Tag: Ask Me Anything August 2011

Wow…due to all the stuff that went on last week and the busy work week the week before, I forgot to finish Ask Me Anything! August 2011. Sorry about that, folks. I suck. Kinda.

Anyway, Scotty has a couple that will result in a couple of lame answers, unfortunately. Not because they’re lame questions, though! Just my answers.

You’ve periodically extolled the virtues of spum, any thoughts on the various whisky families?

I know virtually nothing about whiskey. Seriously, I’ve had extremely little whiskey in my life. I occasionally have a bottle of Seagram’s 7 around because I like 7&7’s, and once in a great while, if I’m buying something at the Candy Store, I might pick up one of those teeny bottles of Jack Daniel’s. I wouldn’t really even know where to start! (I tried a small bottle of some kind of Scotch once, and I did not like it, at all. Maybe it was a bad brand, because I really hope that stuff isn’t representative of what those Scotsman have been drinking for centuries. If so, well…no wonder they’re an angry lot!)

Growlers-love them or not?


Unfortunately…I know absolutely nothing about growlers. Never partaken of one. I suppose I should, huh? Growlers are apparently big thick glass bottles that you fill with beer from a tap at a store that deals in such things. It sounds like the kind of good idea that can be around for years before I say, “Hey, I should check that out.” In fact, it is the kind of good idea that can be around for years before I say, “Hey, I should check that out”!

SKWaller also has a couple that I hope I can answer more fruitfully:

Why is it that on the days that I work the hardest, longest hours on editing jobs, I can’t sleep at night? I get really tired *and* sleepy (for me, they are different matters, entirely unrelated), but there I sit at 5am, unable to go to sleep. And then, when I finally do go to sleep, why do I dream about carrot cake in the shape of a rabbit? No, there are no drugs or alcohol involved.

Wow. Being up at 5am might be part of it!

But seriously, it just may be the case that this type of work just happens to fire up the part of your brain that’s the hardest to allow to run down to the point of sleep. It often takes me time to wind down from a shift at work; luckily I don’t work night shifts, so I don’t have to wind down in order to go to sleep. But when I worked in restaurants, I could never just go home and go to bed after a closing shift.

As to the dream about carrot cake…I got nothin’. Sorry!

Do trees feel pain? I used to think so (I read The Secret of Life of Plants back in the 1970s), but I’ve given this considerable thought.

Pain is a signal that something bad is happening and that we should either get away from what’s causing the pain, or fix whatever is wrong. Since trees (and other plants) can’t run away, or go to the doctor, what would be the purpose of them feeling pain?

What are your thoughts?


Wow…that’s some deep stuff. I’d have to say that trees do not feel any kind of ‘pain’, in any kind of way that we could relate to meaningfully. Trees certainly do have ways of responding to negative stimuli, but to describe that as ‘pain’ seems to me to possibly stretch the very concept of ‘pain’ beyond a breaking point.

I remember a day early in the year when I was a sophomore in high school, in Biology class. One student tried to argue that humans are inherently superior to trees, but the teacher was having none of it:

“Trees can’t move around!”
“Then they don’t get in accidents.”
“Trees can’t invent stuff!”
“But do trees really need anything other than what they have?”
“Trees can’t think! They have no emotions or thoughts!”
“Which means that trees don’t have to see the psychiatrist!”

And on. The teacher’s point was that we shouldn’t look down on trees, or take an approach to living things that is based on notions of superiority and inferiority. I tend to agree with this. Sometimes I think we just can’t help thinking along those lines, though — it’s almost hard-wired into us, probably as a leftover of our hunting-and-gathering forebears.

I don’t know what trees feel or think, or if they do feel or think in any way that approaches what we mean when we use those words. I do think that I’d like it if our trees were like Tolkien’s trees, and that they spoke to one another, and had deep, long memories.

OK, folks, I think that’s it. Sorry it took me a month and a half to wrap this up, but hey, I got there, and that’s what counts. Start thinking up your questions for the next go-round! February is only four months away!

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Continuing to answer queries from Ask Me Anything! August 2011….

