Greene Features

JUST INSTALLED in downtown Catskill: Mike Tigerson. Motorcycle Meowsma, Catadozer, Chinese Good Luck Cat, Olanacat, Mad Catter, Boo Boo Kitty, and 42 other fiberglass felines.  This year’s Cat ‘n Around figures are just as imaginative, as startling, as exciting as ever.  Arriving at a time when all too many Main Street stores are empty, supply they supply a timely morale booster.   Meanwhile, downtown Cairo is acquiring a fresh bounty of bears, while Rip van Winkle figures re-appear (newly configured) in Hunter,  and the streets of Athens are bedecked with lighthouse-shaped birdhouses. 

                      Momcat
FEATURED at the top of the Washington Post’s Lifestyle section of May 19: a long illustrated article titled “The Impulsive Traveler: Following in the footsteps of the Hudson River School in Catskill, N.Y.” 

   I’d come to Catskill, N.Y., a town about two hours north of Manhattan, to retrace the steps of the Hudson River School, the 19th-century movement of landscape artists who walked the mountains of this verdant slice of the Northeast in search of inspiration.

   The people at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, a.k.a. Cedar Grove, the movement founder’s historic residence, have made the reasonable assumption that visitors would enjoy exploring the same places the artists did. So they’ve put together a guide to eight sites (more to come later this year), creating the Hudson River School Art Trail. Armed with that, and not a whole lot else, I found myself on a bright May day wandering the wilderness and channeling my inner artiste.

    The first two stops on the trail, Cole’s Cedar Grove and Olana, the elaborate Persian-style mansion of painter and Cole student Frederic Church, was the most leisurely part of my day. I strolled their grounds, taking in the views perfumed with the heavy scent of lilacs. But with six more stops to go, I couldn’t dally too long.

 [Queries for County Tourism promoters:  Is Cole House in your mind as a tourist attraction?  Do you do enough to spread the word about Cedar Grove and the Art Trail to visitors and prospective visitors?] 

FEATURED in the Real Estate section of Thursday’s New York Times, with a big picture and an interview: a two-bedroom house in Palenville, whose Manhattan-based owners  fell in love with the place, already had a place they love, bought this one, fixed it up, then gave it a lavish buildup on web site www.waterfallrental.com, as a vacation rental.   “Feast on the majestic mountain and waterfall views, the inspiration for the famed Hudson River School of Painters.” $400 per night in season, or $2600 per week, or $9800 per month.  Right.

FEATURED at the top of the Wall Street Journal’s Arts & Entertainment section on May 17, in an illustrated article hailing the opening of his first solo show in America: artist Vahap Avsar, who is a part-time GreeneLander. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703509104576327790564647756.html?

FEATURED on the Crain’s NY Small Business site, May 18^th, a story titled “Lexy Funk’s Take on the Night Shift.”  It’s about how, after coming home, feeding the kids, reading them a story, and putting them to bed, this mogul uses the 9 pm and midnight period to work on her $20 million business. http://crainsnewyork.com.  Ms Funk is a part-time GreeneLander. And is training for a triathlon.  And is about to be featured in Inc. magazine. And is married to Mr Avsar (who does help with the kids).

OFFERED for just $1.1 million:  The whole site of the former St Patricks Academy on Woodland Avenue in Catskill.  After being closed in 2008, it was used for a year as a temporary county courthouse.  It’s billed on the Coldwell Banker Commercial web site as “land sale.”  On the 10.6-acre site stand a 20,000 square foot school building, a 2800 square foot office building, and an 8500 square foot gymnasium, all set back from the road by a plentiful lawn.  The land goes right down to 400 feet of Hudson River frontage.  Selling agents are in the Cohoes office; 785-9000.  

BOYS UP!  At Catskill High School, in the latest term, 12^th grade girls achieving High Honors did NOT greatly out-number boys.  Eleven of those 19 were boys.  That marks a rare break from the pattern of female superiority there and elsewhere.  By way of contrast, at Greenville High, only four boys achieved top honors among seniors in the last term, while eight girls made the grade.

DISCIPLINE CASE.  At a GreeneLand school recently, the principal suspended and sent home a misbehaving student.  The student’s father reacted with anger and indignation.  He demanded reinstatement.  The principal relented.  On the day that the student returned, her best friend was rushed to the hospital, on account of a toxic reaction to pills supplied by the student. 

 

                Serenitymeow
           --Photos by Rob Shannon 

 

 

 

 

Greene Money

BUDGETS PASS.  In all parts of GreeneLand on Tuesday, voters who turned out to rule on school budget proposals that were submitted to them by their district boards of education delivered strong majority support.  They authorized, for the county’s six school districts, expenditures on public education during 2011-12 totaling $139.3 million. In doing so they were acquiescing in the prospect of increases--historically small increases, to be sure--in their taxes.  

This show of support for school spending plans proved to be consistent with what occurred elsewhere.   In New York State, outside the five big cities, there are 678 districts where outlays on public schools are subject to approval by local voters.  On Tuesday, in response to proposals made by their locally-elected school trustees, in 634 of those districts, according to The New York Times, majorities of the voters said Yes.

Four of the other 44 districts are near GreeneLand.  In Columbia County, according to The Register-Star, voters in the high-standards Ichabod Crane school district (Kinderhook area) rejected the board-proposed $33.8 million budget.  So, by 1249 votes to 424, did Hudson voters.   And in Ulster County,  according to The Daily Freeman, refusers out-numbered assenters  in the Pine Plains district, by 476 to 413, and in Saugerties, by 1631 to1369. [NOTE.  The foregoing paragraph is a revision of what was published yesterday (5/20).  The original text did not include Columbia County results].

     In GreeneLand, margins of support for those budget proposals ranged from comfortable (Cairo-Durham, 529 to 408) to overwhelming (Catskill, 565-301; Coxsackie- Athens, 854-449; Greenville, 582-255; Hunter-Tannersville, 181-97; Windham-Ashland-Jewett, 178-65). [Daily Mail, 5/18]
COST AND BURDENS

The school budgets that were adopted here on Tuesday offer substantial contrasts in financial ‘meaning’: cost per pupil, local tax burden per pupil.  Some of those contrasts are brought out in statistics compiled from State Education Department figures by staff at the Empire Center for New York State Policy.  Thus, in GreeneLand, with projected school enrollments in 2011-12 totaling 6760, and with Tuesday’s passage of  district budgets, cost per pupil works out to $20,624.  As between the six districts, however, cost per pupil will range from $16,452 (Coxsackie-Athens) to $34,171.

The high-cost district is Hunter-Tannersville.  Next highest is Windham-Ashland-Jewett ($26,309 per pupil).  Those districts are much smaller in enrollment (and substantially larger in space) than the other four.  But the correlation between size of enrollment and cost per pupil is not neat.  GreeneLand’s second largest district--Coxsackie-Athens, with 1525 students anticipated in 2011-12--also is the least expensive, and by a big margin.  Its projected cost per pupil is $16,452.   Cairo-Durham is third highest in student population (1458) while being second-lowest in cost per pupil ($16,685).  Greenville’s school district is fourth in student body size (1286) and is fourth in cost per pupil ($20,276).  As for Catskill, it is first in the county in enrollment (1702) and third in projected costs per pupil ($21,863).  

No less interesting are inter-district contrasts, following adoptions of the new school budgets, in consequences for local property tax levies.  Among GreeneLand’s six school districts, according to the Empire Center’s calculations, those costs will range from $7956 (Cairo-Durham) to $24,929 (Hunter-Tannersville).

