Absurd

Flannery O'Connor 1925-1964After graduating from Georgia State College for Women, Milledgeville, O'Connor studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. Her first novel, "Wise Blood" (1952), explored, in her own words, "religious consciousness without a religion." The work combines the keen ear for common speech, caustic religious imagination and flair for the absurd -- all traits that were to characterize her subsequent novel and collections of short stories. She is regarded as a master of the short story and one collection in particular, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," is a classic.

BIG INVESTMENT FIRMS are making a mockery of the state's property tax sales, which until recently were orderly auctions that helped Maryland jurisdictions clear up delinquent real estate bills.Investors violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the bidding process by offering absurd sums of money -- a trillion dollars and even "infinity" for tax-delinquent properties. Successful bidders win the right to pay the taxes and then to seek reimbursement from the property owners plus legal fees and interest rates ranging from 12 to 24 percent.

The Bowman Ensemble's double billing of two one-act plays, Eugene Ionesco's 1950 classic "The Bald Soprano" and a brand new play by Bowman artistic director Matthew Ramsay, "Mr. Positive," makes for an evening devoted to the theater of the absurd.It also might seem absurdly bold for a young Baltimore playwright to link himself so directly with Ionesco. The surprise of the night is that while it's easy enough to make some negative observations about "Mr. Positive," Ramsay does deliver plenty of laughs in his surreal comedy of manners.

It's absurd not to educate prisonersI do hope that many read and realize the importance of Michael Naughton's commentary of Feb. 21, ''The value of teaching inmates."

" Bombardiers," by Po Bronson. 319 pages. New York: Random House. $22Poor, naive Sidney Geeder.Geeder thinks his firm, the Atlantic Pacific Corporation, is going to turn belly up when the market discovers how flimsy its RTC bonds are. Geeder thinks that the SEC will come storming in like the A-team when it finds out Atlantic Pacific is propping up both sides of the market on its Romanian investment deal. At the very least, Geeder thinks he can walk away cold with a few million bucks as soon as his company shares mature.

Rocky Coppinger, the Orioles pitching prospect who has dominated in the minors this year, threw a 3-0 shutout in his first start for Double-A Bowie at Reading yesterday.Is it completely absurd to think that Coppinger, who went 7-1 with a 1.57 ERA at Single-A Frederick before being promoted last week, could be with the Orioles by the end of the year?"No, not completely absurd," said Syd Thrift, the Orioles farm director. "It's not normal, but it's not absurd."It's not normal, but then neither is Coppinger.

When Baltimore artist Dick Turner invented his Smile Machine two years ago, he never dreamed it would be swept up in a Winter Olympics media blitz -- and that he wouldn't get an ounce of credit.Mr. Turner's contraption, which is worn over the head to keep a smile in place, consists of "sustaining rods," a "joy strap," and a "calibration buckle" that allows the user to adjust the "level of happiness desired."It was originally made to symbolize his "30 Points of Ideaism," a philosophy that encourages "exploration of the symbolic content of our ideas and our everyday behaviors."

Here's a meaningless but amusing question: What is the single least lamented, most absurd minor film genre? You say teen-age slasher pix? You don't win. You say midget westerns? You don't win either. You say campy Japanese monster movies? You don't even come close. (Some of them were pretty good!)Here's the answer: James Bond knock-offs. In the mid-'60s, after Sean Connery broke through to world celebrity with the Bond films, there was a brief spurt of minor clones of utterly no consequence.

Free Trade HurtsAn established manufacturing company has remained competitive for many years by means of modern thinking, methods and equipment.The contributions of this company and its 800 employees to the good of the nation, through depressions and prosperous times, through war and peace, are part of the proud heritage of all who are touched by the company history.The principal manufactured product of this proud organization is produced at a rate of about one-half the labor-hours per unit of any competing organization.

Recently I attended the opening night of ''Largo Desolato,'' a play by Vaclav Havel, the dissident who became president of Czechoslovakia. The play mixed three influences: the absurd theater of Samuel Beckett, the inhuman power of the state, a la Franz Kafka, and the cajoling pressure of modern communism.The Americans in the audience laughed heartily at the quasi-comical repetition of scarcely barbed threats by the police and the ludicrous repetition of paranoid or hectoring comments by the lead character's friends.

A Baltimore County man who has been implicated by the Web site The Smoking Gun as a key informant in baseball's steroid scandal has denied any association with the federal government's investigation into illegal performance-enhancing drugs. In an exclusive interview with The Baltimore Sun yesterday, Andrew Michael "Mike" Bogdan admitted to helping the FBI in a real-estate fraud case as part of a plea agreement. But he said he did not use his close friendship with former Orioles outfielder Larry Bigbie to assist the FBI in nabbing one of baseball's primary steroid distributors.

