The Buffalo Spree’s annual best-of issue is out, and Jen14221 won best blog, quite deservedly so.

I did, however, get to participate in an “ask the expert” discussion and I talked about blogging, natch. Note the placement of the sign in the picture. K.C. and I had a good time with that.

Saturday night, part of my older daughter’s birthday present was to take place. She and a friend were to see Vanessa Hudgens (of High School Musical fame) perform at the Fair.

It was a great late afternoon, not too hot, lots of people. We got some food and took a walk over to the Moo-ternity ward before heading over to the grandstand.

We had some pretty decent seats, too, as we watched the opening act, Rooney, perform:

Halfway through Rooney’s act, it began to rain buckets, and I kept my eye on the radar because storms off on the horizon looked very ominous indeed:

At 7:37, a bit before Rooney took the stage:

Just before 8:00, as the rain began during Rooney’s set:

They ended their set at around 8:30, and we waited 1/2 hour for Hudgens’ act to set up. By 9:00, it wasn’t looking good:

The lightning began getting closer and closer, and we caught a glimpse of Hudgens being hustled backstage as they began breaking everything down for the passing electrical storm. The audience was sent to wait in the grandstand area while a decision was made.

As the crew lowered the overhead doors in the grandstand area, I asked an usher why they hadn’t called it yet. The storms were only getting worse. She replied that it didn’t look like it was going to happen, and they were waiting for a final decision to be made. Kudos to the Fair organizers for handing out free ponchos, without which we would have been completely drenched to the bone during our 15-minute walk back to the car.

This is my site. It is my home. I write this for free, and I don’t charge you for anything.

As a result, you do not dictate to me what I write, how I write it, or when I write. You don’t get your money back. I, in turn, do not dictate to you anything. If there is a worthy cause or an event that I choose to promote, I will ask you to go. I will not instruct you to do anything.

Certainly some may infer from my choice of story how I feel or what I think about a topic, and that should be pretty self-evident by now.

I most likely won’t publish everything you want me to publish, but be clear that I owe no one “equal time” or an equal measure of outrage any more than any other editorial writer or broadcaster does. I very seldom meta-blog, but in the last 24 hours I’ve had two people give me shit about what I post and how I post, and I’m putting the kibosh on that right now.

If you don’t like it because I’m not sufficiently outraged by the fact that Powers’ campaign didn’t do rapid response to the smear in McCarthy’s column, by all means write it on your blog, or go commiserate with Buffalo Bean and have a Republican circle-jerk of outrage over there. If you don’t like it because I haven’t posted as vigorously about John Edwards’ affair, by all means go post about it at Red State or call 1-800-282-2882 between 12 - 3 PM weekdays.

For instance, I didn’t even print the fact that Jack Davis has admitted that his payments of $5,000 each to the wives of the chairmen of the Independence Party in Erie and Monroe Counties were bribes, and apologized for them. The Monroe IP called them bribes and shitcanned the party chair and his wife. Tony Orsini of Venice, FL hasn’t been shitcanned yet, but the fact that Davis is now acknowledging that they were bribes doesn’t bode well for the powerful man. Only a few weeks ago, they tried to explain them away by saying that Mrs. Orsini was selling names of Democratic “players” who had “worked with the Independence Party in the past“. Davis’ campaign manager said,

The payments were meant to help build relationships with members of the Independence Party, which the Davis campaign sees as an important group for winning the election, according to Davis’ campaign manager, Luke Vaughn.

Those payments will continue, even though the Colons have left the party, Vaughn said Monday. “The goal of the payments was to help build relationships with Independence Party members, and that effort continues,” Vaughn said.

Now, Davis says:

his payments to the wives of Independence Chairment Anthony L. Orsini Jr. of Erie County and Rafael Colon of Monroe County for “consulting” services constituted a “mistake.”

“I am severing my relationships with the consultants in question and apologize for my part in the spectacle,” he said.

There’s a reason why Davis is apologizing now, and it has more to do with the fact that people in the district are “apathetic” to him in 2008 than it has to do with whether attempting to bribe the IP chairs was ok in April, but bad in August.

This blog isn’t the newspaper. I can’t and won’t print everything. If that affects your state of mind in some way, I suggest that you get over it or click away.

I’ll be taking your questions at Buffalo.com at 1pm today during lunchtime on a new feature over there hosted by Evan Parker Pierce

Update: sorry, had to cancel due to work. We’ll try again soon

UPDATE THE SECOND: Next Wednesday at 12pm.

Just like old times, Buffalo Geek and yours truly will join Professor Hardwick during the first hour of Hardline this coming Sunday at 10am.

Incidentally, 2nd hour in-studio guest is NYS Assembly candidate Jane Corwin (facing Mike Cole in the Republican primary).