PUPILS VS, PRISONERS

Our cost per pupil of public schooling, incidentally, is less than the cost per prisoner of incarceration.  Nation-wide, the average is around $24,000 per inmate per year.  In the big northern States such as California and New York, it’s more than $40,000. [Reuters, 5/20]. 

THE GREEN AT GREENE.  GreeneLand’s foremost local bank, in the words of its president, Donald Gibson, experienced “strong” earnings during the latest three-month period. 

According to the official company report, however, net income during January 1-March 30 was the same as the net during the first three months of 2010.  That result ($1.2 million) marks a contrast to results in the same quarters of previous fiscal years.  It suggests a drop in momentum.  But the immediately preceding quarters of the 2010-11 period did show gains.  Consequently, the nine months from July 1, 2010, to March 31, 2011, as compared with the same period in 2009-100, yielded an 8 per cent gain in net income. The raw score was $3.9 million.

The appearance of a slowdown in net income could be due to accounting precautions taken.  Company executives evidently are preparing for an increase in loans that go sour.  Thus:

*Provision for loan losses for the current financial year has been boosted over the same provision in 2009-10, by nearly 20 per cent to $1.2 million.

*Commercial loans extended by the bank have increased relative to residential loans, and those loans, as a general rule, are riskier.

*Properties owned by the bank in consequence of foreclosure action—owned but not earning a return--increased during that same period by $563,000.

*”Nonperforming” bank assets have enlarged.  These are loans for which repayments have ceased while foreclosure actions, often stretching over two years from the time of commencement, have not reached completion.  Their total book value at the end of March 2010 was put at $3.2 million.  The new total is more than double the old one; $6.9 million. That increase, says Mr Gibson, “reflected the decline in the overall economy.”  And it prompted an increase in the bank’s level of allowance for losses on loans that go sour relative to the value of the total portfolio. The new figure is 1.62%.  The March 2010 allowance was 1.33%.  

Those figures can be read as signs of trouble to come.  They also can be read as signs of prudent anticipation. 

Meanwhile, some contrasts are worth noting.  The mammoth Bank of America, having previously closed its Germantown branch (which the Bank of Greene County took over, profitably) is closing its home-loan office in Saratoga, putting 34 people out of work. [TimesUnion, 5/4/11].  And the Bank of Greene County, unlike neighboring banks and other lenders, has avoided all of GreeneLand’s larger financial flops: Friar Tuck, Quality Inn, Shady Harbor Marina, Irving Elementary School makeover, Union Mills Lofts, Catskill Creek condominiums…. 

HAPPY NEW$

GreeneLand’s current fiscal health, says County Treasurer Peter Markou in his annual report, is sound.  For 2010, while revenues declined, so did expenses.  The debt burden did not get heavier.   

Also in good fiscal health, according to another treasurer, is the GreeneLand’s Historical Society.  Much of that condition, said David Dorpfeld at the Society’s annual meeting last Sunday, is due to the “very generous” bequest of IBM stock made by the late stalwart member, Olga Santora.

 BUYER BEWARE 

Those gasoline prices that are posted outside stations may apply only to payments in cash.  Credit card purchases may cost more.  The difference is posted on the pump itself, but it must be noticed there and then acted upon BEFORE refueling. 

      The difference at a Catskill Getty station recently (5/16) was seven cents per gallon. 

 

 

 

Leading Ladies

  In higher education, American women now out-number men.  And for the first time, according to U.S. Census figures, the ladies’ numerical superiority applies to Masters and higher degrees as well as to Bachelor (!) degrees. 

   That situation is eminently consistent with what has been reported persistently about performance at the secondary school level.  Girls evidently rule.  Thus, at Catskill High School in the last term, 16 seniors achieved High Honors; 10 were female.  At Hunter-Tannersville High School, one boy scored high honors, along with 12 girls (and congratulations to Nicholas Tripsas). 

    Those GreeneLand results conform to what is reported elsewhere in the mid-Hudson region as well as the nation.  According to figures supplied by school administrators and reported in newspapers, girls out-numbered boys in the ranks of High Honors achievers at Rondout Valley High School by a score of 18 to 10.  At Red Hook High, the female edge  was 46 to 25.  At Kingston High, 27 girls achieving High Honors in grade 12 were joined by 14 boys.  At little Germantown High, girls who reached the top bracket of achievers in the 12^th grade out-numbered boys by 6 to 3. 

     Such figures shape eligibility for admission to college and, particularly, for admission to the more selective colleges.   

     They also shape rates of employment.  According to U.S. Labor Department figures, as reported in the Wall Street Journal, the unemployment rate among men who are classified as members of the work force is currently 9.4 per cent, down from 10.5% in 2010.  For women the figures are 8.4% and 8.6%. 

SCHOLARSHIP NOTE.  The Kiwanis Club of Catskill annually offers two college stipends of $500 to GreeneLand high school seniors.  Selection is related to service as well as scholarship. Applications from Cairo-Durham High School numbered zero.  For the second year.  

PAWED.  According to regular news media reports, on April 14^th a GreeneLand lady disturbed a black bear that was sifting through garbage outside her house Round Top.  The bear knocked Joy Bayer-Mozynski down, held her down with one paw while finishing its repast with the other, then departed in peace.  Authorities subsequently set a trap for the bear, but soon removed it.  People who live along traditional bear trails, especially in during the weeks when ursine hibernating has just ended, are warned to keep garbage cans indoors, to forego bird-feeders, and to feed pets inside.

SEX, FAITH, TAXES.  What is a religion?  GreeneLand Judge George Pulver Jr, sitting as a State Supreme Court judge, will soon take on the task of ruling on that question.  The need for a ruling derives from a dispute about the status, for property tax purposes, of a property in Palenville.  That property, once known as the Central Hotel, now is depicted by its primary occupant, Cathryn Platine, as the Phrygianum of the Maetreum of Cybele and “center of the world wide Cybeline revival,” or worship of a particular ancient pagan goddess.  Ms Platine’s claim for ecclesiastical exemption from taxes levied on her Phyrigianum has been rejected by Catskill’s town council.  Judge Pulver has ruled that the rejection was poorly rationalized.  He is calling for a more comprehensive treatment of qualifications for exemption.

   (Ms Platine’s movement—see www.gallae.com -- differs substantially from a London-based “world wide” Cybeline revival. Whereas Palenville’s pagans offer shelter and durable fellowship (so to speak) chiefly to persons who have achieved female status by means of surgery, the alternative Cybelians are militant gynocrats.  They cohabit with men on the condition that their partners accept a position of absolute toilet-like subservience.  The prescribed position is dramatized by means of a most extraordinary marriage ceremony.  www.cybelians.com )

SEPARATING: law partners Eugenia Brennan-Heslin and Edward Kaplan, based in Hunter.  Scheduled for a May 27 hearing before Supreme Court Judge Roger McDonough is Ms Brennan-Heslin’s contention that “it is not reasonably practicable to carry on the business…since it is no longer carrying on the purpose for which it was formed and has become dysfunctional….”  She asks that a receiver be appointed to make an accounting of the partnership’s assets and liabilities and to distribute them.  In addition to practicing law, Ms Brennan-Heslin stood for election, back in 2005, on the Democratic and Working Families party lines, as county judge.   She currently works for the State of New York. 

“BUY 1, GET 1 HALF OFF!”

