I can’t help feeling that this summer is coming to a premature end. I’ve been noticing that some of the trees around my house are looking like they want to start on the fall color now, especially a maple the next street over which, unbelievably, is half red now, and it’s not even August […]

Gov. Paterson will deliver a speech at 5:10 p.m. today, focusing on the (dire?) state of New York’s finances. Obviously meant to be covered live on your local newscast, but probably meant to send a message to Albany. Well, you can’t say that Paterson graduated from the Spitzer school of (non-)communications.
Updated: […]

New York Media Guide is your one-stop shop for links to New York newspaper websites (both daily and weekly). A highly useful resource, even if it does bear somewhat of a visual (not political) resemblance to the Drudge Report. Take a look.
Syracuse B-4 is a blog that digs up old Syracuse news stories […]

While we sleep at night, giant hogweed continues its silent and sinister march across the countryside. The DEC has this set of pointers on how to deal with giant hogweed. Strangely, they still are not mentioning flamethrowers — or the best defense, which would be running away and screaming.

The Joe Bruno era ends today in anti-climactic fashion as the old man exits stage right stage left through the trap door with all of the hefty retirement benefits that New York State employees have come to know and love. Blogging about Albany just won’t be the same without him. His righteous […]

This in-depth, well-researched New York Times story about problems with public toilets in Seattle and other cities states everything but the obvious: You can have safe, clean, convenient public toilets in big cities if you have attendants working at them who are decently paid. Apparently nobody in Seattle is willing to work as […]

Now that the economy is really looking peaked, and we’re all supposed to have spent our stimulus checks on cool stuff already, I thought I’d take a quick look back at the select handful of electronic appliances/gadgets/doohickies that I once lovingly unwrapped, yet still find useful or cool. I am not a huge purchaser […]

Well, this story doesn’t give the reasons (I think we know them well enough) but it does confirm the obvious, which is that Upstaters are feeling very grim.
The Siena Research Institute Poll released Monday finds just 15 percent of upstaters say they will never move out of the state. Twenty-two percent of New York City […]

I woke up this morning to read a small item in the PS Local section about Holy Family Church being robbed yesterday in broad daylight, right after a service. It appears some punk with a BB gun stole the collection plate. Between this, the Burger King robbery and the rogue bear, maybe […]

The New York State Fair has a lot of competitions for kids, from dance to animal husbandry to even a spelling bee, but I wonder why they don’t hold a New York geography bee for kids at the fair. (Couldn’t be any more boring than some of the other stuff going on!) I […]