A lot of past medical practices strike us as instantly absurd -- all that nasty bloodletting, for a start. But time was when otherwise sensible professionals didn't think twice about applying cures that flew in the face of logic, not to mention common sense or common decency. One of the most egregious of treatments, prescribed for women who didn't seem themselves after childbirth, became the subject of an influential short story in the 1890s -- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman.

NEW YORK -- Knicks guard Stephon Marbury testified yesterday in the case of a fired team executive who has accused coach Isiah Thomas of sexual harassment, calling the lawsuit absurd while downplaying an encounter with a drunken intern. After hearing about the lawsuit brought by Anucha Browne Sanders, "I laughed," Marbury said in U.S. District Court. "It was more of a joke than anything." Browne Sanders says she is owed her vice president position back and at least $10 million for enduring a sexually harassing workplace for five years.

A feature in which Sun writers and critics sound off about the movies. Going to the movies can be a drag, regardless of the quality of the film. Bad enough that ticket prices keep going up and concession prices tend toward the absurd ($3 for a cup of popcorn?). Worse is what happens when you sit in your seat, and then have to put up with the guy behind you who keeps trying to impress his girlfriend with his knowledge of the movies, or the gal in front chatting on a cell phone, or the couple to the side who can't keep their opinions to themselves, or the two dudes one row back who seem on the verge of fisticuffs.

What's absurd is tolerance for acts of torture President Bush's response to Amnesty International's report criticizing U.S. treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay was to characterize it as "absurd" ("`Gulag' charge absurd, Bush says," June 1). What is absurd is this administration's penchant for flouting the international rule of law, detaining individuals without charges, trial or access to due process. What is patently absurd is the U.S. interrogation and detention policies and practices that condone torture and mistreatment of detainees.

In an old episode of The Simpsons, America's favorite cartoon dad, Homer, lands an upaid gig in a Lollapalooza-like rock music show. His job: to go onstage between acts, display his ample, middle-aged gut and absorb a cannonball in the breadbasket. In the crowd, two kids are puzzled. "Oh, here comes that cannonball guy," says one with a nose ring. "He's cool." "Are you being sarcastic, dude?" asks his flannel-clad buddy. There is a pause. "I don't even know anymore," he says. That's pretty much how you're liable to feel if you choose to treat yourself to the unique postmodern experience that is Inspiration, the new CD/DVD featuring the vocal artistry of one William Hung, the 21-year-old California grad student who, thanks to a wildly popular television show, has come to embody a Huey Lewis adage that is by now so dusty it has to be au courant: "It's hip to be square."

I WALKED OUT of New York's Penn Station right into a horde of bodies that couldn't quite avoid smashing into each other along 7th Avenue near 34th Street. After about 20 minutes, I figured the driver who was supposed to take me to Queens wasn't going to show. So down into the subway I went, to hop one of those cars to Queens that former Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker said were so horrible. (The ride wasn't that bad.) My debating partner, Congress of Racial Equality national spokesman Niger Innis, picked me up in Queens, and the two of us headed for the Rev. Floyd Flake's huge church.

When We Can't See the Forest for the Bushes, by Pat Oliphant (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 128 pages, $14.95). Pat Oliphant, a native Australian, has stood firmly among the top three or four cartoonists in the U.S. since he began at the Denver Post in 1964. Now syndicated in more than 300 newspapers, his pen has never been sharper. In this collection of cartoons from October 2000 till a year later, he gives absolutely no quarter to anyone. Perhaps the closest thing to a lovable image in this collection is the enormous bear that represents the economy, which is alternatively tweaked, goaded, wrestled and ridden by a tiny, obdurate and over-spectacled Alan Greenspan.

Flannery O'Connor 1925-1964After graduating from Georgia State College for Women, Milledgeville, O'Connor studied creative writing at the University of Iowa. Her first novel, "Wise Blood" (1952), explored, in her own words, "religious consciousness without a religion." The work combines the keen ear for common speech, caustic religious imagination and flair for the absurd -- all traits that were to characterize her subsequent novel and collections of short stories. She is regarded as a master of the short story and one collection in particular, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," is a classic.

BIG INVESTMENT FIRMS are making a mockery of the state's property tax sales, which until recently were orderly auctions that helped Maryland jurisdictions clear up delinquent real estate bills.Investors violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the bidding process by offering absurd sums of money -- a trillion dollars and even "infinity" for tax-delinquent properties. Successful bidders win the right to pay the taxes and then to seek reimbursement from the property owners plus legal fees and interest rates ranging from 12 to 24 percent.