     --Kohl’s advertisement for “perfect bra.”

AS FOR THE MEN, GreeneLand is now home for Major League Baseball’s official Historian.  John Thorn, a Catskill resident since last October, was appointed to the office (vacant since 2008) by Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig.  Mr Thorn’s latest book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, pushes the true history of the sport far back beyond its reputed origin at the hands of Abner Doubleday.  (Could it be that local Little League organizers need a suitable season-ending speaker?). 

MOREOVER, GreeneLand is home, so to speak, for a man who has chosen to waive his right to a service that would cost the taxpayers about $800,000. According to an Associated Press story (Daily Mail; Daily Freeman, 4/27), Kenneth Pike, who is serving a long sentence in Coxsackie Correctional Facility for raping a 12-year-old relative, decided to forego getting a heart transplant at public expense, even though relevant laws, plus expert medical diagnosis, make him eligible.  The 55-year old inmate already has undergone, at public expense, triple bypass heart surgery and the insertion of a pacemaker. 
AND for a forthcoming division meeting of Kiwanis Club members, one of the dinner entree choices is  “Chicken Franchise.”   

REMINDER REMINDER REMINDER:  Tuesday (5/17) is school board and school budget election day. 

Greene's Greene

 In his new 900-age biography of George Washington, Ron Chernow describes another Revolutionary general, whose name adorns this county (and a dozen more around the United States) in these terms:       

Nathaniel Greene of Rhode Island was one of the first brigadier generals picked by Congress; having turned thirty-three that summer, he was the youngest general in the Continental Army.  Tall and solidly built with striking blue eyes, full lips, and a long straight nose, Greene had been reared in a pious Quaker household by a prosperous father who owned an iron forge, a sawmill and other businesses.   Discouraged from reading anything except the Bible, he had received little school and missed a college education as much as Washington.  “I lament the want of a liberal education,” he once wrote.  “I feel the mist [of] ignorance to surround me.”  To compensate for this failing he became adept at self-improvement and devoured authors both ancient and modern….

     After his father died in 1770, Greene inherited his business but was shadowed by mishaps.  Two years later one of the forges burned, and the following year he was banned from Quaker meetings, possibly because he patronized alehouses.  In 1774 Greene married the exceptionally pretty Catharine ‘Caty’ Littlefield, who was a dozen years younger and a preeminent belle of the Revolutionary era.  As relations with Great Britain soured that year, Greene struggled to become that walking contradiction, ‘a fighting Quaker,’ poring over military histories purchased in Henry Knox’s Boston bookstore.  At that point his knowledge of war derived entirely from reading.  Greene was an improbable candidate for military honors: handicapped by asthma, he walked with a limp, possibly from an early accident.  When he joined his Rhode Island militia, he was heartbroken to be rejected as an officer because his men thought his limp detracted from their military appearance….

    Nevertheless, within year, by dint of dawn-to-dusk work habits, Greene emerged as general of the Rhode Is;and Army of Observation, leading to his promotion by the Continental Congress.  Washington must have felt an instinctive sympathy for this young man restrained by handicaps and with a pretty and pregnant wife.  He also would have admired what Greene had done with the Rhode Island troops in Cambridge [MA.]—they lived in “proper tents…and looked like the regular camp of the enemy,” according to the Reverend William Emerson.

     Nathaniel Greene had other qualities that recommended him to the commander in chief.  Like Washington, he despised profanity, gambling, and excessive drinking among his men.  Like Washington, he was temperamental, hypersensitive to criticism, and chary of his reputation; and he craved recognition.  As he slept in dusty blankets, tormented by asthma throughout the war, he had a plucky dedication to his work and proved a battlefield general firmly in the Washington mold, exposing himself fearlessly to enemy fire.  Years later Washington described Greene as “a man of abilities, bravery and coolness.  He has a comprehensive knowledge of our affairs and is a man of fortitude and resources.”  Henry Knox paid tribute to his friend by saying that he “came to us the rawest, the most untutored being I ever met with” but within a year “was equal in military knowledge to any general officer in the army and even superior to most of them.”  This tactful man, with his tremendous political intuitions, wound up as George Washington’s favorite general.  When Washington was later asked who should replace him in case of an accident, he replied unhesitatingly, “General Greene.” 

  --Washington. A Life.  NY: Penguin Press, 2010, p. 202.

Star Turns

  Among Young Global Leaders newly crowned by the eminent World Economic Forum’s selectors is a new GreeneLander: Asli Karahan-Ay. YGL designation, according to a Forum release, goes to “outstanding young leaders from around the world for their professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world.” 

  Honorees emerge from a rigorous screening of thousands of candidates who are under 40 years of age and come from the ranks of business, government, foundations, communications media and social entrepreneurship.  Included with Ms Karahan-Ay in the North American contingent of honorees are a novelist (Dave Eggers), a mayor (of Calgary), a governor (Nikki Haley of South Carolina), a news broadcaster (Dana Perino, former press secretary for President George W. Bush), a Gates Foundation executive, a politician who has turned to business (Harold Ford Jr.), and leaders of several go-ahead enterprises. Ms Karahan-Ay was chosen in deference to her work at the global bank, UBS, most recently as executive director of the office of the chief executive officer, and previously as director of the investment bank division.  And she won that distinction shortly after performing another feat: giving birth to her second son, Adrian Aslan Ay.

     Ms. Karahan-Ay and her husband, Evren Ay, recently bought a GreeneLand estate whose main house dates from 1754.  

THESPIAN WATCH

     *”Sparrow Lane” is the title of a short movie to be shot, all being well, during April 18-24 in Catskill.  According to director Patricia Gillespie, it will be a “true fable” of a young man who experiences a “crisis of honor.”  Desperate for money to stave off foreclosure on his home in up-state New York, and to care for the pregnant widow of his lately deceased older brother, he sees no solution other than working as a well paid strike-breaking scab.  Some footage will be shot in the Cus D'Amato gymnasium, with local young boxers working under trainer Ernest Westbrooke.  Main location of the action would be on Water Street, between Factory and Bridge.  The crew of 15, and the acting cast of 10, would come up from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.  There may be openings for an extra or two, including a uniformed Catskill cop.  (Not quite on the same scale as “War of the Worlds.”).  Queries: yellowbellyfilms@gmail.com

*Casey Biggs has been busy on both coasts.  Out in Hollywood, he played the part of the president of Wells Fargo Bank in the forthcoming movie “Too Big to Fail,” and he taped a choice role in an episode of the television series “The Good Wife.”  Moving up the California coast, he spent quality time sampling the cookery, as well as the charms, of spouse Brigit (Roadfoodie) Binns in the zinfandel-growing region around Paso Robles, where he also taped a trio of commercials for a California zinfandel-growing region.  (The first one is delightful: http://www.youtube.com/wach?v=XVaNxB5TN2M&feature=youtube_gdata_player).  Then too there was a weekend in San Antonio, where he gave the keynote speech at the remembrance of the 175^th anniversary of the Battle of The Alamo.  (He played the fort’s commander, Col. William Bliss, in the IMAX movie re-enactment of that ordeal).  Meanwhile, in Manhattan he has been teaching New School of Drama classes, including performances of a play that he conceived and directed: a blending Anton Chekhov takes, in "Uncle Vanya," "Three Sisters," "The Cherry Orchard" and "The Seagull," on the themes of love, lost and leaving. Next year, he confects Shakespeare’s Henry plays) 

*Warner Shook too has been out west, away from his Catskill abode, in Los Angeles directing the Irish-flavored play written by Colin McPherson, “The Weir.”   Now he is in Seattle, his old theatrical/dramaturgical stomping ground, directing a fresh production of “The Prisoner of Second Avenue." 

