Finally some of the newest Buffalo Bills were able to show their talent on the field Thursday night as quarterbacks Tyler Thigpen and Brad Smith along with linebacker Nick Barnett saw their first a...

Canadian officials tell him to submit plan but gave no indication whether they would approve it.

To be a Bills fan, you must have an “unbreakable heart” because we keep coming back for more. With the new season upon us, I have a different feeling this year. No, I’m not talking about a Super Bowl appearance or win-although that would be … [visit site to read more]

General what is bctc

Brewery Ommegang, tents. All thats missing is the crowd!

Last weekend was Brewery Ommegang’s annual Belgium Comes to Cooperstown festival.  The fest offers a couple hundred beers from a slew of breweries at Ommegang’s gorgeous grounds outside of Cooperstown, NY.  Camping is encouraged, so when you finally decide to turn in bed is just a few steps away.  You don’t really want to turn in though.  The tasting itself runs 4 hours but a wonderful community springs up and people all over the grounds are sharing beer, food & camaraderie into the wee hours of the morning.

BCTC is a fest like no other.  If you can, go.  Its that simple.  Go.

I headed to Cooperstown on Friday, with a quick stop in Ithaca to pick up a case of this year’s batch of Brute from Ithaca Brewing.  Brute is magic – I’d argue that its the best beer currently made in New York State.  But this post isn’t about Brute.  But we should write a post about Brute.

We arrived at Ommegang around 7pm and the VIP dinner had already started.  The VIP dinner is a beer & food pairing they put on for people who have purchased, well, VIP tickets.  Its usually 5 to 7 courses of higher end food paired with Ommegang/Duvel/Chouffe/Whatever other breweries Ommegang is directly associated with beers.  This year used the VIP dinner to roll out Aprhodite, a 9% fruit beer, brewed with raspberry, pear and brettanomyces.

Thank God for Model Trains

I skipped the dinner and hung out with friends from across the Northeast & Eastern Seaboard.  We shared a bunch of great beer and stories, talked about what was going on in our lives (its amazing how many people there are in the process of opening a brewery) and stared into the fire.  At some point we went wandering and found the campsite of a well known NYC bar that was happily sharing kegs of Ballast Point Sculpin and Mikkeller/Stillwater Our Side.  We ran into a guy we had never met before who handed us a 500ml bottle of an amazing homebrew gueuze.  I shared a bunch of CBW test batches as well as some things I’ve collected over the last year or so.  Someone opened a 5 year old 3 liter bottle of Russian River Temptation which ended up being one of the best beers of the weekend.  We set off a really large smoke bomb for some reason that made sense at the time.  At midnight Ommegang showed the movie A Mighty Wind on the side of their barn, drive in movie style.  I went to bed sometime around 2am, sad that I couldn’t keep visiting but knowing that the next day was going to be even better.

Upon waking up I needed two things.  Coffee and food.  Ommegang has a new cafe that was serving up both – pretty tasty versions of them too.  I ran into the guys from Psychobrew who built our brewing system and talked with them for a while.  Ommegang has a new pilot system based around a Psychobrew – which is super cool in a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon kinda way. We had a few beers before the tasting portion of the fest began – most notably beers from a buddy who is working on starting up a brewery on Long Island, Spider Bite.  Check them out if you see them at a festival.

Then the fest began.  And oh, the fest.  It isn’t possible to sum up in words.  Yeah – there were some amazing beers that I can single out – Allagash brought a pin of their 100% spontaneously fermented gueuze.  Stillwater brought bottles of their Stateside Saison, aged in Chardonnay barrels and then infused with Brettanomyces.  Captain Lawrence brought their new Saison.  But the fest isn’t really possible to take in.  Its like standing in front of the Grand Canyon – yeah, you’ve seen it in pictures, but when its in front of you it seems fake.  Its just too massive.   I was at GABF last year & while there are fewer beers BCTC somehow seems bigger.  Its certainly more fun.

I only had 3 this year. I think my record was 7 a few years back.

And oh my god.  The Waffle Cabin comes and makes the best waffles on the face of the planet.  I’m on the verge of giggling just thinking about them now.

