A continuning series where I trawl the local Prog Blogs for tasty nuggets of infotainment. Don’t see your blog represented and think it should be? Send me a nastygram via the Contact Us page or just comment below. There’s more local progressive coolness out there than I ever imagined, and I feel really happy when I stumble across one of your sites. - btp

Well now let’s see what’s new since the last Roundup. Our buddy DragonFlyEye is of course hard at work promoting Rochester’s finer points, smacking down its annoyances, and asking the important questions:

• Ya Think Duffy Might Be Full of It? comments on Duffy’s recent comments about keeping infrastructure in place for maybe someday having another ferry service. I might be ok with what Duffy’s saying, if he’s leaving it open for a smaller hovercraft-type ship. The fare for riding the Fast Ferry was just too much to justify us schlepping our family to Toronto on it, cool as it would be.

Over at RochesterWriters…

• Rottenchester nets a good catch from Slashdot about why the heck don’t we bury our powerlines ’round these parts instead of being out of power for friggin days after a windstorm or ice storm. Even more interesting to me (and progressive), in the comments Jason O (of jayceland.com fame) makes the point that if we just decentralize power generation (that is, set up folks with solar/wind generation for their homes, we reduce the need for power lines significantly. Especially since RG&E is already planning on potentailly having rolling blackouts this summer. From their Energy Lines newsletter in May:
  

  Because power use continues to rise in New York State, there may be a rare occasion – particularly in the summer – when the statewide demand for electricity may outpace the available supply. [...] As a final step to relieve stress on the system we could be directed to temporarily shut off electricity to selected areas for an hour at a time. As these “controlled interruptions” end in one area, they might then move on to other areas until the high demand for electricity passes.Â

  That’s right. Blackouts. As a friend of mine of Indian descent said, “Wow, that’s the kind of [stuff] they pull in India.” Except there the issue is underdeveloped capacity, not overuse. Where’s that regional Energy Independence plan, Maggie Brooks? Mayor Duffy? Jiminy Christmas, get me Sandy Frankel on the phone! Maybe we can get this started in Brighton.

• Rottenchester also comments on our “Greening of Rochester” post in “Tracking Back“. And now we’re commenting on his comment. Why, it’s like we’re looking in a mirror, holding a mirror, and in that mirror we can see our reflection holding a mirror, looking in a mirror at…
• In “A man, A plan, A canal, Panama“, FarMcKon piles on with DragonFlyEye and others irritated about the latest city megaproject/boondoggle. Jason O rightfully laments the lack of sensible media coverage in the comments “What about non-financial things that make sense?” My point exactly. If it costs $10-13 million, for what appears at first glance to be window-dressing and landscaping, it probably ain’t sustainable.

Over in jayceland…”Weekly Rochester Events #390: Eighty-Three Miles” contains a couple interesting progressive bits:

• A good find: “Flex Your Rights which is a site that describes ways to guard your 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment rights.”
• He “met Andrew Stankevich [...and...] checked out the warehouse and work space for Friends Helping Friends (230 Hudson Ave., formerly Food Not Bombs)”. Andrew Stankevich? Now there’s a name I’ve not heard in…years. Actually, I was at the very first Food Not Bombs meeting in Rochester. It’s nice to see that Andrew’s keeping up the good work, including keeping one step ahead of the NSA’s spying by changing the name to Friends Helping Friends. Well done, my man. :-)   Â

I ventured onto NYCO’s blog.Â

• She’s a big-league blogger with a pretty site (mmm…berries….) and when she’s not educating folks on the evils of NYRI, she’s having interesting meta-conversations about how effective is upstate blogging, really? Are we monologing in an echo chamber with our fellow bloggers? To some extent, sure, that’s the nature of the beast. But the spillover to real live life-forms we’ve seen since we started this blog just a couple weeks back, shows that the impact goes beyond the blogosphere. Does this mean bloggers are just unbelievably awesome? I’d like to think so… But I think it more points to how much there is left on the to-do list for building a progressive infrastructure. Despite all the hard work folks & groups are doing, we’ve got a long way to go.

Now, on Michael Caputo’s Political Notebook…

• Yeah, I gotta start the roundup with his. If I save his for last, I’m so spent I have a hard time slogging through his delightfully wonky posts on workers’ comp, Albany, and taxes. I’m interested what takes you folks have on them.