Features (All)

Article - Creature Feature; by Diana Beechener - 2/24/11

This Week’s Creature Feature: Wild Birthday...

DC Cupcakes gives you a sweet reason to Go Bananas

Eleven-year-old Kwame and 9-year-old Kojo celebrated their birthdays with cupcakes. As part of Georgetown Cupcakes’ reality show on TLC, DC Cupcakes, the sister-owned business, delivered a giant gorilla sculpture, comprised of cupcakes, to the National Zoo where the two male western lowland gorillas were celebrating their big days. Sadly, gorillas can’t get the real sweet treat, so zookeepers gave them an approximation of Georgetown Cupcakes’ red velvet...

Article - Places; by Diana Beechener - 2/24/11

Black History On a Street Where You Live

A neighborhood walk can be a history lesson

In honor of Black History Month, Bay Weekly tracks down unsung African Americans behind some street signs. In our capital, many streets are footprints for the African American communities that developed in the late 1800s. In Annapolis, King’s Apostle Holiness Church sits at the mouth of Kirby Lane, watching over a sleepy street dotted with residences. No more than 500 feet in length, the small stretch of pavement is named after a country teacher....

Article - Places; by Matt Driscoll - 2/24/11

Morsels of Sustenance

In lean times, two Annapolis black history memorials win much-needed state support

In these times of withered wallets and skeletal budgets, African-American history has scored in state money. Two Annapolis landmarks — the Alex Haley-Kunta Kinte Memorial at City Dock and the Maynard-Burgess House on Duke of Gloucester Street — are slated for money toward renovations and repairs. Their $36,000 and $100,000 respectively are fractions of fractions of the state’s $425 million budget proposal for Anne Arundel County. But in a time when most state money is...

Article - People; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 2/24/11

Chronicler of Presidents

In his fifth book, Family of Freedom, Chesapeake Neighbor Ken Walsh introduces us to Presidents and their African American servants in the White House

To keep up with presidents, you have to share their drive and stamina. Understand that, and you are getting to know Ken Walsh, one of the shrinking corps of reporters whose job is telling the rest of us about the plans, plots and policies of the occupants of the White House. Walsh has so much drive and stamina that, after a full day writing about presidents for US News & World Report, he comes home to what he calls “my second full-time job,” writing books...

Article - Creature Feature; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 2/17/11

Love is in the Water

Oyster babies abound

Chesapeake Bay oysters were amorous last summer, and the seed they sent forth willy-nilly into the water has set into abundant spat. Natural Resources researches examining the intimate lives of 53 key oyster bars last fall found spat — or oyster babies — about five times higher than the 25-year median. Instead of 16, spat count per bushel was nearly 80, the overall highest since 1997. Oyster babies were most plentiful in saltier waters of the...

Article - Things; by Diana Beechener - 2/17/11

Goosey, Goosey Gander, Where Do You Wander?

One reader’s quest to gander a gaggle sent us to the experts

On a recent trip down to my pier, I found a gaggle of interlopers monopolizing the planks and moorings. Geese. Loud, messy and surprisingly aggressive long-necked Canadas were using my pier like a roadside rest area. I was happy they’d be on their way north in a few weeks. Reader Bill Seabrook doesn’t share my uncharitable attitude toward these migrating fowl. He wrote in to find out why his recent birding walks in Anne Arundel and Calvert...

Article - News; by Dennis Doyle - 2/17/11

Natural Resources Police Locate More Illegal Gill...

Reward up to $22,500

Illegal gill nets continue to be hooked by Maryland Natural Resources Police, with two more on February 11 bringing the month total to eight thousand yards of illegal net and 25,000 pounds of illegally caught rockfish. The latest two 900-yard strings of illegal gill nets were anchored in Eastern Bay. Both were in the vicinity of Bloody Point Light, one about a mile south and other about two and a half miles northeast. The poaching was bold and defiant, with the nets anchored...

Article - People; by Margaret Tearman - 2/17/11

Back In the Saddle

Teresa Chambers of Dunkirk is back at work as chief of the U.S. Park Police. Her swearing in January 31 by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar not only returns her to the job she loves but also clears her name and vindicates her claim of wrongful dismissal. Chambers lost her job seven years ago after telling the Washington Post that funding cuts to her department could endanger public safety and national monuments.

Article - News; by Margaret Tearman - 2/17/11

Lowering the High Price of Electricity

Great power poles — not bills — will shrink

After a year of public flogging, Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative has agreed to replace behemoth power poles with smaller, less intrusive poles along Calvert County’s winding Bowie Shop Road and Route 2/4 in Huntingtown. Smaller is relative. The poles will still be as tall — 75 feet — but a thicker steel plate will allow for the poles to taper toward the top. That, says SMECO spokesman Tom Dennison, is because “The most...

Article - Green Living; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 2/17/11

Beat Back the Bag Monster

We’d get two sticks under Maryland’s Clean the Streams and Beautify the Bay Act

This is how you’d look if all you had to wear were the plastic bags you toted home all year long. You’d look like a plastic imitation of New Orleans’ legendary Mardi Gras Indian tribes. But you’d be warm. That’s the overheated conclusion of Bag Monster Rick Rogner of Silver Spring. Rogner donned the borrowed costume to help Del. Al Carr, of Kensington, convince Maryland to learn to follow the District of Columbia’s...