On Buffalo and The 716 Archives - Page 9 of 10

September 3, 2022

Everybody on the Bandwagon!

A metaphor for the concluding thirteen seconds of the Bills’ 2021 regulation-time season.

So, the NFL season kicks off next Thursday! And playing in the 2022 season’s very first game are the Buffalo Bills, taking on the defending Super Bowl Champion LA Rams! Wow!

It’s been an interesting ride with the Bills in the last five years or so. The fifteen or so years before that were pretty much of an unending era of bad football. Somehow every year the team would manage to do something in the offseason to make fans think “Hey, maybe they’re turning the corner, maybe they finally won’t be crappy this year,” and yet…every year another terrible season. Records like 6-10 and 7-9 as far as the eye could see. Every year, picking somewhere between 9th and 13th in the draft, and yet somehow never getting better.

Longtime readers will remember that through all that, I simply stopped watching them. There was a weaning process that took place over several seasons (where I’d watch the first few games but eventually stop), but when the 2009 Bills took the field in a home game against the Cleveland Browns, and held the Browns’ quarterback to just two completions, and still managed to lose 6-3, I started thinking that the Bills were not a worthy use of my time.

Well, long story short, eight years later they drafted a quarterback named Josh Allen from Wyoming who has turned out to be an unimaginable stud of a player, and they put a whole bunch of talent around Josh Allen, and lo and behold, the Bills are good again. In fact, as I write this, they’re a common pick by “experts” to, as Tom Berenger once said in Major League, “win the whole f***in’ thing”.

Obviously, this region’s mood is…very different now, as far as football is concerned. Bills-mania is everywhere, and especially this year, where the Bills may be about to field the single most Super Bowl-ready roster in their history. It hasn’t felt like this around here* since the early 1990s, when the Bills famously went on their run of four consecutive Super Bowl appearances (none of which produced a championship, but hey, it was still fun to live through).

During the long run of football futility, Bills merchandise would show up in stores in August and September, and then usually quietly disappear except for a few key items by November. Ohhhhh, not so this year! The Store is constantly getting in shipments of Bills stuff, to the point where we’re struggling with where to put it all. Last year there was a special run of a certain toy made with a Bills theme, and The Store got pounded on the day this was released to the public. Now, we’re all wondering, “OMG, what’s it gonna be like if they actually do win the Super Bowl?”

(I’m not making any predictions, by the way. This isn’t any fear of “jinxing” things, but simply acknowledging the reality that the NFL can be a wide-open free-for-all once the playoffs roll around. Last year saw both conferences’ fourth seeds make it to the Super Bowl, so…you never know!)

One thing about fandom, though. I saw this sentiment on Twitter the other day, and it’s not the first time I’ve seen this type of thinking:

Yeah…folks, ignore this. If you’re out there cheering for the Bills because it’s fun and you just love that everybody around you is happy about it, and somebody tries to gatekeep your fandom by asking you if you watched the Bills fall to the Patriots 34-20 on the last day of the 2013 season to wrap up yet another shitty 6-10 campaign, just tell them to feck off.

Seriously.

I have posted the following several times, always as a reminder to sports fans that if their team sucks, they are not required to support them or watch them play or do anything at all. This flies in the face of the notion that “If you’re a fan you’re always there for your team!”, which I think is just a big waste of time. There is no virtue at all in being a staunch fan when your team sucks, and your joy when the team wins is no better or worse in comparison to whatever suffering you may have chosen to endure or ignore.

When the Bills were eternally crappy, I finally just stopped watching the games entirely. At the time I imposed a rule: I would start watching again whenever the team reached a point where they were no fewer than four games over .500. (Meaning, only when they would have won at least four more games than they’d lost.) At the time I imposed this rule on myself, I honestly didn’t think it would take that long for them to get to that point. If memory serves, I came up with that rule in 2010 or 2011, and the Bills did not reach my new rule for watchability again for something like eight years. By that time I was so accustomed to not watching football that…I just went on not watching football. Hence my new version of sports fandom, where I only read about it, like folks did before teevee and even radios everywhere.

But I remember a lot of mocking when I would tell people about my four-games-over-.500 rule, with the most common being a derisive comment along the lines of “Oh, so you’re just a fair-weather fan now.”

And now, I quote my earlier remarks:

The Buffalo Bills aren’t friends of mine; I have no personal connection with them at all, and therefore, I see no reason to assume that they deserve a greater commitment of time or emotional energy from me than I’m willing to give them. The idea that I must devote three hours a week to watching a bunch of guys who aren’t very good at their jobs, or I’m not a “fan”, strikes me as deeply bizarre. I can be a “fan” of a restaurant, but if they start serving consistently bad food, I’m not going to keep eating there because that’s what a good fan does. That just doesn’t make sense. Being a “fairweather friend”, only there to support and help a friend in good times, is a bad thing to be. But fandom isn’t friendship. Never has been, never will be.

