Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY 21st) was on the Truth About Trucking radio program yesterday, talking up a bill he's sponsoring to increase trucker safety. Named for the late Jason Rivenburg, who was killed while sleeping at a gas station last spring, Jason's Law seeks to fund more parking and rest areas for trucks throughout the federal highway system.

Here's the OpenCongress page for H.R. 2156, where you can track the bill's progress and follow news coverage on it.

Steven Schimmrich, writing at Hudson Valley Geologist, remembers Rosendale's Dietrich Werner, who died in December.

What affected me the most about Dietrich's death was that the week he died I was working on a project having to do with the Rosendale Cement industry and I was thinking of calling him the following week to get together to discuss it.  He knew more about this topic than anyone I know.  Researching local history was a labor of love for him and a lot of local knowledge passed away when he did.

Shortly after Werner's death, Ulster Logic published a tribute written by state assemblyman Kevin Cahill.

I'm not sure when Dietrich became a Rosendale police commissioner, but many of us took great comfort that someone from the counter culture could assume such a position of responsibility. For me, it affirmed my faith in our legal system.

Tony Fletcher finds an unexpected treasure trove of '70s music history in his basement.

It’s not like I don’t already have several boxes full of cassettes in the storage room behind my office, including tapes of my pre-pubescent bedroom band from back in the late 1970s, mix tapes from the 80s and more promo tapes than I’ll ever know what to do with from the 90s. It’s that those tapes don’t tell the whole story, that of the obsessive future music journalist who practiced for taping John Peel shows on Radio 1/2 by frequently recording the Roger Scott show on Capital Radio as early as 1975; a kid who often seemed intent on taping every single track that ever came out and who, naturally, catalogued his cassettes along the way.

Ulster County legislator Mike Madsen reflects on county executive Mike Hein's recent State of the County address, and is a little frustrated about not hearing more about forward progress.

But I'm a realist. It's not so much who was giving the speech as much as what the limited options are in 2010, and the task is huge. Hein and my fellow Legislators know that we need to provide life support to Ulster County in-spite of what the state throws at us in unfunded mandates, increasing health costs, anaemic sales tax revenue and unrelenting tax increases.

Oklahoma investor Joey Abbo, who failed in his bid to buy the ailing Friar Tuck Inn in Catskill last year, says he's still interested in buying, if he has time to put the financing together. From the Times Union:

Abbo says he had been working with several commercial lenders to pay for the Friar Tuck deal, but he was not given enough time by the court to put a financing package together. He said he wanted an exclusive window of 60 to 90 days to close, instead of the 48 hours he was given to wire the money, which was supposed to total $5.3 million to also pay for auctioneer fees and unpaid taxes.

As with other real estate deals involving bankrupt hotels in the Catskills, the proof is in the pudding.