Concrete

The Minneapolis police chief estimated Thursday that 20 to 30 people were missing following the sudden collapse Wednesday evening of the crowded Interstate 35W bridge into the Mississippi River 60 feet below. The Red Cross reported a higher number: 65 people still missing. ?We have a number of vehicles that are underneath big pieces of concrete, and we do know we have some people in those vehicles.? Tim Dolan

To get the bridge near her Locust Point home fixed, Karen Johns says she'll stand naked with a sign. No one wants it to come to that, but after nearly a decade of ignored letters, phone calls and so many appeals to politicians that she's lost count, it just might. "I'm just afraid the bridge is going to collapse one day," she says. "I've been trying to get someone to take care of this for 10 years. "I don't care how safe they tell me it is. I'm not in another world that I can't see what's right and what's wrong.

Hugh Silcox of Baltimore installed a wireless thermometer in the concrete back "yard" of his rowhouse. Last Saturday it read 110 degrees. "Clearly the thermometer was basking in a direct beam of sunlight," he said. "Should I place the thermometer under an upturned flowerpot? Seems too cool to me." Keep looking, Hugh. Your yard's a solar furnace. Shade the sensor from direct sun and mount it away from brick or concrete, which absorbs and re-emits solar heat. It also needs air circulation.

OFF TOLCHESTER BEACH -- The skies were a worrisome gray, and the wind was strong enough to knock over even the most seasoned seaman. Fishermen who had mulled a day on the water seemed to have quickly scrapped their plans - for miles, the Chesapeake Bay seemed almost deserted. But then the Patricia Campbell plowed through the whitecaps. The crew aboard the Chesapeake Bay Foundation's 60-foot research vessel hoisted a crane, loaded several concrete balls filled with holes and dropped them into the water.

Fuzzy magazine illustrations of nesting birds and Alaskan sled dogs might not seem like promising subjects for ambitious art, but Lorna Bieber's mural-scale black-and-white photographs at C. Grimaldis Gallery endow these banal images with a mysterious aura of arrested meaning. Bieber, who started her career as a painter, is interested in a classic minimalist strategy: How much can you take out of a picture and still have an image that signifies something? In a painting, the ultimate expression of minimalism is an all-white or all-black canvas (or any other monochrome hue, for that matter)

WASHINGTON -- The Washington Nationals' unfinished, $611 million stadium exists largely in the mind's eye. It's a steel-and-concrete repository for imagined home runs, cotton candy not yet made and summer nights to come. Remember, Baltimore, when the Camden Yards gates slid open 15 years ago and giddy fans literally raced around the concourses examining their shiny new toy? That's the Christmas-morning feeling Washingtonians are anticipating as they begin to catch their first glimpses of Nationals Park, due to open in April 2008.

Danny Lloyd was hit by a rocket and a mortar round while serving in Vietnam, and to this day, he can't go through an airport metal detector because of all the shrapnel lodged in his body. Still struggling with his Vietnam demons in 1984, Lloyd got into a bar fight, during which he was stabbed in the chest. Police later accused him of assaulting several patrons, attempting to kill one man with a knife and shooting at another. He eventually served time after pleading guilty to some of those charges.

BEIJING -- In a dusty field on the outskirts of China's capital, Fan Zhi has built the American dream. The two-bedroom cottage comes with a front porch. The rocking chair is not included. By capturing the attention of Americans weary of high heating bills and soaring construction costs, Fan hopes to turn this prefab home into the McBungalow of the homebuilding world. He claims his energy-efficient product, which can be assembled in less than three hours, can withstand hurricane-strength winds and wildfires.

Brother and sister Robert Philipose and Keisha Pase saw a future in a dodgy Federal Hill watering hole. The space at 1542 Light St. had a checkered history, to say the least. For some years, it housed Copa 2000, a shady swingers club that was busted for adult entertainment violations in 2002. Then, it became the Royal, a grungy live music venue that fought noise complaints from neighbors. Pase and Philipose were looking to open a bar when Royal owners Mark Lasker and Peter Allen put its liquor license for sale on eBay this year.

It's a giant slab of mud-colored concrete jutting nearly 300 feet into the sky at the edge of a peninsula, an old, abandoned plant that once stored and weighed tons of grain hauled in by rail. Or, as architect Christopher Pfaeffle sees the former Archer Daniels Midland grain elevator in Locust Point - with a few modifications - it's the perfect place to watch the sun set from the living room of your penthouse. Pfaeffle's firm has taken on the task of turning an 83-year-old grain elevator into sleek, upscale condos.