Tag: Buffalo

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The Buffalo News to Science: DROP DEAD

One of my favorite parts of the Sunday Buffalo News, for years, was its Science page. This page appeared on the back of the Viewpoints section, and featured the paper’s only real science coverage: articles on the latest findings from the various sciences, and a weekly column by a local naturalist named Gerry Rising. As one of those people who reads the paper in the “my favorite stuff last” order, I saved the science page for one of the last things I read, and I actually e-mailed Mr. Rising a note of appreciation for his columns a while back.

A few Sundays ago, there was no Science page. Instead, the News decided to use that space to print facsimiles of its very first editions, from whatever year in the 1800s the News started publishing. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t give two shits about this and I figured this would be a temporary thing until the Science page’s return.

Well, I learned last night that the Science page is gone. Gerry Rising speculates as to why the page was axed in an article he wrote for a local weekly publication, The Public:

On October 4 my final Sunday Buffalo News column was published. The column, my 1,280th over a period of 25 years, was critical of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). On October 8 I was informed that the entire science page of the Sunday News would no longer appear so, according to my editor, “I do [sic] no longer have a place to run your column.”

On October 15 a rebuttal to my column from HSUS representative Brian Shapiro appeared in the News’s ”Another Voice” column. I find this coincidence interesting, because, as I pointed out in my original column, HSUS has a history of intimidation.

I’ll spare the details (you can read them at Mr. Rising’s article), but Mr. Rising suspects that the Science page was axed, at least in part, because of a column he wrote that was critical of the Humane Society. Now, I don’t know how true that is or may be, and to be honest, I don’t really care. If the News felt that a particular columnist was out of line or beyond the pale or whatever, that’s one thing. But the decision to eliminate the entirety of the paper’s science coverage is indefensible and stupid, and it angers me greatly.

I believe, very deeply, as Carl Sagan did: Our civilization’s future will only be more and more dependent on science as it moves forward, and to the extent that we’re successful as a civilization, it will be because of our respect for science. I am troubled by the increasing levels of hostility toward science in America today, and part of this is the general dearth of real science coverage in our major news media. What the News has done, whether because the Humane Society protested or because the News just wanted to fellate itself, is to tacitly endorse the idea that science is best left to scientists, that regular citizens have no real need to know anything about it or engage it in any real way, and basically, that it’s OK to be dumb about science. Science is just an optional thing that we can live without just fine, as long as the scientists are off doing their thing…someplace.

Watching the increasing levels of arrogance from Buffalo News personnel over the years (especially from their sports department) has been pretty disappointing, but cutting the entirety of science coverage (even if it consisted of a single original, locally-written column and a bunch of stuff culled from the wire) is worse than that. The News has become a little less useful, and it’s come a bit closer to being what it dreads: nothing more than a weekly delivery service for grocery coupons.

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Report from the County Fair 2015

Some random notes from this year’s iteration of the Erie County Fair:

:: One regret that was in my control: No ride on the Big Wheel. It was such a gorgeous night…shoulda done that.

:: One regret that was out of my control: Apparently the Fair has done away with the daily parade? I hate this decision. We loved that parade and we hope it comes back. What the hell, Erie County Fair!

:: Another regret out of our AND the Fair’s control: Due to avian flu, no birds were on display at all. So no cool-looking chickens from local farms. Bummer!

:: I read people complain about prices on rides (well, duh) and food. The food one catches me by surprise. Granted, it’s more expensive depending on how many people you have along, but I think we spent around $50 to $60 on food, all day, for the three of us. If you’re spending a lot more than that for a small group, are you eating all the things? Or buying your own drinks? Bring in a cooler with stuff in it! They let you do this! The only drinks we bought were a couple of birch beer refills.

:: There’s an outpost of the local Antique Mall at the Fair every year. I don’t usually buy stuff there…but this time, I did. Did I ever.


Cool Toy score no. 2: The starship ENTERPRISE herself! #startrek #starshipenterprise

Cool toy score no. 1: Klingon Bird of Prey! #startrek #klingonbirdofprey #scifi #spaceship

Cool toy score no. 3. Is it weird that I hate the ALIEN movies, but find the beastie himself just amazing? #sciencefiction #sf #scifi #alien



Yup: the NCC-1701-A Enterprise, the Klingon Bird-of-Prey, and the Alien from, well, ALIEN. Now, I’m on record for hating the ALIEN franchise from pillar to post — I’ve disliked every single one of those movies (in fairness, I never watched the fourth one, figuring that I was deeply unlikely to enjoy it after the crappy first three), but the Alien beastie him/herself? That is one of the iconic creatures of all time. Just a fantastic design. So I bought him.

