Well, it’s been a typically crazy week at the Brew:
First, some verse we published triggered, unexpectedly, a sort of poetry slam. (Edgy town, we got here!)
Then, we walked over to the pool of blood where a garage intruder was slain by a sword-wielding Johns Hopkins student and found some creepy-but-not-uncommon local reaction (“Awesome!” crowed a fellow Hopkins undergrad, upon hearing what happened).
Then, a reader tipped us to a downtown traffic headache/hazard created by the way the city was channeling cars around a water main repair project. We got a quick response from the city and now they are (we hope) fixing it.
Oh yeah, and we were named “Best Local Blog” by Baltimore City Paper. Thank-you, CP!
((We were also recognized, btw, in Baltimore Magazine’s 2009 “Best of Baltimore” issue as Best Sun Watcher for our coverage of layoffs and wrenching changes at the daily newspaper.))
In honoring the Brew this week, City Paper mentions some of the great journalists who have been brewing over here. In case you missed their work, some links are included:
* Who but Joan Jacobson, our chronicler of this year’s dramatic layoffs and severe shrinkage at The Baltimore Sun, could make your heart ache for the loss of a particular kind of typeface or the Letters to the Editor feature?
* It took Ann LoLordo to remind Baltimore that developer/bakery magnate John Paterakis actually acknowledged violating campaign laws to a Sun reporter back in 1997 (“a goof” he said) and that prosecutors never took action. She also described what’s it like living next door to a foreclosed-on Baltimore rowhouse: not nice.
* The Sparrows Point steel mill may be a shadow of its former self, but toxic gunk levels, in the water are apparently actually increasing, Mark Reutter found. When you read his account of how officials greenlighted pollution, there for decades, you can see how all this happened.
* Gerald Neily, meanwhile, saved the city $2.6 million . And who but Neily looks at the devastation caused by Baltimore’s “Highway to Nowhere” and not only gives a damn, but proposes a detailed fix?
* In this so-called ”City of Neighborhoods,” you’ve got your east-side rats and your west-side rats and, as Heather Dewar explained, your Johns Hopkins animal scientists who hang out in alleys and study them.
* Political writer Doug Donovan reminded readers, amid the furor over a cushy promotion for Baltimore city school board chairman Brian D. Morris, that many public officials helped boost the financially troubled Morris into a position of power.
* Looking like a tiny Moses, gripping a favorite carved wooden cane, Jennifer Bishop’s son wandered, one Easter morning, out into moving traffic. For Bishop, whose son was born with developmental disabilities, her son’s rescue that morning by strangers seemed even more mythic.
* When a little food cart appears in downtown Baltimore selling popular pit beef sandwiches for $5 each – and it’s right in front of a hotel restaurant peddling $10.95 burgers – well, you’ve got a food fight on your hands, hon. Melody Simmons laid it out here.
* And when you are a public school parent living in one of Baltimore’s private-school neighborhood, as Tom Waldron does, you sometimes encounter assumptions about city schools that make you fume.
* Remember when the Orioles 2009 season seemed fresh and kind of, promising? Dean Bartoli Smith captures that here-Charlie Brown-I’ll-hold-the-football-and-you-kick-it moment.
* Sometimes, the way Robin Reid sees it, you just need a hot dog smothered with something.
* Or, as Jada Fletcher sees it, a really good deal on a candy-apple red mohair-looking sweater.
* Or your go-to dish, your boeuf et nouille (beef and noodles) like Nana made, as Rafael Alvarez explained.
