I’ve bookmarked your blog for future reference.

I’ve bookmarked your blog for future reference.

Wow I saw a VPS for less than $5

So I was browsing the web today and I was distracted by this ad for a VPS server going for $4.95 per month. Now take into account this wasn’t shared hosting which I have seen as well for about $1 per month in several places but a full blown Virtual Private Server. It got me thinking whether or not it’s going to be worth it to buy shared hosting nowadays when you can just grab a VPS instead.

That building has been “spiffed up” many times over the years… probably a reason why people don’t consider it “historic.” I guess this is just another chapter. I would be surprised if anyone wanted to demolish it as I understand it underwent some serious renovations around 1990 or so.

Thanks,
Don Argus AIA

KAZ, I also noticed that the Poultry Building seemed less cramped than usual, but I wasn’t sure I liked the “cleaner, more modern” feel. Didn’t notice less chickens. The chickens are the great spectacle of the Fair if you ask me. So smelly, so noisy, so faintly scary and bizarre.

I was disappointed when I went to the PB because I had my camera with me and wanted to take a panoramic view from upstairs. You used to be able to go up there but they closed it off.

But the change to the International Pavilion was outstanding and unexpected. I was pleasantly surprised to see it and how clean and open it was, because that long table format just never worked. I went to the Fair twice, and I have to admit that I was a little upset the second time I went, the Sunday before Labor Day, and found that the Chinese restaurant was closed down.

Overall, it was a great Fair year. But parking was only $5 for me; where do you park? lol

I wonder if there is a resistance to something like this in most communities, because people might be afraid that by honestly discussing failures, it would be painful and also a little terrifying because you’d have to try something really new next time. Or even scarier… maybe to admit that your stated goal is not really in line any more with your current values.

http://www.reverb.progressivetech.org/?p=1113

Basically that past generations (and now this reconstituted version) of City of Syracuse decisionmakers have been phenomenally successful at successfully executing absolutely terrible decisions.

I mean, the history feels like one less of failure, than one of immense success at doing some really dumb and myopic things.

That’s nine and a half inches a day. Can you imagine what it would have been if we hadn’t TRIED??

Was just this morning working with somebody here in Ithaca, saying that they can’t just keep referencing “high tech jobs” without pointing to something local by way of example. The person drew a bit of a blank….

And, of course, the idea that apparently will never fail: skybridges.

I didn’t know about the beguines until a few years ago, I had never heard of them and it’s interesting how social displacement in the Middle Ages resulted in a new informal institution that worked, at least for a while. (There were beguinages for guys, too.)

Yesterday, the NYT ran a story on the outsourcing of legal gruntwork to India. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/05/business/global/05legal.html

As for rage, maybe more people are just being quietly practical. Another NYT story on another institution: marriage, or its replacement, “undivorce.” People effectively divorced, but staying married for financial reasons (dumping the emotional stresses and their associated costs, but keeping the benefits). http://nyti.ms/cywtBv

I think that there are a lot of men hitting a similar wall to the one you describe for women. Partly it’s because more and more of this seems to be age-based, but partly I think it’s because men have been taught for generations that we have choices. It’s just been assumed for most of the 20th century that men always have choices.

In the 21st century, we’re starting to see a lot of those choices disappear or unravel. People who “did what they’re supposed to do to compete in a global economy” are finding themselves trapped with huge debts and little future. Whoever decided to make those “educational treatment” debts “non-dischargeable” was playing a very evil joke on our country, especially given the insane costs of education here.

I’m mostly surprised that I hear so little rage, not that I hear so much.

Wanna buy a kidney?

The Onondagas want people to not only swim, but to eat fish from the lake. I wonder what the estimate is on that?

also, a question: have you read ‘neither wolf nor dog’? and if so, what did you think?

sean

Bloom where you’re planted and just visit Portland, OR and steal their best ideas.

The northern part of the county (along Lake Ontario) feels more laid-back.

Intesting post. After WWII, when the GI’s all started families, they wanted a new home as well. Post-war, there was a serious housing shortage that the cities couldn’t address. The suburbs were the logical solution to this.

As far as Syracuse’s decling population goes, there are numerous reasons. High state taxes drove mfg out of the entire NE, and most Co’s moved South, not to China. Many of the remaining factories moved out of the city to be closer to their workers, take advantage to tax incentives, and get away from crime. As I have posted to Sean’s column on many occasions, only mfg, process, mining, and agriculture produce wealth through “added value”. “Eds and meds” cannot do this.

It is now quite possible for a person to be born, grow up, earn a college degree, find a job, shop, get married, buy a house and never have to set foot in Syracuse. The city has become like the hole in a doughnut; just airspace with no substance.

Additionally, a professionally trained young doctor, lawyer, accountant, can practice their profession in places where the tax/regulatory burden is much less onerous than in NY/Syracuse. IMHO, they’d be crazy to endure living in Syracuse when warmer, more tax friendly venues await. Keep in mind that there is nothing particularly noble about paying high taxes.

Another issue is violent crime. Recall if you can the last stabbing/shooting in Lafayette, Cazenovia, Pompey, or Marcellus? Now, when was the last shooting/stabbing in Syracuse? How many days ago? Who was involved and what was the cause; a bad “look”, money, drugs, gang turf war, or just old-fashioned random violence for its own sake?

According to the last figures released by the Census Bureau (1997-2006), NY lead the nation in population loss, almost 2 million. People are voting with their feet!

Syracuse has an entitlement attitude relative to tax revenue. I’ll wager most of the sales taxes generated in Onon Co. are generated in the suburbs. Yet Syracuse, which continues to view itself as the center of the known universe, seems to think it “deserves” a certain slice of the sales tax pie.

Lastly is the state of the city schools. Graduation rate below 50% and declining. This despite the fact that the city spends more per pupil than many of the suburban towns and still can’t seem to get the job done. Why would anyone subject their child to that environment when a better, less expensive education awaits them in the suburbs?

Like most othe upstate/NE cities, Syracuse will continue to spiral downward. And a tidal wave of generational migration is about to begin. Over the next 5-10 years the boomers are all going to retire. They’ll be moving to tax friendly states like TN, DE, NH, FL, or the Carolinas.
NY has overtaxed and over-regulated itself into a position of irrelevance. After the 2010 census #’s are complied, we’ll lose 2 more seats in Congress and our ability to influennce national policy will decline as well. To paraphrase the great sage, Yogi Berra; “If people don’t want to move back into the city, nobody is going to stop them.”

The real estate ads from the 1920s in the Syracuse Herald are fascinating – many contain paragraphs/extensive lists of why people should buy in the (streetcar) suburbs. Most seem to emphasize “strictly residential” and “fresh air”.

The 1938 photo clears up a few little mysteries… like, why is Beverly Drive so crazy (answer: it looks like it follows the edge of the original housing tract) and what on earth they were referring to when they named “Fairwood Drive” since the street never seemed to have many trees. Well, back in the ’30s and ’50s, it had the only trees around.

I always thought the divided streets were supposed to be like Parsons Drive in Westvale. The PDF article I linked to at the bottom of the post discusses traffic calming strategies in the early burbs. The usual story about suburbia and cars is that they were built as havens for car travel, when in fact they were built as a means of getting away from deadly street traffic found in cities – to make walking residential streets safer. That’s what the curvy streets were primarily for – to avoid dangerous intersections. Then they were seen as desirable street configurations in their own right.

The linked-to Syracuse Herald article about the Geddes family only scratches the surface of the history of the Fairmount area, which is quite interesting and hardly included in any of the standard Town of Camillus histories.

What I find most interesting is how Beverly Drive was originally envisioned AND constructed as a 2 lane divided road it’s entire length – if you research old town minutes they were supposed to be planted with trees in a grand avenue. The divided idea only lasted through the development of the 100 and 200 blocks only, and there’s recent discussion that during the next major road resurfacing the divided portions may be eliminated altogether in the interest of traffic safety. Although the answer was already known, the photo clearly shows the winding path of Beverly drive and explains what “happened” to the 700 block of Beverly, which is now Skyview Terrace. This same idea was attempted again in the Weatheridge subdivision, and appears to have suffered the same fate.

i also think you’re dead-on about suburban movement. in syracuse, for instance, one of the early waves consisted of italian-americans from the north side shifting out to liverpool, salina, north syracuse and eventually cicero and clay. from the stories i’ve been told, some of that consisted of servicemen’s families after world war II, folks who wanted to stay in the city and had literally no room, this ‘birthing’ what we know as mattydale; and some of it consisted of folks just eager for space after generations of living on top of their neighbors. was race – and thus the schools – sometimes a factor throughout the city? of course. but to blindly judge is foolish and simply wrong.

the goal, it seems to me, is not to dream about reverting to something unattainable. the goal is community, for which you serve as an oracle.

sean

We also moved for a better school district. I have no doubt the city school teachers work very hard but my son’s kindergarten class were treated like convicts at lunchtime. When we arrived at his new school district he was woefully behind in his first grade class. Not only was he already expected to know how to read– rather than be “ready to learn t0 read” but there were other skills that he was never introduced.

Our decisions actually had nothing to do with diversity or minorities. In fact, we were very happy to decide on a home in a neighborhood in Liverpool that is very diverse.

If Syracuse would like to increase it’s city population, my suggestions are to decrease violent crime, address domestic crime issues appropriately, address nuisance problems, and improve their physical and academic structure in their schools.

I would really like to live in the city, I lived there as a child in Strathmore and as a teen in Eastwood. I graduated from Henninger. I lived in Bellevue area as a college student. The school systems stopped me. Also, the city isn’t what it used to be. As a young girl I used to enjoy Saturdays taking the bus to downtown, shopping at the dept. stores, the Economy bookstore, lunching at Dey Brothers. Downtown is pretty dull despite the Armory development. Nothing is connected efficiently. The stadium is by the Gulag mall. The transportation center– that should have been more central. There is no mass transit connection from the airport to the transportation center or the city. It’s just easier to negotiate all these places with a private vehicle from the suburbs using the highway system than trying to do this from a residence in the city where I have a higher risk of my car getting broken into and stolen (my mother’s car was stolen when she stayed with us on Herkimer St.) Parking can be problematic downtown, unnecessarily so. This would not be a problem if there were more options on mass transit, but there is not. There is no alternative urban supermarket in the major neighborhoods along the line of Nichols in Liverpool (with the exception of the Real Food Coop in Westcott).

Compared to downtown Nashville (Davidson County has about the same population as Onondaga County), we could do much better. My opinion is that the city planners were inept over the past 40 years.

As for Fairmount: George Geddes, though a country gentleman, was an urbanist — though “not as we know it, Jim”. As today’s urbanists gaze outward at the suburbs and have big ideas about how suburbs should be (if they are even allowed to exist any more, which most urbanists don’t think they should), some of yesterday’s gentleman farmers gazed inward at the new cities and had big ideas about how they should be developed – but they were ideas framed by 19th-century concerns which are no longer valid to 21st-century minds.

Of course, some of these big ideas were bad ideas and recognized as such even back then. If there had been a “b4 Syracuse B4″ blog, it would have been all over these grandiose plans to nowhere – like George Geddes’ own plank roads scheme, which was probably Onondaga County’s very first boondoggle.

There may well be material for a whole raft of book chapters on this stuff…

As for the city’s elite white power structure, they were the ones who collapsed like a ton of bricks on Rhinehart and got the County leg. to vote unanimously for a bill that seriously damages the finances of the towns and villages. I think a bunch of the pow3e rstructure now lives outside the city though–Fayetteville, Caz, Skaneateles.

I always thought of Say Yes as a “come home to the city” plan for the low/middle income families living in the County–folks that I’ve always referred to as The Lost Tribes Of Syracuse. But you’re right–it was never explicitly marketed as such. Even folks in the city refer to it as mainly a city entitlement program. But the sub-text is all about luring folks back to the city–folks with jobs and a demonstrated and active interest in their children’s education. More tax dollars, more active PTA’ers.

Can we all come up with a handy term for those “who hang out on Syracuse.com comment boards?” H.L. Mencken called them the “booboisee “

And 50 years later, landlords still don’t want to rent to people with dogs. The ironic thing is, dog owners are usually the most tuned-in to the community and the neighborhood, as we are walking the sidewalks every morning and evening.

Parker went way over the top; that seems to happen often when griping about folks who don’t get it, such as Beck and Limbarf. And it then legitimizes them when if we just let them rant, they’d possibly already be gone and out of our hair.

DeFrancisco is long past his prime. Unfortunately, I no longer live in his district (outside it by a few blocks, actually), so there’s little I can directly do about it.

The scary thing is that chemical pollution is now a “Planetary Boundary” (from last September’s issue of Nature). Not good!

Sandra Steingrabber writes on this, on how “banned” chemicals like atrazine (I think?) have found their way back into lawn care.

George Geddes was apparently not a fan of state-of-the-art fertilizing. He wasn’t even a strong believer in the use of manure. This is probably more because of his extreme obsession with sanitation than anything else. His lack of enthusiasm for the latest advances in fertilizer made some other farmers look on him as an overrated flake, yet it was noted that he managed to get other farmers in the immediate area to sign on to his ideas. Someday soon I need to go down to OHA and look through his papers.

http://cnal.cals.cornell.edu/forms/documents/CNAL-Form-H-Homegardens-External.pdf

(see below on the form for “total metals” testing.

I don’t know where you pick up the kits though.

I’d be really interested in what you came up with.

Steve

My backyard soil is rocky clay anyway, very uninspiring stuff, so it’s not exactly great for veggie gardening, which is why I will do the raised-bed thing. But this year, just more potatoes in containers and also carrots. For me, it’s important to grow stuff I’ll actually eat… I’ll get myself to become a tomato and salad greens fanatic at some future date.

Sitting at dinner yesterday across from an academic who studies ways to supposedly make it OK to garden in contaminated soil (certain veggies and fruits, certain mulches and other techniques). I was pretty skeptical– lots of that depends on humans following instructions, something I have little faith in for adults, and none for children.

I think, like the aforementioned Emerald City, this is something to be scoffed at and then wholeheartedly ignored.

http://www.troyrecord.com/articles/2010/03/24/news/doc4baa6a345f9cb743624305.txt

http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=908652

-and the effect of the current chaos in Paterson’s Albany on the parks situation.

The City v. Tartaro v. State v. Northern Suburbs issue is a sadly wonderful example. The drivers decry Tartaro for asking for subsidies and grants for this building…all while assuming a 15 minute or less commute to North Syracuse is a Constitutional (or God) given right, no matter the billions of $$ of subsidies that went into building and that go into maintaining the federal highway infrastructure.

When peak oil really sinks in, I hope our fellow residents that built in the swamps of Cicero (with much thanks to the likes of Bragman)…they appreciate how deeply all taxpayers subsidized their commutes!

Thanks for this, and below, too, Ellen.

One of the things I fault Gov. Paterson for was the amount of money he left on the table, when it came to parks. There was $100 million in “shovel ready” projects for OPRHP, and not a dime was requested under the stimulus. I know DEC had several projects in the same category – includng finishing a campground that’s been under construction for years. Again, not a dime requested.

I got one answer for this nonsense and one answer only: Raise the needed revenue.
How? Well, progressive taxation, for one thing. Raise income taxes on the wealthy. If cuts are needed, eliminate truly wasteful things (the Authorities reform enacted by the legislature this year was a good start on that).

Clark Reservation + alcohol + local boys – rangers = terminal velocity

Clark Reservation–how are they going to keep people out and will loss of staffing make it more likely that people will get hurt falling–no one to keep them on the paths etc.?

There are also DEC campgrounds and since the DEC budget is going to be cut 16%, expect to see some list of closures coming next.

John Brown’s site only employs one person … not much of a savings. The property is worth a small fortune, however!

So Long Island is not very impacted at all. All the parks listed are tiny. I got there all the time and did not even know there was a park in Cold Spring Harbor. Never heard of it. Orient is the only one I have been to.

I know of lots of parks in Suffolk county and have been to many. None are on the list.

Did you know that Governor Paterson is from Hempstead, Long Island?

And the Selkirk thing is just weird. Selkirk has (IMHO) nothing going for it except the beach, or maybe the picnic area. Why would people camp there without the beach? I’m also surprised that they were smart enough not to announce a lot of campground closures.

I’m not clear on just how many parks Long Island has, but it seems to me they want to close an awful lot down there. I’m also guessing that the Finger Lakes parks (Fillmore, Treman, etc) escaped because if they cut back on maintenance of these, all the WPA era stonework will just go completely to hell very quickly.

One other comment about the Long Island Parks… Cuomo tried saving money years ago by closing some of the parks. He planned on closing Robert Moses on Fire Island because it was expensive to staff and maintain. I almost thing he lost every voter on Long Island with this great idea. He lost the next election by a landslide.

If Paterson wants to close all these state parks — let’s see how many votes he will get! He must have nitwits for advisors.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/02/snow_race_syracuse_back_on_top.html

And to think of how different James Street would be had these mansions stayed intact rather than filling landfills, that really seems like another universal rule of planning not to be violated. It was bad planning then, no matter the prevailing thought.

This is an article worth reading – about why people keep seeking the suburbs and exurbs:

http://www.urbanophile.com/2010/02/04/the-power-of-greenfield-economics/

How do you clean up the “brownfields”?

and b-4, pretty amazing conversation on the blog about your stuff … i think it plays out a point you made: some of the people who made those decisions – and their kids – are still around, and taking a hard look can sometimes be a painful thing.

but if we don’t, it will continue to be painful for cascading generations.

sean

Regarding the (Mc)Mansions- oddly enough, at the same time the city leaders were advocating tearing down the mansions, they were predicting the existence of McMansions in the suburbs fifty years into the future. I’ll be posting something about it in a few days.

re: your point about the mansions. the one difference, i would venture, is that the mansions of james street had been there for 60 years or so, even in the 1950s, while the ‘mcmansions’ are clear-cut in otherwise wild areas of the county … and the other separation is simple quality. the mansions in the city were constructed by the finest architects, craftspeople and artisans in the community (and beyond), with lasting and precious result. not sure the mcmansions meet that threshold.

I guess, bottomline…it’s our own fault, with the solution being something along the lines of what Robinia writes. Heading to nature to remember, and thus, be renewed.

Thanks in advance for your answers.

P.S. Sorry if I have posted to wrong section this but as you can see I am new here.

Yikes!

To me, the biggest obstacles to organizing (which I agree is more or less natural) are the passivity acquired from too much television, and the obesity acquired by the force-feeding of a hog-fattening diet by the Food Monolith. Unfortunately, these two together really slow down the innate response of the community.

http://kredyt-studencki-lenin.blogspot.com/2009/12/polityka-zagraniczna.html

My point, though, isn’t that hydrofracking is the ultimate issue, or only one against which to organize. On larger scales of time and geography, there are emerging planetary boundaries that truly threaten survival, and which have already compromised our health, integrity, and sovereignty as communities of individuals.

One last thought…Wade Davis, an anthropologist and ethnobotanist, writes about how modernity’s achievement of elevating the individual as the most important unit is the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. He also discusses how shamans, in those rapidly-diminishing “indigenous” cultures that still survive, essentially are healers of community, that any individual disease is more a product of a broken community than an individual flaw. Yet even the shaman, even more so than the cultural relativism that has afflicted modern socieity, knows that there must be a vision, a narrative, or cosmology that fixes moral rules and standards. That while a paradox does exist between the truth of Gandhi that you cite and the necessity of having a moral ruler to make any definition of progress a meaningful one…I’d leave it as, in specific issues, there is clearly defined failure or successs. There must be, because in a relativistic world, nothing is right, or wrong, unless one believes so.

