Landscaping

The landscape in South Jersey sports continues to change, and how it will look in even five years is anybody's guess. The latest change came in late February when the Burlington County Scholastic League voted to accept Pennsauken's application. Pennsauken, currently a member of the Olympic conference, will join the BCSL in the fall of 2012, giving the conference 20 schools. It continues an exodus from the Olympic Conference. Triton is leaving for the Tri-County Conference, and Camden County Tech is going to be an independent.

A landscaper was critically injured today when his torso was caught in a stump grinder, police said. Landscapers from a Mount Laurel company were loading the machine onto a trailer when it appeared to accidentally turn shortly after 11 a.m., said Evesham Police Lt. Walt Miller. The crew had been finishing up grinding tree stumps at the township's Board of Education building. The victim was airlifted to Cooper University Hospital in Camden, Miller said. The victim is about 35-year-old and from Washington state, though he may have a local address, police said.

Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that a masterpiece in the basement goes unnoticed for more than half a century. It is a wonder, however, when a neglected nothing, a dirty ragamuffin of a painting, is suddenly noticed amid a quarter-million stored confreres - is pulled out, looked at, looked at more closely, and finally recognized for what it really is beneath the soot, the grime, the clouded varnish: a treasure. This is precisely what happened with George Inness' 1851 landscape Twilight on the Campagna , acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1945 as part of a bequest from Judge Alex Simpson Jr., then shipped to storage Siberia in the early 1950s.

Philadelphia-area fans of the Phillies, Flyers, and 76ers should finally be able to get Comcast SportsNet via satellite TV. About 2.5 million poor households around the country will be able to buy broadband service for less than $10 a month. And the new breed of online-video distributors won at least some assurance that they won't be frozen out of access to NBC Universal's content. It's far too soon to know how Comcast's takeover of NBC Universal will affect the rapidly changing marketplace for consumers who love their TV, movies, and online video any way they can get them.

THE GOP won the House, and we have a GOP governor and Sen. Toomey. Well, here we go with the Tea Party, and the likes of Sarah Palin, who should return to Alaska with her family and stay there. No president of this country has ever been so disrespected as President Obama, who brought us back from the brink of a total collapse of the economy. Obama is a man for all the people, and that's why the Republicans are so disrespectful toward him. Lora Neal, Philadelphia

HASAN MALIK figured he could start greening his Oxford Circle neighborhood by placing a call to the Fairmount Park Commission. The Park Commission is the city agency that plants trees in front of people's houses at no cost to the homeowner, if and when they can get around to it. He knew what number to call to get one taken down if it was standing in the way of progress or interfering with utility lines or cable-TV reception. He knew how to get the city to send someone to spray a tree if it was infested with creepy crawly things that pose a threat to folks in the neighborhood, or to give it a final push if it's about to fall on someone.

BEVERLY HILLS - With the status of television, and the people who cover it, changing almost daily, writers are gathering here for the Television Critics Association summer Press Tour. Over the next two weeks, an unusually truncated schedule, a shrinking number of newspaper and magazine writers and a burgeoning crowd of online workers - the highest total attendance in five years - will grill executives, actors, and a few supposedly fascinating reality TV stars. The scribes will be gathering and disseminating information primarily about shows scheduled to premiere in the fall, but also about existing programs and the state of American television in general.

Days after hundreds of mourners memorialized a 33-year-old Chester County landscaper, his accused killers - his wife and her young lover - appeared in court this morning for their preliminary hearings. Authorities say Morgan Marie Mengel, 34, of West Goshen Township, conspired with Stephen M. Shappell, 21, formerly of Broomall, to kill Kevin Mengel Jr. on June 17. Shappell, who was represented by attorney Thomas Wagner, was an employee of Kevin Mengel's landscaping company, MKB Property Maintenance, a name created with the initials of each of the couple's three children.

When the 21-year-old landscaper suspected of killing his boss in a suburban love triangle went on the lam Friday, he allegedly packed his getaway truck with clothes and maps. Unfortunately for him, he also brought along his cell phone. Police acknowledged Monday that they used the phone's signal to pinpoint Stephen M. Shappell in Denver over the weekend. Officers nabbed him as he walked from a motel late Sunday afternoon. The arrest occurred a day after investigators found the body of Kevin Mengel Jr., 33, decomposing in a field near Marple Newtown High School.

Perhaps you've seen the T-shirt that chides: "Friends don't let friends buy annuals," the 1997 creation of Tony Avent, the irreverent owner of Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, N.C. His best-selling shirt was meant to needle an industry that for half a century had been churning out acres of the same old one-season plants - impatiens, begonia, geranium, periwinkle. While Avent now applauds the annuals industry for offering way more variety, millions of "same olds" still fly out of stores every spring, on their way to becoming one-note landscapes in city and suburb.