Articles by Sandra Olivetti Martin

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; 11/3/11

Aliens Among Us

It’s harvest time for Genetically-Modified Organisms

This isn’t the movies. It’s real life. Surrounding you left and right. But you don’t see it — any more than Dr. Kate Lloyd and her team of Norwegian expeditionaries recognize The Thing. Through October, the local aliens have gilded the countryside, improving your vista as you travel Maryland highways. Lately, the gold has been fading to sere brown. In the last days of October, farmers will drive their combines into the fields, harvesting soybeans that...

Article - News; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/27/11

This Week’s Creature Feature ... The Northern...

This invader transforms from trick to treat

Since 2002, when the northern snakehead made its Chesapeake debut in a Crofton pond, it has been nothing but trouble. The pond was poisoned and drained. The species set up housekeeping in the Potomac and its tidal tributaries, whence it could eventually migrate to the Bay. After all that trickery, who’d expect the snakehead to turn into a treat? Yet the snakehead now is attracting fishermen, chefs, seafood marketers and gourmets. ...

Article - Creature Feature; 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; 10/27/11

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; 10/20/11

Greening the U.S. Boat Shows

From 800 pounds of trash rise the prospect of ‘an entirely green event’

Beneath the marketplace of dreams that is the U.S. Boat Shows runs a stream of waste. That’s the conclusion of the first ever audit of the waste produced by one of the shows, this year’s Sail Boat Show. While you were slipping off your shoes, stepping aboard sleek sailboats and sipping Pusser’s Painkillers, a pair of sustainability managers from the environmental strategies firm WasteStrategies were sorting through 800...

Article - News; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/20/11

This Week’s Creature Feature ... A Happy Cow Is a...

Maryland Grazers hope to clean up the Bay getting cattle farmers to switch feed from corn to grass

Cows in the Bay watershed will live happier lives grazing at their whim in green pastures rather than confined in cells and fed a diet of corn. Their comfort is so good for the Bay and for farmers that it has earned the Chesapeake Bay Foundation a $200,000 grant to extend its three-year-old Maryland Grazers Network to more farmers in more places. The Grazers Network is one of 55 bright ideas on reducing pollution to local waterways and the Chesapeake Bay...

Article - Creature Feature; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/20/11

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; 10/13/11

Working with a View

Tim O’Neill talks with Bay Weekly about the restoration of Annapolis’ Capitol dome

Tim O’Neill of Severna Park is project manager for Power Component Systems out of Hanover. One of several subcontractors restoring the dome of Maryland’s State House — built between 1784 and 1787 as the second dome to top the 1772 Capitol — Power Component Systems has the job of stripping the top layers of paint from the Capitol’s dome. Bay Weekly What’s it like up there? Tim O’Neill I’ve been above the acorn...

Article - Bay Weekly Interviews; by Sandra Olivetti Martin; 10/13/11

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...

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