By Donald Gilpin
As Municipal Attorney Trishka Cecil reported to Princeton Council at last week’s meeting, the town’s plans for deer management, using both lethal and non-lethal means, are at an impasse.
“I am very disappointed,” Cecil told Council members. “Your constituents, your Council, and White Buffalo [the town’s deer management contractor] all want to include non-lethal means. They want you, as scientists, as people committed to responsible deer management — they want you to be able to use every tool that is available in your toolbox, and you are being confronted with a division that for reasons I cannot understand seems dead set against it.”
Princeton’s deer management program has been in place since 2000, and the existing sharpshooting initiative carried out by White Buffalo Inc., which operates nationwide and specializes in population control of white-tailed deer, has helped to reduce the town’s deer population, with some assistance from recreational bow hunters. more
According to A Book of Days for the Literary Year, the week of December 15 begins with the publication of Emma, a day before Jane Austen’s 40th birthday in 1815. Emma Woodhouse’s comment about a divided understanding of the world’s pleasures, spoken soon after she herself disastrously misunderstands a courtship charade, has me thinking about Authors, the card game that my parents and I played when I was a boy. The fact that Jane Austen had been overlooked by the creators of the game (the only female being Louisa May Alcott) naturally didn’t occur to me, although when my wife and I played Authors with our son decades later, her absence was front and center. How could they leave her out, a question that had serious resonance on the Christmas morning I gave my wife illustrated editions of Persuasion and Mansfield Park. 