*Joseph Capone is here at home, writing a play about Sybil Ludington, who is celebrated in statues and memorial postage stamps as the female Paul Revere.  In 1777, when she had just turned 16 years old, Sybil made a 40-mile circuit (twice as long as  Revere’s), in darkness, in the rain, through Putnam and Dutchess counties, spreading the word that the Redcoats were coming.  Four hundred militiamen responded to the call to muster in what is now Kent NY, under the command of Sybil’s father, Col. Henry Ludington.  The call-up came too late to prevent the sacking of Danbury CT but it brought vital Revolutionary force to the Battle of Ridgefield soon afterward.  Sybil subsequently was married to a lawyer named Edmond Ogden and they lived for some 12 years on Main Street, Catskill.

*Robert Lupone of Coxsackie will be retiring at the end of the current academic year as director of the Master of Fine Arts program at New York’s New School of Drama.  He will continue to spend time in New York, as artistic director of the MCC theatre company, which stages three new plays per year.

     *Frank Cuthbert returned to GreeneLand just in time for last Saturday’s Beaux Arts Ball at Hunter Mountain, after a Winter retreat in Asheville NC working on the libretto of a musical for which he has written music and the lyrics….

     *”Oliver” will be performed at Cairo-Durham High School this weekend.  Saturday (4/8) and Sunday at 2pm and 7pm, Sunday at 2pm.   239-6922.

     *Mozart pieces for woodwinds will be played by a Bard College ensemble on Sunday from 2pm at Beattie-Powers House in Catskill.

      *Alternatively, a seeker after novel experiences could devote this weekend to apprehending “The Energy of Money.”  In Acra, at the Peace Village Learning & Retreat Center, participants will explore “inner dynamics of wanting, hoarding, receiving, donating, and generating prosperity.”  www.peace-village.org589-5000.

DESIGNING

 While redecorating the home of Jennifer Aniston out in California, Stephen Shadley finds time to supervise reconstruction here of his Potic Mountain castle.  That historic edifice was built in 1913 for Winifred Grier, daughter of a Canadian timber baron. Its designer, Wilfred Buckland, was primarily a theatrical scene designer whose career took him from David Belasco productions on the Broadway stage to silent film epics in Hollywood.  As for the castle, Winifred Grier sold it when she moved to England as bride of Ion [sic] Hamilton Benn, baronet and Member of Parliament.  The place was last occupied back in 1976.  It was heavily damaged by arson in 1977, during winter when fire trucks could scarcely reach it. It is now receiving the careful attention that Mr Shadley has given to dwellings of luminaries such as Diane Keaton and Woody Allen. 

Bad News: Pushy Personation

 Another choice example of journalistic Personation (as discussed in Seeing Greene’s Feb. 18 installment) has turned up.  This one is noteworthy on account of its psycho-political use.

BERLIN (AP)—Germany is determined to show the world how abandoning nuclear energy can be done. 

    The world’s fourth largest economy stands alone among leading industrialized nations in its decisions to stop using nuclear energy because of its inherent risks.  It is betting billions on expanding the use of renewable energy to meet power demands instead. 

   The transition was supposed to happen slowly over the next 25 years, but is now being accelerated in the wake of Japan’s …nuclear plant disaster….

    Berlin’s decision to take seven of its 17 reactors offline for three months for new safety checks has provided a glimpse into how Germany might wean itself from getting nearly a quarter of its power from atomic energy to none.

The author of that piece of news discourse endows a nation-state (plus its capital) with a mind, (a determination, a decision) plus a capacity to wean itself and to lay a bet.  Joined to that metaphysically bold bit of rhetorical Personation is a flight of Presumptuousness, whereby the author pretends to disclose, and thereby pretends to be able to detect, mental states (of, in this case, a nation, which also is an economy). 

     Moreover, on this occasion the author wields Personation and Presumptuousness on behalf of advocacy.  By aggrandizing the breadth of an attitude, (s)he glorifies it.  In doing so, (s)he employs a variant on what rhetoricians call The Bandwagon Device, or promoting an attitude by endowing it with wide popularity.

     The case may also be noteworthy on account of other elements of the article. Apropos of that “decision to stop using nuclear energy,” the author refers to a decision made by a previous “center-left government” to phase out nuclear power use by the year 2021.  The present German government “amended” that decision “to extend the plants’ lifetime by an average of 12 years.”  The amendment then “was put on hold after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami compromised nuclear power plants in Japan.”  So: where is that determination by “Germany” to demonstrate “how abandoning nuclear energy can be done”? 

  

ANOTHER MATTER OF PROPRIETY

     A reader who chooses to be anonymous professes to “find it disrespectful” that in Seeing Greene (March 4th) we “published the name of the bridge jumper.”  “NO OTHER publication published his name within an article about the bridge.   Yes, there was an obituary published, but it of course did not mention he was the jumper.”

     Mr or Ms Anonymous is factually correct.  We alone identified the suicide as Christopher Hare.  Obituaries devoted to Mr Hare were published shortly after the fatal jump but (like most locally published obituaries) did not name the cause of death.

     Our practice in this case was consistent with common practice.  News stories about suicides generally do identify the principals.  Sometimes identification is delayed, as when authorities withhold the information pending notification of next of kin. Sometimes identification does not occur.  Sometimes identification does not occur  because local journalists do not bother to follow up (or “chase the story,” in journo parlance).  

     In the meantime, Anonymous offers an instructive case of spurious humility. (S)he voices a personal attitude (“I find it disrespectful…”) in a way that suggests that it is the Correct attitude.  And (s)he skips the business of indicating how, and to whom, publishing a suicide’s name is disrespectful.

    (BTW:  Anonymous also says that we “also published wrong information as [the jumper] DID NOT DRIVE a vehicle to the bridge. Please remove WRONG information.”)

WRONG-HEADEDNESS 
     The headline “U.S., Allies Attack Libya” (Daily Freeman, 3/20/11) differs from  what has been reported elsewhere in the news media, and it falsifies the text of the story that it introduces.  The headline makes Libya the target of American and allied attack.  Other contemporary news sources depicted the attackers' target not as Libya but as pro-government or pro-Gadhafi Libyan forces that are attacking anti-government Libyan forces.  And that version of events is voiced in the text of the Associated Press story that appeared under that headline:

     The U.S. and European nations pounded Moammar Gadhafi’s forces and air defenses with cruise missiles and airstrikes on Saturday, launching the broadest international military effort since the Iraq war in support of an uprising that had seemed on the verge of defeat.

The misleading headline in this case may be a bit less interesting, to be sure, than these cases:

 Astronaut Welcomes Baby From Space

Craigslist Killing 
Suspects in Tacoma Court

Man Seeking Help for Dog

Charged with DWI

            TESTS SHOW MAN NOT MISSING BOY

TV Pilots Shot in R.I. Await Word of Fate

 

Bad News: the Framing Game

Gen. David Petraeus, the top US commander in Kabul, said yesterday that continued progress in Afghanistan is critical to preventing the situation in neighboring Pakistan from deteriorating further – and to persuading Islamabad to mount a more...

Councilman Ruben W. Wills of Queens acknowledged on Sunday that he had failed to resolve an outstanding arrest warrant related to a business dispute from more than a decade ago.

