WE'VE BEEN IN TOWN less than a month, and already the rumors are flying. One the one hand, this is something that we expected. It's natural to assume that when a group of notoriously belligerent journalists from halfway across the planet move without any warning or obvious explanation to a place like Buffalo... well, questions will arise. What are these guys doing here? Why did they come? What do they have planned?

While this is not a question that we here at the Beast can answer easily, there is one thing that we can say for certain, and that is this: that those rumors that we have come here to blow up the HSBC tower, killing everyone inside and setting the whole downtown area ablaze, are absolutely unfounded.

We repeat: we have no plans to crash a small commercial jetliner hijacked en route to Toronto into the HSBC tower with the aim of destroying the entire downtown area, human population and all. It's ridiculous even to think that we might. After all, we didn't labor for five years in Russia to create a successful and critically-acclaimed newspaper called the eXile just to throw it all away in one last, desperate, suicidal act halfway around the world-- no matter how much we might want to.

American Airlines can rest assured: there is absolutely no way that we will be travelling under assumed names on flight 1127, leaving Laguardia for Toronto, at any time in the near future. Furthermore, it is both slanderous and irresponsible to suggest that there is anything suspicious or out of the ordinary in the fact that several members of the Beast staff have have learned to pilot, but not to land or take off, a twin-engine passenger liner. A great many people take flying lessons; not all of them complete their studies.

Our response to all those questions about our strangely frenzied patterns of foreign travel in the last few months, including clandestine trips to and from uncharted moutnainous regions of Abkhazia, Chechnya and Georgia? We just throw up our hands in amazement. Have we as Americans become so paranoid that we can no longer accept as neighbors people who happen to have friends in heavily-armed extralegal territories within the Iranian sphere of influence? Have we lost the ability to live and let live-- just because the guy next door sometimes wears a turban, a canteen, and an ammo belt, and spends his evenings unloading crates marked in Arabic from a panel truck with no license plates? Has it really come to that?

We at the Beast believe that tolerance is America's, and Buffalo's, salvation. While our president speaks of defeating enemies abroad, and uniting in vigilance against threats here at home, we believe that our primary responsibility as Americans is to love our neighbors. We believe that there are a great many ways in which even we here in Western New York can learn to achieve a greater sense of closeness with our fellow citizens.

We can, for instance, learn to better understand and appreciate the point of view of the practioners of other faiths-- the Muslim, the Buddhist, and even (as Melville would call him) the Hindoo.

We can put ourselves in the shoes of the black and the brown, and genuinely try to imagine what the bite of our repressive white society feels like-- the harrassment by police, the persecution by landlords, the cold stares of would-be employers.

And at at approximately 11:38 a.m. sometime between May 29 and June 17, we can allow ourselves to be momentarily distracted by a small and apparently inconsequential electrical fire that mysteriously breaks out in the corner of the air traffic control tower at the Buffalo airport. We can take off our headsets, leave our seats, and walk over to inspect the commotion, leaving the skies unattended for a crucial four-to-seven minute period.

These are just some of the things that we as citizens of Buffalo should do to make our world a better place in these uncertain times. One thing we must do, however, is learn to refrain from indulging in hurtful rumors and innuendo. We here at the Beast have already suffered because of our collective failure in this area. Our only purpose in coming to Buffalo was to come home and put out a newspaper that wittily blends nightlife and club reviews with incisive commentary and hard-hitting journalism. Our only thought, our only desire, is to serve U, the reader.

There is simply no truth to the rumor that our plans are any more involved than that-- that they involve acts of catastrophic terrorism, outbursts of violent misogyny, or, say, the running of hideous lounge singer Tom Sartori out of town with a lead pipe and a four-foot cattle prod. Nothing of that sort has even been discussed in our offices. We're your friends. Honestly.