Reader

Brett Guessford receives a certificate from Miss Donna at the Williamsport Library. He was the top reader and read 83 books over the summer.

OK, so there are no oceans, peacocks or beach crabs in the Tri-State area. Let us explain. We like to run reader-submitted photos on this page, photos of local subjects taken by local amateur photographers. But once in a while, Tri-State-area residents send us a great shot they take while on vacation. Today, we're featuring some of the best vacation shots. Florida, the Canary Islands and Puerto Rico were among local vacationers' destinations. But we do favor local photos by local amateurs.

We asked what some of your favorite getaways are if you had a tank of gas just to get there. You responded with several suggestions, including some familiar favorites, some nearby surprises and some distant pleasures reachable with good mileage. Some of your getaway ideas were one tank away, round-trip. We had 37 entries and randomly drew two winners of $50 gas cards. The winners are Tammy McCardell, 37, of Waynesboro, Pa., and Lois J. Mason, 69, who lives near Rohrersville.

When a company wants to roll out a major change to its customers, it sometimes tests the idea first with focus groups. Focus groups might be small in number, but they can be a wealth of information, as we found out last week. More than 50 loyal and occasional readers - who were randomly selected - were invited to review some prototypes of a redesigned Herald-Mail that we plan to launch in early October. We held the focus group sessions at Antietam Cable and 48 people showed up. The readers sat in a conference room and reviewed our prototypes while we watched them on a closed-circult television.

A Herald-Mail reader in the North End sent in this photo of a clematis plant that covers the lamp post at her home. She said it is beautiful, along with the other variety of flowers.

In French, a "canard" is a duck, but in modern English, the word has come to have a much different meaning. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes that while the English meaning is derived from a French expression vendre des canards moiti - to cheat, literally, to half-sell ducks, canard means something different today. Now the dictionary defines it as a "groundless rumor or belief. " Like what? Like "all politicians are crooks" or "no woman knows how to parallel park. " Then there's my least favorite: "You're just doing this to sell newspapers.

Fifth-grader Pa'Shun Mosima-Hill and reading specialist Sue Marshall were dressed to match the "Bee a Reader" theme of Thursday's ninth annual PJ Reader night at Thaddeus Stevens Elementary School in Chambersburg, Pa.

No, gas has not risen to $8.88 per gallon - yet. Herald-Mail reader Larry Black took this photo of the new Weis Markets gas station's gas prices sign before it was set to the correct price per gallon. The new Weis is at Stonehouse Square along Leitersburg Pike in Hagerstown.

Readers who have had questions about why we make some of the decisions we make here at The Herald-Mail only have had a couple of avenues available to them in the past. One option was to pick up the phone and ask the city editor, executive editor or whomever else you needed to speak with to make your opinion known. Writing a letter to the editor that would run on our opinion pages was another option. Another option was to just do nothing. Thanks to the ever-expanding Internet and the resources available on our Web site, there now is a new option.

Whether they meant to or not, the Tri-State-area photographers whose submissions are featured on this page captured some funny - or at least odd - images. Most of the humor they just happened upon. A couple photographers contributed to the humor: Putting a face on a tree. Tilting a camera when snapping the shutter. We regularly run readers' photos - funny, fleeting, eye-catching, poignant, thought-provoking or otherwise - on this photo page. So we're looking for the best recent photographs from the Tri-State area.