ALBANY -- Detective James Miller, the city police department spokesman charged with driving while intoxicated during a Friday night traffic stop, released a statement as he prepared for arraignment Monday morning.

KINGSTON – The chairwoman of the Ulster County Republican Committee said the county should give serious consideration to selling the Golden Hill Health Care Center.

Those sentences, each the opening of a news story (New York Times, TimesUnion, DailyFreeman; 3/21/11), illustrate a dual communicative operation. Each one combines brief description of an event with a hint about newsworthiness. The cited event in each case is a speech act. The hint about newsworthiness comes by way of what the reporter picks to say about the cited speaker’s identity. The reporter chooses to mention that the person whose words are being reported is a general (and more), a borough councilman, a detective and police department spokesman, or a Republican county chairwoman. By singling out that aspect of identity, and by giving it pride of place, the reporter invites respondents to infer that the most important thing about the news subject’s act, for the present situation, is his or her role.

As regular recipients of news, we recognize this mode of suggestion. We respond to hints that serve our felt need to grasp the meaning, the implications as well as the immediate nature, of a cited event. We credit the sender with attempting to render that service with verbal economy. To that end, the sender employs a device that can be called the First As Foremost nudge. It prompts receivers to construe the first thing that is said about the identity of a news subject as, circumstantially, the most important thing.

In the cases cited, drawing the invited inference seems altogether safe. The reported deeds surely are newsworthy becauseof the named social traits of the speakers: U.S. commander in Kabul, councilman, detective who is facing charges, local Republican chairperson.

In other cases, trust in the First As Foremost clue could be misplaced. The following sentences also opened news stories. Each report, again, recounts an individual’s act or experience.

An 18-year-old Cairo man was charged with possessing marijuana and driving recklessly after leading police on a high-speed chase early Sunday.

A 24-year-old Palenville man has been charged with possession of child pornography, authorities said Thursday.

The 22-year-old Cairo man accused of forcing his way into a Cairo home last year, robbing the residents at gunpoint has pleaded not guilty in Greene County Court.

Joseph Francis “Bubba” Conlin, Jr., 55, of Tampa, Florida, died suddenly on Thursday….

Captain Thomas J. Bradley, 79, of Corwin Place, Lake Katrine, died Saturday…at Ferncliff Nursing Home in Rhinebeck after a long illness.

A 25-year-old Greene County motorcyclist was killed in an accident Saturday morning, according to the Greene County Sheriff's Office.A 66-year-old Hunter man has died after being struck in the chest by a tree he had cut down on his property.

Salvatore Taccetta, 49, of Athens, was arrested Sunday at 3:50a.m. by state police at Catskill and charged with two counts of misdemeanor drunken driving and the infractions of leaving the scene of a property damage accident and unsafe lane change.

Zachary S. Coons, 25, of Saugerties, was arrested Sunday at 4:45 a.m. by state police at Coxsackie and charged with two counts of misdemeanor drunk driving.

Each of those sentences conveys, by means of the First As Foremost nudge, a suggestion about causation. Each one conveys the same explanatory suggestion. Each one invites recipients to believe that with regard to the deed or the experience of the person mentioned, great importance attaches, surpassing relevance pertains, to years of age. Each one can be seen as equivalent to reporting that

Gen. David Petraeus, 58, said yesterday that continued progress in Afghanistan is critical to preventing the situation in neighboring Pakistan from deteriorating further....

Such sentences can be seen as acts of devotion to a little-known, quaint, scientistic doctrine: Ageism. To alert receivers, however, they convey an additional message. They signal the presence in mainstream news organs of thoughtless, habit-bound, misleading verbiage. They call attention, more particularly, to blind habit as a shaper of verbiage about the identities of news-makers.

The need for sensitivity to that aspect of news discourse can be demonstrated by reference to opening sentences such as these:

Democrat Jim Van Slyke has announced his candidacy for a third term as NewBaltimore’s representative to the Greene County Legislature at his family’s farm.

Republican Elsie Allan, citing her concern and love for her community, has announced that she will seek the Town of Durham seat on the Greene County legislature this fall.

Democratic Greene County Legislator Forest Cotten has kicked off his re-electioncampaign at Union Mills Gallery, 361 Main St., Catskill.

Those sentences too perform a dual communicative operation. They combine bits of information about candidacies for elective office with hints about what is at stake. In the latter respect they deliver a politically sensitive suggestion. By means of the First As Foremost device, they invite recipients to adopt a particular way of seeing the named candidates. Each one suggests that the foremost fact about the named candidate, the fact that is topically most salient for receivers of the news, is party affiliation. And cumulatively, those sentences suggest that the foremost fact about candidates generally, the fact that we most urgently need to know, is party affiliation.

Accepting that suggestion can be convenient. As conscientious prospective voters, we might feel obliged to learn about each candidate’s family, career, character, principles, policy stands, and non-party as well as party affiliation. If we take at face value the suggested primacy of party affiliation, we gain relief from a daunting task of information-gathering. Thus, accepting that suggestion—seeing it as a trustworthy application of the First As Foremost nudge--can be more convenient than seeing it as a thoughtless, habit-born manifestation of hack journalism.

Local Politics Notes

 Tuesday’s village elections in GreeneLand, and elsewhere, were noteworthy for the absence of contests, and of voters. Tannersville alone offered a choice between candidates.  That came about after a trio of newcomers pulled a surprise on the incumbent mayor and two trustees, by bringing a few friends to the local Democratic caucus and winning that party’s nominations.  Mayor Lee McGunnigle and one of the trustees, Gregory Landers, responded by rounding up signatures in support of putting them on the ballot as Watchful Eye Party candidates.  Mr McGunnigle then out-polled Jason Dugo in the mayoral race, 109-58 (according to The Daily Mail), while Mr Landers led the trustee candidates, with newcomer Christopher Hack winning the second board seat and Jeremiah Dixon finishing out of the running. 

In Catskill’s election, trustee Joseph Kozloski, a Democrat who was cross-endorsed by the Republican committee, won re-election without contest, as did village justice William Wooton, an enrolled Republican who was cross-endorsed by the Democratic committee.  Thirty-seven votes were cast.

In Hunter, similarly, mayor William Maley won re-election without contest, receiving 33 of the 36 votes that were cast.

In Coxsackie, 135 voters went through the motions, returning Mayor Mark Evans to office along with trustees (and fellow Republicans) Stephen Hanse and Paul Sutton.

In Athens, Mayor Andrea Smallwood coasted to unchallenged victory along with fellow Democrats Robert June (incumbent trustee) and Anthony Patsky (successor to Tom Sopris, who opted not to run for re-election).  Fifty-two votes, according to The Daily Mail, were cast.

 

ELSEWHERE in the mid-Hudson region (as reported in Daily Freeman and Times Union), contested elections also were the exception rather than the norm.  In Rhinebeck, Red Hook and Tivoli, among other Dutchess County villages, candidates for local office (mayor, trustee, and/or judge) gained office without opposition. To the south of us, in Saugerties, the incumbent mayor won re-election without opposition, while four candidates vied for three village trustee offices.  Over in Tivoli, again, the ballot paper offered voters one candidate for mayor and one each for two board seats. To the north, similarly, elections without choices between candidates occurred in Ballston Spa, Round Lake, Altamon, Voorheesville, Castleton East, Schaghticoke, Glens Falls….

