Fish Rustlers Go to the Hoosegow

A Washington, DC fish wholesaler has been found guilty of buying rockfish from a gang of rustlers. A co-owner and a fish buyer will go to the pokey, and the company has been fined $875,000. The DC bass bandits were collared last December. The rockfish (Morone saxatilis or Roccus saxatilis), also known as the striped bass, is the state fish of Maryland. It was overfished for decades, and harvesting is tightly controlled.

A posse has been roundin’ up rockfish rustlers for some time. Convictions were based on investigations by a special task force of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Maryland Natural Resources Police, and the Virginia Marine Police between 2003 through 2007.

Aloha, Terps

The “Mighty Sound of Maryland” marching band rode a wave of sound out of college park into TV land recently. The University of Maryland musicians won a contest by performing the theme song of televison’s “Hawaii Five-O” with appropriate precision formations:

Bluebird Blues Festival September 26th

There’s no website for Sunday’s free Bluebird Blues Festival, but Culturemob’s Michael Rugel provides a superb summary. Two stages, eight great acts including Clarence Carter, Phil Wiggins  & Rick Franklin, Charles “Big Daddy” Stallings, Diunna Greenleaf & Blue Mercy, Warner Williams & Jay Summerour, and a Blues workshop with Dr. Barry Lee Pearson.  Kids’ activities and food, too.

18th Annual Bluebird Blues Festival
Sunday, September 26, 2010 12:30 PM – 6 PM
Prince George’s Community College
301 Largo Road
Landover, MD 20774 (Map)

FREE

 

PGCC press release here.

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Exposure

Photographer Roy Lewis began his professional career in 1964 when Jet magazine published his photo of Thelonius Monk.  Mr. Lewis was with Jet and Ebony before leaving Chicago for Washington in the 1970s to work for the Afro-American Newspapers, the Washington Informer, and as a freelance photographer. 

Roy Lewis has captured images of the African-American experience for a half century, across the country and beyond. In 1974, when Muhammad Ali fought George Foreman in Zaire, Roy Lewis was there with a camera.  No wonder his current exhibit at Gallery 110 is called “Everywhere with Roy Lewis.”

Everywhere with Roy Lewis
Gallery 110, Gateway Arts Center
3901 Rhode Island Avenue Brentwood, MD. 20722 (map)
Tuesday – Saturday: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm & Thursday 10:00 am – 7:00 pm
Free. For more information call (301) 209-0592

More:

Social Media Addiction

  
Flash: digitally deprived college students go daffy. The youngsters are social media addicts and feel disconnected when not online.

200 University of Maryland undergrads spent an entire “Day Without Media.”  No Blackberry, laptop, television, iPod, texting, Twitter, phone calls, IM-ing, email or Facebook. OMG!

Participants were students in Professor Susan D. Moeller’s JOUR 175 ”Media Literacy” course at the U of Maryland J-school. After 24 hours of “cold turkey,” they each wrote around 550 words about their mental states and experiences. Could students TXT this in? BTHOM (beats the hell outa me).

Meaty DC News

Our long National Capital Area nightmare is over, according to transplanted Californians. Fatburger is coming to the DC region. The first two will be Beltway burger joints: Fairfax VA and Columbia MD locations open in July. FB plans to open another in DC proper, near Howard University.   

Five Guys might feel the heat, but Spike and Ray’s won’t worry until In-N-Out Burger comes to town.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Here Comes the Judge

Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor has traveled to Washington to meet privately with Senate leaders before her confirmation hearings. Republican leaders are concerned about some of her more controversial rulings, particularly that inexplicable vote for Sanjaya.

We hope Judge Sotomayor packed lunch. A well-known Caribbean food fancier, she will find no decent Puerto Rican cuisine in the Nation’s Capital. Maybe the Judge and Mr. Obama could make a food run up to the Manna Carry Out in Takoma Park for mofongo, though that eatery may be more Dominican than boricua.

We hunger for more information on Judge Sotomayor’s DC trip. 

 

 

Image (¿Qué es esto cuchifrito?) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Zappa Returns to Baltimore, Via Vilnius

Hey! What’s new in Baltimore?
Better go back and find out.
– Frank Vincent Zappa, “What’s New in Baltimore?”

Musician and composer Frank Zappa (1940-1993) was born in Baltimore, and spent boyhood years in a Park Heights Avenue row house and at nearby Edgewood  Arsenal. His family moved to California in 1952, but Charm City plans to honor its native son with a statute from Lithuania, which will be placed somewhere in Fell’s Point.

Lithuania? Did Mr. Zappa visit that Baltic land or have kinfolk there? Nope. It turns out that young revolutionaries in the capital city of Vilnius adopted the music of FZ as a symbol of freedom:

We never saw Zappa, but nobody ever saw God, and they still go to church. Lithuania is a nation of mythology, legends and fairy tales. Everything is mystified. People believe really quickly, and one of the myths is that independence is good for everyone, with no exceptions. That’s why, in such an environment, the Zappa seeds were so successfully planted.
– Vytautas Kernagis, Lithuanian musician, quoted by Adam B. Ellick in Rolling Stone.

After the fall of the USSR, grateful Lithuanian patriots erected a statue of the inspirational Mr. Zappa in the hip Užupis neighborhood of Vilnius which, except for a medieval monastery or two, seems a lot like today’s Fell’s Point. 

The statue, a representation of Frank Zappa’s head by sculptor Konstantinas Bogdanas, is on a tall thin column. A duplicate of this 15-foot-tall artwork, purchased by Lithuanian admirers, will be shipped to Baltimore, (the city will pay for crating, shipping, and installation).  The sculpture looks a bit like a huge parking meter, the kind Fell’s Point is phasing out. The exact site for the statue has yet to be determined.

Washington Goes to SXSW

Washington DC’s annual assault on Austin’s South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Music Festival includes these local shock troops:

Bomani Armah & Project Mayhem
Carol Bui
Laura Burhenn
Deleted Scenes
Benjy Ferree
Gaybomb
Hall Monitors
H.R. Band
Kid Congo Powers
Medications
Middle Distance Runner
Nadastrom
Thao Nguyen and the Get Down Stay Down
Pygmy Lush
Edie Sedgwick
These United States
Tittsworth
Turboslut
U.S. Royalty
Wayna

Support DC’s troops in Travis County. Follow the action on GOG Blog, Black Plastic Bag, DC Rock Club, PostRock.

Image by Mike Licht, after Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze). Download a copy here. Creative Commons license. Credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Maryland Motorcycle Helmet Choice

There is a bill before the Maryland State Senate to make the wearing of motorcycle safety helmets optional for riders and passengers. Senate Bill 776 has many reasonable and science-based provisions, like requiring state health officials to scrape fallen cyclists off Maryland roads, see if they were wearing helmets or not, make two separate piles, and compare their heights.

The bill fails to explain who is going to pay the resulting additional ambulance, emergency room, medical, and highway cleanup costs. On the other hand, It will set riders free to feel the diesel exhaust blow through their hair.

 

Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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