10am on Sunday on WBEN AM-930, or online at WBEN dot COM

Unfortunately for this week’s discussion, our spam filter is particularly harsh on the words “casino” and other terminology that is associated with gambling. If your comment is deleted or thrown into moderation, that is the reason. Shoot me an email and I’ll post anything that gets blocked. Sorry for the inconvienence.

Courtesy of Wordle, HT Kevin Lim

From Kelly at Byzantium Shores, who has been doing this longer than I have:

BTW, Alan: your commenters are lunatics. When did that happen, anyway?

I’m not going to go all Buffalo Rising on everyone and start arbitrarily deleting or censoring people’s comments, but it probably wouldn’t kill anyone to pause and think before clicking “submit”.

I’m thinking of switching the blog up a little. I’m thinking of a new template and of making it a quasi-group blog, permitting certain invited people to post on a periodic basis. Mostly people who like to blog but don’t have the time or desire to maintain a blog full-time anymore.

What, if any, requests do you have with respect to a new template? I don’t want to do anything too dramatic, but I’d like to switch up the design a bit, modernize it to incorporate some new functionality in Wordpress 2.5.

One of the things we had on the old shit.0 white-on-black template was truncated posts that you had to click-through to read the rest of. I didn’t necessarily have a problem with click-through, per se - it was the overall lack of functionality I had with that template that frustrated me. And don’t worry - I won’t be reverting to that.

I write the blog for my own benefit, but am mindful of the fact that you read it and that you don’t want to wade through a bunch of crap. Thoughts you have go in comments and I thank you for them.

Direct link to the video at Channel 4 is here.

This year, my wife and I both turn 40 years of age. She goes first - today. To my beautiful wife who loves me and keeps me sane, Happiest of Happy Birthdays.

Also, when I first moved here, there was a little crew of four of us at work who used to have lunch together just about every day in this little windowed conference room in our office. We’d read the paper and talk and laugh about, well everything. As of tomorrow, they’ll all be gone ‘cept for me. I wish the other three all the best and miss mocking the News’ trivia quiz and perusing the real estate transactions and obits.

I was interviewed about the blog recently, and decided to put up a FAQ for people. Sorry.

1. Who are you?
I’m Alan Bedenko, a lawyer working in Buffalo and living in its suburbs. I have a wife, two kids, a house, and two cats.

2. Can I hire you as a lawyer?
Nope.

3. How can I contact you?
buffalopundit[at]gmail.com

4. Will you post items sent to you by other people?
Generally not unsolicited ones. When I take a break, I will invite people to guest blog. If you’d like to be considered, you should have a body of work that I can review to determine whether you’d be a good fit. Email me at the answer to number 3, above. You’re welcome to send me anything else you have, but I can’t promise you anything.

5. When did you start this blog?
In September 2003 as the “WNY for Wesley Clark” blog. When Clark left the campaign in March 2004, it morphed later that year into Buffalo Pundit, focusing more on local goings on than national ones. The Clark blog still exists at http://wny4clark.blogspot.com.

6. Why do you blog?
I like to write, I like to have an outlet to express my opinion, and I like to advocate for and against things. This is purely a hobby, and although I am grateful for the traffic and attention I get on a daily basis, I’d still be doing this even if I got 10 people reading it per day.

7. What are your favorite topics?
I don’t really have anything. There’s so much material from which to select when writing a post, I guess it’s safest to say that whatever I post about is my favorite topic of that minute. I do tend to gravitate to posts about cars or international politics when I get bored or frustrated with more local, political topics. Which is frequent.

8. What topics get the most attention?
That’s hard to say. Sometimes I’m quite surprised by the topics that generate comments while others don’t. I do recall that a very old post about Wal*Mart, and the Ron Paul posts from earlier this year got well over 100 comments. Topics about the Outer Harbor and Inner Harbor also tend to generate interest.

9. You’ve got a big mouth, why not put your money where that mouth is and run for office if you think you know everything?
Well, I tried that and didn’t do too well.

10. What’s your take on city versus suburb?
I think that all of the communities of WNY, as defined for me by the 8th Judicial District, sink or swim together. We should be working together for solutions that will help to lift all of WNY up from its economic depression, and not pit one community here against another. The suburb/city divide is one of the most idiotic anachronisms to still attract people’s attention, and I really cannot tolerate either side claiming to be superior over the other.

11. Why did you move here?
Have you seen what real estate and day care cost in Boston or the New York tri-state area? If you have a good job, living here is a no-brainer.

12. How can I get my site on your blogroll / links?
Shoot me an email. I generally ask that you provide my site with a reciprocal link.

13. Whom do you speak for? Myself and no one else. Nothing I write here or anywhere else under the BuffaloPundit handle is attributable to anyone except myself. Not WNYMedia.net, not my employer, not my family, and not my pets, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Yesterday, I was driving to work during the height of the storm. I was on the Thruway heading west when I heard - and then saw - a large FedEx jet coming in for a landing. The winds were devastatingly strong from the west, with a very low ceiling and near-blizzard conditions.

