Kangaroo

It's national hamburger month. Just trust me. I guess I better have a hamburger every day and blog about it. Ya with me? Let's get started. Have a look at this photo gallery from a few months back. Not all of them are hamburgers. Some of them are other kinds of burgers, made out of things like turkey, kangaroo and even vegetables. But a few of them are legitimately hamburgers.    

Police logEllicott City: 4400 block of Montgomery Road: Police found a rear window broken at Ellicott Mills Middle School after responding to an alarm between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Tuesday.Elkridge: 6300 block of South Hanover Road: Someone left a television, VCR and telephone outside a door that was pried open at Kangaroo Coach about 4: 30 a.m. Wednesday.Elkridge: 6300 block of South Hanover Road: Someone took a television/VCR and telephone, which was later recovered, from Snyder Electric Inc. about 7 a.m. Wednesday.

Remember that scene in "Crocodile Dundee" where Dundee fixes an authentic Australian meal for the woman (blackened alligator on a spit, yams, grilled slugs) and then says something like, "Actually, that stuff tastes terrible" and opens a can of chili for himself?Well, you won't want to open a can of chili if you try the authentically ethnic food at Boomerang, Baltimore's new Australian pub. But you might want to order instead the Port Philip Bay fillet, a tender piece of beef as big as your fist, topped with fried oysters and a creamy red-pepper sauce.

On a small island, near a large harbor, there once lived a fisherman's little daughter (named Samantha, but always called Sam), who had the reckless habit of lying.Not even the sailors home from the sea could tell stranger stories than Sam. Not even the ships in the harbor, with curious cargoes from giraffes to gerbils, claimed more wonders than Sam did.Sam said her mother was a mermaid, when everyone knew she was dead.Sam said she had a fierce lion at home, and a baby kangaroo. (Actually, what she really had was an old wise cat called Bangs.

No single person could be responsible for making movies as haphazardly executed as either A Guy Thing or Kangaroo Jack, two supposed comedies that surely must have been slapped together by committee, so disjointed are the finished products and so thick is the air of desperation - as in, "There must be some way to make this work!" - smothering them. Kangaroo Jack is surely the worse of the two, firmly establishing itself as the film to beat when it comes to gawdawful moviemaking for 2003.

It could well have been Howard County's Kangaroo Kids auditioning for television's "America's Got Talent" several weeks ago instead of a rival team from the Midwest. The Colorado-based precision rope jumpers waited 10 hours to perform on the popular summer program, but errors soon set off the dreaded triple buzzers from the judges. In less than a minute, they found themselves trooping back off the stage beneath three illuminated red X's, said local coach James McCleary. He commiserated with the other team's bad fortune as if his own team had been axed.

The Kangaroo Kids, the county's competitive jump-rope organization, and the Howard County Junior Striders, a running club, brought home an array of national titles from last weekend's Amateur Athletic Union Junior Olympics in Hampton Roads, Va. Jimmy McCleary, whose father is Kangaroo Kids' head coach Jim McCleary, maintained his record of never losing his event since jump rope became an AAU sport in 1995. He has seven gold medals in single-rope competition. And Robby Moylan was elected top male jumper overall, putting up the most points of all males at the competition.

Our mission," says Jim McCleary, "is to promote physical fitness, not to jump fancy." McCleary is standing in a small, temporarily chairless cafeteria at Wilde Lake Middle School in Columbia, delivering a pre-practice pep talk to about 20 members of the Kangaroo Kids, a precision jump rope team he has been coaching since 1983. His fitness message rings a little off key -- in a perfect-world, we-eat-our-spinach-'cause-it-tastes-good kind of way. These youngsters, ranging from 9 to 20 years old, are in undeniably good shape (and should be since most practice at least four days a week virtually year-round)

Homebuilders as a rule are not known for their largess when it comes to preserving or planting trees in the communities they erect. That tendency has been a blight on the suburbs and often results, comically, in the naming of subdivisions after forests and woodlands that have been bulldozed bare.That's why a recent award to a Howard developer caught our eye. As winners of the 1995 Project of the Year, Chateau Builders of Columbia has illustrated that giving quarter to the environment makes solid business sense, too. Sponsored by the Land Development Council of the Homebuilders Association of Maryland, the award was made because of extensive tree and foliage plantings at Chateau's townhouse and condominium development known as the Woodlands.

At Oakland Mills High School on the eve of the first, a musical called Seussical was played and rehearsed. And the audience, familiar with the Seussical plot - they all liked the musical, yes, they liked it a lot. The childhood rebel's favorite Cat in the Hat acts as the emcee through a flashy, energetic production of extraordinary "thinks." Familiar Seuss characters return to wreak havoc in lands like the Jungle of Nool and the planet of Who. Before long, the imaginative elephant, Horton, hears a Who and becomes friends with the Who Mayor's son, JoJo, who often gets into trouble for his extravagant daydreams.