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Some (Not All) Of The Best Of My Times

Being the baseball fanatic I am, I have many great memories of annual Sunday Yankees/Indians doubleheaders Dad took brother Lou and me to as kids. There we got to see some of our favorite childhood Cleveland players we cheered for in the 1960s. A ride that takes just a little over two hours to make today seemed like it took six hours to make then, but it was always worth the time it felt like to get there. Lucky for us though, we had professional baseball 10 blocks from our Bowen Street home where I grew up. I've been lucky to have watched future Hall of Famers, World Series MVPs, ...

The Good Life: Yee-Haw! Squirt! Wrangle Them Hens!

A fellow who wrangles cattle out West is a “cowboy.” A geezer who chases chickens hereabouts could be a “chicken boy.” That would be me. We keep up to 30 chickens for eggs, meat and enjoyment. At this time of year, our free-range chickens zoom in on my wife’s blueberry bushes. They must be rounded up and rerouted, which is no easy task. Our hens sneak beneath the netting, then jump/hop/flutter up, nabbing some blueberries and knocking others to the ground, making them inedible as people food. My wife is not pleased. That is an understatement. One can chase chickens on foot ...

Input Sought After Test Results

Segment two offers a glimpse into some reported history of Maxwell’s, Max for short, work history. A dairy farmer turned P.A., Max’s work schedule was lengthy and challenging. I wondered if the years had taken a bit out of his endurance. I’m reminded of a radio interview I heard years ago. The speaker, a neuropsychologist, stated that our bodies were wired to sleep when it’s dark outside. Daytime work allowed, he added, for a healthier schedule for sleep. Additional work shifts introduced during the industrial age transformed daytime schedules to 24- hour schedules. I think ...

Save Our District Again

It’s census time, which means reapportionment time is coming. Reapportionment occurs each decade and involves redrawing legislative-district lines, including for Congress. Although new congressional-district lines will take effect for the 2022 elections, it’s time to look ahead to our decennial fight to save our congressional district. Decade after decade, New York has lost congressional seats. That means remaining New York congressional districts have had to grow geographically. The same will likely occur after the 2020 census. Since the post-2010-census reapportionment, Western ...

Far Left, Far Right Are Not Very Far Apart

The political divide is typically envisioned as left versus right, with the Democrats on the left and the far left being socialism, and Republicans on the right, with the far right being fascism. While there are obvious and significant inadequacies with that paradigm, if we accept that spectrum, rather than being a straight line between them, they both fall along a closed loop. The loop has totalitarianism on one side and individual liberty on the other. As you move away from individual rights and freedom, you can move in one direction or the other, but either way, the further you go ...

Local Falconer Has Interesting Job At The Lake

I like seeing clever solutions to worldly problems, and I think the Chautauqua Harbor Hotel nailed this one. Before the hotel opened, but when the structure was intact, local seagulls thought they’d found a new place to party. The roof at the hotel was inundated with birds and they were making quite a mess. Obviously any kind of solution had to be humane. But it also had to work. So they hired master falconer Jonathan Clarkson of Ellicottville to bring his birds of prey to the hotel to let all the pesky birds know there were was a new gang in town and there wasn’t going to be ...