MoxSync

Before we say goodbye to 2022, let’s check up on a few of the people, places and things I wrote about this year:

Traffic camera man

Remember Dave Statter, who has pointed multiple video cameras from his apartment in a Crystal City high-rise toward I-395 below? Dave captures all kinds of vehicular shenanigans on the cameras, many involving daft, desperate and dangerous attempts to cross four lanes of traffic to get from Boundary Channel Drive to the Route 1 South exit.

Since my column ran in March, Dave has seen some improvements. VDOT installed white flex-posts at the Route 1 off-ramp, dissuading drivers from creeping over.

“I have seen almost no one going through the posts,” Dave wrote in an email. “There are a lot of people who start to make their move across the lanes, see the posts, change their minds and keep heading south on 395. While it has reduced a bit of the craziness it’s still occurring in great numbers.”

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Online map programs are not supposed to recommend dangerous routes. Recently, someone pointed out to Dave that Google Maps was again routing drivers from Boundary Channel onto the left side ramp. Dave tweeted about it and a few days later the route was removed again.

“So that’s good,” he wrote. “The biggest issue remains drivers who will do just about anything to avoid missing their exit and don’t seem to care who they put in danger. VDOT isn’t going to change that behavior. Selfish, dangerous driving abounds. And it isn’t just here.”

Camera kid

Karsyn Sterns is the young nature photographer from Dumfries, Va., I wrote about in September. She’s 12 now. After my column about the 7,000-mile road trip she took with her father, Stephon, two magazines took interest in her work: The Week Junior, which published one of Karsyn’s photos in September, and Ranger Rick, which interviewed her for a story due out next year.

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Karsyn also spent time with filmmaker Cintia Cabib for a documentary on RedGate, the former golf course in Rockville that has become a destination for birds — and birders. That film, “Bird Walk,” should be out in 2023.

And Karsyn continues to do plenty of kid things, too: go to school and play sports (basketball, soccer and track).

London calling

Michael Gordon of Chevy Chase, Md., is among the fans of the English soap opera “EastEnders” who were distraught when the BBC pulled the show from U.S. airwaves late last year. He’s a little less distraught now.

“Yes, I am still a devoted fan of ‘EastEnders’ and I am able to watch all the episodes from 2009 to the present through a perfectly legal website that I found on Reddit,” he wrote in an email. “It is a bit less convenient now because I have to access the site on my laptop and then screen mirror it to my TV and no subtitles are available.”

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Subtitles? Isn’t the show in English? Yes, but as Michael pointed out, those Cockney accents can be hard to understand. Innat roit, guvna?

Grave effort

In May, I wrote about the epic effort of Don Milne of Louisville and his hardy band of volunteers. Their aim: to post mini biographies online of every U.S. service member killed in World War II. That’s more than 421,000 Americans.

So far, volunteers with Don’s Stories Behind the Stars project have written 22,000 biographies. About half of the 8,000 World War II dead buried at Arlington National Cemetery have been completed.

The aim is to be finished by Sept. 2, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the end of the war. There’s still a long way to go.

“Realistically, we may not get 100 percent of all of the remaining 399,000 names done in the next 33 months, but we will be able to get 100 percent at the state level for many of the states and also 100 percent at the unit level for many ships and units,” Don wrote in an email.

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Don said if he can find 3,000 people to write one story a week, the math works. If you’d like to get involved, visit storiesbehindthestars.org.

Helping Hand

And what of The Washington Post Helping Hand? We’re over halfway through our annual reader fundraising campaign for three local charities: Bread for the City, Friendship Place and Miriam’s Kitchen.

So far, readers have donated $109,724.46. That’s 28 percent more than you all had donated by this point in last year’s campaign.

That’s terrific. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we can’t take our foot off the gas. (Or the volts, if you drive an electric car. Or the pedal, if you ride a bike.)

Our campaign ends on Jan. 6. Please consider making a contribution of any amount. For information on our three charities, visit posthelpinghand.com. Conveniently, that’s also where you’ll see three buttons marked “Donate Online Now.”

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