Off sports for a bit… I attended my first WNY Coalition for Progress meeting last night, which meant passing on all the Artvoice Mardi Gras doings downtown and a chance to tip a few. Peter was at the arena covering the Sabres game - yeah HE gets to see the Campbell/Umberger fight and Peters’ first goal of the season. I’m going Thursday and with my luck the game will be a snooze.

Anyways, I wanted to go for two reasons - first of all this group seems to be involving itself in all the right things for Buffalo; second, it gave me a chance to finally meet some people who I have only known via the internet so far.

So yeah, I finally met Alan Bedenko, aka Buffalo Pundit, who is one of the most amazing and energetic community activists and a growing media force in Buffalo. Alan won Artvoice’s “Best Blog” category in the 2006 Best Of competition and surely will be in the race for a back-to-back championship in ‘07.

Marc Odien of WNY Media Net was there as well filming the event, dots of paint on his jacket as he is working hard on his new headquarters opening soon in Allentown. EC Comptroller Mark Poloncarz and I chatted some, and I invited him to come to a future meeting of the Cheektowaga Democratic Committee (I’m the town party’s Vice Chair woo-hoo!) to address our group. EC Legislature Chairman Lynn Marinelli was the featured speaker, and has an amazing way of exuding boundless optimism about the County’s future. Deep down I look at her as a protector of the old guard, but it’s hard not to like her.

Making new friends with some extraordinary people… building the information network… cementing new contacts in the community… man oh man this blogging is fun!

RSS 2.0 Respond Trackback