Massena Supervisor Joseph D. Gray has a plan to solve the feral cat problem in his town: Starve the animals to death.

It’s hard for me to even type that idea in a sentence. I can’t imagine being able say it out loud.

Mr. Gray doesn’t have the same reservations.

He wants people to quit feeding feral cats so they will die slow, agonizing deaths.

Problem solved.

Child obesity is also an issue in the north country. I surely hope no one asks Mr. Gray for his thoughts on how to solve that problem.

I would call the supervisor a buffoon, but I don’t want to insult all the people who manage to be clowns without being cruel.

Starvation is not an acceptable solution to any problem – be it feral cats or fat children.

At least not in a humane society.

Mr. Gray’s cold rationalization for starving stray cats to death is that they die early and young even when people do feed them regularly. But apparently they are not dead early or young enough for Mr. Gray.

Starvation as a problem-solving tool would be reprehensible if proposed by a mentally disturbed person. That a sane elected public official came up with the idea makes it reprehensible and unbelievable.

Mr. Gray came to the conclusion that there is a serious feral cat problem in Massena based on the observation that he sees an average of three a night when he takes his dog for a car ride.

How’s that for science? He sees three a night. Somehow he determines they are wild. Conclusion: We got a problem, Massena.

And this problem creates three more that he cited: cat-damaged lawns and outdoor property; the potential for health concerns – such as rabies; the costs incurred by the town to capture and control these wild animals.

I see three cats a night in my yard in Canton, but unlike Mr. Gray, I make the leap that they belong to one of my neighbors.

I could just as easily determine them to be feral. I could just as easily determine them to be a problem.

That doesn’t make any those determinations valid. Guessing is not a good way to come to a definitive conclusion.

In any event, I’ve not been able to chart any property damage that I can tie to these cats on the loose. The closest I’ve come is spotting some cat hairs left on a cushion of one of my lawn chairs. I suppose one of the potentially rabid beasts must have needed a nap during its reign of terror.

To be fair to cats of all stripes, all mammals are “potentially” rabid beasts. All mammals. Even town supervisors. That they can be rabid doesn’t make them rabid.

Rabid cats in my memory have not been a problem in St. Lawrence County. Mr. Gray’s suggestion to starve wild cats makes him the first supervisor to show signs of rabid behavior. I am not in favor of starving him, either.

If the supervisor perceives there is a problem caused by the number of stray cats in his town, he needs to do more than drive around in his car asking his dog which ones are pets and which are feral to confirm his suspicions. Dogs, when it comes to cats, are notoriously biased.

He needs to figure out a way to do a census to determine if his anecdotal evidence is on the mark. He might find that his dog steered him wrong and the feral cat problem is smaller than he thinks.

But if he confirms his and his dog’s guesses that feral cats are a problem, the next step would be to figure out a proper way to solve it.

Maybe the answer is for him to lead the charge for people to spay and neuter their cats – their pets and the ones considered wild. Maybe he can lead the charge to have fundraisers to get the cash to fund spay and neuter programs. Maybe he can lobby veterinarians to do mobile spay and neuter work pro bono.

As an elected official whose name is well known in the community, he has clout that he could use to help curb the problem if it exists.

Trying to spark a campaign to starve feral cats is not the responsible way to handle the problem. It’s not the proper way to use his clout.

I’ve met Mr. Gray and know he is not a mentally disturbed and rabid man. He would do well to stop sounding like one.

There are positive things Mr. Gray can do to reduce the number of unwanted cats in his neighborhood.

The first step he can take is losing the idea that starving animals to death is a good, acceptable plan.

Road work is causing traffic to move through downtown Canton slower that a three-wheeled Amish buggy in a blizzard.

This has everyone grumbling.

There’s a rumor that the grumbling reached an historic height when a young Amish man wrote “WTF?!” in big block letters on a sign that he hung from his horse’s neck as he stood mired in one of the many traffic jams on Main Street this summer.

