After 10 years of commemorating the 9/11 attacks at sporting events, it is time to lay that custom to rest. Born of an instinct to maintain national unity in a time of threat and a desire to honor the memories of those we lost, it has morphed into a forum for the praise of militarism, and as such it serves us no longer.

Sept. 12 seemed to go on forever. It was the first day of many spent staring at smoke. And smoke, like running water, is something you can’t ever really see. The eye tries to hold on to the image, but, in an instant, it’s gone. On that day, Sept.

It was the quiet that revealed most about New Yorkers. Sitting in traffic on the West Side highway, creeping toward lower Manhattan three weeks after the attacks, I was struck by the absence of horns blaring. A reverential silence was universally observed, unplanned.

Her dad, architectural draftsman Keith Berger, is going to bake the cake, as he has done every year since her first-birthday party in 2004. That year it was a kitty; other years’ themes have included flying unicorns, Tinkerbell and a dragon. Daddy, it turns out, is quite the baker.

Four hours and change from Clinton Square, absent traffic, you can take a brief but scenic tram ride over the East River and disembark on Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land stuck between Queens and Manhattan. Roosevelt Island is a city within the City.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, and this season none other than Ann Marie Buerkle and the Syracuse Peace Council have crawled into the same sack, this time on the right side of the question of the war in Libya.

The next Congress should pass a law saying that they will only subject us to these ridiculous and ugly spectacles when the weather is crummy. These past few weeks have been so lovely you want to bottle them and save them for a chilly, rainy October day or for a frosty February night between blizzards.

How is it that some of us are unable to pull back from the abyss while others seem to skate on the edge of self-destructive behavior even when the costs so visibly outweigh any perceived benefits? How is it that someone so talented that the world is begging for more of you seems hell-bent on transforming herself into someone else, anyone else?.

Summertime reading is always different than any other time. Through the cooler and harder working months we get to read in snatches, read while we fall asleep, while we wait for an appointment, and we read mostly what we have to read. In summer there are, if we are lucky, some days given up mostly to absorbing a book.