[tgslTakoma]

These people who are "mourning" the loss of their private woods should have looked at their plats (or whatever the hell those property blueprints are called) before they signed the mortgage papers. The ICC has been on the Montgomery County Master Plan for more than 50 years; and everybody who bought property backing up to the ICC right-of-way knew damn good and well (unless they didn't look at the papers they signed) that they were buying property that backed up to the ICC right-of-way.

And they continue to whine.

Montgomery County was a nice county when I was a kid, with lots of farmland and rolling hills. I spent many a day wandering around Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Megnetism field station in Derwood, MD, where there were a few radio astronomy dishes which my dad helped to build. As kids, my brother and sisters and I traipsed all over that property, climbing on the base of the under-construction dishes like they were monkey bars, and collecting snake skins and all kinds of "wild" stuff in the tall grass all around us.

Now if you drive out to Derwood, where Carnegie used to own the land, you'll find ticky-tacky, brick-front but vinyl-sided houses crowded together. Carnegie got crowded out by suburban sprawl. And the only reminder of those days is the street sign on that short street leading into that subdivision - Carnegie Avenue.

Now, I would be very happy to see all the liberal transplants leave Montgomery County and go back to where they came from and get back the rural charm of my old stomping grounds; but that won't happen. Time, and progress, marches on. They need to march with it, or get trampled by it. But they need to quit whining, that's for certain.