So the ultimate fight falls within that frustratingly (or peacefully) unknowable nature of this world and the future. But one should not make the mistake, that specific battles have winners and losers, with painfully clear moral and biological consequences.

2. Ellen: If I understand him correctly, Orlov believed that societies inherently sense their commonalities and the need to work together to achieve them. No argument from me on that. Even the supoposed “rugged individualsm” of the frontier pioneers was helped along by things such as barn raisings and other common efforts. A modern day equivalent are the outpourings of assistance when tsunamis and earthquakes strike–or, when people organize benefits for families facing catastrophic illnesses to defray some of the costs and give people a sense of not going it alone. Yeah, things might go a little faster if you hire a professional organizer (and I highly suggest it!) but the basics are ingrained.

Salvation does inhere in the effort, but solely so. Victory is more than the effort itself. An example? With hydrofracking, I will measure success in ten years by drinking water that doesn’t have benzene in it, not whether we mounted the most robust and powerful advocacy campaign the world’s ever seen.

Lots of folks, all down for the cause (as they define it), working their hearts out across this land. This is a golden age for organizing.

You’ve commented in the past that Americans, particularly the young, are quite uneducated about organizing and don’t know how to organize themselves because of that lack of knowledge. I don’t believe it. Maybe its just because of my profession, but I see efforts all over the country on wide varieties of issues. Youths, especially Latino youth, are all over the immigration issue. Remember the huge demonstrations in favor of liberalized immigration policies a few years ago? High school students shut down schools and staged walk-outs to join protests.

Again, I might be biased, but I see organizing blooming all over the country–across the entire political spectrum . . . and transcending politics.

Orlov is a native Russian, which probably explains his weird attitude toward women, but I enjoyed his 2008 book “Reinventing Collapse.” I think that book was his high point as a public voice, however. Sometimes one says all that one has to say, and should not necessarily keep talking (a concept I try to keep in mind with this blog…)

However, if Nozzolio wanted to say what you’re saying he said, I think he should have… said it. :-)

Bowling Alone is widely blown out of proportion. New means of acting together have replaced the older forms–it doesn’t mean organizing has disappeared. Orlov doesn’t see people organizing to do what he sees as important–challenging what he calls “totalitarian consumerism”–but given half an hour and a decent internet connection, i could find him 20 groups to whose meetings he could start attending.

I also think Orlov is prone to one of the most widespread problems facing left activists–we’re not winning, so all hope is lost. We are drops of water wearing away the stone–that will eventually and totally dissolve. Progress is slow and sometimes almost invisible. That’s the faith a true organizer needs–that our feeble fits and starts will eventually lead to great and meaningful change.

Don’t like this guy’s attitude. Strikes me as elitist and unconnected to everyday folks. Small sample size of his work though.

New York is better as ONE state IF Upstate and Downstate interests are balanced. That was once the case — and it worked beautifully — until the US Supreme Court said it was unconstitutional to do so. Now there seems to be no other option other than what Nozzolio proposes.
http://strikeslip.blogspot.com/2009/06/whats-fix-for-upstate.html

http://www.state.ny.us/governor/press/factsheet2010.html

(from http://www.buffalorising.com/2010/01/paterson-on-sustainable-neighborhoods-project.html )

Are they going to designate these homes clustered together (I suppose in Buffalo you could do that), or are they just going to scatter these first-time homeowners all over the place?

Maybe the funding we get to help families stay in their homes and change local housing policy to reflect low income families needs will not be cut too drastically. Maybe there will be more funding for low income families to get loans to repair their homes (since mainstream banks redline us.) Maybe non-profit housing agencies can get financing to repair abandoned homes for new owner-occupants–since the private market has walked away from low income neighborhoods (no Parade of Homes on the Southside!)

Of course, the big question is will any of these plans survive the Patterson administration–quite possibly less than a year from now.

When I left that job, I went to work as a VISTA volunteer (the domestic Peace Corps–called Americorps since the Clinton years) at Auburn Correctional Facility. Believe me, this humanities schooled college guy wrote many a horrible poem, short story etc. on the irony of having to go to a maximum security prison to become free and the similarities between wage slaves and and prisoners of the state.

Here’s the deal, as I understand it. After 9-11, a whole passel of the Big Biz decisionmakers came to the patriotic decision that NYC was not, you know, all that “safe.” So, lots of them proceeded to consider which aspects of their operations actually NEEDED the Manhattan address and access, and which could move, say, to Jersey. Lots of “back office” operations were moved. This was a big hit to NYC/NYS tax collections, because it also made it easier for some of those employees to live in Jersey, or even PA.

But, what you are describing is not really the stuff, as far as I can tell. It’s not collections– its more like bookkeeping and data warehouses. Esp. data warehouses– let’s put all that computerized record storage somewhere where the rent is way cheap, lots of empty commercial buildings… and no terrorist would even think of bombing. But, while these facilities use up a lot of space and pay real estate taxes (maybe through rent), they don’t really have much in the way of jobs. A couple of tech guys, a few guards, a custodian… and lots of servers. Heck, Binghamton could be the new, automated back-office capital… few messy and inconvenient human workers needed.

Makes collections or call centers look attractive.

sean

It IS about risk…

If Syracuse considers Option 2 as “pioneering,” this just reinforces the idea that Syracuse has a negative self-image of itself. If Option 1 is how we’re supposed to Come Home to Syracuse, then apparently they haven’t been paying attention (not surprising), as recent college graduates–let alone late twenty, thirtysomethings–don’t really want to risk their physical/emotional/financial lives for an entrepreneurial dream. (As discussed in the NY Times over the weekend: http://bit.ly/5Oez4)

http://tinyurl.com/ykjg6df

Hal…….

Bigger Better Water Bill could have been bigger and better still since they exempted energy drinks.

I almost put the NY- 23 House race in my Syracuse list–cuz we had to put up with all the freakin’ negative TV ads from the right winger/teabagger/Fox idiots. Best moment–after the election when Hofman issued a press release blaming ACORN for stealing the election! The conservatives really do think we’re a bunch of dolts, don’t they?

A great list–10 items, too! What would make this NY’er happier is more NYCO in 2010! Thanks you for the blog, the wonderful writing and the interesting POV.

First it was Oldsmobile, then Pontiac. Now GM is dumping the Saturn and Saab brands as well. If this keeps up, all GM will be “making” are the loan payments on their bailout money!

So, you’d kind of have to invert the algorithm to predict how blight would spread. Or, you could use an algorithm like this to predict how blight could be solved.

…with a bunch of young “professionals” going around infecting others with not the Rage virus but Creativity & Optimism, Coffee Shops, and community art!!

…with government types chasing developers with tax incentives and PILOT agreements, paying Florida types big money to discuss how air conditioning actually killed the Northeast (rather than mindless politicians paying big money for outside “experts” and nationally renowned PhD consultants).

…with backhoe’s to demolish “blighted” landmarks and historic homes full of families for “Progress” (as depicted by SyracuseB4) rather than guns to shoot zombies!

Man, I love Zombie Outbreak thinking already!

Ellen I think you just solved the State’s impending bankruptcy crisis!!

Doubt it, though.

(just to finish that thought)…

The statewide good-government groups have always had a problem isolating the issues and polarizing the populace.

However, I am glad that we don’t have mob grunting enshrined in ballot propositions, like they do in California. That would be a disaster.

I mean the basic freedoms we give away, the higher costs of corruption and incompetence we bear, the sense of loss we all feel upstate (like a lost generation, 30% to 40% of 25 to 40 year old’s that have moved away)…we suffer all this or don’t give it second thought.

But when the state wants to charge us more for a license plate, we revolt. We deserve whatever Bruno et. al give us.

More interesting to me now is how ordinary New Yorkers navigate this system. The people of the state don’t completely lack for political force – the license plate thing is an example. Although the state is going to gradually introduce the plates anyway, they’re not going to force everyone to buy new ones now. Thanks to massive and immediate citizen revulsion with the idea. The corruption of the official system is so longstanding and total, and the citizenry is just becoming a grunting mob in response.

Hey, but aren’t you glad we are avoiding the evils of a “government-run” health care system, and just moving directly to a “government-run” food system? Methinks it will involve much corn and soy…

Anyhow, my parents were probably uncomfortable about using the coupons, but I was sort of lovin’ those grasshopper cookies. :-) Except today, whenever I see them in the store, I associate them with “food stamp days” and don’t care to have them now!

Walmart, you should feel shame.

Off topic and from another post your pictures from Green Lakes are beautiful. The one you have above was my favorite. Great pics!

I don’t understand the uproar though Mitch. It seems like the cuts are in the worst areas to reduce, like schools and such, when there’s so much more that’s ‘untouchable’ due to backroom political deals. I’d rather see Patterson and the legislature go headfirst at those issues. I’d even pay the $25 just to watch.

To be sure, many transient places have great wealth. Including pirate ships. But, long term, how well do they steward their natural resources, to what degree to they prepare a place to offer their great-grandchildren a better shot at life?

Breaking down somewhat now, admittedly. As far as education, if that means “years of schooling” (which is the typical proxy), I think that relationship may be inverse to land stewardship. While the highly-educated US resident talks a good line, they also tend to consume vast amounts of electricity, gas, jet fuel, etc.– much more than their modestly-paid maids and burger-flippers who don’t have high school degrees.

If education is taken to mean cultural tradition of land stewardship, well, that is a different matter. But, I still believe those traditions come into being in places where people stick around the same general environs long enough to learn a lesson or 300 to pass on.

What does matter is education, attitude (of the community as a whole) and commitment.

For as much as I resent an additional fee, I resent the time more.

The scientific method excels at uncovering the effects of a single element of causation. It is much less effective at measuring or describing indirect or synergistic effects. Thus, in urban development research, we find that scientific approaches may describe a phenomenon, without accurately deducing where causes and effects lie in the landscape being described. In the case of Richard Florida’s research, he has fingered some demonstrable trends (US is exporting more “services”– in quotation marks because some “services” like credit default swaps or predatory loans are more scam than service– and people are less rooted to place than they once were, allowing interest in a social milleau or the availability of specialized employment to dictate their place of residence). These are provable trends, using, as he does, census and employment data. However, he extrapolates future causation to the expected continuation of these trends, without proving that the geographic sorting of people resulted in the urban development, rather than the other way around.

Geographic sorting of population, IMHO, is better described in the book “The Big Sort” than in Florida’s work, which nonetheless has some merit. Population self-sorting by geography is, as you say, complex…. but it has much more to do with political pressures and regulatory capture, etc. as it does with, say, the interest of young people in living in areas with sporting opportunities, especially around water (one of Richard Florida’s more obvious statistical artifacts christened a “cause”). And, lousy jobs geographically sort, as well as high=paying ones: all this country’s meat processing is clustered in Texas, because it has the distinction of being the state in which worker’s compensation is optional for employers, and meat cutters get hurt on the job a lot. Presumably, after they get hurt in Texas, they might move to a place with a good social safety net, like NY. Texas also used to attract young men looking to evade child support payments by having a lax enforcement mechanism…. until the feds stepped in.

Which is why my intuition is that a “public option” in health care that allows an “opt out” option for really red states will exacerbate geographic sorting in a way that is not helpful overall, although it may enhance the capacity of one state to filch young workers and jobs from others.

My intuition regarding regional development in this country generally is that our geographic mobility is a relic of the frontier, and is less than helpful in furthering civilization and true development. The most highly civilized peoples have always prized settlement– nomadic culture, while distinct and interesting, has a tendency to be spare… and can sometimes trend toward opportunism, theft and loss of any sense of responsibility to land, neighbors and future progeny who will inhabit the space in which it currently resides.

Haudensaunee have it right: think 7 generations, right here, when you wonder what we should do.

one God of the Internet, indeed – or maybe the one ring.

sean

Reckless suburban sprawl has destroyed the cities of the aforementioned region(s). By allowing unnecessary, uncontrolled growth in outlining areas we have caused our own failing health much like a smoker we have caused our own cancer.

There is a cure and it rests in a regional government that emphasizes the city. By refocusing development in existing areas and desegregating its schools knowing that a region will only be as successful as its central city.

I don’t understand why they can’t just build a pontoon bridge. They got one over the Rhine in WW2 in less than a couple days (if that) and here they won’t even have Germans shooting at them. If this was the Depression, FDR and the Alphabet squads would have been all over this like flies on a turd. But today? Shrug… “Let’s study it for a while longer.” However, as we all know, we are not in a Depression, by no means…

sean

Also, since my wife’s family took me under their wing, they drag me to the Polish language Mass at Sacred Heart–they bribe me to attend a service where the only word I understand is Amen by promising a post service visit across the street for strudel (although the rest of the family favors the eclairs.)

Something that history uncovers after the wrecking ball of progress has already hit…

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/11/MNVVURG40.DTL

Hm. If you can’t make it work in SF…

But, part of the problem with the demise of the old Genesee is that nobody actually seemed to have any real ideas for alternatives to knocking it down (business plans and so forth). I don’t see any harm or waste of time in discussing plans and dreams. I may even do a separate blog project about this, but that depends on how much free time I have so I don’t know. At least it could be a virtual Genesee Theater …

Between the Epic Fail of Pep Boys and NBD (I went a couple of times and all I can say is that it was in better shape than their one in Chittenango) I say at this point the Solvay Town Board should just stop and remember what did survive there. So just turn it into (back?) a movie house, and add space for stage performances. I mean the place is large enough to handle both ideas, and it’s something both the Palace and Westcott have embraced. So why not? Off the top of my head we don’t have anything like that on the West Side…and perhaps down the road they can slowly add Genesee elements back to the building.

I’ve been unable to find the exact opening date for the Genesee, but the March 14 issue of Boxoffice said that the theater had recently opened.

Michael DeAngelis was a Rochester architect who designed many theaters from the 1920s into the 1950s, some as far away as Florida, though I’ve been able to track down the names of only a few. His page at Cinema Treasures currently lists a mere dozen.

I’ve been unable to find out anything about Albanese Brothers, but it’s likely that they were a local firm of builders and developers in Syracuse.

Scans of Boxoffice Magazine and its predecessors are currently available at issuu.com, and there are many articles and brief items about upstate New York theaters, some going back to the mid-1920s. If you’re interested in the subject this is a good place to search for information about it. I’ve found it easier to search through Google than through Issuu’s own search box, though.

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5745

No matter how oil, gas and ethanol Iowa or anyone else can provide, it will never be enough to sustain the complexity curve of today’s society. Eventually it will all collapse, or at the very least, contract. So, I think your assessment is far too optimistic.

Interesting post despite the fact that the data appears to be nearly 20 years old.

Today Iowa’s economy is doing much better. Corn based ethanol is putting $$$ into the farmer’s pockets. There have also been significant finds of both oil and natural gas. And unlike NY, Iowa seems eager to exploit these resources and thus has refrained from building a wall of environmental roadblocks preventing their development. The DEC has successfully blocked most NG drilling in the Marcellus Shale formation, and by the time they do loosen the permitting process the regs, they will have in place will make drilling both impractical and too expensive to pursue. Iowa on the other hand will be reaping mega dollarinos from their NG and laughing up their sleeve at the DEC drones in Albany. Think about it this way. How high would the productivity of the average bee hive be if there were no drones to be cared for and fed? But I digress.

Another way to interpret the stats you cite is that 70% of the students either stayed from the get-go or returned. BTW, what town was the study conducted in and who gathered the data? Personally, I don’t thnk a 200 student sample is a large enough group to draw any conclusions from anyway. 20,000 students – maybe, but 200, nope.

I’ll assume that you believe there is a parallel between Iowa 20 years ago and NY today. But I don’t believe the two states have much in common.
NY’s population hemmorage is due to:
Overregulation
Punishing levels of taxation
Inept, corrupt politicians at nearly every level of government
An evaporated industrial base
And a failure in the government to even comprehend the basics of prudent fiscal policy regarding state spending. (The $10,000 stimulus signs are a sterling example of this)

Iowa never touted itself as the “Empire State”, NY did. Now that empire is crumbling as the infrastructure fails, the educational system malfunctions, and the population seeks greener pastures. In the period from 2006-2007, NY lost 250,000 people! Think of that as nearly enough bodies to fill Syracuse TWICE!

Am I being overly critical? I think not. You see there is nothing cruel or heartless about informing a terminally ill patient that they’re going to die. But, it would be an abrogation of even the slightest sliver of humaity to let them suffer in ignorance.

http://syracuseb4.blogspot.com/2009/08/august-1937-august-1955.html

It’s a good start.

Well then by your own definition, this blog could certainly be considered “art”. It reflects your cultural values which are undoubtedly a reflection of the unique situation of our local area. And I mean that in a good way. The printed word is every bit as relavent to our visual senses as painting, sculpture, graffiti, etc.

But to my mind, there is a distinction between culture and art. Culture is our collective experience, values, and behaviors. And you’re correct, culture is not a luxury: it simply exists in good times or bad. Art on the other hand is the individual’s perception/interpretation of that culture.

What I lament is the monotonous sameness of modern design. We seem to have lost our creativity when it comes to the stuff we make. Structures like the NIMO bldg or machines like the ’59 Cadillac have no present day equivalents. The ’59 Caddy with those distinctive bullet tailights almost shouted – “Hey look at me!” By comparison, the Caddys of today don’t look much different from anything else. Little rectangular boxes with 4 wheels. The ’59 Cadillac was “art”. Appearance-wise, today’s models are the automotive equivalent of a Big Mac.

Culture is never a luxury. It is a natural by-product of being in survival mode. It would be nice if limited funding for the arts went toward the expression of local culture, as opposed to “cultural consumption opportunities” (ie the creation of an “arts scene” where people do wine and cheese while they look at stuff created by people who aren’t speaking to the unique situation of local people.)

Your comments about the “arts” are pithy and thought provoking. In the past, I’ve posted numerous comments to the P-S about this same topic but I come at it 180 degrees from your view.

The arts are a luxury, an extravagance that Syracuse could once afford with ease. The wealth that private industry and entrepenuers created using the Erie Canal and the city’s once robust manufacturing base meant there were plenty of private $$$ to be spent by art patrons. That money is gone – forever. Why? Only process driven industries or basic manufacturing create value-added wealth. When a local economy has economic “drivers” consisting of education, healthcare, and government: no new wealth is being created. Those sectors only consume wealth they don’t generate any.

These days the primary funding sources for the arts are grants and various forms of public (read taxpayer) largess. And any time you get the government involved in funding the arts, you have the very real potential of the public being presented with another “Piss Christ” (remember Robert Maplethorp?). BTW, that one bonehead move by the NEA cost them more goodwill than those eggheads can possibly imagine.

Unless Syracuse can reinvigorate its local economic base and the private wealth which would be created, the “arts” as you envision them are all but dead.

I don’t attend SSO performances, opera performances, plays and rarely if ever even set foot inside a museum. Personally I have neither the time nor the inclination. Your lament is legitimate and quite understandable and I sympathize with your concerns although I do not share them.

The sad and undeniable truth is that funding for the arts is a luxury and Syracuse can barely afford the necessities.

The Nigerians thing has been explained by the director as being a kind of South African in-joke (or in-horror) because black and white South Africans alike have felt terrorized by what they see as bad elements moving in from Nigeria and Zimbabwe. (In fact, if you watch the short film that inspired it, “Alive in Joburg” – the locals appear to be discussing aliens, but in reality, the director was only asking most of them their thoughts on Nigerians and Zimbabwean refugees.) Apparently Nigerian street gangs make really good villains in South African pop culture, or something. However, someone else pointed out that the evil corporation in the film and the Nigerian gang leader both want exactly the same thing from the hero… for the same reasons… and are willing to do pretty much the same things to get it.

