Goats

PUT YOURSELF IN Cathy and Rodney Holden's place -- but hold your nose while you're doing it. Picture yourself at their new house, on Oella Avenue off Frederick Road, where they saved all their money, and sacrificed convenience, and finally built this lovely split level brick home to raise their two daughters.And now they all have to share it -- with goats.This is not what they had in mind -- not in all the years the Holdens were saving their money, not in those 15 months Rodney Holden was building the house in Oella, not in those months when the family lived in a trailer to save money while Rodney finished construction.

BUFFALO, Kan. -- In the world of Kansas livestock ranching, the stockman knows he's got two enemies in the cow pasture.One is the coyote that steals his stock. The other is the weed that chokes his grass.Now he's got two new allies.Which is why we find ourselves rolling through a bull pasture in southeast Kansas, sitting alongside Wildcat Ranch foreman Carroll Bennett, in the seat of a dusty pickup truck with two hunting rifles in the gun racks.Outside the truck, staring at us with expectant curiosity, is a herd of critters John Wayne would not have been caught dead with.

PUT YOURSELF IN Cathy and Rodney Holden's place -- but hold your nose while you're doing it. Picture yourself at their new house, on Oella Avenue off Frederick Road, where they saved all their money, and sacrificed convenience, and finally built this lovely split level brick home to raise their two daughters.And now they all have to share it -- with goats.This is not what they had in mind -- not in all the years the Holdens were saving their money, not in those 15 months Rodney Holden was building the house in Oella, not in those months when the family lived in a trailer to save money while Rodney finished construction.

1. Section 526Row 32Price: $2,000 PSL, $55 per gameView of field: What would you expect from the highest row in the upper deck? "You can see the plays unfold, but not the players' faces," said Katherine Sullivan, 26, calling that a fair trade.View of scoreboard: Rarified air notwithstanding, these seats are on the 50-yard line. "We're perfectly positioned to see both scoreboards," said Sullivan, of Alexandria, Va. The boards score big with Steve Brandenburg, 26, of Glen Burnie. "The clarity is unbelievable," he said.

MANORVILLE, N.Y. - In the late 1950s, when Cristos Alexandrou was a teen-ager, he fled the family farm on the outskirts of Larnaca, a seaport in Cyprus. He worked at a gas station in Larnaca, became a businessman with a small fleet of taxis and rental cars, then moved to New York City in 1972, where he worked in parking garages, drove taxis and tow trucks and spent all his money in nightclubs in Astoria. "Whatever I made, I spent the same day," Alexandrou recalls.Now, at age 56, Alexandrou has rejected the fast life and bright lights and returned to his pastoral roots, a few hundred yards from Exit 69 on the Long Island Expressway.

MARLENE DUKEHART brought two of her pygmy goats to the Savage Library on Wednesday.A Sykesville resident who lives on an 18-acre farm, Dukehart brought her two smallest goats to help the library and its young patrons celebrate spring.Muffy and Buffy -- she calls them her "yuppie goats" -- were well-behaved for the approximately 30 children who came to pet them.Dukehart has more than a dozen of the miniature goats.Originally, she bought a single pair to breed with the idea of making a bit of money.

REDFORD, Texas -- A Marine will be the subject of a grand jury inquiry into the fatal shooting of an 18-year-old who was tending a herd of goats on his family's farm near the Mexican border.District Attorney Albert Valadez said he would proceed with the investigation of the Marine, whom he did not identify, based on reports from Texas Rangers who are investigating the shooting of the youth, Ezequiel Hernandez Jr.Hernandez died May 20 after he was shot by a member of a Marine team from Camp Pendleton, Calif.

WHILE THE Teamsters' strike against United Parcel Service seems to have gained them some public sympathy, the labor union has had its troubles over the years. Past corruption was a major problem, and some locals haven't portrayed unionism in the best light.Take, for instance, Local 70, which filed a grievance against Mills College in Oakland, Calif. The college's alleged sin? Hiring a company that used a herd of goats to clear poison ivy and blackberry brambles from 40 acres of college property.

The normally routine, often boring array of issues put before the Baltimore County Council may be spiced with a little comic relief tonight as members debate the merits of Silly String and pygmy goats.Silly String -- a rubberized substance sprayed from cans -- is not actually mentioned, but its presence at Fourth of July parades is an underlying issue for a bill sponsored by Councilmen Louis L. DePazzo, Douglas B. Riley and Stephen G. Sam Moxley.Each represents a district -- Dundalk, Towson and Catonsville, respectively -- with an annual Independence Day parade, and the three want to give sponsoring groups holding parade permits the right to keep any vendor at least 100 feet away from the route.

Sarasota, Fla. -- YOU probably were as thrilled as I was to read that George Steinbrenner has taken over the helm of the Florida State Fair Authority.As owner of the New York Yankees, Steinbrenner has shown himself to be a take-charge kind of guy, and we can only hope that he brings the same, sensitive style of leadership to the fair.Overseeing a bunch of pigs, chickens and goats is not the same as overseeing major league baseball players, of course, but with any luck, Steinbrenner will soon whip his farm animals into the kind of surly, arrogant, overpaid crybabies who have made America's pastime what it is today.

