Bruce the Blog

Playing with great relish the role of truculent network TV executive Arthur Jensen, actor Ned Beatty bellows across a forbidding boardroom slab of wood at posthumously-awarded Best Actor Peter Finch in the film classic “Network”: “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it!! Is that clear?!” Later in his show-stopping diatribe, he says, “That is the natural order of things today.”

I have my own natural order of things, except I insist they also apply to others, not just to me. They include being a sensible, mature, well-mannered motorist who parks where there are parking spaces and puts on headlights when necessary so other cars can see mine because that’s one good reason God gave us headlights.

I don’t deny it’s an Obsessive Compulsion I possess — or am possessed by — one of several (”My name is Bruce and I’m an OCaholic”). It’s when people step outside of MY norm, which can mean something as seemingly inconsequential as parking outside of the yellow lines or parking inside the blue disabled parking lines without the requisite permit. This stuff, I am sorry to say, drives me batty. I’m sorry, that is, for the objects of my scorn, not for myself. I’m sorry they are Rudimentary People, to paraphrase the title of Judith Guest’s bestselling 1970s novel-into-film that won Oscars for Best Picture, for director Robert Redford, for supporting actor Timothy Hutton and for writer Alvin Sargent.

Rudimentary denotes something simple in the extreme, or in the first stages of development. It also can be seen as a slightly euphemistic, softer way to say, “rude.” That’s how I view the inconsiderates who park in the middle of driveways at public buildings, like the Starbucks in Yorktown, where I recently jawed at whom I don’t doubt was a very nice woman behind the wheel but whom thought nothing of planting her SUV in the driveway to effectively block those entering and prevent two cars from passing in opposite directions, as the driveway is designed to allow.

Such folks, without meaning to ostensibly, create disorder.

My disorder disorder includes cryptic voicemail messages that say nothing except, “call me,” or that, instead of telling me the topic of the call, waste the caller’s breath and my aural cavity on superfluous, gratuitous, hypothetical reasons about why I might be excused for not calling back (”deathbed,” anyone?).

Gee, thanks for the cheery thought, as well as for proscribing the acceptable limits of my behavior. Of course, I know the caller was jesting about the deathbed remark, but don’t forget, I’m talking about a disorder here on both ends, wherein humor is in the mind of the phoneholder.

My response to such rudimentary behavior as cryptic calls is simple: none. Am I being a big baby about it? That’s a definite probably. That’s what happens when an immovable brat meets an irresistible baby: stasis.

I ran into a rudimentary person of the third kind at food boutique Iron Tomato on Mamaroneck Avenue in White Plains Friday afternoon. My bosses Carla Chase, Frank Rich and I had just finished a very productive meeting with a Westchester County government official and went to grab lunch.

At cafeteria-style Iron Tomato, you first get your food, either from a deli counter or a shelf, pay for it, then find a table. There is no wait service. It was 1:00 p.m., high lunch time, and so three open seats together were scarce at first. When I spotted a couple of tables-for-four with only one person seated, I told Carla I would grab one of them while she finished the transaction and Frank was parking the car.

I approach a window-side table where a lovely young knitted-capped woman is reading a paperback and thoughtfully has her boots perched on the seat directly across from her and her coat draped on the chair next to her. As I quickly discovered, they really were symbological signs that read, “Stay Away.” That’s usually my cue to invade the space of someone so presumptuous to think they own a public space that is readily capacious and available to others as well.

“Anybody else sitting here,” I ask rhetorically and with a modicum of patience evident in my tone because I know her type, who also can be found on Metro North trains where a certain kind of rudimentary passenger thinks nothing of putting a briefcase on the seat next to him even during rush hour when seats are scarce, or doing the same with a piece of clothing, both of which belong on the overhead rack. That’s another case where I purposefully would take the seat occupied by a briefcase to make my point that such a person was not going to passively intimidate me into not sitting there. I’m not sure I ever said it, but I know I used to think to say to one of these beauts, “Maybe I should try to sit on the overhead rack so you can keep your briefcase on the seat.”