:: More importantly, I kept The Wife properly adorned. Check out this bracelet!


I bought this bracelet for The Wife. I think it was made for her wrist, actually. #jewelry


:: The model railroad layout included an alien abduction, and Minions. Because Minions are this close to kicking the Frozen crowd off the stage.


In this year's model railroad layout at The Fair: Alien abductions! (And Minions hidden throughout.) #ErieCountyFair #modelrailroad #minions


:: As always, for me the highlight of the Fair is the Creative Arts building, where people show off paintings and quilts and items they’ve sewn and photography and place settings. I love this stuff so much and I always spend at least an hour looking at the creative efforts of Erie County people. Seriously, this stuff is always good. Here’s but a small sampling:


Quilts of the Fair I #ErieCountyFair

Quilts of the fair II #ErieCountyFair

Quilts of the fair III #ErieCountyFair

Decorated guitar #ErieCountyFair


(Sorry about the size differential there…I hadn’t got ’round to uploading the lower six photos to Flickr yet, as of this writing.)

:: Most importantly, though? A dream came true this year! Our day at the Fair was cool enough that I was finally, at long last, able to attend whilst rocking overalls. Granted, it was my Carhartt white painters’ pair, which is made of lighter fabric and therefore cooler, but still: Overalls at the Fair. One more item off the Bucket List!


Enjoying the Fair. It was just a great day. #eriecountyfair #overalls #carhartt

The Wife and I at the Erie County Fair!

It’s the little things, folks! But if there’s an event that cries out for overalls more than the Erie County Fair, I’ve not found it.

See you next year, Fair! (And bring the Daily Parade back!)

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Tank You Very Much

Is it ever OK for sports teams to lose on purpose?

I’m sure we’d all say, “Probably not”. After all, there’s a very real reason that gambling is strictly forbidden in baseball, and there’s a very real reason one of the game’s greatest players — Shoeless Joe Jackson — will likely never get in the Hall of Fame. It has to do with losing on purpose.

But is it OK for a team to be purposely assembled by management with the goal in mind of being bad?

Well…if you’re in Buffalo, the answer is almost certainly a resounding “YES!!!”

Our NHL team in these parts, the Sabres, is virtually beloved. It’s entirely possible that hockey fandom is a bigger thing here than football fandom, although I suspect that’s because the Sabres had a brief period of being awesome eight or nine years ago while the Bills have been crappy for fifteen. But right now, the Sabres are awful. With one more loss, they will clinch the worst record in the NHL this season, and most fans here are fine with that.

Why?

Because the NHL Draft has not one but two astonishing prospects lined up to very likely go first and second in the first round. If the Sabres finish dead last, one of those two kids will end up playing in Buffalo. These guys (Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel) are referred to almost universally as “generational” players, the kinds of players who only tend to come along once every ten years or so. We’re talking Sidney Crosby and Mario Lemieux territory here.

But why would the Sabres be interested in both of those guys if they finish dead last? Well, that’s because the NHL does not do what the NFL and Major League Baseball do with their drafts. Those leagues slot their drafts strictly according to order of finish: the top pick goes to the team with the worst record, second pick to the second-worst, and so on, using various tie-breaker formulas to distinguish between teams with identical records. The NHL, instead, uses a lottery to determine the top pick, so this year (the lottery rules change next year, for some reason), the team that finishes dead last has only a 20 percent chance of picking first, that team is guaranteed to pick second if they don’t get the top pick. Which means that the team finishing dead last is guaranteed one of these two amazing players, who are both the type of talent that hasn’t resided in Buffalo in many moons, or maybe ever.

And the Sabres this year are bad. Really bad. Cataclysmically bad. Some sports people have determined that the Sabres are, statistically-speaking, historically bad. Ouch.

And they’re this bad, this year, on purpose.

Is that wrong? Is it wrong for a sports team’s management to purposely field an awful team?

Well, here’s the thing: I don’t think it is.

First of all, there’s nothing new at all about this. In hockey terms, they call it “tanking”, but a football team would likely refer to the phenomenon as “bottoming out”; you see it fairly often, when football teams whose rosters are aging and getting prohibitively expensive have a big purge of talent, resulting in a pretty bad team that has decided to go into “rebuilding mode”. Rebuilding almost always involves being pretty bad for at least a year or two (or so the team hopes; NFL history is replete with rebuilding projects that failed, resulting in another rebuild three or four years after the first one). “Bottoming out” is a pretty common idea in the NFL, and in fact, in recent years a lot of local sports commentators have called for the Bills to “bottom out”, so they might pick higher in the draft and maybe land on the best quarterbacks.

