Acclaimed musician Lhasa de Sela, who spent much of her professional life in Montreal, died of breast cancer at the age of 37 this New Years' Day. The Globe and Mail has an obit:

Music in an unfamiliar language is too often relegated to a niche genre - the marketers like to call it "world music," and others often consigned her to the cabaret or folk bins. But Lhasa spoke to all listeners, even those who did not understand the literal words of the songs; like Holiday and Tom Waits, two performers to whom she was often compared, she could reach an audience through cadence and rhythm alone, as any listener of the songs "De cara a la pared" and "Con toda Palabra" can attest. She mesmerized live audiences with her sensuality and her between-song stories.

Drugs flushed down the toilet and ending up in drinking water is a growing problem nationwide. This week, New York Attorney General (and rumored gubernatorial hopeful) Andrew Cuomo went after five hospitals and nursing homes within the New York City watershed for their illegal practice of flushing drugs: O’Connor Hospital and Countryside Care Center in Delhi, Margaretville Memorial Hospital and Mountainside Residential Care Center in Margaretville, and Putnam Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Holmes. The facilities face fines of a few thousand dollars apiece and have agreed to stop the dumping.

Federal OSHA guidelines for hospitals recommend that drugs be taken to "either an incinerator or a licensed sanitary landfill for toxic wastes, as appropriate."

A press release from the AG's office calls the settlement "groundbreaking":

In an interview with Big Gay Hudson Valley, WAMC's Hudson Valley bureau chief, Susan Barnett, gets just a little too smug with the regional pride.

Schoharie, Otsego, Delaware counties are absolutely lovely and there are certainly some creative people hiding away in their hills.  But I don’t believe there’s any other part of the state that is so liberally populated with independent thinkers, proud members of the counterculture and members of various groups that show the real diversity of what it means to be American.

As opposed to that other, non-real kind of diversity.

Also, is anyone else getting heartily tired of hearing about how all the gay folks are so artsy and creative? Gays sell car insurance too, people.

While the Huffington Post gleefully declares phone calls, newspaper classifieds and letter-writing obsolete, Sullivan County blogger and news columnist Jeanne Sager frets that the world is leaving rural upstate New York behind.

As of August of 2009, Neilsen estimated there were more than 220 million Internet users, but only 69 million were broadband subscribers. Listen at a local town board meeting, and there are repeated pleas by residents for these resources - requests to resist the frogmarch toward irrelevancy. We need to get moving before another decade passes us by.

It's only January, but About Olive has had enough of the single-digit temperatures.

Life is rough here in the mountains in winter. I'd like to see the survivor TV show drop those folks here in January and see who survives.