June 3, 2002 -

WILL BUFFALO TURN LAVENDER?

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Tales of Buffalo and how a city can resuscitate itself after it has been fagged out.

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That, and more. Now, the details...

TOW, Texas -- The language and the times, they do change. A not-insensitive term from my misspent youth described being exhausted; spent. If you were thus you were said to be "fagged out." There once was an AM radio station in the North Carolina tobacco town of Farmville: WFAG. WFAG's call letters were a treasure in its early days - because "fag" was then a synonym for "cigarette." A common term for bumming a weed was "slip me a fag." WFAG is now politically correctioned to WGHB.

Back when WFAG was broadcasting in Farmville, the moribund metropolis of Buffalo could have been described as exhausted, spent, indeed fagged out. However, only "exhausted" and "spent" pass PC muster today. And Buffalo is being advised that there is only one path out of its doldrums - Buffalo needs to get gayed. So says Richard Florida, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He theorizes that towns and cities rich in homosexuals are likely to prosper economically, too. Florida's "creativity index" ranks gay-rich San Francisco as the top city. Interestingly, Prof. Florida says Texas has three "creative" centers - Austin, Dallas and Houston.

I looked at the New York Times op-ed site last week and was afraid that terrorists had slipped some LSD into the Cottonwood Cove well. The terror came from reading a column by Nicholas Kristof headlined "Liberal Reality Check." Kristof is one of those liberals who is so predictably wrong that I read his columns for entertainment. So I thought about dialing 911 and asking for the LSD testing division when I thought I read that Kristof wrote this about the FBI sillies: "One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we're pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror." Wow!

The column got even better: "So it's time for civil libertarians to examine themselves with the same rigor with which we are prone to examine others. The bottom line is that Mr. Moussaoui was thrown in jail, thank God, not because there was evidence he had committed a crime but because he was a young Arab man who behaved suspiciously and fit our stereotypes about terrorists." Wow-squared.

NEW YORK -- Historian and Plagiarist Doris Kearns Goodwin has resigned from the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes. Columbia University said Dr. Goodwin will furnish a complete letter of resignation at a later date. "She is looking at previous letters of resignation by her fellow plagiarists and wants to steal the one that is absolutely the best for this sad occasion," said Xandy Xerox, a Goodwin research assistant.

From the hilarious state of New York comes the revelation that educational idiots in the Empire State have been "sanitizing" book excerpts for a Regents English exam. There are no references, it seems, to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol - or just about anything that might possibly offend someone, somewhere, at any time. Authors whose works were altered for "testing" purposes were livid. Literary Lifter Goodwin also decried the New York stupidity. "When I steal something from someone else's writing, I expect to be able to pilfer the original language," she said.

HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- Napoleon Beazley deserved the death sentence carried out last week on Texas death row. Beazley, 25 at death, was only 17 when he murdered John Luttwig so he and his punk friends might have Luttwig's 1989 Mercedes-Benz. So, Beazley wasn't executed for insufficient reason. That said, his death is cause for sadness. Beazley was an honors student, a star athlete, president of his senior class and an all-around good kid until he decided gangdom was cool. Unlike most of his fellow felons, he accepted his fate with dignity. Beazley said his crime was "not just heinous. It was senseless."

LOS ANGELES -- It's apparent that the Mouse is afraid of Jesus. Or maybe it's just Goofy. It appears increasingly clear, however, that Disney's ABC needs a corporate shot of lithium. That appraisal from ABC's bleeping out the word "Jesus" from the West Coast broadcast of ABC's talk show, "The View." View co-host Joy Behar commented that her weight-loss program has been successful. Then she said - to everywhere except the West Coast - "Yes, and thank you, thank you, Jesus, is all I have to say." I'm speechless. About all I can say is Jesus!

QUESTION FOR THE DAY: Is it possible that terrorists are putting LSD in Nicholas Kristof's water?

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