Meanwhile, the Sabres are definitely rebuilding. They have jettisoned virtually every high-priced player and every player who was due to become an unrestricted free agent, often in return for draft picks. This, too, is nothing new; baseball teams have been doing this for years. Over there it’s commonly called “having a fire sale”, when baseball teams that are pretty much out of contention start trading away players who are either going to be free agents or who command a high enough price in return that a team can use a trade to restock its minor league system with prospects. Are such teams “embracing losing”, as some have accused the Sabres of doing? I find it hard to see how. Same with the football teams who have elected to enter a rebuilding process. Is it “embracing losing” to enter into a period where losing is almost certain?

And why is it that sports commentators — columnists for the Buffalo News are notorious for this — so often call for rebuilds, call for “blowing it up and starting over”, call for “bottoming out”, only to harshly criticize the team when the process of rebuilding, blowing it up and starting over, or bottoming out results in a period of losing?

Who knows, but it seems to me that there are conflicting impulses at work here. We expect the players on the ice, or the field, or the diamond, to always put out their best effort. But the problem is that sometimes the best effort of management actually involves being bad for a while. The players may expect to win each time, but management has a different job, and sometimes it means being bad for an entire year in hopes of landing a very, very good player on the other end of it.

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“I wonder why that guy won’t talk to the media!”, or, Great Moments in Buffalo Sports Journalism

Here’s a thing that happened. Last weekend, the Buffalo Bills’ 2014 season ended with the team out of the playoffs. Locker cleanout day was last Monday, and then the team dispersed for the offseason.

Fast forward to this past Saturday, two days ago. Rookie wide receiver Sammy Watkins, a high-profile player because not only was he a 1st-round pick but the Bills traded up to get him, sends out this tweet:

This caught the eye of Buffalo News columnist, and eternal claimant to the title of Official Source Of All OBJECTIVE Knowledge In Buffalo, Jerry Sullivan:

There was, as you might expect, a miniature pile-on directed at Watkins for saying that Buffalo is “so boring”.

Only….

Ayup. The guy wasn’t even here.

Sullivan wasn’t the only person to offer up an assumption that Watkins was dissing Buffalo as “boring”, but he was, so far as I could tell, the only professional journalist to do so.

I hope he’ll remember this some time next summer or next season when he whines about how Sammy Watkins avoids the media.

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This is downtown Buffalo.

One of the projects that’s been under construction downtown has been the recreation of old sections of the Erie Canal, which were then filled with water and which have now frozen.

Think of Buffalo as an old, decaying, has-been city filled with rotting buildings and tired, gray people? Think again, America.

This city still has lots of problems, but for now, there’s a sense that yes, we can get this stuff done.

(Photo credits: Dennis Gee, Kevin Rybczynski, Craig Kannaley, and Canalside Buffalo)

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The blanketing of the world, part deux

Oy.

That was fun.

And by “fun”, I mean, “This is the kind of shit that makes people want to live in weird places whose names end with ‘exas’ or ‘zona’ or ‘ida’ or ‘arolina’.”

The lake-effect snow that started the other day? It just kept on coming…for three days. My town has received over 70 inches of snow, and other places nearby have received even more than that.

At least our personal larders were well and truly stocked, so at no point have been even close to going hungry. We never lost power, and our heat has been fine (especially once we saw warnings about the exhaust vents on high-efficiency furnaces, and started making a major priority of keeping them clear). I haven’t been to work since Monday, which stinks, but it is, as they say, “what it is”. Not a big thing in the greater picture.

How did we occupy our time? Reading, fretting, hanging on the Interwebs. Making geeky jokes about Imperial walkers in my backyard and more Frozen references than anyone need hear. Oh, and shoveling. Lots of shoveling. Holy shit, the shoveling.

The storm came in two “waves”, with about twelve hours between the first wave (about 4-5 feet) and the second (another 2-3 feet). So, after the first wave we dug out as much as we could, just to give ourselves a fighting chance of digging out after the second. Shoveling that much snow is really hard, not just because it’s difficult to begin with, but when the snow piles get to be almost as tall as you are, it gets hard to figure out where to put the stuff as you shovel it. As it is, I have completely barricaded both of our garage doors, so we won’t be getting out of those any time soon. (We haven’t been using a garage for a car at all, so that’s not an issue until Tuesday, when I have to take the garbage out.)

