It appears that several readers of this blogcolumn would like me to do lots more research before developing the opinions which are published on this Web site and in the Watertown Daily Times next to my professionally altered mugshot. Can't do it.

I have a full-time job as the St. Lawrence County editor for the Times. This blogcolumn thing is sort of a hobby that I shoehorn in during the gaps of time I have left between meetings with bosses, yelling at reporters or fixing the toilet in the Canton office where I work. My researching is limited by time and the fact that I am generally lazier than a three-toed South American sloth.

Last week, for instance, I wrote that people were wasting their time by trying to save the Ogdensburg prison that is scheduled to close next year. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/section/blogs06 I formed this opinion after reading one quote that reporter Jude Seymour pulled from Gov. David A. Paterson during a recent interview:

“This is a difficult situation. Any other time, we would probably keep the facilities open just to maintain the financial integrity of the local governments, the villages and the towns. Here we would do it, but we don't have the money.”

I read that quote several times before writing the blogcolumn. And I literally spent minutes reading a press release from the state that said fewer prisons are needed because we have fewer prisoners being housed these days. So it is not like I didn't do any research. We don't have the money. We don't need the prisons. Bye-bye Ogdensburg Correctional Facility. It all seemed pretty simple.

Readers who wrote wanted more. Many of them focused on the reason we have fewer prisoners – primarily state laws that reduced sentences for those who commit “low-level crimes.” A veteran corrections officer said the public is being “hoodwinked” because many of those released are not low-level offenders. He invited me to come see the scary group of early release candidates he watches over in Ogdensburg.

I took a pass. Seeing criminals in prison wouldn't help me form an opinion about whether reform of the state's drug laws – one of the changes that led to fewer inmates – was a good idea. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. I am sure there are good arguments on both sides. But figuring that out would have taken a lot more time than my hobby allows. I remain without an opinion on the issue.

Same goes for the issue of whether prisons are economic booms or busts for a community. A brief check of the Internet and you'll find that there are professors out there who have studied it and say prisons don't have much of an impact. And there are others who say they do. I have no idea who is right. That's why I didn't write much about it.

I did write that Ogdensburg was a sad place before it had prisons and remains pretty sad after getting them. I didn't say Ogdensburg was a bad place, I said it was a sad place. It's sad because it lost its tax base years ago when a bunch of industry left town. It's sad because it has a beautiful chunk of riverfront land that is mostly full of decaying, empty buildings or prisons. It's sad because it isn't – and will never again be - what it once was.

If you believe that keeping the prison open might change things, or at least stop things from getting sadder, join the growing fight to save it. I am just saying my research shows it's not a fight you should expect to win.

It is clear that we have to do something concerning the recently announced proposal to close the Ogdensburg Correctional Facility.

The reason the state wants to close Ogdensburg and other prisons – and why it already has closed places like Camp Gabriels near Saranac Lake in the past few years – is that we don’t have enough criminals to go around. So the most effective solution is for everyone to start promoting crime.

Others concerned about the Ogdensburg closing have already started down the more familiar road of forming Save Our Prison committees and organizing lobbying efforts and Facebook brigades and standing around public buildings with placards saying, “We Heart Our Correctional Facility.”

Those efforts are going to provide screeds of newspaper stories and hours of dramatic television news coverage right up until the day the Ogdensburg prison closes next year.

Grassroots efforts to save prisons might have worked years ago when the state was flush with cash and criminals. Now that we are short on both, it’s unlikely that the people in charge will listen to protesters screaming that closing the prison is going to kill Ogdensburg’s economy. They’ve heard it all before.

They didn’t listen when the protesters screamed about closing Camp Gabriels. They didn’t listen when the protesters screamed about closing Camp Pharsalia in Norwich. And on and on.

So you can have your committees and your placards and your politicians saying all the right things about how horrible it will be to lose the prison. Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that your work is going to pay off. If you want to save the prisons, you are simply going to need more criminals. Thousands and thousands of them.

If you can get enough people willing to commit a crime for the community and get the prisons filled back up in a hurry, you have a chance of keeping the Ogdensburg Correctional Facility alive with activity.

The problem is I am not sure why you would want to do that. Studies have shown that prisons are not economic saviors. Washington State University professor and Fulbright scholar Gregory Hooks did an in-depth study of the impact prisons have on communites. In one published article about the study, he suggested he went into it expecting to confirm the hype that prisons were white knights saving communities in distress nationwide. Instead, he concluded:

“On average, prisons don't do much of anything. If you put a prison in a struggling county, they get worse, not better.”

Do a search on the Internet if you want to find the wherefores and whys that led him to his conclusion. If you are short on time, just take a look at Ogdensburg to confirm that his study was on the mark. Ogdensburg was a sad place before it got prisons. It is a sad place with prisons. It’s hard to see what economic benefit the prisons have provided.

That doesn’t mean there won’t be lots of folks tossing around numbers and bemoaning the pending loss of the prison in the upcoming months. There will be passionate debates. There will be powerful predictions of gloom and doom. There will be letter-writing campaigns. There will be protests.

The next year will be a civic-minded good time that will keep lots of people busy and out of trouble. And people staying out of trouble is the reason, after all is said and done, that the Ogdensburg prison is going to close. That seems pretty clear.

Mile-high times: Potsdam Times reporter Alex Jacobs had her vacation extended a day when United Airlines canceled the flight that was supposed to get her home from Colorado on Sunday. Terrorist trouble? Nope. Winter weather woes in Denver? Nope. “They told us the plane was broken,” she said. Glad they figured that out before boarding.

Remember Scotty?: Former Times reporter Scott Bronstein – who wrote nearly 3,500 stories during his tenure here, but is still perhaps best known as the guy who in Dustin Hoffman “Rainman” style could rattle off the drink specials for each day of the week at all of the Potsdam bars - turns 40 this week. This is the guy who in his 20s made the journalistically sound but questionable move from a job-comfort standpoint of ratting out our boss's boy for underaged drinking while on a recruiting trip to SUNY Potsdam. He's now writing a blog and translating news items from Spanish to English for the Web version of Panama's largest daily paper, La Prensa. http://blogger.prensa.com/scott/ And he does this with very little grasp of the Spanish language. Feliz cumpleaños (Happy birthday), Scotty.

Futbol fever?: There is a Manchester United flag hanging outside a home on Waverly Street in Potsdam. Give yourself a point if you knew that Manchester United is an English football team. Score another point if you knew that English football is soccer. You get nil if you didn't know either of these things, but a bonus point if you knew that nil is the preferred way to say zero in soccer scoring.

Day 149 of “Thai Cuisine – Coming soon:” The sign went up last summer on the cursed building in Potsdam. Still no pad to be priked. Could it all have been a mean joke on all us St. Lawrence County foodies?

Welcome to Julian's: The restaurant recently opened on Market Street in Potsdam, where the Indian Carnival used to be. It took me a while to notice the subtle “Julian's” painted on the awning over the door, so I wonder if they are low-keying it until they get into the swing of things.

Good luck Matt: High school student Matthew J. Flynn II is going to announce his candidacy for a seat on the St. Lawrence County Legislature from the steps of the courthouse building (cue the theme from “Rocky”) in Canton next week. That's when I expect to find out why an 18-year-old kid would want to spend his first summer after graduation campaigning for a job that at least two current legislators don't want. Maybe he's trying to impress his prom date?

Living and dieting update: Note to self - don't start a diet a week before your favorite bar owners invite you to their “Christmas” party that features two hours of free drinks and food. That said, I am about five chicken wings shy of three pounds lost during week one of my diet quest. Looking at a tough week two, however, as I am going to a birthday party in Panama. The week coming up may may make the Tardelli's bash seem like time spent at a health spa. Stay tuned.

I am going to lose weight. This might sound like a New Year’s resolution – seeing as it is coming shortly after the start of the new year and there is a law that says columnists have to write a resolution piece within seven days of Father Time being ushered out – but it is not. I have no evidence that New Year’s resolutions work, so I am not going to make one. I am just going to lose weight.

It was a suggestion from my doctor. Here’s what he said:

“You really have to lose some weight, big fella.”

That’s not really what he said. You can’t charge someone $128 and simply tell them they are fat. He used words like “high blood pressure” and “bad cholesterol” and “stroke” and “or you’re going to die” to make his point. OK, so he didn’t say “or you’re going to die,” either. But he didn’t have to ... I got his point.

Not that a doctor’s words or the threat of eating my way onto a seat on the Cardiac Arrest Express are enough on their own to motivate me to lose weight. Healthy living has never been my trump suit. Cheeseburgerandabeer is one word in my world. I fall asleep at night thinking about what I am going to eat the next day – and those thoughts are more likely to be about corned beef and cabbage than couscous and raisins. Everyone eats to live. I live to eat.

