Blow

"Hello, dear friends, and welcome to my online home," Miss Abigail invites. "Take a step back in time with me as I pull out relevant quotes, tidbits and words of wisdom from my collection of old advice books in a quest to solve your modern-day dilemmas."The Web site is "Miss Abigail's Time Warp Advice," found at www.MissAbigail.com. On it, Miss Abigail, a k a Abigail Grotke, posts timeless common sense about "puberty, dating, love, living together, marriage, sex, relationships, etiquette, home repair and housekeeping" from her collection of 252 books, spanning the years from 1822 to 1977.

BLOW, BLOW, THOU downtown sky; freeze, freeze, thou button-store morn. Remember March, the woes of March remember.I'll huff and I'll puff, and I'll rip your roof and turn your iron, brick and board into chaos.Is the wind rising? Florida's trailer camp thinks so; the El Nino mappers and Whitbread voyagers think so. Television news feels the story may be West Baltimore Street's ensuing traffic jam. But the environmentalists know so: burn all those forests, pave all those plains, and less and less is left to impede the blast.

The Chicago Tribune said in an editorial Monday:IT'S TOO soon to know how the government's historic antitrust suit against Microsoft Corp. will play out, but those who treasure memorable -- and deliciously wrong -- predictions already have won."This antitrust thing will blow over," Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates allegedly told executives from Intel Co. in July 1995, according to notes introduced at trial by the government.L Maybe he meant "blow over" like Hurricane Mitch in Honduras.

Saying the facts surrounding Wednesday's shooting in Westminster "sounded like a massacre," a Carroll County judge ordered one man held without bail and set high bonds on three co-defendants.District Judge JoAnn M. Ellinghaus-Jones rejected bail for Michael C. Blow, 18, of Milford Mill in Baltimore County after prosecutor Brian L. DeLeonardo said Blow and another defendant are accused of entering a Sullivan Avenue apartment with guns drawn and shooting two occupants, a man and a 17-year-old boy.Ellinghaus-Jones agreed with the prosecutor that Blow was not entitled to bail because he has involuntary-manslaughter charges pending in Baltimore County.

A senior editor of George magazine gives the New Republic a sharp kick in the pants in December's Washington Monthly.With four editors having left within an eight-year period, the magazine has lost its "mandate" and its "vision," says Richard Blow. It has "become smug and cynical -- the embodiment of much that is wrong with political journalism today." It "skitters from one end of the ideological spectrum to another," he writes, and it "fails to radiate the sense of a magazine with a purpose, that wonderful feeling the best magazines provide when you open their covers, of having entered a community with common interests and goals."

Maersk Inc. has once again cut back its shipping service at the port of Baltimore, greatly diminishing the presence here of one of the world's largest and most prestigious steamship lines.The move this week ending service from Baltimore to the Middle East and India via the Suez Canal stems from Maersk's continuing assessment of how to use the 175-ship fleet resulting from its alliance with Sea-Land Service Inc.The latest decision by Maersk had been anticipated since the Danish shipping company in April abruptly suspended its weekly South American service here.

If this movie star thing ever peters out on him, Tom Cruise just might have a promising career as a stuntman. Cruise, who dabbled in race driving for a while and enjoys the odd act of aerial derring-do in his own plane, is the kind of thrill junkie who finds putting life and/or limb on the line for a "cool" (his word) shot "fun" (see previous parenthetical comment).His latest vehicle, "Mission: Impossible," a high-tech, $64-million updating of the cloak-and-dagger CBS-TV series, gave him plenty of opportunity.

Fred Hobson jokes that he's precisely the sort of guy that H. L. Mencken wouldn't have liked: He's a Southerner, an academic and a liberal Democrat. Now there's another reason. He knows who Mencken slept with.And much, much more: who the Baltimore-born writer fought with, why he was relieved when his father died (so he didn't have to work in the family tobacco store and could be a newspaperman), and how alone he felt even while at the height of his popularity as a literary and social critic in the 1920s.

Like a political Energizer Bunny, Baltimore County Executive Roger B. Hayden has absorbed blow after blow -- a few self-inflicted -- yet he keeps on going, and going, and going.Only months after he took office in 1991, the luck that transformed the former steel company executive from a Johnny-come-lately political novice to the first Republican Baltimore County executive since Spiro T. Agnew seemed to desert him.A series of personal and political crises, as well as a recession that battered the county treasury, often kept him preoccupied as he tried to establish himself as a professional manager trying to streamline county government.

