Garbage

Longtime Democratic strategist Elaine Kamarck started her government career as a Woodlawn middle-schooler, listening to her father read his Medicare training manuals to her. "If I could figure them out, he knew he was writing clearly enough," she said of her father, a career civil servant at the Social Security Administration. Almost 30 years later, Kamarck arrived at the White House to help Vice President Al Gore "reinvent government," injecting corporate management practices to the tune of 350,000 fewer federal jobs.

Anyone remember the Trash Bash jingle? How about "Baltimore Sparkle?" Or Trash ball? Those rubber garbage cans embellished with "Believe"? A stroll down memory lane, in Baltimore's case, is littered with failed cleanup initiatives. As it is everywhere. Ever since that lone tear rolled down the Indian's cheek in the famous 1970s commercial, national and local campaigns have used guilt, humor, bullying, goofy slogans, goofier mascots and celebrity endorsements in an attempt to get it through America's slovenly skull that littering is bad, garbage cans are good.

NEWARK, N.J. -- A potter's field that became a garbage dump contains more than the 18,000 bodies originally believed buried there, a new study says.And it is possible the sliver of land in an industrial area near the airport and an Anheuser-Busch brewery could hold as many as 200,000 bodies, according to the study by Malcolm Pirnie, a White Plains, N.Y., environmental engineering firm.The city ordered the study as part of a court-ordered restoration of City Cemetery, where people without money to pay for a funeral were buried between 1869 and 1954.

RICHMOND, Va. -- "Garbage time" in a basketball blowout ordinarily begins in the fourth quarter. For the Richmond Rhythm and the BayRunners last night, garbage time consumed all of the second half of the teams' International Basketball League contest.The Rhythm ran past the BayRunners, 103-84, before 1,024 at the Richmond Coliseum in a game that wasn't as close as the score indicated.The Rhythm (3-8) led 52-33 at halftime and twice took 30-point leads in the third quarter.The BayRunners (4-7)

I have often said that if I misplace my daily calendar, I will be forced to stand perfectly still until someone finds it for me because, without it, I have no idea what I am supposed to do next.I once opened my Day Runner and read this note I had written to myself: "10 a.m."That's all. Just "10 a.m."Not "10 a.m. -- hairdresser." Not "10 a.m. -- school conference." Not "10 a.m. -- anger management therapy."Just "10 a.m."I was frantic. I was supposed to be somewhere at 10 a.m., and I had no idea where.

A Halethorpe couple, their infant son and the family puppy escaped serious injury early yesterday morning when a 13-ton garbage-hauler truck smashed through their newly renovated house.The truck's driver, William C. Michals, 28, of Annapolis, might have blacked out just before the 5: 30 a.m. crash, said a spokesman for his employer. Michals was taken to Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he was stable in serious condition yesterday.The impact collapsed the back half of the house in the 4200 block of Washington Blvd.

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia -- Imagine what would happen if the Baltimore area were blacked out four times in a month, with everything from street lights to televisions shut off.Picture living without running water for a few days.Then, visualize people coping with air raids, anti-aircraft fire and bombs.This is what it is like to be in Belgrade these days as NATO's war against Yugoslavia plows on.Almost amazingly, the place hasn't yet fallen apart.In fact, NATO planners might be shocked to find shops full of goods, buses and streetcars operating, cafes serving cappuccino and restaurants dishing out hunks of prime meat and fresh fish.

WE MIGHT as well face facts, kids. Our society is disappearing down a cultural sewer.The evidence is everywhere. Be it movies, television or music, coarseness, vulgarity and sophomoric sexual innuendo are the order of the day.The New York Times, in an article on "Gross-Out Humor," listed a few recent examples of successful attempts to set new standards in bad taste: an MTV talk show host vomiting into a toilet on camera, a character in a movie thought to...

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. -- The United States is covered, swamped, buried in garbage, 85 percent of it readily recyclable.The largest man-made object on Earth, dwarfing anything you can name -- the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Great Wall of China, the World Trade Center -- is New York City's aptly named Fresh Kills Landfill. It is visible to the naked eye from orbiting spacecraft.At this date, with global deforestation, fouled air, manufacturing's dioxins and PCBs in our water, and 6 billion people, each unrecycled aluminum and tin can, glass and plastic bottle, Styrofoam peanut, cardboard box and piece of paper (office, fax, computer, magazine, newsprint)

If you're going to collect garbage for a living, this is the place to do it -- out here where the gulls cry, and the brown Inner Harbor water laps against the bulkheads like a lullaby. In fact, when a summer morning blows in blue and soft across the masts and the condos, such a task can seem more like pleasure than work. At least for a while.That's true even when you're piloting one of the city's six slow and ungainly garbage skimmers, a noisy contraption that looks like a cross between a tractor and a Zamboni ice groomer.