Miss Iron Tomato Paperback already is not suffering my presence gladly, to say the least. She fixes a kind of stare on my visage and actually says to me, “What do you want me to do about it?” The subsequent exchange was not at all pretty, but also not loud, although I peripherally noticed some patrons enjoying our ultimate bickering contest. She says I’m rude not to ask her permission to sit there. I reply, “I don’t think so.” She says she didn’t realize it was a “community table” (when in fact at a cafeteria, that’s exactly what it is). I ask if one person like her controls all four seats at the table and tell her I don’t need her permission to sit there. She says she sits there every day. I resist the urge to say, “Well, you’re the most convincing undercover security guard I’ve ever seen” and instead say, “Good for you.” She moves to another table rather than bearing to sit across from yours truly the rest of the time.

Both she and I make a mutual point of glaring at one another for good measure, both of us (I am convinced) trying strenuously not to let the inevitable subcutaneous smirk surface, because we both realize how ridiculous is the entire episode that just transpired.

As I take momentary leave of our newfound acquisition (being the table) to get some condiments, I see my new best friend going over to chat a bit with Carla, no doubt assuring her I’m the only one in our party she thinks is rude. Well, thank goodness for small favors.

When Paperback Polly is leaving, she says to Carla, “Nice talking with you.” I turn to her and say, “Have a nice day!” I was not being facetious. She understandably ignores me. I would too if I were her, but I’m not. I’m an old(er) guy who has learned once I vent, even to a stranger, life is too short not to quickly put it aside and get on with the niceties of existence, precious as they are. One day, I’m sure she’ll feel the same way. At least I hope she does. And I hope that day is today.

Please go to The English Languish page for today’s blog entry. Thank you for turning the page on Bruce the Blog.

Please go to the “It’s Enough to Make You Sixty” page for today’s Bruce the Blog. Thank you and have a nicer day than yesterday but not as nice as tomorrow.

Wall Street. Sixth Avenue. Easy Street. Main Street. Which one doesn’t fit?

Hmmm. Let’s see.

Wall Street is where investment banking treasury mints like Goldman Sachs of Moolah deem it a hardship when, as it just announced, its impoverished workers will just have to make do with only half-million-dollar annual bonuses. Oops. There goes the country club membership, Cougar Plum, at least the backup country club membership when we’re in West Palm. How will we break it to the kiddies when they’re back from their study abroad program at the Etoile d’ Bratwurst in Fleur de Lis?

Sixth Avenue is where wiseacre mediocre media monkeys dispense tens of millions of dollars to middling TV personalities who actually refuse job offers and whose appeal to begin and end with is 90% time and place and booking agent and production values, and 10% personality.  

As a talk show host, Leno is a world-class stand-up comic. As a talk show host, O’Brien is a world-class comedy writer. They both embody The Peter Principle of performing talent, which is to keep rising past your skill set’s glass ceiling until cracks appear in your smooth facade, much as when a TV actor releases an album to cash in on his or her celebrity in the hopes the gullible audience won’t notice they don’t have much of a voice.

But don’t mind me, because I don’t fully get Will Ferrell either. He’s parlayed extremely broad humor and a recyclable shtick of familiar frat-house shenanigans into a blockbuster film career. Only in Hollywood.

Have you ever seen Craig Ferguson on CBS at 11:30. Have you ever been able to stomach him for more than 30 seconds? If you have, I’d like your recipe for Pepto Bismol, because it must work wonders. This guy mugs so shamelessly, broadly and relentlessly, if he were a blogger, he would be me, but probably would have enough sense not to admit it. If success on these amnesia-lovers’ plugathons were dependent on more than a 10% personality quotient, Ferguson would have been canceled before his opening show’s opening monologue.

Craig the Fungus, Conan the Barber and Jay-Won’t-Lay-Low are the avatars of 1960s broadcasting executive Paul Klein’s watershed theory of audience indiscretion that posited couch potatoes slouch towards their LOP as much as their lap: that is, we channel surf like boob-tube zombies until we alight on the Least Objectionable Program. Although I always found him to be more a MOP.

Easy Street is where all the above dwell.

Main Street is where they pave their way to stardom and riches and neuroses when the first falters and the second stagnates because the first falters and the latter sends them into a downward spiral of unproductive maturation.

Main Street is where some of us don’t get the fascination with the people who live on Easy Street. That includes me, by the way. I don’t get my own, albeit dwindling, fascination, with people in “The Show Business.”

Modernity has brainwashed us into seeing that locution as awkward, yet it’s wholly in keeping with how we still converse about every other business, isn’t it?

We don’t go around talking about “auto industry” but about “the auto industry.” We refer to “the banking business,” not “banking business.” Although we do say “consumer electonics” rather than “the consumer electronics.”

