It sure is nice being fully vaccinated and not having to wear the muzzle when out for my evening walk 😷

It sure is nice being fully vaccinated and not having to wear the muzzle when out for my evening walk 😷

While I always just used a bandana out walking and only flipped it over my face when other people approached it still was hot at times ever just around the neck. Plus no more worries about getting severely sick from the COVID-19.

So Long to the Hotel Pennsylvania

So Long to the Hotel Pennsylvania

The Hotel Pennsylvania is going to come down, Steven Roth has told his Vornado shareholders. That’s not a shock. It’s an old-fashioned hotel with a great many small rooms, on an extremely valuable site directly across from Pennsylvania Station, fronting on Seventh Avenue. Because it’s lost some luster over the years, the hotel probably has a rough time drawing business travelers. I stayed there as a young person around 1984, and by that time it was passable but dowdy. Judging by some of the recent reviews on TripAdvisor (e.g., “a real life episode of American Horror Story” and “there were blood stains on the pillows”), it’s slipped further since then. Eight years ago, Roth said that he was planning to renovate and turn it into something great, but we live in a different economic climate now, and the empty air above that giant site at 401 Seventh is apparently just too tempting to resist. A 1,270-foot tower, bearing the not-at-all-phallic name of PENN15, is its likely replacement.

Farmer accidentally moves Belgium-France border 7.5 feet

Farmer accidentally moves Belgium-France border 7.5 feet

This is the kind of thing that used to start wars, but we highly doubt that this incident will come to that. A farmer who was annoyed by a historic stone marker that was in his tractor’s path moved the object 7.5 feet — unofficially making his own country of Belgium slightly bigger and neighboring France slightly smaller.

Farmers are notoriously protective of their land rights; sovereign nations tend to be, too. As you can imagine, the incident has raised some eyebrows.

First reported by the BBC, the news outlet said that the border between France and what is now Belgium was formally established under the Treaty of Kortrijk, signed in 1820 after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo five years earlier. The stone, which is between the Belgian town of Erquelinnes and the French town of Bousignies-sur-Roc, dates back to 1819, when the border was first marked out.

Court rules against Forest Preserve tree cutting for snowmobile trails

Court rules against Forest Preserve tree cutting for snowmobile trails

Snowmobile trails planned for the Adirondack Park violate the state constitution’s “forever wild” clause and may only be approved through a constitutional amendment, the state’s highest court has ruled. It is a rare New York State Court of Appeals decision on the constitutional provision that protects state forest preserve, which includes the Adirondacks and Catskills. Four judges ruled in favor of Protect the Adirondacks, the advocacy organization that brought the suit against the state Department of Environmental Conservation, while two judges dissented. The New York Court of Appeals decision issued on Tuesday ends nearly eight years of litigation and overturns part of a lower court ruling.