In the few weeks since the terrorist shootings in Paris, a number of people have asked about my take on the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and whether The Star would have published them.

Whether to reprint these images was a serious question, one that many news organizations around the world asked themselves in the days after 11 people were killed at the office of the satirical magazine. In the United States a great number of editors decided to run them either for their news value or out of a sense of solidarity with those killed, or even for reasons of defiance. Others did not.

Notably, Dean Baquet, the relatively new executive editor of The New York Times, chose not to print them. His reasoning, which The Times made available on its website and which we endorse, included, “We have a standard that is long held and that serves us well: that there is a line between gratuitous insult and satire. Most of these are gratuitous insult.”

Running these cartoons was never a real consideration at The Star, since the news did not directly involve our coverage area. However, the general question about when and how to handle certain kinds of material is worth talking about. The Star has no hard-and-fast rule, but the yardstick we use to measure such things is that if we are going to run something that will deeply offend some readers, there had better be an overwhelmingly good reason to do so.

An example that I give the staff is that the uncalled-for use of profanity, an F-bomb perhaps, in most cases is not necessary. But, if a hypothetical town official dropped one during a public meeting, it then would be newsworthy and fit to print.

One cannot always catch everything that is going to offend. Things slip through, such as the description of a Bridgehampton neighborhood as “crack alley” in our pages not that long ago. That does not excuse it, however, and I regret that it happened. But something as obviously insulting as stereotype-heavy drawings of the Prophet Mohammed or a caricature of a black French high official as a monkey did not need to be redistributed as widely as they were in the aftermath of the shootings.

French intellectuals have all sorts of explanations for why the context of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons justifies their publication. But to the people who saw and see their religion maligned or race depicted as something less than human, those subtleties may be less than convincing, especially here in the United States, where equal rights and respect for all is something we strive for.

I’ve been reading about Zen Buddhism lately, and was reminded of the Yogi Berra koans I’d seen at the Artists-Writers Game last August.

    Here are some:

    “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

    “It gets late early out here.”

    “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

    “Baseball is 90 percent mental — the other half is physical.”

    “A nickel isn’t worth a dime anymore.”

    “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.”

    “I didn’t really say everything I said.”

    “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

                                    * * *

The Zen masters used to rap inquiring students over the head if they didn’t catch the drift of their puzzling koans, and the concussive force of the blow often led to Enlightenment.

I almost achieved it myself the other night during the Super Bowl, giving my forehead an awful whack with the back of my hand when the Seahawks tried that second-and-goal slant pass at the Patriots’ 1-yard line with 20-some seconds left in the game.

In somewhat unenlightened fashion I’ve been hoping to see the Patriots defeated for the longest time, it seems. Once the Steelers went down and I could no longer root for, rooting against — as in our national elections — became my goal. It’s not that I hate my country — I just can’t stand teams arrogating to themselves exceptional, bright, shiny status, even if they are exceptional. I’ve chafed at that self-satisfied our-city-stands-upon-a-hill kind of thing for a long time, ever since “America’s team” was flattened by the one in black and gold that brandished the United Steel Workers’ banner — in the Bicentennial year no less.

So the Patriot fans remain smug, and I’m going back to “Anne of Green Gables,” whose third disc I almost watched instead on Super Bowl night. Actually, I did remain unglued for just about all of the first half, calling out to Mary as I went down the hall to inquire as to the halftime score that I trusted my quest for spiritual peace would not be derailed by a little violence.

“We must look at the big picture,” I said.

“You are — you’re looking at the big TV screen down the hall,” Mary said.

“Well, yes, but I mean by the big picture that we must embrace life in all its mystery and contradictions and through serenity somehow transcend the duality that leads to our problems. That’s the only way to world peace. . . . It’s all one.”

“At least until the hockey playoffs begin.”

This has been a rough winter for my husband and me, even though we’re 1,100 miles south of the snow, and it’s been made no easier by reports from Amagansett of big changes in store for the quiet street we’ve lived on for — whoa — one year short of 50. (Like Jack Graves, I may soon be reading my own words in the “Years Ago” column.)

With Sidney pretty much incapacitated since late December by a serious accident, we’ve had to confine our usual comings and goings to staying put, and while spending most of your waking hours within circumscribed limits is infinitely more bearable here in Florida, where the sun sets an hour later and the only ice is in your glass, than it would be up north, it’s not at all what you anticipate when you pack your flip-flops.

