🏷️ buffalo

We went to dyngus day the Central Terminal. It was kind of a stupid place to be in freezing cold weather and I can't believe it is "safe " - I had figured they had cleaned it up more until I got inside. When I saw asbestos wrapper furnace piping all shredded up in the ceiling of the room that had food I knew it was as craptastic as ever.

I still think they should just knock it down, even though I got a death threat @paul #31900 for saying it before @paul #31144 . To me it represents one of those absurdities about Buffalo. I am all about preserving history, living in the city, preserving architecture, etc but I think you have to also learn to say when its too far gone. I still cannot believe they let kids in paper masks clean that nasty shit up.




Okay, on to other topics.

Like snow in April



The day before easter, @lilho tried to kill us with a heart attack. This was the second breakfast for the day that came before noon.



Easter night I tried to punch a hotel in the wall of my office closet to see how much bigger it could be. I want to put a bathroom there this summer so that we can open up the space under the foyer stairs and return it to its free standing glory. That way @terry can have a piano underneith it, but we can still have a bathroom on the first floor.





@lilho tried to pretend to be Dolly Parton and @matthew took pictures of it, I wish we had a video instead it would have been much more entertaining.

On the way home rfom lunch today I saw this dolly in the window in one of the closed down shop fronts on main street near Allen. What is up with that building, why are all those store front vacant and why did they leave just this doll in this awkward position and is it black or tan?

This is my 4th journal in 24 hours. Sorry but I am trying to make up for last week. My journal gave me a guilt trip. It is so nice sitting by the fire on a cold day and just playing with my internet.

First of all I really wanted to touch on why "inner city" is used like a swear word. I heard someone refer to inner city youth yesterday but I don't think they meant from the inner city, they just meant poor with a not so good education system.

What about the east coast cities makes the inner city such a bad place? Okay, I know the answer to that but can you even refer to inner city in a newer city like phoenix? Is the inner city a bad place in older cities like Paris? Have people just adopted the term inner city to refer to anything ghetto? Where is the inner city of Buffalo? The map below is all the city of Buffalo. I am even missing some fringe areas.



I thought the red part was the city before. It is the area from Niagara st to the 33 on an east to west plane, and from downtown to Kenmore on a North to south plane. When I asked @terry to point out Buffalo on the map he also said, the area in the ring. In fact I never even realized it continued past their until we really looked at it at a party at @lilho 's house last year when someone who was from south buffalo commented that my view of the city was missing all of south buffalo and most of the east side. I guess I should have known as my Dad grew up in Love Joy but I always though Love Joy was more like Kenmore, not in culture but in the fact I thought it was an independently governed area.

It seems like if Buffalo is really that whole map, then if you were to pick out the inner city you would pick out the part in the ring. But that area doesn't really live up to the term 'inner city'. In fact, most of the wealthiest parts of the city are right in the center of that.

So at some point was saying you are from the inner city a good thing to day. Or maybe what I think of as the inner city was the country back then. Where is the inner city of buffalo?

Imagine if everything changed and all the middle class fled the suburbs and moved into the entire city. Do you think the term inner city could ever be something positive to say about a place, or does it have to much baggage. Will anyone move on up to Buffalo's inner city of the future.

We went on the garden walk, see @matthew #761 for better pics.




My favorite gardens were the ones in the West Village which is kind of at the end of Prospect near downtown.

The ice cream truck was there the whole time.




Afterwards we hid out at Globe Market


This guy must be so warm with so many dreads


Has anyone ever eaten these chocolates. Lemon Pepper Chocolate?

The bees are dead, apparetnly they are stupid enough to swim into soapy water. The landlord later used chemicals even though most of the bees were gone at that point.


Started out with a trip to the Larking Building to see the Leonardo de Vinci exhibit.



When they say that Leonardo invented the helicopter, this is what they meant.








They also had this really nice Rocroft Table that would look sweet in our new dining room. Unfortunately, it is not for sale and says do not touch. Not that I could ever afford it.




Afterwards we stopped Uncle Sam's Army Navy Surplus. It is the largest army navy surplus store I ever saw although it smells extreemly moldy - they really do have everything - that is othe rthan geiger counters. I really want one so I asked. Does anyone know where I could get one in town?



They did have these totally transparent microwave radiation protection suits. I almost bought one.









Afterwards, we headed over to Tifft Farm. Nothing like a nature preserve build on a land fill.

These bees started a nest in our back door, at first I thought we could learn to live with them peacefully - like with the ants and other bugs. Today they sting @terry and started getting realy out of control. We fought back a bit. I killed some with rocks and terry killed some with soap and water. I called the landlord because I think the problem is getting out of control at this point.



Sorry about the blair witchiness of the beginning, I was scared. It might be hard to tell but I think there were about 150 of them.


The traveling barber on elmwood has some interesting signs.







Baby at rust belt books.




The mansion they are redoing on deleware. It has come along so much since it was just a facade but I am still scared of the pillar holding up the porch roof. It kind of buckles.







Beautiful flowers on the edge of an elmwood concrete crack below the old buddies which is becomming a dinner theatre? Seems like they stopped reconstructing a while back.