At least I did. Now there is a bigger issue pushing me to change my ways: My niece is getting married in March and I need to fit into the only suit I own. So maybe I sound like the girl I took to the senior prom in 1975, but that’s my major motivation.

I don’t mind being known as “the puzzling uncle,” or “the crazy uncle,” or “the uncle who buys our love with really neat Christmas presents.” I might be all those things, but I don’t also want to be known as “the uncle who showed up to my wedding in sweatpants and a XXX-sized sweatshirt with chili stains on the front.” Which is one of my favorite outfits these days.

So I am going to bite the bullet and stop biting things that are fat rolls waiting to happen. I was going to try Weight Watchers, but the idea of a bunch of people in a room all giddy that Bertha lost half a pound and only has the equivalent weight of a Volkswagen bus left to lose didn’t seem too appealing. The Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem programs are out because they cost money (buying a new suit was a plan eliminated early for the same reason). So the plan right now is eat less, weigh less.

I have until March 20 – that’s the big day for the little niece who somehow grew up while I wasn’t looking. The numbers look like this: Today I weighed in at 260 pounds naked. In my youthful prime I was 200. The goal – with an allowance for age, for those of you who are handicapping this race – is somewhere in between those two numbers.

I could probably squeeze into my suit at 240 – which would only mean losing about two pounds a week before the wedding. But three pounds a week seems utterly reasonable. I’d be the poster child for fat and happy if I manage to crack 230 before Lara says I do.

This is a quest ... not a New Year’s resolution. I have to succeed. Would someone pass me a veggieburgerandadietsoda?

This all started out in April with a kid strapping an electronic dog collar on the boys that make him a man. Then there were bank robbers and white collar criminals.The antics of officials in the town of Potsdumb made occasional appearances. There was the Thai restaurant that may forever be coming without ever getting here. And the Jamaican restaurant where coke had nothing to do with soda.

In short, there was lots of interesting stuff to talk about since All That JAS started: Stupid college students and ones who shined. The craze that I don’t give a Twit about. Furloughs in a dying newspaper industry. Pies in the sky over the GM Plant and a cornfield that would be an entertainment complex in Brasher Falls. The rise and fall and hopeful rise again of Hacketts department stores. A not-so-sovereign nation of Mohawks. A not-so-racist group of racists. And, of course, my girl dogs – Molly and Jasmin.

Thanks to all of you who read this column – the ones who like what I write and especially the ones who don’t. Even though I haven’t been wrong since 1923, I love to hear opposing views.

I’ll be on vacation until next year. And this one is not a furlough – it is paid time off. Merry Christmas to me. And happy holidays to all of you.

Talk to you in January.

One thing you can say about the north country is we love our celebrities. If you end up famous and grew up here, went to school here, vacationed here or stopped at a rest area here on the way to Ottawa, we love to tell the world about it.

When opera star Renee Fleming performs on A Prairie Home Companion, we'll be sure to tell you that she graduated from the Crane School of Music in Potsdam. When Viggo Mortensen gets mentioned as a candidate for an Oscar, we surely won't let you hear about it without adding the trivia that he is a Watertown native who went to St. Lawrence University in Canton.

That's the way we roll. Sure, you have to drive three hours to an airport to catch a one-hour flight. Sure, there are still some towns around here that don't have a Walmart. Sure, we might have more cows than humans. But we're not Podunksville as long as we have famous people to tell you about.

Frederick Remington. Kirk Douglas. Eric Cole. Tony Bennett. The guy who made Lifesavers famous. They all lived, learned or loved it somewhere in the north country. And they are all very famous in their various worlds. Now you can add Mindy Lawton to the list.

For a day or so, Lawton was just the fifth woman (yawn) to say she had chased the married gazillionaire golfer Tiger Woods around naked. Or been chased naked. Or tied up naked. Or something. It wasn't all that interesting or worth paying attention to until one of my reporters e-mailed me this message Monday morning. “Dude, I used to sit next to this woman in band. She graduated Ogdensburg Free Academy with me in 1994.”

That was when Lawton went from the latest floozie to come out of Tiger's closet, to Lawton – FORMERLY OF OGDENSBURG – the latest floozie to come out of Tiger's closet. Now she became worth talking about.

The Watertown Daily Times Web site and the Ogdensburg Journal ran the same photo of her in a red dress and red high-heeled shoes in a pose that is part seductress, part “oopsy doodle, I've fallen down and can't get up.” The photo, taken from the British Web site that first published her story, was probably shot as a promotional tool for use as she sells her tale to whatever media outlet wants to buy it. Or maybe it was put out there simply to provoke thought. That's the impact it had on me.

I thought that I surely would grab my putter and chase Ms. Formerly of Ogdensburg around any golf green in America if I had the chance. This is not just a woman with big hair willing to pose nearly prone in a provocative position. This is not just a woman famous for doing the freaky deaky with someone famous. She's all that and is from the north country, too. Be still my heart.

But my heart and everything else is 52 years old. I rarely use my driver anymore and I haven't sunk a meaningful putt in years. In short, I am no Tiger Woods. It's easy to see why a fat old divorced guy might find a 33-year-old glorified waitress worthy of a round on the links of love. Tiger, though, is ripped and rich. He is married to a Swedish model. He has two kids. It would seem that Ms. Formerly of Ogdensburg would have a better chance nailing a ticket to watch Woods play the Master's than she would of nailing him in his own master bedroom.

It is fascinating that she seems to have done the undoable. In the process, she became famous. It's all anyone in the north country is talking about these days. Afghanistan? Soooooo yesterday. The fraud that is the NCAA national football championship? Talk to me next year. Swine flu? Swine who? Did you hear that the girl with curly hair who used to play clarinet in the OFA band is saying she made music with Tiger Woods? Whooooo-hooooo, now you are talking. Now everyone is talking.

We love to talk about our north country celebrities. Thanks to Renee and Viggo and Frederick and Eric and Tony and the Lifesavers guy for giving us the chance. Ms. Formerly of Ogdensburg got herself famous and can't stop telling the world all about it. She is north country through and through. We'll be talking about that for years.

Richard Hayes Phillips of Canton recently published on-line an article that is to journalism what the Blair Witch Project was to cinema: Scary and presented in a way that makes it seem true.

But you knew the movie – even though pretending to be a documentary – was all in good fun. It was entertainment. The piece by Phillips was published on something pretending to be a legitimate news Web site. So if you read his article detailing serious flaws in St. Lawrence County vote counting after the recent elections, you might be led to think it was true. The problem is it wasn't.

In a nut, the rambling piece of pseudo-journalism used lots of numbers and data to say that there were more votes than voters who cast them in the 23rd Congressional District race. That truly would have been big news were it true. It wasn't. Phillips mixed and matched certified results with unofficial results and came up with his incorrect conclusions.

He made a human error. That's pretty entertaining if you consider the point he was trying to make in his piece was that the computerized voting machines were the problem in this election. And they were a problem. They froze up. They slowed the process of counting votes. But there's no evidence so far that shows bugs in the machines tainted election results. At least no evidence that includes facts, which are usually pretty important to a news story.

The scary part of all this is not that Phillips got it wrong ... it's that he got it wrong on something masquerading as a credible news Web site. It has the banner masthead you might see on a real newspaper. It runs wire service stories provided by legitimate news-gathering organizations. You might think by reading it that it strives to meet standards developed by real journalists and real news organizations over the years. The problem is it doesn't.

It is a problem because we are in an age when Web sites by honest-to-goodness news organizations are becoming more prevalent in the world of journalism. These organizations apply the same standards of fairness, accuracy and other journalistic tenets to the electronic product as they did when they were only providing news on paper or on television. The sites that are not real news organizations but play them on the Internet threaten the credibility of all the legitimate sites when they pump out a product for no other reason but to make a few bucks.

A butcher, baker or candlestick maker with a personal computer can fabricate these sites as easy pie - or hamburger or candles, for that matter. And by looking like a real news product they can trick some people into buying advertising. Pretty soon, they look like the real thing and are lumped in with the rest of the electronic journalism world – the ones that actually have trained reporters asking questions and separating the news from the chaff.

All this means that when these sites post something like Phillips wrote, the world assumes it is real. The world takes notice. Fiction becomes fact that spreads like a virus across the lines of the Internet.

It took about four hours for a real reporter at the Times to sort through the stuff Phillips had published and turn his “facts” back to fiction. It took a lot of phone calls. It took a lot of questions. It took care and analysis. It took everything that wasn't provided when the article was first published on the Internet.

