Tag: Buffalo

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When special places become a bit less special

A few years ago, when I discovered that other people in Buffalo were blogging, a community of sorts started to develop, in fits and starts. Gradually that community got larger and larger, and as it did so, it started to separate itself out a bit into somewhat-discrete groups, ultimately with two “collectives” basically becoming the big wheels of it all. Now one of those collectives has caught the other behaving badly, and is itself behaving as though it has pulled off some kind of grand journalistic expose of the kind you used to see in the heyday of Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes.

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here at my computer, plugging away at the only blog I’ve ever owned, as the only person who’s ever written the posts here, wondering why it is we never have BloggerCon’s anymore. Now I know. We stopped being a bunch of happy people with blogs, and instead declared ourselves — well, some of us, anyway — “citizen journalists”, pratting on about “New Media” and “Information for the 21st Century” and all that jazz.

Oh well. Obviously the Buffalo blogging community couldn’t stay the way I liked it forever — but it would have been nice had it stayed that way a little longer.

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If elected, he will not serve!

I’ve been remiss in not wishing Alan Bedenko well on his run for the Erie County Legislature. So, best wishes to him, and high hopes that he wins. I’d pledge to vote for him, but I’m not in his district.

I also didn’t know that Alan grew a beard. Someone should have told him that bearded guys look shifty and evil. Of course, someone may have also pointed out that without a beard, Alan looked eerily like a dark-haired Dick Cheney….

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Breaking the Ships

One of the unfortunate mainstays of Buffalo’s outer waterfront the last bunch of years has been the presence of an old ship that basically got docked here and then forgotten about, as it rusted in its moorings for years and years. Well, that ship has finally been taken away, towed out of Buffalo’s waters on its final voyage. Although the ship’s fate is apparently now unclear, I suspect it will ultimately sail to the fabulous land of India, where it will likely end up in a place like this:

That’s a shipbreaking yard on the coast of India, where decommissioned ships are literally run aground and then slowly dismantled by laborers. It can be very dangerous work, so let’s hope that the former blight on Buffalo doesn’t ultimately end someone’s life when it reaches its ultimate destination.

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Where there’s swill, there’s a way

That may be the worst pun I’ve ever used in a blog post title, but anyway, I just happened across a website called Swillparty.com, which turns out to be a Buffalo/WNY site devoted to social wine tasting. Apparently SWILL is an acronym, standing for “Several Wine Imbibers Liking Libations”.

They’ve got a wine blog (already bookmarked for the next update of the blogroll), and they’ve even come up with a nifty-looking kit for getting your own wine-tasting parties together, along with several other items of merchandise. So, if you’re local and you’re looking for wine-tasting stuff, keep your money local and buy from them. And if you’re not local, buy from them anyway, because your locality doesn’t need the money as much as Western New York does! I’m not quite the wine drinker I used to be — beer, rum (Spum! Vrum!), and Southern Comfort are my poisons of choice these days, although I do enjoy wine and I’ve got a half-bottle (or whatever the technical term is for a 375-ml bottle) of Sauternes that I’m keeping for consumption when I make my first professional fiction sale. (Although at the rate I’m going, that bottle will be too valuable to drink when that day comes….)

I found this site, incidentally, by exercising an old online pseudo-hobby of mine, namely, Googling names of people I’ve gone to school with. Turns out that the founding SWILLer, Anne Conroy-Baiter, is one of those old friends with whom I lost touch years ago. (It also turns out that she’s apparently quite the watercolorist, which is something I don’t recall knowing about her at all from high school. I could really learn to like this Interweb thingie!

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A Very Public Service Message

For folks attending A Taste of Buffalo this weekend, two key points:

:: Each booth serves, at most, three or four different things, and that’s it. So if you wait in a line for more than, oh, one minute — and exactly zero booths at ToB have wait-times less than that — then there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t know what you’re ordering by the time your turn comes up. So, please oh please, don’t stand in line with two other people, and then when your turn arrives, turn to your cohorts and say, “So what do you guys want from here?”

:: You may have noticed some fairly large numbers of people clustered around you, especially in the food lines. So once you get an item from a booth, please oh please go somewhere else to eat it. Do not simply move all of four feet from the counter and then stand right there to chow down. Now that ToB is on Delaware and Niagara Square, there is absolutely no shortage of places to slip away while you eat such that you won’t be in the way of the other people coming behind you in line.

:: If you’re in line for some booth, and it’s getting very close to your turn, then please oh please do not then cluster closely around the poor soul in front of you who’s just grabbed his or her food and is only looking to get out of the way. Let them out.

Please oh please.

Thank you.

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Yeah. Best. And don’t you forget it!

According to Alan, I won something the other night: Buffalo Spree Magazine‘s survey of Best Blogs, or something of that nature. I think it was one of those surveys city publications do to see what their readership thinks are the “best” of whatever in that city, whether it’s restaurants, arts venues, sports teams, or websites devoted to sporadically-updated thoughts of persons of varying degrees of geekitude.

