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Sep 02 Summer SqualorPosted by gcatt | 09/02/08
Well, Labor Day has come to pass. I guess it's time to start cleaning up after the people who come to my neighborhood each summer to sip over-priced wine; drive too fast on both the lake and the roads and then throw their trash and empties out the window. Or...sometimes pause their RV just long enough to make a roadside deposit of the leavings of their vacation.
We hear so much about the value of tourists and the cash they bring with them, but no one talks about the filth and flotsam the unthinking leave behind. Like along the road in front of my house. A roadside inspection in the 1.1 miles from our front door to our lakefront revealed that "Sun Chips" have replaced "Lays" as the chip of choice among the litter set... CATEGORY: Relationships
Aug 13 The Other CNY OlympianPosted by gcatt | 08/13/08
Whoa there......just a minute. All those people getting themselves all overcooked drooling at the thought of Lopez Lomong, the Lost Boy who found a home in Tully, making his Olympic debut this week may have forgotten the Madison County woman making her second swing at the Olympics -- Cazenovia's (more specifically, Fenner's) Beezee Madden.
The winner of a gold medal in the Athens Olympics, she'll be saddling up at the 2008 Olympics today (Thursday) to compete in the jumping competition. She'll be riding "Authentic", a 13-year-old bay, Dutch warmblood at the Hong Kong Olympic Equestrian Venue. The event is slated to start at 8 a.m. their time... CATEGORY: General Society
TAGS: Olympics, China, Cazenovia, equestrian Jul 29 The Past Roars BackPosted by gcatt | 07/29/08
A little more than a year ago, a resume crossed my desk at the Palladium Times in Oswego where I was the editor before stepping up to this position. The applicant had written rec sports for the paper and was then studying at Cayuga Community College. I remember getting up from my desk and walking to the doorway of my office. Across the newsroom, I barked to the sports editor. "Hey, you know this Gosek guy?"
The sports editor rolled his eyes. "Yep." "Well, how'd he do with rec stuff?," I asked. The questioning went on for a two or three more rounds before it dawned on me. "Is he...?" "Yep." He was the son of the former mayor who had run into trouble and was jailed. The moment did -- quite literally -- leave me flummoxed... CATEGORY: News & Media
TAGS: journalism, Oswego May 11 Bear justicePosted by gcatt | 05/11/08
So...the DEC killed that bear they treed the other night in the town of Geddes. The official line on this event is forked. On one hand, the DEC argues that the bear was executed because it was known pest, with a history of repeat interactions with people. On the other, the DEC says there may have been an issue with the bear's slow recovery from being tranquilized.
Where's the truth? Hmmmm. In the first explanation, the DEC is left to explain why officers didn't relocate the bear to a wilderness environment after the first couple instances. In the second explanation, it would appear that somebody screwed up, either with the dosage or in the way in which the bear was retrieved... CATEGORY: General Society
May 04 New York State of (I) MindPosted by gcatt | 05/04/08
Here's another reason to hate New York. Despite the bloated promises from the scalawags on both sides of the political spectrum, the state is a mess. It was mess before Paterson. It was a mess before Spitzer, Pataki, and the prince of inflated sanctimony, Mario Cuomo. Each has promised "change." Each has failed to deliver what New Yorkers need: A simpler, less intrusive, less expensive government.
This is due mostly to various overheated pronouncements and promises. Could anything be kookier than the Upstate Economic Czar? That was Spitzer's panacea for Upstaters. "Oooo. Spitzer knows we exist." We oozed anticipatory sweat as Client #9 put us on Cloud...oh, never mind. So now, in the midst of Paterson's litany of things he's going to do, beyond sleep in this own bed with his wife, we find that he wants to attach New York's tentacles to sales made on the Internet. There's a clutch of reasons that supporters of this stupidity offer to pursue a new raid on our pocketbooks. Chief of among them is poor, beleaguered small business owners who must, by law, collect state and local sales taxes amounting to over 8 percent in most cases. That's opposed to Internet merchants like Amazon which collect no sales tax, but do charge substantially for shipping in most cases. Pretty much a pocketbook wash, if you ask me. Small businesses experience financial challenges not from the Internet but by a despotic state legislature beset by Balkan principles and narcissistic arrogance. That means stupid regulations; exploitive taxation and a bureaucracy that oversees this effort with with the cruel zeal of a Russian apparatchik. There's hope, however, that this last frontier without New York's avarice my survive. Amazon has filed suit to stop the money grab by New York. And, if you're an optimist like me, the Amazon challenge on Constitutional grounds looks pretty good. But then there's hundreds of thousands of dollars the legislature and Paterson will spend defending this flaccid idea to stick it to us once again. CATEGORY: Government
May 01 An American TragedyPosted by gcatt | 05/01/08
It's curious how events converge in the news business. Eagle columnist Russ Tarby writes in this week's City Eagle about Chester Gillette's last letters before his execution in Auburn prison in 1908 for killing his pregnant lover. Gillette's crime, you may recall, was immortalized in Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel about murder in the Adirondacks, "An American Tragedy." Writes Tarby: "...the public has remained fascinated with the story of an innocent factory girl seduced by Gillette, the nephew of the factory's owner before being lured to her death over the side of a boat on desolate mountain lake.
Events this week brought news of a strikingly similar killing... CATEGORY: Law
Apr 16 Annual InsultPosted by gcatt | 04/16/08
Well, it's done. The IRS has extracted its due. For a full 24 hours or so each year I'm held hostage while the government exercises its power to rifle through the filing cabinets of my life, forcing me to answer personal questions and confessing things that I feel, frankly, are none of the government's business. The IRS wants to know the date I bought stuff. How much I paid for the stuff. Intrusive, annoying questions. Questions about health. Questions about decisions that should be private and certainly not the government's business. The IRS then sniffs through my personal material looking for suggestions that I didn't tell the truth. The agency compares data from past years using high-tech and high-end logic to tip its BS meter...
CATEGORY: Commentary & Debate
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NewsholeFrom the dark center of the Eagle newsroom, greetings. I'm Gary Catt, executive editor of Eagle Newspapers. I've come to this calling after a career that's swerved through a half-dozen daily newspapers and an ad agency that was once the world's largest. Along the way I've written or edited most everything and an I've guided successful strategies around times of difficulty for Fortune 50 companies. My job here is to make sure that when you pick up your Eagle community newspaper it's a like a walk down main street, spotting faces you know; discovering news you need to know.SubscribeEmail Listening to...Etran Finatawa James OttoArchives |