In yesteryear, the show business was no business archetypically ambitious immigrants wanted their children to mess with, a la seminal talking motion picture The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, which was autobiographical.

Today, people will sell their souls to be rich and famous the Hollywood Way. Or, as in Conan O’Brien’s case, the show business bossman will sell his soul to give his employee a windfall so there are no hard feelings after the employee has upped and told the bossman to go shove his offer of a high-profile TV show five nights a week.

It’s times like this I thank my lucky stars that someone like Conan O’Brien likes little old me so much he wants to entertain me a half-hour earlier, and was even willing to lower himself by accepting tens of millions of dollars to free himself up to practice his craft somewhere that would pay him even more than that to have his way.

What did we do to deserve this? I shudder to think.

Sure, Peyton Manning’s a legend in his own time. Shades of Joe Montana and John Elway the way he can close out games, gets cooler the hotter the pressure. Dares you to stop him. Picks apart defenses with the ease and clarity of a speed-reading Rhodes Scholar deciphering Dr. Seuss.

But Peyton’s already won a Stupor Bowl (most of them are; the rare-in-a-while exception lives up to the Supermania).  So has his little bro Eli. Two Super Bowl rings is more than enough for any one family, let alone a set of siblings who didn’t even bother sharing them across the generation gap. Today’s kids are so darned spoiled, especially when they’re sinfully talented quarterbacks dancing behind a bevy of behemoths who feast on raw meat smothered in helmets and padding.

Let’s cut to the chase. How can you on Feb. 7, 2010, NOT root for N’awlins, for saint’s sake? It’s not just the double-entendred “romance” of balconied, bumptious, rococo Bourbon Street, with its “thou swill” allure, or those powdered, fat-friendly beignets, or those hurricanes (a really bad double-entendre), or the French Quarter, or all that jazz.

We’ve just been terribly reminded anew of the real meaning of the oft-corrupted word “enormity,” which means not merely huge but unspeakably huge horror, as in Holocaust or Sept. 11 or tsunami or Katrina hurricane or Haitian earthquake.

Those of us living in relative paradise, geologically speaking, can’t begin to fathom life under water, under rubble, under ground, under unlivable circumstances. Back a couple years, I sat comfortably on a bus as it “toured” the notoriously disfigured Lower Ninth Ward, where front stoops stooped to nowhere because the house foundation formerly attached had been swept down the block and knocked on its side. It wasn’t like a war zone; it was a war zone.

Yes, the New Orleans Saints, NFC Champions for the first time in their history, are sentimental favorites to win the Super Bowl. Even the team’s stadium name is prophetic: Superdome.

On Sunday, after watching on Friday the star-studded Hope for Haiti Now telecast organized by the reinarnation of Cary Grant named George Clooney, I spent the best eight bucks imaginable by downloading the telethon’s commemorative album of today’s top recording artists who performed on the special. It’s good music for a great cause: humanity.

In the relatively short time Hudson Valley Gateway Chamber of Commerce ex-CEO Ron Forehand and I worked together — the past three years — we got along fine, with one notable bump along the way involving the Peekskill election debates of October 2009. That’s when his organization and ours mutually decided to part ways, for that one event,  temporarily suspending the partnership we had cultivated as joint sponsors of election debates. We immediately resumed the tandem production with the Putnam Valley supervisor debate.

Ron was served notice Jan. 21 that his contract with the Chamber was being terminated, for reasons, as usual, not made public. Let the speculation begin.

One thing I witness firsthand is that Ron was partial to using the League of Women Voters as moderators for the debates we produced together. That works in some cases, and I’ve had excellent results working with the League myself. I’ve also had unsatisfactory results. As the head of a news organization that reports daily on the politicians and issues that populate the debates we produce, I am highly biased in thinking that nobody is better equipped to grill candidates than a beat journalist.

I also like the idea of having journalists involved in the debate process, either as moderator, or as an inquiring panelist cued by a moderator, as if typical in televised Presidential debates. Ron didn’t agree with that notion, at least for the Peekskill debate.

Funny thing is there already was a pact with the League of Women Voters to moderate that debate — at least until the morning of the debate, when I had an intemperate conversation with the scheduled moderator, one Polly Kuhn. Ms. Kuhn asked me why we were staging a debate only between the Peekskill mayoral candidates, and not also among the Peekskill City Council candidates.

