I will keep this short and just give you two reasons.

The NYTimes has been giving Zilly Cakes more coverage for her Obama/Lincoln cupcake portrait than the Buffalo News.

And then I saw this on the Buffalo News. This is part of a 2008 retrospective of best cartoons.



Buffalo Wings? That isn't even a clever play on words. Are you trying to say that Tim Russert's virtue is somehow related to bar food? It doesn't make any sense!

What is wrong with you?

I have a new favorite game.

It is called Make My Head Grow. At a Nordic gaming festival game programmer extraordinaire, 2dboy, was given 48 hours to conceive, design, and program a game. And thus Make My Head Grow was born.

The game is simple. You are in a box and your opponent is in another box. You have to push his box off the ledge by pushing your own box against his. But you don't foolishly do it with your pathetically small arms. No, you have to do it by slamming your head against your own box. To get even more momentum you can slam your head into the ground to make it swell to even greater inertia filled sizes.

Take a look at the gameplay



It is simple, and enjoyable. But the real action is when you push your opponent off the ledge. You are then treated to the finest tune ever written.



super awesome

The property management company who ran my last apartment has been renovating a house on the corner of elmwood and lafayette for a few years now, never quite finishing it seems.

Since the end of summer there has been a sign, saying that Zilly Cakes was coming soon. I thought that it might be some chain bakery I had never heard of. Every time I would walk by it I would think to go to the listed website, but forget by the time I got back home. Then I just happen to see an article on them for making an Obama cupcake portrait.



So I go to their website and it turns out Zilly Cakes is owned and ran by Zilly Rosen in our own Buffalo. She has had the garage portion of the building rezoned so she can have a bakery and shop. Check out some of her work





She won a gingerbread house contest in 2007 with this



When she does open she will make cakes to order, teach classes, and sell baked yummy goodness. From the site:

Our retail line includes a fresh cupcake bar, icing shots, naked cakes (rated G of course) and cupcake flights in our special tasting booth that last 1 hour and that you can book in advance. In addition to cupcakes individually or by the dozen, we'll have a small but incredibly artistic and delicious line of decorated cookies, miniature cakes, and little stacked cakes for sale

Yum. Yum.

Thank you god and Al Gore for inventing the internet.

Dear employment,

Thank you for paying a visit. We really should do this more often.

kisses.

I just heard about this hot new game coming out for the Wii and I have to ask...




WTF!

In this exciting game there are 30 minigames. In one, you use your remote to fill a bottle, then hold that remote like a bottle to feed a baby, and to finish it off you make the baby burp!

Then there is baby racing. Where you try to keep your baby standing as they race down an inflated bounce house. You can also jump (babies jump?) to knock down the other babies.




I understand babies. They are cute, they make funny faces and noises. I get it. But this level of role play just creeps me out. At least with the tomagachi you could quietly feed them during math class. But frantically pressing a button to make a fully-customizable burp? That is just sick.

Have you heard of this bizarre product from Microsoft. Basically, all those budding vocalists out there can sing into your computer and Songsmith will provide the music. That is a pretty nifty idea. But, like so many nifty ideas Microsoft fails to deliver anything remotely like what we imagine. Instead of quality sound samples we get MIDI. MIDI? Yes, MIDI, in this day in age.

But what happens when you take the vocal track from some of the most iconic music? Just listen to the first minute if you can to see how horribly Songsmith hacks apart these classics.

First, Roxanne by the Police. This is as close as it gets to sounding good.


But it gets so much worse. SO MUCH. Listen to We Will Rock You by Queen


But the winner has to go to Love Shack by the B-52's. This doesn't even sound... like... what the fuck?



edit:

holy shit... Van Halen the lounge act.

If you are reading A-Ha I think this would make an excellent storyboard for your comeback music video.

Buffalo is a little rough around the edges, but a beautiful city. We have some absolute gems in this town and many homes of the middle class from the turn of the century have more character and charm than in other cities. Architecture is clearly part of what makes this city so beautiful. With the Darwin Martin house and renewed talks (and endless studies) about the Richardson Complex a phrase I keep hearing is "architectural tourism". Tourists will flock to the city. Bringing with them money for hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Why the Richardson/Olmstead Complex website even says that architectural tourists "spend a great deal more than the average visitor to the area."

So, I decided to google this architectural tourism to see what sort of pony shoes other cities were putting on to draw money spewing tourists. First result: flickr. Ok, a fluke. Second result: Buffalo as a Museum. What followed was a series of sites on the various cities of Italy. From the tower of Pisa to the Vatican. We are so fucked.

I have to assume that our local organizations are taking us for a ride, inventing this brand of tourism. I always wondered, who are these tourists? Who gets a yen to go see the work of their favorite late 19th century architect and make a whole vacation out of it? More so, can these people exist in such numbers as to justify spending this kind of money of fixing up crumbling buildings?

Now, I firmly believe that fixing up the gems is essential to bringing back this town from the dead. But not to draw a dozen tourists to gaze in wonder at an insane asylum, but to draw business and keep people here. Our mentality seems to be we have passed our prime and our best years are behind us. So, we wont tear down a few run of the mill homes to build a hotel. We will jam up a successful business expansion over two years because that means ripping down a home with a faulty foundation. We are scared to damage already damaged specters of our golden age.

makes me wonder if our benefactor has abandoned the Statler Tower yet.

No,

Thank the heavens, I am not going to go on about having a viable local TV station here in Buffalo. No, that would be much to crass and I am sure the Buffalo Rising readerhip has already contemplated how to get millions to move here with the finest in public access. Rather, a moment to highlight some of the finest in local TV adverts.



John Waters. I understand your work now!



rap music. It sells clothing. Dinette sets? Not so much.



That crap.. it just boggles the mind



Already I want to move millions to Rockingham county!