Animal Farm

George Orwell's "Animal Farm" derives much of its power from the contrast between a simple little fable about animals and the biting satire this fable conveys.In the opening production of its fourth season, the Bowman Ensemble maximizes this power by contrasting an almost naive, childlike theatrical approach with Orwell's sophisticated message about the corruption of power.J. Marshall Walker's set design consists primarily of a small, square barnyard covered with mulch, and the main elements in Brian Chetelet's costume designs are T-shirts bearing the names of the animals (with the noted exception of the hens' shirts, which bear the name of their labor union: "Egg Makers Local")

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to enact new rules to curb pollution from development and large-scale animal farms to help restore the Chesapeake Bay, the agency's chief announced Monday. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said the rules governing storm water and farm animal waste would serve as a "backstop" to pollution control measures that Maryland and other bay states are expected to take over the next two years. She made the announcement in Washington at a bay cleanup conference that ends today.

Sometime in July, call up everybody you know who is genuinely concerned about human liberty and invite them to a 50th birthday party for George Orwell's "Animal Farm."To mark that book's historic first half-century, Harcourt Brace & Co., the original publisher, has produced a special edition, gloriously ornamented with paintings and drawings by Ralph Steadman (180 pages. $26). Or there is a current simple paperback copy available (Signet Classic. 128 pages. $4.95).You know "Animal Farm." It is said to be among the 20 bestsellers in the entire history of publishing.

MOVIES 'Animal Farm' With "lipstick on a pig" threatening to make our political discourse thoroughly ridiculous, it's time to revisit a classic by a master of political thought and criticism: George Orwell's Animal Farm, in which pigs take the leadership role in a barnyard revolution and ultimately declare "all animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others." The 1954 British feature, the first full-length entertainment cartoon in British history (funded by the CIA as anti-Soviet propaganda)

At 8 o'clock this evening, Turner Network Television, which coyly designates itself "The Best Movie Studio on Television," will broadcast a two-hour adaptation of George Orwell's "Animal Farm." If you are getting married or being launched into space at that moment, rest easy: Seven "encores" are scheduled over the next two weeks.TNT's publicity declares this "the most ambitious film ever made for television." Not only that, TNT also proclaims that the film "is destined to become the most important television event of the year."

George Orwell(1903-1950)Born Eric Arthur Blair, Orwell was an English novelist, best known for "Animal Farm" and "1984.""Animal Farm," set on a barnyard with animals as the characters, is Orwell's expression of anti-Sovietism. "1984" is Orwell's interpretation of the future. He saw it as having an omnipresent demagogue known as "Big Brother."Orwell also wrote "Down and Out in Paris and London," after having lived among the lower classes in Europe. Orwell later wrote on his dread for communism in "Homage to Catalonia."

'Animal Farm' opens Bowman Ensemble seasonThe Bowman Ensemble launches its fourth season Wednesday with a revival of one of the most controversial shows ever to play Baltimore -- George Orwell's "Animal Farm," adapted by Peter Hall with music by Richard Peaslee and lyrics by Adrian Mitchell. Last seen here in 1986 at the Mechanic Theatre in a production by the National Theatre of Great Britain, "Animal Farm" was deleted from the official program of the Theatre of Nations festival following protests from the former Soviet Union.

What if Snowball had his chance? An American novelist has written a parody of Animal Farm, George Orwell's 1945 allegory about the evils of communism, in which the exiled pig, Snowball, returns to the farm and sets up a capitalist state, leading to misery for all the animals. The book, Snowball's Chance by John Reed, has just been published by Roof Books, a small independent press in New York. And the estate of George Orwell is not happy about it. William Hamilton, the British literary executor of the Orwell estate, objected to the parody in an e-mail message to the James T. Sherry, the publisher of Roof Books, stating, "The contemporary setting can only trivialize the tragedy of Orwell's mid-020th-century vision of totalitarianism."

George Orwell's contribution to human liberty, I will contend for the sake of argument, is greater than that of any other single man or woman in the 20th century. There is no remotely conclusive way to prove that. But his "Animal Farm" and "1984" are among the century's most widely read volumes. Their epiphanic truth did more to alert the reading population of the world to the innate perfidy of utopian totalitarianism - Left and Right - than any other argument, act, party or platform. When I was a college kid, the majority of my acquaintances were New York "progressives" -proudly "Red diaper babies."

The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to enact new rules to curb pollution from development and large-scale animal farms to help restore the Chesapeake Bay, the agency's chief announced Monday. EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said the rules governing storm water and farm animal waste would serve as a "backstop" to pollution control measures that Maryland and other bay states are expected to take over the next two years. She made the announcement in Washington at a bay cleanup conference that ends today.

