Editorial

April Fools! This Week, Satire Reigns
You won’t want to believe quite everything you read in this week’s issue of Bay Weekly. It’s our tradition to stoop to satire when April Fools Day falls on a Thursday, the day this weekly hits the streets.

Back in 1999, when we were still known by our birthname, New Bay Times, we brought you New Bay Crimes, featuring the dead-of-night theft of the State House by St. Mary’s County loyalists. That feature did double duty, also celebrating Maryland Day, which commemorates the landing of Lord Baltimore’s colonists in Mary’s Land back in 1634.

This year, we’ve solved the problem of Chesapeake Bay.

We’ve taken our lead from Gov. Robert Ehrlich, who auctioned off the state yacht on eBay. Like the yacht, the Bay’s a grand symbol. But it’s become more expensive, and more problem-ridden than the people of Maryland can afford. Sell it at auction while it’s still got value, and we can solve some of our more affordable and pressing problems. That, our investigative reporter Louis Llovio learned, is the compromise solution of the 2004 General Assembly to finding new revenues without either raising taxes or legalizing slots.

Upstairs in the State House, the governor, Llovio has learned, developed his own last-ditch solution. Rather than an outright sale of the Chesapeake, he prefers leasing naming rights to attractions from shining sea to mountains.

So don’t throw the solution out with the satire. There’s a lot of truth in these April Fools pages.

Among the truths you’ll find here are the words of Gov. Robert Ehrlich, Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, and delegates Virginia Clagett, Bob Costa and George Owings.

Congressmen Wayne Gilchrest and Steny Hoyer also joined in the joke, through their spokespeople. Maryland League of Conservation Voters Executive Director Sue Brown and U.S. Naval Academy Professor Howard Ernst also played along.

We thank them all for their good humor and appreciation of the art of satire. If science and ecosystem survival can’t inspire us to save the Bay, maybe satire can.

Meanwhile, you’ll find other bits of foolery throughout the paper, including a bit of impersonation in this week’s theater review.

We also hope you’ll join us in giving in to the spirit of folly. Laughter is contagious. It’s how you catch spring fever and break out in jokes of your own.

Welcome Two New Columns
In the last weeks, we’ve added two new columns, both with an environmental slant. Beginning last week, EarthTalk brings us questions and answers about our environment, and we receive it from the editors of The Environmental Magazine www.emagazine.com. Many of the questions answered here are e-mailed by readers, and yours are welcome as well.

This is our third week for Ask the Plant and Pest Professor, another Q&A developed from readers’ questions. It comes to us from the Home and Garden Information Center, part of Maryland Cooperative Extension, an educational outreach of the University of Maryland. You can put your questions to the Plant and Pest Professor in person Monday through Friday from 8am to 1pm (800-342-2507 or anytime at www.hgic.umd.edu.

Read on, for information and advice on keeping our world green.