Like a holiday box of chocolates (thanks Bill Vance, Betsy and Alex), this week’s paper brings you a variety of choices, all I hope to your taste. (And none, I hope, that sticky cough-medicine flavor that makes you say yuck!)       Two of those stories have histories that have become stories in themselves. Bob Melamud wrote the first draft of Maryland Roads on a Reduced-Salt Diet back in 2016. We almost printed it in December that year … But the...

      A Bay Weekly reader bragged to me that he’d created an apple orchard by planting a single tree.       “So you purchased one of those trees with four to five varieties of apples,” I replied.       He was crestfallen at failing to fool me.       Before you buy such a magic tree, with multiple varieties of apples grafted onto a single stem, look closely at the pictures in the nursery catalog. Almost every catalog I...

      In 1971, a secret study exposing the futility of the Vietnam War was leaked to the New York Times. Printing it reveals decades of deception. The Pentagon Papers, as the explosive revelations were known, shook the American people’s trust in their government and infuriated the Nixon administration.       Nixon sued. The Times was barred from further revelations while the Supreme Court deliberated on the paper’s First Amendment rights to print. That...

Commit to Quit Learn To Live Are you thinking about quitting smoking? Are you ready to try again?     The Learn To Live program of the Anne Arundel County Department of Health, in partnership with community health care providers, sponsors free quit-smoking classes for adults who live, work or attend school in Anne Arundel County. The classes include counseling and may offer patches, gum or other FDA-approved nicotine-replacement therapy.     Go to...