Hard Knocks

by Daniel B. Honigman & Geoff Kelly

Adrian Rodriguez, president of the Hispanic Coalition of Western New York and a long-time community activist on the West Side, can tick off a laundry list of slights to his neighborhood: the 2000 redistricting that fractured the Hispanic population’s growing political clout; the reorganization of the city police department that resulted in the closing of three police precincts, more than doubling police response time; the closing of the Roberto Clemente Clinic on Grant Street; the loss of two firehouses.

by Chuck Shepherd

■ Dave “The Dragon” Lockwood and his tournament-tested sons, Max, 16, Jon, 13, and Ben, 10, of Silver Spring, Md., might become to competitive tiddlywinks what the Manning family of quarterbacks is to football, according to a January Washington Post story. Dave was previously ranked No. 1 in the English Tiddlywinks Association (and is currently No. 8, with Max No. 52). “Tiddlywinks doesn’t sound very serious,” said Max, but “(t)here’s so much strategy.” (For the uninformed: You mash a “squidger” down on a “wink” to propel it either into the “pot” or to “squop” it onto an opponent’s wink to temporarily disable it.) Dave said he plans to get Britain’s Prince Philip, a winker, to suggest tiddlywinks as a demonstration “sport” at London’s 2012 Summer Olympics.

Dick Cheney: That Dog Should Not Hunt

by Caroline Phelan

When Vice President Dick Cheney decided to go hunting for quail over the weekend, he probably didn’t foresee Monday’s headlines. Yet his leisurely weekend ended with a 78-year-old hunting buddy sent to the hospital with shotgun pellets in his face, neck and torso, a 24-hour delay before Cheney’s office admitted anything had happened and a campaign by the White House to blame the guy who Cheney shot for not following “protocol.” One wonders: How common is it to be accidentally shot by a fellow hunter? Should we be concerned that our vice president mistook a man for a bird? Should someone take his guns away for a while?

by Rob Brezsny

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): Fashion designer Ennio Capasa was asked if he found his work difficult. “If it wasn’t difficult I wouldn’t enjoy it,” he replied. That’s the kind of activity you will specialize in during the coming week, Aquarius. The more it stretches your capacity and forces you to dig deeper into yourself for stamina and willpower and resourcefulness, the happier you’ll be—and the more successful, too.

How can Bruce Jackson possibly write an entire article on the impact of a Buffalo casino (“The Seneca’s Buffalo Creek Casino,” Artvoice v5n3) without considering the fact there are four different casinos within a 20-minute drive of the proposed Buffalo casino? A casino will do little to revitalize the city and the jobs created will not have a profound impact on the economy, but the negative impacts will be negligible.

Electoral Mischief and the Bewildered Herd

by Michael I. Niman

Six months after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, affected areas are still lying in ruins with no relief in sight. New Orleans’ evacuees have become a permanent diaspora, many with no means to return and no homes or even neighborhoods to return to. FEMA, citing budgetary constraints, is cutting off emergency housing allowances, forcing evacuees out onto the street.

Fanning The Flames of Flavor: Saffire Grill

by Arthur Page

Clarence is one of the fastest-growing towns in Western New York, so it follows that its continuing population spikes are going to coincide with more new restaurants within the 14031 ZIP code, especially along Main Street, which, for many of us “outsiders,” is the town’s main drag.

A Year In Photography

by Cynnie Gaasch

Can you imagine taking note of each hour you lived for a year? Christine Gatti’s exhibit “:18” makes you wish you were just a little bit more aware of what you did with your time. Gatti took one photograph of her face and a second of her surroundings on the 18th minute of every hour, every day for 12 months, July 2004–2005. The images that Gatti captured are the featured member solo exhibit for the CEPA Gallery’s Annual Members’ Show.

'06 5 is a 10

by Jim Corbran

Until recently, if you wanted a vehicle which carried six passengers, your choices were quite limited: your grandfather’s beige-and-brown pin-striped conversion van; Uncle Vinny’s ’69 Sedan DeVille; or a large SUV. All of the above, while maintaining different levels of (un)hipness, are these days frowned upon by most as being environmentally unfriendly.

Hail to the Sabres Olympians!

by Andrew Kulyk & Peter Farrell

Talk to any professional hockey player and you will pretty much get the same reaction—that playing for your country in an Olympic tournament is an incredible high.

Culture Workers United

by Michael Kelleher

For those readers unfamiliar with the landscape of poetry publishing, here’s a quick fact: most poetry published in America today is printed by small, not-for-profit presses, most of which are run by one or two people, most of whom operate out of their homes and make little or no money for their efforts. This kind of behavior has come to be known as “culture work,” which, loosely translated, means: work done for the love and fun of the art it serves. Members of the Brooklyn small press collective Ugly Duckling Presse (UDP) are culture workers in the best sense of that term. That is, they love what they do, they do it for fun and they do it well.

Michael Meldrum

by Mark Norris

Why you should know who he is: If you’ve attended a live music event in downtown Buffalo in the past 30 years, chances are good that your life has intersected with that of Michael Meldrum, whether you’ve realized it or not. A Buffalo-based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and founder of the Buffalo Song Project, Meldrum organizes annual tribute concerts to John Lennon (Cold Turkey) and Bob Dylan (the Bob Dylan Imitator’s Contest) at Nietzsche’s in Allentown. Not only are the events well attended but they also draw some of the best-known names on the local music scene.

Macintosh SE/30 & Hypercard

by David P. Kleinschmidt

As stylish as it is small, the classic lines of the Macintosh SE/30 are instantly recognizable to anyone who’s been using a computer longer than 10 years. You can say what you want about its cramped, nine-inch, black-and-white monitor and its snail’s-pace 16MHz Motorola 68030 processor, but it’s impossible to keep yourself from grinning once you start monkeying around in Hypercard, an easy-to-use program that inspired Macromedia Director, Flash and the World Wide Web.