Tyler Bloom helps out with the coin toss at a Towson football game. Photo by Brendan Cavanaugh.

Tyler Bloom doesn’t necessarily have the physique you’d expect from a football player. He stands less than 4 feet tall and weighs less than 50 pounds. Also, he’s five years old.

Tyler’s involvement with the team begins in one of the scariest ways possible. After his parents noticed that Tyler was acting oddly clumsy and walking strangely, they took him to Johns Hopkins Hospital. A CAT scan showed that a tumor was encroaching on the right side of his brain. Bloom was rushed into surgery, where surgeons successfully removed the tumor — but a stroke during the surgery left Tyler paralyzed on the right side of his body. The travails didn’t end there; his particularly aggressive form of brain cancer required 33 doses of radiation in six weeks.

Tyler got involved with the Tigers through an organization called Friends of Jaclyn, which works to improve the lives of children with pediatric brain tumors. Through connecting children and their families with local teams, FOJ hopes to foster new support networks — and also help the team’s members to see the world with new eyes. Towson is one of 100 teams nationwide that’s adopted an honorary team member through the organization.

Even better news:  Tyler’s cancer treatments concluded in August, 2011 — and all his scans have come back negative since then.

A scene from last year's croquet match between St. John's and the Naval Academy. (The nerds almost always win.)

As far as Maryland universities go, St. John’s has always been a bit of an outlier. They learn science from Galileo and Newton, read ancient Greek, and have a mean croquet team. And now they have perhaps the least fight-y college fight song we’ve ever heard.

It wasn’t always this way. While it may be known now as a bastion of bookish eccentrics, the school started out as a “quasi-military academy” with varsity football and lacrosse teams, according to alumnus Adrian Trevisan. The former fight song, “St. John’s College March,” dates from 1911 and featured some of the usual fight song rhetoric:  “St. John’s forever,” “Fight for her colors,” “United we as brothers stand,” etc. But things have changed a lot over the past century. These days, St. John’s only varsity teams are in crew, croquet, sailing, and fencing. Not to mention that this is a crowd that doesn’t appreciate androcentric language. So last year the call went out for a new fight song, which was unveiled at its 30th annual croquet match against the U.S. Naval Academy.

The new song, penned by current student Charles Branan (with a musical arrangement by Baltimore resident John Bonn, who teaches at Friends School), is notable for talking about books and wisdom and freedom, and not really mentioning fighting or winning. True to form. The lyrics to the new song are below:
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It was only last year that John Waters championed hitchhiking as “a great way to meet people, and to have sex” and claimed that he’d stuck out his thumb everywhere from Baltimore to San Francisco. And apparently now… Eastern Ohio. The famed film director was spotted by indie rock band Here We Go Magic.  They told the story to DCist:

“Getting back on the highway this morning, there was a man at the side of the on-ramp with a sign that read ‘to the end of Rte 70.’ Jen wanted to pick him up, but we drove past him. As we passed by, our sound guy said ‘John Waters’ Luke said, ‘Yep, definitely John Waters.’ We got off at the next exit and circled back. He was still there. We pulled up, opened the door and asked where he was coming from. ‘Baltimore,’ he said. And we said ‘Get in, sir.’ ”

Read the rest of the story here.

Book festivals:  they’re not just for the tweed-suited and elbow-patched anymore. This weekend in Gaithersburg you’ll find advice columnists, stand-up comedians, and one of the stars of 30 Rock (!?). Oh, and writers. Our picks for festival highlights are below:
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Okay, I know that saying that District Attorney Jack McCoy stopped by Baltimore last week is stretching it a bit… mostly because McCoy isn’t technically “real” or whatever. But a girl suffering from Law & Order withdrawal has to cling to whatever hope she’s got.

In reality, it was of course actor Sam Waterston who stopped by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health to accept the school’s Goodermote Humanitarian Award. And while Jack McCoy may have been an upstanding DA, it turns out that Waterston himself might be an even more admirable person. “Mr. Waterston’s acting accomplishments are well-known, but his work as an advocate for the displaced victims of war is far less celebrated,” Michael Klag, dean of the Bloomberg School said at the ceremony. Refugees are Waterston’s particular area of advocacy; after starring in (and receiving an Oscar nomination for) The Killing Fields, a film about the Khmer Rouge’s brutal reign in Cambodia, Waterston became a board member of Refugees International. He’s also been active in many other charitable organizations.

If you missed the ceremony, check it out here. And if you just like picturing McCoy and his eyebrows frowning sagely at the mean streets of Baltimore, you might want to check out the two-part Homicide/Law & Order crossover episode “Baby, It’s You.”

Around this time last year, I remember asking my Johns Hopkins students what their summer plans were. As soon as the question left my mouth, I could tell it was a mistake. Apart from the few who had solid gigs as lifeguards or research assistants, most of these bright and dedicated kids were still searching for someone who would let them work for the summer… for free. Once an optional half-step up the career ladder, the unpaid internship has become something of a necessity. According to new research, more than 90 percent of employers think that students should have completed at least a couple internships before graduating. And that, according to Atlantic editor Derek Thompson, is a big problem, because “unpaid internships aren’t morally defensible.”