Then I’ve actually read some complaints from reviewers about how the film is demonizing corporations. (boggle) Was not aware that corporate weapons manufacturers needed defending. Wow. (Maybe Nigerian gangsters don’t need defending…?)

As for Syracuse, I guess I shouldn’t paint everything with a broad brush. There is the Community Folk Art Gallery, after all. And that large mural of the snow crystals sliding into Onondaga Lake. I just wonder how much of a truly local arts vision we can expect in a college town where the artistically supported tend to come and go in four-year waves.

I saw “District 9″ as a wicked satire, “The Office”meets “Alien, with a powerful sense of place. The best satires are presented with a straight face, and that’s part of why the movie is sometimes uncomfortable. We get the apartheid theme, but is the movie unaware of what it’s doing to the Nigerians? Or is that another level of irony? An American movie would probably be more obvious about whom to mock, and that’s not necessarily better.

On Central New York movies: “The Express,” of course, was the full Hollywood treatment. It put Syracuse in the best possible light, and that’s a good thing. But its sense of place was of Hollywood, not of Syracuse.

“Frozen River” might be closer to what you’re looking for, a powerful story that comes from this part of the country.

A movie that I think captures the soul of Syracuse (or one part of it) better than any other so far is the 1999 movie “Freak Talks About Sex,” which is not what it sounds like.

On local artists: I wonder if they worry about being pigeonholed as merely local or regional artists when they want to perform on a big stage. To tell powerful stories about your hometown, you have to be so much of it, yet able to stand back from it and see it differently. And do the university and the art scene overshadow any outsider or primitive art that might emerge?

But as far as honesty in the arts goes, this city doesn’t openly address it’s own issues as much as it could. Art is the best way to do this because it’s less confrontational. If you want to see the underbelly of Syracuse, read user comments to a Post-Standard article on anything near controversial.

I don’t think arts in Syracuse lacks honesty. Visit Art Rage gallery for an example. Or the warehouse of artists at the corner of Geddes and Erie. What Syracuse arts lack is making honest statements *about Syracuse*. Which would be the most powerful.

For filmmakers and other artists, there have been some low-profile events, usually related to SU, but not always. I know that the Syracuse Film Festival rejected the (really quite good, in my opinion) short film of a friend.

We’re out here, usually doing stuff when we can, when we aren’t working, but where do we go with the output? The best solution that some of us have had is to rent out the Westcott CC to do stuff, but since the larger community doesn’t really have a great way of hearing about this stuff, it ends up being friends/family/same fans over and over.

It’s a void that does need to be filled because the talent is definitely here.

And Phil, the comment about “used to be” got me too. There have been some people living on my block since the houses were built 50 years ago; still friends and neighbors, or at least you know their names even if you never associate. I’m told that very, very little has changed around here for decades. Old-growth suburbia can be a nice place to be.

The other thing that I found incongruous is that the weather was just about perfect every day. I would walk in wonder at how great the day was and people would look at me like I was soft in the head– “It’s like this every day” they would say. Being the weather guy there is a real light weight job. Winter was two weeks of rain in February. It served to make the personality of the region very bland. Consequently, one should not be offended or surprised at any “wackiness” or outrageousness of some West Coast individuals. You would be too if everything was so unrelentingly same around you.

Sometimes a knucklehead can not be blamed.

I keep wishing to see less motorcycles but instead they are more popular than ever. Looks like the rewards outweigh the risks for the riders.

I can smell the pungent, sharp odor of hot weeds from that photo.

http://www.pressrepublican.com/midday/local_story_226113536.html

sean

Things have, indeed, changed. Being an imaginative, nonconformist kind of person is not just more rare among the young– it has also gotten a lot harder for those of us who have struggled with it lifelong.

Am now reading, and highly recommend, Bill McKibben’s “Wandering Home.” Will then go to the very place– Champlain Valley and wilderness/mountains around it, and wander around. Believe it is essential at any age. Only succeeded in getting my grandson to be able to join us for one of the days; will NOT stop trying.

I was lucky to grow up in a neighborhood that had a “blank spot” nearby. I didn’t explore it much but it had a big effect on my imagination as a kid. I don’t think I would be “me” today, in fact, without that “wilderness” presence in my imagination. But by my grandparents’ standards I was probably grossly deprived of freedom. So I don’t know what to say either.

What bothers me is the end result. I am not a teacher or professor, but I work in higher education and am around students a lot, dealing with them, every year I see them come and go and… well, they’re different now. They really are. I don’t know if it’s the tide of affluence we’re coming off now or just part of a passing phase. But while college kids today question things privately, they don’t really do it publicly any more. I can’t remember the last time any students had a protest on the Quad that actually made anyone uncomfortable. They seem very consumed with following all of the corporate “rules” to the letter, the rules (spoken and unspoken) laid down so they can enter the work world. Today you tell a “good” college student or even a high school student “Jump” and they say “How high?” And it makes me sad to think that the corporate world is screwing them worse than it ever screwed my generation.

Anyhow, can’t say for sure what a lack of “wilderness” has to do with any of that, but it can’t be helping matters. OR, it could be I have passed the magical line into “bitter old fart.”

but i also know that during my childhood, we sat on the floor and mindlessly watched black and white TV for hours upon hours, and that my folks saw the end of civilization in much of rock music, and there is a certain inevitability to each generation seeing the end of knowledge in the next. so i try to sift through that natural spasm in evaluating what’s going on – and i still come out of it feeling distressed.

sean

There are lots of wilts and rots that can get into potatoes, not just late blight. Sometimes it is just like when you catch a cold, while others in your office do not… just the luck of the draw or the way the wind blows.

A good gardener accepts that almost nothing is under his/her control.

Monsanto IS pretty evil. I recently learned that it’s possible to patent plants in the U.S. which you didn’t even make any genetic modifications to. That you just found somewhere else and brought into the country.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/27/what-real-piracy-loo.html

As far as the average impulse to garden, yeah, people underestimate how difficult it is, just as they underestimate how difficult home improvement jobs are, etc., etc. But, to grow food, even just a little of your own, is an immensely comforting and satisfying thing. It speaks to a primal need, and, ya know, just feels really good. And, the more you know how and get good at it, the more good it feels.

BTW– potatoes really aren’t very hard most places. Try getting and following some instructions. Not every potato needs to be a science experiment, some can be art, exercise and recreation.

The tomato blight is nothing, in how destructive it is, compared to Monsanto.

I recommend planting by seeds as much as possible. Of course, now we all have to purge our soil…

Plants tend to run away from me screaming. I could kill a cactus by just looking at it.

Diversity and its importance was the grim lesson humanity was to have learned from the Potato Famine. If we just lose our Nightshade family crops, we will be lucky. Think, people, before it is too late!

I bought one of these tomato plants from KMarts, and it looked perfectly healthy, but this blight showed up about a month ago (Today = July 20, 2009), and I have been holding it at bay with a vinegar spray once a week. Otherwise the plant is growing great, with lots of cherry tomatoes, yum.

Now that you have informed me what I am up against, I will spray every day, and snip all affected leaves off.

I’ll check back here to see if you accept follow-up stories.

I only have a small patch of plants and every year I keep forgetting to bury the ends of the canes so that they multiply. I got 2 cups of berries on Wednesday night and only half a cup tonight. And I didn’t remember to go check my favorite berrying spots this year so I missed out on a lot.

I don’t want to live in a world without black raspberries.

As for law schools — considering the amount of litigation going on in Albany recently I am sure we will need more homegrown lawyers for decades to come.

There is alot of negativism in this area. Maybe central ny should be a bit more positive about the largest employer in Binghamton. Also, it is the biggest tourist attraction and the biggest recipient of research money in Binghamont.

Has anyone ever really sat down and estimated the net energy gain/drain of college sports on a community? Why is it always considered an unquestioned plus? Granted, SU sports are probably more of a net gain than Binghamton sports, but honestly… is one 2003 NCAA heroin rush of a win always going to balance out the dreary sameness of the athletes (or other associated people) behaving badly?

am I making any sense?

A new $33 million athletic center and a NCAA tournament berth this year–but all anyone talks about ids how Binghamton (the academic leader of SUNY) has compromised their standards.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/22/sports/ncaabasketball/22binghamton.html

The Ramones played their first show ever in London. It was a seminal event in the history of punk rock: among the concert-goers were members of nascent bands The Clash, Sex Pistols, Siouxie & The Banshees, X-Ray Spex. The punk DIY ethos led to almost everyone in attendance to start their own bands. Punk rock was born on the 4th of July!

Meanwhile I was playing tennis with my friends (we had just finished up 10th grade) and boycotting bicentennial events because in our teenage minds, they were sooo lame!

As for the struggles of families visiting incarcerated loved ones, I can attest to the problems first hand. I was a VISTA volunteer for 18 months at Auburn Correctional Facility in 1992-93. My job was to recruit volunteers for the education, clerical and counseling needs of the prison. The most worthwhile thing I did was help organize a supervised children’s play spot inside the visiting room at Auburn. It gave kids a chance to play while their parents etc. had more private conversations and also gave them a chance to play with their incarcerated loved one–rather than just sit at a small table on a plastic chair for a couple of hours.

The other thing that struck me was that nobody repaints their houses (outside of the Mennonites I suppose). It can’t just be a money thing; the area doesn’t seem desperately poor. It’s like they just don’t see it as a priority. Peeling paint everywhere! I haven’t seen it to that extent even in some of Syracuse’s worst neighborhoods.

The weather on Thursday through Saturday was miserable but I was based at Sampson State Park during those days and moved down to FLNF on Sunday so the weather had turned nice.

I’m probably going to go back there this summer if I get a chance for another extended vacation.

Cayuga County, and Northern Seneca County, is the locus of the anti-native-people sentiment. Most of the National Forest is in Schuyler County, which has a very different feel to it…. more Southern Tier, more woods, less Cayuga County-type corn+cow farming. It’s about the soil, which, in turn, is about the geology. Big differences North to South in the Finger Lakes region.

As for the history of Ithaca, local historian Carol Kammen has some nice overviews, and you can’t beat Morris Bishop’s “The History of Cornell.”

That’s the Plainville Rd. bridge that spans the “State Ditch”. Unless memory fails me, Jack’s Reef proper (over by the Hotel and Trapper’s) is farther down the river. Again, if memory serves, one cannot even view that bridge from Jack’s Reef.

Having said all that, I fell in loe with the entire “reef” area when I was first introduced to it nearly 30 years ago. I ate many meals in the hotel and had a few “snappers” at the bar. A good friend of mine was the bartender at the time.

It was during the digging of the Satate Ditch that the water level in Cross lake was lowered (by design). That in turn led to to the ongoing land disputes between the lakeside land owners and NYS over who “owns” the shoreline and whether the older water mark which was higher than the current lake level is still legal/valid.

As far as the sacking/trashing of Albany goes; relax and enjoy your vacation. With the overabundance of stupidity now on display in the Senate, you’ll have plenty of targets remaining after you return. Smaller states like DE, RI, or NH are incapable of generating the type of political inertia being cranked out in our state capitol. They’re too small to hold that much dumb thinking or childish behavior. If the state would only levy a tax on stupidity, those clowns would have the deficit erased in just a week or two.

Sounds like a business model to me!

Hey, Johnny D. and Dave: you’re playin’ for realz now!

No, seriously, though: all the good people have left ESD quite a ways back. There is barely any there there anymore. Who wants to be titular Czar of a pile of temps looking for real econ dev jobs in other states? Not surprising he is scurrying back to his failing bank. If we got outrageously lucky, maybe Paterson would hire somebody who actually had a background in economic development…. although, the last guy like that got disgusted pretty fast and moved on…

Kaz, I didn’t think through that far. Blech. Paterson should be very wary of hookers he doesn’t know really well– in case he isn’t already.

And, Forg, I think the two crooks are doing something akin to plea-bargaining– less jail, more cash, and an early exit from the scene.

I have yet to see anyone – except the GOP of course – consider this a good move. Now any sort of delay in regards to any law/topic/project/funding, whether it’s consequential or not, can (and will) be laid at the doorstep of this GOP “Coalition”. Based upon the new rules they immediately set down I can only guess they know this might not last for that long and they did this just to cut off alot of the majority party’s power in the Senate, putting the GOP on slightly more solid footing.

But consider, the GOP, already smarting from a fair number of issues (to be fair the Democrats aren’t pure either), got two power hungry and scandal laden Democrats (who already tried a power play within their own party) on their side. Gee how long before these two try to grab even more power, or even worse, play the GOP off against the Democrats? I can already see them trying to dangle influence and money over the Democrats’ head in order to try to solidify their position. Which, in this pork saturated legislature, sadly could work.

I have no idea what those two Democrats were thinking (besides ‘me want power’). Even if by some miracle the GOP survives with the same number of seats – never mind if they themselves survive without the Democrat party support – after the next election, do they really believe Skelos and the other GOP are going to continue to allow them all the influence and power they currently have?

“NYS Senate control returned to GOP which controlled it for 4 decades, by 2 senators under criminal indictment? Sounds like “reform” to me!”

Note that the Republicans were all up in arms when both were indicted, but have now become silent as they fit their uses.

You can nearly guarantee that regardless of how this shakes out, both will lose their primaries come 2010 by very, very large margins. Both are in deep blue districts (one is in one with only 6% Republican registration) and aren’t likely to care much for these antics.

I don’t know if gay marriage is any deader than it would have been (nor do I believe it’s dead). It’s not like the Dems were in a hurry to pass it.

I also forgot to mention that Land Banks enable the creation of governmental authorities to seize tax delinquent houses and drive re-development discussions in deteriorating low income cities where the private housing markets have essentailly collapsed.

Of course, the big question everyone working on substantive issues now faces is will ANY legislation get passed in the waning days of the term? I’m very much invested in the fight to get the Land Bank enabling legislation passed that Gov. Dipshit vetoed last term, due to intra-Democratic squabbling between Mayor Brown and Assemblyman Hoyt from Buffalo over the city of Buffalo and Erie County working together. Two other areas–hopefully Syracuse–have had to wait another year to get this thing going. Will it get anywhere this yeear? Who knows now?

I can only imagine how the Gay Marriage folks feel right now–talk about dead as a doornail.

http://blogs.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/15240/skeloss-statement-rules-changes

“This was no boating accident!”

I’m not one to tell people to move if they don’t like conditions here in NYS (the opposite actually…come back and fix it!), but one of the newest residents of Florida should be down there fighting his hurricane insurance premiums rather than messing with the State Senate.

Also, the post-apocalyptic TV show “Jericho” … Rome was one of the seats of the U.S. government, I think. I’m sensing a trend…

…which is possibly explainable by many TV/movie writers hailing from NYC and thinking of Upstate as some sort of mysterious wilderness or tabula rasa, conveniently located nearby.

Joebass, it WAS all about post-oil. And global warming. And pestilence and plague. They even had Joseph Tainter as a guest (but apparently didn’t let him talk much, or else the show would have been far more downbeat). Other guests included Jared Diamond and James Kunstler.

if it was kunstleresque as you say, maybe i should give it a second look.

Not a bad vision! And with a good measure of truth to it.

There has been speculation about wolves moving down from Canada, but no confirmation. I heard that dna tests were done on a “coyote” and it was found to be genetically a wolf.

The DEC does not want to officially recognize these sightings as some action might be needed. They are so understaffed and the situation is just getting worse.

re: your comments on the great gray wall:

last saturday, my son played at alliance bank stadium, and nora and i stopped at the market beforehand. remember the old blarney about how they’d be intertwined attractions? it’s a nightmare to get from one to the other. to walk it would be an awful experience, and it’s not much fun by car. beating a dead horse does no one any good, but as the years go on it becomes it is easy to be more and more incredulous that millions of public dollars were invested in this whole mall-market-stadium complex that is hopelessly disconnected, and – except for the market itself – stunningly impersonal. all you can do is laugh, out of despair.

green planning? are you kidding me?
sean

I also hope she realizes she’s too good to start out as a cashier next time.

We have so much to learn from these peoples, who, IMHO, formed “a more perfect union” than any other democratic experiment has yet to achieve.

Josh, I noticed that there is a used copy of this book at Amazon for $2.99:

http://www.amazon.com/Six-Nations-New-York-Documents/dp/0801483174/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242249805&sr=8-4

(surprised it was also published in paperback)

And I’d be happy to see three true New York’s.

It seems so simple to at least rhetorically unite everyone in the state, but why won’t anyone do it?

Nobody I know of has gotten it so right ever since.

I wish all public representatives took their responsibilities seriously, and not the minutia of things such as .gov websites.

That said, transparency and sunlight cleanse, so hopefully this helps. But when those that are in most need of the bath are holding the soap, water, and scrub brushes, I’m not so confident.

If people really want a wake-up, go have your blood tested for the presence of industrial chemicals.

except there may be no mainstream anymore.

sean

I am a big fan of urban, as well as other kinds, gardening. But, over the years I have been utterly amazed by how cavalier people are about soil and what’s in it. NOBODY should start a garden in a backyard without testing the soil for contaminants. Building materials are chock full of toxins, and people dumped coal ash in back yards for decades if not centuries.

You live in a world that other sloppy, careless, disgusting Homo sapiens despoiled before you– read “The End of Nature,” get used to it, and garden defensively.

–to start fires with when you are done
–to read in the bathtub without fear of damaging expensive equipment
–to leave in the car to read between appts., without fear of theft
–for stuffing in shipping boxes, while being recyclable and biodegradable
–to grab quick to sop up the mess when you spill your coffee
–to use under mulch to block the weeds
–to put on the kitchen table when wallpapering or potting plants
–to wrap gifts
–to read in the fishing boat while buddies fish
–to wrap the fish guts in before bringing home and composting

So, maybe we can find substitutes… but, especially for those of us who can’t afford I-phones, we ain’t there yet… and what is it that the folk are reading in the bathtub now that the cognizanti get their better=quality news on-line?

I can’t help wondering if my despair at all of this is just a failure of imagination. Things are going to be different. Why do I cling to my newsprint?

The Utica Observer-Dispatch is running a retrospective of their anti-Mob work of 50+ years ago: http://www.uticaod.net/site_html/SPECIAL_CONTENT/MOB/MOB_index.html
It’s no secret that the OD’s parent company has fallen on hard times, so one wonders if they’re hauling out those old guns as a talisman against the dark? To remind people “Hey, you need us” – not a bad reminder (but then one could ask, “What has the OD done for Utica lately?”)

As for what comes after… Syracuse has not known a “hard” blogging culture – that is to say, the testosterone-driven sort that would have put local journalists up to the sort of scrutiny and criticism and oppositional head-butting that would have made them occcasionally see red and, if not be credible competition, might have at least nipped at its flanks. (Buffalo has something approximating that) In that sense, as an aggregator of other local blogs, this blog may have failed – because these folks could be out there in the Syracuse area and I just didn’t look for them. So, as part of a journalistic ecosystem, blogs can also fail to play a needed role.

maybe there is something waiting to replace that venue. right now, i don’t exactly see it. that doesn’t mean it is impossible. the draining nature of the moment … and in a lesser way, of the last 15 years … is that nothing emerges as replacement as the old way fades. what we get is s spectrum of information – some terrific, some abysmal. where that leads us, i don’t know.

sean

When a Daily Show and Colbert Report emanate more thoughtfulness, truth and accuracy in reporting through satire than does most any “major” news outlet, there should be change.

