The first in an occasional series exploring the impact of continued corporate downsizing on the region. Thanks of a special sort are in order: Pop guru Spencer Johnson, co-author of The One Minute Manager and purported master of “taking complex subjects and presenting simple solutions,” also has given the world Who Moved My Cheese? […]
Jack Bradigan Spula
Posted inNews & Opinion
Odd day of hope
It’s 9/11 all over again as I write this. Two years dead and gone, and the tragedies, ironies, and absurdities keep coming. A request is floated for $87 billion to maintain an illegal military occupation; a treasured veterans’ hospital meanwhile faces closure. A top Nazi propagandist dies at 101; her methods are immortalized on […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Mt. Hope: What’s in store
Talk about a slogan with a place-name that works. “Meet Me on Mt. Hope” tells you where to go, in a very positive way, and how to feel. The invitation will soon make a monumental debut. Artist Achille Forgione Jr., whose studio is on Mt. Hope Avenue just south of Crittenden Boulevard, recently […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Rochester unplugged
Let me be Systems Analyst for a day. As I see things, the health-care, financial system, and energy systems are like Tinker Toys. Stick the pieces together and hope they stay stuck. Controlled chaos masquerades as policy. It’s so crazy, it just might work. Then comes the wake-up. We’re seeing this now […]
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Primarily personalities?
Too many Monroe County residents may view the town of Hamlin as an appendage to popular Hamlin Beach State Park. True, the park and the Lake Ontario shoreline in general are vital to this west-side community, as to the whole region. But Hamlin has its own special character — still largely rural — and […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Penfield: two for super
The town of Penfield is used to challenges. In recent years, for example, there have been floods in the Panorama Valley that made a temporary mess of some homes and businesses — and, some say, highlighted the problems of inappropriate development in a floodplain. (Federal, state, and local officials are on the case.) […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Judge twice for yourself
The old quiz show What’s My Line might speak to this year’s race for two City Court judgeships. In the run-up to the September 9 primary, the official candidates list has eight lines; after the primary (which is only for registered Democrats to choose their party’s two candidates) there will be seven lines for […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Vets: wounded once more
After seven quiet decades on a back street of a small town, the Canandaigua VA Medical Center is generating some noise. Actually, it’s a public uproar. And it’s directed at the federal Department of Veterans Affairs, which seems intent on closing the Canandaigua VA essentially to save money to spend elsewhere. The VA […]
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In the dark
Peter Tautfest, a well-known European journalist who died this past winter, was truly a man of the world. He was born in Berlin, grew up in Chicago, was educated in Texas, and served as a foreign correspondent in Washington. His paper was Germany’s most interesting daily, Die Tageszeitung, which not long ago helped disclose US […]
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Beating the HEAP
It’s a cool million (plus) in grant money — and a few county legislators and advocates for the poor are searching through a procedural haystack for it. The grant in question is $1.5 million in federal funds that Monroe County recently received (via Albany) for the Housing Energy Assistance Program. HEAP is a federal-state-local […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
‘City’ on a hill
American suburbs are schizo. That’s clear even from the dreary landscape of academic prose. Look at these two diagnoses. On one hand, suburbanites think small is beautiful. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk put it this way in The Second Coming of the American Small Town: “[They] sense what is wrong with the places […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Your government at work on the air
Having grown into a cluster of cable channels, C-SPAN has become a semi-official American institution. Not because it offers the most consistently fascinating, exciting programming, of course — but because it engages viewers with what you might call “reality-check” TV. Think of routines like the latest “White House Press Briefing With Ari Fleischer” or “gavel […]