This is for all JV football players: Your game today has been canceled. JV cheerleading practice has also been canceled. "That was actually a short poem - you could type that up and call it 'Football Announcement,' " said Terence Winch as he listened to a voice come over the loudspeaker during his talk on poetry at Centennial High School on Wednesday. Winch - a writer and poet who is also well-known to fans from his days as the button accordionist of Irish folk band Celtic Thunder - wasn't joking.

The city's new recycling plan is exceeding expections, officials say, with trucks picking up 53 percent more recyclables since July, when Mayor Sheila Dixon increased collections to once a week. "I really thought it would take a little bit longer to get to this point," Dixon said in an interview. "People have taken heed. People are really getting into the groove of this process." The mayor's plan also reduced garbage collection to once a week and now city garbage trucks are hauling less trash to the landfills.

New routes, a pared trash-pickup schedule and expanded recycling, all starting this week, mark some of the biggest changes to city sanitation in decades. Among the changes: * The city is discontinuing Monday pickup. * Garbage will only be collected once a week. There is a limit of 96 gallons, or about three cans, on the amount of trash you can set out. Trash must be set out in cans with tight-fitting lids. * Recycling will be collected once a week. There is no limit on the amount of recycling you can set out. * Garbage and recycling must be placed outside no later than 6 a.m. - rather than 7 a.m. - the day of collection.

The sun had only begun to cast shadows Friday as garbage collectors jumped into their trucks to begin routes that have remained virtually unchanged for more than 40 years. But starting Monday, sweeping changes will come to Baltimore's sanitation routine. City garbage and recycling crews will be placed on newly drafted routes, and trash and recycling will each be picked up once a week, instead of the former schedule, when trash was picked up twice a week and recycling once every two weeks.

"Mankind is ... a manifold opening of the possibilities of growth and an infinite capacity for wasteful consumption." - Georges Bataille (1967) There is something distinctly human about trash. Zoologists and entomologists have found many connections between humans and animal behavior, primate psychology, even the DNA of fruit flies. So far, though, there is no evidence that hordes of bees, colonies of ants or herds of elephants are endangered by their own junk. Only human civilizations pose such a threat to themselves.

Our view Mayor Sheila Dixon's plan to switch municipal trash collection to once a week while boosting recycling pickup is the right thing to do. It saves $7 million and frees up sanitation crews to clean the city's filthy alleys. And it will encourage people, by necessity, to recycle more, which is good both for the environment and for Baltimore's bottom line - stowing trash in a landfill isn't free, after all. The mayor does, however, need to follow through on providing residents with sturdy trashcans with attached tight-fitting lids.

The word is out and the anxiety is growing. In neighborhoods rich and poor, black and white, neat and messy Baltimoreans are keenly aware that a decades-old, twice-a-week rhythm of their lives is about to be disrupted. Soon the garbage trucks that pick up their trash will clatter down their streets just once a week. Oh, another truck will come a couple of days later, but it will only take recyclables, those mostly non-offending papers, boxes, bottles and cans - not the crab shells, baby diapers, cat litter, moldy bread and bruised spinach you don't want sitting around for the week in between pickups.

Somerset Democrats didn't slight minorities I live and work in Somerset County and I am a member of the Democratic Central Committee. I have read with great interest your article and editorial concerning racial disparities in Somerset County. While I agree with the gist of the article, I must take strong issue with using the recent appointment of James East to the Somerset County Board of Commissioners as an example implying that blacks and other minorities are specifically excluded from holding high office in our county.

Baltimore is a step closer to once-a-week trash collection with the City Council throwing its support Monday behind Mayor Sheila Dixon's controversial changes to the municipal garbage schedule. The council will have to vote on the measure once more before it is sent to Dixon to be signed, but Monday's 8-to-5 vote indicated that several council members who initially had opposed the mayor's plan now support it. The bill reduces garbage pickup to once a week, but also increases recycling to once a week.

Mayor Sheila Dixon's proposed "One Plus One" sanitation plan would limit garbage pickup to a total of 64 gallons once per week, while allowing for unlimited recycling. On the surface it may seem like a good plan; after all, who would oppose increasing recycling and sending less waste to landfills? However, once we look at the math behind the plan, it no longer makes sense. According to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an average person in this country produces 4.6 pounds of garbage daily, or a total of 32 pounds per week.