Coin

You couldn't care less about quarterbacks or halfbacks or running backs. Or maybe you're just so bitter about the Ravens' season that you can't bear to watch the Steelers and the Seahawks face off tomorrow evening. Fear not: There are some escapes from the Super Bowl madness, or at least from the endless hours of pregame coverage. To maintain some machismo even while avoiding the big screens, head to the last hours of the World of Wheels Auto Show at the Baltimore Convention Center, 1 W. Pratt St. The annual auto show, which kicked off yesterday, features more than 30 clubs and 200 cars, plus assorted events and exhibits, including a fashion show by the Texas Bikini Team.

I've never been one for market predictions, and I stand firm that personal-finance journalists have no business making them. Nobody can say for sure whether stocks are going up or down next year or where interest rates are headed. Still, many of my colleagues persist in this useless exercise, even if their results are no better than flipping a coin. But after 15 years of writing this column, I do have a high degree of confidence that a number of things will happen in 2006. These are my predictions - I prefer to call them expectations - for the New Year: Energy stocks, real estate and emerging markets all soared at various times in 2005.

Imagine driving from Washington to Delaware without stopping. No fishing through pockets or purses for that last quarter to make $2 for the tunnel. No backup at Exit 109, listening to horns blaring as you almost lose your life cutting off that 18-wheeler in the E-ZPass lane. Imagine being able to drive smoothly through the Washington suburbs - bypassing all that Beltway traffic - for a price you might not even realize you're paying. If the Intercounty Connector is finally built, it will bring the future of electronic toll collecting to Maryland, allowing motorists to zip through "open-road tolling," as the industry calls it, without stopping to hand over cash or make sure the green light goes off. "The toll industry is in a state of major transformation," said Peter Samuel, a Frederick resident and tolling expert who maintains a Web site that monitors tolling news.

A common college dilemma: You're down to your last T-shirt and need to do laundry. But the only idle machine has a load of wet clothes in it, the owner of which is nowhere to be found. Do you take the clothes out of the washer, grabbing a mysterious lump that potentially contains gym shorts, old socks and who knows what? Or do you sit and wait? That problem may go the way of the VCR at Goucher, Villa Julie and other colleges that have replaced coin-operated washers and dryers with swipe-card models that send students an e-mail when their load is done.

Paul Edward Finck, a collector of rare coins and an avid golfer, died in an accident on the Eastern Shore on Sept. 19. He was 68. Mr. Finck and a helper were trying to move the family's two-bedroom trailer at Eagle's Nest Campground on Sinepuxent Bay when it fell on him. Mr. Finck had retired from his coin-collecting business this month, closing his small office in Timonium. "We buried him with a putter, four golf balls for each of his children, and seashells," said his wife, the former Paulette Hergenroeder, adding that the family loved spending time on the Sinepuxent.

In 1935, frustration met ingenuity in Oklahoma City. The result? The "park-o-meter," a coin-hungry device intended to stop people from hogging all the prime downtown parking. Not quite 40 free parking years after the advent of the automobile, the jig was up. The world's first parking meters hit the streets in July of that year. By August, someone had the honor of the first ticket, and immediately thereafter came the first lame excuse - the ticketed preacher was just running into a store to get change.

Time is expiring, Baltimore, for the bubblegum-machine parking meters of old. The deposit-your-coin, twist-for-time machines were first introduced to the city in the 1950s and they now stand sentry over 10,980 individual parking spaces. But a $4 million plan by Mayor Martin O'Malley's administration, presented last night to the City Council, calls for replacing nearly half of the traditional meters with new, high-tech machines that have been tested for more than a year in Fells Point and along Charles Street downtown.

In an apparent change of heart, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. has accepted an invitation to participate in a coin toss at the start of today's football game between the University of Maryland and the Naval Academy. A University of Maryland spokesman said on Thursday that Ehrlich, a Republican, had declined an invitation to join House Speaker Michael E. Busch and Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller representing the Terrapins at the pregame ceremony. The governor would instead make an appearance during halftime festivities, the school official said.

A political scandal over the loss of millions of dollars in rare coins has mushroomed in Ohio, where officials in charge of the state's injured workers fund have revealed that a politically connected private investment company lost $215 million of state money. Although Republican Gov. Bob Taft said he did not know about the loss until Tuesday, Democrats are charging a cover-up and some are demanding a recall of the governor after the release of an October 2004 e-mail from a Taft administrative aide.

What started as an unusual investment by the state of Ohio in rare coins - including the purchase of nickels, dimes and pennies dating to the 1700s - has exploded into a political and legal scandal. Yesterday, the director of Ohio's workers' compensation bureau resigned after authorities learned that as much as $13 million of the state's $55.4 million investment may be missing. James Conrad, once dubbed "Mr. Fixit" for his reputation of turning around troubled programs, said he would voluntarily resign over the scandal.