A new proposal for Buffalo’s long-dormant waterfront has been put forth: A domed amusement park that would include such attractions as thrill-rides, snow-boarding, white-water rafting, and the usual restaurants, bars and other entertainment venues.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of this proposal. On the face of it, it looks like a nifty attraction, but I worry if this is just the latest in a long line of “silver bullet”-type proposals put forth over the years, each of which promised to create lots of jobs and bring tourists to Buffalo and generally solve all manner of economic problems in the city, but none of which has ever advanced past the “pretty pictures on the easel at the press conference” stage. If such a thing could be built, and if it really could attract all those tourists and generate the promised 1000 new jobs, great. But Buffalo’s economic problems go a lot deeper than this — the decades-long erosion of population, manufacturing jobs and tax base; the mistakes made with the infrastructure that put Buffalo’s strengths in jeopardy; the lack of political leadership needed to cut through the red-tape and cronyism; a bloated governmental structure that has resulted in a bureaucratic nightmare; a lack of a high-tech industry base that will likely be necessary for cities wishing to compete in the 21st century….I’d like to see some steps taken to correct some of these problems, instead of looking for the big “juggernaut” project that will start the great and glorious turn-around for this city.

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The Rittenhouse Review is one year old. Congratulations, Mr. Capozzola.

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I’ve come to see this whole reality-TV craze as something of a dark period that we have to endure for a few years, after which TV will get better again. The silver lining, so far as I can see it, is that a lot of lousy writers who had jobs on lackluster “fictional” shows are now jobless, thus constricting the “writing talent pool” on television a bit. It’s kind of like the theory that contracting Major League Baseball by a couple of teams will actually help competitive balance by forcing a number of players who are in the Majors out of necessity back to the Minors, where they actually belong. I figure, sooner or later people will tire of the “reality” crap and decently acted, well-written shows will make a comeback. At least, that’s my utopian dream. I’d also like a pony for my daughter, as long as I’m dreaming.

I’ve also figured out why I like American Idol as much as I do. It’s not because of the music, a lot of which is “take it or leave it”. It’s not because of Simon being mean, although I must honestly admit that this is why I started watching the current season — I wanted to see if Simon is as mean as he’d been said to be. I’ve been wondering why I’ve kept watching this particular reality show, whereas just about all of the others send me racing for the DVD player. Then I happened to catch a few minutes of the syndicated version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, and I remembered why I liked that show so much when it was on prime-time while I absolutely hated Survivor, which was then new, and why I still hate Survivor.

It’s because, alone of just about all the other “Reality” shows, Millionaire and American Idol aren’t about narcissism. They don’t celebrate devious people scheming against others. They don’t invite me into voyeurism on people who have nothing going for them other than their carefully-cultivated looks. Survivor, with its “alliances” and its schemes and plots and backstabbing reminds me of office politics, and if I hated office politics when I was actually working in an office, why on Earth would I want to see it played out on TV? Why on Earth would I enjoy watching the “Big Prize” won by a person whom I would probably detest if I had to endure that person in any kind of real life capacity? I think back to that Richard guy who won the first Survivor, and I remember watching his smiling trickery and thinking of all the people I’ve worked with, in various settings, who were precisely like him. That’s the kind of person that “Reality” TV seems to elevate, and I prefer to not spend my leisure time watching TV shows that remind me of what a bunch of shits humans can be. (This is also why I don’t watch C-SPAN.)

But in the case of Millionaire, I wasn’t watching schemers and plotters and would-be Machiavelli’s. I was watching some guy or some woman who might work in some decent, if not particularly posh, job trying to win a lot of money merely by knowing some stuff. That I could like. And in the case of American Idol, I may not entirely like the music on display (although I did enjoy last night’s episode, which focused on Billy Joel songs) and I may not care for the contestants’ senses of style, but I have to love the cameraderie that exists among them. When one of them is eliminated from the competition, the runner-up invariably bursts into tears as they realize they’ve dodged the bullet that the person whose hand they’re holding has just taken in the chest, and then everyone else gathers around the soon-to-be-gone person to wish them well. And it’s not about plotting or forging alliances; Clay and Ruben don’t get together to try to get Trenyce voted off, or some similar nonsense — it’s just a group of people, dwindling by one each week, each of whom is working hard to take advantage of a particular talent they’ve got and hopefully grab an opportunity that they otherwise might not have had. Yes, Simon can be very caustic, but the main draw for me is watching these people put their talent on the line, saying “This is what I got, America. I hope you like it.” I appreciate that a lot more than watching a motley group of people who haven’t showered in three weeks banding together to take down the other folks.

As an aspiring writer, I have to admire the folks on American Idol, and I partly wish there was something called Writing Idol. Of course, it would be deadly boring television — just a group of people pounding on keyboards, and one guy scrawling away on some paper with a fountain pen.