The reporter's work prompted Phillips to send a letter to the editor of the Times - even though we didn't and wouldn't have run his piece as submitted - that included this sentence: “This is more than enough to convince me that the error is mine, not the Board of Elections. I owe an apology, and this is it.”

Had he sent his work to a real news organization in the first place, he never would have had to say he was sorry. The facts would have been checked before it was published. The problem is that isn't what happened.

Phillips promotes himself as one of the leading election fraud investigators in the United States, so he had nothing to gain by getting things wrong in this case. He was just a human who made an error. Maybe his greater error was in not sending the piece to be looked at by real journalists in the first place.

Real news organizations are also capable of human error, but the standards of the profession force them at all times to strive for accuracy and to minimalize the chance for mistakes. When you eliminate these standards from the equation, you get Web sites like the one who published Phillips's flawed piece. That is scary.

My young golden retriever’s whole butt wagged as Bill Lewis tapped her on the head with one hand and stoked a big cigar in the other. He made no attempt to pet my old dog laying nearby. My old BLACK dog.

Turns out the retired college professor whom I have been smoking stogies with semi-regularly for years at a friend’s farmhouse in Stockholm is a member of what’s been dubbed a white supremacist group by some pretty famous watchdogs of such things – the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Lewis is a member of the Council of Conservative Crazies or Crazy Conservatives for Christ or Conservatives who Crave Chocolate...something with three Cs. The name doesn’t matter. The watchdogs say they are a hate group actively recruiting in the north country.

An editor in Watertown turned me on to the watchdog group’s map on the Internet that, sure enough, identified Parishville as the home of the haters. To see the map, http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp#s=NY I was dumbfounded by the idea that I have lived here and worked in the news business here for so many years, yet needed some folks in Alabama to alert me there were racists in my neighborhood. Not neighbors who every now and then reveal some bigotry they harbor but usually keep hidden. These were supposedly real, live racists trying to recruit other haters into their fold.

I asked a reporter to do some digging and get to the bottom of this issue. After a day or so, he came back with two very unsettling words that started to clear things up: Miles Wolpin.

I know Wolpin well enough to say hello to him by his first name when I see him in a public place. I also know him well enough not to encourage any discussion beyond hello unless I am ready to hear some sort of anti-feminist or anti-government diatribe. But in all the years I have known him, I don’t recall any of his rants being racist. He never struck me as anything but a nut who was so far right he was wrong.

Wolpin, a retired political science professor and former town justice whose home is in Parishville, seems to be the darling of the Triple Cs, which the watchdogs think are pro-whites and anti-everyone else. So, by association, he becomes racist in the eyes of the watchdogs. And, by association, all the people who hang around with him in the group – Bill Lewis, for instance - carry the tag, too. It’s all pretty simple when you are making the call from Alabama I guess.

Bill Lewis is a host of things, and I’ll give you that liberal isn’t among them. We have an unspoken agreement that goes something like this: “I know what you are and you know what I am, so let’s talk about building cabinets or cleaning out our gutters or making chutney ... anything but politics.” That said, my clear and reasonable liberal views slip out every now and then. And his crazy right wing notions make an appearance on occasion in our conversations. So I have a pretty good idea where he stands ... and it is not on racist ground.

Maybe the founders of the Triple Cs intended that the club foster racism. Maybe in other parts of the country, the Triple Cs proudly carry the racist flag. But the Triple Cs that Wolpin leads are the the black sheep of white supremacist groups.

Wolpin can spew messages bloated by academia that make George W. look like a wimpy liberal in comparison. But he’s pretty weak on hatred of other races. Lewis is all about liberty, justice and the pursuit of crazy conservatism for all. But he’s also got black friends. That probably doesn’t get you a merit badge from any white supremacy club in America.

Wolpin and his crew have managed to stay virtually unknown outside of watchdog Web sites and a small circle of north country people despite years of “actively recruiting” members. They are really nothing but a bunch of crabby old guys with political views most people would think are way out there. They are a lot like the women I have dated in my life: Crazy but not dangerous. And some of them are fond of dogs ... even black ones.

I was combing the Times looking for something serious to write about today when I came across this sentence buried in a story by one of my reporters:

“A man was arrested by village police on top of the town hall for masturbating naked in front of an apartment window next door.”

That's quite a to-do list this fella had: 1.) Get naked. Check. 2.) Get on top of a public building. Check. 3.) Masturbate in front of an apartment window. Check. 4.) Get arrested. Check.

This actually was a good plan if you take out the parts about standing on a public building in front of an apartment window and getting arrested. But I don't want to dwell on this guy's questionable decision-making skills. The point is I found this tidbit of information while reading a newspaper.

Combing a newspaper – unlike combing my hair – is something I am happy to say I am still able to do. You can buy a Watertown Daily Times, an Ogdensburg Journal or a Daily Courier-Observer in St. Lawrence County. You can turn the pages. You can spill your coffee on the front page and swear. You can always find a second-hand copy of one of St. Lawrence County's newspapers laying around the neighborhood diner.

The people in Ann Arbor, Mich., can no longer make such claims. They used to have a fine newspaper called the Ann Arbor News. For 174 years you could buy an Ann Arbor News to comb. And then all at once you couldn't. The owners cut out the cost of ink, paper and delivery by morphing the News into a Web site only product. You still get the news, but it's tough to wrap fish with it when you are done. My brother who lives in that area immediately called his sibling in the biz to vent.

“How can this happen? People like reading an honest-to-God paper newspaper, don't they? I mean, what's better than sitting down on Sunday morning with a cup of java and the paper?”

He was preaching to the paperboy. I told him to take his questions to his children who are in their 20s. They didn't grow up as we did checking the newspaper first thing in the morning to see if the Detroit Tigers won a game the night before. They checked the Internet on the night the game was played. They didn't check the obit page each day to see who died. They got text messages when there was a death they cared about. Technology has made life a lot more immediate – and newspapers, as much as I love them, have trouble keeping up. They are sadly becoming yesterday's news.

Who you are and how you act are learned behaviors. The people born well after my brother and I learned by hitting enter buttons instead of by turning pages. It's not that they have anything against newspapers, they just aren't as familiar to them as a keyboard and computer monitor or a cell phone. Newsprint and ink is familiar to people around my age. It's what we grew up with. It's what we know.

We move with the times and go online for our news more with every passing day, but we continue to hold on to our old school ways. Getting our news online is fine. It's fast. It's effecient. It's right now. But we still need that choice of having a newspaper that you can read when you're sitting on the can. One you can read without an Internet connection. Fewer communities each day are having that option.

The north country is so far bucking that national trend. We are not one of those places where the news is about the death of a newspaper. Naked guy partying with himself on top of Potsdam Town Hall grabs the headlines here. And you can read about it online or in the paper. It's still your choice.

Mystery to me: Last week as I was walking on Pierrepont, Main and then Maple streets in Potsdam, I noticed piles of bird seed in the middle of the sidewalk. This was not the product of a leaking bag someone was carrying – they were neatly poured piles, usually about 20 to 25 steps apart. The piles were black oil sunflower seeds for some stretches and thistle seeds for others. They were obviously put there for a reason, and I doubt that feeding birds on a well-traveled walkway was the reason. If someone knows anything about this, give a shout.

Growing old: I cut myself shaving the other day. My ear bled for several minutes. I am pretty certain when you are bald but have to shave your ears, the days of pretending that you are not growing older are over.

Twenty-three skidoo: Somebody in blogsville put together a great montage of Fox News reporting about the 23rd Congressional District election. It is eight minutes of them punditing about the victory for all right wing screwheads in one of the most important races in the country, and then 30 seconds of them explaining how insignificant it was that the Conservative candidate actually failed to win. Really good stuff. Check it out ... http://www.dailykos.com/tv/w/002316/

Just to be clear: The JAS in All that JAS refers to my given name: Jeffrey Alan Savitskie. Somebody responding to this blog suggested it might actually be short for, “Jeffrey's A Socialist.” Which I thought was really funny in a P.J. O'Rourke kind of way. The world would be a much better place with more funny Republicans.

Looks aren't everything: Another person responding to this blog suggested that the mug shot appearing with this column makes me look intelligent. Then the person spent about seven long paragraphs telling me that I might be the most ignorant person ever spawned. I won't quibble with either notion, but I do want to thank photographer Jason Hunter for Photoshopping the appearance of intelligence into the photo he took of me. Amazing how far technology has come, isn't it?

More from the 23rd: A former Massena resident wrote me to ask how it was that issues like abortion and gay marriage had worked their way into the north country election. He pointed out that where he lived now they tended to focus on issues such as unemployment, the economy and fighting two wars at the same time. And what socialist state does he live in now? Indiana – where Daylight Savings Time is considered too liberal of a program in which to participate.

