As I write this, it is Sunday morning, 9 November 2025. Outside it is cold and cloudy and rainy, but according to the local weather predicting folk, that rain will be turning to snow later today, for our first actual snowfall of the 2025-2026 wintry-weather season. Now, longtime readers will know that I, for one, love the snow and the winter and I welcome our wintry overlords, but as happens every year, social media is alive with WNYers saying things like “Ugh, here it comes!” and “Stop saying the S-word!” (as if “snow” is the weather equivalent of “Lord Voldemort”).
I’m not going to lecture people as to why they should embrace the snow, but…yeah, I’m gonna do that, actually. Buffalo and WNY have a lot of problems and there are many things that need to happen if this region is ever to truly rebound, and this one probably isn’t the most important one on the list, but I quite firmly believe that self-image matters, and the degree to which the people of a region communicate their love of their region matters. And like it or not, snow is a big part of living here. It just is. And I don’t think it sends a great message to the rest of the country if a lot of people living here seem to convey that for at least a quarter of the year (and, I’ll be honest, as much as a third of the year), they’d rather be living someplace else.
So once again, Buffalo, let’s embrace the snow. Let’s make it a positive part of our identity instead of making it sound like the “mushy peas” part of our year. Let’s embrace warm clothes and colorful sweaters and fuzzy hats and hot beverages and winter wonderlands, shall we? It’s coming anyway.
DISCLAIMER: I reserve the right to complain about any snow that arrives after St. Patrick’s Day. I have adopted March 17 as my personal cut-off point.
The Buffalo Bills beat the Kansas City Chiefs last week, which they do just about every season when they play each other. But the last bunch of years, when the two teams have met again in the playoffs, the Chiefs have won. Two of those have come in the AFC Championship Game, and one of them is one of the most notorious playoff games in NFL history, the epic shootout in which the Bills took a 36-33 lead with 13 seconds left in the 4th quarter, but somehow they allowed the Chiefs to get to field goal range in those 13 seconds, tying the game and sending it to overtime, where the Chiefs promptly scored a touchdown to win 42-36. (In an illustration of the NFL’s ongoing stupidity when it comes to overtime rules, if the first team with the ball scores a touchdown, it’s game over…so Josh Allen never touched the ball again after he left the field with a lead.)
Even though Josh Allen has played very well in all of those playoff games, the narrative has formed: Allen is basically nothing until he beats the Chiefs in the playoffs. None of his accomplishments matter until he beats the Chiefs in the playoffs. He’s just another guy until he beats the Chiefs–no, until he beats Patrick Mahomes–in the playoffs. Try to point out that he has played more than well enough to win every one of those games, and it’s been the defense allowing Mahomes and the Chiefs the victory every time, and you get ignored. No, Allen has to beat the Chiefs. Allen has to beat Mahomes. So it must be, or he will forever be judged as less than.
Setting aside the increasingly annoying tendency in American sports discourse to vastly overrate championships as the only things that matter, the only true marks of greatness, and the only valid measure of worth…it’s been very strange to me to see this clunky narrative be forced upon Josh Allen and the Bills. It has almost reached a point where I genuinely believe that if the Bills (a) put together a playoff run, reached the Super Bowl and won it, but (b) didn’t meet the Chiefs in the playoffs during that run, the country’s sports discourse would put a virtual asterisk on the Bills’ win. I really believe that the Bills could win multiple Super Bowls, but if they somehow don’t beat the Chiefs during any of those title runs and get beat by the Chiefs every other time, their accomplishments would be downgraded. It sucks, but that’s just the way it is. It would literally almost be better for the Bills to beat the Chiefs in the playoffs but not win a Super Bowl, than to win the Super Bowl but never knock the Chiefs out.
Basically, American sports discourse is simply insane. I guess that’s reflective of the society itself, innit?
Mad About You is a sitcom that aired in the 1990s for seven seasons. It was about the day-to-day life of a young couple in New York City, Paul and Jamie Buchman, played by Paul Reiser* and Helen Hunt. The show tended to be very down-to-earth in its concerns, almost mundane; in a way, Mad About You was better at being a “show about nothing” than Seinfeld was. We loved Mad About You when it first aired. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) discovered it before I did, but it quickly became a bonding thing for us during the ten or so months after I graduated college that we were doing a long-distance thing. Mad About You, at its best, had a lot of wonderful things to say about love and marriage…and I’ll have done there, as I want to write a longer piece about the show and What It Meant To Me, probably for the upcoming newsletter relaunch.