And then there was the stuff at the foot of the driveway, the Plow Pile, which is the broken clumps of icy stuff blasted up by the passing snow plows. We’re lucky that our street was plowed each and every day this week, when other people we know still haven’t seen a plow. (We’re wondering if some town official or another lives on our street.) That was insanely hard to shovel, but the guy next door let us use his snowblower for a bit, which did help. The kicker there is that a snowblower actually came with the house! It’s in my parents’ garage. One main order of business, once we’re cleared out, is me figuring out if it works, how to use it, and getting it into my garage, so I’ll be able to deploy it in everyone’s favor. I’m not generally a big fan of snowblowers, but they have their moments.

Let’s see, what else? Not much. All those snow days were stressful and worrisome, which meant that they were awful for writing. I don’t have much hope of being a NaNoWriMo winner this year, but them’s the breaks. Princesses III is still on the way!

And now, because I’m tired and I don’t feel like writing a nice transition to the “here’s a bunch of pictures” part of this post…here’s a bunch of pictures. I’ll arrange them roughly chronologically so you can see the progression. And note the dee-oh-gee action; turns out he loves this stuff. What a weird dog.

Oh wait! One geeky thing that struck me as funny, although no one reacted when I posted it a couple of times to social media. Our “official” snowfall total ended up being 71 inches, which I decided to convert into other units. I thought about light-nanoseconds and other such items, but then I settled on…the smoot. What’s a smoot, you ask? Well, fifty years ago, some guys were pledging a fraternity at MIT, and as part of their pledge, they were ordered (MIT is legendary for its pranks) to measure a local bridge, using as their measuring stick a guy named Smoot. Mr. Smoot is 67 inches tall, so that’s one smoot. Therefore, my town officially received 1.0597 smoots of snow.

And now, pictures.

Snowmageddon '14

Snowmageddon '14

Snowmageddon '14

Snowmageddon '14

Snowmageddon '14, continued

Snowmageddon '14, continued

snowMG 3

Our front walk is now a trench. That mound on the left is as tall as me. #Snowmageddon #OrchardPark #wny

My car, right now. #Snowmageddon #wny #OrchardPark

The Wife's car, right now. #Snowmageddon #wny #OrchardPark

Trench! But there's no thermal exhaust port at the end of it. #StarWarsReference #Snowmageddon #OrchardPark #wny


So, there you go. Snowmageddon 2014 draws to a close. Next up? A massive warm-up might lead to flooding! Huzzah!!!

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Buckets, the Bills, Stadiums, Pies, Sharkheaded girls: Some random opinions on some random stuff

Just a grab-bag of some thoughts on stuff going on….

:: I posted the following on a Facebook exchange debating the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. This wasn’t really in response to anything anyone specifically said, but more in response to some more general negativity I’ve seen about it. (As such, it was probably out-of-place on that particular friend’s feed, for which I feel a tad guilty.)

Here’s my thing: fundraising of every kind, everywhere, is more successful when there’s something “fun” involved. It’s why charities have big galas and parties. It’s why churches and small town organization have chicken barbecues. It’s they the Jerry Lewis Telethon isn’t twelve hours of scrolling text with telephone numbers. It’s why people trying to raise money to help individuals with massive medical bills have events with basket raffles and Chinese auctions. It’s why PBS stations air their really popular shows and specials at pledge time. I can’t remember where I read it, but the other day I read an article where some charity in some city had an annual gala which was their BIG fundraising event each year, but one year they decided to not hold it and simply ask for the donations anyway, and their fundraising fell through the floor. We may not necessarily LIKE this aspect of things, but it’s simply the way things are. All the ALS people did was figure out a way to tap into one of the newer avenues people are having fun with, and frankly, if it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else.

That said, I cannot for the life of me have any problem with this whole endeavor. It’s a horrible disease (my wife’s grandfather died of it, just a few weeks after we started dating), but really — they ALL are. If we approach fundraising with the solemnity of the disease itself, nothing would ever get funded much at all.

I stand by all that, even if my posting was rather badly misplaced.

:: As I write this I’m basking in the afterglow of my first-ever Buffalo Bills preseason game. Oh wait, did I say “basking in the afterglow”? I meant to say, “waiting for the stench cloud to dissipate”. I know, it’s just preseason and it’s the last preseason game, so it’s not like either team was really trying all that hard, but boy howdy, the Bills just looked fundamentally awful. They attempted no long pass plays, they were bumbling and mistake-prone, the backup quarterback hit exactly one guy on the numbers, and I saw four punts in the single half of football we bothered watching. (The tickets were free; no way do we pay to get in there.)