Believe me, it can be a real downer to hang around with football fans the Monday after a representative Bills game of late, which is another reason I stopped watching. Why would I want to feel like that, when I can do something else instead? One fan friend of mine questioned this once, saying “Well, it’s not like I’m doing something great and important with those three hours,” to which I replied, “Nobody said you had to cure cancer in that time, but maybe doing something else means you’re not spending the rest of Sunday and Monday morning in a funk over a football game.” Seems to me that, all things being equal, subtracting things from life that regularly make us angry is a good thing.

So go ahead, Bills fans, or fans of any crappy team out there! Turn them off! Watch something else! Do something else! And if your “fandom” gets questioned, so what? If and when your team wins the Ultimate Championship, there will be no Fan Police in the streets to stop you from dancing because you didn’t watch each and every crappy game they lost six or seven years earlier. When you die, there will be no Sports Fan Valhalla into whose golden halls you will be denied entry because you chose not to witness every down of their fifteenth consecutive losing season.

It’s OK to jump off the bandwagon, and get back on it. The team won’t notice you’re there. You don’t owe them shit. You have zero moral obligation to watch any more or less of a team’s games than you want to, and nobody gets the right to judge your “fandom” on the basis of their personal yardstick for voluntary suffering. For those calling me out for not watching this team, I hope you’ll remember this next time you’re sitting inside on a stunning fall afternoon watching your team lose 38-10 in the fourth quarter, or in December when you’re insisting on watching every minute of a 42-3 laugher as the Bills fall to the Broncos.

I note now that this advice goes both ways! If they’re crappy and watching them brings you no enjoyment at all, it is totally OK to turn them off! But if they’ve been crappy for years and you stopped paying any attention because really, why spend three hours a week staring at a turd floating in the porcelain bowl, but now they’re actually good again and watching them not only doesn’t fill you with torpor and existential ennui but actually starts making you feel something akin to actual joy, go ahead!

And if there are people around you who chose to suffer for all those years who are now getting pouty because you’re back on the bandwagon, enh, screw ’em! Jump on that bandwagon! Be a fan, if you want! Screw the gatekeepers! There are no gates!

(But don’t do that table-jumping thing. God, that is some dumb shit.)

Go Bills!**

*I didn’t actually live in Buffalo during the Super Bowl run, so I’m kind of guessing as to what the local mood was. During those years I alternated between college and my then-home in the Southern Tier.

** I’m not especially in love with our regional adoption of “Go Bills!” as a greeting of choice for all social scenarios. I’m sticking with a mix of Detective Sipowicz‘s mechanical “How’s it goin'”, or Wayne‘s “How are ya now?”

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August 21, 2022

“Then you may take me to the Fair–” “We did that.” “No, it’s a DIFFERENT Fair this time!”

Our summers often pivot on two fairs: the Sterling Renaissance Festival, and the Erie County Fair, which we attended on Friday the 12th. (I would have posted about it sooner, but then that dumbassed virus showed up and put its feet on the furniture and drank from coasterless glasses and got crumbs over everything and was basically just a big asshole.) While The Wife was unable to attend Sterling because of her recent foot surgery, she was able to attend the County Fair, by virtue of a day-long scooter rental.

This year we were graced with probably the most perfect weather for the Fair we’ve ever had: it was clear with low humidity, there was a light breeze all day, and the high temperature was 72 or so. It was simply a perfect day for going to the Fair.

We had a mostly great day, though The Wife petered out quickly by the end (it was her first major long outing since before her foot surgery in June). There are some notable things from years past that aren’t there anymore, which does happen every year but seems more sadly common moving forward. The biggest thing I missed this year was the giant model railroad exhibit that used to always be set up in the Grange Building; hopefully that manages to return next year. Also, the lovely old building that used to house the woodcarving exhibits is entirely gone, having been demolished for safety reasons, which is a shame. The Fair is still a huge amount of fun and can easily kill and entire day, but it did feel–this year and last–a bit more wide-open, which is to say, a bit more empty. I’m hoping for rebounds in the future, but…who knows.

After reading lots of online complaining about prices, I have to report that while prices were up, they did not seem wildly up to me. I spent roughly what I usually spend in terms of food, plus a little. But I never got the sticker shock that I had at the Sterling Renfest when I saw that the turkey legs that were once $9 are now $16. They also rolled parking and admission into a single price, which eliminates the need for money handlers at the parking entrances and makes getting into the park that much quicker, but folks are complaining about that online too, for reasons I can’t fathom.

