Howardcounty

They say America is suffering a crisis of ill-maintained infrastructure prone to occasional failure. Closer to home I’ve been having my own infrastructure problems, culminating last week in shoulder surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff. I’ll be taking some time out from blogging to invest in healing, physical therapy, and (I hope) eventual recovery. I’m sorry I’ll miss the memorial service on June 4 for Dennis Lane, and probably also the reception for Tom Coale on the 18th. In the meantime best wishes to my readers and fellow HoCo bloggers; I hope to see you online or off-line as soon as I can. ...

I knew Dennis Lane only slightly: I occasionally commented on his blog, he commented on mine once or twice, and I met and talked to him several times at Howard County blogger meetups and other events. I can’t speak to his life as a private person and how he came to a violent end, and even if I could I wouldn’t: I don’t blog about my own private and family life, and won’t do so about others. However I did want to say a few words to mark his death. ...

One political faction obtains a solid majority and uses it to push through a far-reaching initiative, only to have their dominance threatened in a subsequent election marked by newly-energized opposition and relatively low turnout. The 2010 mid-term victories of the Republican party? No, it’s the “Pioneers strike back” victories in the just-concluded elections for the Columbia Association Board of Directors. Tom Coale has already done a good wrap-up, so I’ll confine myself to a couple of thoughts continuing the analogy above. First, what I’ll call the “anti-Arbor” faction faces a decision on strategy similar to that of the anti-Obamacare GOP post-2010: They apparently don’t have the votes to reverse the decision outright, so they face a choice between trying to shape the Inner Arbor plan more to their liking, making compromises where they can find them, or throwing sand in the gears of CA governance to try to delay things until they can re-take a board majority and kill the plan then. ...

I don’t usually comment on Maryland politics beyond Howard County, but this Washington Post story on Martin O’Malley’s approval rating reinforces an opinion I’ve held for a while: O’Malley seems to be frittering away his second term trying to make himself into a national figure, as opposed to actually doing the hard work of preparing Maryland for success in the 21st century. Maybe this is an unfair characterization; maybe (as with the college tuition and school funding issues mentioned in the article) he’s just had a problem “communicating his accomplishments.” ...

I think this is a record for me: Three posts in one day, and all about libraries to boot, to mark the occasion of the “Evening in the Stacks” fundraising event at the Miller Branch of the Howard County Library System. After finishing my last post I happened to be thinking of the role that libraries play in the life of their communities and how libraries are portrayed in TV and films: as just another setting for sitcom wisecracking and rom-com “meeting cute,” or perhaps as a place to go to discover mysterious dark secrets leading to overblown action sequences—what I’ll call the “Indiana Jones” or Da Vinci Code perspective. ...