Fit to be Thaied: It was August when I first wrote with the glee of a foodaholic that a Thai restaurant was coming soon to Potsdam. My evidence was a big sign on the window of the building that said something like, “Thai restaurant coming soon,” and papered windows that made it appear people were inside secretly trying to get it ready for customers. Since then, the windows are still papered and the sign is still up ... but it sure doesn't look like anything is going on inside. I hope they didn't mean “soon” in the same way I mean it when I say I plan to drop 20 pounds soon. I've been saying that for about three years.

Can't hack it: The bankruptcy filing by Hacketts and closing of its Gouverneur store sure has to make you wonder how long it will be before that north country fixture is playing cribbage with Ames in department store heaven. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20091110/NEWS03/311109950 Or maybe a more positive thought would be that the former owners whose name is on the sign can win a few legal battles to reclaim the once-great store and get it out of business purgatory. I guess we'll have to wait and see how it all shakes out.

I've spent my life telling people that I am a voter who looks at all candidates and decides which one is the best based on experience, positions on issues, track record, blah, blah, blah.

Yes, I am that guy. The one who proudly maintains that political orientation doesn't enter into the equation when determining who I think is the best person for the job.

Then I always pick the Democrat when I go to vote. I have good friends who preach the same gospel of non-partisanship and then always vote Republican. I think the truth is that most people are one or the other – Democrat or Republican - no matter what they say at cocktail parties or after church.

But Dede Scozzafava was going to be my ticket out of decades of posing as an independent thinker. She was going to get my vote in the 23rd Congressional District race and become the first Republican to be endorsed by me in nearly 34 years and who knows how many elections.

That was before the all-capitals, bold and big headline screamed out at me from the front page of my Times: SCOZZAFAVA BOWS OUT. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20091101/NEWS03/311019920/0/FRONTPAGE

It was Sunday morning so my first thought was that God didn't want me voting for a Republican – even a clear-thinking, moderate one who has a grasp on local issues gained through years of service in political offices from Gouverneur mayor to state assemblywoman. It took a few cups of coffee to shake out the cobwebs and conclude that God probably has bigger things to worry about than my voting record or a congressional race in an area the national media describes as, “somewhere in New York.”

Turns out that God didn't force Dede to throw in the towel, it was mostly a group of Republicans with a bunch of money and a dream to send a message to moderates in their ranks. A “my dogma is bigger than yours” type thing.

These conservative powerbrokers picked a candidate – Doug Hoffman - to spew general messages of tax cuts and less government and pro-life and anti-gay marriage. Then they bankrolled him onto the ballot as a Conservative Party candidate. Dede couldn't compete. All she had was a proven record as a state legislator and local knowledge to help her understand how to do the job in a way that would best serve the north country. That apparently doesn't buy you votes these days. You need the cash.

Hoffman's cash didn't come from somebody in Hermon or Hopkinton or Adams Center or from anywhere that cares about the north country. It came from folks who know so little about the north country that they would likely believe it if you told them Alexandria Bay was an exotic dancer. They know the 23rd Congressional District only as a place they might be able to make a political point for their team nationally. They might know where it is exactly, but I doubt it. They probably just describe it as “somewhere in New York.”

It is somewhere, by the way, where their handpicked Hoffman robot doesn't even live. A minor concern, I suppose, if you have your eyes on a bigger prize and aren't worried about the little people who actually do live in the district. Hoffman and his moneybaggers might be pro-life, but they sure aren't pro-north country life.

I looked at all the candidates, and based on experience, positions on issues and track record, Dede was the best choice. I could have cast a symbolic vote for her and legitimized my claim that my interest is in picking the best person, not party. It was an option I thought about well and long while I stood in the voting booth with my Sharpie marker and paper ballot. Then I chose the Democrat.

Bill Owens may not be Dede. He may not be my inaugural Republican vote. But most importantly, he's not Hoffman ... and he won. That is a victory for the north country.

Steve Warr is on a mission to do away with the village of Potsdam.

This wouldn't be nearly as newsworthy if he was one of the local nutjobs who periodically come out of the woodwork to protest something the village government is or isn't doing. It wouldn't be that newsworthy if he was just a longtime businessman with an opinion that village government is costly and unnecessary. What makes Warr's quest interesting is he is a village trustee – or at least soon will be.

The Democrat is running unopposed for a village seat in the Nov. 3 election. His campaign strategy is: “Hire me so I can work to get myself fired.” Well, not fired exactly, eliminated. Or consolidated. Or dissolved. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20091024/NEWS05/310249959 Call it what you want, he'll lose his job as a trustee if he is able to make good on his campaign promise to get rid of the village government. He WANTS to lose his job.

I like the way he thinks. But I also think he'll still have a job four years from now when his term expires. The idea of getting rid of the village isn't new ... people have been talking about doing it for more than a decade. The problem is it makes far too much sense for it to actually happen. People don't generally like change. And there is always some measure of comfort in the devil you know.

The truth is the change proposed by Warr probably wouldn't end up being that much of a change. There would be no village government, but services would likely continue under a new master and need to be paid for by residents. The only thing that would change is what you put on the “pay to” line of your checks. The devil would still be there, he would just have a different name.

If the goal is to lower the cost of living in what now is the village, getting rid of the government is a good first step. A baby step. Saving real money, though, will take more than losing a board of trustees here, a village administrator there. It will take residents willing to say things like we don't need to spend a boatload of bucks for a police force that doesn't do much beyond breaking up beer parties and giving out traffic tickets.

The generally safe streets of Potsdam would not go to the devil if we didn't have village cops. State police, the St. Lawrence County Sheriff's Department and SUNY Potsdam cops surely could fill the gaps well enough if we didn't have the village blue to stop students from occasionally relieving themselves from the pressures of college life in the middle of Market Street. So losing the local patrols would have no practical effect on Potsdam residents other than lowering their village tax bill by a considerable chunk of change. And I can almost guarantee it won't happen.

People like the perceived protection of having a local police force. It's comfortable seeing “Potsdam” on the side of a cop car in your neighborhood ... and comfort most often trumps cost-benefit analysis when it comes to paying for police. It's easy to complain about taxes being too high. It's not as easy to accept the cuts that would have to be made to lower the levy.

Steve is probably going to lose his fight to lose his job. But even if he wins and puts himself out of work, it won't be much of a victory if all we end up with is a different devil collecting the same high taxes for services – needed ones, luxuries and ones that aren't vital – that we've always gotten.

Paul Matott doesn't look like you. He doesn't look like me. Like lots of folks these days, he's got a lot of tattoos on his body. But what sets him apart from others is his face is literally a work of art.

I don't know his story. I don't know if the intricate etchings that blanket his face from the neck up mean something special. I don't know how, when or why he made the decision to become a man of color. I don't know him except to say hi when I walk by with my girl dogs and he is sitting in front of the Sleepy Hollow tattoo parlor in Potsdam where he works.

I know that he lives on my street. I know that he probably takes the same path home each night from Sleepy Hollow – shortcutting the trip by going through the Clarkson Inn parking lot and a small field to get to Hamilton Street. I know that three guys and a two-by-four jumped and beat him when he was making that walk Friday night. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20091020/NEWS05/310209948 I don't know why.

I know that the motive wasn't robbery. Paul says he had a laptop computer and $1,300 on him when they came out of the bushes wielding pepper spray and the lumber. When they ran away and jumped in a red SUV waiting for them on Bay Street, he still had the money and the laptop. So if they were robbers, they were really bad at it.

I am no Columbo, but it sure looks like this band of young punks staked out Paul's nightly route for the sole purpose of ambushing him and beating him up. I can only guess why: He didn't look like them. That is more disturbing than if the motive was robbery.

Robbery – as heinous as it might be – is a crime I can at least understand. Robbery solves a need for money. Beating someone because they are different solves no need that I can think of. I hope the police ask the punks when they catch them what pleasure they got out of their act - what need was solved by leaving Paul laying in the field.

And I do think they will be caught. If the motivation wasn't money, it had to be some sort of twisted bragging rights within a twisted social sphere where these kids hang out. So they have to tell people what they did or they lose whatever value the act had for them. The more people you have trying to keep the secret, the better the chance it will escape the twisted sphere.

The farther from ground zero the secret gets, the more likely it will find its way to a person whose sense of right and wrong leans more closely to the right. Maybe that will be a parent. Maybe a policeman. Maybe it will be someone who wants to claim the $500 reward being offered by Paul's boss. I can almost guarantee these kids will be caught. Their success on this very disturbing mission - like Paul's injuries - will only be temporary.

