Hester's Stateside drums have been beating fast and this little gem reaches us from the Long Island Newsday newspaper, which reported that during a recent "tabletop" drill for a bio-disaster, some staffers of the Office of Emergency Management got a surprise when they urged (pictured) to go public and tell people to stay in their houses. "How was he going to tell them that", Bloomberg shouted, "if he was already in Bermuda? " Aides said after the rehearsal it was just a joke. Some officials took it a bit more seriously, though, and at other points Bloomberg spared no language grilling them up and down over their preparedness. Last weekend, Bloomberg really was at his palatial house in Bermuda - talking finances and golfing with the state's top legislative leaders, Sen. Joseph Bruno and Sheldon Silver. The way the fiscal crisis is forming, that troika may soon be doing its own disaster drills.

These days there seems to be a day in the calendar for everything - seniors, grandparents, secretaries, bosses, next door's cat - but the latest, from none other than the Bermuda Philatelic Bureau, takes some topping, quite literally. World Peach Day was, according to the press release from the team at the , declared by the United Nations and celebrated earlier this year. Here in Bermuda we were to mark the occasion with a special set of stamps. Hester nearly spat her pear pips out when she saw the communiqu?, surely it couldn't be, but then again, maybe it could, because everyone knows peaches are an endangered species in the Island's stores - and, even if they do make it across the Atlantic, they are well known to die quite spectacularly the second they reach the outside air. However, much later in the release, the DCI came clean and revealed it was actually World Peace Day....ah, that explains the doves then..

These days there seems to be a day in the calendar for everything - seniors, grandparents, secretaries, bosses, next door's cat - but the latest, from none other than the Bermuda Philatelic Bureau, takes some topping, quite literally. World Peach Day was, according to the press release from the proof-reading professionals at the Department of Communications and Information, declared by the United Nations and celebrated earlier this year. Here in Bermuda we were to mark the occasion with a special set of stamps. Hester nearly spat her pear pips out when she saw the communiqu?, surely it couldn't be, but then again, maybe it could, because everyone knows peaches are an endangered species in the Island's stores - and, even if they do make it across the Atlantic, they are well known to die quite spectacularly the second they reach the outside. However, much later in the release, the DCI came clean and revealed it was actually World Peace Day....ah, that explains the doves then..