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“We’ve gone through a very extensive selection process with significant amounts of stress, sleep deprivation, and food deprivation,” said a weapons sergeant with B. Company, 2nd Battalion, 20th Special Forces Group (Airborne), Maryland Army National Guard based in Glen Arm, Maryland. “The majority of individuals that make it through special forces training are people that deal well with stress and ambiguous environments, and COVID-19 falls under that.” [Special Forces Soldiers will not be named in order to conceal their identities.]

Many Marylanders may not even know that the Maryland Army National Guard has a SF asset… let alone how they have both a federal and state mission to accomplish on a daily basis.

Members of B. Co. 2-20th SFG are awaiting mobilization to Afghanistan to relieve other Soldiers who are currently there on duty, but COVID-19 is changing the timeline of events making it unclear as to when the unit will deploy.

Special Forces Soldiers are trained to perform counter-insurgency operations, unconventional warfare, direct action missions, foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, support of information operations, counter terrorism, and security force assistance.

From deployments overseas to working in their own neighborhoods delivering food during COVID-19, Soldiers from B. Co. 2-20th SFG find a way to serve their community and country, despite the circumstances. “It all goes back to adaptability, teamwork, intelligence, cultural awareness, language proficiency, mental toughness, and physical fitness,” said a communications sergeant with B. Co. 2-20th SFG. “Everyone here has the internal ability to be a leader.”

The Special Forces Group falls under the, recent retuned from deployment, 58th Expeditionary Military Intelligence Brigade, which is one of four of the Maryland Army National Guard’s major subordinate commands. While the 58th EMIB was deployed, Task Force 291 provided administrative and logistics support of the 58th EMIB’s subordinate units.

“We are proud in Maryland to call them our own, knowing the challenging qualifications these Soldiers must endure to become a Green Beret,” says U.S. Army Col. Kristine Henry, commander of TF 291 based in Towson, Maryland.

Facing the unknown head-on despite uncertainty is one of many qualities that members of B. Co. 2-20th SFG show. Known as ‘quiet professionals,’ these Special Forces Soldiers are tested in every type of hazardous environment and operate confidentially. Their efforts and perseverance have led them to be an invaluable asset to the Maryland Army National Guard and the United States Army Special Operations Command.

George Burton has been making the five-mile commute from his family's 200-acres of farmland in Glen Arm to Parkville's Main Street since 1974 when George's Farm Market opened its garage-style doors for the first time.

Now it's a much anticipated event when George's opens for the growing season each April.

Over 38 seasons in business, Burton said he's seen a lot change: families and businesses have come and gone from the neighborhood but, he said, he still sees people he remembers from that first spring.

These days? George and Rick work their 200 acres and their families help out at the market.

George's wife Kathleen was there Thursday morning and his youngest daughter, Laurie, helps out on the weekends. The youngest of Rick's five children, Allison and Gregory, do their time behind the counter too. Everyone is friendly and always ready to assist a customer buying flowers or some awesome-looking fresh-picked strawberries.

"You might not know much about strawberries," Burton said. "But you know these look good, and I can promise you they don't get any fresher than that. They were just picked three hours ago."

At the time it was about 9:30 a.m.—Burton said that during the five-week-long strawberry season he starts picking berries daily at 5:30 a.m, then brings them down to the market. Then it's back to work—plowing, planting and harvesting.

"Then I'll come in, have my supper and I'm off to bed. If I see 11 o'clock, I'm no good the next day—you've got to get six uninterrupted hours of sleep," he said. Even if it means that because the day starts so early, he's trying to catch Z's before the sun has set.

Right now if you stop by George's you'll find onions, asparagus and strawberries grown right here in Baltimore County.

As spring turns to summer, strawberries will stop coming in around the end of June, asparagus will disappear by June 1 and they'll have fresh flowers until Father's Day.

Then the summer crops will start rolling in—they'll have home-grown squash by the middle of June, corn and green beans by the end of June and by July 10 we'll see the summer favorites: cantaloupe, watermelon and, of course, tomatoes.

It's been that way for 37 seasons before this year, and hopefully it'll be that way for another 38. George, who is in his 60s now, said that when he retires his brother Rick and family will take over the farm and keep the market going.

"I think being here is good for the neighborhood," Burton said.

This weekend Burton Farms is hosting an open house at their farm, 11031 Factory Road in Glen Arm from 9-5 p.m. Typically open houses run from the last weekend in April to the third weekend in May. Flowers, herbs, and vegetable plants will be available along with hanging baskets.

Do you go to George's on Harford Road for your produce? Are you excited for the growing season? Tell us in the comments.

Lightning curls into balls that pass ghostlike through windows and explode. Auroras dip from the sky to buzz and crackle around astonished viewers. Unexplained booms shake the skies over bays and rivers worldwide.

For more than three decades, a Baltimore physicist named William Corliss collected scientific journal reports of these and thousands of other strange phenomena into dozens of books, culminating in his multivolume “Catalog of Anomalies,” a shadow encyclopedia of things science doesn’t understand. Like any curiosity seeker, he aimed to delight and dazzle; but he also hoped to spur new discoveries and understandings. “Anomalies reveal nature as it really is: complex, chaotic, possibly even unplumbable,” Corliss wrote in one catalogue. “However iconoclastic the pages of this book, the history of science tells us that future students of nature will laugh at our conservatism and lack of vision.”

