Tag Archives: Loudoun

Oysters and you!

Posted on by |
Jessy Diaz preparing some oysters at the King Street Oyster Bar

Jessy Diaz preparing some oysters at the King Street Oyster Bar

What do folk like to do on a Friday evening, perhaps downing a “happy hour” beverage and that iconic bivalve, an eastern oyster, from the Chesapeake Bay?

Don Peterson, from Brunswick, Maryland, said, “I didn’t like oysters when I was a kid.  But I went down to Jacksonville Beach, in Florida, and found I like them, and like them best, raw, and I eat them as white as you can get ‘em.”  Some favor the Blue Water Daquiri and Oyster Bar in Jacksonville.

Closer to home, Magnolia’s at the Mill in Purcellville, get its oysters from the War Shore Oyster Company, according to Magnolia’s floor manager, Julie Dalrymple, and they almost always “get them once a week and serve them as ‘specials’.”

Lovettsville’s Market Table Bistro gets their oysters from Chincoteague and further up the east coast from Nantucket, according to Eddie Johnston, the “front of the house” manager at the Bistro.  Continue reading →

An inspired community

Posted on by |
Karen Watson – Infusion Arts

Karen Watson – Infusion Arts

We live in a community of hardworking folk and, among us, is a community of artists who lend grace, beauty and a wealth of spirit to the region.

They are down the side streets in spaces that they’ve set aside for their art, in converted farm buildings and garages, having overrun kitchen counters, closets, and cluttered places in their homes.

The soil and clay around these parts is fertile for the various arts.

They work at their crafts down dirt roads, make and show what they’ve wrought on town and county art tours, and bring their inspired creations to local festivals when they are not shown on-line.

They work at their art because they love it, inspired by the smoothness of formed clay, an attempt to synthesize a media array, to play with the forgiveness of oil brushed on a stretched canvas, the challenge of water colors, or acrylics, or a charcoal drawing stick, a string of stones to make a necklace, or wool to make a scarf, inspired to try to create something no one’s ever made quite like what they’ve imagined and made concrete and real.

They have a passion to invoke their gifts, creating when they can get away from their “real” work, until, they dream, they can make their art full time, and give up “their day job.”

Thus has it always been.

Jill Evans-Kavaldjian, the President of the Loudoun County Arts Council said, “I was struck by the reflection of the trees outside on the tiles inside and captured what I saw with colored pencils and a varnish.”

Tiles

Tiles

Continue reading →

Post modem post election

Posted on by |

electionSigns2015Every election has its themes and forces that shape its outcome – that is – who will govern and implement what policies?

While there were a series of familiar campaign issues in this last election, there was an underlying concern about the character of our Loudoun County government.

We had a crowded field of experienced and inexperienced candidates offering themselves for public service.

Experienced hands enjoyed some special advantages, name recognition of course, but also incumbency, and those solidly gerrymandered election districts strewn across the Commonwealth’s electoral maps.

The greatest and most telling changes to the County’s character came, however, in several key contests for the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.

Eugene Delgaudio, the orange-hatted incumbent Sterling Supervisor, has been attacked for years for his allegedly questionable ethical and discriminatory antics on and off the Board of Supervisors. To its credit, the Board itself recoiled from Mr. Delgaudio’s misconduct, citing a scathing special grand jury report to do so. The Republican Party members took the Republican Board to task for its modest sanctions against Mr. Delgaudio, signaling a split in the party that proved deeper than may have been first understood.

Mr. Delgaudio’s conduct prompted a bitter and abiding distaste more generally for the Board’s ethical ambiguities.

There was legitimate unease with the Board’s cronies in construction and development who contributed heavily to Board members. Continue reading →

Board gets a failing grade on schools

Posted on by |
One Student’s Plea for saving Lincoln Elementary School!

One Student’s Plea for saving Lincoln Elementary School!

Our Loudoun County Board of Supervisors is poised to close four community schools to save what they spent on the Redskins – two million dollars.

The Board calls this “budgeting.”

I call it government mismanagement, preferring games over grades, and fail the Board for its gross mishandling of a core governmental function, how we rightly educate our children.

In 2012, our football sycophantic Board of Supervisors promised to pay Danny “Redskin” Snyder two million dollars to sell Loudoun as the home of the Redskins; in the bargain, the County got game tix, and a classy suite like political big shots crave to watch pro ball games.

(Not to be too much of a buzz kill, but don’t the Redskins now rehearse their winning team form in Richmond, and not Ashburn?)

Now we want to close these four elementary community schools in Aldie, Hamilton, Hillsboro and Lincoln, the oldest of these founded in 1840 and the newest in 1922, because these closures will save the County two million dollars of a school budget shortfall of thirty eight million dollars, because the proposed budget was irresponsibly shrunken by the Board, making these misguided cuts by our School Board “necessary.”