People ask, “who will do the journalism?” and it’s good that they care. It might in fact be New Urbanism-type starving artists, rather than the middle-class families with health care, mortgages and kids nearing college. It might be hobbyists with day jobs. And I say that in the best sense of the word “hobbyist.” I think of those folks who build hot rods for the Syracuse Nationals. They’re not professionals, most of them, but they’re not amateurs in the common sense. They have remarkable skills and a passion for what they do. They just have day jobs, too.

At some point, the job of informing people will be reconstituted because it needs to be done, beyond the daily conversations. Sadly, it’ll be after many dedicated people who did it well have been disrupted. Now they tell us, about “filter failure” http://tinyurl.com/8arg38 and expert-based search engines http://tinyurl.com/cuhrej

In the meantime, NYCO might have to dust off what she can remember from her newspaper major.

Here in Ithaca, our newspaper is the farm team– for Gannett’s major papers. Reporters change out very regularly, and can barely find the municipal meetings they cover, let alone understand the issues. The general public that has lived here a couple of years would usually have more background, could probably write more insightful articles.

If, in losing professionalism, we regained community and a sense of belonging to a place, I think it would be a very worthwhile trade-off. It takes a village to nurture creativity…..

yeah this follows the disappointing pattern of most other marketing initiatives put out by the usual characters.

and definitely slamming benzene and other chemicals into our aquifer is not a good idea.

We read this! All in the fall of an empire I suppose…

http://www.newsweek.com/id/194590

Not much sense that he or anyone else is thinking about how he wasted a year of NYS voters’ time. Oh, and he might run for NYC mayor someday too? Shrug. It’s all stuff from another world; not my world.

sean

Sorry, but that is way, way off the mark. Upstate NY is the original hotbed of individual liberties, the soil of the abolitionist movement and women’s suffrage and rights… even, before that, the place where Dutch women were the first in the “new world” to own property in their own names, and Haudenosaunee women walked the woods alone, secure in their inviolate right to do so without fear of male aggression (as women’s individual rights to control their own bodies were inculcated deep in the culture).

Boston clipper shippers, merchants whose profit margins were diminished by taxes on imported products, staged the first “tea party” over their unhappiness with the King’s new tax…. but were eerily silent about the third leg of their “triangle trade,” which brought stolen and enslaved Africans to this country to work without individual liberties. The poor can, indeed, remain without rights while the wealthy squabble about who deserves more of the take….

Jean at akagaga.blogpot.com attended the Albany TEA Party, which was extremely successful. And of course, in Texas it was reported that tens of thousands showed up.

New York State has never been a traditional supporter of individual liberties, anyway, so NYS’s comparatively lower turnout than other states was not surprising. And that’s not even mentioning the media (small and large) blackout of the entire event. Oddly enough, many Upstate NY bloggers were eerily silent about the events.

With public money, you’d think the public ought to have first dibbs on submitting innovative proposals.

Sorry, today is the day all the students on the Hill get drunk and unfortunately I work near Ground Zero for the partying, and some of the little cherubs tried to rip the license plate off my car. So I’m grumpy.

One thing I’ve noticed, though. We remember the names of the communities when we’ve forgotten the names of the killers.

Frankly, I’d rather us fail by our own wits (or lack thereof), than continue as is, just as it’s been for too long now.

Sometimes, all one needs is that extra push, shot of fear, or glimpse of freedom to ready her/himself…

Last I knew, stuff like the Golden Snowball, Winterfest, and the skating rink downtown embodied exactly that message, that a little weather never hurt anyone.

Neither do ad hominem arguments!

If anything, you supported my point: that the system does not require high technologies, sustainable innovations, or MDA grants. Just some old fashioned cleaning and new signs, to start.

Regarding its alleged hopelessness of urban legend and mythical routes, it seems that enough in the community find it useful to continue using it. Yes, certainly as their only and last choice, I’m sure…but your bad experience is another’s gratitude.

I think most of our environmental ails today to be traced to very simple causes, like expecting to not be subjected to the weather when you’re outside. Reading Sean Kirst’s columns about earlier generations of Syracuse residents, many seemed to walk, frequently…

Could it be cleaner, more efficient, with shelters to protect against the worst of CNY winters? You bet, without a doubt. But also, and I would guess you’d agree Phil, that the push to clean out the “common center” is predominately one of urban pre-cleansing for the so-called Creatives, necessary before they’ll recolonize the area with creative coffee houses, apartments, and art galleries.

There’s no disputing that even in its dilapidated and downtrodden condition, that the common center is one of the few things in downtown Syracuse that the community actually uses, especially those closer to or well below median income levels.

Simon St. Laurent’s comment is good. DeWitt Clinton did forge a One New York, but it was merely a blip on the historical timeline; and Upstate is not responsible enough to lead its own way (at least when one looks at the past 100 years or so). The problem is mainly that Upstaters are more relaxed– most of us just want to live our lives, and not be the power-brokers of the nation or the world like so many in NYC.

7) there is no mets (or chiefs) bar in central new york. actually, there is no mets or chiefs anything. anywhere.

6) the lack of an original and vibrant music scene

5) terrible general maintenance of civic infrastructure and streets (litter, potholes, sidewalks, lights)

4) i-81 and 690 obtrusively running through the city limits

3) the urban vs suburban separation (with its race, crime, social, and class undertones)

2) no accountability or learning from bad urban planning mistakes (is this too much to ask?)

1) wait for it… no pedestrian-friendly, downtown baseball stadium

Take Rt 81 to Whitney Point

Make a right turn at exit
Rt 79N Lisle –
1. count the abandoned houses
2. count the outdoor wood burners within close distance of a neighbor
3. count the number of port a potties on main street (bet you can’t!)

Turn around and go south

Rt 79S
1. Notice the large gravel pit in the middle of the scenic river. This was what the former farmers did when their farm was no longer worth farming. It would be easy to count the number of working farms in the county. (40 est)

Rt 79 chenango forks
1. count the number of abandoned houses
2. count the number of abandoned businesses
3. count the number of cars in front of the main business — the bar

make a right turn on Rt 12S/Upper Front Street, Binghamton
1. count the number of parking lots
2. count the number of signs
3. count the number of people walking on the newer sidewalks.

Make a left on main, changing to Court St, Binghamton
1. count the number of historical buildings in disrepair
2. count the number of empty lots that were once historical buildings
3. count the number of empty stores
4. count the number of people that appear to be shopping

And don’t forget to tour Johnson City and Endicott — see the former EJ Shoe Company buildings, the former IBM factory buildings and the parks they created — CFJ Park (soon to be walmart) and the IBM Country Club (an assortment of town houses, catering center and private golf course , and unused buildings)

Anyone want to come along?

7. Apathy

6. Sidewalks in disrepair

5. Sidewalks not cleared of snow

4. Decrepit city parks

3. Crime

2. Lack of dedicated Bicycle Paths

1. Litter

- – -

Before my current job required me to have a car, I was totally mass transit dependent. For six years I commuted to James St. from Westcott to go to work. This meant I spent an inordinate amount of time at Common Center. It sucks. No, not because it doesn’t have “Connective Corridor” amenities. It sucks because it has no amenities whatsoever. It is filthy. Not just dirty, but public health violation level filth. Bus riders are at the mercy of the weather, often waiting up to an hour for the next bus line up if you happen to be going at non-commute times. Until recently, there wasn’t even any place to sit. Try figuring out the transit map–posted in micro-type on only one of the four corners. Bus routes are a matter of urban legend and oral tradition. Even the freakin’ clock they put in broke after a month–never to be fixed.

Common Center sucks–and it sucks the worst for the riders taking mass transit. Don’t get me started on the hub and spoke model of transit that dooms southsiders to make an hour long journey to the S.U. hill on the bus–even though they can see the freakin’ place in the distance from in front of their homes.

If you’d ever been reliant on this ghastly system, you would realize how parochial and condescending your statement about how the system doesn’t need high technology or MDA grants. THEY CAN’T EVEN GET THE FREAKIN’ CLOCK TO WORK!!!!

One thing I read about over the past few years that I would include as one of NY’s “7 Horrors” would be the depradations of rogue town justices. That NY Times series was an eye-opener. How could such feudal “justice” be going on here?

The Finger Lakes are a wonder, but historically, the Sullivan Expedition was a horror (and the subsequent starvation, and its cultural and legal aftermath).

Marcellus Shale hydrofracking – an ongoing horror as we speak?

I guess until recently I would have included the Rockefeller drug laws but maybe times are changing…

As for Syracuse itself, Onondaga Lake pollution, of course. A place that I think illustrates the intimate connection between wonder and horror. Though it’s hard to use the word “horror” for these things because I think we have become so dulled to it.

That “common Center” is one of the few places in Syracuse that, for a second, reminds me of NYC or other urban area. A mass of local humanity using public transit (gasp…because it doesn’t look like a Creative Corridor?!), doing its business locally, without high technology or MDA grants.

If only our leaders would just let us be (and our pocketbooks), we’d be far, far, far better off.

The stadium, the regional transportation center, you name it…it all starts with public money and ends up with a frustrated, deteriorating community, ripe and ready for the likes of Richard Florida.

Re NYC’s prominence as a financial center: that won’t ever be fully be back. London used to be the world financial capital, but no more; I see the same happening to New York.

Just wanted to recommend Simon’s post on Wall Street, it’s worth a read.

http://www.thealbanyproject.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=704CD769BEB4539B26B4258172576C52?diaryId=6140

1) There used to be One New York. DeWitt Clinton was the blacksmith who hammered it together with the Erie Canal, and the state then worked hard for a while to knit it together with more canals. It’s been weakening since railroads overshadowed the canal, and really collapsed about the same time that the railroads did – the 1960s and 1970s. No one’s bothered with it much, except rhetorically, since then.

2) No, Upstate is not ready for the responsibility. Of course we’re not ready for the responsibility. Why would we be? We’ve been in a strange position where we’re not quite responsible for ourselves for over a century, never really taking charge, and finding our political opportunities mostly in blocking moves. It’s not quite as severe as figuring out what to do after colonialism, but why would we be ready?

3) Even if there’s never a formal secession, the divisions within the state are real, and worth talking about. The divides won’t fade if we try to ignore them. If anything, I expect that would make them grow.

(This is the only context where I regularly feel sorry for Long Island – cut off by NYC, dependent on NYC, but different from NYC in a lot of ways. They’re trapped. Upstate isn’t as badly trapped.)

I suspect – I’d like to be wrong – that NYC’s standing as a world capital is collapsing right now. Not that it’ll ever go away, but it’ll be one of many, not pre-eminent. Fifty years from now, it’ll be something more like Paris (still not at all bad) or Buenos Aires (has its appeal) than the centerpoint of the many schemes of the Masters of the Universe.

That’ll change a lot of things. We’ll see…

The problem lies with one powerful group ruling the other (even if it is a rule of intangible economic policy). Downstate rules Upstate, presently, and Downstate is doing a heck of a crappy job. I’m in favor of recession if Downstate refuses to back off.

1) Does One New York really exist? No. I find very little connection or affinity between upstate and downstate. Both of our groups of friends complain about the other area, both politically and socially. In fact, I often hear, “I could never live there. That’s a whole other world.”

2) Is Upstate politically and economically ready for prime time, ready to control its own affairs without undue outside influence? As you mention – No.

3) Even if it’s wrong to instigate it, should we think about preparing for eventual separation? Nah. There’s always somewhere talking about succeeding from somewhere else in this state. Long Island as its own state. Staten Island succeeding from NYC. New York City from New York State. It never happens.

New York’s founders wanted to ensure that constituencies in less populated regions had an effective voice in government. While on occasion there was grumbling downstate, it worked, and NY became the most populous and wealthiest of states.

Now, with laws and State Policies made from a “Downstate perspective,” Upstate does not have a chance.

Was one civic faith more advanced than the other? The Europeans, when they recovered and met the “primitive” Iroquois, certainly thought so.

The Two Row Wampum is a very tough ideal. Likewise, newspapers and blogs (et al) coexisting together. Maybe there is a chance to do it right this time.

i am glad for blogs. i am glad for the joy people clearly show in twitter. but as the water laps around our ankles, i also struggle to see the replacement for newspapers, if they collapse. people have always griped and moaned about papers, but despite all their flaws, i am frightened by the idea of our republic without them. as david simon has written, citizen bloggers – and i mean this as a compliment – are a gift to democracy and ought to be applauded. but papers offer a central voice, a kind of stake in the ground, to a vast civic audience. they also pay reporters to spend a lot of time providing detailed public information that will simply vanish from public inspection once that venue gone. i honestly don’t say that as a guy clinging to the past; if i saw a logical successor, i’d embrace it, in the way i embraced the p.c. over the typewriter. but i don’t see that successor. i just see a void.

Josh, it would appear that “intellectual” as a term has been distorted and disfavored in much the same way as “liberal”?

Our society is moving away from specialization. I hate to bring up “Gone with the Wind” because it’s such a racist old movie, but I keep remembering the scene where Scarlett went back to Tara and told everyone they had to do everything, including field work. Suellen didn’t want to get hands dirty and the butler (former slave) was confused – “But we’re house workers!” And then of course Scarlett had to re-brand herself with those green velvet drapes. Now I have an image of Carol Burnett with the drape rods stuck in her dress so I’ll stop before this analogy gets worse.

But anyhow, do you really think there are “green careers” out there for for every kid in college today? There is a great collapsing and telescoping of the professional job market going on; kids who are not Swiss army knives are going to be in trouble. But that’s part of what a humanities education was about – making you a better Swiss army knife.

I did not go to Ivy League, but I think I saw the “rules don’t apply to us” attitude described on display when I was a freshman at Newhouse. That was the year they decided to require incoming students to pass a grammar/spelling/punctuation test (3 strikes and you’re out). Sam Kennedy, chair of newspaper program at the time, was fed up with students who couldn’t spell. Apparently Newhouse admits were supposed to be far, far above this sort of testing, so some parents and alums made a fuss. (I have no idea if they still require the test.)

I liked this article because it offers a different and more realistic and skeptical view of the college experience. There are so many assumptions of college as being a “net benefit” but that’s only because our society is set up totally for it now. No one ever questions it. I enjoyed high school a lot, found it enlightening and a good time… but college was just a blank for me, it didn’t give me anything I needed in my life at the time, and it’s only now that I’m older that I understand just how limited my options really were because of my family’s economic situation, and how little guidance was available to me (especially, Robinia, as a working class kid). I hope today’s kids are not going to be sitting around 20 years later asking questions they weren’t allowed to ask as 18-21 year olds.

work in a field where it is my job to relate to working class (and the jobless poor) and to do so for peanuts. I have done it for fifteen years.

I am a walking refutation of that article. Exception that proves the rule or is he full of horse manure? I think the latter–’cause I know a lot of folks just like myself.

Yale, what a joke. Takes a Penn man to sort this out!

It is definitely the specialists and abstrations that are killing us right now.

I’m not sure I agree with what he thinks being an “intellectual” truly means….to me, it’s a pejorative in all cases (unless of course you redefine the term to suit your purposes).

Agreed about Facebook’s “tavern” appeal. On Facebook, people come to you because of pre-existing relationships – some of them no longer relationships but everyone is labeled “Friend” on that system! – and on Twitter you go out and find new contacts. Take the new outdoors thing I started: finding an audience likely to be interested in the topic requires some pounding of the digital pavement, some searches, some reading of their past tweets, and then following them so they notice you and follow you. They won’t just come to you. Facebook is much more passive: you get found, or maybe you do a quick search on your email address book, or Facebook even suggests people for you.

In that way, Twitter is more potentially subversive: it cuts across existing circles. Facebook widens the existing circles. Facebook does have an aspect I don’t particularly like: the sense that the good-time tavern is a single, self-contained artificial environment run by one group of people. It doesn’t seem to connect to anything on the Internet but itself. Twitter seems more porous and less interested in your personal information.

As for newspapers and society… if Facebook is a tavern, newspapers used to be like church. The congregation would file in and listen to the sermon. I don’t mean that in a negative way. (lots of good churches out there.) I read an interesting foreword to a book called “Eyewitness to History” that pointed out that religion used to fill the role that reportage does today: a constant backdrop to daily life, and the means by which everyone felt connected to the “whole world.” As opposed to listening to the news (or what’s happening on Facebook or Twitter or a blog).

As for where blogs fit in, if they’re not a raucous tavern or a church maybe they’re just late night snack and conversation at the kitchen table or after-dinner in the drawing room. (Not that anyone has drawing rooms any more…)

Twitter is hardly a place, since you can reach out from anywhere and get messages back from anywhere. Twitter is more about publishing your thoughts than about hanging out. People pick on Twitter for mundane text-message chatting, and there’s plenty of that, But I’d say it’s more about micro-blogging these days.

People like to say that anyone can be a publisher, but most people, especially in high school and college, would rather just hang out with friends. Maybe that’s why highly expressive people in various fields love publishing their thoughts on Twitter and are surprised that “the kids” don’t take to it right away. You can publish on Facebook and chat on Twitter, but Facebook got its start as a college social place and Twitter is such a streamlined publishing tool.

If had the time, I think I’d start a blog about the history of new media, beginning maybe with how the telegraph covered the sinking of the Titanic and how that changed everything …

sean

All irony and contradiction, I am a fan of Wendall Berry on Facebook… but, I read his books and poems, too.

all of this skirts the issue that remains at the center of my thoughts: the fate of newspapers, print or electronic, amid the upheaval.

sean

This guy is intelligent and passionate, and was thrown into a role I’m sure he wasn’t ever thinking about shooting for. I think he’s done a fine job under the circumstances, and he has my support.

The same is true of Twitter and other social media devices. A certain amount of trivial chit chat –and every other level of conversation– will go through, but there are people and companies building lives and livelihood, connecting with people of like minds, advancing causes and education, and building worthwhile Tribes — Seth Godin book, oh so worthy of reading. As Josh says, it’s there. You do with it what you will. You tune in and out of the streams that are relevant to you — as you do television channels.

The bottom line of it all, however, is relationships. And these tools — Twitter, Facebook et al — are helping us build or rebuild relationships, and in many cases making them easier to maintain and sometimes even flourish, on personal *and* business levels.

Eh, maybe that’s a little too poetic.

Twitter is great fun, and yep, an amusing time waster. However, while participating in the Adk twitter boom, I’m find that it really sort of can be all things to all people. The biggest complaint right now is needing to dodge marketers and advertisers. With the addition of filters and such, I am now only reading what I want, and having a grand time chatting with new friends, business owners in my area, and all kinds of folks of my choosing.

Yeah, it’s pretty neat. But above all (and much like anything else) I’m discovering that it is only going to be what you make of it. Fly little Twitter! Fly!

But, I do think the author of the Chronicle article I posted also has a point: Just as natives in the Amazonian forest didn’t know they were naked until someone suggested clothes to them, just as kids didn’t know they were bored until television told them they were, we didn’t think we were isolated until the Internet came along. Or (to use your analogy, Josh) we didn’t think we were standing still until we saw the river. I think the feeling of having something forced on one, of having to choose between cultures, is real, and is a serious choice we all have to make.

There is a force in the world today (and maybe always has been) that militates against stillness, solitude, and nakedness (if not physical, than emotional). I can’t help seeing social media as part of that; but neither do I reject it like a Luddite. When it gets too much I just come back here to the stillness of “Fortress NYCO” and write a big fat post about something. Although i really should be scraping the carpet tape off my hardwood floors today (here at my actual fortress…)

The part that does have me concerned is that I do believe our attention spans are slipping away. I wonder how long it will be before we are all zipping around acting like that squirrel on Over the Hedge when he is given caffeine. The fact that your outdoors project has to be Twitter rather than blog based is the perfect example. I think you are right though. I love my Google Reader; however, I find myself reading my Twitter feed a lot more these days and my Google Reader a lot less. I don’t think this means a full loss of blogging, just a reshaping.

