Opinion

It’s Tuesday morning at 10 minutes to 10, and I have somehow neglected to come up with a subject for this week’s column, which needs to be turned in by 2:20 this afternoon.

At first look, an effort by the East Hampton Town Board to gain greater regulatory power over sand mines and composting operations might seem worthwhile, but is it really?

Hobbled and fearing the worst, I jumped at a chance to see my knee doctor in Great Neck on the Tuesday before Christmas.

The first-ever issue of this paper read in a gothic font, “The Easthampton Star.” Seeing the name of the town as one word has raised the question of when East Hampton became two words and if it ever properly was just one.

As the cliché goes, endless ink has been spilled over a wide range of subjects here on the South Fork, and while measuring it all would be pointless, we can be certain that reasonably priced housing would make the top two or three. So it was with some excitement this week that a new idea came in over the transom in the form of a letter to the editor.

It's always easier to destroy than to build, Mary keeps telling me. Perhaps that's why we're at each other's throats, on the Internet and elsewhere — it's easier.

It seems everyone took up at least one new thing during the pandemic. What with few or no social obligations and nowhere to go, we have tried to learn a fresh skill or do better at a familiar chore. Cleaning the kitchen has never been so interesting!

It's Spidey to the rescue — of cinemas. And just in time, before the hacking, feverish world backslides into another lockdown.

With the Omicron variant of Covid-19 on a rapid rise, the danger of being unvaccinated comes again into sharp focus. And yet, for many, even the recent threshold of 800,000 deaths in the United States is not persuasive.

Just how did modern civilization make the transition from spirit, light entering the world, to matter — to the materialism that marks Christmas Day?

Radio seems to be surviving the advent of the internet, doesn’t it? Reading suffers, print media staggers, but listening goes on. I’m a radio person. You are or you aren’t.

This is a good time to take stock of how the area is doing in keeping the sky dark at night.