So we are looking forward even more than usual to April, when, with his usual determination plus intensive therapy, he should be, if not what you’d call nimble, at least able to negotiate the trip home.

What we will find upon arrival, though, is iffy. I had a call from a real estate broker last week who’d been studying the tax maps and wondered if we’d care to sell a buildable piece of land that Sidney presciently split off long ago from the rest of our flag lot. It turns out that the people whose yard backs onto that vacant parcel, and who have been our good neighbors from the beginning, are moving to where their kids live and selling their house.

Meanwhile on the other side of us, I’m told that a house only 10 or so years old was recently demolished (“I had heard that when the house was sold she specified that it not be torn down,” a friend lamented in an email), and the one next to it, an immediate neighbor’s, is almost certainly about to be.

Oh, dear. Bulldozers to the west of us, bulldozers to the east, volleying and thundering, and who knows how many mini-estates coming to the south, where we have been blessed all these years by a full-on view of someone else’s vast empty meadow.

Our three children grew up spending summers in Amagansett and they love to visit, but they all live so far away that expecting them to keep the old house going after we’re gone is folly. It will be a teardown. There, I’ve said it.

As I said, the winter has been hard. I wonder whether, were it not for the accident, with its intimations of mortality, I would be fretting so much. We’re not selling that vacant parcel just yet, though.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large. She is at large at the moment in Key Biscayne, Fla.

Did you read about the gigantic opossum that got stuck in a wooden gate in Sag Harbor last week? The story of its rescue was told on easthamptonstar.com almost as soon as it was freed, and the ’possum pictures, which The Star didn’t have room to publish in print, were ridiculously adorable. This week, like all weeks nowadays, plenty of feature and sports photos that weren’t used in the paper itself appeared on the web. When a fire broke out at Duryea’s Lobster Deck on Fort Pond Bay in Montauk Saturday afternoon, to give another example, the story and accompanying images popped up quickly on the website and an update was posted later in the day.

I’m old-fashioned about reading, almost always choosing a book between covers rather than a Kindle and a snail-mailed magazine rather than an electronic version, but lately I find myself making a habit of going to The Star’s website a few times a day. 

For decades, I have tried to read every word that appears in The Star, and I get a head start each week by editing some of the stories that will appear. Nevertheless, the website is filling a daily gap I didn’t know existed. Every time I look at it I find something our digital editor, Taylor Vecsey, decided should be put there right away rather than held for print publication. We’re not about to become a daily newspaper, to be sure — but reading more of it ahead of time turns out to be fun as well as useful.

It goes without saying, probably, that what is called breaking news (fires, bad accidents, and, at this time of year, weather warnings and cancellations) can now be seen on the website as promptly as possible, but surprising features and news of a lighter variety — like the aforementioned opossum — pop up constantly there, too. Eventually, everything ends up on the website, including the long, detailed accounts of what government and quasi-governmental organizations here are doing; reports of meetings; activities of the civic groups, and so on. 

I, and our readers, do still have to wait for Thursday for many of the more popular parts of the paper: the yard sale ads, the letters to the editor, editorials, and personal columns (and, yes, the drunken-driving arrests), but these juicy bits seem even more worth the wait when you have whetted your appetite all week long via the digital portal. 

It is impossible to ignore the evidence that news-hounds in generations younger than mine are more apt to get what is called news these days digitally than any other way. It’s in the zeitgeist, and I don’t want to be left behind. 

Even though I am sure that sources like Twitter, which limits entries to 140 characters, or Facebook and Instagram cannot do more than provide superficial summaries and links, they certainly make it easy to catch ahold of unfolding events, and they certainly stoke the fires of news addiction in those so inclined.

I’ve got a vested interest in The Star, of course, and am delighted that the number of individual visits to our website is growing by leaps and bounds. In the end, naturally, I hope that those who are introduced to The Star through the website will become print subscribers, too. The surprising thing I’ve discovered is that my own growing digital-news compulsion, far from being discouraging on that score, points to healthy days ahead for local newsprint.

Did you know that Starbucks sells souvenir mugs featuring images of different cities, countries, and states around the world — from Arizona to Ireland to Tokyo? Shush. Don’t tell my husband. He’s got a mug bug.