I have not confirmed that rumor - and doubt that it is true because WTF is shorthand that means What The Fudge when texting or sending an Internet message - and the Amish aren’t into the whole Twitter or cell phone scene. But I sure can see where the moonscape that used to be our quaint little downtown might move a God-fearing person to curse a bit nonetheless

I walk a lot these days. Or ride my bike. Or take ridiculous routes in my car to avoid cursing the work being done to make the downtown underground beautiful again.

That’s what all the tree-cutting-road-busting-dust-making-hole-digging work has been all about. Replacing pipes and other stuff that make a village work.

It doesn’t make things fun on the roads around here and it isn’t going to make Canton much more glamorous when it is finished. But it is work that had to be done.

You know all that if you live here. Not everyone driving through town has such local knowledge, though.

One night when I was walking home from dinner, a woman standing next to her car made a sweeping gesture as if to introduce me to the unmoving line of automobiles ahead of her.

“Is there any way around this?” she said. “I need to get to Watertown and I’ve been sitting here for at least a half-hour without moving.”

I thought about giving her the long answer.

“Yes. Take that road - Park Street - and follow it well past the college to a three-way stop sign. Stay right toward the sign that says “Russell.” Drive quite a ways until there’s another sign on a road that points right toward “Hermon.” Take that winding road until you’re convinced you are lost among the cows in the cornfields. Right about then you should see a building or two. That’s Hermon. Search out a bar called the “Skunk’s Nest.” Go in there, knock back a couple of Genesse Cream Ales ... then ask how to get to Route 11. You’ll be home free on the road to Watertown a few miles of cornfields after that.”

I’ve taken that route before, so I know it is effective. But I’ve lived in St. Lawrence County for a couple decades. I figured those directions might be a little troublesome for big city folk, so I went with the short answer to the grumbling woman’s question.

“Um, nope.”

“WTF?!” she said, oozing frustration as she opened the passenger side door and eased back into her car.

WTF indeed.

Life in Canton has not been pretty this summer. You mostly can avoid the mess if you know what you are doing. But even the most savvy and experienced Cantonites have been caught at least once in an unmoving line of traffic heading into town.

Here’s one way it happens: You are cruising along at 62 mph on your way home from work in Ogdensburg. For 10 or 12 miles you haven’t seen another car. You’re daydreaming about what to cook for dinner when a vee of geese flying south overhead directs your thoughts toward the coming winter.

Traffic jams are the farthest thing from your mind until ... BOOM, BANG, BING ... you’re just past the entrance to SUNY Canton and are stopped cold at the end of a long line of cars.

In denial, you sit for 10 minutes thinking things should start moving any second. The line of traffic grows as you watch cars back up behind you. Soon, 20 minutes has passed.

At 30 minutes you think about turning around and going back to the road to the hamlet of Morley you should have remembered to turn on in the first place to avoid this mess. But cars have you pinned in, so you sit and wait. And wait. And wait. At some point you call your husband or wife to vent.

“I’ve been sitting here in my car for an hour and we’re still not moving, honey. WTF?!”

It’s happened to me. It’s probably happened to you if your travels have taken you to Canton this summer. It happens to my Love Nugget - who works in Ogdensburg - once or twice a week. She daydreams a lot. And she is a big fan of Canada geese.

She wanted me to write a column about how bad the stupid traffic problems are. Her outline for the column went like this: “Write about how bad the stupid traffic problems are.”

I considered it. I also for a time considered writing about what a good job the road crews were doing on the whole to keep traffic moving most of the time.

I decided against either idea because traffic is always going to be bad when you rip up the main artery of the village. And road crews doing their best will never make the bad situation a good thing. Manageable, perhaps, but not good.

We are suffering through work that needed to be done before an antiquated sewer or water pipe broke under Main Street and left a sinkhole far more dangerous than the inconvenience of a traffic jam will ever be to any of us.

Things are probably going to get worse before they get better as crews start working nights to get the project finished before the first snow flies. That means you might sometime soon get snarled in traffic before and after dinner.

