Short Takes Short Takes (March 10, 2004)

High praise indeed

A conservation guide for Portola Valley residents is in the works with ecological advice on all manner of everyday activities. Among them: how not to pollute the night sky with artificial light and how to minimize the accumulation of excess packaging materials. New residents can look forward to receiving it in future welcoming packets from the town.

"I think this is the greatest thing since the design guidelines," says Councilman Richard Merk about the 25-page booklet. "To have it go into the Portola Valley welcoming packet is just fabulous."

B.Y.O. blancmange

There's always something interesting going on at the Woodside Library. This month, devotees of archaic prose can convene at Chaucer Night on Thursday, March 25, for a reading of the medieval wordsmith's poems and tales, augmented by the duet of Pat Marion and Charles Fischer on recorders. Call 851-0147 for details.

But they don't have to make the coffee

Internships are seldom glamorous, and the Almanac is no exception. Newsroom interns toil mightily, not only to report on everything from crime to high school sporting events, but also to suss out the quirks of the Almanac's computer systems.

According to latest update from a couple of former Almanac interns who are Stanford University students, those with journalistic aspirations may expect to go on to bigger things. One says she is headed to the nation's capital in September and will likely have an internship with the Los Angeles Time's Washington, D.C., bureau. Another reportedly snagged an internship in New York with Newsweek, and has a summer job lined up in Hong Kong at the Wall Street Journal's bureau office.

Short Takes is edited by Andrea Gemmet. Send items to agemmet@almanacnews.com.

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