Life in the time of COVID AFB Vaccine: It’s the Bee’s Knees The announcement of probably the most important medical breakthrough of this year was made on January 7. It had nothing to do with COVID. In fact, it had nothing to do with human diseases. Dalan Animal Health, a company in Georgia, announced that they had successfully produced a vaccine to protect bees from a disease called American Foulbrood which had been conditionally approved by the U.S. Food and…
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Hawthorn Hill by Richard DeRosa Forget the Beltway, Rethink Stale Assumptions, Consider Course Alterations My January 12 essay ended with these words: “Forget the Beltway.” Given the embarrassing shenanigans of the past few months, that sentiment still holds true. The fact that many years ago it took 133 votes to elect a speaker in no way negates the atrocity of it all. I used to excuse the political conundrums that we continually embroil ourselves in as just more evidence of…
Life Sketches by Terry Berkson Made in the Shade: There’s More Than One Way to Curb a Rooster I once had this beautiful tropical fish that was mutilating and eating up the rest of the fish in the tank. It looked like he would have to be flushed down the drain, but before doing so, I tried threading a piece of dental floss through his tail with a sewing needle to create a drag that would slow him down when…
The Partial Observer Adventures in Casting: ‘Roadhouse Coup’ an Otsego County Who’s Who Folks throughout the area have asked me at least a thousand times, “How did you get all those leaders of Otsego County to be in your film?” Here’s the “Reader’s Digest” version. I first met former Oneonta Police Chief Douglas Brenner while working on another project. The introduction went something like this: “Hi! My name is Lori. You don’t know me, but I’m going to make a…
Column by James Dean Saving Main Street USA As a non-retail small business owner and an astute observer of Main Street USA, I have great sympathy for the economic struggles of Main Street USA storefront retailers. Main Street USA, and its storefront retail businesses, can define their communities desirability and quality of life, by whether they look bright, attractive, welcoming, thriving, and growing, or dusty, dark, stuck in time, just holding on, or dying. The centuries-old, only game in town,…
Wordle. Batman. COVID. By Ted Potrikus I’m addicted to Wordle. It’s a part of the morning routine now – pour the coffee, read the news, tell myself that I’ll wait until later to Wordle, then Wordle nonetheless. If you’ve not heard about this nifty little online game, a warning: Do it once and you’re hooked. It’s almost too simple – it’s free, it’s not an app that you have to download, there are no ads clogging the site (powerlanguage.co.uk). Once…
Desert Dispatch 1 By Richard DeRosa We arrived at our winter redoubt in Arizona about a week ago. We have made this cross-country trek several times and always enjoy it. Even look forward to it. Each of us experiences it differently. And those differences have elicited some curious responses when chatting about it with friends, not to mention some friendly quarreling about when to turn on the radio to catch up on the news. One of my quirks when traveling…
Signs, signs. Everywhere the signs. By Ted Potrikus I get a kick out of the ROUGH ROAD sign on I-88 west, just past the Worcester exit. The overused “Thanks, Captain Obvious” comes to mind as my car frame rattles through the next dozen miles of highway that, atmy most charitable, I refer to as ‘rough.’ Closer to home, I look forward to the LED radar speed limit signs that tell me precisely how fast I am going as I enter…
Up on Hawthorn Hill: Early Winter Musings By Richard DeRosa A light coating of snow now blankets our hillside, snow shovels at the ready. The new snow blower waits quietly for its first call to duty. Life is now lived more inwardly, more reflectively. Books having piled up for some months now await their turn in line. Thoughts that have incubated for some time seem riper for reflection, perhaps a temporary resolution of what have been conflicting possibilities. Few would…
Opinion by Greg Klein Is it a successful soccer season? Ask me again in November Years ago, when I began covering high school sports here, I coined a truism about New York State Public High School Athletic Association seasons. If you are playing in the spring season, you need to be playing in June to have a successful season. If you are playing in the winter season, you need to be playing in March to have a successful season. If…