Two stories we wanted to hand you this week didn't happen. Explaining why goes a long way towards explaining what kind of world we're all entering, and why our politics seems so volatile these days on a national level. But oddly calm the more local things get.

With Joe Martens leaving his post as state Department of Environmental Conservation commissioner and returning to his previous position as head of the Open Space Institute, we had loads of questions about what this might mean for our area, where both agency and institute play very large roles. As well as whether Martens' interim successor, the expert environmental attorney Marc Gerstman, might be able to stay on at the agency he's worked with for decades... and have an effect helping to re-fund its more local efforts.

We've been worried about enforcement issues, about half-baked new environmental laws from wetlands protections to stream protections, as well as a long-held hope that the state finally recognize what a treasure it has in the Basha Kill and do something more to both highlight and better protect it.

We're also interested to see whether Martens can now push the OSI into even greater efforts to save and promote the Shawangunks, as well as both sides of its magnificence. Working with Minnewaska State Park, the Palisades commission and DEC, he has the ability to get new trails built or expanded, and push for better services on the 209 side of the ridgeline... and maybe even help push the Colony Farm prospects into an even greater reality.

Unfortunately, however, our attempts to talk to anyone about any of this, either on or off the record, has come to naught for now. Why? Because pretty much everything in large entities like the state, or most of our counties, now go through overworked executive press offices. Which basically bottlenecks all news excepting press releases and damage control scrums.

What a shame, when the effects include a sense that the larger the government entity, the less its responsiveness to people and communities. With local towns and villages often feeling snubbed, as well.

A second story we were after was the SUNY New Paltz conference on the role of the arts as a regional economic engine, to be hosted Monday by the Center for Research, Regional Education & Outreach at SUNY New Paltz and based on the report they released last autumn on the same subject. Panels were going to look into the conjunction of new cultural and older heritage tourism modes, increasing the ways nonprofits, government, education and local business can work together, and the au courant idea of sustainability as it relates both to arts organizations in specific and the culture in general.

We were already to ask how such things could be played out in the Wawarsing, Wurtsboro and Pine Bush areas, where arts efforts have flourished only to falter for lack of funding and local enthusiasm. Could the greater region help? The larger regional entities?

Unfortunately, the whole event was postponed at the last minute. These things happen, we know, but that doesn't make their repetition any easier.

Finally, we must note the oddity, this week, of news headlines noting how the Pine Bush School District had to both vote to sue their insurers for not paying their huge settlement fee for the anti-Semitism case now ended, and then vote to retain same insurers for the coming year. But isn't THAT also life these days.

On a larger scale, we've been watching with interest the way Donald Trump's been messing with the 2016 GOP primary process, recalling the time years ago when we watched Howard Stern take over the state's Libertarian Party nomination for governor. Funny? Not even Stern thought so after he got the nod and realized what a mess he was making.

Unfortunately, political processes are so mixed up with emotions these days, given the ways in which so many voters use elections to comment on their fears of change, that any misuse of them can become threatening but fast. Think back to the 1930s in this country, and elsewhere, and how buffoonery brought us all to war.

For such frolics, better to go to a country fair, such as those starting this week or next. Or switch the channel from "news" to real comedy.