Check out my new blog on CNBC.com,”Pony in Here Somewhere,” which takes a look at the lighter side of the economic crisis.

 

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New York Curiosities: Quirky Characters, Roadside Oddities & Other Offbeat Stuff (2008)

by Cindy Perman

Order your copy!

New York Curiosities, part of a state-by-state series from the Globe Pequot Press, is your round-trip ticket to the wildest, wackiest, most outrageous people, places and things the Empire State has to offer!

• Visit the idyllic village whose residents “talk to dead people”; the town where monuments to its most famous daughter, Lucille Ball, abound; America’s one-and-only Kazoo factory and museum; and, the National Buffalo Wing Festival with its “Running of the Chickens”—i.e., people dressed as chickens.
• Learn how abolitionist James Caleb Jackson invented “granula”, the first cold breakfast cereal; why one of Rochester’s favorite eateries is known as the Home of the Garbage Plate; and why the famous negative ions of Niagara Falls feel so good.
• Meet the Wonderful Wizard of Chittenango, L. Frank Baum; Panda the seeing-eye horse; Brooklyn’s “little green invaders”; and, the night watchman at the Fallow Hollow Deer Farm—a donkey!

Cindy Perman is a native New Yorker, a freelance humor writer and an experienced journalist, who wrote for the Wall Street Journal Online for nine years. She knows the state up, down, left and right, having grown up in Rochester, attended school in Syracuse and lived in New York City, where she’s made her home since 1994.