Sunday, January 20, 2008

Cold News

“CAIRO, NY” is the title of a poem that appeared in the January 7th issue of The NewYorker. According to its first 14 lines “The town near our house/ Isn’t fancy,/ But it is ripe./ At present,/ it is still on/ The wrong side of /The Hudson River./ But there’s potential./ What happened/ In Woodstock,/ What happened/ In Red Hook,/ What’s happening /In Catskill,/ Could easily Happen here.” Subsequent lines deal ironically with the prospect of gentrification. Author Cornelius Eady, a part-time Acra resident who has taught poetry in many colleges and institutes, currently runs the creative writing program at Notre Dame University. Victims of the Latest Dance Craze and Autobiography of a Jukebox are titles of two of his six collections of poems. A seventh collection, Hardheaded Weather, is on the way.

EXPEDITED in GreeneLand, modestly, during 2008: Youth theater, adult theater, Chinese brush painting, origami, poetry appreciation and composition, youth art, fiction writing, clay sculpture, stone carving, belly dancing, art history for children, digital photography, story-telling, Shakespeare, weaving, book illustrating, classical music-making, quilting, teen film-making, art for developmentally disabled children. These activities will be expedited, each in a modest way, by grants from the State’s Decentralization Program Support Project, as administered locally by the county Arts Council. Grants totaling $25,850 will go to 22 selected organizations, in amounts ranging from $750 to $1800. Among grantees or program managers:: Jeanne Heiberg, Bonnie Mion, Joseph Capone, David Woodin, Margo Muller, Vladimir Pleshakov, Cindy Putorti, Kevin VanHentenryck, Vera Gaidoch.

POSTPONED: sentencing dates for GreeneLanders James Pine and Michael Deyo, as given in our previous blog (“A Criminal Trial”). They will not get the news on St Valentine’s Day. Their dates have been changed to February 22 at 3pm for Deyo and to February 29th at 10:30am for Pine.

APPOINTED as secretary to the county’s new sheriff, Greg Seeley: former Daily Mail reporter Andrea Macko. No, she won’t be getting orders from her father, Sergeant Andy Macko.

CRIPPLED by a schoolyard bully last week, to the point of needing multiple pins inserted in a plate in his shattered hip: a GreeneLand boy, 9 years of age. He had dreamed of becoming a soccer star.

OPENED last Wednesday, by Deborah Braiman, in Athens (360 Warren St): a campaign office for Barack Obama. More information may be available to skilled cyber-trackers starting with the web site mybarackobama.com.

CLOSED, not just for the winter: Bowerbird home furnishing shop on Catskill's Main Street.

SUGGESTED, by us, here & now, to GreeneLand legislators: explore the feasibility and costs of adapting a part of the Hudson Correctional Facility for use as Greene County jail. That historic minimum-security prison is located just across the Hudson River, a few minutes’ drive from the Greene County courthouse. It is slated by the Department of Corrections , along with two other facilities in the State, for closing by next January (because our prison population has dwindled). Couldn’t a piece of it be adapted readily for use as a jail? Wouldn’t that yield a saving of millions of dollars, many millions, compared with the cost of building an all-new GreeneLand jail?

MAULED lately, at a higher-than-ever rate, in the columns GreeneLand’s reigning daily newspaper: the English language. “The Athens Local Development Corporation’s project with the Athens village board to get small, job-creating businesses started on Second Street”--sentence ends here--seems to be a case of predicate-purging, as do

A number of interesting programs for those interested in a number of areas to learn about male trees and personal empowerment, according to the Agroforestry Resource Center.

The Monday announcement by the county of the grant’s arrival, preceded by a Governor’s Office for Small Cities declaration six days earlier, accompanies along with some statistics, seen as staggering by a county Planning and Economic Development Department statement.

as well as

This instruction coming after Speckman had attested to the fact that this ordeal has been going on for months and a resolution has yet to met, having given the property owners numerous opportunities to rectify the situation in a civil manner.

“An agreement outlining various issues discussed at this meeting will be introduced at the Catskill Village Board meeting on Jan. 11 at 7 p.m.,” published on January 14th, seems to be a case of backward forward-looking, or maybe forward backward-looking. The headline “One man’s prospective on things to come” exemplifies misnomer in 30-point type; and it happens to introduce a column whose author opines that a predicted personnel-type event “came to pass, the most prominent of who was…Barnhart.”

“IDA officials has adopted a statement…” and “one unique piece of equipment are the red and green lights D’Amato utilized…” demonstrate blunders in the matter of achieving numerical agreement between parts of a sentence. “ That may be the least of the pratfalls in dangling construction-pocked “He said that as a taxpayer himself the maintenance work and upkeep of the ‘not- for-profit’ facility has already been paid for.” For distinction in the Clear As Mud category, however, the foregoing sentence falls well short of

Louis said that the question was whether he ‘knew of a termination’ of newly appointed Planning Board member Joseph Caputo, not the ‘why’ of the termination and it was one associated with the public’s questions as to why the Town Board substituted Caputo for Jim Coe, who was not reappointed following the end of his term with the Planning Board on Dec. 31.

Got that? Now for this week’s Pukelitzer Prize-winner:

A wave of check scams has [sic.] been targeting residents of Greene County and beyond, which [sic.] continues to invade the homes of unsuspecting victims, warns Greene County Sheriff Greg Seeley….The unassuming [sic.] winner of the scam [sic.] is directed to reply with a personal check covering processing fees and taxes, this may total in the thousands….The apparent authenticity of the check is sometimes mislead [sic.] by a bank name and telephone number on the back. When called, however, they [sic.] are actually calling a direct line to the con artist…. Similar incidents have been occurring all across the Hudson Valley region, one of which was recently reported in Hyde Park.

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