CONSEQUENCES?  The absence of contests in Athens may be especially remarkable, given a recent history of inter-party and inter-personal clashes.  It evidently prompted a local resident to scold local Republicans for “not running any candidates to oppose the incumbent positions that are up for re-election” and to dilate broadly on the functions of electoral contestation.  “When both parties run candidates for a common position,” said this citizen (Daily Mail, 3/4/11, verbatim), “the voters can expresses his or her feelings by voting for the candidate of their choice, and the one that will represent them the best.” “Politicians may not always do what ever voters feels is in their best interest, this is why the voter should always have a choice of the candidates running that office.  This is also that voters way to keep the incumbent candidates in check which will be evident by the ratio between votes cast for each individual.”  The author did not say why he did not file his own candidacy.  Neither did he address the option of writing in a candidate’s name.

ANOMALY FILE.  Demonstrated in those village “races” was a quaint feature of election law in this State.  It is the requirement that in order to appear on the ballot, every candidate must pretend to be the nominee of a political party.  On the ballot, each candidate’s name appears not only in a column devoted to aspirants for a given office, but also on a horizontal party line.  Thus, in order to appear on the ballot, a would-be candidate (or his friends) must round up voters’ signatures on supportive petitions AND those petitions must brand her as prospective nominee of a supposed local aggregation of Democratic, Republican, Conservative, Working Families or other co-partisans.  Then, when several kinds of offices are to be filled (Governor, Treasurer, Judge, Assemblyman, Highway Superintendent, Coroner…), the ballot provides a column for each office (read down for each gubernatorial candidate) and a line (read across) for all Democratic candidates, another line for Republican candidates, and so on.  From this there is no escape.

     Some people, however, are unable or unwilling to run for office wearing the familiar party brands, Democratic and Republican.  In more than a few cases, especially at the local level, candidates want to avoid assumptions and stereotypes that are apt to be triggered in voters’ minds by those labels.  They solve the problem by gathering petitions that make them the nominees of elusive, nominal aggregations.  Thus, last Tuesday elections in mid-Hudson villages brought victories not only for some Democrats and some Republicans, but also for champions of the Vibrant Village, Citizens, NOP, Tivoli First, Rhinebeck First, Justice, New Vision, Home and Watchful Eye parties.The results, with those affiliations cited, were duly reported in the Press.  Readers were invited accordingly to impute meaning—ideological significance? policy orientations?—to those labels.

      Such misdirection can easily be forestalled.  The method consists simply of  eliminating party designations from the ballots.  

                 

NEW FACE.  The seat in GreeneLand’s legislature that was vacated by the resignation in January of Durham representative Sean Frey has finally been filled. The new member is Patricia Handel, who operates, along with husband Roy, the Blackthorne Resort.  Ms Handel was nominated (after a lengthy delay) by members of the Republican Party committee of District 9, and then appointed by vote of the legislators.  In the best of worlds, the new appointee would have been the joint nominee of District 9 Democrats as well as Republicans. The incumbent legislators could have insisted on that process of selection, in light of the facts that Mr Frey was elected as a Democrat while enrolled Republicans are numerically preponderant in the district.  In that case, the appointment could not have been treated so readily, so reductively, as another stage of party-political warfare.  That treatment was exemplified in the Daily Mail story (Colin DeVries; 3/17/11) holding that Ms Handel’s selection “furthers the power of the county legislature’s Republican majority, which now has nine seats over the Democrats’ five.”

Ladies First

ELEVATED to the Presidency of the Catskill Golf (& Country) Club for the year 2011 is--gulp, ahem, gasp, wheeze--a woman. Donna Meo is first of her gender, in the course of the club’s 83-year history, to occupy the presidential suite. (Jan Vincent was a board member and club secretary for around 20 years). The Windham Golf Club, now 84 years of age, has never had a female president.

RETIRING soon, as full-time executive director of the the Heart of Catskill Association (qua Catskill Chamber of Commerce), after 12 years on the job (following six as a founding volunteer), is Linda Overbaugh. But she may not withdraw altogether from promotional work.

HONORED as businesswoman of the year, by HOCA at the recent Mardi Gras party: Dr Christine Scrodamus, optometrist, who in 2006 took over Dr Damon Pouyat’s Main Street, Catskill, optometry practice, and in 2010 bought the building.
      Businessman of the year title was bestowed upon Joe Anese, proprietor of The Wine Cellar (which is not a cellar and is more than a wine shop) which he acquired from Oreste Vincent back in 1998 after working there for two years (and after a six-year stint with the band “Equinox”).
      In addition, Hillcrest Press was hailed as Business of the Year, with the award being collected by proprietors Christie and Nathan French, who had acquired by business years ago from her parents, Carol and Robert Goodling.

SELECTED for special photographic attention, during Women’s History Month, for a presentation at the Athens Cultural Center this Wednesday (3/16): clandestine pictures taken by Miroslav Tichy, using cameras improvised from junk, of women in Communist-era Czechoslovakia. The evening’s Greene County Camera Club program will include a discussion, led by Palenville’s Jill Skupin Burkholder, of “Finding Your Artistic Style.” www.gccameraclub.com.

POTENT PAUL. After starting at the Oriental Guide level 12 years ago, and climbing up the ranks through High Priest & Prophet, Assistant Rabban, and Chief Rabban, GreeneLand’s Paul Rosenblatt has achieved the eminence, in the seven-county Cyprus Shrine order, of Illustrious Potentate. Sir Paul is the 135-year-old Cyprus Shrine’s first GreeneLand Potentate since 1994, when George J. Wilk of Cairo held the office (and the robes). At the order’s Temple in Glenmont last Saturday, with the Lady Eileen at his side, the new leader welcomed Nobles and their ladies to the Potentate’s Ball. www.cyprus5.org.

PAY CAPS. Governor Andrew Cuomo has invited the State legislature to support the imposition of limits on the salaries of public school superintendents. The caps would vary according to district pupil populations. For districts whose populations are in the 251-750 range, the limit would be $135,000 per year. The caps would rise by increments of $10,000 for superintendents in districts with 751-1500, 1501-3000, 3001-6500, and more than 6501 enrolled students. As it happens, salaries of GreeneLand’s superintendents, with a minor exception, already come in under those proposed limits. Thus, Catskill Central School District superintendent Kathleen Farrell draws a salary, in a district with 1775 students, of just under $152,000. Sally Sharkey’s pay of $123,094 as Cairo-Durham’s superintendent puts her under the $145,000 ‘Cuomo cap’ of $145,00 for a 1467-pupil district, and Hunter-Tannersville’s Patrick Darfler-Sweeney’s $122,548 salary in a district with 423 students puts him under the $135,000 gap. In the Greenville district, with 1250 students, the superintendent’s reported salary was under the Cuomo cap at $140,057. In the Windham-Ashland-Jewett district (401 students), superintendent John Wiktoro’s salary at last report was $131,457. In the case of Coxsackie-Athens, however, superintendent Earle Gregory was being paid a salary last year that put him $953 above the Cuomo-proposed cap of $155,000. But then Dr Gregory retired, and interim superintendent’s Annemarie Barkman’s salary is under the Cuomo cap.

CONTRAST. Those figures mark a contrast with salary levels of superintendents in many neighboring school districts. To the south of us, as reported in The Daily Freeman (Kyle Wind), salaries ABOVE the Cuomo caps are more common than salaries below. In the Kingston district, with more than 6501 students, the proposed cap would be $175,000 but the incumbent superintendent, Gerard Gretzinger, is currently paid $193,401.