I watched the jet’s wings wobble in the wind, and thought to myself that whoever that pilot his, he’s damn good if he can line up a landing with these sorts of brutal cross-winds.

I twitted, “Just watched a FedEx plane land in crazy snow and wind. Very hairy.”

Today, that little anecdote made its way to the Buffalo News. I think it’s the first time a twitter post has made its way to the pages of the paper here in town.

In many ways, the small but growing local community on Twitter reminds me of what the Buffalo blogosphere was like in 2004 - small, somewhat inside-baseball, and everyone followed each other’s goings-on.

My blogroll is pretty much unmanageable at this point, but seems to have plateaued - whatever new sites I find are generally offset by someone essentially abandoning a site.

Twitter is a micro-blog platform that enables people to post what’s generally supposed to be an answer to the question, “What Are You Doing?”, and the size is limited to that of a text message.

Anyhow, chalk one up for Twitter in the Buffalo News, although it’s most certainly not the first time a twit, in the Pythonesque sense, has made it to the pages of our local daily.

First, click on the new front page (if you haven’t already), and click around & check it out. Then come back here. I’ll wait.

K, done?

Now, please click over to this post by BuffaloGeek, who discusses some upcoming changes being proposed for the network. We want your input.

If you’re running Mac OSX, and if you’re a blogger or otherwise deal with images on a regular basis, do yourself a favor and download the free beta of Plasq’s Skitch.

I have never found anything quite as easy for capturing, manipulating, editing, captioning, and uploading images. Pre-Skitch, I’d have to involve Grab, change the resulting tiff to a jpg via Preview, make changes via Photoshop, and upload via Flickr or Wordpress.

With Skitch, I can drag an image into the program, make changes in a few seconds, and hit a button to upload it to flickr or Skitch’s own hosting. What took 5-10 minutes now takes 60 seconds.

Have you seen the new frontpage for WNYMedia.net? We’ve gone back to a portal - with a much better design than before. The idea is to make it more of a news site than just another blog.

But don’t you think, as a practical matter, “Western New York Media dot net” or “Double-u enn why media dot net” is too much of a mouthful? We need a new name for the site, I think. Any ideas?

What with this being the end of the year, and given that it’s going to be a pretty slow news cycle (i.e., your friendly neighborhood Buffalopundit is hard up for crap about which to write), let’s review what we talked about in 2007.

Ah, remember Shorter Buzz? We all wish Mary well on her hiatus. I hope it’s packed with Catholicism, beer, Wagner / Bach, and all things German.

Spitzer was on Day 4, and made a rousing speech calling for statewide unity, growth, and prosperity. We’re approaching day 365 and I don’t know that we’re any closer to that at all. The speech was light on “war with Bruno” and “licenses for illegals”.

I posted very lightly about “Troopergate”, because I didn’t find it interesting. What I do, however, find interesting is that anybody working for the piece of crap that passes for New York State government has access to a helicopter or a private jet. All in all, I was unimpressed by Governor Spitzer’s first year.

Hevesi and Holt found themselves in a world of trouble.

In January, people were still talking about the WNYMedia.net bloggers being blacklisted from WBEN. Good times.

Bass Pro. The story that keeps on giving - writing about a store that we’ve been chasing for half a decade or more. In 2007 we turned to Bass Pro on the Central Wharf. It was in January that we first heard rumblings of that aborted trial balloon. I still think it’s a perfect location, so there.

Also, remember this rule for any discussion about Buffalo development or preservation: Must be done vs. would be nice.

February was a bit slower, but we were embroiled in Albany politics 101, which dealt with the selection of Hevesi’s replacement. Same old, same old.

Much as idiotic arguments over strips of grass in front of Greek Diners are same old, same old. Thank God all other problems are solved so that we can really focus our ire on Diners.

I asked Buffalonians to take pictures of their winter beaters (which is a double entendre) and submit them to Flickr.

Dale Volker, WNY’s best unintended comedian, got into it with Scott Brown. “So, a 34-year incumbent walks into a public hearing…” At least he didn’t call anyone a “Bohunk”. That day.

By February, WNYMedia.net had its own space - a studio and everything. In other news, we still have it!

In February, I called the XSPAND tax lien sale at 105% “found money”. It still has yet to be approved.

Homeland Security needed some information on cross-border travel in WNY. Because, um, we live on the border.

In March, Al Coppola got his payback a freshly-created city job not long after he tried to spoil the race for cousin Marc waged a valiant effort to return to the State Senate.

There was some discussion on teh intertubes earlier this year about a flea market downtown. I can’t imagine it would be that difficult for someone to get a deal to use a downtown surface parking lot to set that up, but as it stands now nothing’s happened. It is Buffalo, after all, and if we can’t have precise perfection, we’ll settle for nothing less, dammit!