Lynn has a couple of good ones:

Imagine that Star Wars, Star Trek, and Firefly do not exist. What would be your favorite space opera?


Wow, this is a very tough question. Those are some of the big space opera franchises, aren’t they? Without the first two, I’m not sure I even have a deep love of space opera to begin with. And Firefly is just all kinds of great, even if it is a bit uneven at times.

I think that my favorite space opera outside of those would be a literary one — but, which one? For mind-blowing hugeness, you can’t go much wrong with the “Commonwealth” novels of Peter J. Hamilton. (Thus far I have only read Pandora’s Star and Judas Unchained.) And I’ve loved what I’ve read thus far of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan stories. And there are the Lensmen novels of E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith…which I need to continue reading one of these days.

Favorite? I suppose I’d go with the Commonwealth novels. It’s the universe I’d most want to live in: traveling to distant worlds via train, the conquering of death without a whole lot of Singularity weirdness, and, of course, space ships galore.

Lynn also asks: If you could live on any of the Firefly worlds for the rest of your life, which would you choose?


Probably Ariel. I’m a city guy, I think. Not a big fan of the Alliance, though….

More to come…wrapping it up next time, I promise!

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Continuing to answers the questions from Ask Me Anything! August 2011 (yeah, I’m going well into September with the answers. At the rate I’m going, I’ll still be answering when Ask Me Anything! February 2012 rolls around!).

Anyhoo, as always, Roger has a bunch of good queries.

Do you tend toward melancholy or depression? If so, are you aware of what triggers it? And what do you do to overcome it?

Depression? No. Not that I know of, anyway. Melancholy? Sometimes. Maybe I tend toward melancholy a bit more often than most other folks, but I’m not sure if that’s the case. One thing I’ve learned through the years is that it’s really not that easy to know what other people are feeling. It seems that every time I hear about a suicide, some close friend or family member of the person will say something to the effect of “He/she always seemed so happy.”

I don’t dislike melancholy, per se, but for me, I tend to get into quiet, meditative moods where I’m just thinking about all kinds of stuff. Not particularly deep thoughts, per se, but I do tend to easily get involved in my own thought-world…and one thing I’ve discovered about myself is that my face, left to its own devices, tends to default to an expression that looks…well, sour, or annoyed, or sad, or miserable, or any similarly negative emotion. I wish I had a nickel for every time someone asked me “Hey, what’s wrong?” or “Wow, you look pissed!” when I was not feeling anything remotely like those things.

And that leads me to another thing: the expectation that people have to look happy at all times, or there’s something wrong. It’s like there’s an expectation for people to be grinning all the time. I smile plenty, I laugh a lot, and I’m really not unhappy in general (obviously, the less I think about Republicans, the better). I just don’t have a naturally happy looking face, so I have to strive for looking artificially happy. Maybe I should just paint on a clown smile every morning and be done with it!

(Not really. Clowns, for the most part, give me the willies.)

Do you still want to buy a home or has the financial nonsense made you wary?

We want to buy one. For many various reasons, we just can’t seem to get our shit together quite to that degree. But I wonder if it’s not just a matter of saying, “Oh, hell with it, let’s just pull the trigger and get this done.” Lots of folks own homes who are financially no better off than we are, and it’s not like we’re teetering on the brink of destitution here.

I’m not sure we’d really approach home ownership as an investment, anyway. We’d want a place to live, a place where we can grow our own fruits and vegetables, where we can plant trees and have privacy, where we can hook a surround-sound system up to the teevee and watch Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings in massive sound. (Well, maybe that last one’s for me, only.)

I think we’ll own a home in the next couple of years. I hope, anyway.

Would you appear on The Amazing Race? Another ‘reality’ show?


Probably not, but if I was to appear on a reality show, TAR would be the one, I think. It just looks like so much fun, traveling the world. I don’t think I’d do well on Survivor, and with my luck, I’d manage to get on the show during Boston Rob’s next appearance, and nobody would listen to my pleas to vote his ass off the very first time we go to Tribal Council. I think that Big Brother just looks stupid. And while I like to cook and make good food for my family, I am nowhere near good enough of a cook to go on either Hell’s Kitchen or Master Chef. But hey, maybe I can find some kind of really nifty antique doodad to take on Pawn Stars!

