Ah, the miracle of modern digital photography. This may look like an Instamatic print from a battered box marked "Spring 1967," but this nostalgia-hued snapshot of the ice on North-South Lake was taken last week.
Photo by Flickr user Catskills Grrl. All rights reserved; reproduced with permission.
The Times Herald-Record reports that when a bear tried to crawl into a Parksville house on Sunday, the woman inside made three calls: to the state police, to the Department of Environmental Conservation, and to her grandfather. Unluckily for the bear, grandpa arrived first.
The grandfather fired a warning shot, said Steingart, but the bear didn't stand down, so he shot it.
The Daily Freeman offered some bear avoidance advice on Sunday.
Bird-watching fanatic Corey Finger, a Saugerties ex-pat who now lives in New York City, spent his Easter morning tromping around the swamp. He got some great bird photos and a shot of a tree-dwelling porcupine:
I went for a drive to the Great Vly, a large swamp on the border of Ulster and Greene Counties, and enjoyed the dawn there, surrounded by Tree Swallows and Red-winged Blackbirds and Wood Ducks and Eastern Bluebirds and Common Grackles and Ring-necked Ducks and I could go on like this for quite some time.
It probably isn't news to locals that in Ulster County, the city of Kingston pays for the lion's share of Safety Net, a statewide welfare program. In most of the state, the buck stops with the county. Not so in Ulster County, which bills towns for half the cost of its Safety Net payments -- providing a perfect excuse for towns not to invest in affordable housing, and also an environment ripe for bookkeeping errors.
Speaking of errors: Ulster County's largest city has been overpaying for Safety Net to the tune of $25,000 to $40,000 a month, says the Daily Freeman -- and that's going to stop.
Concerns about the way the county charges municipalities for the cost of its Safety Net program arose after Kingston Mayor James Sottile discovered the city had been billed for a number of clients in the program who had Kingston mailing addresses but actually lived in the town of Ulster and other towns that share Kingston’s 12401 ZIP code.
The Pollyanna of the Week award goes to the Daily Star and its unnamed teenage sources, for their weirdly chipper Day 5 take on the Cooperstown shooting: "Most students unfazed by Cooperstown shooting."
But for most students, Monday was a normal day, several classmates said after school.
"I'd say about 90 percent of the school didn't notice," said one senior, who was walking with two other students.
Like other students approached by The Daily Star on Monday afternoon, the senior, who didn't wish to be identified, was asked by school officials not to talk about the shooting , which is under investigation as a possible hate crime.
The Daily Star is also the source of the most substantial bit of concrete information concerning the possible prosecution of the shooting as a hate crime: An unnamed official apparently told a reporter that 16-year-old shooter Anthony Pacherille said he "hated black people."
Monticello, the Sullivan County village whose mayhem and machinations lately have been worthy of prime-time on HBO, continues to be wracked with political intrigue. The latest, in the Times Herald-Record: Twice-ousted village manager John Barbarite, a crony of the town's controversial mayor, has been re-hired.
Also in today's paper: The man who was shot and killed in Monticello early Monday morning has been identified as Hercules Jones.
It turns out that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's crusade on behalf of New York City drinking water only targeted about 10 percent of the drugs that humans flush down the toilet. The other 90 percent, according to an article in Time Magazine this week, is the stuff that humans, er, excrete:
The planet may still be paying for the cold you had last winter. If it was a bad one, you probably took medicine. Maybe you rinsed the little dosing cup in the sink every time you used it. Maybe you finished the bottle and threw it in the trash. What you surely did several times a day was go to the bathroom — perhaps more than usual if you were taking care to drink plenty of liquids — and some of that medicine passed straight through you. What all this means is that while you were taking your cold medicine, so was your local water supply.
Say you're in the area of Oneida, Madison, Otsego, Broome, Chenango, Montgomery and Schoharie counties. You're having a tough time getting tourists excited about visiting. "Leatherstocking Region" just isn't bringing in the crowds like it used to. What do you do?
1. Launch an ambitious re-branding campaign for the region. Come up with something really zesty. Something that screams excitement. Let's call it "Central New York."
2. Announce this sensational new name on Easter morning, on a weekend when even the luckless reporters who are working have been dispatched to Cooperstown.
3. Don't get rid of all the old "Leatherstocking" signs right away. Having the same name on all the signs would only confuse people. Instead, just wait til the old ones fall apart and replace them one by one over a period of several years.
Reporters from across the state were hard at work over the Easter weekend, hoovering up any available details to try to explain Friday's horrifying shooting in Cooperstown.
WKTV in Utica found a parent of a black child who says bullying and racism are a serious problem at Cooperstown High:
As much as there is a social divide, often there is a racial divide, said the mother. She says it is something she and her daughter have experienced.
"I was a senior in high school and I was constantly called a 'n****r lover' because they found out I was pregnant by an African American," she said. "The same thing, my daughter is called a n****r all the time."
WBNG Binghamton says the town has clammed up about the shooting, scheduling and then abruptly canceling a press conference this afternoon.
It seems as though local authorities were told to keep quiet.
Steve Schimmrich, the Hudson Valley Geologist, took advantage of the spectacular weather to hike in Minnewaska State Park on Good Friday.(He got some great pictures, too.)
Having a Ph.D in geology has its benefits: Where most of us probably would have been going, "Oooh, pretty rocks," Schimmrich sees glacial erratics, striations and strike-slip faults. But that doesn't mean he didn't enjoy all 8.5 miles of it.
I have to say that Lake Minnewaska really is a treasure - one of the most beautiful places in the area where I live. Deep blue water surrounded by white rocky cliffs and green pines - on a sunny day, it's incredible and pictures can't do it any justice.
Bonus points for using the word "embiggen."