Here are some photos from our day at The Fair. I have more available in a Flickr album, if you like this sort of thing.

Wide view of one of the main junctions at the Fair. No, I did not eat at Mr. Sticky’s. Sticky buns and cinnamon rolls are wonderful, but I can’t eat such heavy stuff at The Fair.

I always love the ole firefighting equipment.

This guy won SECOND place for woodcarving! I’d have given it first, which went to a duck decoy. (Yes, it was a VERY well-done duck. I just love this dude better!)

Beautiful chess board! I like how this carver took inspiration from, but did not reproduce, the classic Staunton pieces.

We don’t eat NEARLY as much at The Fair as we used to. Ribbon fries, though, are ESSENTIAL.

Dinner is always Chiavetta’s. I make some mean Chiavetta’s in my backyard, but the pros just somehow always seem to get it done just right.

Sheep. (I am not convinced that sheeps and goats aren’t somehow the same beasties, just at different points in their lives. I mean, I know they’re not, but some part of me remains pretty sure they are.)

The Fair is most beautiful at the end of the day and into early evening. We left shortly after taking this. Hopefully next year we can manage a little later stay….

I’m already looking forward to the 2023 Fair!

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August 7, 2022

The Rainbows of the 716

One of the things that sticks in my memory most strongly from our trip last December to Oahu is the rainbows. Every day, at least one rainbow. It just became this thing I did every morning: Get up, make the coffee, go out to our balcony, look off to the right, and see a rainbow. I even saw my first moonbow there.

Western New York is not nearly so prolific in the rainbow department.

But the other night, our WNY skies put on a show. A series of thunderstorms rolled in from Lake Erie, and in their wake, the sunlight did its thing. It started with the faintest wisp of a rainbow, barely there:

As the evening progressed, the bit of rainbow brightened…

…until finally…

And the rainbows were impressive in their duration, too: this one lingered in the sky for a good, long time. On the second pic above, we were heading home from dinner at a gluten-free restaurant in Lockport, which is way up north, about 30 miles. I took that full rainbow shot from the car in I-990, north of the Amherst UB campus, after about ten miles of driving. (Safety note: I was not driving! The Wife was driving. I was not doing sky-photography while driving.)

Another ten or twelve miles later, as we were approaching downtown Buffalo on I-190, there was this.

That just made me all kinds of happy.

Meanwhile, in the other direction, out over the lake, the sky was doing this:

Obviously nobody is ever going to mistake Buffalo for Waikiki, all right? But the sky here can really put on a show sometimes. And in Buffalo you can see sunset over water.

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July 9, 2022

Sun-dappled leaves, and other pursuits

Some photos from a recent trek to Knox Farm….

I love the full-screen shots I can take with my phone.

One of my favorite things about walking in the woods is the way the sunlight breaks through in spots, dappling the forest floor in pools of golden light while other spots remain shrouded. Here are several shots of just that:

Two shots of the Dumas Bridge, first from the southeast end, and then from the northwest. Same place, same camera, but two different vantage points make for very different moods in the photos!

Yes, I photographed a couple of photographers. I saw them several times on this particular walk. They were intently photographing things up close with those long-lensed cameras. (I enjoy my photography, but not enough to gear up to that degree…though occasionally I do find it tempting to try to move beyond the limitations of my phone’s cameras, amazing as they are, and my now seven-year-old point-and-shoot camera.)

Toward the end of our visit this big military plane flew overhead. I’m not sure what kind of plane this is.

Two adventurers, one of whom is thinking about the bowl of water and the air conditioning in the car.

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June 25, 2022

Confessions of a Delaware Park First-timer

Until yesterday, I had never walked through Delaware Park.

In Buffalo, this is almost a kind of heresy. Delaware Park is Buffalo’s equivalent to New York City’s Central Park: it is the biggest of Buffalo’s public parks, the one with the most variety in terms of things to do and see, all of it tucked into an energized urban environment. I’ve driven through or around Delaware Park many times (among other things, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery is on the park’s western edge), but somehow, in all my years of living in The 716, I’ve never actually stopped to spend a bit of quality time in Delaware Park.

Until yesterday.

What was more is that The Dee-oh-gee and I were there shortly after sunrise.

I am not a morning person–at least, I am not a sunrise person. We were all up that early because we had to whisk The Wife to a local medical facility for a scheduled procedure (she’s fine, just tendonitis in a foot that wasn’t responding to physical therapy), and of course we had Cane ride along with us; after depositing The Wife at the hospital where the thing was being done, I decided to take Cane someplace for a walk before heading home. I thought to go to Buffalo’s Outer Harbor, but I was in the vicinity of Delaware Park, and as I drove through it, I thought, Hey, why not walk right here?

