• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Ave. Noon to 5 p. m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, Sunday, noon to 10 p. m. Friday. Adults $12, students and seniors $8. Free after 3 Friday.

Best Bet –Park free at the LaSalle Metro Rail station and take a 20- minute ride to HSBC Arena. Fare is $1.75 for adults, with trains running every few minutes. The rail has added more capacity and will be running more frequently to accommodate fans. This deal applies only on Friday and Sunday. Park & Ride Tip: Try to stay away from the University Park and Ride so you don't hit the everyday commuter traffic. The LaSalle Park and Ride is about eight-tenths of a mile away and offers more than 700 spaces.

With 4 a. m. closing times, clubs offer nights filled with fun

1. Pearl Street Grill &Brewery, 76 Pearl St –Great beer and hearty food

Orchard Park Town Board members Wednesday night put off a decision on rezoning a parcel that would allow People Inc. to build subsidized senior housing.

A woman in her 40s died late Wednesday, shortly after fire broke out in her first-floor apartment in the Commodore Perry projects, fire officials said.

SeethroughNY recently posted the April – September 2009 operational and staff expenditure for our NYS Senators and Assembly.

And the WNY winner is Antoine Thompson at $422,650.

It cost us $52,921,444 to run the NYS Senate for six months and $57,205,033 to run the Assembly, including over $1,000,000 for Assembly postal services.  Everyone feel like they got their money’s worth?

Mark Schroeder – $131,636
James Hayes – $134,829
Dennis Gabryszak – $140,473
Jane Corwin – $141,151
John Quinn – $141,640
Francine DelMonte – $146,366
Crystal Peoples – $151,674
Sam Hoyt – $239,241
Mike Razenhoefer – $283,430
George Maziarz – $325,111
Robin Schimminger – $332,115
Bill Stachowski – $362,256
Dale Volker – $407,661
Antoine Thompson – $422,650

More to the point of the upstate/downstate divide, there is a clamor around here that goes like this: downstate New York is holding upstate New York down/hostage/back and we need to secede from them in order to have more control over our own political, economic, and social destiny.

Because this region is so dramatically different from the New York City area, this clearly resonates with a lot of people. Even downstaters have begun to talk of secession because they’re tired of subsidizing upstate’s ancient, tired, and static economies.

If Norman Mailer and Jimmy Breslin had had their way, we’d be living in a state called “Buffalo”.

But secession is a drastic remedy to the identified problem.

The notion of “one country, two systems” is not new. Hong Kong is still legally part of the People’s Republic of China, but enjoys a completely different political, economic, and social system…for now. In Switzerland, the cantonal governments are in many ways stronger than the federal government, and each canton is run differently. In Bosnia and Hercegovina, the Republika Srpska was carved out and is run separately and autonomously from the Bosnian/Croat federation, but nominally still a part of the Bosnian nation-state with its capital in Sarajevo.

New York could remain one legal state entity with two autonomous systems, so that the massive political influence that downstate holds would be dulled, and upstate could be free to control its own economic policies and affairs, and thus better compete for business and residents.

Theodore A. Sypnier, the 100- year-old pedophile, wept Wednesday as a state parole official urged a judge to send him back to prison for two more years.

Two major downtown projects -- the Hotel Lafayette and the former AM&A's building -- may be back on track thanks to proposed changes in New York State's historic tax credit program.

Buffalo native Christine Eber will discuss her work helping women in Chiapas-- Mexico's poorest state--organize into a cooperative to sell their weavings in the United States when she speaks at 7:45 p. m. Tuesday in Daemen College's Wickes Center, 4380 Main St., Snyder.

Parking could be a challenge as thousands of people converge on downtown beginning Friday for the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Assemblyman Jack Quinn has thrown his hat into the SD-58 ring, joining an already-crowded primary race to unseat Volker-with-a-”D”, Bill Stachowski from the state senate.

The Republican Quinn has been in the Assembly since 2004, and his site lists legislation he’s sponsored, most of which has to do with schools (e.g., ensuring that school districts sit on IDA board), crime & safety (e.g., making cell phone use a primary violation, year-round school session), and governmental reform such as reducing the senate to 40 members, and the assembly to 100.

To a great degree, when you poke around what junior Albany legislators do there all day, it doesn’t amount to a whole lot. Quinn is parroting that tired old upstate-Republican-state-senator refrain: those mean downstate Democrats!

“The only way we are ever going to change Albany is to change the one-party system we have right now, and that one party is all from New York City,” he said. “The only way to better Western New York is provide for some split system, and the only way to do that is to take back the Senate.”

I don’t know how increasing the justice court civil suit jurisdiction from $3,000 to $6,000 worked to reduce the influence of downstate Democrats, and I don’t know how creating the crime of “manufacturing drugs in the presence of minors” will improve upstaters’ lot in life, either.

But the depressing part is that under our current system, who wins – whether Stachowski, Kennedy, Quinn, Cooney, or Kuzma – absolutely nothing will change. The state senate is not a democratic entity comprised of citizen legislators who advocate and legislate on behalf of their constituencies. It is a unified entity where every vote is pre-arranged, and what the leader says, goes.

The anti-downstate Volkerist rhetoric is just taking a page from a tired, unpersuasive script.

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