"A View from the Field"

Not all of the work of the Office of Cemetery Oversight goes on at 500 North Calvert Street in Baltimore. An important part of the work occurs in cemeteries around the state. The Investigator for the Office of Cemetery Oversight routinely investigates aspects of complaints firsthand, interviewing complainants, talking with cemetery responsible parties, investigating damages and allegations of improprieties, and trying to get a feel for the issue at hand.

Rest assured that just because the investigator visits your cemetery doesn’t mean that something is wrong. In order to establish a good working relationship with the entities the Office regulates, the investigator will often stop in just to say hello, and get to know you. Think of the investigator as the face of the Office of Cemetery Oversight. Now that the Office is once again fully staffed, it is anticipated that the investigator will be able to spend more time in the field.

Starving artist

Last week, Raymond Taylor - serving three consecutive life sentences for attempted murder - "escaped" the North Branch Correctional Institution in Cumberland, Maryland, by posing as a cellmate who was due to be released. Taylor was recaptured the following day in West Virginia...but being Maryland, there is naturally oh-so-much-more to the story, and Taylor's motives for escape, as The Baltimore Sun's Peter Hermann reports:

Taylor had sued a woman on the Eastern Shore named Lavern Jackson for civil damages, claiming she had solicited drawings from him of Shrek and Garfield to sell at a flea market, but then never deposited the promised $685 into his prison bank account...

[From the article "Artwork Suit Set Convict on Path Toward Escape," by Peter Hermann, originally published February 28, 2010, by The Baltimore Sun.]

Baltimore Airlift

Former Baltimore mayor (and Maryland governor) William Donald Schaefer bids his beloved Inner Harbor adieu as he's airlifted to safety...

In the Big House

Today, I attended my first gubernatorial press conference, at the State House in Annapolis. Here is a photo I took of Governor (and former Baltimore mayor) Martin O'Malley speaking with reporters in attendance:



Beginning with the third issue of Smile, Hon, You're in Baltimore!, and throughout O'Malley's tenure as mayor, I would send copies of each new edition to his office at City Hall. And to my surprise, he actually sent me several brief thank-you notes in return.

A. AUBREY BODINE Slideshow/Lecture October 18 at the Pratt Main Branch

BALTIMORE - Jennifer Bodine, daughter of legendary Baltimore Sun photographer A. Aubrey Bodine and proprietor of AAubreyBodine.com, will present a slide-illustrated talk about the life and work of her father, whose photographs captured the essence of life in Baltimore and Maryland from the 1930s and beyond, beginning at 2:00 p.m., Sunday, October 18, in the Poe Room of the Central Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. (Copies of Bodine’s Chesapeake Bay Country will be on sale following the program.) Jeff Korman, Manager of the Central Library’s Maryland Department, will also talk about the work of the Federal Writers Project in Maryland and Maryland, A Guide to the Old Line State.

The Mankind All-You-Can-Eat Buffet

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies...

"This is Johnny-On-The-Spot Reporting..."

Consider, if you will, this appalling little episode from Cambridge, Maryland:

After exiting the portable toilet in Long Wharf Park in Cambridge, Candy Vigneri got a cigarette from a construction worker and sat at a picnic table, police Lt. Wayne Bromwell said.

As she sat, a male passer-by approached the toilet but Vigneri warned him, "Don't go in there, I just had a baby there," police said.