It was an exhibit of Dominy furniture at Clinton Academy that set off his addiction: He must have bought a half-dozen of the attractive commemorative Dominy mugs, keeping some and giving others away. I agreed that they made nice gifts, but I had no idea they would open a floodgate.

Truth be told, back before I realized this would become a problem, I once aided and abetted my husband in buying a half-dozen mugs with the word “Noank” and a sailboat imprinted on them in bright blue. They seemed appropriate, because we once kept a boat at the Connecticut port, but we really didn’t need them: Our kitchen cupboard was already perfectly well equipped with antique and vintage tea cups, coffee cups, and your basic mug-mugs, not to mention various other ceramic mementoes of faraway places, such as egg cups and candy dishes.    

The Noank mugs all remain intact, as do some appealing Spode mugs in various shades and patterns, and together these ought to have been perfectly adequate to the needs of not just us but any potential guests. But when it comes to mugs, apparently, too much is never enough. 

Somewhere between the Noank mugs and the Dominy mugs, Chris acquired a souvenir mug from Chez Christophe, a roadside Acadian restaurant in rural Nova Scotia where we had a good meal. Also among Chris’s souvenir-mug collection are two of the heavy cafeteria type from the Frank Lloyd Wright houses we visited in Buffalo; a determined Wright fan, he came home more recently with two tall, sturdy ones from the Gordon house in Silverton, Ore.

It’s probably a good thing we don’t travel too much these days, because the cupboard couldn’t bear it. We have officially run out of shelf space. Also crammed in are four mugs from family members — one with a drawing by one of the granddaughters and one, which we somehow acquired by mistake, bearing a drawing by somebody else’s granddaughter. There are custom photo-mugs showing the smiling mugs (ha, ha) of the Nova Scotia branch of the family, plus three more souvenir mugs from Shelburne, N.S., with flags (Canadian and Empire Loyalist) emblazoned on them. Who but Chris would have bought the “Oh, Canada” mug with the words of the national anthem on it? He claims it wasn’t him, but I don’t believe him. Then there’s a mug honoring the retirement, some years ago, of the Rev. Robert Stuart from the Amagansett Presbyterian Church. 

Need I go on? 

Yes, I will go on! My own favorite mugs are two purchased by my daughter at Home, James many Christmases ago: one with a leaping salmon on it, another with a trout. They match not my green Spode dinnerware, by my eldest son’s brown-and-cream Spode. And let’s not forget the two space-hogging ceramic cups with matching saucers that are so huge they are better for soup than hot drinks.

I hatched a plan last week to offload some of this overflowing collection by surreptitiously carrying mugs down to the Star office. But when I looked inside the cupboard in the Star’s kitchen, I was confronted by another situation: It held two or three dozen assorted mugs and cups, along with such peculiar things as coffee beans in a jar labeled “chocolate bits” and a bottle of wheat germ that has been there since the 1980s, I believe. 

Hoping to pin Chris down about why he collects mugs — and perhaps to press him to cease and desist — I confronted him when he arrived home from Sag Harbor the other day carrying two more. 

“They are nice reminders of good places,” he said.  

Then, because the two Sag Harbor additions to his collection came from Canio’s Books and the new Harbor Books, his voice took on a righteous tone. “I believe in supporting independent booksellers,” he said. Thinking further, he added, “If BookHampton had a mug I’d certainly get one.”

Shush. For our kitchen cupboard’s sake, I hope no one at BookHampton is reading this.

So this guy sidles up to me at Java Nation in Bridgehampton and says, “Hey boss, you got any of those eight-grain loaves today?”

I, by coincidence having made a mental note to stop by Breadzilla in Wainscott that morning, replied, “No, but I’m heading there later.” And then I realized that it had happened again. I had been taken for Brad Thompson, one of its two owners.

The area that spans a triangle from East Hampton to Sag Harbor to Bridgehampton is where this case of mistaken identity happens. It speaks to this being a community of sorts: It’s not so small that people actually know the difference between us and not so large that they can respond to our similarities. It’s actually kind of nice.

It had only been about a month before the awkward situation at the coffee shop over the eight-grain that it had happened last. I had just sat down for a haircut, when the owner of the salon started telling me how he had really enjoyed the falafel sandwich or something the last time he was in the shop. “I get it every time I am over there,” he said.

A fast-talking guy, he was already discussing the differences between doing business in Sag Harbor and doing business in Wainscott and a whole bunch of things before I could find a pause to clear up my identity. Smoothly, though, at a certain point, he figured it out himself, and without a pause segued into something having to do with photography and drone aircraft, and whether The Star might want some of his images to print.

