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.

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.