Corliss was praised by some fellow scientists in his day, but now, eight years after his death at 84, his family is shuttering his self-publishing house in Glen Arm, Md. Tomes with such stiffly offbeat titles as “Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena” (which Corliss said sold 100,000 copies) or “Rare Halos, Mirages, Anomalous Rainbows and Related Electromagnetic Phenomena” will go out of print for the first time. And Corliss’s legacy as a proponent of anomalistics, an interdisciplinary field that seeks scientific discoveries in the lore of the curious and the unexplained, may be destined for obscurity, lost in library book-weedings and buried in footnotes in the even lesser-known works of his handful of fans.

Corliss was not your typical compiler of UFO tales and ghost stories. In the 1960s, he served as director of advanced programs in the nuclear division of what is now Lockheed Martin and penned numerous scientific books as a technical writer for such partners as Nobel Prize-winning chemist Glenn Seaborg and NASA. But even those dry histories and manuals included references to unexplained mysteries and digs at the way the scientific establishment is sometimes faster to laugh at an idea than to investigate it.

Two revolutionary books set Corliss on his maverick course. One was a 1920s creationist assault on mainstream geology. Corliss himself never bought into the creation myth, according to Patrick Huyghe, publisher of a journal called the Anomalist and one of the few writers to interview the publicity-shy author. But he was intrigued by the widespread evidence for “catastrophism” — the concept that biblical-scale disasters like mega-floods and super-quakes shape the planet’s surface — and championed it well before it became cool again in an asteroid-killed-the-dinosaurs tale you may have heard.

The other book that influenced Corliss was “The Book of the Damned,” by Charles Fort. Fort was an eccentric New York journalist who spent the early 1900s scouring newspapers and scientific publications for bizarre reports — rains of blood and frogs, UFOs, ancient Roman coins plowed up in American fields — and compiled them into wild, absurdist books that mocked academic certitude. The stories were “damned” from textbooks because they didn’t fit prevailing theory.

Fort launched an entire genre of paranormal writing. Hundreds of imitators followed — Corliss foremost among them. On research trips for NASA to Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, Corliss detoured into old journals to follow up on some of Fort’s reports. He was astonished to find that Fort had touched only the tip of the anomaly iceberg.

In 1965, Corliss started compiling his own collection. Unlike the cranky Fort, he maintained a respect for science and its skeptical approach. He selected material primarily from the pages of respectable scientific journals and eschewed Fort’s dramatic taste in titles, instead referring to his research blandly as the Sourcebook Project. From 1974 through 2007, he published his collections first as ring-bound pages, then as meticulously indexed hardback catalogues, almost always printed in the relentlessly unsexy font of an old electric typewriter. For illustrations, he signed up a fellow outsider: John C. “Jack” Holden, a cartoonist trained in geology, who told me he delighted in Corliss’s professional dedication to “things that shouldn’t be.”

Corliss hoped that his compilations of the weird just might spark a scientific revolution. After all, the history of science is replete with cases of ridiculed reports and obscure observations that, when fitted together, revealed something new: the extraterrestrial origin of meteorites, for example, or the grim reality of battered-child syndrome.

Of course, many bizarre reports are untrue or insignificant, and Corliss admitted that his books were undoubtedly full of chaff. But several formerly fringe claims for which he connected the dots on 150 years’ worth of reports have joined scientific orthodoxy, including gigantic “rogue waves” that appear from nowhere to swamp ships, and the eerie glows known as “sprites” that sometimes manifest above thunderstorms. There is no sign, however, that Corliss’s research directly inspired any discoveries. (Rogue waves and sprites were “discovered” by accident, detected by recording devices set up for other purposes.)

As a motto, Corliss adopted a quote from “The Hidden Self,” an obscure 1890 essay by psychologist and philosopher William James, which reads in part: “Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular, and seldom met with, which it always proves less easy to attend to than to ignore. ... Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena.” James referred to this “dust-cloud” of anomalies as the “Unclassified Residuum,” and Corliss set forth to classify it.

Along the way, Corliss won some high-profile fans who shared his open-minded eclecticism. Among them was Arthur C. Clarke, the sci-fi visionary of “2001” fame, who praised the physicist in his memoir, “Astounding Days.” Nobel-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock was another; her biographer, Nathaniel Comfort, told me her discovery of the mobility of genes was such a shocking anomaly that it stirred her curiosity about other strange observations.

At his death in 2011, Corliss left no successor, and the fate of his archives is unclear beyond some newsletters still posted on his website, Science Frontiers (science-frontiers.com). His family declined my interview requests, but his son Jim Corliss confirmed via email that “book sales have finally slowed down to a trickle,” and “I think we will be sadly saying goodbye to the Sourcebook Project this year.”

That means saying goodbye to thousands of reports that, at the least, can inspire readers to a renewed sense of natural wonder. Holden recalls the favorite anomaly he learned about from Corliss: mima mounds, unexplained patterns of humps that dot the U.S. landscape. “No one knows what they are. ... I like that,” Holden says. “The more we learn, the more we don’t know.”

