Is there some kind of terrible recession going on in the creative industry? It seems like the anti-budget-cut campaigns coming out of New York State's usually-staid nonprofit sector are getting awfully clever lately.

From the Healthcare Association of New York State: A new website called StopCutzilla.org features video of a giant dinosaur crushing cardboard hospitals full of Playmobil doctors. Special feature: Type in your zip code and check out the devastation Cutzilla plans to wreak on your local hospital.

Spectators along the Rondout Creek got a rare glimpse of an Arctic harp seal yesterday. The Daily Freeman has the story, with video.

Steve Noble, an environmental educator for the city Parks and Recreation Department, said the seal, which spent most of the morning and into the afternoon lying on its back on a patch of ice about 15 to 20 feet from the Rondout Creek’s shore near Mariner’s Harbor, was sunning itself and that it had probably followed a school of fish into the creek.

A panel discussion of natural-gas drilling at SUNY New Paltz last night drew several hundred people, the Times Herald-Record reports.

Those against it — including New York City and most of the crowd of some 200 Monday night — again said drilling, or specifically, the horizontal drilling technique called "fracking," will pollute the water and scar the pristine land atop the shale.

"The industrialization of the landscape," said Kate Sinding, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, pointing to incidents of pollution in Western states.

A proposed 355-mile power line from Canada to New York City--much of it buried in the PCB-laced muck of the Hudson River--will be the topic of a developer presentation tomorrow, at 6pm at the Holiday Inn at 300 Broadway in Albany.

Taghkanic resident Sam Pratt is dubious.

The Catskill Daily Mail repeats unchallenged TDI’s claim that "neither commercial nor recreational current use of the Hudson River will be affected by the line’s presence." (Note the word “current,” which would suggest it might affect future uses.)

In a little over an hour, Roxbury resident Roger Ross Williams will find out if he's taking home an Oscar. The director and his crew are up for their film "Music By Prudence," a short documentary about a severely disabled Zimbabwean singer-songwriter.

From the film's website:

African plain: supple and green. Clouds (celestial rapids) racing over an otherwise halcyon sky.