If Marshall McLuhan was right that "the medium is the message," in the case of wildly popular fake news, the message must be: Laugh your head off or you'll just end up crying your eyes out. But what if a few angry and motivating tears are what we need? What if all this laughing is pacifying us - making us inert? I hate to say it - I love my Amy Poehler fix as much as the next gal - but I fear therapeutic irony is rendering us politically impotent. We are drawn to fake news for obvious reasons.

GREENSBORO - William LeCompte sped in a golf cart alongside a windowless steel building nearly twice the length of a football field, packed with 28,000 chickens and monitored by computers that calibrate their food, water, heat, lighting and air. At the end of the immense, hangar-like structure, he pointed to a vent framing a 4-foot-high fan, whose whirling blades breathed a warm, moist plume of fetid gas into the night sky over Maryland's Eastern Shore....

If you always wished to catch a glimpse of Santa's reindeer up close before they land on the slate roof of a Whiteford house on Christmas Eve, you may be in luck. Just 20 minutes north of Bel Air, nestled in the rolling hills of Whiteford and open for the Christmas season, is a 100-acre farm with a reindeer village on the Pennsylvania end of the property. Sassy, Molly, Minnie and a baby named C.J. romp and play to the delight of schoolchildren taken on tours by farmer Brian Adelhardt. On Dec. 5, Santa will stop at the reindeer corral before he visits 1,500 homes a second, at an average sleigh speed of 3.6 million mph, while carrying about 156,000 tons of cargo, according to "Santa Claus: Ergonomic Risk Assessment" from the System Concepts Web site.

Move over, Twiggy. This fall's fashion news is dominated by the mod look, playing off the clothes of the '60s. Spring's miniskirts, it turns out, were no one-season wonder. The fall runways were filled with high hemlines, as well as other signs of the times -- trapeze dresses, tall boots, bold colors, colored tights and op-art prints. Not interested in the mini? A pencil skirt with a high waist and a deep slit looks just as now. If geometric angles and clean lines don't appeal, satin, lace, feathers and fur are also making news.

George Orwell, born 100 years ago today, achieved so much in so little time (he died at age 46 in 1950) that he's become the subject of an intellectual parlor game: "What would Orwell say?" The game attracts so many players because, as the late British writer John Wain observed, Orwell "was born into an age in which the really suffocating nonsense was talked by reactionaries, and lived on into an age in which it was talked by progressives." That makes it possible for almost anybody to pick and choose something in Orwell's work that fits his prejudices.

What if Snowball had his chance? An American novelist has written a parody of Animal Farm, George Orwell's 1945 allegory about the evils of communism, in which the exiled pig, Snowball, returns to the farm and sets up a capitalist state, leading to misery for all the animals. The book, Snowball's Chance by John Reed, has just been published by Roof Books, a small independent press in New York. And the estate of George Orwell is not happy about it. William Hamilton, the British literary executor of the Orwell estate, objected to the parody in an e-mail message to the James T. Sherry, the publisher of Roof Books, stating, "The contemporary setting can only trivialize the tragedy of Orwell's mid-020th-century vision of totalitarianism."

If Marshall McLuhan was right that "the medium is the message," in the case of wildly popular fake news, the message must be: Laugh your head off or you'll just end up crying your eyes out. But what if a few angry and motivating tears are what we need? What if all this laughing is pacifying us - making us inert? I hate to say it - I love my Amy Poehler fix as much as the next gal - but I fear therapeutic irony is rendering us politically impotent. We are drawn to fake news for obvious reasons.

CHANGING THE DIETS of cows, pigs and chickens could help address the serious problem of runoff pollution from farms. Reducing animal manure, by altering livestock feeds, would mean less waste available to foul the Chesapeake watershed.With agriculture accounting for nearly half the harmful nitrogen and phosphorus reaching the bay, that's no small factor. But the trade-off would be higher prices for consumers, as well as for the farmer.The technology and policy that have provided Americans with low-cost food have also created a system that disrupts the natural agricultural cycle, overloading the environment with excess chemicals and manure that flow off the land into our waters.

THERE THEY go again. Over the years, those who control the Columbia Association - the giant homeowners' association that runs that planned community's wealth of recreation programs and facilities - have exposed themselves to no end of ridicule with various schemes to stifle public debate. You'd think that the elected representatives of one of Maryland's richest, best-educated places - albeit elected in sparsely attended community votes - would finally figure out the basics of an open society, even short of endorsing the messiness of full-blown democracy.

PIGS MAY SMELL like money to those who raise them, but not to the neighbors. And when there are too many pigs, the impact on a community goes beyond the staggering stench to serious environmental and health concerns. Frederick County's new law limiting hog factory farms may be the first in Maryland to deal with the problem, but it won't be the last. Maryland lawmakers are studying this issue, as plans for concentrated feeding operations have cropped up in Carroll County and on the Eastern Shore.