in the history of musical expression. And not just human musical expression. Human song, whale song, Vulcan song, Gungan song…”Devil Went Down to Georgia” is worse than all of it.

First of all, the whole idea’s just goofy; second, there’s the sad fact that the fiddle playing in that song is, well, crap. I always break out laughing when I hear what’s supposed to be this astonishing playing by the Devil, which turns out to be this scratchy shit that would get jeered off the stage at just about any place where anyone knows anything about good fiddling or violin playing. Seriously, the Devil is so bad that it’s no surprise that “Johnny” beats him; frankly, the Devil couldn’t even rosin the bow of a Natalie MacMaster or an Alison Krauss or an Eileen Ivers, and Itzhak Perlman could blow the Devil right off the stage just by playing a C-major scale.

Anyway. “Devil Went Down to Georgia” is the worst song ever.

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Lord….

OK, I need all of my readers from Minneapolis to chime in here, as soon as possible. Let me know you’re all right.

UPDATE: This is the bridge that collapsed:

Here’s the bridge’s location in relation to downtown Minneapolis. The bridge is at the far right; that’s the Hubert Humphrey Metrodome near the middle, and downtown Minneapolis dominating the lefthand side of the image.

How horrible.

(I’ll keep this post at the top of the blog until tomorrow.)

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A brief quiz thing

Stolen from Incurable Insomniac:

1. If there were no blogs, what would you be doing right now?

Reading and writing. Being more productive.

2. If you had to spend one year living alone in a remote cabin, what would you spend your time doing?

Reading and writing. If I have electricity, listening to music and watching movies and stuff on DVD. Seeing how long I could grow my beard before I finally gave in and trimmed it. (I’m guessing, not very long. I get antsy when it approaches a half-inch in length.) Chop firewood. Learn to fish. Sleep. Swim fully-clothed in remote mountain streams. Drink tea. Sing at the top of my lungs.

And that’s what I’d do by ten in the morning!

3. If you could go back in time, what one piece advice would you give yourself?

To when? If I’m talking to my five-year-old self, I’d say, “Smile when they take the damn picture.” If I’m talking to my thirteen-year-old self, I’d say, “You know, maybe that guy’s not blowing smoke up your ass when he mentions that you should be on the swim team every time he sees you.” If I’m talking to my seventeen-year-old self, I’d say, “You’re barely going to remember her in ten years, so stop acting like an idiot stalker and move on.” If I’m talking to my twenty-one-year-old self, I’d say, “Start writing now.” If I’m talking to my twenty-six-year-old self, I’d say…actually, forget that one, it’s a bit kinky. If I’m talking to my thirty-year-old self, I’d say, “Don’t take that telesales job, and call back that grocery store.” If I’m talking to my thirty-three-year-old self, I’d say, “Get ready, because this is when it all gets worse.”

If I’m talking to myself yesterday, I’d say, “Life starts when you damn well say it does.”

4. “If you really knew me you would know that…”

I’d walk through fire if you asked me to.

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When special places become a bit less special

A few years ago, when I discovered that other people in Buffalo were blogging, a community of sorts started to develop, in fits and starts. Gradually that community got larger and larger, and as it did so, it started to separate itself out a bit into somewhat-discrete groups, ultimately with two “collectives” basically becoming the big wheels of it all. Now one of those collectives has caught the other behaving badly, and is itself behaving as though it has pulled off some kind of grand journalistic expose of the kind you used to see in the heyday of Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here at my computer, plugging away at the only blog I’ve ever owned, as the only person who’s ever written the posts here, wondering why it is we never have BloggerCon’s anymore. Now I know. We stopped being a bunch of happy people with blogs, and instead declared ourselves — well, some of us, anyway — “citizen journalists”, pratting on about “New Media” and “Information for the 21st Century” and all that jazz.

Oh well. Obviously the Buffalo blogging community couldn’t stay the way I liked it forever — but it would have been nice had it stayed that way a little longer.

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