So, instead of a music selection, here’s a comedic sequence from Mad About You. This is from the show’s second season, when it really hit its stride; its best seasons were probably its second and third. To understand what’s happening here, all you need know is that Paul Buchman is a documentary filmmaker by trade who often finds himself doing film work he finds “beneath” himself (but he grits his teeth and does it because he knows he has to eat). Here he’s been working on a film called A Day At the Zoo. The rest of this should be easy to understand. This scene never comes out and says what’s on “the tape”, but we know, don’t we? And the comedic timing here is just amazing. Reiser and Hunt had the kind of chemistry together that many actors playing parts of fictional partnerships dream of achieving.
(Oh, and this scene ends at the episode’s first commercial break. The complications pile up after this.)
* By the way, what was up with sitcoms in the 90s featuring standup comedians in the lead playing dudes with the same first name as themselves? In Mad About You Paul Reiser plays Paul Buchman. In Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld plays…another version of Jerry Seinfeld. Jonathan Silverman starred in The Single Guy, as Jonathan Eliot.
As part of my ongoing* efforts to extend myself into video content, here are some thoughts I shared on Tiktok earlier today regarding Taylor Swift. These thoughts are more a matter of concern, not any kind of “red flag” thing I’m seeing, and I’m not criticizing her music here at all (though I have to admit, I did not like the newest album very much). Enjoy!
* By “Ongoing”, I mean…I keep thinking that I want to do more video content, and while I guess I have been doing more video content (I’m getting downright consistent on Tiktok!), I still need to get better about doing YouTube, longer-form content.
Water Abstract Taken at Canalside, Buffalo, NY Miranda (Lumix FZ1000ii) f/5.0, 1/4000sec, ISO 500
This theme ought to yield some good things! That’s right: after completing an exploration of music inspired by the moon, we’re going to explore music inspired by water, in all its forms. And we’re going to start with a work premiered over 300 years ago, the usefully-titled Water Music by George Frideric Handel.
And maybe this isn’t the best place to start, because the work wasn’t actually inspired by water. Handel wrote it for the water…or rather, the boats upon it. Let me explain…no, is too much. Let me sum up.
In 1717, King George I decided to take a barge up the Thames in London, using the tide to propel the barge upstream before coming about for the return trip. The King wanted music, though, so he commissioned Handel to write some; this was performed on another barge that accompanied the Royal Barge on its journey. Some fifty musicians played Handel’s music on that other barge, and apparently many Londoners took to the water in boats and barges of their own to hear the music and pay homage to the King. This must have been quite a spectacle, and honestly, were I given the keys to Doc Brown’s DeLorean and told I could go back in time to witness one concert, the initial performance of Handel’s Water Music might well be the choice.
And the concert was very much a success: the King liked the piece so much he had it performed again on the return trip back down the Thames.
I’m not the best listener when it comes to Baroque music, but Handel and Bach are always exceptions. The Water Music is one of the most pleasant works I know: in its short movements over three suites, Handel deftly creates music of opulent delight and meditation in simple pleasure. As you listen to it, you may notice familiar themes throughout; the Water Music has provided a great deal of familiar music used for other things beyond some King’s barge journey. One movement was the theme music to The Frugal Gourmet, for instance.
Here is a wonderful original-instruments performance of Handel’s Water Music.
LEO: (Leo is the stoner who owns the local Foto Hut) I saw a UFO once, man. It was awesome! It just hung in the air, then it sent me a message. In big, bright, yellow letters. Said I was going to have a good year.
STEVEN HYDE: (Steven is one of the main teenagers on the show) Did this, by any chance, happen at a football game?
LEO: Yeah, man! And the weird thing is, I was the only one freaking out about it, man! Wait a second… Good year? No, it was a terrible year, man! Stupid aliens.
Why do I bring this up? Because that same UFO was visible from outside my house as it hovered above Highmark Stadium during the Bills-Chiefs game. That’s a good idea, if you’re flying a UFO; you can study humans from right above the stadium where an NFL game is happening because nobody there is looking up at your alien craft. Except for the photographer-writer who lives one neighborhood away. I’m onto you, aliens!
Way back in Season Three of MasterChef, there was a competing cook who quickly became one of my favorite people ever on any food-related show. Her name is Mairym Carlo, but she goes by “Monti”, to which Joe Bastianich reacted with quite a bit of skepticism when she introduced herself to him on the show. He quickly came around on her, though, and she lasted deep into the competition. She didn’t win (honestly, nobody was going to beat Christine Ha that year, Christine was the ’91 Redskins of MasterChef contestants), but she lasted and since then she has gone on to quite a lovely career as a food blogger, podcaster, occasional judge on other food competitions, and so on. (She appeared on an episode of Cutthroat Kitchen where she told one cook that their dish “tasted like divorce”. Ouch! That must have been a terrible dish.)
