I fear that this will not end well.

In the absence of real information, we bring you the following live-blogs. The Guardian and The Huffington Post are tracking each other pretty closely now. There's different information at the New York Times and the National Iranian-American Council Of course Tehran is 8 1/2 hours ahead of us, so last call is 3:30pm EST.

In other news, 400,000 angry indigenous Peruvians called off their protest when the government admitted they hadn't bothered to consult anyone whose land they'd decided to sell Thirty-four people died in the conflict and the prime minister resigned.

Look it's not like I hate the government or anything, I just wish they'd pay closer attention to the governed [from whom they derive their just powers, right].

- Z

Item! Keep your meat-hole clean. While the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets is fucking around with a Freedom of Information request, Weggies gave it to me straight. Their meat grinder used to connect to another machine, and now it doesn't. The inspector felt that the hole coming out of the meat grinder should be capped [it wasn't] and gave Wegs a "non-finable critical deficiency."

Item! I am the Troy Tulowitzki of base humor. Anyone else want to try fitting Pablo Neruda, Joel Giambra, and the US Geological Survey into a joke about public sex, while commenting on the chronic underfunding of the Erie County public library system? Can you do it in under three sentences? Yeah, thought so.

Item! Don't be a cock to the press. This is pretty self-explanatory: we have a press and you don't. Furthermore, we're underpaid and cranky and if we're writing about you we already think you're a fucking idiot. Oh yeah, and we record pretty much every telephone conversation we have. What is wrong with you?

::DOWNLOAD SOUND::

- Z

I will refrain from adding my own commentary.

Since at least mid-June, BRO has been posting negative stories about Buffalo that are saved to a hidden cache page and not posted to or made mention of on the main pages that we are all familiar with.

I didn't read about the YWCA heroin-at-daycare case on BRO, did you? Yet here it is, and it was Dugg by nearly two thousand users. Which put it on the frontpage of one of the web's most visited pages, seen in the neighborhood of 200,000 times.

Here's a story BRO didn't post (but did) about the man who was beaten with his own prosthetic leg. I especially love the accompanying graphic. It's been posted to Digg.

To top it off, BRO has even posted stories from way outside city limits - Lockport, County of Niagara, is representing on BRO's cache site, with sodomizing pitbulls galore. Digg? Check. Over 1,000 Diggs, to be precise.

[...]

So, while promoting the wonders of Buffalo to the local audience, Buffalo Rising is perfectly content to promote some very ugly, very negative stories about Buffalo (and Lockport, County of Niagara), to a separate worldwide audience in order to artificially inflate web statistics.

- Z

Ya so I started talking to B-52* on our trip about an idea i had a while ago (e:zobar,37324) and now it's bugging me, beacuse I'm totally convinced I'm a visionary genius. I've even given it a name that I think is quirky yet compelling: The Muckraker & Picayune.

The idea is, I'd start out with a cryptic classified ad in the paper [since I kind of get the five-finger discount here] and maybe craigslist that basically just says:

INTERESTING PEOPLE WANTED for new publication. www.* for info or mail submissions to *.

Submissions: limit one per issue, 8.5"x11", anything else goes. Then I'd collect the entries and get them printed up & distributed every full moon. [Not that that's really significant or relevant in any way, but 'Sturgeon Moon 2007' sounds cooler than 'v6n32.']

But here's why: the newspapers around here are for shit, present company included. A long time ago my paper had a real DIY feel, but now it's old and stodgy like NPR. The editorial at the Buffalo News is idiotic, and they'd be better off just reprinting the AP feed. The Beast, if they're still in business, is only in it for shock value. The guys at Buffalo Rising are political space cadets** and really, you can only be so elitist when you run a meet-your-merchant magazine. There's a new one called Block Club, and I wish them all the luck in the world but Buffalo Rising will not tolerate another meet-your-merchant in this city, and I doubt the public is really that interested in the private lives of potential future advertisers.

The Muckraker would at least be a fun & hopefully interesting diversion. At RIT there was an approximately similar publication which at one point enjoyed greater readership than the 'official' magazine. Only problem: how the Hell do you pay for something like this? I don't think it'll cost much, but it'll still cost something. You can't really sell advertising, because [theoretically] anybody can get anything printed in it for free. You can't really sell subscriptions, because you can get it free at the coffeeshop. Voluntary donations just don't work. Merch? An expanded edition for subscribers?

Any ideas? Any writers?

- Z

_______________

• Well, if (e:dragonlady7) is B-17 then I guess that makes her younger sister B-29 and her next younger sister B-52. Makes sense to me.
  
• You want proof? In 2005, Newell donated $5000 to each mayoral campaign - Brown, Calvaneso, Einach, Flynn, even Jackson. Who the fuck does that?

'Buffalo's bloggers took a break Saturday from criticizing Joel Giambra, Wal-Mart and the Buffalo Sabres' proposed new logo to eat some barbecue and meet their cyber peers.'

'only about a dozen bloggers ... attended'

'Saturday's event is the fourth BloggerCon meeting for members of the area blogging community.'

'The social-networking aspect of blogging just comes with the territory," said Derek Punaro'

WTF?! WNY Media has a get-together once a year and, out of their less than 20 members, half show up. What's the deal, call a roast pig a 'conference,' and it'll make B1 in the local paper? We've done more get-togethers in the last four months than they've done in the last four years, usually on less than two days' notice, and there's usually at least a dozen people there each time. And furthermore, we have no offline picnics because when we unplug ... we're still online.

(e:strip) - The Jimmy Olsen of the Buffalo Blogging community.

Who's the new PR director? You need to send the News an angry letter to the editor. I have it on good authority that they'll print anything.

- Z

I picked up a copy of 'Kepa 3 Gallery News,' v1n1 at lunch today. Very amusing. It is a one-page, front-and-back, 11"x17" xeroxed paper, written and illustrated entirely in laundry marker. I liked the following two articles, which were necessarily short due to the medium:

Mystery of El Greco Christ Revealed

Prado, Madrid- Officials find "trimmed" portion from middle section confirms tighty whitey prototype theory.

Casino to promote fine art using Vegas style. Is it possible to believe that big dollars will finally promote local fine art!? Past mayor Tony said Friday that this and pulled pork are win wins for our city.

It gave me an interesting idea for a concept newspaper: find a dozen interesting people and give them each a page. Content, photos, graphics, design are entirely their responsibility. Use InDesign, Word, paste-up, typewriter, marker, MS Paint, whatever. Collect and publish regularly.

- Z