In truth, I wasn’t even aware in any real sense of being in the running. It’s kind of like a recurring funny fantasy I have, in which we’re at the Oscars, and they’re announcing Best Actor: after reading the five nominees, the envelope is opened and the name therein turns out to be some completely-unexpected sixth actor. Camera then cuts to that actor, who’s in his kitchen, eating a sandwich, and we freeze-frame his reaction as a piece of pastrami hangs from his mouth and a dab of mayo oozes down his chin. “The nominees are Sean Connery, Denzel Washington, Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and Ralph Fiennes — but the Oscar goes to Bob McGaskill! Congratulations, Bob!” And Bob says, “Gwhaaa?”

Anyway, apparently this blog won. I’m frankly amazed, because I’m in no way one of the cadre of “citizen journalists” who constitute the larger portion of the Buffalo Prefecture of Blogistan; my Buffalo-blogging tends to consist of the occasional thing about the Sabres (not terribly often because I don’t know much about hockey), the more frequent stuff about the Bills (especially during the season), and once-in-a-while takes on urbanism. I don’t do reportage here, and the vast majority of the content I produce could as easily come from Peoria. That I, a guy who’s content to blog about the obscure SF books I read and movies and food and women who look good in workwear and whatever other obscure topics leap to mind, should come in first in such a survey is somewhat amazing. This blog isn’t any kind of organized set of thoughts; it’s rather my own personal mix-tape for the world.

So, thanks to those who voted. The full roster of winners can be found here. I should really start paying attention to stuff like this, I suppose. I could delude myself into thinking that they could do a big profile thingie on me, like they did for Jennifer a while back, but — well, I suspect that a big picture of me in that magazine wouldn’t be the best thing in the world. I still cringe when I see the way I looked in the Buffalo News for my short-story thing.

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Yuck….

I know they’re still ironing out details and whatnot, but I really don’t like the way the new WNYMedia site looks.

1. I don’t like the colors. I have no great objection to light text on a dark background; my own blog had such a color scheme for a large chunk of its early existence, after all. But the colors they’ve chosen are unpleasant to my eyes.

2. I don’t like how every post that’s longer than a couple of lines now goes to a “after the cut” type of thing. In fact, I’ve never been a big fan of “Read the rest of this post” widgets on any blog, but WNYMedia.net seems to be applying it to every post on any of its blogs that’s literally more than three or four lines long.

2a. As of this writing, there’s not even a “Click here for the rest of the post” link. You’re supposed to automatically know to click the post’s permalink to bring up the whole thing.

3. And my big complaint is that WNYMedia now forces a single blog template upon each of its member blogs. Frankly, this cuts down a great deal on the sense of individuality amongst the blogs there. Now, this isn’t some new thing they’ve done; large media organizations that have numerous blogs under their imprints all tend to use roughly the same templates between them — good examples are all the Buffalo News blogs, or Andrew Sullivan, Matthew Yglesias and the rest of the pros at The Atlantic. But the thing is that little word, pros. These are all professional journalists who are being paid to blog by a larger media company, so it makes perfect sense that those companies would want some branding going on. Perhaps I’m mistaken, but it’s my understanding that the WNYMedia bloggers are not professionals, and thus I see no earthly reason why every one of their blogs should have to look the same. For a media outlet that has in the past indicated that “independence” is its great strength, this degree of conformity being exerted on its members, in my opinion, hurts the experience.

Welcome back, I guess.

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Is this thing on?

Not be mean or anything, but now that it’s been more than a day since they all went into the cyber-weeds, it’s sure a good thing that some of us have held out on the “Hey, let’s get all of Buffalo’s blogs into one basket!” notion, eh?

Come back soon, guys!

UPDATE: OK, what the hell? Kevin reports that he can at least access WNYMedia blogs, but still gets nothing on the main WNYMedia site. I, however, only get this screen:

whenever I try to access those same blogs. However, I can get the entire stable of WNYMedia blogs if I use AOL’s browser, as opposed to Firefox. This is the case even after I cleared my Firefox cache. What on Earth is going on? Is WNYMedia.net actually implementing some version of their site that will not be accessible to Firefox users?

What’s going on over there, guys???

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But for the Grace of God….

On a whim I bought a copy of the Buffalo News this morning — usually I just skim through the website — and found a story that hit me right in the gut, about a family that is currently undergoing struggles with their newborn child that are eerily similar to those that we endured with Little Quinn, only their struggles are even harder since their boy has a tracheostomy to go along with his G-tube, where Little Quinn (in about the only time in his life that his medical problems broke in his favor) was able to avoid the trache.

They’re blogging his life’s struggle as well, at Mikey’s Love. Love, it turns out, doesn’t conquer everything — but dammit, you’d think a force that powerful would, you know?

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