It’s funny how this notion of the cyber celebrity is getting so much press this past week or two. With SXSW going on we kept hearing about how these people who have a lot of Twitter/blog followers are becoming so full of themselves and people are treating them like celebrity. I believe they have a ways to go before they are real celebrities; however, how are they any different than the mass produced musical one hit wonders?

One of the running themes through the night was that those who were just learning about social media but not yet involved in it felt it was being forced on them, and that once they signed up, they would be tied to it.

My analogy is Twitter is like a river. You stand and watch it for a time, and when you’re ready to come back, it will still be there for you. It won’t be exactly the same as last time you looked (it will be different water, the height will vary, the speed will vary, maybe there are sticks or rocks or litter in your view), but it’s there when you choose it. Nobody’s forcing you to stare at the river, and nobody’s forcing you to take it all in, reprimanding you should you decide to step away for the weekend, for a cup of coffee, for a movie, or whatever else.

It’s all a matter of remembering, as Jill Hurst-Wahl put it, Facebook, Twitter and the like are *tools* for our use. They are not slave-masters. You use what makes sense for the purpose you want it to. You wouldn’t use a hammer to grout your tub – if getting outside to run at sunrise fulfills you, getting on Facebook as the sun comes up is not going to make you happy, running is. Your shoes are the proper tool for that time, use them.

When you want to play Scrabble with your kid who’s a 4-hour car ride a way, that’s when you use Facebook as your tool.

Anyway, I find the various classifications fascinating. You didn’t mention the “invasives”. I suppose they would be equivalent to the “untouchables”.

But I agree, there’s no reason the maple syrup loving world shouldn’t be bending their knees to our will here Upstate! :)

http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1453320

The pillar sign is hardly unusual around here – but the sidebar is hardly an improvement.

*Disclaimer: I didn’t really care all that much for the old sign, either. But this one and the Westvale Plaza sign are really quite dreadful

The Atlantica alternative at least specifically names Upstate New York as a part of its master plan. Whether that plan, as currently envisioned by its leading proponents in the business world, is fully acceptable to people here is something to be concerned with. What seems clear is that both pro-Atlantica and anti-Atlantica people would probably be very concerned with public opinion in the North Country, Adirondacks and on the Lake Ontario shore: they’d want us on their side against the other. (For instance, a real bone of contention with the Atlantica trade concept is the construction of new highways for transport across the Maritimes, northern New England and along the US-Canadian border. New England environmentalists hate this idea, perhaps not without cause. But there are probably thousands of North Country residents who would love the idea if they only knew about it.)

So why concern yourself with wooing the glitterati who don’t even know you’re alive, when you might actually make a difference in a regional trade/development dispute that’s already gotten kind of politically hot?

The people who live in those three cities do visit the others at various times for various reasons, and there is some interconnectivity there.

The problem as I see it is that currently Toronto has little use for us, but we sure wouldn’t mind if some of Toronto’s glitter washed up on our shores.

That said, I’ve always been hesitant to do any comparisons on my own blog, because, as the article states, RI has a host of serious problems. As I spend most of my time in Providence — and the East Side at that — I experience very little of Rhode Island as a whole. Plus, I work and live in the college community, so most of my colleagues are non-natives as well. But as far as discussions of downtown revitalization go, I will say that Providence has a lot of ideas to offer Syracuse.

sean

sean

If the economy had been better here in CNY, more go-go, you can be sure that Butternut would have been flooded with “young creatives” and then you would still have gentrification’s social issues to deal with. In Syracuse, this process is only happening in fits and starts, and mostly heavily subsidized by “grants and initiatives.”

I admit to not knowing what the difference is between a “gastropub” and just a regular “restaurant with bar” but I suspect it has something to do with the “mirrorshop” concept that the poster in the second article I referred to mentions. The village of Aurora, if you recall, went through this with Pleasant Rowland where she tried to create a fairy tale village and bulldozed over some of the favorite unglamorous haunts of the locals, as if what those places meant to them were irrelevant to her vision. She didn’t care about the indigenous people. (Which opens up new horizons of irony, since Aurora was the location of “Peachtown” which was the Cayuga village destroyed by the Sullivan campaign…)

Personally speaking about collapse and renewal – I have inherited the care of a nice suburban house that used to be well supported by a bustling family in a bustling local economy – but now all that is gone, there isn’t quite enough money and energy or people-help to make anything but basic improvements to the house (fixing a crumbling walk, getting a new furnace or fridge, painting the outside, etc), while cosmetic and stylistic improvements constantly have to wait for more money and energy to happen. The houses and buildings and streetscapes we see, were once supported by many webs of family, community, thriving industries, etc. When those are gone, even a modest house starts to “go south” – much less a streetscape. You look at the home improvement mags and they make it seem so easy to accomplish a total makeover — when in reality, just repainting a large room or figuring out the logistics of a new bathroom floor can be overwhelming if you don’t have that web of support that existed when the house (or community) was built.

You can’t waste energy on despair.

sean

sean

As for the end of life… I guess you end up where you end up. I suppose at the end, those inclined to pair off will pair off and finally settle down.

As for being or becoming indigenous, maybe there are degrees. I sometimes feel as if people from outside the Syracuse area look at the natives (the white/black/brown ones) as unsophisticated “tribals” in dire need of improvements. I feel more and more like I understand what the “onkwehonwe” felt when the Europeans came.

This is good stuff: “It often seems to me that America is potentially divided not between races, or ethnicities, or even classes, but between indigenous people and non-indigenous people. People who belong to a place and people who don’t belong to any place.”

Can you imagine the aloneness a “young creative” might feel, after years of hopping from one chic apartment to the next, running through several relationships that ended as the partners went separate ways, following the next job to the next city, finally old, and wondering where on earth to be buried?

http://ledeberg.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/why-myths-fail-the-fairy-tale-of-eagle-rock/

I think this writer hits it on the head:

“Day after day more people started to realize that what they needed from Eagle Rock was not really Eagle Rock but what the myth of Eagle Rock stood for. It weren’t the stores with the wooden toys from Sweden, nor the imported Australian products. They didn’t need another handmade soap.
What they needed was authenticity. And day by day it became clearer that all these so called authentic products and services hadn’t made them happy after all…

What they were looking for wasn’t to be found in a town like Eagle Rock. It was to be found in their hearts, in their minds and in their day to day actions. It was to be found in their daily lives. All these products, all these surroundings were merely mirrors trying to reflect the things of life which they couldn’t see anymore.”

When people start really seeing life as it is, then old cities like Syracuse will become more beautiful to them.

I loved how the NYT story ended with one of the bohemians thinking about taking a martial arts class (after decrying the number of martial arts studios the boring old ‘hood used to have). She thought she would refashion the place as she saw fit, now she desires to let it refashion HER. This article is also useful in thinking about the meaning of “an indigenous person.” Can people other than Native Americans be indigenous to a place in our land? How do you become that? What does that mean? What does it mean when you’re not indigenous — as this wave of “young creatives” in Eagle Rock don’t seem to be?

It often seems to me that America is potentially divided not between races, or ethnicities, or even classes, but between indigenous people and non-indigenous people. People who belong to a place and people who don’t belong to any place. We seem to have reached a lull in a great game of musical chairs, the music has stopped, and now people are more anxious than ever to truly belong to a place, because they no longer have the economic power to push indigenous people out of their chairs.

My favorite part of the article was how the neighborhood may not become a new hip urban enclave, but “Indeed, Eagle Rock will probably return to being a neighborhood whose best qualities are well-preserved homes, old-school pizza and a really good hardware store.” or as another person stated–“I’ve got enough handmade soap. I don’t need anymore.”

And you’re right NYCO–many CNY neighborhoods would love to be what Eagle Rock considers depressed.

So an 11-year-old today must see 1980 the way I saw 1951. Chilling!

http://twentyfour01.com/nyco/2008/03/01/winter-report-card/

But of course the snow seems to magically melt as you near the Mayor’s neighborhood :)

The 3rd week of Feb is without doubt a toughie. But, days are getting longer, the birds and squirrels are waking up a little, and it’s actually time to plant some seeds.

We can make it!

Or maybe it’s just February, and we’re ready for it to be over.

sean

“POSSIBLY GOOD NEWS: The fourth circuit appellate court also insisted that the FERC was obliged to consult with the Council on Environmental Quality CEQ when making rules. The CEQ is newly headed by Nancy Sutley (Google her) an Obama appointee who went to Cornell, lived in NY State and worked in Los Angeles on trying to make its water system both sustainable and able to grow. She sounds like a potential ally, although Obama himself is nutsy-crazy about big, federal, Soviet-scale infrastructural projects like “transmission superhighways.” Those who write to him frequently via change.org should be lobbying him to prioritize DISTRIBUTED GENERATION and ENERGY EFFICIENCY – esp. in the densely populated Northeast.”

They will still continue to use this and maybe ask for stimulus money. They are arrogant enough to try it.

Let’s hope the new administration does some homework on them — see Nancy Sutley, Obama’s new head of his Environmental Council in the White House. She lived in Queens and went to Cornell, then to Harvard.

The battle of attrition between money (investors) and community (that needs jobs and money) continues…

http://twentyfour01.com/nyco/2008/01/01/starting-over/

Maybe even a remigration of our own “lost” generation!?

So why the fuss over Attica? Are the politicians really worried about safety of surrounding towns? The only escapes from the state system are absconders from work release programs. The detainees would most likely be held in protective custody–no contact with the general population, allowed out of cells one hour a day.

Are they worried we wouldn’t get paid for the gig? Or are they just posturing?

Thanks NYCO for bringing this up, we would have taken their protestations more seriously if they had said anything at all about the deprivation of rights and the use of torture at Gitmo.

Person receiving services, in most cases this is home health care–disabled receiving basic assistance that allows them to remain outside an institution or elderly trying to stave off nursing home.

The determination of what assistance is needed and the overall review of the efficiency with which the worker provides the services are overseen by the recipient of the services–hence they are self-directed, another step in maintaining a person’s independence.

However, such details of the program such as recruiting of workers, payroll, insurance, filing of governmental reports (Medicaid and Medicare) is done by agencies such as independent living centers as ARISE and Enable, or for-profits such as home health care agencies and even some nursing homes that are diversifying their services (think PACE by Loretto). Hence the need for the director of self-directed services.

Yes, it is a bit of double-speak, but at its core it is correct–people receiving services direct how and by whom they are provided. The paperwork is outsourced.

In WWII, which I’m sure is a tired analogy in this debate, the Nuremburg trials made the US and cause of democracy and freedom stronger, but valuing and testing the principles we believe most deeply in, i.e., the due process of law.

I don’t mind the prisoners being brought here, and tried in some modified/abbreviated form of public justice. Not the same accorded to US Citizens, but one that respects rules of evidence, habeus corpus, the right to confront accusers…etc.

Then again, the U.S. government has broken with so many other practices, traditions, customs, morals and laws regarding Gitmo, I can’t say I’d trust them to behave predictably or reasonably… Their instinct, so far, has been to obfuscate and to hide. It seems to me that this is just about some county legislator going ballistic over the whiff of an idea, but then again… Upstate has always been a great place to stash unwanted people.

The only way I can see them ending up in NYS is if New York prosecutors convicted some of them for crimes directly related to 9/11, and I somehow suspect that won’t be a local prosecution.

http://clarence.ny.us/plane_crash_fund.asp

Thank you NYCO.

Re the article: I always thought CNY had enough skill sets we could set up a good barter economy if worse came to worst. The only wild card in my mind was gas rationing in a hyperinfationary scenario. With no real public transportation that would really put a crimp in local productivity.

The original architecture innovation around here was the longhouse, which had no windows but must have gotten the job done. If you have an active inner life, especially during long cold winters, I would imagine that windows don’t really add much value.

What gets me is that, as you note, almost EVERY architect out there uses funky capitalization and precious lowercall, ALL OF THEM, in an effort to demonstrate visually their innovative nature! Same with modern design…take the School of Architecture’s three winning designs that are intended to “revolutionize the sustainable, affordable home from the ground up” by “creating innovative and new (i.e., never before seen) models”. Well, at least from the eye of this onlooker, the three designs sure look alot like the ubiquitous single/double wide trailer home.

Nothing wrong with that, but I just love how some of the most “innovative” architects out there have thought themselves into a box. That’s their best, most revolutionary, and never before designed idea…a rectangle.

arrgh.

But I’m most curious about convseration breaker #1. Because I’d like to believe it’s not true- and although I agree with the idea that it would be ideal for Upstate to remove itself from the potentially unhealthy and detrimental wall street money- but I don’t know how you suggest we break out of this road block. Reconsidering what makes a healthy economic relationship or a state is interesting, but doesn’t get to the crux of the issue which is maintaining investment without over-taxation. and although I support the idea of a separate North-New-York in principle, I don’t see a readily available solution.

Either way though, I like your blog and will be keeping an eye on it-
cheers,
Aaron

They ceded long ago to the engineers and builders. If only laws requiring an architect’s stamp could be undone, or probably better, if only architects would step up and assume responsibility along with builders for stewardship of the natural world. Farmers abdicated that role long ago, as the industrial system destroyed traditional/Jeffersonian agrarianism.

i’m going to try that with my kids.

- sean

As for the mercury in soda (or pop or other depending on your geography), this is a good summary:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/26/132619/467

As I read the Bald Eagle story, warmer water generated by purifying human wastes melts ice, creates suitable wintering habitat for eagles, and the eagles “return”. But are still eating contaminated fish. But we’re drinking soda with mercury in it (a recent study showed that maybe 50% of all high-fructose corn syrup contains mercury)…

I suspect that Oren Lyons might see the Eagles as bearing a more foreboding message.

there’s always: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knetbVx5A-Q

sean

Another comment from this post that is resonating with me–”it’s never easy.” We’ve forgotten about that as a country, seemingly blessed with nothing but plenty. My worry is that the uneasiness is going to fall disproportionately on those ill-prepared, whose lives were listing severely even during the good times. If I have to hear one more right wing jerk use the phrase “cull the herd”, I’m going to lose it . . .

Once we become tied to a place, emotionally and economically, the notion of moving becomes something to be feared. It’s interesting to see how a place can lose it’s competitive advantage and no longer sustain human habitation and survival. Thank God we don’t have Nunavut in New York or it would be the biggest Empire Zone in the Northeast.

the whole thing still blows me away. i’ve gone out in hope that i might find some safely-accessible point of view from afar. the I-690 would be perfect – a viaduct offers a great vista – but that would be an easy place to get killed. we saw one of the ‘immatures’ in a tree near the mall wednesday afternoon, but that’s hit or miss. i saw two more young eagles thursday morning in some lakefront trees visible from the absolute end of state fair blvd., at least one chunk of it, that comes to an end in a mordor-like industrial zone north of hiawatha. i stood on some big cement blocks to get the view, but it’s another place where it would be easy to crack your skull. the ideal places for a viewing tower, a la montezuma, would be either at the mall parking lot or on the grounds of the wastewater treatment plant, both of which are far enough away that you wouldn’t spook these eagles, who routinely ignore trains and other hubbub beyond the outflow, where they feed. as oren said, any day on which you see an eagle is a good day.

sean

sean

Wrong! She represents parts of the Adirondacks including Saranac Lake. This area has been depressed for years. I would not want to measure who has it worse — Adirondacks or Central NY!

Today, the park has a year-round population of about 130,000 .

In 1880 the population of the area numbered 113000 permanent inhabitants.

Most of the residents are summer people who Kirsten will now represent if they are New Yorkers. As a House Rep, she represented a population far less wealthy.

Loved the bit about NYS being all “true blue”. The arguments with my conservative friends who argue how liberal NYS is (“true blue”) usually end when I remind them of 12 years of Pataki and the rest.

Funny I thought elephants had good memories.

sean

sean

I’m not sure I see any silver lining there, other than more citizens to shoulder the much heavier burden that’s coming.

sean

the retirement thing somehow goes back to your great passage from gatsby, doesn’t it? i also remember a passage from tolkien – i think in his letters – where he talked about how every great culture in his books, just before its collapse, became obsessed with death and the fear of death (reflected in an obsessive compulsion to retain youth), generations that became preoccupied with their own end rather than the next generation. you look around right now at the ‘youth generation’ as it rolls into its 60s, and our theaters and television screens are filled with shows about talking dead people and miraculously revived dead people and mutilated dead people and all sorts of serial killers and it’s just kind of generally one big dead people network. and somehow that plays into what you’re saying about notions of retirement.

well, dammit, i gotta get out there. the deer have been amazingly bold as of late, and this is the time of day when i sometimes bump into them. that’s worth a run in the dark.

sean

I don’t take my Christmas decorations down before New Year’s, either. It seems a little tacky (“OK, we got our presents! Holiday season over!”) It’s usually done the first weekend after New Year’s Day.

As for midwinter around-the-house puttering, I also envisioned myself doing that during this work break, but it hasn’t really happened. Maybe it hasn’t snowed hard enough. I think I remember the story about the snowbirds who returned to Oswego. I agree that staying comfortably housebound in the dead of winter should be one of the prerogatives of a peaceful old age. I think people’s resistance to enjoying it probably has something to do with the fear of life’s end.

i gotta tell you, and this is the deep upstate native part of me: when i occasionally daydream about retirement (and i never used to daydream about retirement; i used to think i couldn’t imagine life without work, especially since i’m fortunate enough to have a job i love, but i’m starting to sometimes think those little thoughts) i now daydream in particular about the holidays and january and february: i love the idea of getting up with the smell of coffee in the house and just watching the birds at the feeder in the yard and taking the dog out for a walk and then coming home and just reading while the snow piles up outside, the idea of winter as the farmers used to know it: down time, quiet time, slow-moving thinking time. i did an interview once with a couple from florida who retired to oswego, and they said upstaters tend to get it backwards: we go out and drive and push in our ferocious winters during our commuting lives, and when we retire – and could simply shut the door against the winter – we move south into heat and the implicit pressure to DO SOMETHING.

all of this, of course, is giving you roundabout (in and around the lake) when it comes to the original point. but somehow it seems a shame that these days between christmas and new year’s are no longer a warm and joyous respite, as they seemed to be years ago, and are instead somehow barren.

sean

http://sev.prnewswire.com/oil-energy/20081222/CLM06022122008-1.html

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf?/base/news-13/122469336925650.xml&coll=1

http://blog.syracuse.com/opinion/2008/10/new_life_for_port_of_oswego.html

And see these two posts from Fault Lines about some possibilities for a speculative answer to your question about how cargo could be distributed after reaching Oswego:

http://strikeslip.blogspot.com/2008/11/canal-comeback-upstate-comeback.html

http://strikeslip.blogspot.com/2008/08/my-2-cents-griffiss-port.html

But process is personalities, and personalities, the process. She’s resting on her laurels, which happen to be much more comfortably connected than most other candidates.

A real personality would have headed Upstate, taken the pulpit, and at least talked about how and why s/he felt most qualified to be appointed.

You can bet anything, that had some form of publicity been necessary, the local power club guy would have been working and spending his way through the press.

Instead, because of this quiet force of entitlement, this whole matter can be kept in the dark, out of public light, other than a short and quick speech from Patterson.

Process is personality and vice versa. They are not separable.

Gina Percz

It is pure power behind the scenes, of men (and now women) in rooms with doors shut, giving the public the same old, same old: “We’ll talk to you when we want to talk to you. But don’t bother us or ask any questions until WE decide to…”.