I don't know if their actions will be considered a “hate crime” and subject to tougher penalties. You might have to be gay, or Jewish, or black, or old, or member of some other traditional minority to be officially hated under federal law. I am not sure Paul qualifies. He's just a guy who made the choice not to look like me or you or the twisted punks who needed numbers and lumber to prove they were tough.

Hacketts President Herbert Becker has a bunch of jobs he wants to fill at his company's department store in Ogdensburg. St. Lawrence County has a bunch of people out of work. It doesn't get more yin and yang, more ham and egg, more Tracy and Hepburn, than that.

Except when Becker offered up jobs, the jobless said, “no thanks.” Yin gave yang the brush off. Egg kicked ham off the plate. Tracy and Hepburn .... well, they're just dead. Maybe that wasn't a good comparison.

In any event, Becker was shocked when he got no response to advertisements seeking applicants for 12 clerk, cashier and sales positions at his store.

“It seems so strange. I thought we'd put up a few notices and we'd be overrun, but we're not getting anybody," he said in a recent Times article. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20091005/NEWS05/310059979

It does seem strange on its face. Like a homeless person refusing to accept free lodging because the drapes in the apartment being offered clash with his Army green knapsack. Or like me turning down a cheeseburger. It is not something that you would think would happen.

But it did. And maybe it isn't so strange. Hacketts hasn't been the poster child of stability lately.

It was a cool store for a long time. You could buy a high-end All-Clad frying pan or a plunger. A Woolrich brand sweater or fishing tackle. A weed whacker or bottle of Drano. It offered quality, variety, and stayed open until 9 p.m. on weekdays. People liked Hacketts.

It grew from its Ogdensburg roots and added stores. It got bigger. It got sold. It got bigger. It got bigger. Then it tanked. Financial troubles led to months and months of nearly empty shelves in its stores. Workers in the stores would tell tales of being kept in the dark about the company's problems. They'd come to work each day with little to do and only a sliver of gratefulness that they had jobs at all. People started liking Hacketts a lot less.

Then stores started closing. Watertown – gone. Canton – gone. Massena – gone. Potsdam – gone. Jobs – gone. Massena rose from the dead and reopened. Gouverneur received the death sentence but got a last-minute stay of execution. Store closings and near-closings aren't the kind of things that makes potential workers bang down the door for the chance to wear a Hacketts smock.

At least that is what Becker – hired to turn the struggling business around – is finding out. People want jobs, but more than that, they want job security. Becker can promise them that a turnaround is on the horizon, as he does in ads that shout in bold letters, “Hacketts is here to stay!” But words aren't the best building blocks of confidence in a company. He needs to roll out the turnaround and let people see it for themselves. Until that happens, he should expect some rough going on the hiring front.

It may take a while to remake Hacketts into the store it once was – the one that people liked. I hope Becker succeeds, because I am one of those people. My winter coat was purchased at Hacketts. I bought two of my bird feeders there. I kept Yankee Candle in business with birthday, anniversary and Christmas presents from Hacketts over the years. The paint in my living room came from its shelves. I have been a fan for a long time. It would be sad if the company ends up like Tracy and Hepburn.

The guy slumping next to me at the bar perked up when he heard a television news reporter on Cornwall Island say that the Seaway International Bridge might close again because of a dispute between the Canadian government and the Akwesasne Mohawks. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090923/NEWS05/309239966

“She ish gonna get inta deep doo-doo for calling the Mohawks a slobberin' nation,” he said.

I explained to him that she had said “sovereign nation,” but his head was back down on the bar and he was snoring. Good thing, too, because he might have asked what she meant by that and the answer would have given him the spins quicker than the whiskey he was drinking.

The Mohawks are a sovereign nation except when the United States or Canada says they are not and starts bossing them around. So it is technically correct to incorrectly say that the Mohawks and the land they live on is sovereign. I warned you this could make your head spin.

Take Cornwall Island, for instance. No one disputes that it is part of the Akwesasne reservation and sovereign land of the Mohawk tribe. Except the Canadian government owns it. So when a Mohawk returns home to the island from the United States, they have to report to Canadian Customs. If they don't, Canada comes and seizes their sovereign cars.

Canadian Customs used to be on what is but isn't the sovereign Mohawk land of Cornwall Island. The Mohawks for years put up with that breach of their not-so-sovereign sovereignty. But when Canada decided to give their border guards guns this year, the Mohawks protested and the bridge was closed. During the time the bridge was closed, the Akwesasne Mohawk Casino on the American side of the Indian reservation lost an estimated $3 million worth of Canadian business. If it closes for good, as some Mohawks are calling for, it could be financially devasting to the casino. Nobody ever said pseudo-sovereignty was cheap.

The bridge reopened after the border guards were moved off the island and into the city of Cornwall. This means those folks living on Cornwall Island now can't go straight home after a night at the casino in the States. Well, they can, but like I said, then Canada takes away their car. Sovereignty gives. Sovereignty takes away.

On the gives side of the ledger, both of the North American federal governments allow the Mohawks to sell tax-free cigarettes and give them the freedom to let people smoke them inside public buildings like casinos – which were not legal to operate on sovereign Indian land until the feds figured out how lucrative sovereignty could be.

On the takes side of the ledger, when the governments figure out a way to collect taxes on the cigarettes, that strand of sovereignty will be stripped away from the Mohawks faster than you can spell Akwesasne.

The Mohawks clearly get to operate under different rules from other Americans or Canadians, but calling them sovereign is like calling a man pregnant: Saying it doesn't make it so. And it is ridiculous. Yet we do it every day in papers and on televised news reports without ever having to make a correction or clarification after the story runs.

I am sort of glad I didn't have to explain all this to my drunken friend. I doubt he would have been able to follow the story. Then again, maybe it all makes more sense if you are too drunk to think.

Three times I have edited stories about the Ogdensburg School Board voting against filling a seat left when one of its members resigned. Three times I came away shaking my head.

The vacancy leaves an even number of votes and creates the possibility of ties. Sounds like an easy enough problem to solve. You fill the seat. It's math in its simplest form: Add one person and you will always have a majority on one side of any vote. But the city school board keeps failing the test. Four members vote to fill the seat. Four vote against. That's a tie. See the problem, folks?

The board members voting to stomp on common sense and logic by keeping the tie-breaking seat empty apparently don't see the problem. And none of them - President Frederick P. Bean and board members Angela M. Rufa, Paul M. Drummond and Vicky M. Peo - have given a clear reason why they are content to maintain the deadlock in a vote that would remove the possibility of deadlocks.

"The law says we may fill the seat ... it doesn't say we have to or shall," Mr. Bean said recently.

You don't have to go swimming or turn on your air conditioner when it's 95 degrees outside, either, but both of those things are still really good ideas. Choosing to sweat doesn't make near as much sense.

The four filibuster types are not just choosing to sweat, they are at the beach covered in blankets and wearing Arctic parkas in August.

And it gets sillier. Filibuster Angela Rufa - after helping tank the third vote - suggested others should respect her opinion and quit bringing up the issue of whether to fill the seat. Her opinion – and the others in the deadlock gang - apparently is that it is a bad idea to eliminate the possibility of tie votes that could stop the board from accomplishing things for the children in the school district. They are saying they welcome the chance to be an ineffective board. That's not an opinion that needs respecting. It needs rejecting.

To be fair to the filibuster four, they haven't technically given an opinion or offered insight as to why they don't want to add a ninth member to the board. They voice their opinions with their puzzling votes. And as far as the issue of tie votes with an eight person board goes, Mr. Bean has a plan of attack should that arise: “We'll deal with it,” he said. Quite a plan, Mr. President.

There must be more to the story. Something none of the board members want to talk about in public. There is no other way to explain the odd behavior of these four board members. Or maybe they just love the irony that a tie vote is stopping an action that could stop tie votes.

There have been residents at meetings who ask them to do the sensible thing and fill the seat. Joseph Lightfoot, the guy who left the seat, has urged them to fill it. Former board members have attended the meetings to give them a nudge in the right direction. Nine candidates ran for three seats in the last school board election, so there are plenty of people out there who would be interested in serving on the board. They easily could fill the seat. But it appears they won't. Tthat seat will likely remain empty until an election in May, thanks to the filibuster four.

That means no more having to scratch my head after editing a story about another tie vote. I suppose my chafed scalp is the only winner in this whole deal.

Love Nugget had one word when she read that Potsdam's economic development specialist thinks there is a good chance a major retailer will step in to fill the void left by the closing of Hacketts.

Nordstrom.