More recently, Carlo has made a nice career for herself as a food influencer, particularly on Instagram, where she posts videos of her visiting restaurants that feature a specific thing they’re really good at, and also where she shares a ton of information about product recalls in the food world. This last service seems especially important right now, seeing as how we have a government that I’m not sure, ahem, has our best interests at heart.
Yesterday, Carlo shared a slideshow on Instagram in which she describes a lot of what’s happened in her life over the last quarter-century, starting with this:
“Twenty-six years ago today, I was run over by a dump truck.”
That is not a metaphor. From that horrible moment that could have ended her life, she emerged laser-focused and has done all the things I mention above, and more…and all of that leads up to her announcement that she has a book coming out next year, called Spanglish: Recipes and Stories. I, for one, will be buying that book on sight. Watching Monti Carlo forge a career and identity for herself out of passion, warmth, and unending energy has been truly inspiring, and I can’t wait to see what she has in store next.
And oh, imagine my delight earlier this year in seeing that she is also apparently a member of Team Poofy Shirts And Overalls!
And as long as I’m celebrating Monti Carlo, let me repost something I put together way back in 2012 when her run on MasterChef came to too soon a finish. (I still don’t understand why Josh didn’t get sent home on that dish, when he actually won a basket of the exact ingredients in the dish the cooks were supposed to replicate and he didn’t get it done.) I have to admit that I miss the early years of MasterChef, when the personalities seemed bigger. There are cooks I remember from those seasons even though they were a decade ago, and yet I have to really try hard to remember anybody from the season that just finished. Anyway, the balance of this post is a time capsule of sorts…let’s go back to August 2012….
[Insert weird time travel music and wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey sound effects and shimmering here]
Well, I will find whatever episodes of Master Chef remain a lot less interesting, because my favorite contestant, Monti Carlo (yes, that is her real name), has been eliminated. Her departure was pretty upsetting: it was the first time in the whole season she ever found herself in the Bottom Two, and the other one there, Josh, had managed to completely screw up the assigned dish despite having won the earlier challenge and thus having literally been handed a box of the exact ingredients for the dish they were supposed to replicate.
Oh well. I thought Monti was just terrific. She was smart, skilled, and funny. She clearly didn’t know as much about food as some of the other contestants, but she made up for it with an adventurous spirit and a self-confidence that grew as the season went on. I loved the episode where she was given a John Dory fish to filet and cook, and she’d never even heard of that fish before, much less cooked one. The judges noted how long it was taking her to start fileting it, but when she did, she took the knife right to it and muttered, “I’m gonna figure you out.” I loved that.
I don’t think she was destined to win, really; I expect the finale to boil down to Frank (the Italian stockbroker with mad kitchen skills) and Christine (the blind woman with mad kitchen skills). Becky is annoying with her oddly inflated sense of self-worth, and so is Josh, with his pouting whenever he doesn’t get what he wants. I don’t think Monti was going to win, but I think she should have come closer than this. And if Graham (the fat judge) was going to offer the last guy to get eliminated a job in one of his restaurants, why no offer to Monti? Why didn’t Gordon Ramsay offer her the money for a down payment on the food truck that she wants to run?
Oh well.
I also loved Monti because she had fantastic facial expressions. She mugged for the camera wonderfully, so I took some screengrabs and captioned them…as if Monti was the heroine in some kind of cheesy Asian martial arts/fantasy flick. At least, that’s the notion.
[Wow, I used to generate some really weird content, didn’t I??? –Present Day Me]
It’s Monti Carlo’s world, and we’re all living in it, is all I’m saying.
Posted inOn People|TaggedPeople|Comments Off on Dispatches from Planet Monti!
Ohio Street rail yard, Buffalo, NY f[9.0, 1/160sec, ISO100
A few weeks ago I went down to the foot of Ohio Street in Buffalo, near its southern terminus at Fuhrmann Boulevard, near the Outer Harbor. My main purpose was to do some shooting of the amazing graffiti that adorns the Ohio Street overpass (I’ll feature that work in a future post, though I’ve already posted the images to Flickr), but as I was there some railroad activity. The overpass carries Ohio Street over the rail lines that service the cargo areas near the big grain silos downtown, a remnant of what once was in terms of freight transport in this region. They were moving lines of cars from one line to another, connecting and reconnecting the locomotive as needed. It was a fascinating process to watch, and in the photo above, that locomotive is actually pushing that line of cars down the track, not pulling them as it arrives.
Still, trains and locomotives are absolutely fantastic subjects, and if there’s one nearby and I have a photographic device on my person, I will get a shot of it!
(And the title of this post comes from here, which is the single greatest cover of an already great song in the history of popular music, a position against which I will listen to no argument.)