That’s why NY is broken, why people on boards like the OnCenter decide they don’t have to be subject to the cleansing public light of day, why people think they can sell Senate seats. It’s all connected.

Why I won’t support Caroline Kennedy, then I guess has nothing to do with her, but rather because of the simple fact that she felt she didn’t have to head Upstate and actually talk to real people or even the press. That’s an inbred entitlement!! How many other prospective candidates enjoy the freedom to decide whether to make a public petition about seeking a public seat? How many others can activate a decades old power channel?

At least I had a sense from Hilary, that she had and was going to go out and earn it by talking to the press, and to real people.

Caroline is trying to fix the game before the public ever gets to watch it unfold.

Part of my lack of antipathy toward Kennedy is that I have a strong visceral dislike for Cuomo, who is the kind of guy who’s always looking over your shoulder to see whether there’s someone more important behind you. Schumer’s the same way, really. I guess it’s a quality of hybrids. But she’d better improve with the media–parsing her words to the TV folks in Syracuse made her sound shockingly like Sarah Palin.

Re: Marcellus Shale and local water issues, etc., see:
DRAFT Southern Tier East Technical Paper # 08-07
OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING THE ROLE OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN RELATION TO
NATURAL GAS EXPLORATION AND PRODUCTION IN THE MARCELLUS SHALE
IN THE SOUTHERN TIER EAST REGION OF NEW YORK STATE
at:
http://www.steny.org/usr/Draft%20-%20Observations%20on%20Gas%20Production%20on%20marcellus%20shale.pdf

Knowledgeable people seem to think that the water mining issue pales in comparison to the potential water pollution associated with the fracking process and, especially, disposal of the fracking liquid, which includes “trade secret” unnamed chemicals.

Now, of course, all this is based on cheap oil. You can solar-heat a house up here in the snow (snow actually reflects more light into the house, for a passive solar type like mine). But, it is harder to arrange post-oil-and-coal-energy air conditioning.

Beautiful segue there into the Maddoff thing. Still shaking my head on that– and thankful that the btus in my firewood patch are remaining very stable and very slow-growth-oriented…. you can enjoy same second-hand in a secure European location: http://www.robinia-invest.com/ …. not my company, just my tree ;-)

More people live in urban areas than not nowadays … when we were living in rural areas, the snow was “natural”, when we were just moving to the cities, it was “nostalgic”. Now it’s neither for a lot of people. Hollywood can’t make money from it, either, they’re trying to relate to the urban-living demographic.

We’re in so much of a hurry that it seems like we can’t wait a little while for the roads to be cleared, either … watch the drivers on the roads behind the “reporter next to the highway” stories on the news … they seem to believe that they shouldn’t have to slow down for snowy or icy roads.

but i’ll tell you what: maybe there’s a little backlash. i’ve run into a remarkable number of people win recent days, including the stormy friday morning we spent hawking papers for ‘old newsboys,’ who have said: ‘you know what? i kind of like this.’

because it’s kind of home.

like syracuse china.

sean

Uh, interesting. Doesn’t that violate the Great Lakes Water Compact though? (did that get signed into law yet?)

Yeah, I am sure that they own “Onondaga Pottery.” Better watch out that they don’t start charging your county royalties on the Courthouse sign. Good book on this subject: Freedom of Expression (R): Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity by Kembrew McLeod. He trademarked the term “Freedom of Expression” to prove a point… I read the old version, but, last year a new version came out, Freedom of Expression: Resistance and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property by Kembrew McLeod and Lawrence Lessig.

In the “we are running out of things to be taken away from us” category: they are already shipping Finger Lakes water down into PA for natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

It’s as Robinia says, we’ve moved from capitalism/democracy to consumerism/corporate feudalism abetted by governments.

I mean, if you can buy a senate seat for $30 million, why can’t you sell one to the highest bidder!!?!?!

The feeling of being the odd man out in a “prosperous” nation was a big part of Upstate’s agony for years… decades.

And that’s true…maybe these continued losses, as bad as they are for community, will eventuate a local, self-reliant economy.

The comments at syracuse.com are pretty telling, too.

In many ways, we are doing this to ourselves, with what we buy. Those quick trips to Target are as responsible as NAFTA or any global trade policy.

Sharon

So, magnanimous individual that I am, I suggest that Paterson appoint Caroline NYS Princess, rather than Senator. Then, she could do all that stuff in your last paragraph of your comment above, but, they could be a tourist attraction instead of a governance distraction.

“Change we can believe in.” Well, things are changing really fast for a lot of people in this country today. But the Kennedys, they never change. That’s what bothers me. They always get the same amount of ink and adulation no matter what they do — whether it’s sitting on boards as a career, or being hypocritical about wind farm siting, or snorting coke and crashing their sport planes into the sea, or whatever else it is that Kennedys do.

I noticed Teddy has backed off from the media reports that he’s been making phone calls. I guess no one wants to be even remotely associated with Blagojevich’s possibly illegal behavior. Bad timing, that.

Yes, Ted Kennedy was there at the creation of many of the advantages we’ve now lost. So I have to wonder if, since we’ve lost these advantages, the mighty Kennedys are really not all that powerful, so why should we appoint one — except for the election $$$?

I’m not looking forward to the same old bullshit with the celebrity senator this time. The “listening tours,” the rote platitudes about “Upstate needs jobs,” the awed editorial boards getting hard-ons for how historic it is to be in her presence. You KNOW it’s not going to be any different this time. It’s just going to be another dog and pony show distraction from the actual political talent development problems of this region. I really rather would have Nydia Velazquez or Cuomo if it came to that. They would be far less of a distraction.

Lately it seems the illusion is slowly crumbling (being ripped off?) the veneer and fiction of the people deciding their representatives.

The media and other commentators seem lately to have taken to saying, “Kennedy has the $30 million it will take “TO BUY” the senate seat”.

It seems to me that this is a huge shift, from acknowledging the role that money plays in elections. Those observers seem to be admitting that political seats are now a commodity, to be bought and sold by those who can, just like yatchs or Aspen condos. Those without $30 million need not apply…so go away!

The states(wo)man model is the HR Clinton, DP Moynihan, RF Kennedy type.
The Senator Pothole type is the Jacob Javits, Al D’Amato type
Our hyper-organized and ambitious Senator Schumer is the hybrid model–a little of both

As they used to say, if you want a nuanced policy discussion on immigration, go see Moynihan. If you want a passport, go see D’Amato. The U.S. Senate is supposed to be a deliberative body, insulated from the need for incessant campaigning and focused on the big picture of our nation. As such, it is the place for thinkers and policy folk. So, eliminate the Senator Pothole model.

Does anyone being discussed fit the bill for either a states(wo)man or hybrid? Cuomo seems to be a lot like Schumer–very bright, but whose ambition seems to outweigh all other character traits. He’s your classic hybrid model.

None of the others mentioned seems to have any gravitas at all–Gillibrand, a one-term Rep. who is a Democrat, but barely. The dude in Congress from Buffalo–I can’t even remember his name. Nydia Velazquez–does she even know where upstate NY is located? Byron Brown–Mayor of Buffalo, with a control board doing all his work.

Kennedy certainly has a name and the ability to self finance two very expensive campaigns. But when has she ever set foot into the public arena? She defiantly stayed away (something that made her distinctive amongst Kennedys, probably why there is a resevoir of goodwill now). But she is a legal scholar and she also has loads of Obama brownie points due to her campaign, VP selection and transition work. She’s the stateswoman type.

It all boils down to Kennedy v. Cuomo (no, not the divorce again!). I’d say its “pick ‘em”–money/charisma/Obama cred v. hard work/intelligence/ambition.

Today’s power brokers are incompetent wannabees by comparison . . . They or their friends may do OK for themselves, but the community as a whole is paying for their benefits, and is in the gutter.

sean

I do like the idea of measuring happiness (as per JS21′s comment) rather than simply economic activity– no way that inefficient health care systems and too many divorces should make the US look better off… which current GDP-figuring does…. and, the DOW mostly measures animal spirits, far as I can tell, at least lately.

Second, you focus on the fact that the index has fallen from 11,000 to 666, but you don’t mention why it ran up to 11,000 in the first place. Six years ago the BDI stood at 845. The price ran up in part due to increased shipping demand, especially from China. However, the ban on single hull ships also lowered shipping supply by 5-10%, creating a big imbalance between shipping demand and available supply. With the long lead time for building new ships this created a several year situation where companies dramatically bid up shipping prices. As transportation prices are a small percentage of a products final price, companies where willing to pay more to assure they could get the raw materials they needed, and get their finished goods to market. Now we have new shipping capacity arriving in the market, and a drop in demand, which has quickly sent prices back to historic levels.

So, while the BDI does indicate a drop in demand for shipping(it could just be an increase in supply, but there seem to be enough indications of reduced demand that I won’t make that argument), and that does reflect a drop in the economic activity behind the need for shipping, it is misleading to make statements that imply economic or shipping activity have almost ceased to exist.

Here is an interesting site that provides a different view of the topic. Look at the website for the port in Newcastle, Australia http://www.newportcorp.com/site/index.cfm, and click on “The Port of Newcastle”, “Shipping”, “Weekly reports”. Newcastle is the main port for exporting Australian coal, primarily to China. The record for monthly coal shipments was 8.394 million tons in December, 2007. For November, 2008 they shipped 8.1 million tons. While this is a small decline, it is nothing at all like the decline that would be implied by the BDI rate.

http://www.grossinternationalhappiness.org/gnh.html

but this is what is so strange about syracuse: i feel like we’re all braced for this recession, the way you brace at the doctor’s just before you get the shot … but it hasn’t hit yet, at least not wih a real vengeance.

sean

But I won’t believe the automobile industry’s truly in trouble until those loudmouth late night TV ads disappear . . . .

i’m not an nj-native, so perhaps hanging out at a mall is the thing to do on weekend evenings, but it could have been because there was no money to spend.

The Oneidas (Inc.) get a lot of criticism, some of it deserved, over their embrace of gambling and their dealings with fellow Oneidas, the commercialism and so forth. But, they were out there, “representing” in earnest, in the way they have chosen, the same way that the Onondagas are “representing” here in CNY and also in the world (with indigenous rights at the U.N.) There was a nice story in the paper on the Thanksgiving gathering at Onondaga Lake too – an event which has been going on for several years, but which never got covered with a full story before.

There are strong feelings about what is the proper way for Haudenosaunee to relate to the white man’s boat – you couldn’t see two approaches more different than these two.

sean

I actually think this kind of dreamscape “visioning” is okay for students who are just starting out. It’s when the city (and therefore, the taxpayer) starts paying for similar imagineering that you ought to worry.

I have a visionary and inspired project going myself right now– making a new set of front steps out of cast-off bricks and ashlar stonework that was going to be bulldozed for clean fill. Could use a few collaborative students to haul gravel for me. If they started visualizing and making drawings of what they thought would be better like I didn’t know what the %*#@ I wanted, though, I’d throw a free brick at ‘em. Comfort zone, ya know?

Students, go home and do your homework and wash your laundry. If you want to help Syracuse, send a donation, or tutor a local kid having trouble learning to read. Or, volunteer to really build something with Habitat for Humanity.

Auburn also has wonderful buildings (Seward, Tubman, Willard Chapel), a great minor league baseball team and Schweinfurth is a much better community museum than our own stale/dry/patrician Everson.

Go Auburn!

sean

Or, how about Seneca Falls, and, as a nod to the past history of women’s rights and emmancipation (and the Haudenosaunee traditions that came before that even) the government could use a peculiar custom of debate in which women and non-white elected officials speak first?

As far as the grain elevators: they were invented in, and the first ones built in, Buffalo. On the water. The midwestern ones next to train tracks came later, after the shift in transportation technology. The whole industry of ready-to-eat breakfast cereals started in Buffalo, too, associated with the grain. Much more useful than nanotechnology in my ranking of industrial endeavor.

I don’t think we do enough “what-iffing” about an Upstate without NYC attached. At some point we’re going to have to start imagining this, if only to identify realistic means of building actual regional political and economic strength. Whether the scenario is that NYC secedes, or gets blown to Kingdom come by some dreadful catastrophe, some serious thought experiment might be worth doing.

Also, I don’t understand the whole concept of “saving Buffalo” or “saving Syracuse” or “saving Upstate.” Saving from what? People will still be living here 100 years from now, eating, drinking, reproducing and dreaming in some kind of manner and I don’t think they will have reverted to subsistence farming and cannibalism. So what are we “saving” ourselves from exactly? We’re already irrelevant (to an American way of life that is, itself, rapidly coming irrelevant). The sun still came up this morning, however. Now, I’m all ears when it comes to saving the most vulnerable among us, or saving treasured buildings, but this whole “save Syracuse” concept is strange and I don’t know what it means. If people would just try to save buildings (while they still can be saved) and stop worrying so much about “saving Syracuse,” maybe we would, you know, actually succeed in saving some buildings.

sean

Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine Upstate NY cut off from the rest of the state, say, everything north of I-88 and west of Albany (which is my favorite definition of “Upstate”)… imagine a new state… what city “should” be the capital? Where would a capital make sense? Buffalo, because it’s the biggest? Syracuse, because it’s centrally located? Ithaca, because it’s smart? Rochester, because anything else would be uncivilized? (Or should we just award it to Wampsville…? )

Hm, I smell a whole new debate coming on.

sean

the problem is, i’d argue that if you’re looking for an upstate symbol of renaissance, you might as well pick syracuse. not just being parochial, but our problems – from core area violence to economics – are still manageable. bring 1,000 or 1,500 good jobs here, and you can essentially swing the economy, and our downtown – while struggling in places – does not have the full sense of abandonment that you can find in large portions of downtown rochester or buffalo. i have deep loyalty and love for all these cities – they’re essentially distinct siblings – and i have family roots in them as well, but one could argue that the more achieveable and sustainable model might be here … and that our renaissance could then become the model.

sean

Nah, I actually think it has more to do with Cornell alum retirees who have fond memories of the place and come here to retire, and trailing spouses who are stuck here and have to get creative and make up a job that interests them. We are also quite the hub for “green” technology and building throughout the region, and have a vibrant and growing arts and music industry that shows/plays mostly outside of Ithaca.

But, the colleges (there are 2 big ones and 2 little ones in the county, and that’s without counting the massage school) do provide a certain stability to the economy. Like a Carrier that can’t move production or a Kodak that can’t experience a technology paradigm shift. And, the cultural advantages of having educational institutions nearby are immense– concerts, lectures, art exhibits and public gardens. Not a bad choice of prime industry. BTW– Educational Services has now eclipsed Optics and Precision Manufacturing as Rochester’s largest industrial sector, so, they are in a similar situation to Ithaca for all that.

And, Buffalo was a regional hub beyond Western NY. When the grain elevator was first invented, and much of NYS’s population was still on the farm, and water transportation was the way goods moved, Buffalo was a major center of commerce on which much of upstate depended. Take a water-tour of the grain elevators with their historical society docents sometime. It’s fascinating.

As for Ithaca, I would imagine their health has a great deal to do with Cornell’s. And government research grants.

I’m not unmoved by Buffalo’s amazing architecture and history– indeed, I would suggest that and the Falls, along with the proximity to Ontario and transportation advantages, make it an ideal place for a strategy that encourages tourism (esp. in non-winter seasons)…. which Burgh Diaspora disparages.

Asset-based development is all that really ever works. Look at the places that people love to live, and ask them why…. don’t listen to some Diaspora dreamer who imagines his economics-devoid visions of revival are “What’s needed now.” Announce that it is chic, whatever. I’ll boost what I like if I feel like it. BTW– have I mentioned lately that in Ithaca, we’ve been adding both population and jobs consistently for years, unlike elsewhere in upstate? See the write-up on us in last week’s NY Times?

i suppose, if buffalo flies, it becomes a clear beacon of hope for us all. but the comparison spreads across the table; if buffalo was, say, the dallas-fort worth of 1900, then syracuse was equivalent to a booming columbus. and each of these upstate cities, if not quite on the scope of buffalo, had their own extraordinary ascendancies in our history … how about our role in the arts and crafts movement? or women’s rights? or abolition? or the typewriter industry, which i often think was strangely parallel, a century ago, to the rise of the personal computer today.

my fantasy is still a brilliant, broad-based strategy, overseen by state officials intensely familiar and intensely passionate about the personalities, traits and shared maladies of all the upstate cities … but even spitzer, with his billion-dollar upstate plan, never offered that sense of intimate passion. i like paterson, but under him we again become the colonies, and we’ve seen where that’s gotten us for the last 45 or 50 years.

sean

I agree completely with your observations of Fowler. This is really one of those rare win-win-win ideas.

I think we’d all benefit if Buffalo went for Canada! :)

http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2008/11/blodgett_vocational_high_schoo.html

this was inspired saturday, when i was at danforth middle school for the oratorical competition, and i just thought about that school’s incredible history, and the whole bone-deep sense of security inside it, and we watched the kids speak in the classic auditorium – and i thought how irreplaceable the place where really is – much, despite all its flaws, like blodgett.

sean

Along came a group of concerned citizens who put private and public resources together to give those kids a state-of-the-art library. It was a $700k project brought in for just over half that amount. Verizon kicked in a large contribution and James Earl Jones came on a hot July day in 2001 to dedicate the library. A seed had been planted, even though some said it didn’t make sense to put the best public school library in the district in the worst school. But the students and faculty responded. Test scores went up, thanks in part to the library and a tutoring/mentoring program. Blodgett even got off the State watch list. Time and again we heard elected officials and schools chancellors commit to Blodgett’s renovation. “First on the list” we were told time and again, even as money went to other schools, some equally in need, some not.

Today, the playground has been renovated, the gymnasium is functioning and more importantly, the school has a heart and soul that has been nurtured by many caring individuals. Even Skiddy Park, across Oswego St, has been cleaned up. There was a sense of hope in the building, and in the community.

That is, until now. Now the school that no one cared about is an embarassment to the District and should be closed immediately, at least according to Syracuse Common Councilor Pat Hogan, having just toured Blodgett for the first time. Yet when he was invited to participate in a campaign rally on the very streets surrounding Blodgett in 2005, the first year he ran for Council, Hogan was nowhere to be found.

And maybe Hogan is right … Blodgett is no place for our youngest and neediest students to get an education that might help them break the poverty cycle. But the solution, to close it, disperse the students and take away the most vibrant entity in the immediate area would spell a return to the abyss for the neighborhood, just when in-fill housing, United Way and Habitat for Humanity’s efforts to restore the neighborhood are making a difference.

And this is what Hogan, the JSCB and many other so-called leaders in this community don’t understand. The right answers aren’t always the most expedient or easiest to implement. True genius is in finding the “second” right answer. Ask any Blodgett student … they’ll tell ya!

–Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Certainly we cannot blame the current users of the building (the children) – rather, it’s our power positions (politicians, community leaders, and other local Big Giant Heads) who are the “interlopers” here, in the sense that they have lost continuity with the “Old Ones” who built these structures. I see the “attenuated version of previous ceremonialism” as being embodied in a lot of the talk about reviving Downtown which takes the form of stuff like creating apartments out of old office buildings and warehouses (i.e., “public space converted to private“)… while at the same time a grand old school like Blodgett is not part of the plan.

At least, not as a school. But I think the current collapse of our very complex economy (which is eventually going to make American society less complex) will preclude any thought of developing Blodgett into apartments for the Creative Class. For now anyway. You may see apartments in Blodgett one day, but of course, those schoolkids will be long scattered and gone.