But your car is not going to end up at the bottom of a sinkhole, so quit grumbling. Suck it up and focus on the fact that this will all be over as soon as winter blows into town in a few short months.

Then, no doubt, there’s a chance you’ll be grumbling about getting stuck driving behind a three-wheeled Amish buggy in a blizzard.

At least you’ll be driving on a safe new road.

Bonjour. Bienvenue. Ah, oui.

Excuse my French. I just want to show what I might sound like if I lived in the shadow of Montreal’s suburbs — which the Atlantic magazine suggests I do in an online article called, “For the Amish, Big Agribusiness is Destroying a Way of Life.”

Allez Tricolore! (Go Habs!)

It’s sort of fun in a romantic way to imagine that I live only a bridge toll away from the suburbs of such a cool, cosmopolitan city. The truth is I am a bridge toll away from Cornwall, Ontario, Canada – which is 70 some miles and a world away from Montreal.

Here is my unofficial count of all the people in Cornwall who consider themselves living in a suburb of Montreal: Zero. Here is a count of all the people living just across the border in Massena who think of Cornwall as a Montreal suburb: Zero.

The Canadian cities aren’t even in the same province. And if Montreal had its way, it wouldn’t even share the same country as Cornwall.

Fantasy has its place, but it isn’t usually in articles published in such a well-known and respected magazine as the Atlantic.

The most disturbing part of this story is that the Montreal reference is not the most disturbing part of the story. The article in which it was said that St. Lawrence County “stretches from the Adirondacks to the suburbs of Montreal” got lots of other things wrong. Making Cornwall a suburb of Montreal was one of only two errors that the Atlantic editors refused to correct in the story online.

“The definition of ‘suburb’ is subjective and elastic. Our reporter spoke mostly to residents at the northern edge of the county, and they characterized the towns across the border as Montreal suburbs,” said the Atlantic spokeswoman Natalie Raabe in an email.

Note that I have lived here nearly 20 years and have never heard anyone living anywhere in the county make such a characterization. And the definition of suburb is no more subjective or elastic than the definition of poutine.

Suburb: A district lying immediately outside a city or town, especially a smaller residential community.

Poutine: French fries topped with cheese curds and gravy.

You take away the cheese curds and you don’t have poutine – you’ve got fries and gravy. There is no elasticity there. Same goes for suburbs: You can’t add miles and miles and miles of cornfields between one city and another and conclude each is lying immediately outside the other.

Well, you can ... but you would be wrong. Which was a general theme of the whole article written by reporter and fellow at the Atlantic, Malcolm Burnley. For a more accurate picture of agricultural life in St. Lawrence County and the niche the Amish are filling in it, see the report done by Staff Writer Christopher Robbins in the Sunday papers published by Johnson Newspapers. http://watertowndailytimes.com/article/20120923/CURR04/709239987

Mr. Burnley got a lot wrong in his piece. To their credit, the Atlantic editors corrected many of the problems in the story when alerted. They also said they regretted what they called “immaterial factual errors and omissions” by the author. As well they should. The article’s errors and omissions on this list are surely nothing of which to be proud. The author:

■ Failed to disclose that he had worked for Bittersweet Farm owner Brian Bennett, the source he used as the primary voice in the story.

■ Reported big agribusiness was moving into the area, when the truth is there are a handful of family farms that have been around long enough to grow into big operations. No big agribusiness is moving into the county.

■ Misidentified a large Canton dairy operation as being in DePeyster.

■ Spelled the name of a source Inus instead of Enos

■ Referenced the smell of “synthetic manure” – a product that doesn’t exist. There is nothing synthetic about manure.

■ Described a farmer milking a cow by pulling on two udders, rather than teats.

■ Wrongly said that Watertown suffers a high foreclosure rate. That city is actually booming with the expansion of Fort Drum and has a low foreclosure rate.