The makers of "The Men Who Stare At Goats" have planted this epigraph before the movie: "More of this is true than you would believe." But I heard one young man emerging from a preview saying, "I don't think any of this is true." After all, who in their right mind would buy a story about a visionary Army officer embracing Eastern martial arts and West Coast encounter sessions, then recruiting new American fighting men who would "fall in love with everyone," "sense plant auras," "attain the power to pass through objects such as walls," "have out-of-body experiences" and "be able to hear and see other people's thoughts"?

Constellation should leave Now that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved the Constellation Energy Group/Electricit? de France joint venture ("CEG nuclear venture advances," Oct. 10), I, as a stockholder, would like to see Constellation tell Governor Martin O'Malley and the legislature to go jump in a lake, move their corporate headquarters to Delaware, build a nuclear facility in upstate New York and sell any excess power to BGE at a premium. Walter J. Kasprzak, Fallston Obama is the MVP Here we go again!

The decrepit mansion once served as home to the president of the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, but two decades of brush has grown and, along with vandals, has made it uninhabitable. Cue the goats. In what's the first step to a $10 million project to transform this piece of Druid Hill Park into an environmental and recreational center for the city, the four-legged weed whackers have cleared a half-acre ring of ivy and other invasive species. The herd of 40 will be brought back to clear the rest of the 9-acre parcel that few have used, legally anyway, for years.

Perhaps a herd of goats will help Gibson Islanders solve a mystery that was created when an ancient tulip poplar that blew over six years ago during Tropical Storm Isabel revealed several handmade bricks in its extensively tangled root ball. Earlier this year, a Gibson Islander out for a stroll with his dog was greeted with a present of a handmade brick when his dog exited the thick underbrush. A quick glance and the passer-by realized that it wasn't a typical run-of-the-mill Home Depot brick; it turns out it harks back to the 18th century.

In yet another partnership between Maryland government and goats, Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold said that the munching power of a herd of 40 goats will be employed to help clear invasive vines and plants from a half-acre site at Hancock's Resolution Park in Pasadena. Monday's announcement came two months after the State Highway Administration enlisted another group of goats on a similar mission in Carroll County to protect the habitat of the bog turtle. The goats, on loan at no cost to the county from Garden Farms in Davidsonville, are scheduled to graze on overgrown bittersweet, honeysuckle and poison ivy plants for two days later this summer.

A herd of goats coming to the rescue of a handful of imperiled turtles may sound like the plot of a Saturday morning children's cartoon show, but that's just what's happening in the Carroll County town of Hampstead. The State Highway Administration has enlisted the help of about 40 goats to devour invasive plant species in wetlands along the path of the soon-to-open, 4.4-mile Hampstead Bypass to protect the habitat of the bog turtle - a species listed as threatened in Maryland. State highway officials decided to give the goats a tryout as four-legged lawn mowers rather than to attack the unwanted vegetation with mechanical mowers that might have killed the diminutive reptiles or damaged their boggy habitat on the fringe of Hampstead.

At night, when Stephen Elliott can't sleep - a consequence of years of shooting heroin - he leaves his mattress in the barn and walks to the pen where five spindly-legged goat kids live. They crowd around him, jostling for a scratch behind the ears, and sometimes Princess and Jasmine settle into his lap. He strokes their heads and thinks about the unlikely journey that brought him here. After years of drug abuse and months of homelessness, he has found solace, perhaps salvation, among a family of goats.

In the early morning hours on Nov. 17, a band of cadets from the U.S. Military Academy sneaked onto an 875-acre organic dairy farm, located about 15 miles outside Annapolis, and stole three goats. They raced back to West Point, N.Y., slapped together some photos and created a YouTube video that detailed "Operation Good Shepherd" -- the theft of the Naval Academy's unguarded and defenseless mascots. Yawn. This still passes as a legitimate prank in this rivalry? C'mon, cadets. Log off the computers and crack open a dusty copy of the Army-Navy Prankster History Book.

Support for beating victim Family, friends and city officials gathered at 24 bars to help raise money and awareness after the beating of Zach Sowers, who remains in a coma. Got a right to hear the blues Over 10,000 fans flocked to Sandy Point State Park to enjoy the Chesapeake Bay Blues Festival. State feels credit crunch Maryland lost hundreds of jobs as a major mortgage lender filed for bankruptcy and other lenders are pulling back, thanks to a drop in the housing boom. Goats shown the gate Two Essex homeowners are told they must get rid of their pet goats because their backyard is too small under zoning rules for livestock.

At the Howard County Fair, it seems as though every third person is sporting a bright-green 4-H T-shirt. Teens wearing the shirts are showing off their pigs and goats. Adults are keeping an eye on their children or hovering near the animal stalls. Though farms and farming families have declined over the decades in Howard County, the 4-H Club is alive and well. The county organization has about 650 members, a number that has stayed constant over the years, said Sheryl Burdette, the 4-H extension coordinator.