Delaware County's finest eels will be featured on the Cooking Channel this Thursday, along with the county's resident eel whisperer Ray Turner, the owner of Delaware Delicacies Smokehouse in Hancock, and Ed O'Neill, the chef and co-owner of the Andes Hotel in Andes (a Watershed Post advertiser).
Alexander T. Watkins-Blazeski, a 16-year-old from the Shawangunk hamlet of Pine Bush, was killed in a snowmobile accident near Sinsabaugh Road on Saturday. In a news release, state troopers said Watkins-Blazeski was driving a 2005 Arctic Cat in a field when he lost control and slammed into a tree.
The Times Herald-Record reports that friends of Blazeski's tried to get him to the hospital:
Friends who stopped hearing the sound of the snowmobile went to search Blazeski and found him near the tree. They started to transport him by car but along the way his condition deteriorated and they called 911, cops say. An ambulance rushed him to Orange Regional Medical Center in the Town of Wallkill, where he succumbed to his injuries at the hospital.
An obituary for Blazeski in today's paper notes that a fund has been set up in his memory:
Van Morrow hoists the Lesbian and Gay Band Association's official flag during a Sunday rehearsal in Baltimore for the upcoming Inaugural Parade. Photo courtesy of Van Morrow.
Forgive us the Onionesque headline: Van Morrow, a longtime Livingston Manor resident and business owner, is indeed an Area Man.
He's also a member of the Lesbian and Gay Band Association (LGBA), a group of gay and lesbian marching bands that will be marching with pride (cymbal crash) in the 57th Inaugural Parade on Monday, January 21. Among the eight floats, 59 groups and marching bands, over 8,800 people and about 200 animals that will process in pomp and circumstance down Pennsylvania Avenue on Monday, Catskillians can keep an eye out for at least one local face.
Above: A young Liberty resident makes it known that he'd like to see a video game store on Main Street. Photo from Green Door's Facebook page.
Liberty’s Main Street has challenged locals for years.
"Driving down Liberty's Main Street, you might get the sense that it is a lifeless place with vacant storefronts and neglect,” said Green Door Magazine editor Akira Ohiso.
Ohiso is on a mission to change that -- and with a new project that transforms a dull construction barrier into a community-wide interactive art project, the village's Main Street is already looking brighter. Last week, Green Door, the Liberty-based “Journal of Responsible Living in the Catskills and Beyond,” unveiled its Interactive Construction Wall on Main Street in Liberty, and suggestions from the community have been coming thick and fast.
"We hope the interactive wall will engage residents in a public space to show Liberty's often missed or disregarded vibrancy," said Ohiso.
Above: Kit Jones, "Shed in Fog" -- image from LivingstonManor.org.
The Catskill Art Society is hosting an artist talk for a new show opening on Saturday. "Look Twice" features the photography of Kit Jones, a photographer, writer and resident of Livingston Manor, and Glenn Lieberman, a Brooklyn-based artist. CAS will host the talk for “Look Twice” this Saturday at 2:00 p.m., with an Opening Reception immediately following. For more info, see the listing in our calendar.
Photo from Friends of Cecilia Tkaczyk Facebook page.
Catskills voters: Never say your vote doesn't count.
After a long court battle that resulted in the counting of 99 contested ballots, Democrat Cecilia Tkaczyk has won the race for the 46th state senate district by just 19 votes, upending Republican George Amedore's previous 37-vote lead.
With a midnight deadline just hours away, four New York State school districts risk losing large chunks of state aid if they fail to submit new state-mandated teacher evaluation plans today. The districts are Fallsburg, Harrison, Pine Plains, and the state's most high-profile school district, New York City.
On Thursday, January 17, the due date for the evaluation plans, Gov. Andrew Cuomo had stern words for the four districts:
You've got to feel for New York State's 46th Senate District. Like the rest of the state, the 46th -- a rural district that snakes from Montgomery County, through the more rural parts of Schenectady and Albany Counties, across all of Greene County and into the northeastern part of Ulster County -- has some identity issues after a recent redistricting.
Unlike the rest of the state, the 46th still has no representation in the state Senate. A squeaker of a race between Republican George Amedore, the presumptive winner, and Democrat Cecilia Tkaczyk has remained undecided, as the two sides battled in court over whether to count 99 ballots that were originally disallowed over minor technicalities.
On a chilly morning last week, Watershed Post reader Frieda Suess snapped this photo of a coyote near the Darling dairy farm in Roxbury, New York.
"His fur is a red/gray mix, and the tall pointed ears determines it's a coyote and not a wolf," Suess writes.
A century ago, coyotes were nowhere to be found in the mountains of upstate New York. After eastern timber wolves were hunted to extinction in the region, coyotes began moving back in, and are now thriving in the Catskills.
But the wolf is not entirely gone from these hills: Many of the Northeast's coyotes are in fact coyote-wolf hybrids, according to recent genetic studies -- and their wolfish genes are making them larger, stronger, and better suited to hunting deer than their more purebred western cousins.
Today in Around the Blogshed news: Do you know a fellow by the name of Elliott Auerbach? Mr. Auerbach is the comptroller for Ulster County, and he keeps a blog called "Ulster County Comptroller: The People's Watchdog." (Hello, Hollywood? Our comptroller is ready for primetime: he's already got his own tagline!)
The blog covers a variety of events around the region, specifically, and in the world of comptrolling, generally. Recent headlines include "COMPTROLLERS UNITED ABOUT RESOURCE RECOVERY AGENCY" and "SEPARATION PAY: The Hidden Cost of Downsizing Government." A recent post also waxed sentimental about Ron Marquette, SUNY Ulster's community relations and special events coordinator, who passed away after the new year.
