Letter: Help Maintain Neglected Fields
Dear MSI Executive Director and Board Members: This open letter is asking you to hold back and defer signing the sublease for the Brickyard Road School site.
Editorial: On Funding the Silver Line
Commonwealth will collect the dividends, but refuses to invest; Northern Virginia pays.
Northern Virginia localities should together commission a study now to determine how much growth is stimulated by the opening of the Metro stations in Tysons and along the toll road out to Dulles, how many new jobs created, quantify how much that growth leads to increased income and sales tax, and how much revenue (taxes) would get shipped off to Commonwealth coffers.
C&O Canal: With Love Comes Responsibility WMCCA
Another spring and another love affair with the C & O Canal Historical Park! Yes, we may brave the cold for a few winter visits, but there is nothing like springtime on the Canal. We who live here are fortunate to have easy access to this incredibly lush, tranquil treasure of natural, historic and recreational resources.
Column: Infusing Is Semi Amusing
So here I go again; heavy-duty chemotherapy for the first time in nearly three years. As such, I thought I’d try and write another column while actually sitting in the Barcalounger at The Infusion Center (as I did three years ago: “Chemo-Cocktailing at the Depot” was that column’s title) and see what my pen has to say.
Column: Peculiar Presence
In the last few months, out of the blue, I have received electronic correspondence from each of my three oldest childhood friends (none of whom have remained adulthood friends, though all three remain of interest to me) commenting on my cancer diagnosis; each having stumbled across one of my cancer columns online, presumably after initiating a Google-type search for yours truly.
Column: Israeli Wines for Passover
Recommendations of 10 wines for the upcoming holiday.
Over the past six months, the International Wine Review has tasted more than 200 Israeli wines in preparation of our Report #32 “The New Wines of Israel,” to be published later this year. We’re impressed with the high quality of Israeli premium wines and encourage our readers to try them. What better time to do that than Passover?
Editorial: Interrupting Harassment and Bullying
Empowering bystanders to intervene, students to set boundaries.
With a controversial and much discussed new movie, "Bully," coming out this week, local school districts continue to wrestle with the issue of bullying in the schools.
Editorial: ‘Practices That Undermine Trust’
Virginia gets a failing grade on ethics rules.
The State Integrity Investigation is "designed to expose practices that undermine trust in state capitols — and spotlight the states that are doing things right."
Column: “Here, There And Everywhere”
The Beatles sang it on their “Revolver” album back in the mid 60s. My wife and I danced to it in the late 70s when we selected it as “first song as husband and wife” – in 1978. And recently we felt it, three years after my stage IV lung cancer diagnosis, as our reaction/assessment to the many similarly diagnosed individuals who’ve shared their lung cancer stories with us. Who knew?
Column: “Early Results Show Stable Disease”
There’s five words e-mailed from my oncologist that I can live with (Duh!). Certainly better than the previous nine words e-mailed eight weeks ago regarding my then current CT Scan: “Scan results show progression. We’ll talk more on Friday.”
Letter: Improve Actions Against Deer
Council President Roger Berliner was “right on” when he stated the need for a cooperative effort to deal with the expanding and destructive deer population in his recent letter you published (March 7-13, 2012).
Editorial: So Hard to Imagine?
Poor families face challenges that officials and many of the rest of us have trouble envisioning.
The Commonwealth of Virginia and even Northern Virginia includes many poor families and individuals. But officials seem to have trouble wrapping their brains around some of the difficulties this can cause.
Column: A $350,00 Golden Fleecing
Remember the Golden Fleece Awards awarded annually by the late U.S. Senator Proxmire? They signaled out for ridicule wasteful, unnecessary government projects that often benefited only a special few. They diverted money away from projects that truly were needed. Even if you don't remember the awards, no one wants to be “fleeced.” But that is just what happened to local citizens when Montgomery County's Department of Environmental Protection awarded a contract allegedly to carry out the Glen Hills study mandated in the 2002 Potomac Subregion Master plan.
Letter: Park Deer Adding To Damage, Danger
The following letter was addressed to Superintendent Kevin Brandt of the C&O Canal National Historic Park.
Column: Look What She Saw—Sort Of
Well there’s five seconds that fellow super-market-shopper won’t have back anytime soon. The question, the curiosity is: will she have nightmares and/or live to regret staring at me so intently that I think I may have seen the whites of her eyes – and it wasn’t even remotely dark?