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.

Bill Fischer moved to Central New York last year to get away from the noise and the risks of hydrofracking near his home in Pennsylvania. He has a simple message for people in Central New York about natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale: “It’s coming, whether you like it or not, so you better be ready.

When the abomination came to pass, I knew immediately the guy to call. Why, God, of course. Things usually get done in Albany by the proverbial three men in a room: the governor, Assembly speaker and Senate majority leader. But this session was a little different.

After all the noise and all of Bob the Builder’s attempts to keep the paperwork a big secret, we learn that the concrete hulk on the edge of the lake has tenants lined up for just a tiny portion of its space, and that the behemoth has none of the fantastic features that made us once again place a bundle of our hopes on this latest Congel enterprise.

Respectable Anthonys nationwide have now taken to asking their friends to call them Tony, all because Twitter is aflutter about a Weiner in the House of Boehner. How can one make sense of New York Rep.

Now that New York state’s moratorium on permits for heavy duty hydrofracking is about to expire, community forums on the many aspects of the natural gas drilling issue are blooming like roses on the roadside. Last week it was a forum put on by a group called Land Stewards of New York, inside the Community Center on Main Street in Fabius.

It has been more than 18 months since a pair of Syracuse police officers investigating a report of gunshots kicked in the door of Jeff Beck’s home on Marcellus Street and let Sadie, his 4-year-old Pomeranian, out into the street.

Grounded in that geography, Jezer, a notquite-retired rabbi, tries to be an optimist, but lately finds himself “totally confused” about the current political state of affairs in the Middle East.

Opponents of hydrofracking have made any number of arguments against the practice of injecting large quantities of water, sand and chemicals underground to release natural gas trapped in the Marcellus shale. It will mess with the landscape, they say. It will mess with the water.

The first I heard was a text message from my son. Then another text message from my other son. Simple words. Osama bin Laden is dead. In the morning, while I scoured the newspaper, young people were posting their reactions on Facebook. Some were celebratory, others somber, most were somewhere in between.