A few days ago, a Sag Hampton resident I've known for years said to me, "The Long Island Railroad should be running shuttle trains in the Hamptons. There should be a train at least every half hour." I started to tell him about Five Towns Rural Transit (5TRT) and the East End Transportation Council (EETC), and the $400,000 grant from the State that those organizations got to study that very situation, but he interrupted me. "Study? What a waste of money. Why doesn't the railroad do it? It'd be a great thing, and they'd get a lot more people using the trains out here that way." ...   more »

Google Maps says it's 98.6 miles from the library in the middle of Sag Harbor to the Empire State Building, which I think of as being the metaphorical middle of New York City. Interesting...take the temperature of any healthy person in Sag Harbor, and you come up with the distance we live from Manhattan. I'm sure there's a correlation there. Maybe the key word is "healthy," in that our health is somehow tied to living almost 100 miles from one of, if not the, greatest city in the world.   more »

A couple of weeks ago I made a list of some positive developments here in Sag Hampton in an effort to cheer myself (and you, if you needed it) up. It worked. I had a very pleasant holiday, barely giving a thought to local issues. I hope your holidays were equally pleasant. I called that post "The Good" and promised "The Bad and the Ugly" would follow. With the holidays over, now is as good a time as any to explore the clouds whose silver lining I praised last time. ...   more »