EXTRAS. Salary figures don’t tell the whole pay story for school superintendents (or private corporation executives or wage-earners or...). The State Education Department compiles remuneration figures that cover not only salaries but also “benefits” and “other.” The latter sums can be substantial. Thus, Superintendent Gretzinger is counted as receiving $50,780 in benefits plus $9762. And in Coxsackie-Athens, Dr Gregory was scored as the recipient of $43,147 in extras compensation in the year of his retirement. That was not the GreeneLand record, however. Surprisingly enough, the biggest package of extras went to the superintendent in the modest-sized Windham-Ashland-Jewett district: $52.468.

BANK SHOT. Ulster Savings Bank, which has a GreeneLand branch in Windham, is in more trouble. It is stuck with GreeneLand’s defunct Friar Tuck resort, into which it had sunk some $3.8 million in the way of loans. And its president, according to Daily Freeman reporter Paul Kirby, “is on leave of absence during what is being described as a ‘leadership transition’.” It is a prolonged transition. Michael Shaughnessy, as executive vice president, has been running the place for months. Now he is the bank’s interim president and chief executive officer. The titular president, Marjorie Rovereto, started working for the bank in 1963, moved up the ladder, and became president and CEO abruptly in 2006, after Clifford Miller resigned in the wake of an arrest for allegedly soliciting sex from a policewoman who was posing as a prostitute.

Girdling the Greenes

RESCUE.  A boat operator and a sheriff’s deputy teamed up last night to rescue a motorist whose Jeep Cherokee had plunged into the river.  They pulled Charles Sidwell from his submerged vehicle and summoned transportation to the hospital, where Sidwell was treated and released.  Although he blamed the mishap on brake failure that caused the Jeep to became airborne, Sidwell was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol, disobeying a traffic signal, and illegally transporting alcohol. 
      

FACTORY.  Construction of an ammonium nitrate production plant for Greene County moved a step closer to reality on Tuesday when county legislators voted to rezone 400 acres to house the facility. The plant would be operated by Austin Power Company of Ohio, a manufacturer of explosives.  Some prospective neighbors of the plant complained about the deal, which was orchestrated by the county’s economic development agency.  
      

OFFENDER.  A former high school teacher who had been convicted of rape and sodomy, but was allowed to go free on probation as requested by her victim, may go to prison after all.  According to Greene County’s district attorney, Alison Peck violated twice a condition of her probation, requiring that as a registered sex offender she give notice of changes of residence.  Ms Peck’s conviction arose from activities with a 16-year-old lad with whom she performed, as a keyboard player, in a rock band. 
    

IMPERSONATOR. A man who is disguised as a police officer could be targeting Greene County women.  The sheriff issued a warning last Monday, saying that a man driving a car with a blue flashing light on the roof stopped a young woman motorist, made her get out of her car, patted her down, and then, saying he was going to look up her criminal record, went back to his car and drove away. 
                      

KIDNAPPER?   A man who is accused of abducting a three-year-old boy and fleeing to California has been extradited back to Greene County.  Bernard Rheaves, 27, is now in jail and facing a child abduction charge, as well as an earlier count of check-kiting.  According to the county sheriff’s office, Rheaves decamped with the boy, who is his son, after getting into a custody quarrel with the boy’s mother. 

PIMP?  A local fourth grade teacher (currently on leave) was booked into Greene County jail last week on charges of promoting prostitution.  The arrest of Laura A. Fiedler, 35, according to police reports, resulted fro an undercover investigation of activities at a local hotel.

DECEPTION.  The foregoing items demonstrate a rhetorical trick: inviting a false inference by not explicitly forestalling it, when circumstances make it likely that respondents will otherwise draw it.  The false inference is that the cited Greene County events occurred in Greene County, NEW YORK.   Actually, they occurred, or were reported to have occurred, in the Greene counties of Ohio, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Illinois.   Of course the author of those items did not say that the events occurred in New York’s GreeneLand.  But the scoundrel set up the deception-by-omission by means of a history of bloggery devoted to matters in that Greene County. 

 So now for some genuinely local items:

SUICIDE.  Just before noon last Thursday (2/24), Christopher Hare drove up from his home in Germantown, parked near the eastern approach to the Rip Van Winkle bridge, walked west onto the bridge carrying a metal briefcase, walked past the sign saying “When it seems like there is no hope, there is help,” and jumped to his death on the ice below.  Mr Hare, 31, a native of Virginia, was an electrician’s apprentice and reportedly had a history of mental illness.   Authorities closed bridge traffic both ways for nearly two hours, until they determined that the metal briefcase was not explosive.

RAPE?  Following an incident in the Jefferson Heights section of Catskill on February 24, sheriff’s deputies arrested Louis Sanchez, 40, of Saugerties on charges of rape and of endangering the welfare of a child.  The latter charge derives from suspicion that Sanchez committed the rape in front of the victim’s two-year-old.

FUEL GOUGE?   The price of regular gasoline in GreeneLand has soared past the $3.60-per-gallon mark.  At Citgo today, $3.66; Getty, $3.68; Stewart Shops in Athens, $3.65. By way of contrast, the nation-wide average was $3.45.  And in other Greene Counties (including Dodge’s Chicken Store in Paragould, Arkansas), lowest local prices for regular fuel ranged from $3.24 up to $3.47.

ASSAULT? Martin Morales, 21, of Cairo has been charged with attempting to murder his former girlfriend.   According to police reports, as covered in local news media, Morales traveled to Winooski, Vermont, donned a black ski mask, broke into an apartment there, and beat and stabbed Mary Rowlands.  She survived and told police that he might have fled to hangouts in Hudson.  After a search of designated places there, he was found and clapped in Columbia County jail.

LAUNCH.  Our community, volunteer-run radio station is now on the air.  The official launch of WGXC (signifying Greene and Columbia counties) last Saturday (2/26) at Catskill’s Community Center, drew an immense crowd of well-wishers.  Scores of people packed the broadcasting room, providing a live audience for home-grown musicians and composers, program hosts, announcers, notables.  Upstairs, multitudes of children and adults partook of the day’s live entertainment and home-made refreshments.  The opening festivities, in short, surpassed all expectations.  What went out on the air, however, was a different matter.  The station’s signal did not go out loud and clear. Listeners were assailed by squawks and squeals and mumbles.  Only half of the station’s  authorized, needed broadcast power was operational.   Since then, the signal has been much improved.  It is at FM90.7.

HIRING.  The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, vaunted birthplace of distinctively American art, is advertising a job opening for a part-time curator.  The appointee would help with the museum’s collection of art and artifacts, with its exhibitions, and with its Fellows program.  She or he would be hired for just 12 hours per week, at a wage that is not specified but would be decidedly modest. 

      So: more than 30 people have applied for the job.  Among the applicants, higher education far past the bachelor level is normal.  Masters and even Doctoral degrees abound, as do publications in professional journals. Every applicant points to at least five years of relevant experience.

     That tells us something about the state of the economy, and about the scramble for survival in the world of art, AND about the prestige that has been earned in the last few years by the Cole House operation

DEAD END.  The Greene County (NY!) government’s web site offers links not only to various departments but also to “News and Press Releases.”  But that link brings up  “Page not found.” 

Jackpots, Crackpots, Empty Pots....

