Editorial An Appeal to theZB of Appeals Two weeks ago, in front of a standing-room-only crowd, the Village of Cooperstown Zoning Board of Appeals considered and ultimately denied, unanimously, the application of Adam Curley for a short-term rental permit for four of the five bedrooms in Mark and Margaret Curley’s newly-acquired house at 40 Lake Street. The Curleys, who live in Massapequa Park, New York, on the south shore of Long Island, did not attend the meeting although Mark Curley’s…
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Editorial - Page 7
Guest Editorial by Anne Donovan Keep FoxCare Fitness Open, Please The closure of FoxCare Fitness gym is ill-advised and unwarranted. Denying about 750 members from looking after their own health by exercising and thereby practicing “preventative care” at the gym is irresponsible. Many of these members are following up after cardio and physio therapy. This gym has been open for 24 years and no is the time to encourage a way forward again. COVID times have been tough on all…
Editorial A Syrupy Salute to Spring Last Sunday the annual Sugaring Off celebration, heralding the evasive but long-hoped-for beginning of spring, made its first appearance of the season at The Farmers’ Museum. This event, which runs for four Sundays, offers maple syrup and everything that goes with it to myriad visitors; the village and farm buildings are open for exploration, and the animals are eager for a pat on the head. Sugaring Off Sundays anticipates the April opening of the…
Editorial Daylight Saving: Time and Time Again Among the myriad annoying swirls of disaffection, rage, frustration and division in this country, the years-long massive popular and political debate over abolishing daylight saving, or abolishing standard, times—and then adopting either as standard—should be a mere minor tremor. But this particular time war, which was in fact first developed by the Germans in World War I (and abolished right after it) has been raging across the country, as well as across Europe…
Editorial Saving Article IX Among the most important sections of our New York State Constitution is Article IX, one that has been on the local books since the organization of our local governments—our counties, cities, towns and villages: home rule. This, in a broad sense, describes those governmental functions and activities traditionally reserved to or performed by local governments without undue infringement by the state. More technically, home rule refers to the constitutional and statutory powers given local governments to…
Editorial Starlight Express Last week, when it was unseasonably warm and clear in the early evening, there appeared in the low sky a string of lights, moving slowly across the horizon and disappearing. Very few people around Otsego County actually saw this, as by habit very few people wander outside and gaze upward at this time of year. There was no record of this phenomenon in the newspapers or on social media; it was as though nothing had happened to…
Editorial Help Wanted First, a heartfelt thanks to our many readers who have reached out to us with praise and appreciation for the steps we have been taking to make our print and digital publications a more informative and engaging community resource. Now we are asking for your help in the next phase of our improvement efforts; please respond to a new survey designed to help us get a better sense of how our readers interact with our newspapers and…
Editorial On Thin Ice An unusual thing happened during this past weekend’s severe cold snap: Between 6:30 p.m. on Friday and 8 a.m. Saturday, Otsego Lake, the largest lake in Otsego County, froze over completely. With this week’s warmer weather forecast, it may well thaw again and, if it does, it will follow a somewhat disturbing trend that could spell trouble in the years ahead. Records of ice cover on Otsego Lake have been kept since 1842 and, with the…
Editorial Let’s Chat Last November OpenAI, a not-so-big (albeit associated, through a $1 billion investment, with Microsoft and co-founded, in 2015, by Elon Musk), artificial intelligence lab in San Francisco, introduced a newly developed chatbot—ChatGPT—that has made impressive inroads into our understanding of the challenges of artificial intelligence. The company first coded a chatbot in 2020, GPT-3, which is one of the first AI tools that responds to prompts in viable human-like text, for the most part both grammatically and,…
Editorial This Is for the Birds Last year, more than 57 million birds, including poultry, perished in the U.S. from a surge of avian influenza (H5N1), a killer disease that has been increasingly effective in attacking wild birds, especially migrating waterfowl. Mallards and Canada geese seem to be the most susceptible. The disease, which has flared up sporadically since its discovery, as fowl plague, in 1878, is caused by infections that occur naturally in wild aquatic birds. These infections are…