That mayoral-candidate-only format was something Ron and I had agreed upon in past years for the sake of concision, to keep the pace of the evening manageable for us and tolerable for the audience. Ms. Kuhn not only had other thoughts on the matter but — and keep in mind this conversation between her and me took place about six hours prior to the debate — informed me that when she moderated debates, she fairly insisted on having input to the format. Did I mention this was six hours before the debate?

I don’t suffer this kind of imposition gladly under the best of circumstances, and so that’s all I had to hear. In that moment, I decided to replace Ms. Kuhn as the moderator with myself, curtly but politely told her so, and disconnected the call.

I’m not clear on why Ron was so set on using the League of Women Voters as moderators for his debates — going so far as telling me at one point that he did not want to use newspaper people as moderators, ouch! — but in general Ron, like me, loves political engagement. Unlike me, however, he makes no bones about letting his political preferences be known without qualification.

You may or may not agree that there’s an analogy somewhere between the positions of newspaper publisher and Chamber of Commerce executive director (or president, or CEO, or what title have you), but I can see some parallels. Both positions call for a certain ambassadorial or diplomatic demeanor, which is why I don’t advertise my personal politics, even though some seem to think they know what it is, and usually prove they don’t.

Ron excelled in many ways as an ambassador, but in other ways, word got around that on occasion he passed a remark that was perceived — and no doubt intended — as an insult to a prominent Chamber member. That kind of expansiveness tends to catch up with you when those members also are the employer(s) paying your wages.

Ron also made it known he was a de facto insider at Peekskill City Hall. In fact, he was the chair of the search committee that ultimately led to the excellent choice of Rick Finn being hired as City Manager (are you listening, Yorktown?!). I’ve gotten to know Rick recently during a couple of substantive meetings, and he looks to me like the real deal — well-informed, disciplined, organized, experienced, personable, adding up to a valuable asset for Peekskill.

I have no idea if Ron’s dabbling in Peekskill politics has any connection whatsoever to the walking papers handed him on Jan. 21 by the board of directors of Hudson Valley Gateway Chamber of Commerce.

The only thing for sure is that the termination of his tenure had something to do with people politics. I  wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him emerge with a position in or around City Hall. For my part, I hope he stays visible and involved on the local scene because he can add value to an organization under the right circumstances.

For those who find it hard to believe I don’t meddle (much) in our news organization’s content gathering and presentation, I refer you to Exhibit A on page 9 of our freshly pressed Jan. 20 edition.

The Editor’s Note at the bottom of the second Letter to the Editor says the writer is “right” — unqualifedly — for taking us to task on a Dec. 30 edition remark about recreation club finances, and that the paper regrets the “error.” It’s not clear what we’re saying he is “right” about. Reading this act of contrition on our part was news to me, but what do I know. I only work here.

It’s important for any publisher to back up the editorial staff’s right to a considerable measure of autonomy, and I like to think I follow that journalistic ethic. That doesn’t equally mean that the publisher necessarily agrees with every word choice in every article or remark on every page.

Here’s where the Editor’s Note and the publisher differ in this case. The writer, Donald Roberts, Member of United Taxpayers of Yorktown, purports to refute (which means disprove) our paper’s Dec. 30 Salvo that called independent youth sports leagues “self-financed.” His evidence includes a line item in Yorktown’s 2010 budget showing an anticipated disbursement of $78,700 among three recreational leagues, for an average of $26,000 per youth sports club. That’s down about $10,000 from the 2009 line item for just one sports club. Mr. Roberts seemed to miss that point. He also blithely ignores that the $26,000 is a fraction of any of the club’s annual operating expenses. It’s a nominal subsidy from the town. The term “self-financed” means the clubs must run themselves on cash flow generated through fees paid by families whose children are enrolled in sports programs. It’s not as if the town stakes any of these clubs to a baseline operating budget. Mr. Roberts also misses that salient point.  Then again, UTY is not exactly known for its rigorous analysis of numbers or its lucid logic. It’s best known for knee-jerk reactions to the spending of one penny on virtually anything. Money spent on our kids? Bah! Humbug!!

Later in his letter, Mr. Roberts takes NCN to task for writing that “youth sports leagues (are) operated by volunteers with nominal or no local government funding or administration.” He then corroborates that very statement — even if he thinks he’s disputing it — by ending his missive with, “…some youth programs do receive local government funding.” Yes, that’s what nominal means — “some” or “token” or “very little.”