I know you love your wife, and all that, but [Oh dear! -Ed.]: In your fantasy world (or before you met The Wife), what physical characteristics were you most attracted to?


Oh God, I hope she’s not reading this! I’ve always liked red-heads, but I think every guy likes red-heads, so that’s not a big one. Long hair is wonderful, and The Wife had long hair when I met her (and for a number of years after that), but she eventually cut it short (except for another fairly brief period of longer hair in 2007 or thereabouts) because of her restaurant management jobs, which had “restrained and up off the collar” restrictions. Eventually she got sick of having to spend time putting her hair up every day, so she went short. Which is just fine with me, really — The Wife is beautiful no matter what!

As far as other physical characteristics, well…I’m not much of [God, I hate this term! -Ed.] an ass-man, for what that’s worth. And I don’t tend to like overly skinny women; flesh makes me happy and curves are awesome.

And a nice smile, of course. The Wife’s got me covered there, too — her smile makes me all kinds of happy.

Is there a question you won’t answer, not because of your own sense of privacy, but because of someone else’s?


Well, I sure had to be careful with that last one, didn’t I! I suppose that there’s a galaxy of such questions that I wouldn’t answer, all of which deal with my family members. Basically, I’d shy away from any question that doesn’t focus on me, since I can then gauge how much of myself I want to reveal (and if I decide to reveal less than I’m asked, I cover that with jokes and verbosity). So yes, I do consider others in phrasing my answers. (Luckily, this is almost never a concern here — in all the iterations of Ask Me Anything!, I can’t recall a single question that actually made me uncomfortable in the answering.)

I’d also note that there are questions that I genuinely expect to get asked every time I do this, and none of those “Hey, will this be the time that X gets asked!” questions has yet to show up!

More to come! Another post or two ought to do it. Great questions, folks!

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No, I haven’t forgotten about Ask Me Anything! August 2011. In fact, I’m going to give some more answers now!


::  A reader e-mails: When you were high school, did you ever play a prank on anyone. Or Streak?


Well, as for the latter…no. God, no. No no a thousand times no. I mean, really — nobody wants to see that, right?


As for pranks in general, not a whole lot. I attempted here and there, but what was weird is that a lot of times people would prank me, but when I turned around and pranked them, you’d think I had thrown tomato sauce on the Pope’s robes or something. Sometimes these same kids who loved to prank me would rat me out to teachers if I pranked them, which got kind of old. It was odd…so in general, my pranking never really went beyond hiding people’s stuff when they weren’t looking. Lame, I know, but I wasn’t all that great at this kind of thing. A dull answer, I know!


Glenn asks: Once upon a time America chose to do great things, such as go to the moon. Today we live in a country that has chosen to give up the ability to send people into space. Do you believe that you will see a human on another celestial body in your lifetime? If so, where will that human come from?


I honestly don’t know what I think about the human future anymore. Most times I can get myself optimistic, because we usually end up progressing almost despite ourselves, don’t we? Who knows what’s going to happen in the future to make life better. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself in my darker moments — which have been coming more frequently of late — when I become almost convinced that my country’s priorities and values are forever dooming us to decline.


I still believe that humanity will go to the planets, and maybe even one day to the stars. Will it be Americans? I increasingly doubt it. I’m suspecting China or India will lead the way, and that the US will be the Portugal of space exploration.


Martine asks: What is the meaning of life?


Wow. Now there’s a tough question. Do I give it a smart-alecky answer, or do I try to give a genuine answer? Or maybe some combination of each?


Ultimately, I think that life is inherently meaningless, except for whatever meaning we create for it ourselves, out of our values, our principles, the things we choose to do and the things we choose to leave to be done by others. We create meaning by the things we care about, the pursuits we follow. Meaning is a human creation, a human notion…and I don’t think that devalues the notion of life having meaning at all.


The problem with this is, of course, that there is an awful disparity amongst our species, in the varying degrees of power individuals have to bring meaning to their lives. For many, ‘meaning’ basically boils down to little more than survivalism, and I find that deeply saddening. I am also disturbed that for many in positions of power, their concept of meaning depends heavily on assuming that the lives of many others are, for all intents and purposes, meaningless.


