On Wednesday, February 1, 2017, Mary Moss and Michael Branstetter, two City of Lakewood incumbent city council members, announced in The Suburban Times their intention to run for reelection. When you cast your vote, be mindful that Ms. Moss and Mr. Branstetter are on record for having voted for the City of Lakewood’s Rental Inspection […]
To Know
Letter: Forests – gateways to imagination
Is there anything so magical as the woods? They’re the settings for adventure, where trees are metamorphized from friend to foe, fantastical creatures they become, their long, spindly, skeletal fingers clutching at the unwary traveler, spookily, eerily suggestive that that tug on the back of the jacket was not just happenstance.
Poem: Home! Sweet Home! revised
With apologies to American actor and dramatist John Howard Payne (1823), and Englishman Sir Henry Bishop (melody composition):
Letter: Behold the heavy hand of government – MJ and RIP
City fence-sitting on marijuana (MJ) won’t be allowed if the State gets its way, and a warrant to inspect rental housing won’t be needed now that the City has its way. If House Bill 1099 passes this current legislative session, Lakewood will lose over a half-million dollars annually from the city’s estimated share of alcohol […]
Letter: Living as a square peg in a round hole world
Martin Luther King Jr., whose life and accomplishments are recognized officially with a day set aside in his honor, was “an American Baptist minister and activist who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his […]
New Sound Romance with a Twist
Reality and fiction sometimes seem to overlay each other in strange ways. When Lakewood-based author Susanne Bacon started writing Telling Truths, her third Puget Sound romance based on the fictitious small-town of Wycliff, she envisaged what might happen if an oil refinery were built in a quaint Victorian tourist destination. “All the more coincidental it […]
Letter: Another day (month), another unmet rental inspection deadline
As of this writing, January 6 was yesterday, “but” in the hit single lyrics of Chad and Jeremy (1963) “that was yesterday and yesterday’s gone.” And with the passing of another day, another deadline promised by the City of Lakewood’s legal department has gone unmet as well.
2016 – The Year in… Woo…
We no more than curbed ebola, then Zika came on a tourist visa. Jolly Old England voted to Brexit, then took the walk of shame the next day. Boy… we would never do something THAT stupid.
Letter: Three questions to ask a prospective landlord (in Lakewood and elsewhere) before signing an apartment lease
“Most people tend to rush signing a lease,” warned Nancy Simmons Starrs in the December 28, 2016 “Washington Post.” Indeed, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” likewise warned Alexander Pope in a poem about tenant/landlord relationships gone bad (or maybe 1711 was pre-rental inspection days).