Or, in the future, there may be a return of population to the Syracuse area… I do not think that is a crazy vision at all. In which case you might see Blodgett turned into jerry-built apartments (as opposed to luxury ones designed by architects), or a jerry-built school with subdivided rooms. But I’m sorry to say it seems highly unlikely to me that Blodgett will ever be a grand and properly restored school. Maybe I’m wrong. It is very important to restore order into these kids’ lives… as far as working on Blodgett can feasibly provide that… but it is best to focus on all the ways to restore order, even if means creating a new order.

School districts with a little bit of financial know-how are starting to use maintenance reserves to keep up with the decay, but it’s tough when you’re trying to pay both for bricks and mortar and for building blocks of knowledge and potential mortarboards. It’s a constant battle in our district and probably in most.

And while I believe that “it’s about teachers and students” in the long run, I do think the physical environment contributes to or detracts from teaching and learning.

let’s think ahead more than a year or five about this. what might that neighborhood need in 10 years, 20, 50?

either way, one basis of the entire near west side revitalization is (was?) the renovation of 100 or so homes around the horseshoe of blodgett, using the school as a driver for community development (free after hours meeting space, community gardening, education, etc.).

if blodgett goes, there will be no new school there for at least 10 years, i bet. how many times has this same thing happened, and how many times does it have to happen, before we realize it is a pattern. we demolish before we have the funds or resources to rebuild. and we demolish the best of what our ancestors built… syracusethenandnow.org always portrays this most powerfully.

and if blodgett goes, the neighborhood, the real neighborhood, not the arts, technology and jazzy design vision that SU has for it, probably goes too.

just one outsider’s view.

Have you read Stuart Brand’s book, How Buildings Learn? His chapter on maintenance is fantastic.

As Sean says, maintenance is stamina. It is also Stewardship, both ecological and cultural. When we fail to preserve what our ancestors devoted themselves to building, and instead take it down and build mostly crap, the environmental and ecological costs far outweigh any isolated price analysis.

And Sean, you’re right about the new stuff being built, most of it anyway. If you examine almost any of the homes on the Near West Side, it is the original structure that is in the best shape. The most recent additions are invariably ready to fall down. That says something about both the skills and intentions of builders 100 years ago, and those today.

phil – someone should be on the phone to the nba now. $50 million to them? that’s the stuff we jangle in our pockets. that’s a year’s salary for some of their players. my feeling on old buildings, though, is tied as much to practicality as sentiment: there was a school in niagara falls, the niagara street school, that was of the roberts-delaware-seymour red-brick ilk. they tore it down recently, claiming restoration was too expensive, and then built this horrid, cheap peace of crap in its place that involved overruns way beyond anticipated costs. look at our history of new schools in syracuse, which has brought us such ‘gems’ as the dreary, soul-killing clary, corcoran, fowler or shea buildings … give me elmwood above them any day of the week.

i got a call today from a city official whose take i’ll get on my blog in the morning. this particular official, nameless for now, questions the pargmatic need for a school where blodgett is at all … another avenue for debate.

sean

Build a unique structure, neglect it, argue it is more expensive to renovate than to repair, knock it down, hope for the best that something other than a lot of grass and trash will replace it.

It’s not about buildings but it is about developing a true cost and comparison about demolition and new construction versus deconstruction versus renovation.

Destroying buildings isn’t much different than destroying local communities, as we’ve seen in the past 50 years locally.

And most of the new buildings that we construct are worse than what we built 100 years ago. New buildings are no less full of toxins than our older buildings are. In some cases, the newer stuff is more toxic.

It’s not that simple, but there is a right answer, if we put some good thought into it.

As for the school, it’s not about buildings. It’s about teachers and students. Build a new school at half the cost and invest in teachers.

OK, Sean here’s where you talk about the 24 second clock–but does history have to be the study of piles of crumbling bricks? Call the new school Danny Biasone Elementary and move the freaking 24 second clock memorial where it belongs. Get the NBA to kick in some dough.

There are many possibilities for prosperity in Upstate New York, if only they could be viewed in Albany through the lens of Upstaters rather than Downstaters (who control both houses of government).

Upstate and Downstate worked together to produce the Empire State . . . and prosperity for all . . . up until the mid 1960s when the Senate was reapportioned. From that point on, everything west of Albany went into decline while Downstate still grows. The Upstate perspective . . . knowledge of what we need to thrive . . . has gotten lost. We need to figure out a way of getting it back out there.

As for politicians, as for economic solutions all I’m hearing are plans to rearrange the existing pieces (which is also a NYS problem). Bailouts so everyone can continue as before, with minimal disruption to the People That Matter.

How could Troy improve in ways that help these folks?

No. Obama’s Cone of Hope does not cover the City of Cynicism. Thanks for the plug for TAP, we are going to need willing hands, as…. nothing ever seems to change in Albany, or maybe the more it changes, the more it is the same sorry mess.

They finally took over the state government, now that it’s a carcass picked clean.

After watching this how-to video, I am determined to do a write-in candidate the next (possibly last?) time I use one…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzOGH6BUE40

ka-shissshhhh (you pull the big curtain level)

ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk (solid sound of dropping the levers)

ka- -shissshhh … CHING-GWONK! (you pull the big curtain level again, and the levers pop up, a sound that says: your vote is registered).

whatever comes next, i want it to feel just as solid.

sean

Go Giants!

What bothers me is that this was a local person (with a family and an employment history all in the town), the police dept. knew he was living outdoors, and people knew the weather was going to be cold. And this was just a few blocks from Holy Family Church, too. There is no one to blame, but this is a classic example of how good suburbanites are at “coloring within the lines” so to speak, but any situation that strays outside those lines, does not get dealt with. And this was (apparently) one of “our own”!

your account makes me recall the story of adelaide robineau, sitting in her window, touching a delicate tool (didn’t she use a knitting needle?) hundreds of thousands of times – if not millions of times – to bring her pottery to her precise vision. it makes me think of the way folks shaped in the early part of the last century would paint a room or strip a piece of furniture: relentlessly, patiently, stubbornly … undaunted.

getting them to talk, though, is not always an easy task. part of that is sorrow, i think, and reopening those doors. part of it is their tenacity, and sometimes their humor at what they see as unduly sentimental: when we tried to get my mother to do an oral history, she replied, ‘what? you think i’m about to croak?’

sean

Giuliani? eeesh! Do we need all the sturm and drang and mindless gut-check posturing while we’re facing such serious economic meltdown issues? Why not have Giuliani pick DA Fitzpatrick as his running mate–alienate everybody!

Not sure what world Silver’s been living in lately, since his world and friends must be feeling the death of Wall Street.

in 2010, in the showdown for control of albany, it sounds as if there’s a good chance we could end up with paterson-giuliani, which would be a governor’s race unlike anything we’ve seen in this state in our lifetimes.

sean

this also, unfortunately, goes back to dave bing’s point: all the good ideas from the sidelines don’t mean a thing unless you’ve got someone at the gearbox who can implement them.

sean

I think Atlantica’s critics make good points about the danger of NAFTA running roughshod over the Northeast (like it hasn’t already?), but that’s the whole idea behind the Atlantica concept – breaking down borders that may no longer serve a practical purpose. The concept of North America getting away from its “east-west” orientation (and back to a “north-south” one) is fascinating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDUM0cNMQ6Y

sean

The odds are good that the Republican running against Magnarelli is the only Republican lever I’ll pull this election… he generally represents the worst of the “Treehouse” and Albany largess.

I’ve met Christensen personally. She’s good people, and very connected to the community.

http://burghdiaspora.blogspot.com/

If Atlantica doesn’t want Dunkirk (but I think it would), maybe these folks would?

sean

As for “one economy,” look around. Every market in the globe is tanking this week. Which economy is doing well?

http://www.qgazette.com/news/2008/1008/front_page/001.html

Wouldn’t it make some sense for NYC to generate more power locally rather than to transport it over 220 miles of powerlines owned by NYRI?

And he’s the man that wants to secede from New York State because they pay too much money for the upstate poor.

http://www.nysun.com/new-york/secession-plan-is-floated-for-new-york-city/70397/

Sounds like he will need his upstate neighbors if he succeeds in stopping the local power plant.

With that definition, NIMBY does not apply to the upstate people who oppose NYRI because THEY GET NO BENEFITS.

What NYRI does, however, is enable any NIMBYs downstate to get the power benefits they want without the baggage that comes with hosting generation facilities.

sean

I am wondering if Pixley’s bridge is actually going to get repaired now as planned. No bridge… no park (it’s the only entrance).

The Post-Standard (Syracuse, NY)

July 7, 1996 Sundayn

SHENANDOAH RECOVERS FROM ILLNESS IN TIME TO WELCOME THE WAMPUM: TADADAHO KEEPS ONE EYE ON THE PRESENT, ONE ON THE PAST

BY: Sean Kirst, columnist

The Onondaga clan mothers felt they had no choice. Leon Shenandoah, the tadadaho – or high chief – of the Iroquois Confederacy, was gravely ill. Eight months ago, for his own good, the clan mothers released him from the position he held for almost 30 years.

His seat by the council fire remained empty. The decision on when to return would be his. It was an attempt at helping Shenandoah to recover, an attempt at easing the burden of looking out for all Six Nations.

“We believed it would help,” said Evelyn Elm, a Beaver clan mother. “He is a strong man.”

Throughout the winter, as Shenandoah was in and out of the hospital, many Onondagas feared they would lose him. The tadadaho himself had none of those doubts. “I figured I’d be back,” he said. After all, he wanted to welcome home the wampum.

“He’s like the belts,” said Chief Oren Lyons. “We need to have him.”

On Saturday, the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City returned 74 pieces of the fragile belts and beadwork. It was only the second time such precious artifacts, held by museums, have made it home to the Iroquois.

Shenandoah, 81, is very thin. He walks with the help of a cane. But he was there, resting in a folding chair, and his presence brought joy to hundreds of his people.

“It took a lot for him to come,” said Ruchatneet Printup, a Tuscarora. “It helped to strengthen him, and it helped to strengthen us.”

Shenandoah wore ceremonial clothes and a headdress of eagle feathers. Chief Irving Powless approached him, dropped a delicate red collar around Shenandoah’s neck. It was made in 1908. It is worn by Onondaga’s keepers of the wampum, belts and strings used for covenant or prayer.

For centuries, as farmland and cities encroached on old Iroquois villages or burial grounds, wampum became booty for archaeological collectors. Some of it, finally, is starting to come back.

The wampum Saturday was covered and placed in a van in New York City. With an Iroquois escort, it was carried to the Onondaga Nation. “It is a special feeling,” said Marylou Printup, a Tuscarora clan mother. “It is joyous, like a child coming home.”

Politically, the effort to regain wampum from museums began in 1966. Powless recalled how he drove to the first of those meetings with his father, one of his teachers and George Thomas, who was then tadadaho. All three of his companions died during the long quest to reclaim the wampum. The Iroquois endured three decades of negotiations, legal roadblocks and cultural condescension.

“What was needed though the whole thing,” said Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp, “was to count on everyone having a good mind.”

He spoke of calm thinking, which is really the point of what Shenandoah does. As tadadaho, he is stripped of his clan and his personal ties. It is his job to keep a clear spiritual view, even in times of dissension or anger.

“I would always speak to him when we were having our own problems,” said Tuscarora Chief Leo Henry, recalling days of violence at his western New York nation in the mid-1980s. “Leon would remind me that these things were prophesied, that they had to happen and that they would pass.”

Shenandoah sees a promise kept in the wampum coming home. Almost 10 years ago, Onondaga Chief Vincent Johnson quietly traveled to Kentucky with the tadadaho. A farmer had discovered a massive burial ground and, for a fee, fortune hunters took turns digging it up. Johnson said more than 1,000 graves, many of them Iroquois, were opened or disturbed.

For weeks, the two men labored to rebury their dead. They burned tobacco and tried to put the souls at peace. It was a difficult and depressing job. When it was over, Shenandoah crouched in the field and burned tobacco one more time. Johnson said the spirits of their ancestors returned to pay their debt. They asked what they could do in return for finding rest.

“What we would like,” Shenandoah told them, “is our wampum back.”

Johnson is convinced that moment was the turning point. Shenandoah, he said, has the gift of keeping one eye in the present and one eye in the past. The tadadaho was there Saturday to greet the wampum at the longhouse, which he described as only a first step in the return of artifacts.

He also admitted his illness has taken its toll. “My stomach, my kidneys, they needed doctoring,” Shenandoah said. He seemed thin, and tired, although he managed to crack a few jokes.

“It was good just to hear his voice,” said clan mother Betty Jacobs, who began to weep in the longhouse when the wampum was unveiled.

As a 3-year-old, Shenandoah was burned almost to death. “They did medicine over me,” Shenandoah said, referring to ancient Iroquois healing rites. When it was over, when the child surprised them all and survived, an elder stood and predicted, “This boy someday will hold a high position.”

He became tadadaho.

On Saturday, amid much joy, he reclaimed that job. His “horns,” or his position, were restored in full. Then he sat on a folding chair in a soft breeze, while the chiefs around him spoke about the wampum.

A great gift, they all agreed, always comes back for a reason.

Sean: Fall is like chocolate. When you’re a kid you want the sweetest gooiest mess (and as much as you can eat.) When you get older, you appreciate a couple of squares of 70% cacao dark chocolate–savoring the taste.

I guess somewhere between the downtown art scene and the dream that someone will build a BMW plant on the outskirts of town is the hard work of slowly improving your lot in life with a decent job in a small local business.

I wonder how the Siracusans are doing?

sean

In addition, he might consider trying to apologize for the racist imagery in the War Room (http://travelphotobase.com/s/NYAC.HTM scroll down and look at the skulls around then Onondagas — not all of the images are here BTW). I still cannot believe that ANYTHING like this continues exists — without an apology and a statement explaining that NY no longer believes in such xenophobia — but then again … I’m not holding my breath.

The Gov came to Ithaca today and reassured us that he was not going to let the Seniors freeze– announced some LIHEAP funds and some for weatherization– and a new program “Heat Smart NY.”

But I don’t think the bond-sales thing would work with cynical NYers. Now, an on-line auction for sitting legislators… that could raise some cash (eh, Golisano?).

The crash will not be televised — only its aftereffects will. Unfortunately those aftereffects will be very real for a lot of people.

That 17 yr old girl is bothering me… she may love what she’s doing, but it is just never a good situation for a minor child to employ their parents, or to be making the most money in the family. What happens to her business model if MySpace (also dependent on advertising) tanks?

A lot of what we take for granted about website business models is going to be seriously tested in a protracted economic downturn, and it could be like the dot-com bust, but worse. I remember the concept of “Pizza 2.0″ – you give away the pizza but make money by selling advertising on the box. Advertising for what? Beer 2.0?

And I absolutely believe that it’s easier to be virulent or rude in typed communication, if only because there’s less brain time used between thought and said thought’s emergence on paper. If people handwrote those local newspaper blogs, you’d see a lot less nastiness.

sean

Athlete! Gimme a break, Gov — these guys are pretty-dressin’ fast-talkers without any muscle!

Two things about this article:

F-M is the kind of school where success is expected, encouraged and never ridiculed. That environment is hard to establish in districts where economic issues intrude on educational issues. (It’s also why schools such as KIPP and the Harlem Children’s Zone are so successful.)

When did the SAT change from 1,600 max to 2,400 max?

Robinia, I don’t know if you can call them “terrorists” and get away with it, but I noticed that a NYT columnist (can’t remember if it was Krugman or not) offhandedly mentioned the specific streets in Greenwich, Conn. where many of these “masters” live. That was an eyebrow raiser.

There has been whispering that Lehman was “let go” because of their leaders’ political (ie Democratic) leanings; one thing that is commonly thought is that there is a club of banks who are “in” and others who are/were “out.” We are losing financial advantage in this deal, but the “masters” are also tipping their hand and forced to reveal themselves more than they have been comfortable with. Knowledge is also power.

If that question is too hard– what about the idea that the CEOs of the investment banks should be fired, because they were persuing a flawed business model (which even the investment banks themselves could see now, which is why they turned into bank holding companies…)? We could, of course, start with Paulson…. or, is he persuing a different business model now? When did he switch, after Lehman went down?

we can’t get our crumbling and dispiriting city schools fixed in syracuse because of what … $30 million?

we can’t fix the water lines spilling all that precious fresh water in these northeastern cities because of what … $500 million? maybe $1 billion?

when nader spoke of a massive public works project that would provide work for the countless young men standing on corners, he was derided as a kook because of what … $20 billion? $25 billion?

seven hundred billion dollars, just like that, for a wall street bailout.

i take my own swing at it tomorrow, but i think your final line sums it up: are we ready to own our own losses? or will we just keep rolling, and push them down the road?

sean

I don’t know if the Pond Street Wegmans has seen any improvements. I always called it “The Wegmans That Time Forgot.”

by the way, i haven’t been by it in a while, but doesn’t the north side wegman still have that early-60s look?

sean

congratulations on your video you have done a great job love it

http://www.syracuse.com/kirst/index.ssf/2008/09/a_different_new_york.html#comments

sean

personally, i see no faults in building a trolly or light rail system here (though i’m sure that there are others who would vehemently disagree). by doing so we would be saving money on commuting and travel costs (less gas use and maybe less car ownership – which could free up more parking spaces in the city for the suburbanites who often complain), we would equally be helping out the poor, middle-class, and upper class demographics (given it’s close proximity to cultural, commercial, work, residential, entertainment, and travel destinations – something that ontrack could never accomplish), rail is not some new, fancy technology that people are unfamiliar with, and it might even give our city some “identity” or an “image” that people are so often complaining about.

also, if we put some additional people to work at all levels with real jobs (not your petty, minimum-wage, short-term destinyusa jobs), i’m all for it.

the only thing that might need to be changed is some re-routing of one-way streets in the city (perhaps just eliminating them) and building some kind of elevated train tracks when you get around the cross section of 81 and route 11 as i can’t imaging a trolly passing through normal traffic there. great concept though.

We have all been thinking, writing and talking about this for years now to little avail. But now it seems as if others want to talk about it when their ability to consume is being threatened.

The debate last night was pretty disappointing.

Thanks for sharing this video. I don’t know how I missed it in the PS.

the moment where there was a real opportunity to speak of all of this – to reflect on what it really meant to be american, and on some greater mission – was during the traumatic days after 9/11, when fear and sorrow had opened us to actually listening. but it wasn’t discussed. the message was that somehow we could fight vast, uncertain wars and nothing would change, that we should simply spend and spend some more at home. we were called to nothing higher, not even to reflection, and now – the bridge collapsing – they say ‘don’t worry’ once again as they ask us to bail out the ones who’d be positioned on the best part of the bridge.

sean

Jon Stewart said something similar on the Daily Show last night, that this is the “economic equivalent of the Iraq War.”

It is interesting to think of what Europe was like in 1914 on the eve of the Great War; the rich may not have had the technological advantages we do, but the scale of the sumptuousness they lived in was so much greater – and the gap between rich and poor was so great as well, just like
today. No one would have thought those magnificent old estates with hundreds of servants would ever be deserted, and I think in 90 years, people will also look back on the early 21st century American lifestyle and marvel at what was and how much it took to maintain it. They may look back with romantic nostalgia, but may also see today’s people as mostly backward and naive in their thinking.

“we need credit so that the American people can continue to consume at the same level and pace that we’ve been accustomed”

Awesome post, NYCO. Change will destroy this Old World, shifting us into a new alternate reality. It’s about When, not If. We’re only hitting fictional economic boundaries. Imagine what happens when the impending natural limits start emerging…

This isn’t just blogging – this is prophecy, witness.