So I think that we create the meaning in our lives, but I also think that we are not all-powerful when it comes to creating the meaning in our lives. If that makes sense. I’m not sure that it does.


OK, more answers to come!

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Continuing with answers to queries posed as part of Ask Me Anything! August 2011. I have a regular reader who occasionally corresponds by e-mail, and here are the questions this reader has posed:

I’m on vacation right now, so: what’s your dream vacation? What’s the best (real) vacation you’ve been on? How much vacation do you get in a year and how do you like to spit it up (or do you like to do it all at one time)?

My dream vacation would involve all-expenses paid to…someplace. Anyplace. Could be Disneyworld. Could be Portland/Seattle. Could be London. A cruise to Alaska. I don’t have a great deal of traveling wanderlust, but I wouldn’t mind being able to do any of those someday.

“Real” vacations I’ve been on? My honeymoon is probably the best, I figure — we spent a couple of days on Cape Cod, a couple in downtown Boston, and then we drove home via New Hampshire, Vermont, and the upper part of New York. By the end we were getting tired and money was getting low, so we came a fairly direct route. We should have done some Adirondack exploring, though.

For our first anniversary we went to DisneyWorld, which was great, except for The Wife having an accident that involved ripping out a big chunk of the nail on her big toe. I spent the rest of that vacation pushing her around in a wheelchair. (Which was actually kind of nice, in that it got us past queues for the rides, but in another way, that kind of sucked, because Disney puts a lot of thought into its ride-queue areas.)

And then, there was our trip to the Jersey coast just last month. (Huh…did I never really blog about that? Weird…photos here, with commentary within.) That was a fantastic time.

Mostly, though, when we take trips, they’re day trips or overnighters someplace. I don’t get a lot of paid time off, unfortunately, so when I want to take a few days off, I have to plan ahead and budget for it. The last couple of years we’ve gone to Pittsburgh in the spring — this coming spring, we may go back to Toronto for the first time in over five years, which is just a stupid amount of time to let lapse between Toronto visits — and each fall lately, The Wife and I have traveled together to the Apple Festival in Ithaca. Those little trips mean the most to me, really — opportunities to go someplace and spend time with The Wife, finding nifty places to shop, and so on.

Also, I started showing my son (who is 16 now) the BBC Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. I think they’re very well done, but I haven’t seen many other productions. What have you seen, if any and what do your recommend? (Or do you not like Sherlock Holmes stories much?) I saw a trailer for a new Sherlock Holmes movie that looked more action-adventure than I remember the stories being — would you be interested in seeing it?

Ohhh, such a finely-crafted question…and I have to offer a really lame answer! I’m terribly lax in my exposure to Mr. Holmes. I’ve only read a few of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories, and I’ve read a few of the many “extended universe” (for lack of a better term) works that have appeared over the century-plus since Holmes first appeared. As for movies, I know very, very little. I’ve seen a couple of the ones Basil Rathbone made, and they are terrific. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (with Jeremy Brett playing the good detective) is good, and I greatly enjoyed Young Sherlock Holmes, even if it is more an adventure flick than a Holmes detective story. I haven’t seen Robert Downey Jr.’s recent film (whose sequel is coming out at some point in the near future), and it definitely looks like more of an action take on Holmes than anything else. I’ve heard that the first one is fun, and I’ve also heard that it’s a waste of time. I’ll probably find out, sometime. But yes, I do need to read more Holmes in the first place!

By the way, if you really want to get into some interesting stuff, track down a copy of Shadows Over Baker Street, an anthology of Holmes/Cthulhu mash-up stories. Fun stuff!

How many books do you acquire in one year, do you think? (I fear library book sales and the like; a good cause and cheap books are a recipe for a house stuffed to the rafters with books.)

I’m really scared to speculate on this. Via the quarterly library book sales, I probably pick up fifty books a year alone. Via other venues, probably around twenty or thirty a year. It’s bad. Next time we move, it better be local because The Wife is going to kill me if we have to rent two trucks.

