CNY ecoBlog takes a quick look at today’s bombshell that Syracuse is somehow the city with the worst “carbon footprint” in New York. Is Syracuse’s sprawl and highway addiction really worse than Buffalo’s or Rochester’s? C’mon. Despite sprawl without growth being a significant problem in Central New York, I can’t get my […]

A Buffalo News story on a backlash against “walkable redevelopment” makes me wonder if we’re not all dancing around the real problem with getting Americans to stop driving so much: it’s not just the distances involved, it’s also the stuff.
The “walkable community” uses a dense, villagelike mix of homes and businesses to […]

The Department of H—— Security has agreed to let New York issue enhanced drivers’ licenses to New Yorkers who wish to cross the Canadian border without fear of their government not letting them back in. Plus, it gets you into Mexico and Bermuda. (I don’t know what this means for occasional visitor […]

The weather’s decent now, so I’ve been able to get out with my camera, a nice entry-level digital SLR. I went to the zoo. The wonderful thing about a digital camera is that you don’t have to use up expensive film, but the beginner’s temptation is to keep snapping away. At the […]

Cookin’ in the ‘Cuse is celebrating a birthday. Happy bloggiversary to Syracuse’s leading food blog! Jennifer also posts about her busy schedule and quotes E.B. White:
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the […]

Has it really been two years since I first posted on this issue? Yes indeed, New York Regional Interconnect erupted as an issue in May 2006 and the fun still hasn’t stopped. So who’s up, who’s down now?
NYRI has been handed a setback with a rejection of their application for federal incentives. […]

Upstream looks at a 1917 diary by a Mohawk Valley farmer and wonders why the diarist wrote nothing about World War I, which was raging at the time. (Much in the same way as someone from the future might come across the remnants of this blog and wonder why I never wrote anything about […]

Outgoing Newhouse School dean David Rubin on local media:
“In Syracuse we have one provider of information about the city, the Syracuse Post Standard newspaper. Local TV got out of the serious news business a long time ago and citizens can’t hope to get serious information about how the city is governing itself from TV or […]

For those still thinking about the bear: here’s a unique Google map of news items about wild animals and their state of health around the world - the Wildlife Disease Map. The map isn’t as complete as it could be, but it’s an idea with potential. Considering how both the health of […]

WSYR reports on gas prices finally spiking to above $4 in some places around Syracuse. This was supposed to be the magical, mythical number that would cause Americans to abandon their cars along the side of the road en masse. Well, I saw a guy proudly driving his Hummer down on Erie Boulevard […]