A reminder: Sean Cunningham’s award-winning Upstate-themed “I Love New York” commercial (shot right here in CNY) will be featured during the broadcast of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade tomorrow. The Oneida Nation also will be having a float in the parade. Have a wonderful and safe holiday! Thank you all for reading.

“You might live in Upstate New York if…” (Clearly a North Country/Adirondack edition.) You might live in Upstate New York also, if you are in a rap group named after a man frozen into a block of ice. Seven Valley Scoop is a news blog about Cortland — an underrepresented area in the local blogosphere. [...]

Now it finally comes out — suburbia’s terrible secret: Forget hot tubs beckoning sybaritic adults, garages brimming with impressive cars and families frolicking on verdant lawns. From their clutter-strewn garages to their mostly lovely but abandoned yards, busy Southern California parents who own their homes rarely use residential outdoor spaces for the purposes for which [...]

Can someone please explain to me what this is supposed to do? Because I’ve read this story several times and can’t figure it out. An example of the types of collaboration COLA B hopes to work on just happened over the weekend, when it brought together students from 10 different majors to work with local [...]

Over the weekend, an editorial on the financial markets by Eliot Spitzer appeared in the Washington Post. It’s worth a read. I’m glad to see that Spitzer is still offering his thoughts on Wall Street. His voice has been missed, and I’m sure in coming years we will hear more of Spitzer at his best.

Burgh Diaspora suggests that Upstate urban boosters should focus their energies on Buffalo’s cause (or at least devote some time to it). What do you think? Is there any evidence that Buffalo is going to experience meaningful economic growth soon, and what can Syracusans do to help? (Personally, I am still evaluating the Atlantica concept [...]

The Post-Standard writes on the fate of the run-down Blodgett School on the West Side. My mom tells me that her aunt (who was only just a few years older than her) went to Blodgett School in the early ’50s or so, when it was even back then deemed a “scary old” school “full of [...]

I don’t intend for this to become a transportation blog, but seriously, even such a modest uptick in commercial shipping on the Erie Canal becomes vastly more interesting when you throw Oswego’s future container port into the mix, and then Fault Lines adds Griffiss Park to the vision: Griffiss IS a port, with the potential [...]

A powerful collection of photos of working-class women of Troy, N.Y., by photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally is very much worth viewing. I’ve posted a link to it on my newly relaunched photoblog, Illustrated. (This is a personal photo blog which I’ve now souped up with some slideshow capability via Flickr, and there are some other [...]

This relatively brief story in the NYT about the uptick in commercial shipping on ye olde Erie has aroused a good deal of interest around the blogosphere. You can see some blogger reactions listed here, with a particularly informative post here. It’s part of a realization that you don’t necessarily need to build up a [...]