Chris Judy, of the Shellfish Program of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, delivers oysters to Herald Harbor, on the Severn River. All photos by Kimberly Benson.

      It’s oyster season in Maryland: not for oyster eaters, but for oyster growers. Yesterday was the first day of delivery of young oysters – oyster spat – to residents along the Severn River who are participating in the state’s Marylanders Grow Oysters program. More oyster spat were to be delivered today and Monday.

      Participants sign up to grow oysters in their back yards – from their docks – over nine months. At the end of the nine months, the oyster cages will be retrieved from the water and adult oysters will be placed on oyster bars in each of the respective rivers.

     The program is aimed at boosting the Chesapeake Bay’s decimated oyster population and cleaning the Bay’s polluted waters. A large oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day during warm months. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the Baltimore Sun’s first website: “Sunspot?” That “cutesy” name was just one of the indignities the site’s early staffers had to suffer, recalls a bitter Kevin Naff, Sunspot’s content manager when it was launched in 1996.

Naff (now the editor of The Washington Blade) describes in a recent Huffington Post essay what he felt was a vicious print/web culture clash at the Sun in the late 1990s.

  (The clash is worth exploring, he argues, because it “hastened the industry’s undoing.” With The Baltimore Sun among the nation’s most dramatically ‘undone’ newspapers, Baltimoreans may find Naff’s reminiscence, clearly from the webby side of the clash, of historical interest.)

Newsroom types at the Sun regarded him as “either the enemy to be destroyed or a dilettante to be ignored,” he complains. They “didn’t respect my work ethic, dedication or journalism experience,” he writes. Naff, meanwhile, also had a low opinion of his own digital-side underlings. The poorly-funded SunSpot was, in his view, “a dumping ground for underperformers from print.” Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Phelps’ Meadowbrook Aquatic Center may be a great place for familes to cool off and would-be Olympians to train, but the storied north Baltimore pool complex is apparently not so hot a venue for reality tv.

The club management now says the planned filming of a swimming race between Phelps and NBA star Shaquille O’Neal on Sunday would cause too many problems for members and that ABC has decided to move the setting for this episode of Shaq vs. to Loyola College’s pool instead.

So when is the event happening and how do locals who want see this chlorinated showdown pull it off now? Read the rest of this entry »

Baltimore City councilmember William H. Cole IV plans to introduce legislation to require those with city food cart licenses to use them within six months. Meanwhile, the popular cart that inspired the bill is trying yet another location to appease a hotel that complains the cart’s $5 grilled beef and lamb sandwiches are taking business away from their $10.95-per-burger sit-down restaurant.

The reaction to Cole’s bill from Vassos Yiannouris, whose wife Maria Kaimakis operates the cart? It’s a lot like the explosive sizzle when Maria drops some marinated lamb on the 700-degree grill.

“I would say to him: ‘You’re not a vendor, you don’t know how hard it is to be out there selling in the hot sun and the rain for hours,’” Yiannouris began, fuming. Read the rest of this entry »

An email sent to members of the north Baltimore club today invites them to watch “an exciting event” Sunday afternoon as an ABC television crew comes to the swim center to film a segment of Shaquille O’Neal’s new reality TV show, in which Shaq takes on Olympian (and swim-club co-owner) Michael Phelps in a swimming race.

Judging from the brief email message circulated to members, folks would be wise to take time out from their tanning, micro-waved-mini-pizza-munching and Marco Polo-playing to catch a glimpse of the 15-time NBA All-Star attempting a chlorinated Shaq Attack on the 14-time Olympic Gold Medal winner. You heard it at the Brew first: this is the Meadowbrook meet regular recreational members will want to see, not shun.

Meadowbrook management has been doing work on the club’s indoor pool, where this splash-of-the-titans may take place: perhaps they were preparing it to handle the impact of the 7′1″ 320-lb. Cleveland Cavaliers center hitting the water?

So when does this celebrity swim meet happen, exactly, and how close will common mortals in LL Bean tankinis and blown-out boat shoes be able to get to these lumbering, lanky, telegenic sports legends? Read the rest of this entry »