Buflows Beter Den Detroyt If our only hope is the tourism industry, we should be emphasizing our stupidity and maybe while we�re at it, our politically corrupt culture, as well. The handout to Bass Pro is great start. If it�s followed by a slimy inner-city Detroit style casino, that would be even better. As much as Masiello and his pal Joel Giambra talk about competing with other communities like Cleveland and Pittsburgh, what they don�t tell you is that the community that we�re really trying to emulate here is Detroit.

Cultural Reality Tourism: �And on your left, Another Idiotic Mega-Project!� In the near future, we�ll be able to conduct �reality tours� for tourists interested in decaying architecture amidst ugly, garbage-strewn streets, peopled by zombie-like wraiths with bitter faces scrunched up by despair and cold. We can bill ourselves as the only American city with no traffic congestion problem whatsoever.

BoSox Formula Will Work: Buffalonians Are A Bunch of Idiots!!!! The Boston Red Sox were onto something when they described themselves as a bunch of idiots. We can work with that theme, and if you think about it for a second, we HAVE been working with that theme all along. Doh!!!! Here�s some more ideas:

Segregate, Isolate, and Steal We can brag about our pockets of deep poverty and racial segregation to Governor Pataki�s red state friends. We can say with a straight face, �This is Greater Buffalo-Niagara. This is regionalism.�

We can follow Chris Jacobs� lead of closing public schools and opening up low budget charter schools in their place.

We can build suburban colonies of gated communities like the Elk Street Terminal that will further accentuate the sharp divide between rich and poor.

We can continue to take HUD money and spend it on rich, politically connected developers with projects that will say to the world, �We�re corrupt and we�re building ourselves nice, little condos and if you don�t like it, leave.�

We can religiously chant prayers for saviors who will come into town and then, you guessed it, prey on us. �Johnny Rigas, he�s our man, if he can�t save us Bass Pro can!�

Screw the Middle Class! Life Sucks, Then Ya Die! We can wage war on the remaining government jobs which pay a middle class salary and make sure that there is no doubt about the anti-worker tenor in our political culture. Most of them are living in the suburbs anyway, right? They need to get down into the hand to mouth, living with no health care trenches with the rest of us. Our region will benefit greatly from all this, and so will Bob Wilmers and M&T Bank.

This will undoubtedly draw foreign tourists who will gaze out their tour bus windows in amazement. They will wonder how so many poor and middle class people in a democracy watched as their local government was eviscerated by an outside �control board.� They will ponder about how these same people are so easily convinced to then continue to vote against their own interests and act as the overseers in their own victimization.

They will see a side of social Darwinism that never quite crops up in all of the American reality shows.

And if their flight out of Buffalo gets delayed, we�ll make sure they get the message by putting �Still Like That Ol� Time Rock and Roll� on an endless tape, cause, hey, we might be dinosaurs stuck in a tar pit, but we�re talkin� proud here and we ain�t gonna change. We�ll be smokin� OP�s till we die � just like our politicians.

By John McMahon

For some bizarre and unknown reason, the 2005 New Year�s Eve ball drop was not, repeat, NOT accompanied by the traditional Bob Seeger & the Silver Bullet Band music. What an outrage! Thousands of people were drawn downtown by the unseasonably warm weather and were expecting to ring in the New Year with one of the great Seeger sing-alongs like the appropriately depressing, slit my wrist, I�m a misunderstood rock star anthem of �Turn the Page.�

But what did they play? Well, to be honest, I don�t know. But it wasn�t frickin� Seeger! If this is the work Mr. Regionalism, Kevin Gaughan, we�re gonna have to have a �conversation.�

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