Nordstrom is a major retailer where you can listen to someone playing a grand piano while you browse for brassieres that lift while separating you from a couple hundred dollars. I don't think it would be a good fit in a shopping plaza that has a store where you can save a nickel on your groceries by bringing your own bags and a Cheers-like bar where a lighted sign keeps track of every time a local Norm knocks back a Jaegerbomb.

But my woman is a dreamer on a grand scale. She still holds out hope that I will one day quit sneezing into my hand and then wiping the microscopic bugs on my pant legs. I told you she was a dreamer.

In her defense, though, her dreams – aside from those related to my personal hygiene - are not that much different from James A. Murphy's. Murphy is the economic development guru who gets paid real money for predicting the Hacketts building won't stay empty for long. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090918/NEWS05/309189940 His dreams are not nearly as specific as Nugget's. A major retailer? K-Mart? Target? Bed and Bath? Pet Smart? Home Depot? Nordstorm? Who knows?

If Murphy does, he is not telling. He doesn't have to. He is paid only to dream. His argument is that Potsdam's economy is solid, so it's a no-brainer that some major retailer will want to set up shop here and exploit that fact. Best Buy? Costco? Kohl's? Macy's? Who knows?

I am leaning toward none of the above. A lot of these stores are failing in big markets in this economy. I can't see a reason they would want to try their luck in the north country. Potsdam's market isn't big and the economy is about as solid as St. Lawrence River ice in early November.

Some time ago – when the national economy was booming – I remember complaining to a local lifer how little the value of my home was increasing from year-to-year. “You should count your blessings, son. We get sort of giddy up here when the value of our home doesn't decrease from one year to the next,” he said.

That lesson in north country economics has stuck with me. When the national economy is good, ours is bad. When the national economy is bad, ours is bad. Economic developers may be the only people sporting rose-colored glasses around here. Them and my Love Nugget.

The Nugget has only been around here for about four years – most of which living in the Adirondacks, where major retailers are considered nightmares and not part of the economic dream. But she spent 30 years before that in Los Angeles, where shopping is a vocation and I am pretty certain that dreaming is required by city code. So when she sees the empty Hacketts building, she really does have visions of grand pianos and bras that cost as much as my first car.

Murphy's vision may not be as grand, but it is about as realistic. Would Hacketts be packing up its $25 candles and trying to sell them in Ogdensburg if the market was strong in Potsdam? Well, maybe that's not a fair question. Hacketts has its own problems that aren't related to location, location, location. That Hacketts lasted so long in Potsdam is probably more surprising than its recent failure. But I still can't think of a major retailer that would fare better in a town that is short on people, short on jobs and short on money. A town that already has a Walmart and almost has a Lowe's where our limited money can be spent.

It would be great if I end up being wrong. I am just not very confident that will be the case. Major retailers don't get to be major retailers by dreaming. They make decisions for locating stores based on demographics and things like facts. They leave the dreaming to economic development types and middle-aged women who live in the north country and have a jones for shopping.

Business Thai: The Lowe's store in Potsdam may be the exception to the “if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, you've got a duck” rule. The building on Route 56 in the town clearly looks like a Lowe's store - and month after month some official quacks that it will open in the next month or so - yet there it sits closed and without a lot of activity. I sure hope the “coming soon” Thai Cuisine restaurant at 29 Maple St. isn't adopting the Lowe's business model. There is a sign that says it's coming ... the windows are papered over like you always see before a new business opens ... but there doesn't seem to be a lot of activity going on. And in weeks of trying, our Potsdam reporter has been unable to find the owner to talk about plans for the business. Could the curse of 29 Maple St. be striking before this latest restaurant even opens? http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090821/BLOGS06/908219991/ Or is the owner just trying to get his duck sauce in a row before opening just to ensure it doesn't fail? Stay tuned.

The Tao of weather: When it is 60 degrees in May, I am dancing and singing as I reach for my shorts and Hawaiian shirt. When it is 60 degrees in September, I am crabbing and moaning as I reach for my blue jeans and hoodie sweatshirt. I can't find the science to explain the phenomenon, but 60 degrees in the spring always feels warmer than 60 degrees in the fall.

Dogging it: A friend recently told me that I had officially become one of Potsdam's “characters” because I can be seen every day walking the village streets with three of my dogs: one each at the end of leashes held in my hands and the third tethered to my waist. Most often the young golden retriever is pulling me, the old fat black dog is lagging, and the schnauzer bred for rat hunting is tugging at my midsection as she scouts for squirrels. Not sure who were the other characters my friend lumped me in with, but I am hoping she did not put me on the same list as the guy who used to walk the streets with a paddleball racket swatting at balls only he could see.

Dogging it, part two: Maybe my friend didn't really mean to call me a character. Maybe she meant that I have become one of Potsdam's familiar sights – sort of like the field of toilets at Market and Pleasant streets. That would make more sense to me, because it is true that I get lots of beeps and waves from people driving by when I am walking the girls. Most of the time I don't have a clue who these random folks are .... but they seem to know me. And I can't tell you how many people don't know me when I don't have the girls in tow. I'd have a good chunk of money if I had a buck for every time someone sitting next to me in a bar said: “Oh, you are THAT guy ... I didn't recognize you without your dogs.”

Guilt by association: The other day I let the girls off their leashes in the park and we came upon a woman with her dog. As I was doing my usual “the black dog growls but she has no plan B” routine for the woman, I recognized that we had met the dog mine was giving the alpha treatment to several times before. “Oh, is that Macy?” I asked the woman. When she said it was, I asked if she was dog-sitting and got a puzzled look and no response. So I asked again. This time she said, “Um, no ... Macy is my dog.” So I blundered forward: “Macy is your dog? I thought she belonged to this couple I always see her with down here.” The woman responded: “Um, I am half of that couple.” Turns out I recognized the dog but not the owner without her boyfriend to complete my mental picture. Funny how the brain works ... or in this case, didn't.

Two kinds of people: There are the kind who see me coming to a corner while walking the girls and they speed up to get there first so they don't have to stop for us. They then roll through the stop sign and hurry on their way. Then there are the kind who see me coming and stop 10 yards from the stop sign and wave us through. I like this kind of person.

Crappy way to act: I am so puzzled when I see adults walking their dogs and letting them dump in someone else's yard without picking it up. When Fido dumps in his own yard, I would assume these people don't pick it up and throw it onto their neighbor's grass. I would also assume they would think that's a ludicrously rude thing to do. But that is pretty much what they are doing when they strap Fido on a leash and walk him down to a neighboring house to let him do his duty. As the owner of the poopingest dogs in North America, I am here to tell you that there is nothing hard (or disgusting) about carrying plastic bags and picking up after your animals on a walk. And if you plan it right, you can take a route that has a garbage can within a block or two of ground zero so that you can get rid of your load without having to tote it too far. Offenders – and you know who you are – give all dog owners a bad name when they don't do their duty and pick up their dog's duty. How about you all clean up your act?

All economics is local: My friend in Michigan spent decades working in the auto industry before losing his job to the poor economy several months ago. Last night he sounded about nine beers into a 12-pack when he called to tell me he got a job. In Michigan. In the auto industry. I once heard the economy explained this way: A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. The depression just ended for my friend and his family. Maybe this is the start of something good on a bigger scale. Everybody cross their fingers.

So long summer, we hardly knew you.

The north country's best season sort of spit the bit in 2009. It rained. It was mostly cool. It rained. But that doesn't mean summer up here was a bummer. Summer in the north country is like what the late comedian Richard Pryor once said about sex and pizza: When it is good, it is very, very good. And when it is bad, it's still pretty good.

I got lucky during the pretty good summer of '09. Mother Nature cooperated almost the whole time I was on vacation. There was nothing but sun and blue sky as a back drop for a couple of eagles who flew overhead when I was in a boat fishing and touring the Thousand Islands in August. That same day we got close enough to a loon to see that one of her little bitty babies was hitching a ride atop her back while its sibling floated just behind mom on the St. Lawrence River.

This was way better than pretty good. Even my friend and guide who grew up in Alex Bay and might just be the only legitimate curmudgeon under 30 was positively excited about the wildlife gifts we were treated to that day. Plus we caught some fish and boated our limit of empty Labatt Blue Light cans before docking at a waterside bar. Just another day in paradise.

OK, so maybe the north country isn't paradise. But it is still a pretty good place to be. We live where people vacation. Sometimes in the hubbub of everyday life that is easy to forget.

I forget almost every winter. The athlete in me packed up a bunch of torn knee ligaments and left town years ago, so I don't do a lot of the winter sporty things like skiing or snowshoeing. I don't understand the lure of standing over a hole in ice to fish in sub-zero temperatures. I don't own a snowmobile. I don't hunt. So my winter fun is pretty much limited to mocking people who vehemently opposed the development of Potsdam's Walmart when I see them in the tofu aisle of the big box while doing my weekly grocery shopping. That's fun and gets me out of the weather, but it's not the kind of thing you'd find on a brochure for paradise.

