Sam Hoyt doesn't love his kids if he'd damage their mother, but nevertheless I expect he'll be re-elected. He has a number of things in his favor: A) he has name recognition in the most apathetic electorate in the nation; B) his party has never looked down upon character flaws such as this; C) despite this "unlucky" mishap he is still at the top of what is the lowest common denominator as far as politicians go.

It's a shame, it really is. I've never really had an opinion one way or another about Sam Hoyt, just impressions - he seems inoffensive, he's around, every so often I get mailings from him which illustrate how government in NY moves at a glacier's pace. He is one of the local political class and he owes his current position to his father, who he succeeded as Assemblyman. He is former Chairman (you're going to love this) of the Assembly Oversight, Analysis and Investigations Committee. He currently chairs the Assembly Local Governments Committee, which I expect is a chair he won't hold for much longer.

This is a major disappointment. Now he is blaming his opponents! I have to be honest, I had no idea that he even had an opponent. The guy has been in office 16 years and it is fair to say that he is part of the political class in Buffalo that has been long on talk and short on delivering. Based on that alone he shouldn't be in office, but we all know he'll retain his seat in the Assembly. We've never punished bad politicians and never will. Nor will a Democrat ever get hung out to dry by colleagues or the media for cheating on his wife - even when she is dying of cancer, eh Johnny boy?

God help our city, although I don't pray for Buffalo anymore.

So if you had to guess, who you would say was the highest paid rapper last year? Jay-Z, Sean Combs? No - it was 50 Cent, who earned $150,000,000 last year. You surely must be wondering, as I did, how the hell he earned that much money in 12 months.



The new king of hip-hop wealth banked $100 million after taxes on one deal alone when his stake in VitaminWater's parent, Glaceau, was bought by Coca-Cola as part of a $4.1 billion deal.

He's a true businessman!

LeRoi Moore, saxophonist of the Dave Matthews Band, died at the age of 46 as a result of complications from an ATV accident two months ago - - it always bothers me when musicians die too soon.

An unfortunate legacy of Heath Ledger's death is his daughter, Matilda, growing up without her father. It turns out that Heath Ledger's will was never updated to include Matilda, so the actors that completed his role in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law) donated their earnings from the film to the little girl. It isn't as if the girl wasn't destined to be a millionaire and wouldn't have lived off of her father's money the rest of her life, but I still think it was a touching gesture from a few heavy hitters in Hollywood.

Here is an ad hoc manga avatar that reflects today's look and general demeanor!

Growing up I was a real product of my generation - dad used to play Genesis, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Miles Davis (the bad stuff), U2, Sade and so on whenever we were in the car. So the soundtrack to my early life was heavily laden with the likes of:

No Jacket Required



and Face Value.



Awesome albums that came from the man's soul while dealing with a painful divorce. "If Leaving Me Is Easy?" Only a wounded bird can chirp a song like that my friend.

Well, it hasn't been Phil's year, I have to say. Mr. Collins will now live in infamy as the British record holder for largest ever payout to an ex-wife. Article - Even larger than Sir Paul's payment to that beeotch Heather Mills! That shit hurts. I'd weep too, man. He's paid a total of $84 million to his ex-wives!

Since the songs were so great that came from what he was feeling during his first divorce, one can only speculate as to what kind of record he'd make based on this most recent unlucky mishap.

I'm a dick so I went ahead and speculated for everybody:



OMG! Oh, and by the way, please take note of his innovations in the sport of love. You've heard of the most recent Hollywood trend of dumping people via text, right? Consider this evolutionary precursor to the text dump:

After taking advantage of technological advances and infamously dumping wife No. 2, Jill Tavelman, by fax back in 1994, he was forced to pay $34 million.

That is a special kind of loathe.

I was introduced to the works of Cormac McCarthy during the wintertime, which I suppose is a bit of a poetic time to be introduced to the works of a man who typically writes violent, post-apocalyptic books vaguely reminiscent of Faulkner's prose style. His best work I'm told (I'm going to study it this fall) is Blood Meridian, which is an incredibly rich text and is widely compared to Moby Dick. I say study rather than read - almost every page is littered with accurate historical references (even seemingly innocuous sentences), and most people that read the book never really understand how monumental a book Blood Meridian is in that regard. It is like reading Tolstoy and not ever really having an intricate grasp of 19th Century Russian society, or like reading Nabokov without an intricate grasp of 19th Century Russian literature.

The one book that has won Mr. McCarthy the most recent praise (and the cringeworthiness of being associated with Oprah) is The Road, which won last year's Pulitzer Prize. Like most of McCarthy's books, the plot is not the focus and is sometimes non-existent. The strength of his writing, particularly with The Road, is how he draws out the most human of our elements in the midst of an end of the world scenario. The focus of the book is not the setting but the journey, and how a father and son cope with survival when civilization has been lost. McCarthy refers to it in the book as "carrying the fire," which is simply another way of saying that in many ways civilization, the goodness and the very humanity that we exhibit really hasn't been lost, and you learn that the "fire" is encapsulated by the boy.

Well, like "No Country For Old Men" and "All The Pretty Horses," The Road has been adapted for the screen and will be released this November. Viggo Mortensen plays the role of the father, and a relatively unknown child actor from Australia plays the son. The film was largely shot in Pittburgh, with some locations elsewhere. The NYT has an article about the movie you can read here - - apparently the final scenes were filmed in Erie, near the shores of our Great Lake. Does this mean that our general area is good for filming what seems to be bombed out landscape half of the year? I don't know, but Viggo seems to be really excited about the child star they brought on to play the son - apparently he is a savant in the same mold as Haley Joel Osment.