FREDERICK -- Allison Bly, known throughout the minor league baseball and Monster Truck circuits as the Dynamite Lady, signs autographs during a Frederick Keys baseball game. A 9-year-old girl, Samantha Cook from Washington, approaches timidly."Is she going to die?" the little girl says in the breathless, hushed tone of one speaking in a mortuary.The Dynamite Lady says cheerfully: "No honey, I'm not going to die. But you're going to stay and watch the show, aren't you?"Who isn't staying? This 29-year-old bubbly, fresh-faced woman is soon going to climb into a plastic foam box at home plate and blow herself to smithereens.

The U.S. economy shed 190,000 jobs in October, swelling the ranks of the nation's unemployed to roughly 15.7 million and pushing the jobless rate to its highest point since early 1983. The news deals a psychological blow to Americans as the holiday shopping season nears and casts a shadow over the economic rebound. Article, Pg 9

The Cornell men's lacrosse team's bid for a seventh consecutive Ivy League championship suffered a blow with the loss of three defensive starters. ( For more, go to baltimoresun.com/lacrosseblog)

Not sure what the referee saw when he called Terrell Suggs for roughing the passer with a little under six minutes left in the game on a third-down play. The penalty kept the Tennessee drive going at the Titans' 35-yard line. It was a blow-to-the-head call as Suggs' right arm caught Titans QB Kerry Collins with what looked like a glancing blow. It appeared that Suggs might have been going for the ball as he was blocked and the contact with Collins' helmet appeared incidental as his arm landed on the quarterback's shoulder.

The lush 12-acre field, bordered by huge oaks and a rippling creek, would have been the perfect setting for a country house, with plenty of room for a few horses to gallop around. That, at least, was Ann Paszkiewicz's vision six years ago, when she paid $250,000 for the property near Fallston High School in Harford County. But yesterday, Paszkiewicz and other residents of the area who have been fighting a proposed natural-gas pipeline got the full measure of what the construction might mean to their properties.

That big, inflatable pumpkin is out front again at the governor's mansion, and this year, I'm not taking the bait. My loyal readers (Mom, Dad) will remember the fury I unleashed a year ago, when I wrote that historic Annapolis is kind of persnickety about holiday decorations, and that the blow-ups at Government House were a little "Arbutus." I'd like to put Inflatagate behind me, so let me just say that in the past year I've gotten to know a lot of Arbutans, and they're all nice - if overly fond of air-filled lawn displays.

LONDON -- One was a well-known student activist at London Metropolitan University whom a friend described as a moderate. Another worked in security at Heathrow airport. Another had a job in a pizza parlor. The youngest of the alleged plotters was only 17. They lived seemingly ordinary lives on ordinary streets in the immigrant neighborhoods of London, Birmingham and High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. Friends and neighbors could have no idea they were planning murder on a mass scale. But little more than a month after Britain marked the first anniversary of the July 7 suicide attacks that killed 52 London commuters, the nation was slowly coming to grips with reports that another, even more ambitious network had taken root in their midst.

The Rev. Samuel A. Blow was expecting a big turnout for the opening of a national meeting of Baptist educators in Baltimore. He just underestimated how many would actually arrive - and yesterday's rush-hour traffic proved it. It's not that organizers didn't plan for the transportation needs of the National Baptist Congress of Christian Education. They did, for a year. But this was a case of people overwhelming the best-laid plans - thousands of delegates registered late. The construction on Russell Street didn't help matters - and the work allows for only two lanes of traffic at a time.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- For two innings, second baseman Brian Roberts' spring debut was nondescript, which was exactly how the Orioles wanted it. But in one play, a seemingly harmless third-inning grounder by New York Mets third baseman David Wright that got under the glove of Orioles first baseman Javy Lopez, Roberts made his teammates hold their breath. Tumbling to the ground to try to prevent the ball from going into right field, he rolled over on his surgically repaired left elbow.

OCEAN CITY IN THE WINTER: NOT JUST for the Seasonally Depressed! Not the snappiest beach promotion, but it works in this case. In the dead of winter, my wife and I went looking for life in Ocean City - just a couple of day trippers needing to see the ocean lest one of us run screaming to the Bahamas with a kidnapped Visa card. We needed to touch the water (it was cold), and we wanted to be alone (we were). We saw things. We learned things - although nothing of huge importance comes directly to mind.

"In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups -- the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories." I HOPED WHEN SUMMER came and the days grew longer, I would be cured. That my days and nights huddled under an afghan in the basement would be over. That the blue glow of the TV screen on my pallid face would be replaced by the warmth of the sun. That I would leave the house, see people, engage the world outside the small screen.