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"If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung
Would you hear my voice come through the music
Would you hold it near as it were your own?"
- Robert Hunter
Good Friday Morning,
Today is Jerry Garcia's birthday.
It's going to be another beautiful day in this neighborhood, sunny with a high in the upper 80's and the weekend doesn't look so bad either. Get out from behind your computer, switch off the television and go outside.
If you're looking for something to do this weekend, stop by Arts on the Lake's rock show tomorrow at 6:45. They've got 6 bands lined up and it's alcohol free and chaperoned (meaning adults will be there) so drop off your kids and come back around 10PM to get them when we're done. Oh, and it's 6 bucks. 6 bands for 6 bucks. Where else can your kids find an evening's entertainment for that price?
The Patterson Fire department is holding their annual parade and carnival starting this evening at 7PM.
A new destination has hit the web of special interest to New York State taxpayers. Called See Through New York it seeks to analyze and show how state monies are spent. The site's pretty popular so you may experience some difficulty in getting through. Try it anyway since a little poking around was pretty interesting.
If you're out for fresh, local produce this weekend, there's a Farmer's Market running today at Tompkins Corners in Putnam Valley from 3 until dusk. Betsey Ryder's Farm Stand is open at all hours on Starr Ridge Road in Southeast. Tomorrow you can visit the Cold Spring Farmer's Market from 8:30AM until 1:30PM, the Brewster Farmer's market from 9AM until 2PM and Cascade Farms in Patterson runs from 9AM until about noon. In other words, get the heck out of the supermarket and support local agriculture.
If you're interested in saving gasoline (see story below) and are adept at two wheel, human powered transportation Sustainable Hudson Valley is hosting a "Bike To Dinner Week" in Kingston the week of August 11-17. You can find more information here. The event offers a 10% discount at various restaurants around that city if you arrive by bicycle.
 From the "What Did They Think Was Going To Happen Department?", the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said they were "surprised" that China had blocked access to various websites from within the media center at the Beijing Games. IOC media Spokesman Kevin Gospar said, "It's learning of it at almost the last minute that I think is destabilizing the international media and certainly embarrassing for me, as up till 48 hours ago I was insisting it would be free and uncensored Internet access."
Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Congress voted 419-1 to urge China to stop arresting, torturing and jailing people based on their political and religious beliefs as well as to caution them about their support of the Burmese and Sudanese governments. The Guardian reports that Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said the US government should curtail "the disgusting actions of this small group of anti-Chinese lawmakers". The bill, he said, "fully exposed their evil motives to politicize the Olympics and interrupt and sabotage the Beijing Olympics". President Bush, in support of the Chinese position, will attend the Opening Ceremonies.
Gasoline prices are stabilizing and even coming down a bit. Where regular was running around $4.50 for a while it's down to $4.30 and in some places even lower.
In the meantime, the US government is sending money and material support to the Mujahadeen-e Khalk (MEK) an anti-government group inside Iran. If our "quiet war" against Iran continues, consider the $4.30 you're paying now for gasoline as cheap.
ExxonMobil has announced another quarter of record profits: Twelve Billion Dollars in three months.
If you're traveling to or from overseas the Department of Homeland Security can seize your laptop computer and rummage through your files without a warrant or even obvious probable cause. This isn't news to business travelers who have been complaining about it for a while now. Part of the problem, aside from the disregard for the 4th Amendment, is that DHS can hold your computer for as long as they want. Forever, if they feel it necessary. According to a Reuters report, the policies cover hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes -- as well as books, pamphlets and other written materials. Do you feel safer now?
Update: Yesterday I reported that Governor Paterson announced he'll be selling the city of Buffalo to Ontario and the City of New York to New Jersey. I was wrong. Buffalo will be sold to a consortium of Chinese businessmen. Canada apparently, was not interested.
And now, an eclectic bunch o' News:
- The duh-bait that can’t shoot straight
- Garage: Southeast supervisor took car without paying
- Conservationists Seek Firm Limits on Gulf Dead Zone Pollution
- Exxon Mobil Reports Nearly $12 Billion in 2Q Earnings
- Dockside Green Awarded World’s Highest LEED Score
- GREEN SPACE: Rain barrels save dollars, make sense
- Stormwater, sewage create beach hazards
- Massachusetts will allow N.Y. gay couples a closer option than California
The duh-bait that can’t shoot straight 30 07 2008
What appears to be the first bona fide debate between the two declared candidates for New York’s 99th Assembly District has been scheduled for Wednesday, August 27, at Yorktown Stage, starting at 7:00 p.m. That’s when incumbent Assemblyman Greg Ball and challenger John Degnan will square off in an event hosted by a non-partisan third-party, North County News, which has absolutely no stake in who is elected.
The moderator will be independently selected by North County News, which will ask if the person identified meets with each camp’s approval. The moderator will pose questions derived from the newspaper’s archives of stories covering both candidates and issues of the day. The questions will betray no bias toward one candidate or the other and reveal no prejudicial leaning on hot-button issues. Audience members will be invited to pose questions of their own.
If all the above seems painfully obvious to any reasonable, well-informed person, the need to exercise ethical, fair and thoroughly impartial procedures to justify using the word “debate” is not obvious to United Taxpayers of Yorktown.
UTY is a local group that has its heart in the right place, but its head too often can be found where the sun don’t shine (we presume the national UTY uses the acronym NUTY). We don’t know who UTY consulted on the principles and practices of staging a debate, but judging from how it has gone about organizing what amounts to a press conference at 6:00 p.m. Friday at Yorktown Town Hall, UTY could write a book of its own on “How to Turn a Debate into a Duh-Bait.”