I'll be the first to admit that north country winters can be brutal. When they are bad, they are very, very bad. And when they are good, they are still pretty bad. But I have months before I have to start really griping about that. Today I am all about the summer I love. A summer that except for spurts and spots, didn't show up for true until just before Labor Day.

A little late for my garden and the tomatoes that have struggled under gray skies and through cool days, but in time to remind me that there are fewer better places to be than here when the livin' is easy and the corn stalks are high.

Be assured that I am not being paid by any area Chamber of Commerce to write this column. And I am not saying nice things about the north country summer because my girlfriend fears that the more-controversial positions I've taken in this space are going to get us run out of town and urged me to tone it down for a while. I told Love Nugget that I would never steer away from controversy simply because she wanted to quit wearing a babushka and sunglasses when she went out with me in public.

The truth is that opinions are going to spark people to praise you if they agree with your position or call you a jackass if they don't. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090910/OPINION02/309109975 It doesn't matter what the topic is.

I know there are people out there who don't understand that the north country during the summer is closer to Nirvana than it is to Ottawa. These are the folks who don't fish or swim or hike or camp or golf or appreciate seeing eagles overhead. They are the ones who couldn't care less that they could walk down to the end of the block on a breezy summer night and see a majestic great blue heron silhouetted against a fading sun in the rippling waters of the Raquette River. They are the ones who would call me a jackass for thinking it is special that I can and do. And I do it a lot.

I know there are still plenty of good days left to enjoy before Old Man Winter comes around to screw things up, but the passing of Labor Day forces you to acknowledge that another north country summer is in the books. Maybe it wasn't the best one ever, but it was still pretty good. It always is when you are a jackass lucky enough to live in the north country.

I have worked at the Watertown Daily Times since 1993 and fully understand that I could get fired today if I happen to tell my boss to go pound salt. The reality of being an “at-will” worker is you are free to be fired.

But reality is not always black-and-white. That my boss could fire me doesn't mean he would fire me if I lost my mind for a moment. He might yell at me. He might ask me if I quit taking my medication or started hammering Jim Beam and diets for lunch. He might even suggest I get a CAT scan done to see if something came loose between the cerebral cortex and frontal lobes of my brain. And he surely would write up some sort of reprimand for my personnel file.

My boss is a pretty fair and reasonable guy. He would look at my whole body of work, weigh it against my digression, and ultimately conclude that I earned some slack by not sucking at my job for more than a decade.

Reality for former Potsdam Village Court Clerk Shelley A. Warner is a lot different. She doesn't work for my boss. She doesn't actually work for any boss since Judge Joseph T. Welch fired her recently. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090827/NEWS05/308279944

In the interest of full disclosure: I like Shelley Warner. She started her job about the same time that I started mine and over the years has always been honest, forthright and helpful to me and the reporters who work for me. She answered questions when she could and told us to pound salt when she couldn't. She did have some strong opinions about issues and people within the village, but I can never remember her saying anything bad about the judges for whom she worked.

Her firing surprised the salt out of me.

The comments we received on our Web site after publishing the stories about her firing varied greatly. There were the black-and-whiters who said the judge had the authority to do what he wants, so there is nothing wrong with what he did. There were the Warner supporters who mourned the village's loss of a proven court clerk. And there were the Welch bashers who basically said the judge had all the management skills of a toad.

All these people are right. Welch was free to do what he wanted, so there legally was nothing wrong with what he did. Warner had surely proven herself by serving the village in the job for some 16 years. And you just might get warts if you rub up against the judge during a seminar about good management.

Like I said, I work for a good manager, so I know a little bit about what is good management. Plus I am the most beloved manager in the editorial department of the Watertown Daily Times in all of St. Lawrence County. When I say beloved, I mean that hardly any of my reporters have ever told me to my face to pound salt. Of the few who have, none have been fired without first being formally reprimanded for doing so.

That is the fair and reasonable thing to do – whether you have to or not. There is no evidence that Warner in more than 5,500 days on the job ever received a formal reprimand for doing something wrong. She says she hasn't and no one on the side of firing her has disputed that. Welch hasn't pubicly said why he fired her, but he reportedly told her the reason was insubordination.

The problem is Welch didn't bother to make his case against Warner during the nine months or so she worked for him. He found her guilty and sentenced her to unemployment despite the evidence that she was a good worker who amassed zero formal reprimands during her career at the court. That's not fair or reasonable.

Warner was the victim of a bad boss. There is not much she can do about it but look for a job for the first time in a long time. I'd like to think she has a work record and skill that will get her out of the unemployment line fairly quickly. I also think when Welch comes up for re-election and asks for my vote, I will tell him to go pound salt.

I read the story twice about Carrie L. Whalen stealing money from the non-profit group she headed and still can’t figure out why she was crying in court after pleading guilty and effectively getting no sentence for the crime. She should have been dancing. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090826/NEWS05/308269965

She got no time in jail. She got no fine. She was basically ordered not to steal from her employer anymore – but if she did plan on continuing her career as a white collar criminal, the court said she couldn’t do it at a non-profit agency for at least a year. She was also ordered to pay back the $25,500 she stole from Citizens Against Violent Crimes. It was sort of a slap on the wrist without the slap or the wrist.

I may be missing something, but here’s how all this adds up to me: Whalen orchestrated a scheme that amounted to getting an interest-free loan for more than a year without having to put down any collateral. Her sentence was a pretty sweet deal, not punishment for a crime. It also seems to be par for the courts.

Former Denmark Supervisor Daniel L. Hurlburt earlier this year admitted to taking $11,511 from his town’s coffers while in office. Debra L. Degone a few years ago stole $17,000 from Key Bank in Watertown. Both copped pleas similar to what Whalen walked away with: Pay the money back and go home. No jail. No fines.

I don’t see the deterrent value in such sentencing. It sends the message that if you steal from your employer, you either a.) get away with it. b.) get away with it for a while and then have to repay the loan. You face a greater penalty for driving a few miles an hour faster than the posted speed limit on Route 11.

I wonder if Whalen got caught speeding on the way to turn herself in for stealing this week. That might explain her crying jag in front of the judge – she faced actually having to pay something for a crime she committed. Maybe that is what made her sad.

Her tears might have made more sense if she had some sort of sorrowful tale to tell the court when being sentenced. You know, like she needed the money she stole to pay for quadruple-bypass surgery on a favorite aunt who was left penniless after sending her life-savings to an orphaned prince in Nigeria. Or maybe that she needed the money to save abandoned puppies from being euthanized throughout the north country. I’d be tearing up with her had she held up a photo of an 8-week-old labradoodle retriever and wailed in front of the judge, “I just couldn’t let this little cutie patootie die!”

Turns out Whalen had no such story to tell. She spent the money on things like hotel rooms, eating in restaurants, clothing, and equipment for horses. Stuff someone making $56,000 a year – a nice salary by north country standards – coulda, woulda and shoulda been able to buy without “borrowing” money from her employer.

CAVA was set up to help people. Whalen used her post at CAVA to help herself. Then she got caught. Then she got teary-eyed. Then she found it’s not always true that if you do the crime, you do the time. That is a crying shame.

The good news is there is a Thai restaurant coming to Potsdam. The bad news it is moving into a building that for years has been eating up restauranteurs as eagerly as a fat guy who loves Asian food would devour a plate of gaeng sapparod goong.

Mr. Donut was there and got dunked. Dixie Lee Fried Chicken went south. Monkey Joe’s Bar slipped on a banana peel. California Rotisserie Chicken spun out. The Riverbend took a dive. O’Mally’s Pub and Grill went on a bender. Six restaurants tried. Six restaurants failed. The building is cursed.

I know there will be logic-lovers out there who will say that O’Mally’s failed because it was the only Irish pub in the world that didn’t sell beer. Or that Mr. Donut would still be frying if it didn’t get cited for a laundry list of health department violations. Or that California Rotisserie killed itself by selling chili that was made with white beans and chicken. These are arguments made by the same folks who deny the Curse of the Bambino and suggest the Boston Red Sox lost the 1986 World Series because Bill Buckner was a shoddy fielder.

The logic lovers and all their fancy factoids fail to recognize that the building curse is what caused the problems that led to the restaurant failures. If the curse didn’t exist, O’Mally’s would have easily gotten a state license to sell beer, Mr. Donut would have washed his hands before frying, and nobody would have let California near the chili pot.

