Street Smarts

Hello World, And so here we find ourselves once again, back on Daylight Saving Time this weekend, switching all of our clocks and electronic devices from Standard Time (or what I like to call "Temporary Winter Time" since it lasts for such a short period anymore) back over to DST, which now makes up 75% of the whole year all by its own perverse self. Actually, I have no squawk with DST, or Standard Time, I just wish they'd pick one of them and stick with it, for heaven's sake, and ditch this hare-brained nonsense with the swapping back and forth twice a year, like modern citizens have nothing better to do with their lives than chase around after that elusive hour as it comes and goes throughout the year. (It goes without saying, my sincerest apologies to hares everywhere, whose brains should not be maligned along with DST, and who no doubt never would have dreamed up a cockamamie scheme like this to start with, and would want no part of it, even less so than the rest of us, I shouldn't wonder.) So please get on with saving daylight, at least to make the whole colossal nuisance worthwhile in some way, and not just some huge practical joke foisted upon us by faceless bureaucrats to suit their own purposes. I'm sure we can count on even the hares to agree on that. Meanwhile, the weather has improved by leaps and bounds, with warmer temperatures (almost 60 degrees a few days ago) and a decided lack of snowstorms that feels like winning the lottery, after the battering we had been taking in the previous months around here. It's true that Old Man Winter might still have some tricks up his sleeve - in fact, a person couldn't help but notice that even the venerable Mardi Gras was hampered by cold and rainy conditions in New Orleans, of all places - but for the most part, it's been the welcome turn-around we had all been hoping for. It even provided some unexpected comic relief recently, when we came home from the diner one night and stumbled across one of our errant solar-powered yard lights, bravely lit up and stuck akimbo, half buried out in the plow tailings in the street, where it had apparently been carried by the truck that plowed out our driveway, and just left there hidden from view until enough snow melted to bring it back to the surface. I'm also expecting to uncover several of our newspapers that we never found during the worst of the onslaught, and who knows what else - although I did already tell the Justice Department not to hold out much hope for Judge Crater at this point. Speaking of weather, our local newspaper printed a front-page feature with Tips On Critter Control, where they addressed the troubles faced by homeowners with grazing deer, rabbits and woodchucks chewing their garden plants and yard shrubs, in many cases, right down to the ground. The Cornell Cooperative Extension weighed in on the subject, admitting that their demonstration gardens had also fallen prey to the same problem, and they had resorted to fences and repellents to help minimize the damage to some extent. They blamed the excessively awful winter for the increased landscape browsing by resident wildlife, and this is my favorite quote from them: ================================ "The lower Hudson Valley has a very large population of deer. They are pressured for food sources and are eating plants on the 'rarely eaten' list, a list that they clearly don't read!" ================================ It's all too easy to say that you've got to get up pretty early in the morning to put anything over on the folks at the Cooperative Extension, but honestly, it makes me wonder if it isn't actually the deer who are feeding them this malarkey about the "rarely eaten" list in the first place. In local sports news, the hapless Rangers were unable to come to terms with their scrappy forward, Ryan Callahan, and instead fobbed him off on the Tampa Bay Lightning at the trade deadline, in exchange for Martin St. Louis and other considerations. St. Louis is a proven performer, with over 360 goals and 600 assists in a career that spans more than 1,000 games in the NHL, plus one Stanley Cup, so his stats certainly speak for themselves and need no defense from me. While at 38, he may be considered on the down-side of his illustrious tenure as a player, he continues to play just about every game and rarely loses time to injury, compared to Callahan, who plays hard and often pays the price for it. In a popularity contest, Callahan would win hands-down, beloved by the Garden faithful right from the very beginning, and St. Louis can only hope to win them over by putting up the kind of numbers that will make this deal seem like a steal, rather than highway robbery. Right now, the Blueshirts and the Bolts have the same won-lost record, so it should be interesting to see, from this point, which player (if either) helps his team more. Of course, everyone knows that I never bet against a sure thing, so once again, my money's on Affirmed. On the even more home-town scene, we passed a major milestone last weekend, marking it as the first time for me driving to church since my cornea treatment in October of last year, and a huge step in getting back to normal automotive transit like the rest of the civilized world. Naturally the local authorities issued bulletins to warn pedestrians and other vehicles off the streets and sidewalks for the duration, in the name of public safety, and I can't say I blame them one bit, by golly. Now, it goes without saying that I'm all in favor of keeping the community safe, but frankly, I thought all of the sirens were just way too much. Say, is that Judge Crater peeking out of that melting snowbank? Elle