John Ruch is a writer and editor in Atlanta.

GLEN ARM, MD — WWE Hall of Fame inductee Nikolai Volkoff, a barrel-chested giant who portrayed a Communist menace for much of his 50-year career, passed away Sunday at his Maryland home, days after being treated at an area hospital for dehydration and other medical issues. He was 70.

Several weeks ago, Volkoff (real name Josip Nikolai Peruzovi?) made one of his last public appearances at a Blitzkrieg! Pro Wrestling event at Mount Carmel Park in Enfield, coming to the ring at the beckoning of fellow 2005 WWE Hall of Famer Jimmy "The Mouth of the South" Hart.

During his introduction of Volkoff at that show, Hart made reference to the big man having "a bad sinus infection," but the Croatian-born legend entered the ring to a standing ovation and, in contradiction to his years of singing the Soviet national anthem prior to his matches, performed a rendition of "God Bless America" in honor of his adopted homeland (he had become an American citizen in 1970).

On Twitter, Hart wrote, "Was just with Nikolai a few weeks ago and had a great time - so shocked and saddened - what a loss."

Joey Eastman of Blitzkrieg! Pro said, "Being able to share a ring with someone like Nikolai is definitely a dream come true for me. He was such a pro and wanted to make sure that we gave fans a very entertaining segment on such a hot day."

Volkoff emigrated from Yugoslavia to Canada in 1967, then trained under the legendary Stu Hart for a career in professional wrestling. A year later, he joined the World Wide Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE) and performed as "Bepo Mongol," winning the WWWF International Tag Team Championship from Tony Marino and Victor Rivera in 1970 under the guidance of Hall of Fame manager "Captain" Lou Albano.

After leaving WWWF for a few years, the 6-foot-5, 313 lb. behemoth returned to the federation under the Nikolai Volkoff moniker in 1974. A memorable highlight of his career was appearing in the main event against champion Bruno Sammartino in a sold-out Madison Square Garden.

He wrestled in other promotions for a decade before returning to the renamed World Wrestling Federation in 1984. He teamed with another 2005 Hall of Famer, the Iron Sheik, and won the tag team titles at the inaugural Wrestlemania in 1985. On several occasions, he unsuccessfully challenged WWF champion Hulk Hogan, who later became another inductee of the Hall of Fame Class of 2005.

Volkoff entered a period of semi-retirement in the late 1990s, making occasional appearances on WWE television and independent shows.

WWE announced the superstar's passing online at www.wwe.com. A tribute to the late Hall of Famer is expected to air during WWE programming this week.

Photo courtesy of Beverly and Chris WalzVideo credit: Tanya Cornell, courtesy of Blitzkrieg! Pro Wrestling

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Everyone needs a friend to survive tough times. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan found one in 5-year-old Andrew Oberle while both of them were battling cancer.

Andrew, of Glen Arm in Baltimore County, became pen pals with the first-term governor in September, after Hogan (R) invited him and three other young cancer patients to join him at the Washington Redskins’ season opener.

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He was at the State House in Annapolis on Monday when the governor announced that his own cancer was in remission five months after he was diagnosed with late-stage non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

30 days after finishing chemo, Gov. Hogan is cancer-free

“For whatever reason, they had a human connection that seemed to help both of them,” said Andrew’s mother, Caroline Oberle. “It’s just human kindness.”

Andrew had a different kind of cancer, T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It is also in remission. But he has two years of treatment to help his bone marrow work properly.

At the Redskins game, Andrew gave the governor a card with 10 tips for cancer patients, such as “Find your hugging person,” “It’s okay to cry” and “You’ll learn to like your doctors.”

He came up with the list over a bowl of corn flakes, his mom said.

The first piece of advice? “Tell him about the cream.” It was a reference to an ointment Andrew had used that dulls the neuropathic pain caused by chemotherapy drugs, which can make the fingers and toes tingle.

“That’s how you un-tingle them,” Andrew said Monday.

Oberle recalled Hogan becoming emotional when he read the card and saying he wanted to take the list with him everywhere. He ended up posting it on his Facebook page.

Hogan as cancer advocate: ‘I never expected to be in this position’

Andrew, who said he thinks of the governor as the king of Maryland, continued to correspond with Hogan after their first meeting. The two traded letters about topics ranging from baseball cards to Halloween costumes.

Hogan, who is known to prefer hobnobbing with members of the public to sitting down with reporters, joked on Monday that “Andrew and I communicate more than I do with the media.”

At the news conference, Hogan introduced Andrew, who walked to the podium and delivered another card and a hug. This time, the message read: “Way to go Governor Hogan! What are you going to do next?” He signed it, “Your pal Andrew.”

Andrew said he and the governor wrote to each other “to feel better.”

With a little prompting from his mother, he told reporters that he often reminded Hogan of what had become an important family mantra: the importance of being brave, strong and powerful.

“We’ve gone from feeling helpless to feeling brave, strong and powerful, all through human connection,” Oberle said. “From a little boy and an adult man who happens to be the king of Maryland.”