The tasting ends, eventually, and everyone goes back to their campsites.  Some people (like me, for instance) take a break and load up on water.  Its just a temporary break though.  I’d wager that on the Saturday night of BCTC there is more good beer opened & shared on the grounds of Brewery Ommegang than in the rest of the US combined.  So I wandered, shared beer, drank beer, talked & was constantly reminded just how great beer people are.

I made it until about midnight.  I got to hang out by the bonfire for a while but missed seeing Spinal Tap projected on the barn.  Sleep was very, very necessary.  When I woke up the valley was blanketed in a thick fog that had burned off by the time we loaded the tent into the car.   We drove away & found a diner near Cooperstown, slowly settling back into reality.

Big surprise here: the US debt spiral of bottomless descent will continue to swirl with no end in sight. The word “debt” has become synonymous with “US” as more and more start to wake up and realize our economy is no longer (err, hasn’t been for quite awhile) based on anything remotely physical or productive.

Still, the whole insipid “debate” run-up to this predictable outcome was a gross insult to the the intelligence of anyone who gets the simple fact that our entire monetary system revolves around perpetual debt, and that our ability to keep playing by all-enslaving rules written by the IBCS (International Banking Crime Syndicate), that super-duper-elite clique of financial asset controllers who completely own our joke of a political system, is seriously at stake in terms of anything resembling a large middle class remaining in America for much longer.

They go by many names: Wall Street (the politically correct label), Banksters, Plutocrats, Vampire Squids, the Illuminati/New Word Order/Evil Satanist Moneylender Cabal, (according to Alex Jones and his conspiracy fiend fanbase)among other colorful monikers. These folks are the ones who own the big international banks, who in turn own the Federal Reserve (its constituent member banks are the aforementioned big private banks, for those of you who don’t know). Thus, the Vampire Banksters are the ones who “own” a staggering portion of the US national debt. We, the lowly peasants, pay them interest (tribute) on these debt bucks the banksters whoosh into existence out of thin air. Monetary wealth is largely fictitious. he only thing that keeps money alive is the people’s undying faith in the institution.

In the above video above, outspoken/renegade economic analyst Max Kaiser makes a handful of scathing-yet-true points that need to be heeded by more people.

• All the proposals the two fake political parties put on the table all involved more and more debt; the rest is just posturing.
• Obama is not much more than a Wall Street puppet
• Huge banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are not much more than elaborate extortion schemes; all “legal” of course.
• Downgrading the nation’s credit rating is in the best interest of the aforementioned
• It’s quite foolish to reduce serious issues to a shallow and distracting “Republican vs. Democrat” narrative.

Having said all that, it’s predictable that those people who do get it will likely still suffer from a mental disconnect from the fact that America’s economy is almost completely divorced from real physical production. About half our economy is tied up in a rat’s nest of finance (ponzi) schemes that contribute almost nothing to anything productive. Shifting income around in fancy ways doesn’t make anyone’s lives better except the small minority that makes up over-compensated executives of investment banking firms addicted to an ever-increasing amount of transaction fees and the top shareholders of those mega-banks.

It’s also too easy for the half-interested to demonize the big-name Banskters, the uber-avaricious megabank executives like James Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein, who have “earned” astronomical salaries and bonuses from the (ongoing) rape and pillage of America. Sadly, in the greatgrand scheme of things, these guys are merely over-compensated henchmen. CEOs and other high-flying execs, worth maybe a several hundred million dollars a-piece are essentially glorified employees who are hired to make gobs of money for those who actually own the corporations; the big shareholders. The real owners control gargantuan family fortunes that drawf those of who we’re all supposed to believe are the world’s richest. Big names like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Lakshmi Mittal, the Waltons, ect., got nothin on the inherited sums that have passed down from the mightiest industrialists and financiers who originally bankrolled, exploited and controlled the industrialization and modernization of Western Civilization. According to Forbes:

The names are famous and often synonymous with great brands, from spaghetti to tires; those who bear them are without question fabulously wealthy. Yet the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Michelins and 35 other billionaire families don’t appear on the Forbes World’s Richest People list. Why not? It’s a question of degrees. We have tried to distinguish between fortunes that belong to individuals or nuclear families, and those that have been passed down through more than one branch of the family tree and are often shared by dozens of heirs. Here are eight extended families we find especially noteworthy:

When we talk about raising the debt ceiling to save our government from “poor credit ratings,” we really mean that the entire American economy should rely on merely making our debt more marketable to “investors,” instead of redirecting our national wealth to invest in real things like infrastructure and technological innovation. Debt begets more debt. And the “owners” of said debt are likely to be largely comprised of members of the plutocratic super-wealthy families mentioned above. Remember that “Wall St.” is just a polite euphemism for those folks.

These financial terrorists, many of them foreigners, are holding our economy hostage for their own selfish ends. The super-rich hold no allegiance except to fellow members of their own elite class. I’m waiting for the day (yeah right) when the Department of Homeland Security can start doing something useful by going after the real terrorists, these sworn enemies of the American people. I’m waiting (again, yeah right) for the day when America can once again lead by example. One can dream, right?

Until that day comes, all this silly talk about debt ceilings and the corporate media’s sensational accounts of the bickering between fake political parties is just one big distraction. We must collectively shed the belief that our worst enemies have our best interests in mind. Sympathizing with the financial terrorists, something our new fascist supercongress is making a fine art of, will just lead us deeper into the abyss.

For the second time in less than a week the Bills added a former first-round draft choice to their roster signing free agent WR Craig “Buster” Davis Thursday evening. The fifth-year wideout is a fo...

I’ll assume … [visit site to read more]

Earlier today, it was reported that free agent Donte Whitner, Buffalo’s starting strong safety, had decided to sign with the Bengals. However, apparently old Donte couldn’t leave Buffalo without pulling one more act of Twitter ridiculousness. After implying over Twitter that he’d signed with the Bengals, we got this from Adam Schefter’s Twitter about a half-hour ago:

“Former Bills S Donte Whitner did NOT go to Cincinnati. He agreed to a 3-year, $11.75 million deal with $4 million gtd with the 49ERS.”

Whitner himself confirmed the signing with San Francisco not long thereafter on his own Twitter:

“Its official…49ers it is! Funny how God works…instead of playing against the 9ers I’m playing w/ the 9ers…”

 For all of Whitner’s past screw-ups, this is probably the most offensive. Here, he decided it’d be funny to DELIBERATELY mislead a member of the media. Read on for this shocking tale of douchebaggery:

… [visit site to read more]

#BuffCashMob To City Wine Merchant on August 4th, 2011

We asked you to nominate a local business to receive a visit from the inaugural Buffalo Cash Mob and you’ve chosen in overwhelming numbers…the City Wine Merchant.

If this is the first article you’ve seen about the Buffalo Cash Mob, here’s a refresher.

Do you want to make a difference in your community? Do you like social media? Are you someone who digs doing cool stuff with cool people? Do you love supporting local small business? Well, welcome to the hastily formed #BuffCashMob!

This is a tough economy and many small businesses in Buffalo and WNY are looking for ways to increase cash flow. That’s where we, the organized social media denizens of Western New York, come in.

Rather than do the slacktivist thing, posting links to businesses we like and writing on their Facebook pages, let’s get out, en masse, and show them some straight up cash love. Buy their goods, pay for their services, patronize their establishments. And have a great fucking time doing it!

The goal will be to get 100 people to “flash mob” a local establishment to spend $10-$20 each on the goods and services offered. No discounts, no coupons, no special deals. Just spend $10 in their business.

You nominate the business and whichever garners the most votes, will receive a visit from the mob.

We received over 300 nominations for the first BuffCashMob visit, but City Wine Merchant received almost double the votes of any other retail establishment. So, clearly, there is some real love for this store at 715 Main Street (Click for map and directions) which has been open since 2009. As owner Eric Genau told Buffalo Rising when he first opened,

Years ago I lived at the corner of Chippewa and Main,” Eric told me. “And there was nothing happening down here. Now we have the Medical Campus and the lofts… there’s the Washington Market. I see young professionals, a hip artistic crowd and an entrepreneurial spirit… that wasn’t here five years ago. We’ve even raised the City of Buffalo flag on the building.

