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Letters to the Editor

We welcome your opinions and letters – with name and address. We will edit when necessary. Include your name, address and phone number for verification. Mail them to Bay Weekly, P.O. Box 358, Deale, MD 20751 •
E-mail them to [email protected]. or submit your letters on line, click here

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What You Read

Dear Bay Weekly:

The short list is what I don’t read.

When I first turned to Free Will Astrology and News of the Weird, I thought I’d entered Monty Pythonland: “And now for something completely different …”

I save Sudoku and Weird to put myself to sleep. The rest is often clipped! saved! sent! And I read the ads.

–Margaret Gwathmey, Harwood

Dear Bay Weekly:

I make sure I pick up Bay Weekly every week, and my favorite column is Free Will Astrology. Don’t get me wrong: I live in an old-time water-privileged community, paddle a kayak, volunteer at Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary. But the baby boomer hippie in me just loves the Free Will Astrology. So don’t listen to those folks who want you to get rid of it — or News of the Weird, either. That one is a great conversation starter with my young nephews.

–Karen Caruso, Riva

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Where the Osprey Go

Dear Bay Weekly:

We’ve had a second Martha’s Vineyard osprey make a long crossing of our side of the Atlantic. Mittark flew about 35 hours from the Vineyard to Florida.

The first, Penelope, seems to have settled down in Suriname.

L.R., our Delaware bird, is in North Carolina. I haven’t updated his maps and won’t have a chance to before I start my own migration to South America. I’ll be back in 10 days, and I’m sure I’ll have a lot of work to do on new maps by then.

There is bad news on Homer. Our three-year old Vineyard bird started his third migration and got as far as Virginia, where his signal stopped. In this case, we do know that the transmitter is stationary, so we can’t fall back on the maybe-the-transmitter-malfunctioned explanation. We can hope that the transmitter fell off, but that’s unlikely.

Follow the osprey online at http://www.bioweb.uncc.edu/bierregaard.

–Rob Bierregaard, osprey tracker: UNC-Charlotte

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Stop Intexticated Driving

Dear Bay Weekly:

A recent study by Fox News showed that 91 percent of teens talk while driving and amazingly 86 percent read incoming text messages and shockingly 58 percent say they do this daily.

Driving while “intexticated” is becoming more and more prevalent on our nation’s highways. Intexicated drivers are 18 percent slower to brake, which is causing an alarming number of rear-end collisions just like the one that killed my daughter Heather on January 3, 2008.

It’s time our individual states or our federal government pass Heather’s Law, a comprehensive ban on hand-held cell phones and texting while driving. It is time to treat these dangerous practices like we treat drunk driving. Intexticated driving is just as dangerous. I urge everyone to write their federal and state representatives to demand they make Heather’s Law the law of the land.

–Russell Hurd, Abingdon

Department of Corrections

The executive director of the Alliance of Foam Packaging Recyclers is Betsy Steiner. Her name was misspelled in the caption to October 16’s Trial and Error story.