More to come!

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Continuing to answer queries from Ask Me Anything! August 2011!

LCScotty asks: When are we going to have another WNY blogger meetup?

I have no idea. Next!

OK, fleshing that out a bit…I’m not sure why it is, but it seems to me that the WNY blogging community doesn’t really exist anymore as such. Which isn’t to say that it’s completely disappeared, but it’s changed in a lot of ways, some of which I don’t mind, some of which bug me a little. But it’s the way things are.

Five or six years ago, blogging was pretty much it in terms of “social networking” online, and community formed in ways encouraged by the nature of blogging: with bloggers linking one another. At one time, bloggers in the Buffalo-Niagara region started discovering each other’s existence, and links started flying back and forth, along with discussions of stuff — politics, issues, Buffalo sports teams, Buffalo restaurants, life in this area, and other items of general interest. And in time, there were a few events where bloggers actually came together and shared drinks, food, and talked about stuff. I attended a couple of these, and they were terrific times. (Before the first one I attended, I asked in all seriousness what I should wear to such an event, and was told by one terrific person, “If you don’t wear overalls, I’m gonna cry.” How could I turn that down!)

Blogging, however, subsided a lot over the next few years after that, for a number of reasons. Some bloggers lost interest in blogging; others still blogged, but a lot less frequently. And some, for whom blogging was a social outlet, moved on to other outlets that were more to their liking: MySpace, then Facebook, then Twitter. There are occasional Twitter meet-ups, that I know of, but nothing that’s as wide-ranging as the old ‘Bloggercons’ we used to have. But then, how could they be? There is so much online Buffalo population nowadays, and it’s all pretty segmented. There are people I interact with on Twitter whom I am fairly confident never ever ever look at my blog, and vice versa.

And within the “Buffalo Blogosphere” itself (or, as I used to call it, “the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan”), things are pretty segmented, too. Links don’t get shared much at all anymore. The WNYMedia.net blogs — quite a few of which I read regularly, because they’re really good over there — seem to mainly link either each other or larger blogs elsewhere online, and those blogs tend to remain focused fairly narrowly on a few specific topics at a time.

Coincidentally enough, I’m writing this on the heels of Christopher Smith’s departure from WNYMedia.net and — one hopes temporarily — the Buffalo blogging community. I’ve been reading him just about all the time he’s been blogging, and I’ve (almost) always enjoyed his voice. His departure came out of the blue, and after he’s been active in launching new ideas like the Buffalo Cash Mob and trying to brainstorm some way of jumpstarting Buffalo as an area of innovation and entrepreneurship. I can’t shake the feeling that there is some kind of “Inside Baseball” involved with his exit from WNYM, but that’s none of my business, really.

So, when the next Bloggercon? I have no idea. I’d be game, but who knows?

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Time to clear out some more Answers from Ask Me Anything! August 2011, huzzah!

Jenny (of Saturday Centus fame) has a couple:

Were you the kid in school always getting in trouble for using the red crayon to color the sky and the blue crayon to color the grass? I was.

I did that, a bit. I was also never one to stay inside the lines. The lines sucked. I hated the lines. The lines were evil. I do remember my kindergarten teacher getting irritated when I colored a person orange, which I did because orange was the closest thing to that ‘flesh’ crayon that Crayola used to make, but which I didn’t have in my box. (I assume they still make that color, but call it something else, right? Something that doesn’t assume that ‘flesh’ is, well, white?)

What I remember as particularly frustrating was that creativity was generally to be exercised mainly in Art classes, and I was terrible at art. Just terrible. So other kids were being all creative and stuff, and there I was, trying to make sure that the clay ashtray was in the shape of a heart in the first place. And if memory serves, I didn’t include the little divots in the sides, where smokers lay their cigarettes. How was I to know? My parents weren’t smokers. And besides, how weird was it, anyway, that in school we were actually required to make an ashtray? Yeah, it was 1977 and all, but Ye Gods, here were schools just assuming that we all lived with smokers! Wow.