That said, I am obviously no expert, but I still do not see why it’s taken for absolute faith around here that Ralph Wilson Stadium is an awful place that needs to be retired in favor of a spectacular new facility that’s “easier to get to”. RWS is plenty easy to get to, and I found it perfectly nice and structurally fine. Maybe some significant work to the exterior, like they did in Green Bay with Lambeau? Anyway, for my money, RWS is fine, and anyway, I’m loath to spend upwards of a billion bucks of public money on a facility just to help a collection of billionaires rake in even more cash. As for the current renovations to the Ralph, I like the place, although there could be some more signage directing where to go in the area between the ticketed entry queue and the actual concourses.

Oh, my prediction for the Bills this season? Well, they’ve gone 6-10 in four of the last five seasons, so why stop now? 6-10, it is!

:: Nobody ever gets to bitch about Presidents and their vacations again. I’m done listening to that shit. It’s just plain dumb, seeing as how in this day and age, with the technology we have, a President could run things from the Unabomber’s shack if he or she wanted to. Enough.

::  Speaking of vacations and such: it’s Labor Day Weekend, which reminds me of something I read once: three day weekends are better when the extra day off is on Friday, rather than Monday, because that way it feels like two Saturdays followed by a Sunday, as opposed to a Saturday followed by two Sundays. I kind of agree with that — July 4 weekend this year broke that way, simply because the 4th was on Friday — but I also rather like having the long weekend and then a shortened work week on the other side. Short weeks are nice, which is why I always try to schedule my vacations to straddle two different work weeks, essentially taking a six- or seven-day weekend, bracketed by two two or three-day work weeks.

:: The other day, Buffalo’s new-and-improving waterfront area became home to a sculpture originally from Cincinnati, called “Shark Girl”. It’s a little girl with the head of a shark. I am not making this up. Behold:

As art, I kinda like it. It’s not really my cup of tea, but it is a whimsical thing and definitely unusual enough that it will have people going to see it and talking about it and so on. My only complaint, such as it is, was that such a high-profile art installation here wasn’t seen as an opportunity to feature a local artist. However, I’m told that this is only the beginning, and that local artists will be featured at Canalside. Good.

Head of a shark. What will they think of next.

:: I’m not sure who I want to win MasterChef this year. I’m leaning toward Leslie, because he’s really gonzo, but he’s also best taken, I think, in small doses. Who I do not want to see win is Courtney, who has the single most annoying “Fake perfect Good Housekeeping wife” thing going on, along with incredibly annoying arrogance regarding her own kitchen skills. True, she has yet to screw up in any way at all, but land sakes alive, is she annoying.

:: A new law: If you have any kind of special request as regards bagging your groceries at all, then I don’t care if you’re only buying five things, go through the other line. Your “I want this item in double paper, double plastic and then roll it up and put it in a third bag” bullshit forfeits your right to use the express lane.

:: Finally, on a topic near and dear to my heart, I posted the following on Tumblr earlier:

Squirty whipped cream on a paper plate ain’t gonna cut it, folks.

So I’m seeing that on the heels of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, some folks are trying to make pie-in-the-face challenges the next thing. As you might expect I am TOTALLY on board with this, but I fear the well may be somewhat tapped, and folks are trying to do this in “honor” of several different diseases, such as depression and Huntington’s Disease. Again, this is great, but I suspect this might have the effect of diluting things.

More to the point, though, is that the “pie” is often a bit of whipped cream from a spray can on a paper plate. This is well below the standards we should be willing to accept as Americans, folks! If you’re going to experience the joy that is a pie in the face, make it happen with a REAL pie and not just a dollop of canned stuff! A thing worth doing is a thing worth doing RIGHT. Come on, America! We invented the pie-in-the-face routine! Let’s show the world how it’s done!

[Insert picture of Sam the Eagle here. Or something suitably pompous.]

Remember, folks, don’t do this:

Do this instead:

Or follow the instructions in the “A Pie in the Face is a Wonderful Thing” page to do this:

That’s all that’s running through my head right now, folks. Have a great Labor Day weekend! (I’m not taking off from posting, though.)

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Crunch Time again for Mercado!

I’ve been remiss in updating about Mercado, the Kickstarter-led effort to open a culinary market in Buffalo. The original Kickstarter effort failed to reach the funding target, but undeterred, the Mercado folks have migrated over to IndieGoGo, and this effort ends tonight at 3:00 am Eastern Time (or midnight Pacific). Check it out and donate!

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