Living in Buffalo’s Southtowns, Delaware Park is far enough off my normal beaten path that it simply has never been a destination of its own. That should probably change, and soon. For now, though, I’m happy to have been there on an early morning in June. It had been a cool night but was warming up, which made the waters misty in the golden light.

In light like that, even a distant cloud of gnats or whatever insects these were can be beautiful, as they catch the sun:

Geese:

And many magnificent trees:

The best thing I saw yesterday was a great egret. We kept interrupting this bird as we walked along the path. There it would be, fifty feet or so ahead of us, and then it would fly farther down the lake as we approached. This happened several times until finally it took wing and flew all the way back down the length of the lake; we didn’t see it again after that. But what an impressive bird this is!

We walked along the southern edge of Hoyt Lake and then we turned around and headed back. It was very quiet and serene, with only the sounds of a few joggers breaking the spell of nature and, beyond it, the sounds of traffic and a city waking up. We also saw the stage for Shakespeare In Delaware Park, which we have likewise never attended; I suppose we’ll have to see for ourselves someday if that cockpit can indeed hold the vasty fields of France.

On the way back, I stopped to pluck a single blossom, and after taking in the rising sunlight one last time, Cane and I headed home. We got back just a few minutes before my normal work day, had I worked yesterday, would have begun.

Not a bad way to pass a morning, even if I am still quite sure that I will never be a sunrise person.

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June 20, 2022

Sundays at Chestnut Ridge

Twice in recent weeks I have taken The Dee-oh-gee to Chestnut Ridge on our Sunday adventure-nature walks. Late spring and early summer are great times to go to this particular park, when things haven’t really started to heat up or dry out just yet.

From the top of the sledding hill, you have a wonderful view–if it’s clear–of Buffalo and Niagara Falls, ON in the distance.

Notable here is the Buffalo Skyway, visible at center to the left of downtown, and the white roof of the Ralph Wilson Field House, which is the practice facility for the Buffalo Bills.

(You can see the full-size version here.)

I’ve walked past this spot many, many times–and only yesterday did I notice this old utility pole.

Cue John Denver: “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy…!”

I love when sunlight breaks through the canopy, fifty to a hundred feet up, to light up lower trees like this four-foot sapling.

I don’t know if there’s a more evocative sight than a trail winding through the forest.

These are from a few weeks ago:

An old well-house. These structures, built by the Works Progress Administration, dot the park.

Brand-new graffiti. I’m glad for Faith and Shane, though I wonder what role cheese has to play in their romance.

A pine dotted with the year’s new growth.

One of many streams. This one usually dries up by mid-July.

Cones weighing down the top of this great pine.

The bib pocket on your overalls is a great place for a wildflower or two!

Adventurers, again. A greyhound is a fantastic fashion accessory. (The shirt is from Oahu!)

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May 1, 2022

First Spring adventure

Last Sunday, Cane (the Dee-oh-gee) and I went out for a Sunday walk in the park for the first time since December. Why no outings since then? Well, we got back from Oahu just in time for the weather to shift into a much colder and snowier pattern; where the WNY winter until the end of December had been very mild, it pivoted hard in January to being snowy enough and cold enough for Buffalo to take this year’s title as Snowiest City In America. Oof. Plus, there’s the fact that Cane isn’t a spring chicken anymore. He’s 9-and-a-half as I write this, and while he’s still got tons of spunk and energy, he’s not as springy as he once was, so I have to be a bit careful about our adventures. I can’t just throw his leash on him and go for a four-hour hike someplace.

But still…he was thrilled to get out!

[Insert Morgan Freeman delivering monologue about hope]

Posing him for the camera remains a challenge.

We went to Knox Farm State Park, a favorite haunt of ours in East Aurora. Even though we’re over a month into spring, in this part of the country we’re only just now starting to see the first hints of spring’s awakening. We’re getting there, though. Today is May 1. It can only get greener from here. (I’ll spare you my usual rant about Spring being WNY’s worst season.)

And if you’re wondering why Carla rarely gets featured in these walks, it’s mainly because she really doesn’t like riding in the car, for reasons we’ve never been able to figure. That sucks! She loves being in new places and being outside, but she is so miserable in the car that we always feel terrible about that part of things.

She is enjoying the greening of our yard, though. Witness:

Elmer Fudd can have “Wabbit Season” and “Duck Season”. Carla is all about “Mud Season”!