  GreeneLand is the home of a newly minted multimillionaire.  As reported copiously in the news media, Stephen Kirwan of Purling hit the jackpot on a Powerball lottery ticket that he bought in January at the Clothes Pin Laundromat in Catskill Commons.  Beating odds of one chance in 295 million, among buyers in 42 States plus territories and the District of Columbia, he snagged what was billed as the prize of $122 million.  But his actual prize was a smaller sum.  After choosing to collect by way of a lump sum payment rather than installments spread over 29 years, he actually copped a prize of  $61.2 million, or $40.4 million after taxes. 

    His decision in favor of collecting a lump sum makes sense in light of the fact, among others, that Mr Kirwan is 68 years old.  He has retired from two jobs: 20 years as a South Bronx firefighter and then, after moving to Purling with his wife Catherine and two offspring, 25 years up here at the Stiefel Laboratories skin care products plant.

    Joining Mr Kirwan at the award ceremony, at Albany’s Empire Plaza on February 11, was another Powerball winner: Jeff Pintuff of Wilton, in Saratoga County.  The nominal $48.8 million jackpot he won at a Christmas day drawing, thanks to a QuickPick ticket bought on December 23 at a Stewarts Shop, yielded payments of $12.4 million to Mr Pintuff and to his wife, Christine, with taxes reducing those sums to $8.2 million each.

    (Publicity photos showed the winners holding blow-ups of checks in the amounts of $122 million and $48.8 million, but no checks of those amounts were tendered).

    Meanwhile, back at the Clothes Pin Laundry, proprietor Bhasu Patel reports that in the last couple of weeks, sales of lottery tickets have surged.

                 

    Not so lucky in the quest for sudden wealth is Coxsackie resident (so to speak) Ronald Williams. Over the past four years, Mr Williams filed Federal tax refund claims totaling $740 million.  Instead of reaping a fortune from that paper work, he achieved a grand jury indictment on charges of filing false instruments—around eight of them, including one for the sum of $293 million.   As reported in the local press (and picked up by the Associated Press), Mr Williams submitted the claims while residing, in consequence of convictions for possessing stolen property, in Greene Correctional Facility.

    The number, the scale, and the effrontery of those claims may indicate an attachment of the prisoner to the “sovereign citizens” or “redemption” movement.  “Sovereigns” deem themselves free from Federal and State taxes and regulations.  They self-award their own ‘legal’ documents (licenses to drive, hunt, fish, own a car…), file nuisance property liens naming huge figures, occasionally make lethal attacks on law enforcers, and claim to be entitled to huge government-hidden sums that were allocated to their accounts at birth. If Mr Williams is indeed a local “sovereign” he might be one of the fools who have heeded the bloviations of “Dr Sam Kennedy” (a.k.a. Glenn Richard Ungar) of Clifton Park, who does or did have a radio show (Republic Broadcasting) called “Take No Prisoners.” (For more information, check web sites of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League).

    And speaking of money, GreeneLand’s recent cases of double-dipping from the public treasury, when compared with what is emerging down in Kingston, look trivial.  The head of that city’s detective bureau has been charged with grand larceny, to the tune of $9000, and more charges, involving lots more money and perhaps more police officers, seem to be imminent.  Lt. Timothy Matthews is suspected of drawing pay from the city, including overtime, while simultaneously drawing pay from the school district, working as a security guard at special events.  As reported in The Daily Mail, the investigation is spreading so as to cover other police officers who have worked as school security guards (at $24.50 per hour), as well as other officers in Lieutenant Matthews’s police division.  Federal Bureau of Investigation agents reportedly are sifting files relating to the Ulster Region Gang Enforcement Narcotics Team (URGENT).  Lieutenant Matthews reportedly drew pay from the city and the school district from 2007 through 2010 of $707,000 (plus benefits).  Before being placed on unpaid leave, he was due to receive in 2011, as a police lieutenant, $118,000 in salary and benefits.  Apart from overtime.  And outside work.

    Oh, and speaking of money,  State financial aid to GreeneLand (among other counties) is shrinking just as local demands for county services, prompted by hard times, are growing.  Workloads of county employees, including overtime, are up.  Obligatory payments to retirees from public sector jobs continue to grow.  Given likely revenues, at present tax rates, GreeneLand faces an excess of spending over income of $5 million.  To meet anticipated costs, even after strict economies, would require a 7 per cent hike in the local tax levy.  But the State’s new governor, Andrew Cuomo, advocates the imposition on county governments of a 2 per cent limit on tax levy increases.   Such is the picture presented in his annual status report (Feb. 16) by the chairman of the county legislature, Wayne Speenburgh.

                                                     
STRIKEOUT.  The lawsuit brought against the Catskill Central School District by the high school’s former principal, William Ball IV, has been dismissed. Judge Joseph Teresi of State Supreme Court (which is not judicially supreme) ruled that Mr Ball’s termination by the district’s trustees at the end of the 2009-10 school year did not manifest “bad faith and subterfuge.” Mr Ball had contended, through attorney Richard Mott, that the trustees were punishing him for union-like activities as head of the State principals’ association.  Judge Teresi spurned that theory, giving credence instead to the trustees’ economic, budgetary rationale for the termination (which was followed by the appointment of a replacement principal).   Little attention was paid to the abrupt suspension last Spring, and to the earlier staff muttering, that preceded Mr Ball’s termination.

TWOFERS.  Now available are “Greene Cards” entitling bearers to mid-week two-for-one deals at GreeneLand resorts and attractions.  They are free and are valid for Hunter Mountain (zip line as well as ski slopes), Windham Mountain, and—come Spring--nine local golf courses.  www.greenetourism.com/greene-card

GENDER SCORE.  Latest reports from GreeneLand high schools on Honors achievers show boys almost catching up in two cases out of three.  At Catskill HS, the ranks of High Honors-achieving seniors for the second term contained nine boys and ten girls.  At Coxsackie-Athens, the score was ten boys, twelve girls.  But at Cairo-Durham, where 32 seniors scored High Honors in second term, only nine boys made the cut. 

DOG STORY.  A sheriff’s raid on a mobile home in Ashland achieved the rescue on February 8 of 20 Golden Retriever puppies that the town animal control officer, Bruce Feml, described as “walking skeletons.” 

       According to Ron Perez, president of the Columbia-Greene Humane Society, the raid followed a tip from a State police officer who had gone to the mobile home, at 580 Sutton Hollow Road, on an unrelated matter. The animals were taken to the Humane Society shelter in Hudson, given a medical checkup, fed, and made available for adoption.  www.cghs.org.   (518)828-6044. Offers of adoption have poured in, to the point where no more applications are being taken.

       The puppies had been under the care of George Leary and Emmaretta Marks, veteran rock musicians,.  Mr Leary told a News 10 reporter that he feeds his dogs “holistically” with emphasis on “natural foods.”  Mr Perez said the dogs’ mistreatment seemed to be “not malicious,” only “misguided.”          

       Ms Marks was a featured player (as one of The Supremes) in the original cast of the Broadway musical “Hair.”  She has performed with such luminaries as Jim Hendrix, Ike and Tina Turner, Levon Helm, Paul Butterfield, Melba Moore and The Rolling Stones.  She and Mr Leary, a drummer with roots in Albany and Woodstock, have recorded music with Mambo Daddy, Agitated Bovine and other bands.  As Marks & Leary & Friends, they produced an album, “Rockin’, Rhythm & Soul,” that, according to the promotional material, delivered an “urban elite sound…of super soul Woodstock dance music” that “leans you to the groove.”