Former town of Ulster Supervisor Nicky Woerner (pictured at left) has moved to Kingston and plans to run for the Common Council seat in the city's Fifth Ward.

It's not exactly carpet-bagging, given that Woerner spent at least the first 18 years of his life in Kingston and he's only 26. But here's a piece of free advice, Nicky: Choosing as your "official" campaign photo an image that shows you wearing a "Town of Ulster" pin on your lapel (pictured below) probably wasn't a good idea.

Just wondering:

Why does Fox News — which proclaimed upon the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 that it's improper to question a president's military actions during wartime — see fit to bash President Obama relentlessly for the current U.S. attacks against Libya?

I guess Fox feels that if it makes the rules, it can change the rules ... especially to give itself license to question everything Obama does.

The adorable little hamlet of Phoenicia, nestled in the Catskill Mountains in the western Ulster County town of Shandaken, recently was voted one of the 10 coolest small towns in America by Budget Travel magazine. But not much else has gone right for the community lately.

* Twice in recent months — once in October and once in December — Phoenicia was beset by serious flooding when heavy rains caused the Stony Clove Creek to overflow.

* The hamlet's most popular restaurant, Sweet Sue's, has been forced to close for an undetermined amount of time because of a septic problem caused by — what else? — flooding.

* And in the predawn hours of Saturday, the local library, in a converted two-story house on Main Street, lost all of its contents to a fire.

That's a lot of bad luck in a very short amount of time for such a small place.

Here's hoping things get better soon for Phoenicia — and stay that way for a long time.

There's a stench of hypocrisy in the air, and it's coming from loudmouth conservative pundits who are criticizing President Barack Obama for filling out his NCAA basketball bracket on national TV amid the earthquake/tsunami/meltdown disaster in Japan.

Why hypocrisy? Because I never heard a peep of criticism out of these same people when President George W. Bush spent a total of more than 300 days vacationing away from the White House — at Camp David or his ranch in Texas — during his eight years as president.

My son Marc turns 17 today. I feel old (but look MAH-velous).
Happy birthday, rugrat. Stop growing up so darn fast!

I find it amusing that people are up in arms over Stone Ridge resident Melissa Leo uttering the F word while accepting her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress on Sunday, but many of these same people are fawning over Best Picture winner "The King's Speech" and particularly its Best Actor winner, Colin Firth, who blurts out the exact same word more than a dozen times in the course of less than a minute in one of the film's most memorable scenes.

Un-f**cking-believable.