Creative writing assignments, however? Those didn’t come down the pike all that often, and when they did, I didn’t much like them, because the topics would be assigned by a teacher. I’m not sure why this bugged me so much, but it did. I recall one assignment called “Turkey Talk”, in which we were to write about Thanksgiving from the perspective of the bird. Now, if you tell me to write that story today, I’m seizing the opportunity and writing a horrifically bloody tale about the turkeys who achieved sentience and staged a rebellion at the abbatoir. Back then, however, my brain just shut down. (In that particular case, I did the smart thing and…just didn’t do the damn assignment. Brilliant plan, that. Especially when my parents found out that I had adopted a personal policy of “I’m just not gonna do the stupid assignments.”)

Writing just wasn’t much encouraged in my school years, sadly enough. I never really knew why; maybe it was just out of fashion back then. Maybe it still is. I craved the assignments — very rare — where we were simply given a genre and told to write something in that genre. (And then there was the “write a piece of descriptive prose” assignment, wherein I wrote a detailed description of the girl I had a crush on at the time. In retrospect, holy shit, was that creepy.)

Music, which was my other passion, employed a rather different kind of creativity. The only real outlet at the time for creating something new, musically-speaking, was in jazz band and improv solos. My problem there was that I was simply never really temperamentally inclined toward jazz. I like to listen to it, and I was a serviceable section player, but soloing just wasn’t something I was born to do. Go figure.

So, going back to writing and whatnot…I see the Centus prompts as a way of, well, making up for lost time. And apologizing to that English teacher whom I refused to take seriously in 8th grade.

I did want to ask if you’d like to be a guest blogger for me.

Sure! I’ve never been asked to guest-blog. This is exciting. Let me know what you’re thinking of!

Reader Bill asks:

Have you kept your trumpet chops up? If not why not?

Sadly, no, I have not. The answers are all the usual suspects: time, opportunity, and life’s other pursuits. I sometimes wonder how I’d sound if I picked up the trumpet again right now, and how long it would take me to recover some reasonable percentage of the proficiency I had back in the day (and I wasn’t half-bad, really, if I do say so myself). But this is unlikely to happen, so long as I live in an apartment.

Time is not my friend there, as well — I only have so many hours in the day, the same as everybody else, and I’ve gravitated strongly to writing as my prime creative outlet. The time I might spend practicing if I was still a musician is time I now spend writing. And finally, there’s opportunity: my finest musical moments always came when I was a member of one ensemble or another, and I tended to find that the greatest musical rush for me came from being one voice in a group that was hitting on all cylinders. Those are the opportunities that are hardest to come by now. There’s nothing at all wrong with local amateur groups, but…well, I have some pretty heady musical memories, and I’d almost rather keep those memories close in my heart than try to recapture the lightning in a bottle, if that makes sense.

It’s a shame, sometimes. I do miss music now and again, as an active concern.

More answers to come (and new questions are still welcomed, so drop ’em here!)

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OK, we’re two weeks into the month, so it’s time to start dishing up some answers to questions asked as part of Ask Me Anything! Augusts 2011. (By the way, I’m not closing submissions yet! You can still ask stuff!)

Andy asks: So I was up there at the Sabres store in HSBC Arena AND everything WAS 1/2 TO 75% OFF!!! Do you know why?

I honestly don’t know, but I assume it’s for the usual reason: clearing out the old stuff in favor of the new stuff. I know that’s a boring answer, but there’s no way they’re not going to be selling lots of Sabres stuff there, so my guess is they’re clearing out inventory before they start bringing in newer items for next season, which I further assume Sabres management is banking upon for drawing in tons of people again. Anyone who doesn’t live here anymore might not realize it, but the excitement that surrounds the Sabres these days — especially since the new owner took over — genuinely rivals the excitement that surrounded the Bills during the Super Bowl years.

Or, maybe it’s all just a front and Terry Pegula is planning to move the Sabres to Albuquerque!

Sketch Element asks: I visit family in East Aurora about once a year in May or June. Can you recommend some neat things to do or places to go that I may not know about?