As I’m writing this it’s a sunny Sunday morning, but there’s rain in the forecast in the next couple of hours. Sigh….

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April 16, 2022

Lookin’ Out My Back Door

As I write this, it’s a little after 9:30 am on Saturday morning, April 16, 2022. Though it has now stopped, this was the scene about an hour ago as I looked over my back yard.

Were I to look out back and see this in late October or early November, I’d be thrilled. But in the back half of April? Sigh….

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March 28, 2022March 27, 2022

Spring in the 716

Here’s the scene in my back yard, Sunday, March 27:

Ayup.

It’s funny about this area: we always get snow this late in the year. One recent year we actually got snow on Mother’s Day, which is still six or seven weeks away. This is not unusual. Granted, snows this late in the year don’t generally pile much on (unless you live in the hillier climes downwind of Lake Erie, areas which are ten to twenty miles south of Casa Jaquandor), but as much as I really do like snow, generally by St. Patrick’s Day I’m emotionally done with the stuff.

Being vexed by snow this late in the year is one thing, but what always gets me is how surprised a lot of people in this region are by it. Every year, we get our first post-equinox snow forecast, and I hear a lot of “Oooooh, I thought we were done with it for this year!” It amazes me that people can live in a place for years and still be caught by surprise by something that happens every year. Weird.

I continue to believe that Buffalo’s winters really wouldn’t get nearly the bad rap they do if spring here wasn’t like this: two months of mostly gray-and-muddy, punctuated by a random stray 50-degree day here or there and more often by a snowfall. We don’t start seeing real, honest green around here until mid-May, and I think a lot of people just mentally combine the cruddy two months of spring into the actual winter. And yes, it does get old. So I look out on our new fresh bed of snow, and all I can muster is, “Well, at least we don’t have to wipe off muddy dog paws today.”

Here’s the same photo from above, with a Prisma filter applied. Just because.

And I’ll probably get to take another just like it before long!

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March 13, 2022March 15, 2022

An item of local geography

A good marker of being an adult is when you find yourself regretting the lack of attention you paid in one class or another in grade school. In my case, sometimes it’s Earth Science, and I really did pay quite a bit of attention in that class! But geology was never really my thing, so I just kinda got through it. And now, I notice things about the world and I wonder how they got to be that way. Here’s a good case in point from my neck of the woods. This image (screen-captured from Google Maps, thanks, Google) is Chautauqua Lake in Western New York’s Chautauqua County.

Chautauqua Lake is a big lake, about seventeen miles long and two miles wide at its greatest width. Like the Finger Lakes, it was formed by glacier activity, but the glacier activity that formed Chautauqua Lake was actually different than what formed the Finger Lakes, so Chautauqua is not considered a Finger Lake for this reason. (Plus it’s a hundred miles away from the nearest Finger Lake and it faces the wrong direction!)

You can see that right in the middle it narrows to a really short distance, which used to be the only car crossing on the lake, by ferry. We rode that ferry a lot when I was a kid, but quite soon after we got here the lake was spanned by a bridge for what was then NY17, the Southern Tier Expressway, but which is now Interstate 86. Chautauqua Lake is a very popular resort lake, with tons of recreational uses of its waters and lots of cool stuff in the towns surrounding it.

In the picture you can see Lake Erie to the northwest, less than ten miles away. New York is a state of several varied watersheds: the Finger Lakes, for example, all empty into the Lake Ontario watershed (which then feeds the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic Ocean), and where I live, all streams eventually flow to Lake Erie and then the Niagara River, and so on. Other watersheds further east flow south to the Susquehanna or Delaware Rivers, and thus to the Atlantic; then there are the waters that drain into the Hudson and reach the sea at New York City.

I never really gave it much thought, but I always assumed that Chautauqua Lake emptied into Lake Erie, since it’s so close by; you could walk from Mayville to the Lake Erie shore at Westfield in a couple of hours. It turns out this isn’t the case! There’s a river in Jamestown, NY, called the Chadokoin, which I always thought fed Chautauqua Lake. Turns out the reverse happens: the Chadokoin is the lake’s outflow, and it confluences with another local stream before joining the Allegheny River somewhere south in Pennsylvania. The Allegheny makes a confluence with the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh, famously creating the Ohio River, which then flows southwest to the Mississippi.

It turns out that there is a divide, called the Chautauqua Ridge, that runs roughly east-west just north of Chautauqua Lake. That divide is all that geology needed to divert waters from the Great Lakes just a handful of miles away, to the Gulf of Mexico, over a thousand miles away. If you’re a drop of fresh water, which side of a hill you fall on determines how long your journey is before you reach salt water again. That amazes me.