While we’re on the topic, I thought it germane to re-paste-post here a letter that was paste-posted in our NCN Forum’s Croton-on-Hudson section.

As with Yorktown Athletic Club, Shrub Oak Athletic Club, and Yorktown Youth Soccer Club, Croton Little League is an independent youth recreation league that contributes mightily to the families of its community and, arguably, subsidizes the government as a vendor of services for which it does not charge that government. Yet, the government, which already taxes citizens so it can maintain quality of life amenities such as ballfields, double dips by assessing certain of those same families a second tax through their participation in the Croton Little League.  What else is wrong with this picture? Read on …

From: Croton Little League <webadmin@crotonlittleleague.com>
To: Croton Little League <webadmin@crotonlittleleague.com>
Sent: Tue, Dec 22, 2009 9:21 am
Subject: Croton Little League FIELD USAGE FEES - PLEASE READ

Dear Croton Little League Families,

Croton’s Village Board of Trustees has just passed a resolution mandating Croton Little League and all other Croton youth sports organizations to pay an hourly field usage fee for using the fields that our hard-earned tax dollars already go towards supporting. As the local youth sport organization most in need of village field space, this fee could exceed $6,000 annually.

The irony of this proposal is that groups, local and non-local, who do not apply for field permits from the village, may still walk onto these fields and use them free of charge at anytime. Croton Little League (CLL) already spends an average of more than $14 per player annually of your registration fees on field maintenance and maintenance supplies. Additionally, CLL preps and helps maintain the fields we use at no additional cost to the village and uses no village resources to do so. CLL is NOT affiliated with the Village Recreation Department and has never received any monetary support from the village. As a non-profit organization, we rely solely on fees we collect through our program to sustain our operations.

We are committed to keeping your registration fees as low as possible so we can be as inclusive to as many families as possible but this new fee resolution would leave us with no alternative but to significantly increase our registration fees. We are also committed to funding capital improvements to these fields for the benefit of our current and future players as we have done in the past. We fully recognize that the economy is in extremely dire straits not only here in Croton but around the country. Other than the weak economy, the village has given us scant rationale or justification for charging these fees. We will receive no services from the village in exchange for these fees.

We are asking for your support in immediately opposing these fees for not only CLL but for the other youth sports programs as well – the very future of these programs depends on action we take now.

Please take a couple of minutes to email or call our Village Board of Trustees to voice your opposition to this resolution. Their contact info is listed here for your convenience.

Mayor Leo A. W. Wiegman 271-1145 lwiegman@crotononhudson-ny.gov
Trustee Ian Murtaugh 271-3130 imurtaugh@crotononhudson-ny.gov
Trustee Richard Olver 271-5232 rolver@crotononhudson-ny.gov
Trustee Ann Gallelli 271-5301 agallelli@crotononhudson-ny.gov
Trustee Demetra Restuccia 827-9048 drestuccia@crotononhudson-ny.gov

With the enactment of this resolution, we expect to increase our registration fees by at least $20 per child to cover this new tax that CLL is being forced to pay. We appreciate your continued support and ask that you contact your elected officials to voice your opposition to this plan.

Yours in Baseball,
Croton Little League

Transparency is the order of the day in politics, though, like water, transparency is fluid: it depends which side of the looking glass you’re on. The view from elected officials is that anything more we’re told or shown than we were told or shown before they took office is transparency. The view from voters is that we’ll decide just how transparent our government needs to be, and we’ll take those who don’t meet our standards out to the voting booth for a little heart-to-heart chad.

So a salesperson in our company walks into my office today — while we’re on deadline, mind you –and claims that there are some nameless, faceless people she’s spoken to who want to know — nay, DEMAND TO KNOW! — why our, in their words, “far right” political columnist Anthony J. Bazzo now also is interviewing people! How dare he ask questions and we publish the answers.

I ask who these people are. I already knew the answer. These are the people who never have names. Only complaints. I wonder aloud what Mr. Bazzo’s political ideologies have to do with him asking questions since he’s not also answering them.

Apparently just the sight of his name to the “far left” nameless faceless complainers is enough to convince them that North County News now is a “far right” publication.

The obvious reply to that is, “compared to what”? If someone self-avowedly on the “far left” thinks someone or something else is on the “far right,” isn’t that relative? Maybe, just maybe, to them, “far right” is somewhere in the middle.