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Garage: Southeast supervisor took car without paying Terence Corcoran
The Journal News
PUTNAM LAKE - The owner of the garage that towed the car of Southeast Supervisor Michael Rights after his July 20 drunken-driving arrest filed a complaint with police, alleging that Rights removed his 2009 Jaguar from garage property after it was impounded and failed to pay towing, impound and storage fees.
"It's theft of services," Justin Marrone, owner of Justin's Automotive on Fairfield Drive, said yesterday. "In 14 years of business, I've only had this happen once before."
Marrone said he filed a complaint with the Putnam County Sheriff's Office.
When told yesterday of Marrone's complaint, Rights, a 47-year-old Republican who began his four-year term in January, said, "Thank you for the information," but declined further comment.
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Conservationists Seek Firm Limits on Gulf Dead Zone Pollution Wednesday 30 July 2008
by: Environment News Service
Water drains into the Gulf of Mexico. Conservation groups have petitioned the EPA to set and enforce numeric standards to limit nutrient pollution into the Mississippi River because it contributes to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. (Photo: Omar Torres / AFP / Getty)
St. Paul, Minnesota - Conservation groups from nine states along the Mississippi River and two national groups petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today to set and enforce numeric standards to limit nutrient pollution in the river basin because it contributes to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Gulf dead zone, a stretch of water covering nearly 8,000 square miles where oxygen levels are too low to support marine life, is the second largest in the world.
It is caused every year when farmers fertilize their fields. Nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilizer and phosphorus from animal manure mixes with rainwater and flows from the agricultural lands into the Mississippi River and downstream to the Gulf of Mexico.
The petitioners say the EPA has disregarded its responsibility under the federal Clean Water Act to limit nutrient pollution in the Mississippi River.
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Exxon Mobil Reports Nearly $12 Billion in 2Q Earnings HOUSTON (AP) -- Exxon Mobil Corp. reported second-quarter earnings of $11.68 billion Thursday, the biggest quarterly profit ever by any U.S. corporation, but the results were well short of Wall Street expectations and its shares fell.
The world's largest publicly traded oil company said net income for the April-June period came to $2.22 a share, up from $10.26 billion, or $1.83 a share, a year ago.
Revenue rose 40 percent to $138.1 billion from $98.4 billion in the year-earlier quarter.
Excluding an after-tax charge of $290 million related to an Exxon Valdez court settlement, earnings amounted to $11.97 billion, or $2.27 per share.
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Dockside Green Awarded World’s Highest LEED Score We featured the innovative Dockside Green community previously on MetaEfficient. Recently, the entire community was certified to be built to Platinum LEED (leadership in energy and environmental design) standards. It was awarded the highest LEED score in the world.
Dockside Green is located in Victoria, Canada. Synergy, the first phase of the development, which includes 95 homes in two condo buildings, townhomes and commercial space, achieved 63 points out of a possible 70. Formerly, the highest-ranked Platinum project was the Minnesota-based Aldo Leopold Legacy Center at 61 points.
The project’s most impressive feature is the water management system. All sewage will be treated on-site and reused in toilets and irrigation, saving nearly 70 million gallons of water each year (roughly 60 percent less water usage than traditional developments). Moreover, stormwater will be captured by green roofs, cisterns, bioswales and bio-filtration and channeled to a man-made stream running through the middle of the property.
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GREEN SPACE: Rain barrels save dollars, make sense metromode, 7/24/2008
The only reason my lawn is green this summer is because of the abundance of rain, so it is hard for me to believe this statistic: 40% of the average homeowner's water usage can be accounted for in outdoor usage.
Plus, the sheer amount of pavement and concrete and rooftops mean that most rainfall in urban and suburban communities gets funneled into an increasingly overtaxed stormwater system -- where it must be treated before its release or reuse. Which, of course, takes energy and resources -- that can and should be conserved.
How? By catching that rainwater in a rain barrel that can be used to water your plants and garden and wash your car.
Rain barrels get linked into your gutter system and store the water for later use. Lids keep animals and children from climbing in and they usually have screened louvers to keep bugs from proliferating. One inch of rain falling on a 1,200 square foot roof will yield over 700 gallons of water, so we're not talking small potatoes here.
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Stormwater, sewage create beach hazards WASHINGTON - Beaches continue to suffer from pollution problems, and this year is no different. "Rivers suffer really from this perfect storm of crumbling, old pipes and infrastructure and lack of money. Now this really intense population growth -- all of this is combining to make it so we have a lot of polluted runoff and sewage in our waters," Kathryn Baer, senior director for clean water at American Rivers, tells WTOP. Every year, stormwater and sewage spills wash pollution into the waterways from those old pipes. In 2007, U.S. beaches saw the second highest number of closings and advisory days, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. Read More
Massachusetts will allow N.Y. gay couples a closer option than California Keith Eddings
The Journal News
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick is expected to sign a repeal of a law enacted 95 years ago to curb interracial marriage, lifting what evolved into the last limit on gay marriage in that state and opening the door to what a Boston newspaper said would be a "flood of gay couples" from New York.
The 1913 law prohibited out-of-state couples from marrying in Massachusetts if the union would be void in their home states, which critics said was intended to block racially mixed couples from going to Massachusetts to wed at a time when most states prohibited the marriages.
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