Hippiegrrlhas stickers on stop signs why don't I.


All of the towne houses by the old Lord Chumley's are for sale. What is the deal with that. @matthew sai dthey are all like 600,000. We decided that we want to go see them.




The side of the buildings.


What is this pretty house? Does anyone know the history of it? It is right by the corner of virgina and elmwood.






The chocolate bar on Chippewa seems like it could be a really fun outting. It is chocolate bar with chocolate drinks and dessert.





WKSE 98.5 is the building right behind our house. I always wondered what that Barn was.

I was writing a comment to congratulate @shawnr #280 on his landing of a great job at PBS in DC and it got me thinking about the BUffalo Brain Drain.

It is so sad that Buffalo is losing him though. Buffalo should be more sad than I am because he is truly one of the young people with a vision and capability to make a change and places like UB are so lame for not having jumped on that.

In fact all of the smartest people I know have left. Maybe I am an idiot for staying (selfish sidenote: the more of you that leave the better I look - if enough tech people leave, I can just lie and say I invented the internet).

@southernyankee, @ajay , @hodown , @haikuster , @codypomeray , @emilyjane , @iriesara , @emily , @jesse , @julie @robin have all already left - not to mention the fact that I have heard e:nejiffer , @ladycroft , @jenks and many others say they expect to work in other cities when they are finally done with their school/interns.

I have a feeling in ther end it will be carey, mike, jill, me, terry and matt- hopefully living on lincoln parkway.

The houses are really fancy, the people are reallly pretentious. I don't have any pics accept for this one of us on the street. The atmosphere felt non-condusive to taking photos.



There was a firmware for my phone that came out and it was reported to fix the video cam problem, maybe tehre will be more video on my journal. The problem is that updating it wipe dout all of my programs. This made me spend the entire night updating my phone which required that I reboot it a millions times. It was so frustrating bt everything is back to normal and google maps work better than ever. I just watched like four episodes of start trek while it "updated." Unfortunately, becase the ocmputer was tied up with the update, I didn't get to finish the new site updates I had planned for today. Soon yo will each get yor own custom theme so yo can pick ot yor own colors sing a fancy schamcy color slider thing I built.

On a totally separate note does anyone know what this building on North Johnson Park (MAP TO: 20%20N%20JOHNSON%20PARK) used to be. It is in total disrepair now but looks like it was something fancy.

Geocaching. I still haven't gone but I want to and I own three different kinds of gps units. Just type your zipcode ito geocaching.com to see all the caches around you

We, @matthew , @terry and I, were gonna go hiking at zoar valley today but it didn't happen because of a million reasons, one of which is that I did not want to bring the tortoise in and e:mattew was working till 2PM. So we ended up going down to the Erie Canal.

The boyscouts were having some sort of jamboree at the battleships. You can find them at the corner of Maine and Maine.
What is up with that?











They are rebuilding the canal, well at least it looks like they are rebuilding the canal.





@matthew decided to take part of the canal home with him.



Buffalo has so many grain mills. These ones are between waterfront, the new casino/projects and the first ward.







We ended up at Times beach - now an wildlife preserve. It seems liek a cool place to watch birds but seems way to nasty and industrial to play at too much.

It all seems to toxic like everywhere i spent my childhood. Here is some info about it



The algae is so long it looks like a furry shag rug.





We tried to walk along the breakwall to get to the old lighthouse but its blocked by an army base.



I got this stress releiving squeezy toy from Roswell Park but the tortoise started to eat it. @matthew took it out of his area and then the squirrels decided to eat it. What the hell is up with it, is it that yummy? I have to admit I kinda wanted to chew on it to.

I am at the infotech niagara show/thing at the convention center. The synacor people talked to me again about leaving my job. They said they hired Mike Cooke, one of my (not very reliable but talented) former students.

Nothing here is interesting. Geico, verizon. We didn't know we were supposed to have a stand.

This won best web site in western NY There is a serious problem with that because it is not the best web site by any means. It looks like a student project and has very little content.

At least the snacks are good.





Ingram micro was giving out fans. They were seriouslt the lmaest ever. They came with a screwdriver to open the battery pack, but unfortunately the screwdriver was the wrong size for the escrew. Why not a latch. They also doubled as a radio. Who needs a cell phone size mini fan/radio. What total crap!



The whole evening was pretty lame. It seemed like a bunch of people that paid a lot of money to be in a group to give each other awards. None of the people nominated were outside the group it seemed. At least the food was pretty good.

The only cool thing I learned was about a group called myhealthfinder.com . They have compiled lots of useful health care data per hospital compared to state average. So you can see which hospital to go to and which ones not to go to. The devloper was showsing us the graphs and was like, if I was having a heart attack I wouldn't go to this one because its way off the charts. You would probably die.

Looking at the graphs and stars Kenmore Mercy looks like a bad choice for just about everything. Its funny that they are based on gold stars @dragonlady7 #5

This is as farewell as it gets. Here is the truck picking up all the Buffalo Current boxes last night.

I wonder if I could get three of those. Does anyone know the people behind the Buffalo Current.