Kevin Purdy

It was, for lack of a better word, art.

The tagline of The Soup, possibly the only show on the E! cable network that won’t ruin your day, is that they watch it all so you don’t have to. In these times, that is no small service.

I watch this show every week, without fail. If I’m away, I set my DVR to record it Saturday and Sunday, as a fail-safe, because for all the easy targets–the Kardashian/Lohan/Abdul bloc, the reality non-shows, Cee Dub’s Dutch Oven Cooking–those brave scanners of cable culture ofen find something truly amazing. If Dadaist morning shows don’t do it for you, try Willard Scott’s Today-Show-sponsored madness.

It’s one of those wonderful accidents of television, like Space Ghost Coast to Coast in its prime, when nobody at the network has yet noticed how weirdly brilliant their tiny little show has become.

I’ve got a piece in this month’s insert to The Real Deal, a New York City-based magazine that covers real estate news, about how Buffalo managed to escape the recent credit and housing downturns. Titled Buffalo stays cold — and calm, it details how the conditions in Western New York’s economy and the character of the city itself have kept over-eager flippers, predatory lenders, and other market-crashers (mostly) at bay.

It’s kind of a big deal for me, being my first print published outside the Buffalo-area market (and not on my main squeeze, Lifehacker). It also generated a bit of discussion over at Buffalo Rising. Here’s a standard writerly caveat for you: The story goes much farther than the headline suggests.

Photo by surrealist303.

Before heading out on a week’s vacation, I had to point out the awesomeness of “The Munchie Box,” picked up by my friend Andrew at Buffalo Buffet. The “standard” size costs about 5 British pounds, comes in a 10-inch pizza box, and includes doner kebab meat, nan bread, chicken tikka, pakora, onion rings, fries, some kind of slaw-type salad, and two kinds of sauce.

I mean, seriously. We in Buffalo have Jim’s SteakOut, Mighty Taco, and roughly 6,387 bars open until at least 2 a.m. serving beef, wings, and all kinds of so-terrible-it’s-fantastic food–not to mention Nick Tahou’s just a short hop away. But it seems a challenge has been issued, one involving whose populace can find the grease-soaked bottom of the culinary barrel first. Let’s get to work on this when I return, shall we?