Cigarette taxes = Genocide. Godwin laughs.

By late March, we had promises of a signed Bass Pro deal. Yeah, right. But I liked it nonetheless. It was dead before it took its first breath, though. It’s interesting how much “debate” goes on in this town over what to do with the areas now overridden with weeds and asphalt. Some even started making comparisons to places that don’t compare.

Ultimately, however, WNYMedia.net and the WNY Coalition for Progress co-hosted a well-attended and well-received panel discussion on the Canal Side project.

Remember City Hall stonewalling on the story about Byron Brown’s kid taking the family car without permission? Sometimes it’s smart to just let the story go, and let it play out in 2 days rather than 2 weeks.

As early as April, I predicted Collins’ victory. I thought it’d be a squeaker. I was wrong. As a side note, don’t talk about using an 89 cent pen to help run your town when that pen should only be costing you a dime.

Whoever bought this ad in the Buffalo Challenger should be outed and subject to outrage and ridicule.

Freshman State Assemblyman Mike Cole drank too much at an Albany bar whilst watching a Sabres game, and all he got was this lousy censure. Meanwhile, Freshman Senator Antoine Thompson took to the floor to argue against the passage of a bill that he himself co-sponsored.

Remember June, when WNYMedia.net was down for, like, a week all so we could bring you a craptacular white-on-black template that pretty much everybody hated?

Me, neither.

At least the template-that-never-was was gone by December.

2007 introduced us to Jon Powers. 2008 is your chance to vote for him.

Hell, even I gave it a shot. And I won in Cheektowaga, even though I got creamed everywhere else. I posted some stories taking the county Control Board to task, but no one really seemed to care very much. Too bad. I’m going to keep writing them. I will also continue to mock Six Sigma. I don’t care how superbly awesome it might be. The whole terminology is begging to be mocked. Six Sigma black belt?

For the record, here’s a short list of stuff I want to see built in Western New York. Can you Digg it?

In September, this blog turned 4. Potty training has been slow, but it knows its A-B-Cs. We also saw the inaugural use of the Failboat, symbolizing the vanguard of political excellence in WNY and NYS.

Speaking of which, who thought the County Clerk’s race would become more interesting than the race for County Executive? You’re playing kindergarten. He’s playing in the big leagues.

I find that I hardly used the “Don’t Tase my ____, bro” often enough. But it was so apt for Vince Anello’s brother, Matteo.

In the immortal words of Public Enemy, don’t believe the hype.

The Bass Pro story may be more boring now, without Tim Tielman around to verbally assault it, but that’s why we have Route 5. Fatigue starts to set in, though, when we undergo yet another “dialogue” about “planning”, when neither word is quite right. With Route 5, we have the added attraction of Buffalo Rising acting as the unofficial spokessite for the Waterfront Coalition. The doctrine of laches came up as an overall response to that group, and WBFO appearances by Buffalo Rising writers and Common Councilman Mickey Kearns contained oh so much fresh meat for this blogger. As does just about any inane anti-suburb flame. The Waterfront Coalition paid for a billboard that has the distcintion of being both ironic and stupid. The Coalition of Enough, Already was only too happy to take the humorless Waterfront Coalition’s arguments a few steps further. And WNYMedia.net wants its outer harbor plan considered by the powers that be.

But at least we got some of the best threads ever out of it.

In his best of 2007 list, Buffalo News TV critic Alan Pergament gives an award to Alysha Palumbo:

Best TV News Critic: Channel 4’s Alysha Palumbo defended herself against a blogger’s criticism by responding with something critical of her superiors’ news judgment.

Here’s the thread where she and her red pantsuit took me to task.

It’s pretty clear that Richard Florida is on to something when he talks of the Tor-Buff-Chester megaregion to which we may belong. There should be more discussion about this, but only if the federal government starts being smart, rather than scared, about cross-border traffic and commerce.

As we close out 2007 and her fiscal year, we pause once again to thank Canadian shoppers, who helped bump Erie County into the black.

So, it was only a day late, but here’s the present I was alluding to the other day. A new template. Black on white, easier to read, cleaner design, proper Wordpress template. The blogroll is back in full effect, and I’ve neglected it, so if you want your site added, or you find a link that goes to something that hasn’t been updated in over six months, drop me a note.

Also in the sidebar you’ll see my Twitter feed. Twitter can be described as a microblogging platform, and generally Tweets answer the question, “What are you doing?”.

Welcome the return of a search box at the top, and “recent comments”/”recent posts” in the sidebar. There’s also a drop-down box for archived material going back to April 2005, when I first used Wordpress at WNYMedia.net.

Anyhow, if you see anything you like or don’t like, as always, let me know.