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Be The Difference – A Music Lesson For Life

The groundwork for many musicians all began with learning the solfege syllables or what are commonly known as the scales. To the advanced they seem almost elementary but to the beginner they are the critical stepping-stones for developing pitch, ear-training and sight reading of music regardless of the preference of instrument. To the untrained, a simple note has very little importance unless it is significantly off-key and cringy to the ear but to the well-learned each note requires a high standard of accuracy and excellence with no room for variation. This is critically ...

Partisan Redistricting Is Coming Back To New York State

Albany Democrats do not favor the redistricting rules in New York, that is no secret. However, the whole truth is that they never did like it. For years, they have been trying to undermine those rules and create more favorable, partisan maps. This is another example of the negative consequences of New York’s one-party rule. Every 10 years, new voting districts are approved as a result of the most recent census. In 2014, New Yorkers wanted a transparent process for creating those districts, and they wanted to ensure that voting districts were not manipulated by the majority party ...

A Beautiful Day On The Expressway

Most people now call it I-86, but I still call it the “Southern Tier Expressway.” That expresses what it truly is. On an overcast day last fall, my wife and I were returning from the Syracuse area where one of our kids lives. It is quicker to take the Thruway to get home, but I always opt for the back roads and the expressway that threads through the hills of the Southern Tier. As we came up the big hill heading west from Bath, the clouds were almost touching the ground as we came to the summit of the pass at Howard. When we drove by Hornell, I said to my wife, “I think ...

Blaming New York Won’t Bring Chautauqua County Jobs Back

Bush Industries is closing, leaving more than 200 people without work in the south of the county. In a region that has already absorbed losses from Truck-Lite and Serta, this is not just another closure. It’s a blow to the foundation of our community. And once again, instead of sitting with that reality and doing the hard work to solve it, our Republican leadership is reaching for a familiar script. Blame New York State. Senator George Borrello and Assemblyman Andrew Molitor both pointed to “burdensome regulations” and the cost of doing business in New York as the ...

High Court greatly restricts racial gerrymandering

Let’s pick up where we left off 12 weeks ago. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was before the U.S. Supreme Court again, this time in Louisiana v. Callais. * * * Writing for the six-justice majority, Justice Samuel Alito observes that the court’s first opinion regarding Section 2’s current text issued in 1986. It “was decided at a time when th(e Supreme) Court often paid insufficient attention to the language of statutory provisions ... . Instead of analyzing what the statute said, the opinion simply ...

The Sweetest Sound In Western New York

Every year in Western New York there comes a moment, usually sometime around late April, or in our case late May, when people begin emerging from their homes with the dazed expression of survivors stepping out of underground bunkers. Somebody hears birds chirping again. Somebody else catches the smell of damp earth instead of snowblower exhaust. And all across the region, people begin saying the same thing: “We made it.” Winter in Western New York is not simply a season. It is a test of endurance. It settles in sometime around November and stays so long you begin to forget who you ...