Tail

Having put us through one torturous, mind-binding fiasco, here's hoping that the Republican Party has learned how to keep the tail from wagging the dog. Al Funk, Timonium

Go to baltimoresun.com to see video from Immaculate Conception School's haircutting event. Riley Fick, 7, had her pony tail snipped Friday before several hundred cheering classmates at Immaculate Conception School. Her mom, Bridget, expedited the clipping in no time and helped the little girl place the strands in a plastic bag. Of the more than 50 girls donating their tresses to Pink Heart Funds, a charity that provides wigs for cancer patients, Riley had one of the most compelling reasons: Her 5-year-old brother, Brendan, is battling the disease.

This week, we pause to salute an original watchdog: William Donald Schaefer. By now, readers have seen countless stories about the former Baltimore mayor's dedication to customer service and to attacking the quality-of-life problems that constantly crop up: trash dumped in alleys, streetlights out, clogged storm drains. He was known to spend weekends and evenings trolling city streets and avenues for such issues, and for delivering "action memos" to staff seeking swift response.

The poor bird was a goner. That's what everyone thought that November day when the big red-tailed hawk slammed into a window at the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus. The impact shattered the quarter-inch-thick plate glass, and the roughly 4-pound bird plummeted some 25 feet, landing in a feathery heap. Not only did she survive, but, amazingly, broke no bones. She was badly bruised, though, and likely would have perished without a few strokes of good luck, such as Hopkins employing a carpenter who happens to be a raptor aficionado.

Our greatest deficit is not economic; it's social. As a cultural and consumer anthropologist who has studied the recession for the last two years, I believe the downturn led us to this situation. With this knowledge, I feel we are in a position to have a great year, but not because the economy will necessarily rebound (although that would be nice). 2011 will be great because we'll start to create and live by our "sense of social" — the sum total of relationships we create with others and our ability to leverage these relationships to create a mutually beneficial way of life.

Once again, witness the tail wagging the dog in our "special" relationship with Israel ("Too much, too fast for peace?" Oct. 7). In an effort to keep alive a moribund peace process, the U.S. is groveling before Israel attempting to appease a client state with favors so that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will extend a moratorium on the expansion of illegal settlements. But this, in effect, validates existing settlements on Palestinian land because these are not addressed. For any meaningful resolution of the conflict, the U.S. has to be a more impartial mediator.

I f anybody was to have made a killing in the economic crisis, it should have been debt collectors. With consumers going bust at the worst rate in decades, who likelier than the debt hounds to score a big recession payday? That they turned out to have been just as incompetent, compromised and insolvent as everybody else might be all you need to know about the economy. In a tawdry coda to the financial crash, one of the nation's biggest debt-collection law firms has gone belly-up, just like many of the people it had been dunning.

It's a miracle that "The Road" works at all, given the harsh, murmuring severity of its source, the 2006 Cormac McCarthy novel full of minimally punctuated dialogue, taking place in a world ravaged by an event - human-made? climatological? - unspecified by the author. Director John Hillcoat's film version, scripted by playwright Joe Penhall, constitutes an act of faithful adaptation. Yet its faithfulness is more to the letter than the spirit, and it's not the work of an inspired director, merely a dogged one. The script and the imagery take the story in some peculiar directions in the name of "relatability" and, odd as it sounds, sentimentality.

James A. Pavesich, a retired senior credit manager and decorated World War II tail gunner, died Tuesday of heart failure at the Edenwald retirement community in Towson. The longtime resident of the Campus Hills neighborhood of Towson was 89. Born in St. Louis, the son of an investment banker and homemaker, Mr. Pavesich attended St. Louis Country Day School before moving in 1935 with his family to a 200-acre farm in Elkridge that his mother operated. He was a 1938 graduate of City College and enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1942.