Dixie Lee and diners like The Riverbend survive just fine in other buildings in St. Lawrence County, but failed when they gave it a go at 29 Maple St. This is not coincidence, it’s the curse. Monkey Joe’s was touted in the Times as “fun, festive and funky” when it opened. How could a full-proof formula like fun, festive and funky fail? Two words (and for once they aren’t Wal and Mart): the curse.

The Red Sox ended the Curse of the Bambino by signing Johnny Damon for $32 million and then waiting three years. The foodies of Potsdam have a much faster and cheaper way out. All we have to do is support the restaurant when it opens. Thai one on for dinner at least once a week and we can send the curse packing. It won’t be easy. The curse will be there at every turn. It will be the curse telling you to stay home and make tuna fish casserole. It will be the curse telling you to avoid spicy food. Don’t listen.

We have to break this curse. And it’s not just because I am a fat guy who loves Asian food and hates driving all the way to Ottawa or Watertown for a fix of pad prik. OK, so maybe that is one reason. But we also have to do it because commerce at 29 Maple St. has suffered long enough. It is time to take the bad news out of what has for too long been a good news-bad news story.

Bank robbers 4, Law enforcement 1.

That is the score in the north country since 2006. Five banks have been robbed. One (alleged) robber has been caught. http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090803/NEWS05/308039957

This is a startling stat if you are like me and thought nobody robs banks anymore – at least not successfully.

Robbing banks is so 1930s. Think tommy guns and black getaway cars with running boards. Bonnie and Clyde. John Dillinger. It was a way to make a living back then. It was also a sure way to make a dying. That had to be one of the big things that historically has taken the shine off bank robbing as a career choice.

Since those days, technology piggybacked the threat of death to thwart would-be thieves. There is that tricky money that explodes and coats you with dye two blocks after you think you are home free with a pile of loot. And there are those expensive high-tech cameras that can capture on video the latest in ski mask fashion worn by the robber while they are robbing.

So what criminals with any sense would choose to do a crime that they had virtually no chance of getting away with in this day and age? I can’t tell you because – in four of the cases we reported in the Times - they all left the north country banks they robbed without leaving a business card. They didn’t shoot anyone. They didn’t get shot. Three of them didn’t even seem to have a getaway car. They ran away and have not been caught.

I don’t get how this can happen. It’s not that I think the bank people or police or anyone but the robbers did anything wrong. It’s not that I think north country banks could have done something to stop the resurgence of bank robbing as a profession here. It’s that I am astonished. Astonished that people are still robbing banks. Astonished that people so far have gotten away with it. Astonished that they have succeeded four times.

It is all so hard to believe. I lived for years in Detroit – a city often cited as a haven for crime – without ever reading in the local papers about anyone robbing a bank. Same deal in Reno, Nev. Same deal in a sprawling metropolis north of Miami, Fla. I had empirical evidence from living in those big cities and would have bet my last dollar that no one robs banks anymore. If you are keeping score, I would have lost.

"We have met the enemy and they is us." - Pogo the possum.

Walt Kelly penned that phrase in his "Pogo" comic strip years ago. Chuck Kelly - no relation - probably has uttered it a few times in the last weeks.

Chuck is the editor and publisher of the Ogdensburg Journal and wears similiar hats for the Daily Courier-Observer, the St. Lawrence Plaindealer and Malone Telegram newspapers. He has worked for various owners of the Ogdensburg papers since he was very young. I may be wrong, but I think the first story he covered as a cub reporter was the British attack on Ogdensburg during the War of 1812.

In any event, ever since those early days, the papers have competed for news with the Watertown Daily Times. That robust competition made sense until 1997, when the Johnson Newspapers - which publishes the Times - bought the Journal and the other papers. But times were good. Newspapers were making money hand over fist.

It should be known that whether you are talking about the late John B. Johnson - editor and publisher of the Times when it bought the smaller papers, or John B. Johnson Jr., who along with his brother, Harold, run the show now, journalistic competition is in the family's blood. So nothing changed after the purchase ... except Chuck's fight was now against the guy who was signing his checks.

I am told Chuck chewed out his reporters royally when the Times broke a story his papers didn't have. And when forced to follow one of these stories in his publications, he would not have his reporter credit the Times for breaking the news ... he would have them say the news was first reported in "an out-of-county" newspaper. No mention of the Watertown Daily Times necessary, thank you very much. Like I said, Chuck is a competitor and we were the enemy.

The times have changed. The Times has changed. I don't know much about finances, but I know the fist we used to make money over seems to have slugged us and taken our wallets. It might not have made sense to pay two reporters to cover the same story in 1997, but we could afford the adrenaline rush that competition brings back then.

The Johnson family about two weeks ago made the announcement that the days of competing were over. That tough times required tough solutions. No more would the company pay two reporters to cover the same story. And Chuck started channeling the little possum named Pogo. He had met the enemy and it was him. He was us.

The Times, Courier-Observer, Plaindealer and Telegram are now sharing stories. There's a lot to do in changing a system, changing a culture that has existed for so long. It's surely going to take a while before the new news operation is running smoothly. It will likely be longer than that before we see any financial benefits from the move. The immediate winners will be the readers of Johnson Newspapers, because the steps we are taking will help ensure there is an Ogdensburg Journal, a Daily Courier-Observer, a Telegram and a Times into the foreseeable future.

The Times will remain the leading full-service newspaper in the north country and will continue to bolster its position in the Internet news race. The smaller papers will continue to provide the kind of community news that people love to make fun of and would hate to do without. You also can expect the Journal and Courier-Observer to develop Web sites of their own not too far down the road. All of this is going to happen with the Johnson Newspapers working as a team.

There was a time not too long ago when that idea would have made Chuck go into convulsions. I think today he has grasped the notion that any media outlet whose checks aren't signed by someone named Johnson is the enemy. Well, he's mostly grasped that. He still seems to gets a little jittery when I call to tell him I'll be sending his paper a story written by a Times reporter. I suppose that's understandable after 55 years fighting the fight. Old enemies die hard.

Lyle N. Furnace and his business partners are soon going to open a hookah lounge in Potsdam. If he can fit it on the sign, I suggest they name it, "Suck on this, federal government!" http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090620/NEWS05/306209934

Lyle is the Potsdam businessman who owns what we used to call a "head shop" when I was a teenager. Among other things, head shops sold things like tie-dyed T-shirts, incense and pipes to smoke marijuana. Maybe it was illegal in the 1970s to sell pipes that people used for smoking marijuana, but I can't remember anyone getting busted for doing it. Lyle got busted for doing it in 2004.

This is the short version of the story: federal agents came into his store, Happy Daze, and told him he shouldn't sell pipes that people use for smoking marijuana. The feds apparently didn't see the signs in the store that said tobacco was the intended weed to be used in the pipes he sold. In any event, he was arrested on federal charges a while later. Then he pleaded guilty to selling drug paraphernalia and was sentenced to a year of probation. Feds 1, Lyle 0.

I don't think any federal agents got promoted for the victory. Getting rid of pipes is not going to solve America's drug problem. Nobody is ever going to launch a national anti-drug campaign with the slogan, "Pipes are dumb." Someone intent on a night of reefer madness will whittle a potato into a pipe if they stumble across a bag of dope and have a match. If you want to talk about dumb, it's that there are laws against selling pipes and there are agents that we pay real American dollars to enforce them.

And where there is dumb, there is often dumber. Listen to this: Happy Daze is still open and it legally sells pipes which could be used to smoke marijuana. They are called hookahs. You suck a hookah hose, drawing smoke from whatever is in its bowl through water before it hits your lungs. It's legal to sell those. Selling a water pipe - a device in which you suck on a hose, drawing smoke from whatever is in its bowl through water before it hits your lungs - could get you time in federal prison. Make sense of those laws and the first bowl at Lyle's lounge is on me.

Lyle managed to miss out on prison - he says by "this much," holding a thumb and index about an inch apart in front of his bushy gray beard when I talked to him this week. But it cost him more than $50,000 in inventory the feds took from him. And he has a federal charge on a rap sheet that he said before this ordeal contained nothing more than traffic tickets. All for selling water pipes.

Neither Lyle nor his business partners, daughter Jessika T. and her fiance, Darin S. Richards, will admit to consciously relishing the beautiful irony that they hope water pipes help them recover some of the money they lost because of water pipes. Jessika talks about business plans and researching other hookah lounges. Lyle talks about how they chose not to offer alcoholic drinks at the lounge. Darin points out that everything smoked at the lounge will be tobacco- and nicotine-free. I couldn't get one of them to say on the record that they chose to open a hookah lounge so they could say, "Suck on this, federal government."

Maybe we'll see that on their shingle when the lounge opens in the fall. Hope it fits.

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