There were more errors, but you get the picture. They may be immaterial to the basic premise of the story – which I remind you was that big agribusiness is destroying the Amish way of life – but they are important to the reporter’s credibility. If he was so careless in all these so-called immaterial areas, it’s natural to wonder if he put more effort into getting the big picture right.

And the short answer is: No, he didn’t.

The editors at the magazine weren’t much better.

“This story was subjected to our regular editing process. It was edited and fact-checked by a senior editor of TheAtlantic.com,” Ms. Raabe said.

This, like the story itself, bends the truth to fit what Ms. Raabe wanted it to be. Fact-checking is traditionally done before a story is published. In at least one case - where they talked to a local real estate agent about land prices here to support the article’s claim that they were rising dramatically - they did so three days after being alerted about their facts being wrong and well after the article was published online.

Even more interesting is the “fact” they uncovered - that land prices doubled in the past five years - is something real estate agent Ken Friedel said he didn’t tell them. Mr. Friedel said that any example of land prices doubling that he gave them would have covered a 15 to 20 year span - not five.

Mr. Burnley took bits of truths and incorrectly blew them up into what he and Mr. Bennett wanted them to show. His editors appear to have followed suit. This method of reporting and editing produced a dramatic story that isn’t true. http://tinyurl.com/9e8scwu

The truth is the Amish population in St. Lawrence County is growing and thriving, so much so that they are more competing with themselves for land than any large farming operation. There’s no evidence that suggests their way of life is being destroyed or even threatened.

That’s the second error that the Atlantic editors refused to correct – and it’s anything but immaterial. They stand by the story despite its glaring flaws.

Maybe they are trying to emulate the news satire organization, The Onion, which makes people laugh by publishing reality-based fictional stories that look and sound like they are legitimate news.

I’ll admit the notion that Cornwall is a suburb of Montreal is pretty funny. And the mental picture of some chemist slaving away to develop synthetic manure has a lot of comedic possibilities. But they have a long way to go to compete with The Onion.

The Atlantic should go back to what they do best: Producing quality journalism through good reporting and fact-checking. That they chose not to do this with the poor journalistic effort by Mr. Burnley has a lot of people up here shaking their heads.

My reaction is this: “Sacre bleu!”

Excuse my French.

Based on the virtually non-stop talk on sports radio and television lately about revered Penn State football program icon Joe Paterno’s role in the cover-up of child abuse by his former coach, Jerry Sandusky, I fully expected to see some damning evidence against the late coach in the recently released investigation report by former FBI chief Louis Freeh.

Then I read nearly every word of the report. The damning evidence I expected wasn’t there.

The sports talking heads – with their calls for the college to take down a campus statue of the legendary coach and their overall tone that the investigation showed we needed to forget anything good Paterno had done in his 60 years at the school – had me convinced I would see something shocking in the lengthy report.

Maybe something like an email authored by Joe Pa that said: “We need to do everything we can to protect Penn State. Jerry may be a horrible man doing unspeakable things to children, but we cannot let him bring down this great institution. Roar, Lions, roar.”

No such email was there.

What I learned from reading the report is that you have to make some leaps to indict Paterno for any sort of cover-up. And that the media has been more than willing to do so. The fall of a legend is a big deal ... and if every competitor in the news media is reporting about the fall of a legend, you sure don’t want to be the guy suggesting we should more slowly and deeply analyze what we know.

I can do that because the survival of my newspaper doesn’t hinge on whether the seven people who read my column give a Nittany’s patootie about what I think – about Joe Paterno or any other subject for that matter.

So here is what I think: Paterno is another in a long line of Sandusky’s victims. There isn’t anything in the report that tells me that, just as there isn’t anything in the report that clearly says he covered for his long-time friend.

But if we have to take what we know and make some leaps, I am leaping in the direction that Paterno’s “crime” was not believing in real time what all the pundits – and a jury – could more readily see years down the road after a lot of investigation: That Sandusky was a monster.

Paterno was a victim of human nature. He likely refused to believe his loyal, long-time friend – a seeming doer of good on many levels – was a sick predator.