This is a quality, locally owned business that cares about its community and its product,

When you walk into the City Wine Merchant remember that you are not walking into a mega Walmart-sized wine warehouse. Rather, you are stepping into a wine boutique where every single label has been hand selected by the owner. Whether a bottle of wine is $8 or $80, Eric assures his customers that they are getting the best value when it comes to quality.

City Wine Merchant offers wines at all price points from $9 to $90 and offers a full line of glassware and wine accessories.

So, please join us in supporting an entrepreneur who took a risk and opened his business in the theater district. Support locally owned businesses operated by individuals who love their city and have a passion for the product they sell.

Join us between the hours of 4-7PM tomorrow and spend $10 or more at City Wine Merchant, tell them the #BuffCashMob sent you.

Follow @BuffCashMob on Twitter or Follow the #BuffCashMob hashtag for updates on what’s next or like us on Facebook.

Related articles

• #BuffCashMob: Nominations, Please (wnymedia.net)
• Announcing The #BuffCashMob (wnymedia.net)
• Before There Was #BuffCashMob (wnymedia.net)

Photos from OAR’s performance at Artpark on August 4th, 2011

OAR August 3rd, Artpark The gloomy weather and chance of showers didn’t keep many from opting out of the OAR show last night. There was little breathing room between the thousands of fans who made their way to Artpark to watch OAR jam—music so reminiscent of many folks’ college days. And to everyone’s luck, the [...]

Mayor suspends aide involved in Thomas controversy on August 4th, 2011

Buffalo's fired human resources commissioner has been getting the maximum unemployment benefit since her termination in January.

Free agent WR Davis visits Bills on August 4th, 2011

He’s a former NFL first-round draft choice and Bills GM Buddy Nix had a big hand in drafting him for the San Diego Chargers in 2007. So it wasn’t all that surprising that after being released by th...

Free agent WR Davis visits Bills on August 4th, 2011

He’s a former NFL first-round draft choice and Bills GM Buddy Nix had a big hand in drafting him for the San Diego Chargers in 2007. So it wasn’t all that surprising that after being released by th...

Opportunity Knocks for $40,000 on August 4th, 2011

Here's a neat brick building that is situated right down the street from Left Bank, Prime 490, and located directly across the street from Five Points Bakery and Urban Roots. It's also close to a new Small Built Works neighborhood park, a rebounding neighborhood, and further urban advancements in the form of a series of nearby home rehabs. For years the neighborhood has hoped that the owner would invest in the property, though that never panned out. With the right owner, and the right amount of investment, this building could be an important anchor and catalyst that would lead to further neighborhood advancements.

The building seen here once housed the infamous Club Utica - at this point there are two-three apartments on the second floor and according to real estate agent JM Reed, "The original layout is mostly intact on the second floor. The first floor has been gutted and is wide open. It was originally three storefronts (this is pretty easy to see once you are in the building). Then the whole first floor was the Club Utica. I did find plans from 1965 with the layout of the club. Following its closure (I'm not sure of the exact date) it was stripped. Everything was taken out. There are some structural issues which appear to be manageable - nothing really serious has happened yet. It is listed for $40,000 and is of course, a total rehab. Great building though, with lots of potential. I think someone could get the apartments up and running first, and then work on the first floor."

Zoned Commercial | 8863 sq.' | 527 West Utica

Listing Agent: Jean-Michel Reed
MJ Peterson Real Estate
431 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, NY 14202
email: jm@reedsalesco.com

Upcoming Summer Festivals on August 4th, 2011

Upcoming summer festivals & more: Taste of Lancaster. August 6, 11am-9pm. Central Ave. (Between Broadway & Pleasant Ave.) Food, music by Tameron, Beatle Magic, and Breakaway, 5k race, and beer garden. LancasterVillage.org Niagara Tattoo Expo. August 6-7. Old Falls Street (Niagara Falls) Festival of Fools, cars and motocycles, indoor art show, kid’s area, DJ, and [...]

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