Letter from the Editor (All)

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 12/8/11

The Call of the Water

Answer that December call with the Parade of Lights and the Volvo Ocean Race

Like you, we’re playing carols, stringing lights and decorating the Christmas tree. (Practicing what the Bay Gardener preaches, we sawed a fire-safe Canaan fir at his Upakrik Farm, plunged it into a bucket of 100-degree water and stored it in the shade before it came inside.) The holidays are a time we savor. They bring us into the universe, husband Bill Lambrecht suggested the other day, as we counted the homes signaling their welcome to the season in codes of colored...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 12/1/11

Do You Believe in Magic?

In December, lots of people do

There are people who believe that December brings magic into the world. They want more than sparkle of terrestrial and celestial lights against the deep, dark velvet of the long night. More than the decorations of yard, house, door and home. More than full-scale illuminations of parks and gardens. More than Christmas trees and candy canes and gingerbread houses. More than the round of parties that gives us places to...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 11/24/11

Our Cornucopias Overfloweth

So now’s the time to turn thanks into giving

On last week’s visit to St. Louis, six-year-old granddaughter Ada showed us how high she can count: all the way to 100. On Thanksgiving Day’s annual inventory, she needs all those numbers and more to count her blessings. Like Ada, most of the family and friends with whom I share three Thanksgiving feasts need good math skills, especially addition and multiplication, to count their blessings. Like our Thanksgiving tables, we are weighted with...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 11/17/11

Good Food, Good Times

Welcome the Season of Bounty

This may be my favorite paper of 2011. The reason is simple. It’s the winning combination of good food and good times. Summer is the season I love best, but these dwindling weeks of the year are hard to beat. The light leaves us early, but before it goes, it’s as golden as the leaves. Under the warming influence of the Chesapeake, temperatures are often balmy. Early twilights rage in hot pink and smoky blue. ...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 11/10/11

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee

Memorials and stories preserve our memories

Pilgrimages to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., are final journeys for many of the long-lived veterans of World War II. These elderly men and women from around the nation come every day of the year, but the days surrounding Veterans Day bring them in great numbers. The weather has been good to them this year, so they linger to ponder in comfort, seeing sights and refreshing memories beyond the imagining of one who has not shared them. Still, the atmosphere of the solemn place is...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 11/3/11

If You Can Catch a Snakehead, Eat It

The theory’s simple: Eat your enemies and your friends thrive

Will northern snakehead join Chilean sea bass, Alaskan halibut, North Atlantic swordfish and Chesapeake rockfish as catch of the day at your favorite seafood restaurant? The toothy invader’s potential as cuisine depends less on taste than availability. Their tasty versatility was proved last week at The Rockfish Raw Bar and Grill, where 100 pre-Halloween diners gobbled the white-fleshed invader in four ways. First came a cocktail...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 10/27/11

Bravo for Second Acts

Pros and community, our theater companies go on with the show

Second acts abound in theater. So it’s a good thing for Chesapeake theater lovers that Lucinda Merry-Browne practices that art and thus is immune to novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous flawed dictum that There are no second acts in American life. With Lost in Yonkers, the curtain rises on a second — or third or fourth — act for Merry-Browne (Merry is her birth name, not a lingering high school affectation, in case you worried). The first production...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 10/20/11

Lightening the Load

The lifting’s easier when we love it

TDML is a leaden initialism, as the experts opined at Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s confab last week on how we can help restore the Bay by reducing our Total Daily Maximum Load. The job is heavy lifting, too, as we’ve written in these pages more times than once, most recently in the September 29 story Sharing the Load (bayweekly.com/ articles/environment/article/sharing-load). Yet I’m uplifted day by day in the many ways I...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 10/13/11

Macintosh Made

Thanks to Steve Jobs, a big part of newspapering is easy

Steve Jobs was Bay Weekly’s silent partner. His Macintosh computers are the machines on which every one of our 933 issues have been made. Since 1993, when we went to work on Mac Classics, General Manager J. Alex Knoll has been thinking ahead to our next bite of the Apple. But death stops the clock. When the future ends, the past steps to the fore. Since Jobs’ death on October 5, I...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 10/6/11

The U.S. Boat Shows Are in Town

And are we in trouble ...

Avoid the occasion of sin. That precept of my Catholic education should, over the years, have kept me away from the U.S. Boat Shows, which occupy Annapolis October 6 though 16. First the Sailboat Show, returning for its 42nd year, validates the city’s title as Sailing Capital of America. Yes, it’s a self-conferred title. But through October 10, it’s as hard to contest as Napoleon’s self-coronation as emperor of the French. As I write, hundreds of...