The best kind.

I don’t know if syracuse.com is too different from other newspaper websites around the country, although there doesn’t seem to be a lot of moderation going on. I can’t say that Syracuse is any less racist/sexist than Albany.

What’s weird to me is that invariably someone logs on claiming to know the defendant/victim/perp – either there are a lot of liars out there or the Syracuse.com comments really ARE a social hub…

I don’t read it enough to know how often they “name and shame” though on one day I did notice that the woman stealing from walmart had her picture in the paper but the white collar criminal embezzling from his employer didn’t.

But the comments are horrible. When someone dies from an accident people just pile on and laugh about it and say it’s their fault and then the family members of the deceased get upset and it just turns into a huge screaming match.

I’m glad I never read that stuff before we came here it would have made me very worried about living here. Maybe we would have ended up taking the offer in Albany instead.

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/hawkins_added_to_maxwell_schoo.html

It now seems that the high and holy democratic ritual of “debate” is actually just “bickering” when there’s a third-party candidate involved. It’s good we have perfessers to edumacate us on these things.

Howwever, he doesn’t DO anything locally–with the exception of distributing densely worded, nine-point font, single spaced, front and back printed position papers. He managed to get the municipal power issue injected into the last Mayoral race, but then he got fewer votes than Dr. Daniels did in her prior Green Party run for Mayor. Howie decides to run for Common Council–ostensibly “in it to win it” and finishes fourth, getting beat two-to-one by the guy finishing third, a Republican who owed the city $11,000 in back parking tickets.

That being said, McClure is a jerk. He believes that he, the University and Channel 5 are the gatekeepers to determine who the candidates should be? McClure believes that his little dog and pony show is the zenith of potential knowledge gathering about this campaign? candidates that get themselves on the ballot should be allowed to participate in public debates–even a sure loser like Howie.

“In some ways, these canisters serve a double betrayal: a man or woman left alone, in a labyrinth of medication, prey to surveillance and other inhospitable indignities, only then to be wed with metal, robbed of form, fused to a lattice of unliving minerals – anonymous.”

” – as if staring into unlabeled graves, monolithic and metallized, stacked on shelves in a closet – the tragic howl of reduction to nothingness, people who once loved, and were loved, annihilated?”

http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/library-of-dust.html

Today that dynamic’s reversed. I don’t think it’s because one place got intrinsically better than the other. Business priorities, air conditioning, automobiles, civil rights, and a lot of other things changed.

Give Oldistan a bit of time, though – Upstate will rise again! (I think.)

We need to focus on Palin’s extremist views and not on her updo, Fargo accent, or backstory. I wouldn’t be so sure we’re going to win. And we should think about what will happen in and to this country if we don’t. We’re not talking about a bunch of Gore supporters who will lie down and give up. I was in Denver; I felt the powerful emotion in those smoke-free rooms, and I can’t believe it’s going to recede quietly without a fight.

It’s funny. In my parents’ generation – and blue-collar culture – the man wasn’t expected to be too terribly involved in childrearing. Breadwinning was very important, but there was a lot of wiggle room for the guy to not be involved in the day to day stuff if it didn’t suit him. But it was also expected that the mother’s family would be there to help, or neighbors or something. As Americans became more mobile, that arrangement got strained, and women were caught in the middle. The extended families weren’t living around each other any more. So pressure was put on the husband to be more involved, and that has sort of become the middle-class standard of behavior… except, when the husband really isn’t around, and it’s all fallen — ALL — on the mother, in the public ideal. Look at the way that errant or troubled or “unfit” mothers are vilified in the “public square” commentariat on your local newspaper comment board. It’s barbaric, if you ask me, and another sign of how far we’ve fallen as a society.

As Hillary Clinton liked to quote, “It takes a village…” When the village is no longer there, maybe women are wise not to have children. And many women choose not to, in ways that don’t involve abortion (ie having fewer, or no children, or adopting someone else’s). Once they’re here, it’s imperative to take a minimum of loving care of them. But women have been evaluating conditions and make child-centered choices for thousands of years (and taking lots of abuse for that too)… “choice” is nothing new.

That said: I’d think that any parent (male or female) who had five children, one of whom was about to become a teen mother and another of whom was a very young Down’s Syndrome child…. should put their own ambitions aside for a while and take care of their kids. Kids take time and attention, and there is no substitute for parental time and attention, although that of others can help, too. Each individual child needs some; disabled children and children in crisis (as per, pregnant teenager) need more. I’d think that if she (Palen) shared my political views, too. Both my brothers have 7 children…. too many, it was too hard, neither’s marriages survived it.

That’s one of the reasons I believe in family planning; if Sarah Palen wanted to have an ambitious political career, she could and should have planned a smaller family. You can do a lot, but you really can’t do lots of everything all at once. And, no job is worth shortchanging a child. (Spoken as a person who also has developed day care centers– both society and parents owe our children the best).

Thanks NYCO!

The quote is correct. http://www.buildingequality.us/Quotes/Frederick_Douglass.htm

Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857; collected in pamphlet by author. In The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Volume 3: 1855-63. Edited by John W. Blassingame. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 204.

2) Culture wars will not be the battle ground in this election, the economy and the war have driven people away from the silliness of 2004. As Barack said in his acceptance speech–you can’t have a big election on little issues. This is a big, throw the bums out, realignment election and Obama will be swept into office by people with expectations of change.

3) You’re absolutely right that the negative buzz around Palin is making the D’s look bad–but the buzz has mostly been by the media. Obamites have been wisely silent about Palin, focusing attention on McCains judgement on Iraq and his parroting Bush economic policies that hurt average Americans. People do not vote on the basis of veeps. Focus on the top of the ticket.

4) http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/ has shown a consistent 5 point lead in total vote for Obama and projects a 307-230 electoral college win. Just like in the primaries, Obama wins because he understands the system and will win a much larger EC victory than the total vote victory.

I’m glad I didn’t find this post right away. Your early points seem to be right on.

In terms of political chess, this move is simply brilliant. Even the “unknown” pregnancy thing may have been preplanned to screw with the media. Tonight’s speech will be so important in so many ways.

phil, you may be right. maybe abortion won’t be a swing issue in this race. but remember how the 2004 vote played out: it was essentially a massive turnout, divided almost exactly by idealogy, and that was enough to give bush another term. it seems to me mccain had to make a choice: does he swing to the middle to bring in obama-reluctant moderates and maybe some bitter clintonites, hoping the right will have no choice but to come along with him, or does he try to fire up the same coalition that kept bush in for 8 years?

yes, palin is a fresh face. but the power issue she brings to the table is abortion, and her own experience. i don’t think you can underplay it, and the democrats do so at their peril: everything changes when you mix personal experience with volatile issues (indeed, my great disappointment with kerry was that he never reacted with fuy to the ‘swiftboating,’ instead of taking it so stoically: it remains one of thee great political con jobs of our time that people who never went to vietnam, much less endured fire, could somehow tarnish the bravery of someone who did).

sean

Anyhow, GOP operatives and Democratic “activist” bloggers alike are now gleefully making this election be all about some 17-year-old girl’s uterus, which means that we now have a culture war in progress — and the GOP never takes any quarter in a culture war, unless they’ve lost their nerve (though anything’s possible these days).

At Verdun, the only heroes were the ones who stayed in their foxholes. Unfortunately not too many did.

In fact, I don’t think that abortion will be a major factor in the race at all. Abortion, pro or con isn’t on the top of most folk’s agendas anymore–only the activists on either side. Those folks have already made up their minds and have their votes set in concrete. Most people accept the current status quo and are more concerned with economic issues and the war.

my parents were disciples of frankin d. roosevelt – they were true believers in the power of enlightened government to lift people’s lives – yet they wound up voting republican in the 1970s. i’ll tell you what – particularly with my mother – it wasn’t crime or race that pushed her that way, despite all the accepted thinking nowadays about the shift in working class catholics. it was abortion, a question my mother thought about relentlessly.

choosing palin represents a whole different strategy on that front, and i know her story would have appealed to my mother, a well-read and philosophically combative woman who also would have been drawn powerfully to obama. i think there’s an entire and similar constituency out there, who never show up because the whole idea of a ‘middle’ on abortion remains our great unspeakable and undebatable. if this election is razor close, who knows how that could swing it.

sean

It does Hillary no good to have him around. Silver’s behavior surrounding the sex crimes of his staff is both disturbing and an insult to women. As a New Yorker, I’m ashamed to have seen him at that event.

Complex loyalties? Paterson “sees” the problem we have here in our state better than all his former cronies. He clearly is not winning friends among those invested in the gravy train which our state government has become. His story is truly fascinating whether you agree with him or not. If he can succeed in turning this state around, I would become his #1 fan.

I wonder what our creative friends, Florida and his gang, would think about moving to where vital basic resources are located, given their thought that the Northeast is a historical appendage because the advent of air conditioning made southwestern living fun.

As for your laments about messages sent to girls, I totally agree, except I’d also note there are equally dispiriting messages sent about what girls “should” be doing other than that. Michelle Obama gave a lovely speech the other night, but I noticed she said something to the effect of “when my girls have children of their own…” as if, of course, it’s only natural that’s a path a girl would want to take. An easy enough thing to say without any malice aforethought, but in this election year some women are thinking harder about the future of girls and the horizons that are or aren’t open to them. You try not to think about it, but the same message is still overwhelmingly communicated in so many ways – a woman’s worth is in her body, or in her nurturing or caretaking instincts, but not her mind or intellect (that’s an extra feature, but not what she’s really “for”). In some ways, this is the most conservative era for women that this country has seen since the ’50s.

Now, my generation had it easier with the messages, so I can’t really complain — compared to my mother’s generation where it was “Hurry up and get married and have kids, there’s no such thing as too young” or, at best, “Go to college and get your M.R.S. degree.” Personally I don’t feel threatened by any of those messages (and certainly didn’t feel pressured as a girl by the messages you mention, but that’s because I was genuinely clueless and didn’t notice them until I was much older), but try to be a well rounded individual open to experience. But it surely is a minefield of expectations and messages — in both directions.

listen to pop music, and the great love songs are replaced by this awful, adolescent, ugly crap … a lot of it built around male command, and women shinnying around on poles, and worse. this is what an awful lot of the kids, male and female, are listening to 24/7.

and i just look at the messages being sent to girls, even by such seemingly-innocuous mediums as the disney channel, where the 10 and 11 year old stars are these thin, made-up girls in women’s clothing, usually surrounded by bumbling and adoring ‘imperfect’ (often kids with weight problems, or kids wearing glasses, or ‘ace students’ in thick glasses, because the last thing we want is our girls exhibiting their brains), all of which says: this is how it ought to be in high school, kids.

and then our politicians … these ugly scandals of the last 15 or 20 years have not been this kind of sad and very human stuff involving long and discreet love affairs that we sometimes hear about with famous leaders who spent a lot of time away from their families. our new political scandals are ‘spitzerized,’ powerful guys hitting on – or buying time with – young women who all too literally, in their hero worship, could be their daughters, which supplies leering, half-envious potty humor for late-night tv hacks and radio jocks with nothing in their quivers but a sixth grade sense of humor.

yeah, sure, it leaves you to wonder about susan b. or harriet may mills or all these other stateswomen who came along at a time when a guy could legally rape or beat his wife, when the absence of the vote for women allowed for a system that sustained barbaric rules, and these folks literally put lives and reputations on line to make a change … but i don’t think they anticipated an america where mtv and vh1 would someday make reality shows about cooing women whose only mission is to find the right kind of dominating, baby-talking, condescending man who will protect them as they make their way through life.

when i’m in typical guy mode, i think the hillary folks are just being sore losers who are playing democratic kamikaze. but then sometimes when i step back and think about all this crap floating around out there, i can see how someone would see this as another infuriating part of the big slide … although even if it is, blaming obama, i think, is choosing the wrong target.

sean

For NYS real stuff, visit the NY Farmers Market Federation farmers market– you can even pay with your WIC coupons and food stamp card. In the Horticulture Bldg.

But, yeah, everybody is taking bets on how many (if any) days O’Hara lasts past the end of the fair…

PS–the Fair took my advice (as well as many others) and created a store where you can buy NY State products, but I went in today and it was incredibly lame. The promise was an old-fashioned country store, it was more like an airport gift shoppe.

Also, O’Hara got up on stage today at Chevy Court stage and introduced Chuck Schumer (who for some reason introduced Joan Jett!) Many boos.

I don’t think making the women leave is the answer. I think some kind of Chastity Tracking Underwear for all elected officials might be more practical. After all, it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that the remaining males wouldn’t be “targeted” for parking permits. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, if you know what I mean.

huh, huh . . .analway . . huh, huh, you said anal!

sean

My suggestion would be to really try to make the fair of interest to all new yorkers. What an opportunity to bring downstaters and upstaters together! This is not happening now.

What is the mission of the state fair, anyway? Can anyone point me to a place that states the mission statement?

1. Raffle off portions of winning entries in the baking contests. This is a no-brainer.

2. If non-greasy Fair food is really so tasty, prove it: create healthy versions of Fair favorites and have them go head to head in competition with the bad-for-you stuff.

3. More museum exhibits. A lot of people go to the Fair to gawk at cool or historic stuff. Why isn’t the NY State Archives or museums from other parts of the state getting in on this? Where the heck is the Strong Museum of Play or Corning Museum of Glass, for instance?

4. More free shows and exhibits in general. I remember one year the biggest draw in the Horticulture Building was some huge Rube Goldberg contraption. People loved it.

5. New butter sculpture artist.

6. PUHLEEZE revamp the nightly “parade” and encourage/pay every county in the state to create their own float for it. Even if you just gave them $200 each they’d have something better than they’ve got now.

7. An old-fashioned, Lincoln-Douglas style public debate about a New York State public interest topic, a different one each year.

8. Llamas. Every day. Not just on one weekend. You can’t go wrong with more llamas.

It’s clear we’re not going to be able to pray our trash away. So there are only two solutions for the problem: politics, or war. I have proposed war. Although politics would be preferable.

O’Hara didn’t get Springsteen, so screw him. (Of course the Dome failed in its negotiations for a last leg concert this summer, too. Screw them too.)

LiveNation is Clear Channels even it it was spun off. It operates under the same rules of engagement as its corporate sibling: enrich yourself and destroy all other competition. Wonder why concert tickets are so expensive?-thank folks like Live Nation.

LiveNation saw us coming. Hicks who don’t understand the business. Thank goodness it was only a one year contract and the P-S kicked up some controversy.

If LiveNation was so much better getting acts that poor Joe LaGuardia couldn’t have gotten–why are the acts at Chevy Court all acts that have played the Fair in the very recent past and the Grandstand acts also mostly retreads and so thoroughly boring?

Why does SPAC have such a better lineup for the end of August than the Fair?

it’s a classic NYS deal, right down to the laugh from the Ag & Markets attorney that negotiated the contract.

that nails it. and, of course, it was the point of the video; there are countless volunteers, without celebration, doing similar jobs every day.

what we need so desperately in syracuse is something so simple: a few public leaders who take those jobs out of sheer frustration at the madness, who go into it only because they are sick of seeing innane barriers to doing the simplest things … such as keeping the garbage off of a heavily-traveled exit ramp (where, by the way, the garbage is piled up again, in a big way: welcome to syracuse!).

you tell me: why hasn’t it happened? why don’t the state, county and city talk regularly about coordinating trash pickup? why doesn’t the state aggressively clean up every area where the traffic is cordoned off for construction, a job that would take 20 minutes? is it that the leaders of our two biggest local governments are longtime political rivals? is it just a kind of sediment in the way we act and think? because this tiny example, this one bridge and exit ramp – one small piece of an issue whose resolution would be applauded in a big way by taxpayers – speaks volumes to the really weighty problems looming above us.

and because of that disconnect, the planets of which you speak continue to orbit – and when they connect it is all too often in spite of – not because – those we ask to lead.

sean

As a NYS taxpayer, I’m not particularly interested in funding this event. Privatizing this event might be the solution.

Have a look at the Writog, he’s got some real interesting trash/art photos from Plattsburgh.

BTW: I think it’s perfectly fine to talk about tits.  At our house, we call them “tetas”.

I recall watching some kind of “Winter X Games” years ago on ESPN. One of the “sports” involved coasting down an icy ski run… on a bicycle. Naturally, all of the X sports had their legendary athletes and this one was no exception. The legendary star of this discipline was a young woman who was very petite. For some reason, on this course she could not control her stop at the end of her runs, and she kept crashing into the barrier at the bottom — each rack-up more spectacular than the last. Finally after three runs they caught up with her and she was crying (brave athlete tears of disappointment, not ouch-I-wanna-go-home tears, I presume) and didn’t want to be interviewed. So the X-announcers just went on without her and delivered a very serious-sounding technical analysis of her repeated wipeouts, having to do with her light body weight and the course design…

And I’m sitting there going, Dude, maybe it’s because she was riding a bicycle down a &$*#*@ ski run???

I’m not sure what a “sport” is, though. If you boil it down to the absolute essentials, I think the only real sport is probably dodgeball.

As for Olympic vignettes, I will be rooting for Lopez Lomong, not just because of the Syracuse connection, but because he goes to NAU, which is in Flagstaff, which is where my grandparents used to live (and my aunt used to work at NAU).

Sports? TV is biased against team sports so we do not see much volleyball, water polo, team handball, the kind of sports you don’t see during the regular sports year. Two other trends are disturbing–the inclusion of so many X Games-type sports (so Americans can inflate their medal totals) and the exploitation of little girls in gymnastics, skating and diving (if you’re a teen, you’re over the hill.)

After School Special? All the heartwarming stories told with breathless sincerity over stirring theme music make me want to vomit.

Political gamesmanship? It’s no longer just countries that seek to score brownie points while wearing track suits. Athletes, NGO’s and issue groups are all jockeying for camera time.

Whacked-out performance art? The opening and closing ceremonies are unwatchable and generally have little or no relation to the host nation’s culture.

Why can’t we hang officials for lying?????? This is serious.

As for the locusts, well, they just don’t have to bother with leaves for a long season– leaf out late, drop ‘em early– because they are so outrageously efficient. Nitrogen-fixers, they basically make their own food (with the help of the symbiotic rhizobia). Ah, robinia pseudoacacia…whadda tree, whadda tree… but, you know how I feel about that :-)

I agree completely about Extreme Makeover and its progeny. Ghoulish and a material sign of where our culture has gone.

At least the couple borrowed to start a new business. I could think of much worse. If I didn’t need a Disney home, in their circumstances, I might do the same, especially to start a business.

Another thing against the show. It was a spin off of Extreme Makeover, where they sent people through radical plastic surgery so they could feel better about themselves. One of the most horrific and ghoulish shows ever put on network tv.

Easier than you think, and good for your health, too.

Now, radio is a different animal entirely. Check out this one from Alternative Radio, which aired this afternoon and will be repeated at 7:00 pm: http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/BEZS004.shtml

But, yeah, the story about the McMansion-in-hock being foreclosed on and the poor family borrowing against it trying to make a buck in the kaputt housing industry is ironic, I’ll grant you that. If you aren’t careful how much you watch, though, I think America WILL make you crazy!

Well put … the real altruists in our society don’t make a big deal about the good things they do for people.

Where do you live?

As far as the desolate wilds, here, hadn’t you heard? The debbil (the mining companies) is building hell-on-the-earth’s-waters underground.
http://www.thealbanyproject.com/showDiary.do;jsessionid=0C801C8BE1432AA1BFDCC71BAB48FB34?diaryId=3781
That and a few more meth labs, and we got an economy again!