I can sort of see what people are talking about when they mix up Brad and me. We have more or less the same complexion, longish hair with a bit of gray, prominent noses, and eyes that are on the small side. We have similar builds, though I think Brad is taller, and, I concede, the better cook.

Perhaps the best of these encounters came quite a few years ago at Yoga Shanti, a Sag Harbor studio that, in those days, Brad and I both attended. As I was seated on my mat before the class, the teacher, who was seated nearby, and I got into an argument over what I said was my busiest day of the week. No way it could be Wednesday, she insisted, getting a little un-yoga like. It was only after she said something about my baking for the weekend crowd that it dawned on me what was going on.

As for Brad, I don’t remember him saying that anyone has mistaken him for me. I’ll have to ask him the next time I pick up one of those eight-grains, boss.

I’ve been in recovery — clean — for almost a full month now, 29 days as a matter of fact, and while of course one always should be wary of a relapse, I think I’ve kicked the Facebook habit.

I haven’t formally resigned — I doubt frankly that they let you — but I swear I have not clicked on it since we returned from a vacation at the end of December.

“It’s just so much noise . . . so much chatter for the most part,” I said to Mary. “It’s not that I’m antisocial, I just don’t have the time on my time off to pay attention to what other people are thinking. As I said to Cebra, when he first recommended Facebook as a means of communication, ‘I don’t do dialogues, I do monologues.’ ”

Isn’t it ironic? I’m repelled, I guess, by the sight of others putting themselves forward when, in fact, that’s what I’ve been doing on a weekly basis for the better part of the past 50 years. Of course my ephemeral thoughts have more heft, I tell myself, anchored (often to my chagrin) as they are in print.

That’s what I tell myself, but deep down, I know the world is passing me by — and swiftly, too. Before you know it’s news it’s old — it’s already been on the Internet. That’s one reason, I suppose, not to defect from Facebook, though there’s only so much input one can put in. It’s as Bob Schaeffer once said, “There’s too much muchness.”

Of course it’s difficult, being a card-carrying member of the chattering class, to deplug entirely, but I figure the less time spent on Facebook the more time I’ll have for idling in other ways, such as happened the other day in the blizzard when I, in need of a horror fix, went in search of the papers at One Stop only to wind up spinning my wheels ceaselessly on an unplowed part of Delavan. Bill Leland, our neighbor, kindly set the car, which might otherwise have impeded the plows that night, free, leaving me chastened and resolved to spend the rest of the day quietly, with a book, listening to the fire.

We have all been under a sort of snow arrest for the last week — lots of time sitting in cars going really slowly to avoid black ice and hours waiting for “the guys” to come to plow us out, or driving around and around the parking lots looking for a spot that isn’t in a drift.

That is not to say that I am not paying close attention, but my mind does wander to the ponder.

There are some words that are worthy of a ponder, favorite words, wonderful words, words to dwell on. No, I don’t refer to big global words like peace and harmony. I leave that mulling to the professionals. I ponder words like my world-class favorite word: puppy.

I am not a dog owner, never have been, very likely never will be. (The family cats would strenuously object.) But, typically, I digress.

Back to the very word “puppy.” It has charm and joy. Puppy is fun to say out loud and it is even fun to spell. Graphically, it is full of funny shapes, making it a cute word to even look at.

I have considered naming a future cat Puppy just so that I could say it every day.

There are other words that inspire my imagination by the very sound of them. What an exotic and interesting word “Mombassa” is. “Funicular” and “lollipop” are words that are fun to say. And, think about it, “suede” feels really good on the vocal cords.

I like “blaspheme.” It sounds like what it is, but that’s not why I like it. It just sounds great.

While pondering these words, I am not pondering their meaning, origin, or effect. I am just trying to figure out how to use them in sentences so I can say them aloud. I will read this little essay aloud and thus give sound to all of the favorites in one fell swoop. And who doesn’t want to say “fell swoop” a few times a day?

Or “boonduggy?” Okay, I know it is dune buggy but say boonduggy once and you will never go back to the pedestrian dune buggy. It’s no damn fun.

Here we go with some of the all-time favorites that I want to say today. Puppy, well we have that in abundance. Additional favorites: swill, diatomaceous, Zebu, Madagascar, and antidisestablishmentarianism. (Just kidding, but I wanted to see if I could use it in a sentence.)

