My mom just told me that this morning’s delivery of the Syracuse Herald American Post-Standard didn’t show up at her apartment building until around 11 AM.  Usually the delivery shows up between 4 and 5.

It turns out that the press broke down. I find it hilarious but also very clever that they got word out about what happened through the local TV stations, emphasizing the “we know what’s wrong, please don’t call us” aspect of it.

Sunday is a pretty bad time to have that happen, but at least it didn’t happen this past Wednesday morning…

I love the Post-Standard.  Not just because I grew up with it and because I used to work for them (sort of) but because of the new press that results in color photos on almost every page, color comics seven days a week, and a different kind of ink that doesn’t get on your fingers. That last part was pleasant enough as a reader, but I appreciate it more now as a person who spends a large part of my work day handling newspapers, then washing my hands.

This blog entry from Cookin’ in the ‘Cuse about one of my favorite places made me smile. I don’t eat hot dogs, and when I’m there I get a grilled cheese sandwich, lots of pickles, and some Byrne Dairy chocolate milk. I like to take people from out of town there, too.

Recently I interviewed for a job in Liverpool, NY, a short distance away from Heid’s. I won’t pretend that wasn’t one of the major reasons I was hoping for a job offer. That, family, Wegmans, and Onondaga Lake Park. The job itself was sort of incidental in the whole thing.

Oh, no!  The Westcott is where I got to see “Amélie” for the first time–the Hamilton French club made a special trip when I was in college.

I never ventured there when I lived in Syracuse, though, which is indicative of the problem here.  I shouldn’t complain when I’m part of the cause of the problem.  And that problem is that “art cinema” has a very specific meaning….as the York Staters post I link to says:

I fear an art cinema, community run or not, that claims to appeal to the ‘community’ but in fact aims only at the wealthiest, whitest and most prestigious of clientele. A place that takes its cues solely from Sundance and where the term ‘foreign film’ rarely extends beyond the art scenes of Western Europe and its Latin American imitators. A place like the misnamed Little Theater in Rochester with its attached jazz club and French pastry shop. I fear a resurrected cinema of fancy coffees, expensive pastries and high brow films—another agent of gentrification.

In the case of the Westcott, the question is whether it wants to be a community cinema serving its neighborhood or an art cinema serving people primarily from outside the neighborhood.  Clearly the latter has failed.

Making Cash a Prize for High Scores on Advanced Placement Tests

I went to one of the few Syracuse-area high schools that offers the AP program rather than Project Advance. AP might be more common there now; I don’t know. What I do know is that not many of us got a 3 or better on the tests. I don’t think the tendency of students to overload their schedules with AP courses helped….maybe that’s the problem.  I only took three AP exams and earned great scores on all of them, but I won’t pretend that I’m any smarter than my classmates in high school.  I just made sure to only take classes I knew I could get something out of and do well in.

Not that any of this really matters for us almost ten years later, but it’s extremely important if you’re playing the admissions game right now.

Maybe providing incentives to do well, instead of telling students that taking as many of these courses as possible will get them into college, is the better choice.