I’ve seen this kind of behavior before. You’ve seen this kind of behavior before.

Maybe it was your child who got caught red-handed shoplifting something from a convenience store. The child tells you he didn’t do it. The police says he did. Who do you – his mom or dad – believe? The child, of course. Evidence be damned, YOUR child would never do anything like that. The police MUST be wrong.

No one knows what Sandusky told Paterno when confronted about accusations he was molesting children, but you can bet it was a lie. And you can bet it was convincing. Sandusky made a career of living a terrible lie. He had to be good at it.

Paterno is too dead to tell us he was duped - that he wrongly chose to believe an explanation of “innocent horseplay” over what we now know was rape. That he WANTED to believe his friend, so he DID believe his friend. You should also note that the choice was bolstered — we now know wrongly — by a university police investigation that resulted in no charges being filed against Sandusky.

Paterno had his friend copping to inappropriate but not illegal behavior. He had cops telling him his friend engaged in inappropriate but not illegal behavior. He naturally wanted to believe what he was told.

Doing so doesn’t tarnish his legacy as one of the greatest football coaches the collegiate ranks has ever known. It doesn’t mean we should pull down his campus statue or forget his strong record of graduating players, of running a clean and top-ranked football program.

It just means he was human.

There’s nothing good about the Penn State story involving Jerry Sandusky. It’s sad and tragic. Freeh’s investigation uncovers problems with how many university officials can be tagged for poorly handling everything that went on. It just lacks damning evidence that Joe Pa was one of those officials.

Watch a great blue heron dad upchuck a nest full of small fish for his clacking brood of babies. See a red-tailed hawk mom plop a pigeon into its nest and methodically start doling out dinner to her youngsters.

It’s reality programming at its finest — found on the Internet at allaboutbirds.org – a site operated by the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca.

A pair of red-tailed hawks — Ezra and Big Red, named after the school’s founder and mascot, respectively — started their family of three about two months ago. An unnamed pair of great blue herons began its family of five in a nearby swamp at about the same time. Cornell put up cameras near the nests and gave everyone with a computer the opportunity to watch those families grow up.

Since then, thousands have logged on to the sites each day to watch eggs get laid, birds get hatched, raised, and then leave the nests. The process of leaving the nest that takes human children 18 to 45 years to complete, these birds do in 40 to 60 days. And, like human children, they have their own captivating share of “firsts.”

The first time the chicks are able to stand on their own. The day they are able to eat their meals without being fed by mama or papa. The day they start “wingercizing” to strengthen themselves to fly. The day they fledge, or fly away from the nest. The day they return to the nest to get fed because they haven’t yet learned to hunt food on their own.

The birdwatchers on the site — which numbered as high as 8,000 on the days the hawks were expected to fledge — were cheerleaders and worrywarts. They were nervous when the chicks didn’t accomplish something they were supposed to right away. They were excited when they did. They were parents watching their kids grow up.

I suspect very few of them actually saw the firsts happen live. Nature didn’t seem to schedule its big events around the limited times people with jobs could check on the families.

Posts common in the bird cam chat room often went something like these:

“I am sure number one is going to fledge in 10 minutes, because that is when I have to go back to work.”

“I’m back. Did number three fledge? No? Oh, goodie. Go NOW number three, go NOW. I am only here for a little bit. You can do it. GO. GO. GO.”

“Number two fledged when I answered the door to get a Federal Express delivery. DRAT!”

The joy and enthusiasm of the human onlookers was infectious. But the birds, of course, developed at a pace dictated by nature. They did things when they were ready, oblivious to all the eyes that were upon them.

The team at Cornell was there full-time, so videos were always quickly posted for those of us who missed a big event live. And, boy, did these reruns make the bird-watchers go all aflutter.

“Oh, the baby fledged so beautifully. She left with so much more grace than her brothers.”

“Number two returned to the nest with strength and confidence he sure didn’t have when the wind accidentally pushed him from the fledge ledge.”