Outgoing School Superintendent Hatrick, to his credit, fired away, rightly charging in the most forceful language that this Board has created an “artificial crisis,” as 2,000 more students enter our countywide school system, and “willfully chosen not to listen to the public, not to listen to the School Board about the funding that is needed for next year for this school system.” Continue reading →

Photos from 2009 Public Advocate stunt show Delgaudio working with his new extremist Library Board appointee

Posted on by |

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. We don’t yet know how many words Sterling supervisor Eugene Delgaudio will emit claiming that he didn’t know “much of anything” about Andrew Beacham, his nominee for Loudoun County’s Library Board – but we do know that they will be arranged into falsehoods.

According to Chairman York, who apparently agreed to nominate Beacham “on behalf of” his Sterling colleague (how does he manage to get himself into these predicaments?), “the information provided on Beacham was not very detailed. Beacham’s four-paragraph resume only said he had ‘worked in the field of media production and broadcasting over the last 4 years.'”

In fact, Beacham’s “work” includes publicly defacing the Koran “in support of Florida pastor Terry Jones” and other political theater acts with fringe anti-abortion extremist Randall Terry. He is active with nativist and anti-government groups in Loudoun, and calls himself a “full-time Pro-Life missionary and activist for Christian policies in government” while declaring that “the only good progressive is a dead progressive.”

Beacham did not move to Sterling by coincidence.

Continue reading →

“NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WIMPER”

Posted on by |

There are those who think the answers to economic progress in a democracy are simply to be had by privatizing everything as much as we can as soon as we can, all the while de-regulating the market place. (Both nationally and locally.) In case you are not yet sure how you feel about that—or even if you think you are, consider your almost 1000% increase in tolls on the Greenway. If that’s not enough to get you “into the streets,” then consider also this local example:

In a current HOA condominium neighborhood in Loudoun, a recent discovery was made of structural repairs needed. There are two cost options for these repairs: 1) $2 million dollars; or 2) $700,000. A vote will be taken of homeowners (never mind the ones who lease and whose lease will increase. They can’t vote.) There is a corporation that owns several investment condos in the community. It gets to vote each piece of property it owns. The rule is “one property = one vote,” not “one person, one vote.”

BUT, each and every homeowner will be assessed either $3500 or $10,000 depending upon the choice this one company makes.
In other words, there is only 1 absentee landlord making this decision – not the resident owners who live in the neighborhood, although they will share the cost burden – most of them seniors or working families… many of them with mortgages under water as a result of the last housing debacle.

Moreover, who will guard against the possibility that the whole repair proposal is possibly a fraudulent scam? The only people who could afford the lawyer to do that are the ones who stand to benefit from having homes dumped on the market at a low price that they can snap up for investment purposes.

THIS is how wealth is transferred from the bottom up… and only a small example. THIS is how we become dis-enfranchised and will increasingly so when corporations own everything. They have already bought Congress and the investment HOAs, and a commuter highway. Why is anyone so eager to give them more?

Unfit for office, unfit for endorsement

Posted on by |

I could never, had I been asked to imagine the most ridiculous and easily verifiable lie that Eugene Delgaudio might invent, have imagined something as ridiculous and easily verifiable as this:

When contacted by the Loudoun Times-Mirror for comment about the exposure of his “Blood Door” email, Mr. Delgaudio told the reporter that the Photoshopped image he had sent to his mailing list was the original and that his image had actually been Photoshopped, by the very people who caught him in this behavior, to make it “look like blood.”

Side by side image comparison by the Loudoun Times-Mirror

When the reporter told me this, I said I thought that was interesting, and suggested that she search on Google images for “blood door.” She did.

Continue reading →

Is this acceptable to you, LTM?

Posted on by |

A second update (the first one appears at the bottom of the post): This is the original image that was photoshopped by Loudoun Republican Eugene Delgaudio to turn the blood “rainbow,” which he then lied about to the Loudoun Times-Mirror. This was found by a commenter via google using the search terms “blood door.”

Image included in the header of an October 25 fundraising letter sent by Eugene Delgaudio

Editor: Please direct the following to all individuals with input into political endorsements at the Loudoun Times-Mirror.

Is this what the Loudoun Times-Mirror editorial staff had in mind when you said of Eugene Delgaudio “his view on social issues is unsettlingly conservative and his antics distracting”? The attached image of the GLBT rainbow symbol in the shape of a pool of blood, complete with a gruesome bloody handprint, was sent to the presumed supporters of an elected official to whom you just gave your endorsement for reelection. While it could be described as unsettling, especially if one has been witness to such a crime scene, I don’t think that “conservative,” “distracting” or “antics” would apply.

Continue reading →