And if they didn’t complain before this, does that mean the paper then was “far left” and coincided with their point of view? Is it that North County News is “far right” or is it that North County News was too “far left” and has move to the right to find a more sensibly centrist middle ground?

But don’t hate me because, like Andy Bazzo, I have the temerity to ask questions of others.

But don’t let my blogarrhea bravado fool you. I really do want to hear any and all feedback about what we publish by whomever wherever whenever whatever forever.

So we look forward to receiving your Letters to the Editor at Editor@NCNLocal.com, but only publish those that are signed and include (not for publication) a phone number for us to verify the sender. Or feel free to call me directly at (914) 962-3871 X410. Operator is standing by … on the right, and left, and in between.

It would be quite insincere for somebody in the news media (take me, if you can stand it) to claim that the kind of shenanigans animating Yorktown of late are shocking, simply shocking (OK, so my acting ain’t exactly Claude Rains-esque). It’s simply human nature at work, in all its vainglory.

No matter where you turn, there’s indignation and allegation. I ran into Eric DiBartolo at Starbucks on Monday, hanging out with Mike Dubovsky. I always enjoy them both, apart or together. They’re easy to chat with, hang out with, and always full of information. (Besides, not everybody enjoys having a journo hovering around them — really?! — so I’m thankful anywhere that’ll have me.)

Eric and Mike are among the lifelong Yorktowners I’ve gotten to know and appreciate in the past three-plus years I’ve been hunkered down at what I’ve unabashedly taken to calling The First Paper of Yorktown and Yorktown’s Paper of Record. Both taglines are documentable, so why not tell it like it is. (May Howard Cosell rest in peace.)

Eric and Mike shared some nuggets with me that we’re probing, and you may yet read about in our pages one day soon. I immediately noticed something about Eric as soon as I alit from my jalopy. It turns out he, like me, has gotten the religion of get-fit-quick. He’s 30 pounds lighter, via Metafast, and has an unmistakable glow. Keep it up — or off — my friend. I haven’t felt this good in too long a time myself. There’s no business like stay fitness.

An intriguing analogy occurred to me re the back-and-forth between Eric and new Yorktown Supervisor Susan Siegel, who somehow seems like she’s been on the job three months instead of three weeks. Never a dull moment in Get Yer Ya-Yas Out Yorktown.

In Super Susan’s deliberative style, she’s been compared — not at all coincidentally — to Linda Cooper, the 12-year supervisor who elected not to run for re-election and since fall 2007 has been village manager in Ossining. But, according to well-placed if biased sources, she left her heart in Town Hall and reportedly, the scuttlebutt has it, is finely tuned in to back channels. Does that make her Susan Siegel’s alleged Karl Rove? Functionally, perhaps. Politically, please.

But one might also compare the current supervisor’s focused, disciplined, policy-wonkish ways to a certain current U.S. President. Everything must be by the book for the bookish, and when it seems not to be by the book, but by hook or crook, there’s a reasonable-sounding reason why. Transparency drives the rhetoric, though it may not also drive the process. (Secret meetings to hire a new water department head, anybody? Aah, that’s all water under the bridge.)

By contrast, one might compare the current highway superintendent’s take-n0-prisoners, get-the-job-done-at-all-costs work ethic to a certain immediate past U.S. President, who didn’t much care what his critics said or how they carped about his style. In the end, a la Sinatra, he did it his way, no apologies. You want results, I give you results.

So there you have it. What, I’m not sure. But there it is nonetheless. Other day I was asked if I thought Eric would run/could win as Yorktown supervisor. My reply was that nobody has higher name recognition in Yorktown than Eric DiBartolo.

[In fact, I recall when our family moved to Yorktown in 1993, his was probably the first town official’s name with which we were familiar, and it had a very positive connotation, associated with the consistently efficient and quick job his crews did clearing snow during storms. That’s no spin. That’s just him.]

The real answer to the question, then, is less about Eric than about who his opponent would be in a supervisor race. Different elections turn on different dynamics. Linda Cooper won re-election five times on a record of diligence and competence. A proficient ice hockey athlete who started her own competitive rec league team, Cooper also exhibited good timing in knowing when enough is enough. Don Peters won election on sky-high name recognition and likability. Susan Siegel won on backlash and voter frustration.