“I’ve got tears in my eyes ... our babies are all grown up.”

This kind of emotion directed at birds would be something I in most cases would be inclined to make fun of. They are, after all, just birds.

The problem is I found myself fully understanding such emotions as I followed the hawk family’s journey from birth to empty nest. I’d be making fun of myself.

One night long after the hawklets were mostly on their own and rarely seen on camera anymore, I sat eating dinner in front of my laptop watching a live feed of the empty nest ... hoping just one of the babies would fly in to say good night.

There were 800 other birdwatchers doing the same thing. Eight-hundred people watching a pile of sticks.

The fun at the hawk nest is pretty much over. But it’s worth bookmarking the website for next year. I don’t have the words to describe how fascinating, captivating, touching it is to follow the rapid development of these beautiful creatures and their doting parents. You’ll have to see it for yourselves to understand.

You still have time to catch the herons fledging. The babies have sprouted to where it’s getting hard to tell them from their parents, but they haven’t left the nest yet. They are “wingercizing.” They are venturing out onto long tree limbs near the nest and flapping to high heaven. They are spreading their wings. It won’t be long before they fly.

There might just be a tear welling up in the corner of my eye. Our babies are all grown up.

Turns out not all war is hell.

Canton gas stations recently started a war that is knocking down prices at pumps faster than a Humvee can burn through a gallon of super unleaded. I saw prices drop twice in one day at a Main Street station last week. Twice in one day.

Talk about shock and awe.

Here’s how it works: One station lowers its price. The station down the street then lowers its price. So the first station lowers its price some more. The competitor then drops the price of its gas again. And so on and so on.

So far, we don’t know when the great war will end. The last skirmish left us with gas at $3.77 a gallon at the cheapest station - $3.82 or so at competing places down the road.

If you are not excited about this, you have never lived or worked in Canton.

All the gasoline for sale in Canton for years had been way overpriced. Make that WAY overpriced. As little as two weeks ago, it was at $4.11 a gallon. You could save money by making the 40-mile round trip to Ogdensburg for a fill-up instead of getting your gas here. I know people who did just that.

My Love Nugget before the war started would regularly put $1 worth of gas in her truck so she could get to her job in Ogdensburg and then fill the tank.

“I’m not giving these gougers my business,” she would say to me. “Why in the world is gas so much more expensive in Canton?”

That is a question I have been asking since moving to the north country nearly 20 years ago. I have never gotten a good answer. Some folks suggested the reason was higher transportation costs of getting gasoline all the way to our cultured burg in the middle of nowhere.

That sort of made sense, except it didn’t explain why a station in Hopkinton – another fine burg 25 miles farther into the middle of nowhere than the St. Lawrence County seat – could routinely sell its gas for a dime less than Cantonites were paying. It also didn’t explain why Ogdensburg residents paid 15 cents less on average for every gallon they put in their tanks back before the war.

Come to find out the station owners weren’t gouging Canton customers because the cost of gasoline delivery was so high. They were gouging customers because they could. It was a brilliant profit strategy that worked for years.

The war changed all that.

A store opened and the owner brought with him a new strategy: Undercut the competition. A nickel here, a nickel there ... pretty soon we were looking at gas prices that were not 30 or 40 cents more than the national average. Or 15 cents more than a station 19 miles down the road for that matter.

It is a beautiful thing.

AAA posted the national average cost per gallon at just under $3.68 on the day the gas wars started here. It was $3.99 at one Canton station before the price was dropped to $3.89, then $3.85, then $3.82. The station that started the war on its first day priced gas at $3.89, then dropped it to $3.86, then $3.79, then settling – at least right now – to the $3.77 mark mentioned earlier.

That’s only 14 cents higher that the national average reported by AAA on the day I am writing this. It might be even lower by the time you end up reading what I’ve written. That’s what I am hoping for at least.

This is the first time in my memory that Canton has had the lowest gas prices in St. Lawrence County. I say let the battle rage on.

This war isn’t hell. It’s heavenly.