Yikes. Those are some strong words. But Thompson has the arguments to back it up. First of all, a career track founded on unpaid internships (as is common in politics, research, journalism, and non-profits) hurts low-income students. “These students need work that pays money, but they also need an internship to work in the field. As a result, poorer students are at permanent disadvantage in the summer internship market,” Thompson writes. Even for students who aren’t in precarious economic positions, the unpaid internship is a shaky deal. Employers reap the benefits of bright young minds, but don’t have to offer up any job security, benefits, or actual money. According to the Labor Department’s guidelines, unpaid internships have to satisfy three requirements:  they must be more like education than a job; interns can’t work in place of paid employees; and their work must not be of “immediate benefit” to their employer. As Thompson notes, “these rules are flouted more routinely than speed limits.” (more…)

Last week’s “semi-covert” ethics forum led by professors from the Hopkins School of Education for the benefit of Secret Service agents may have been planned long before the organization’s recent kerfluffle in Colombia, but that controversy added an extra tinge of urgency to the event. Hopkins has partnered with the Secret Service since 1997, and before the scandal broke, the school expected 20 agents to attend. One hundred showed up.

Although the conference’s focus wasn’t on the Cartagena controversy, the agency did ask that the Hopkins team “retool the event in its context.” That context meant addressing the fact that twelve agents have been accused of soliciting prostitutes when traveling to Colombia with President Obama for the Summit of the Americas. But Hopkins was quick to stress that the ethics forum was not remedial. (more…)

Dr. Shirley Jackson, who will five the commencement speech at Morgan State.

I’m sure there are people out there who remember their commencement speakers forever. I’m not one of them. I vaguely remember a woman speaking in broad terms about leadership, or friendship, or maybe even both. Some of this year’s graduates are going to find that half-hour speech the most riveting part of graduation — probably those lucky kids at Goucher, who’ll get to listen to a born storyteller — while many will spend that time daydreaming about their post-graduation plans. Here’s a run-down of the rest of 2012′s commencement speakers and their relative snooze-scores:
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Photo courtesey Amy Davis, Baltimore Sun

When Johns Hopkins unveiled its $1.1 billion addition a couple weeks ago, most of the focus was on the new buildings — their state-of-the-art equipment, colorful facades, and 1.6 million square feet of space. But opening a hospital is a very different undertaking than cutting the ribbon in front of a new mall. A hospital is full of patients — sometimes very sick ones — and they each have to be moved from the old structures to the new one. This turns out to be precisely the opposite of a simple task, and, as with everything in this new hospital, extreme care was taken to make sure the patient move happened in the best possible way. That meant, according to Robin Hunt, “running two hospitals simultaneously” for a couple days. Like we said:  not a simple task.

Hunt organized, managed, and led the move of 271 patients over two days, a process that took three-plus years to plan. She consulted with representatives from each of the hospital’s departments, ran simulations, and figured out how to deal with critically ill patients. They built a precise schedule, laying out the timing for each aspect of the movement. Specially designated “emergency pull-off zones” were created along the routes, in case a patient being transported required immediate medical attention. The most critically ill patients were escorted by as many as five staff members, sometimes including a physician, nurse, respiratory therapist, and critical care transport staff. Right before the big day, Hunt and her team gathered a group of volunteers and students who acted as mock patients in a last-minute dress rehearsal. Each stand-in patient came complete with a patient profile and medical equipment, so the command center could get a sense of how the entire process would work. “The mock move definitely served its purpose,” Hunt says. The hospital decided to beef up communication between the command center and its transport team, providing radios so they could be in constant contact with anyone moving a patient. “We also learned that the building is massive,” Hunt said, and so transport teams got extra training so they’d always know for sure exactly where they were.

Some patients were moved with as many as five staff members in attendance.

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Sometimes, the internet is really cool. Take, for example, these maps — or are they paintings? — by Baltimore resident Michael Wallace. Fusing GPS technology, detailed city maps, his bike, and a sense of whimsy, Wallace creates what Nate Berg, writing in the Atlantic Cities blog, calls “a city-scaled and semi-crude Etch-a-Sketch drawing [with] Wallace [as] the pinpoint drawing the line.” Except that, unlike Etch-a-Sketch art, Wallace’s “drawings” are often miles wide, and take a few hours to complete.

So far, Wallace has come up with 120 ride/drawings, most of them through his Southeast Baltimore neighborhoods. Some highlights have included sailboats, trains, monsters, and a level of Donkey Kong. Baltimore’s gridded layout makes some of the more complex drawings a challenge, but he’s learned how to shape lines by taking turns at either wide or narrow angles. Patterson Park’s wide open spaces also help with the creative process. Still, Wallace — a middle school teacher by day — knows he must look a little kooky to other cyclists, since he ends up having to do a lot of zigging, zagging, and doubling back.

Once school is out this summer, Wallace will have more time to devote to completing his next batch of rides. He’s got several already sketched out, including one with an ambitious Crocodile Hunter-theme. Check out some of Wallace’s other inventive bike sketches below: (more…)