Author: Alan

Saranac Lake

I could yap it up like a Saranac Lake Chamber of Commerce membership nominee. Suffice it to say it is a beautiful town to which we will return.
The view to the south from the fifth floor of the Hotel Saranac.


The view to the west from the same fifth floor of the Hotel Saranac.

First Two Legs

Best route ever from Kingston, Ontario to Portland Maine.   Highway 3
across the Adironracks, crashed at the Hotel Saranac, this morning down Lake
Champlain on the NY side to cross over at Rutland Vt., nip to Lebanon and down
to Concord NH, over to Portsmouth NH on #4 and up to Portland on
I-95.    At Rutland it was summer in the Maritimes – 20
degrees, leaves out, sunshine.   I lay on mown grass out behind the
Friendly’s after we ate lunch.   We drove through the birthplace
of the US Navy on the south end of Lake Champlain, but made a note to check
it out on a shorter French and Indian Wars / Last of the Mohicans loop.

The Road Redux

Saranac Lake to Portland to Cape Cod to Holyoke to Cobleskill and back. A big north-eastern loop. Dispatches as possible. Attack cats unleashed at home so don’t try anything.

What Blogs Are Good For

Yesterday I needed someone 1,000 miles away to check in on someone and I was able to call on someone I write with regularly through these thingies. The person is notoriously decent but the medium has allowed me to keep up in such as way that I felt it was not an imposition to ask.  Thanks…and thanks…

I puzzle over what thing tool isn’t, given its associated great claims, that it is good to have illustrated what it can do.

So How Easy Is It?

So Bruce Wark of Halifax’s The
Coast has taken the time, as journalists can, to gently lead a new story
into the world of my reading – apparently,
the little tiny Greens are having a little tiny crisis:

a former Green Party leader named Joan Russow and three
high-profile colleagues had quit the Greens to join the NDP. Russow’s three
colleagues sent blistering, bellicose letters to party members last October
explaining why they were quitting. They accused the new Green Party leader, Jim
Harris, of acting like a dictator.

Over a phone line from Toronto, Jim Harris tells me he was elected Green
Party leader just over a year ago. He says the high-profile resignations were
“strictly a personality conflict” adding, “the people who quit the party were
involved in obstructionism.” Harris acknowledges he was once a Tory worried
about government deficits until he realized in the 1980s that the planet was
carrying a crushing ecological debt with more species going extinct every hour.
“So I shifted from being a fiscal conservative to being an ecological one.” When
asked about his political philosophy, he says the terms “right” and “left” are
irrelevant. “We say we are fiscally responsible, socially progressive and
committed to environmental sustainability.” Harris is a 43-year-old motivational
speaker who conducts seminars and writes books to help business leaders focus on
change, “innovation” and “creating learning institutions.” He co-authored The
100 Best Companies to Work for in Canada—a bestseller that sold over 50,000
copies.

Holy scratchy face tree huggers, Batman. Doesn’t sound
like the drum beaters I voted for in the last Federal and Provincial elections.

This is going to make me have a good hard think over my next camomile tea.