Any mention of East Aurora must include Vidler’s, of course, but everybody knows about Vidler’s. East Aurora also has a nice Mexican restaurant called Arriba Tortilla! that The Wife and I like a lot. (No, it’s probably not “authentic” enough for folks who care about “authenticity” in their ethnic-themed food. I, personally, do not.) East Aurora has a terrific farmer’s market that runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays, although The Wife thinks that there are more vendors present on Saturdays than Wednesdays.

Striking out a little farther from East Aurora, there are a bunch of nature options. It’s about a twenty minute drive to the Beaver Meadow Audubon Center, which includes a lot of walking trails and a nature center; in the other direction is Chestnut Ridge Park, in Orchard Park, which is a big park in the hills that is an incredibly popular summer picnic destination and place for walking, jogging, biking, and even a frisbee-golf course. If one enjoys antiquing, there is the amazing Orchard Park Antique Mall (fifteen minutes from East Aurora).

And these two suggestions don’t really help a May or June visit, but East Aurora is quite near any number of locations for New York State’s Maple Weekend (in March), and E.A. is a great starting point for what is, in my opinion, one of the finest autumn drives in the country, Route 20A between E.A. and Canandaigua.

As with most other spots in the Southtowns, the one thing that E.A. really lacks that would put it over the top, for me, is a good bike path. There aren’t any down here, and it’s a damned shame.

And a reader asks via e-mail: Why is August my favorite summer month?

Well, first, there’s weather. I dislike weather that is too hot and humid, and in Western NY, while our summers are generally fantastic, we almost always get one big blast of hot-and-humid, and it is almost always in July. Basically, every year I find two weeks of July sufficiently unpleasant that I don’t want to leave the apartment unless it is to ride in an air-conditioned vehicle to a place that is also air-conditioned. (One of my big fears of global warming is that the length of Unpleasant Summer in Buffalo is going to get longer and longer as time goes by.)

August, however, usually sees the trend shift a bit. The temperatures start to fall, only slightly at first, but enough to be noticeable, and humidity also starts to take a downward trend. In July, there are days when we have to run our apartment’s A/C all day; in August, we start to see days when I only have to run it for several hours in the evening when the heat of the apartment lags behind that of outside.

What else does August have going for it? Starting in late July and through a chunk of August, my favorite summer fruit is in season: peaches, nectarines, blueberries. Sweet corn peaks in August, and for several weeks we will dine on BLTs and sweet corn at least once a week. The Erie County Fair is in August. In sports, baseball’s pennant races are starting to heat up and football training camps are in full swing. And usually sometime in August is when I can think about wearing overalls without being all sweaty and stuff.

And really, August just starts five terrific months. August leads right into September, and then to October (my absolute favorite month of the year), and then November (Thanksgiving and the beginnings of Christmas), and finally December (Christmas, snow, the culmination of football). So much of the stuff I look forward to on a yearly basis happens during these five months. Sweet corn and BLTs, the Erie County Fair, Labor Day weekend, school starting, my birthday, the now-annual trip The Wife and I take to the Ithaca Apple Harvest Festival, my now-annual pie in the face from The Wife, Pumpkinville, Halloween, Thanksgiving, snow, shopping with The Wife, decorating The Store and Casa Jaquandor for Christmas, and Christmas itself.

Oh, and Little Quinn was born in August.

August is a great month!

More answers to come…and feel free to ask more questions!

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A reminder, folks: Ask Me Anything! August 2011 is underway. Post questions in comments on this post, or via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Pony Express. No limit on questions! No subject matter off limits (although answers may not be what you expect)! Every answer of value must GO!!!

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It’s that time again — Ask Me Anything! This used to be a February-only thing, but seeing as how it seems silly to only do it once a year, we now do it twice a year. Or something like that. Anyhow, all queries are welcome — serious queries, unserious queries, queries about any topic at all.

Leave queries in comments herein, or e-mail them, or get ’em to me via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google+. I’m everywhere, I am. It’s like all the people who are normally around you are me! (I got that from an old SNL sketch in which Phil Hartman plays a drill sergeant.)

Anyway, the floor is yours, folks: Ask Me Anything!

UPDATE: There is no limit on the number of questions allowed. If you have eleven things you want to ask, go ahead and ask all eleven!

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