If anyone had the slightest doubt Ulster County legislative leadership is out of touch with reality and with its own membership, last week’s embarrassing failure to stonewall — or to at least delay — the executive on a policy issue of major import offers graphic proof. Recall, late last month county executive Mike Hein surprised everyone outside the executive suite with a plan to balance the 2012 budget by selling the Golden Hill health care facility for (at least) $8 million. A few days la...
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Calvert Vaux, who married the daughter of early Kingston artist Jervis McEntee and is buried in the city’s Montrepose Cemetery, may be as important a catalyst for the way we look at landscape in America as any of the Hudson River School artists with whom he spent his life associating. He also quietly insinuated the idea that it was our government’s responsibility to support our culture, in addition to being the man who hired the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to help bring hi...
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As one of the earliest settlements in Ulster County, with almost 400 years of history, Huguenot Street in New Paltz has a lot of stories to tell. Ten of the most grisly tales, related to the deaths of early inhabitants, will be told by a crew of 50 or so costumed volunteers on October 28, 29 and 30 during the Haunted Huguenot Street Tour (attendance by children under 12 not recommended). Most have never been told to the public before, according to Susan Stessin-Cohn, director of exhibits, edu...
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Among the truisms held dearest by Hollywood is the one that says that if you can’t persuade someone that they really want to see your movie with a 30-second elevator pitch, it’ll never fly. I encountered this modern marketing concept firsthand a couple of decades ago when I was taking a screenwriting workshop. The savvy industry insiders who were teaching the class informed me, based on my capsule description, that no one would ever want to see the feminist revenge black comedy that I wanted ...
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This week, Jupiter stands at opposition: its closest approach to Earth, when it’s brightest and biggest of the entire year. You’ve probably already noticed it. It’s that single ultra-bright star in the east the first part of the night, and in the south after 11 p.m. Since it is now 15 times brighter than any other star, it’s pretty hard to miss. Jupiter’s oppositions occur a month later each year, because each time our planet catches up to it in space, it has moved on a bit in its 12-year o...
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This Monday, October 24, was National Food Day, and the healthy after-school snack food committee of the Healthy Kids for Kingston project used the occasion to draw attention to what it considers a flaw in the local school district’s school wellness policy: limiting the amount of fat and added sugar served in snacks in terms of percentages. Healthy Kids for Kingston is being funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, “We’re trying to get them to revamp it,” said Laurie Deutsc...
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Lance the Plumber is also quite a good gardener; I’ve seen his garden. So I had some faith in his recipe for growing sweet potatoes: Make a circle of fencing a couple of feet across, fill it with soil and plant. The raised cylinder of soil, being warmer than soil at ground level, would be much to the plants’ liking. I eat a lot of sweet potatoes, but have never grown them because summer weather here in the Hudson Valley isn’t quite warm enough for best yields and because the trailing vines...
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There are plenty of scary movies, scary books, scary shows on cable news television. But can anything really beat the eternal goosebumps that come from classic radio horror, from Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds broadcast to the reading of scary stories in hushed tones as we sit in the dark, listening from under covers? Okay, so you had an uncle who could tell a good story, and there’s still that friend of your dad’s who first cast a flashlight’s creepy glow up under his lantern jaw. This Sa...
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It sometimes happens that the total novice, unfettered by secondhand knowledge and borrowed expertise, is able to experience phenomena and report back to the rest of us in a manner that lends credence. We believe his story and take his acquired wisdom on faith. So, when an otherwise unassuming, middle-class, successful black man – who, by the way, has never dabbled in the phenomenon of mind-travel through any means whatsoever – buys a ticket and leaves his life and family behind for an advent...
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