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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 ...

Picking Cherries, And The Bright Summer Memories

My niece posted pictures she took while she was picking cherries with her dad. That evoked strong memories for me. We often went near Forestville to pick cherries. When we moved to Hickory Heights there were a lot of cherry trees growing here. They did not produce much, but I usually got enough to at least make a pie. They were the sour variety— the kind used for pies. When we began to clean up the yard the cherry trees had to go. I was sorry to lose them, but that was just how it was. I remember the lady who had charge of the picking where we went always wore a headband with ...

Finding A Bug, Only To Begin My Discovery Of The Tolype Moth

What on earth? It takes a lot to get me to budge on a hot summer’s day when I’m finally able to sit and sip — my time to relax. This was particularly worth the effort but, even from a foot away, I still had no idea what I was seeing. My first quick guess was some kind of bird dropping but no. Too long and the shades of gray, varying from white to black, seemed to have a design of its own. Audubon prefers to ignore it which is too bad because I could only learn its wing span is 32-58 mm (let’s say 1.3-2.3 inches) but nothing about length. A pity. Some readers of my fiction ...

‘Summertime And The Livin’ Is Easy’

The above title comes from a George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward 1934 aria, used in the 1935 opera, Porgy and Bess. (This summer, the livin’ might not be as easy as past ones.) As we enter the real part of summer (though COVID-19 actually created a spring/summer vacation, but kids have attended virtual school since March, so we’ll still call this the second half of summer for the purpose of this narrative), kids might be facing more time needing activity. School’s officially been out for weeks, though, understandably, some parents feel their kids have been home forever. I’m ...