It has been written that “cellar door” is the most beautiful word combination in the English language, but in my book it doesn’t hold a candle to puppy.

Well there is one more favorite phrase, the favorite of freelancers across America: The check is in the mail.

I really like that one.

Durell Godfrey is a contributing photographer for The Star.

Even if you’re not a kid, snow days are a welcome respite, not from school but from the getting and spending with which most of us fill our days. It was Tuesday afternoon when I wrote this. As I sat at my computer, which is in a corner of the bedroom, I watched the snow veer horizontally, rising high enough to cover the seat of the swing in the yard and making a graceful mound of the car.

From The Star’s website, I learned that only a few households here had lost power. For everyone save the crews at work on the roads and the volunteers in the emergency services, the big snow provided a chance to stay home, warm and cozy — and cruise Facebook.

On Facebook I was surprised to notice a remark by a friend who had a totally different take on this day off: She said it gave people a chance to do chores they had put off for a long time, like cleaning the basement. Better her than me. There are plenty of tasks I’ve put off, but that’s not my idea of how to bask in a snow day. As far as I’m concerned, a snow day is an excuse to, for once, do just about nothing.

Other Facebook warriors recorded their outdoor adventures — shoveling, taking photographs, digging out their vehicles, even snowshoeing. I felt a bit jealous, but not jealous enough to bundle up and go out. “Take heart,” my husband said. “There are advantages to being a senior citizen, and not being expected to venture out in 18-to-24-inch-deep snow is one of them.”

My niece Janet, out in sunny California, posted photographs of a scene from Golden Gate Park, where calla lilies are blooming and Muscovy ducks paddle about like it was already spring. The Facebook “wall” of Pat Mundus — who has been sailing in far off, tropical waters — featured shots of a visit to Mayan ruins in Belize. Now that’s something I dream about.

Usually, on a non-snow day, I start my morning perusing the woeful headlines of the world in the pages of The New York Times, which has been delivered to our driveway for decades. Today, I took a vacation from the bad news: My copy never made it up our snowbound lane. In snow-day mode, I didn’t even look up the headlines online.

But despite my best efforts to simply daydream, all warm and cozy, Facebook managed to intrude on my peace.

I have “liked” Doctors Without Borders (or have I “friended” the organization? I’m not sure which) and it posted its own version of a snow-shoveling photo today, this one from Lebanon. A Syrian refugee is seen shoveling outside his tent in a makeshift settlement in the Bekaa Valley. “Snow and freezing temperatures are bringing misery to many of the 400,000 Syrians who have taken shelter in substandard conditions in the area. Today, the conflict in Syria is seen as the world’s most grave humanitarian disaster,” the accompanying text read.

Even on a snow day, there is no respite from the problems of the world.

From an upstairs window Tuesday, as snow continued to fall fast, I could see a dozen sea ducks riding it out on the bay in front of our house. Seagulls of some sort flew on the driving wind above the water’s edge as a flood tide pushed and clawed at the dune.

The beach is almost dead flat and rocky at this time of year, and the gulls swoop down and pick up any edible thing dug loose from the bottom by the waves. It is one hard way to make a living, though if the cold does not bother them all that much the easy pickings make good sense. On the other hand, the ducks, surf scoters, I believe, have carved out a niche that I find difficult to understand.

Of all the parts of Gardiner’s Bay where they could hole up, our southeastern reach would have to be about the toughest. Rollers propelled by the strong north wind tumble and break above the shallows here. Even in the warm months, there has never been a boat I owned or had anything to do with that did not break loose or drag anchor over the flats.

Watching with an old pair of Navy binoculars, I wondered why the scoters did not find a gentle lee instead. They are sea ducks, however, and to them, the bay may well be a refuge from the day’s ocean turmoil. These birds’ hardiness is something worthy of marvel, an astonishing shell of feathers covering thick down. Their uncovered feet work constantly to keep their beaks pointed in the direction of the oncoming waves.

It appeared that the scotors were not feeding. Rather, they just swam, nearly in place, disappearing and appearing again as the waves came and went underneath them. That they could be doing this for the duration of this stretch of weather is something to think about.

People who live in Florida or anyplace else warm probably think those of us sitting out this blizzard are the crazy ones. And we, warm in the house, look out at the birds and think the same thing.