Never mind a movie theatre or a stoplight: The tiny Ulster County town of Denning is too small even to have a town park. That's about to change, thanks to local realtor Jennifer Grimes, who's looking for a few good dirt- and flower-wranglers to help put together a Town Garden for Denning's 516 residents to enjoy.

To my delight the Town Board approved this project! So the next phase is to put together the Denning Garden Club. While we may have some welcome assistance in the planning and implementation of the garden, I think it’s key that those of us interested, talk about how the space would best be used and designed, and get our hands dirty together. And people from the Neversink side of Claryville are more than welcome too!

Lest any of you residents of sensible, town-boundary-respecting hamlets be confused by that last bit: The hamlet of Claryville is actually half in Denning, and half in the Sullivan County town of Neversink.

A Brooklyn postal worker recently headed for the hills with a trunk full of (allegedly) stolen mail and was caught red-handed, the New York Post reports.

Letter carrier Peter Ramsdal, 26, who works out of the Dyker Heights Post Office, had stashed the bags of mail in his 2008 Mazda during a trip to the Catskills on April 21.

His hoard was discovered when he was pulled over for driving with a suspended registration, cops said.

As Catskills officers impounded his car, they found three US Postal Service mailbags with 537 pieces of mail.

The hero of the day: Lt. Gregory Sager of the "Catskills Police Department" -- uh, that would be "Catskill," guys. Hard to believe, but we've got more than one police department up here.

A few weeks ago, Crossroads developer Dean Gitter was swearing up and down that state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli wasn't holding up a key 2007 Belleayre land deal because of the hefty price tag, never mind what the New York Post had to say about it.

Looks like the Post is vindicated. On LoHud.com today: a copy of the terse paper karate chop DiNapoli sent to the DEC earlier this week.

While I understand that you have identified this as a priority project important to the Catskill's [sic] economy, environment, and watershed, you have not provided justification that adequately supports such a large premium (29 percent or $1,424,400) over the fair market value calculation done by your staff after gathering information, which included professional appraisals.

Today's Daily Yonder breaks open a shiny box of BEA statistics, and comes up with a neat map of income growth in rural areas between 2007 and 2008:

When you rank the nation’s 3,112 counties according to their growth in personal income between 2007 and 2008, the top of the chart has a countrified appearance.

The county with the highest percentage growth in total income was Faulk, a rural county in South Dakota, which reported a 54 percent growth. The next county on the list is rural (Clark County, Idaho) and so is the next (Cavalier County, North Dakota).

And on down the list. The 108 counties with the fastest growth in income between ’07 and ’08 are all rural. The first non-rural county is Benton County, Indiana, ranking 109.

The Yonder surmises that the driving force behind income growth in rural counties was rising farm incomes.

Another interesting factoid that the Yonder notes: Most of the rural counties that saw their personal income decline between 2007 and 2008 are in oil and gas country.