Until the last election, nobody was running to run against Eric for highway superintendent. Then Steve Gardner and Greg Bernard picked up the gauntlet — that Eric had not thrown down — but though they both had the chops, Eric had the well-oiled machinery humming his tune: all party lines were lined up at attention and saluting dutifully. No matter what his detractors may say, I’ve never seen anybody better at political infighting than this gent. You better come at him with all you’ve got, and even when you do, prepare to meet thy doom.

The $64,000 Question now is whether there ever will be another election in Yorktown for highway superintendent. Not if Super Susan gets her way and converts the position to an appointment. For Eric, it would be an appointment with destiny. What nobody else could do at the polls The Super Siegelvisor might yet do with the wave of her legislative wand: vanquish the elected position altogether.

Augie’s vs. Viagra

Last Friday, Elyse and I were part of a party of eight hosted by Carla Chase and Frank Rich at Augie’s Prime Cut in Mohegan Lake. That’s the place I’ve been blogging and Facebooking about (or is that about Facebooking?) lately because of its Augie’s Idol singamathingathon. (As for me, I couldn’t carry a tune if it was inside an ultralightweight roll-on travelbag.)

Elyse was swooning, but it wasn’t over me. It was over her grouper swimming in pistachio sauce. After watching her heavenly reaction to that piece of dead fish, I might as well forsake the Viagra, and find out if grouper qualifies for copay.

I was swooning too, but in addition to it being over Elyse, it was over my Oscar filet mignon, crowned with crabmeat and gorgonzola cheese. Yum-yum in the tum-tum.

We never had supped at Augie’s ere this, and were duly impressed, though we already heard tell from others the food was nothing to writhe home about, but was instead something to swoon over. Or maybe they said spoon over, but this is a family restaurant, after all; still, that didn’t stop Augie’s from expecting us, as with every patron, to fork over the dough after we got the check. What the heck, I say: knife work if you can get it!

[Full Disclosure: The author runs a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit foundation that raises money within the community and invests it in the community for education and recreation improvements and to reward accomplishments by young people.]

Fundraising is an article of faith in any community. Schools, youth sports, religious organizations, civic groups, you name it. Soliciting donations for any number of causes, reasons, events, projects, expenses, is a common practice. Sometimes, it’s all too common.

What does that mean? Common practices on occasion can mean bad form, or at least something other than best practices, which are advisable beyond the rarefied atmosphere of corporate governance, a ten-dollar word for ethical behavior and transparent process as required by shareholders and the commonweal.

We have it on good authority a local body that, in effect, is charged with a type of corporate governance in behalf of constituents is looking closely right now at how to govern fundraising within its purview. We couldn’t applaud the move more, with the conditional comment that we’ll wait to see what exact rules and regulations it purports to put in place before offering an unqualified round of applause.

Anecdotally, here’s why such oversight and formal protocol is needed to control fundraising. I just received an email from someone notifying recipients of a community event, with the rather nominal admission price of $25. It looks like a fun event, and proceeds will benefit very worthy, credible institutions, which are sponsoring it jointly.

However, the red flag went up when the email instructed recipients that one payment option — other than paying through one of the institutions to which a recipient might belong — is to make a check payable to the individual who sent the email.

For starters, regardless of the nominal amount, such payment is not tax-deductible. Beyond that, it’s partciularly bad form to ask a donation be made payable to anything other than a legitimate not-for-profit organization, period.

That’s the sort of guideline we expect will come out of the aforementioned rules and regs now in progress.

There are other considerations we’d like to see addressed, one of which is among the shibboleths in place at our Foundation: money for transportation, room and board is a personal expense, and we decline to make donations that will be used in that manner. It’s fine that teams raise money for those expenses, as long as the donors are made clearly aware that is how the donation will be used.

When our daughter was a high school cheerleader, we told her it was unacceptable to raise money for herself for travel expenses. If we couldn’t afford to pay for her trip, that meant she couldn’t go. That was meant as much to be a life lesson for her as a specific parental instruction. How well she learned it remains to be seen as she moves through college and ultimately into reality of daily living.

Whether it’s for a team or a band or a family, travel these days for most of us is a luxury, not an essential service. Wanting and expecting others — friends, neighbors, relatives, strangers — to subsidize team or school club travel is a matter of personal value system on both ends of the equation.

Our personal value system categorizes it as a personal expense — no different than a vacation expense — which places it squarely outside the bounds of the purpose of community fundraising, which is to improve the quality of life within the confines of a community.