Letters to the Editor

Volume VII Number 7
February 18-24, 1999

Southern AA Traffic Report

Dear New Bay Times~Weekly:

Driving along a country road in South County the other morning, a traffic report caught my attention and then reminded me of your recent editorial "In Southern Anne Arundel, Development Begs Debate" (Jan. 21-27).

On the radio, I was listening to a blaring report of rush hour tie-ups and gridlock in our neighboring state of Virginia, when the reporter made this comment: "traffic no worse than usual." At the same moment in time, the road I traveled made all the difference. I looked out at horses spread across a field in symmetry where art and nature met for the pleasure of morning commuters to Annapolis and beyond.

Don't get me wrong. This same winding rural road without shoulders is an unforgiving and deadly path for young inexperienced drivers. Crosses along the route testify to that sad reality. So as development in Southern Anne Arundel beckons, with planned mega-stores and inevitably more cars on our roads, NBT is right to ask the question about development: Who has the best interest of our community in mind?

A Tyson's Corner in the middle of Deale? Just imagine the traffic report.

-D.C. Bourne, Churchton

No Delight in Deale

Dear New Bay Times-Weekly:

Apropos your Feb. 4-10 issue with Betty-Carol Sellen's fine letter "No Tyson's Corner in Deale" and your challenging editorial "SACReD Truths: People Will Have Their Say": Here are some pre-ruckus questions and answers on just the three proposed supermarkets gleaned from conversations at the February 10 meeting at St. James Church on the Countrywide Exchange in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed, plus some thoughts:

Who/Where? Safeway: corner 256 and 258 in downtown Deale; Shopper's Food Warehouse: corner 256 and 468 in central Churchton; Food Lion behind the Chamber of Commerce on 468 in suburban Churchton. Whew: staggering!

Size?: Safeway alone: 50,000+ square feet: five times larger than Food Rite across the street. And then there are all those other stores Safeway plans to bring with it. Safeway status? Ready to start digging in July, so it says; still needs approvals to pump all that water (whose water?) out of the Magothy aquifer, but could begin to dig without those approvals (!) absent some stiff legal action (or maybe a loud cry of "whoa!" from the community?).

July isn't far off: Not a lot of time to start a ruckus vis-a-vis giant Safeway. Weems Duvall Jr., of SACReD fame, is already in the lists for Food Rite, but one St. George, one David may not be enough on this occasion, and anyway, we the people need to be our own champion. There's no time to wait for the small-area planning committee; so how about an Angry Murmur right away to begin to get Safeway's attention?

-Chris May, Deale

The Facts of the Matter

Dear New Bay Times~Weekly:

You should be ashamed of yourself. An editor of a newspaper, albeit a small weekly, implying that the next millennium is only 337 days away (Feb. 4-10). You know full well that it takes 2000 years to complete two millennia, and the next millennium does not begin until January 1, 2001!

Also, if Bill Burton wants to quote him (p. 12), he should remember that e.e. cummings used no initial capitals in his name.

-Don Benedict, by e-mail

Editor's Reply: On his first complaint, Mr. Benedict scores a mathematical win. Here at New Bay Times, however, we're following the "40,000 Frenchmen can't be wrong" logic in expecting the full outpouring of millennial madness in real time on Dec. 31, 1999. We're also guilty of double-standard reasoning in that we're planning on celebrating the millennium again on its mathematically correct arrival time: Dec. 31, 2000.

But that's all the credit we can allow this writer. The poet in question was born Edward Estlin Cummings. In Cummings' earlier, experimental days, when the play of the poem and not the King's English was his standard for capitalization and punctuation, he indeed signed himself e.e. cummings. In his fifth decade, the 1930s, the more conservative, older poet reemerged as E.E. Cummings.

| Issue 7 |

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