When the renovated State House opened up earlier this month and Maryland got its first look at Bob Ehrlich's $37,500 rug, The Prince of Darkness blogged that the spiffy floor mat wasn't the only Ehrlich-era splurge.
The longtime Ehrlich aide formerly known as Joe Steffen wrote that when Bob and Kendel inhabited Government House, they had the dining room done up in paint flecked with 14K gold.
Real gold?! I was so on it!
But the next day, Sheila Dixon got indicted. And ever since, as the mayor can attest, I've been pretty much all Sheila all the time. At long last, I turn my attention back to the paint.
It pains me to part company with The Prince, who has provided a bounty of Ehrlichian tidbits ever since he fell out with his ex-boss and launched his blog, Darkness Rising.
But after a little reporting, I found his gold-paint claim didn't quite pan out. It was good as, well, bronze.
The Valley Craftsmen, a Baltimore decorative arts company, repainted the dining room in the governor's mansion in April 2003. It was a fancy job, but there was no gold involved, said company president Sam Robinson.
"What we did on the walls was a finish called Venetian plaster," he said. "It was red-brown, like a polished plaster."
That cost $4,000.
The molding in the room was dolled up with "accent lines" created with a mixture of ground-up bronze powder and varnish, Robinson said. That added another $1,200 to the tab.
A little glitzy for old Annapolis, perhaps, but not exactly Versailles.
Said Robinson: "It's not fabulously expensive."
When I told Steffen what I'd discovered, he said he'd had it from a good source that it was real gold, but he said he was sorry if the information was wrong.
He added: "It's somewhat typical of the Ehrlichs to get the bronze when they were going for the gold."
Miller gave up the throne
While we're on the topic of Extreme State House Complex Makeovers, let's consider the matter of Mike Miller's kitchen.
The Senate president had one added to his office during the recent renovation.
He and his staff already had a small kitchen area, but it was in their office bathroom: a mini-fridge and microwave next to - brace for the bipartisan yuck! - a toilet.
The new kitchen has a full-sized fridge and microwave, Formica counters and cabinets. No Vulcan range or granite, at least.
Total cost, including toilet removal: $18,000.
Cheap by kitchen makeover standards, but approaching half the cost of an Ehrlich rug.
On the other hand, if Montgomery County Exec Ike Leggett can blow $65,000 putting a private bathroom in his office, why can't the Senate prez spend a fraction of that pulling one out?
The new kitchen has raised a few eyebrows because of the state's dire financial straits. That and because Miller had his faded and water-stained office wallpaper recovered in some sort of red fabric - not silk, I've been assured, but some sort of fireproof synthetic - at a cost of $15,000. (His office first put the price tag at $10,000, but they've since upped it.)
So there were some snickers when Sen. Jamie Raskin made reference to Miller's "kitchen cabinet" on the opening day of the General Assembly, in a speech seconding Miller's renomination for president. Lauding Miller's "profound sense of history," Raskin said Miller's "inner sanctum, his real kitchen cabinet, is actually a library of books about the history of our state and our country."
Asked later about his kitchen cabinet "joke," Raskin said there was no joke. The real kitchen was news to him.
"It was just a lucky coincidence," Raskin said, "that it had different resonance for people."
Baltimore at the Bowl
So his team didn't make the Super Bowl. I suspect Rep. Elijah Cummings is still psyched for the game. He's one of 15 lawmakers invited to watch it with Barack Obama.
And that's not Baltimore's only piece of the Super Bowl spotlight.
A Federal Hill coffee shop and the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore will appear in separate CarMax commercials.
Expected to air during the pre-game show in one case and during the game itself in the other, the ads will air in 14 markets across the country. That's not quite national because CarMax itself is not in every market, but the audience should still be huge, said David Butler of Butler Films, the Annapolis firm that shot the spots.
"One of them involves a guy at a coffee shop" - Spoons Coffee Cafe and Coffee Roastery - "and one involves a couple guys at a zoo looking at a bear," he said.
Butler wasn't at liberty to say too much more about the ads, except that he hopes they work.
"They're comedic," he said. "They're really smart ideas that I think people will get a kick out of and get a laugh out of and then they'll go buy a car."
Guest at his own hanging
A smiling former Gov. Marvin Mandel had this to say last week as his picture went back on display in the State House press room: "They hanged me again."
A large, "slightly defaced" poster of Mandel had been part of the press room decor for 30 years, but it came down last year for renovations, reports Len Lazarick, the Baltimore Examiner reporter who saw to it that the picture was brought "back from exile," as he put it.
Lazarick drilled the holes in the wall needed to hang the thing up and persuaded Mandel to attend a small ceremony Thursday.
It was a bright spot in an otherwise dismal day for the Examiner reporter.
"The announcement an hour before that we were closing did put a bit of a damper on it for me," Lazarick e-mailed me, "but the ex gov was very happy."