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I didn’t follow the blogging of the person known as “Salam Pax”, who was presumably a person blogging in Baghdad when the war broke out. The blog has apparently not been updated in some time, and a number of bloggers I read who were following it expressed the hopes that “Salam Pax” had not been killed in the bombing or nabbed by authorities and tossed in an Iraqi prison or met some similarly ugly fate.

Steven Den Beste now wonders if the whole thing may have been a hoax. I frame no hypotheses either way, except to note that there is precedent for this kind of hoax in “Blogistan”. Stay tuned.

(As a catch-all term, I have to note that I like “Blogistan” better than “the Blogosphere”. It sounds more like a place, as opposed to a kind-of nebulous realm.)

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For all my readers desperately praying for clouds in Buffalo so I’d stop this inane bit of counting the days on which I’ve woken up to glorious sunlight, your prayers have not yet been answered. That’s right: it’s seven days now! So we went from cold, wintry Syracuse just after a major ice storm, to a place where the sun has been shining every day we’ve been here. Ahhhh….it’s not unlike a trip to Florida I took in my freshman year of college, when we flew out of Des Moines on a February winter morning and landed in sunlight and palm trees four hours later.

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I’ve restored my Ebay book auctions, so go forth and buy all of my books. Help finance my transition to freelance employment and the finest DVD collection north of Bradford, PA !!!

Oh, and for the really generous-minded folks out there, I’ve joined a lot of other bloggers in putting up my Amazon wishlist. You know, on the off chance that any of my readers has a surplus of cash….

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The main critic with The Buffalo News, Jeff Simon, isn’t one of my favorite critics — his reviews tend to be stuffy, pedantic, and focused more on demonstrating his own erudition than on examining the work in question. (Simon mainly reviews films, but he also reviews music — mainly jazz — and books pertaining to the arts.) However, I do tend to enjoy Simon’s weekly commentary columns. He has a pretty good one this week about the war and the aftermath:

….Nothing has yet proven George W. Bush to be anything other than a rich man’s son, a man with a bad swagger and smirk who always looks as if he’s confident that no matter how badly he screws up, daddy and his friends will bail him out.

And yet I have to admit that, as horrifying and amoral as it was to watch, it’s dimly possible that this war positioned America exactly where it might be good to be for the next 50 years:

A) In the center of the world’s most combustible and dangerous region, perhaps finally able to put out the major fires and bring stability to it through influence and strategic placement.

B) In the middle of one of the richest energy deposits currently known.

C) In the minds of every despot on the globe a nation fully capable of being reckless and rash against anyone who so much looks at America cross-eyed. (Remember that Revolutionary era flag – “Don’t Tread On Me.”)

Just as likely, though, are those other possibilities that angry people have been demonstrating about all over the globe:

A) That America is now virtually friendless in the world – except for Tony Blair, the Spaniards and the awesome forces of Cameroon – and will, therefore, be expected to clean up every toxic oil spill in global affairs for generations to come. We are now the world’s cop and sanitation crew combined.

B) That America has just engendered in Iraq all the anti-American terrorism we wanted to eliminate in the first place – generation after generation of Muslim fundamentalists so steeped in hatred for the United States and so hamstrung by history that terrorist strikes on U.S. soil seem the only way to combat hopeless impotence.

C) That our capacity for thoughtless, self-righteous chest-thumping – the whole 24-hour news/talk radio apparatus that has turned American political debate into noisy gibberish – has now been so institutionalized that there is no coherent way to have an informed American citizenry. In the age of information, there is a meaningless glut of opinion and fact that can be surfed over by any president, mandate or not, in pursuit of almost any goal whatsoever. This surfeit of information may have created an entirely new kind of human ignorance.

So the question now is: Just what HAVE we done? (Or, more accurately, what have we allowed to happen in our name?)

It may take a very long and anxious time to find that out.

The whole article is available here.

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OK, I just tried to load my template for a few changes, but I noticed that it loaded an older version, from a few months ago — I could tell because the books listed under “Waypost Books” are volumes I finished quite a while back. Weird….so if things look strange again, that’s why.

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Courtesy MeFi: here is a building planned for downtown London, a proposed 66-floor tower called London Bridge Tower that would be capped by a glass spire that would mirror the weather on whatever day it happens to be. The building itself is a beautiful design, but when I peruse the pictures on the website that depict the building as part of the London skyline, it seems to my eyes to stick out like a sore thumb — a pyramidal structure rising way above the non-pyramidal buildings around it. I don’t know; this building seems more suited to Coruscant than London to my eyes.

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Over on IGN there’s a poll up for people to name their favorite Star Wars movie. I voted for Attack of the Clones, although my real favorite is A New Hope. I was surprised to note that the film in second place is Return of the Jedi, a film which is commonly cited as when George Lucas officially lost it. Of course, I’m of the opinion that Lucas never lost it; it’s just that people have misinterpreted just what “it” is.

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