Airport Bar...Woo00oo!

Taken at "Jakes Bar" at the Buffalo-Niagara International Airport. Apparently Labatt moved their US headquarters to Buffalo...Makes sense...since my first real beer was a blue.

Live at Trimania

DJ Zuk with Sax Accompaniment. Rockin the oldies but goodies. This would count as my "weekly dose of house" I guess.

The Great Industrial Sadness

I am, for the first time in many years, back in my hometown of Buffalo, NY. It's a bittersweet trip; most of my friends have moved away from the city, and of those who've remained, only a select few seem to really be making progress.

I took a trip down the Elmwood strip today. In my youth (not as long ago as I'm making it sound) this was the place to be...a hipster haven, before hipster became a self parody. Walking down here now I see that most of the shops are boarded and shuttered, littered with "for lease" signs that will, in all probability, remain there for some time, being that the city is currently bankrupt. Panhandling seems to be moving its way down the Ave as well. Once confined to the area south of Lafayette, I'm noticing it more and more in front of the remains of Don Apparel and Mondo Video, and further down by Delevan, in front of the former ETS location (they have since moved into a former Burger King...at least one thing to be proud of, I suppose).

More and more, though, what truly surprises me is the dedication of people from here. We ran into someone carrying a Lexington Co-Op bag in Remedy Teas back in Seattle, We chatted a bit, small talk, and then Em in a friendly gesture, made a joke about whether or not he was "glad to have finally made it out of there." The defensive reaction we received was unexpected, to say the least. And a part of me can relate to the sentiment behind it. But not in the sense that the place is what it once was. I came here hoping to find some glimpse of what I'd left behind. Instead, I've found nothing. Just the scarred remains of a city too proud to admit defeat and try a new solution, still holding out hope for the return of the unionized blue-collar middle class of yesteryear. I want to root for my hometown (although the sabres make that harder and harder with each successive game) but there's a reason why educated professionals keep looking outside of the city for gainful employment. Cheap housing will not be enough to revitalize this city, and it's time for Buffalo to stop thinking in terms of what it can offer current city residents and start thinking of what it can do to attract potential residents. If the job market within the city shifts to more college educated pursuits, it might just be the wake-up call the city needs to bring itself into the 21st century. Though with a former city motto of "talkin' proud," it's definately an uphill battle.

3G down in Seattle?

I don't know who reads this thing, or if anyone who does is in the Seattle area, but has anyone noticed sporadic 3G coverage over the last few days? I haven't had any dropped calls or anything, and I doubt the network is at capacity, since there's such a limited number of devices that work on the frequency available, but I'm curious to know if anyone else is experiencing problems.

String Theory

I'm not the scientist in this blog, and I'm a mediocre mathematician at best (a chain of bad teachers...long story), so I'm probably not the best person to be writing about this. Nevertheless, I find it interesting that apparently a composer at Princeton has used String Theory mathematics to graphically represent the "universe of possible chords."

From the article:

Tymoczko's answer, which led last summer to the first paper on music theory
ever published in the journal Science, is that the cosmos of chords consists of
weird, multidimensional spaces, known as orbifolds, that turn back on themselves
with a twist, like the Möbius strips math teachers love to trot out to prove to
students that a two-dimensional figure can have only one side. Indeed, the
simplest chords, which consist of just two notes, live on an actual Möbius
strip. Three-note chords reside in spaces that look like prisms--except that
opposing faces connect to each other. And more complex chords inhabit spaces
that are as hard to visualize as the multidimensional universes of string
theory.

Maybe it would help me to brush up on my geometry before I try and take up an instrument?

Rolled a 1 on a Save vs. Death

News about in the blogosphere tells me that Gary Gygax, the father of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away. I tip my helmet to you sir, for the many awkward basement years. I propose a collective 20 sided die roll at approximately 10 pm CST in his honor.

 

RIP Mr. Gygax.