Check out the “new” New York State license plates we’ll all be forced to buy starting in April 2010! How appropriate… since we’re already headed back to the economy of the mid-1970s. (I gotta confess: I’ve missed the blue and gold.) Updated: BuffaloPundit is right… Feel the excitement!

Whatever activities a hierarchy undertakes initially to bond a population to itself… often thereafter becomes de rigueur, so that further bonding activities are at higher cost, with little or no additional benefit to the hierarchy. The appeasement of urban mobs presents the classic illustration of this principle. Any level of activities undertaken to appease such [...]

Brian Cubbison of the Post-Standard has a new blog called Future News, which is going to look at ways that newspapers will be able to use things like RSS and Twitter and Facebook and other tools that will show great communications promise to generations of journalists yet unborn. He points out that the world of [...]

Everything worth reading about is on Wikipedia by now, right? Well, no. You still can’t find anything on Wikipedia about Stanislaw Kaszynski, the municipal official who was executed by the Nazis for trying to tell the world about what was going on at the Chelmno death camp in his jurisdiction. Nor can you find much [...]

I can’t believe the news today: yet another CNY motorcyclist is the victim of a driver who turned into his path. This comes on the heels of two fatalities last week. If you know someone who rides a motorcycle, you might have had the experiencing of reading the breaking news about one of these accidents [...]

An article worth reading, although it’s not a new complaint: Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood. Though the wilderness available to me had shrunk to a mere green scrap of its former enormousness, though so much about childhood had changed in the years between the days of young George Washington’s adventuring on his side [...]

This is Jacks Reef. I almost grew up right here (just outside the frame) – on the banks of the Erie Canal. During this time of turmoil, let’s close our eyes and imagine New York as it once was, and could someday be again… a murky, stagnant breeding ground for mosquitoes, that no longer leads [...]

This is apropos of nothing, but I have been meaning to link to these for some time and want to do it before I forget again… Filmmaker Errol Morris has been writing at the NY Times in a fascinating occasional series where he takes a single photograph or image and spends a few consecutive days [...]

It’s never a good time for a post about horrors. Especially not springtime. However, I had wanted to do an inversion of this past popular post, The 7 Wonders of…, for some time but had never gotten around to it. Halloween would have been maybe too facetious a date for it — any responses might [...]

An article from last summer which I only recently read: The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, by a retired Yale prof. He speaks eloquently about the process I have always merely referred to as “higher edumacation.” (Toward the end of the article, he also touches on some of the social media-related issues we have recently [...]