On The Beach Blog

I know it's New Year's Eve, but someone in Southampton Town Hall needs to get the gate-keeper at the Westhampton Transfer Site (a/k/a "The Dump") a better timepiece.

Pack up the Escape with official green Town garbage bags ($14.50/five), containers of paper (no wrapping paper, please), cans, non-deposit bottles and hard plastics, and care­fully-flattened cardboard, and set off for da Dump, arriving, by both my watch and 660 WFAN, at precisely 3:50 pm.

The chain-link gates are locked together by a chain More...

...in the new year.

1. The four members of the West­hamp­ton Beach "Union Free" School District Board of Education who caved in More...

Whew!

Congratulations to the New England Patriots... but they can now feel free to lose any time it's inconvenient for them in the post season.

Since my formative days as an Army brat in the Detroit area, I've been a Lions fan... and they've now officially broken my heart for exactly 50 years!

This area has always been New York Giants territory, with which I was all right until the mid-'60s when the New York Jets More...

The United States Postal Service is both oft-reviled, and an easy target... for the same reason! They seem to screw up a lot, mostly in little ways, but it's still annoying!

The mail is such an everyday part of our lives, so much so that we tend to take them for granted... except when they screw up. Then we take notice! More...

Today is Boxing Day, a public holiday recog­nized in Canada, the United Kingdon and many of the other Commonwealth of Nations. It's one of the few Commonwealth traditions I endorse because it allows people to recover from the excesses of Christmas feasting and imbibition rather than slog back to work with visions of sugarplums and brandy still wob­bling through their brains.

It should seriously be considered, and in sup­port of which proposal, it must be noted that most everywhere in America, the day following Thanks­giving, a Friday, is taken off... unless one is in retailing, of course.

This will be my first year-end holiday since 1998 that I will be free from the tyranny of political correctitude in my Web activities.

It hadn't occurred to me that I was in any way shackled until some years ago when, as Village Webmaster, I was forwarded an E-mail from some silly bitch... ah!, the freedom to finally fully express that sentiment!... from Hampton Synagogue who was complaining about the absence of a Menorah on the Village Website, and demanding to know when Westhampton Beach was going to start being "inclusive!"

Aside from the presumptuousness of her demand... the whole sorry affair of the appearance in our Village of a synagogue has yet to be fully told... the worst part of it was that I had already and without prompting or even a concern, placed a Menorah (the nine candle Chanukah version!) on the Website as far back as 2001! More...

Updated 12/22/2007 - 8:53 am

Irony only goes so far with mild-mannered Gerry Piering... then he takes action!

It's been reasonably accurately reported in The Southampton Press Western Edition that the Incorporated Village of Westhampton Beach is being sued by the Habitat for Humanity (Suf­folk chapter) because "officials are wrongly refusing to allow the non-profit organization to build an affordable home on a small lot." More...

The late "Beat Generation" author William S. Burroughs once observed:

"After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn't do it."

Predictably, the "they" people are commanding media attention in the wake of last week's cowardly and insane actions in a shopping mall in Omaha, and this weekend's similar, and combined, events in two churches in Arvada and Colorado Springs, with hysterical and hoplo­phobic pants-wetting statements. More...

Originally an ad hoc group of exasperated area shoppers-briefly-turned-activists, the Commit­tee to Retaliate Against A&P was formed in Joanna Ferraro-Levy's Beach Road living room in the mid-'80s. Not-quite-under-the-heading of "Now it can be told," it was Mrs. Levy, Dot Berdinka, Kay Frankfurt, myself in my "Waldo" guise, and others whose identities escape me at the moment. We assembled late one Sun­day morn­ing chez Levy to peruse the A&P flyer stuffed into that day's Newsday, and make out four identical shopping lists of mostly Sale items so we could dash off to the chain's stores in Southampton, Riverhead, Mattituck and, of course, locally. More...