Converge

As I glanced at the headline of last Monday's article, "When terrorist and '60s child converge" (Feb. 22) by Susan Reimer, I thought that it would be yet another aged hippie opining about why America's enemies are justified. I was not disappointed. In some ways, she was right. Shows like "The Bachelor" and "The Real Housewives of Orange County," while entertaining, portray people whose hot tubs far surpass their character in terms of depth. I am ashamed to have seen shows that match "The Bachelor" in mindless entertainment, but does this mean that I should be wiped from the face of the earth by the likes of the underwear bomber?

Some were first-timers, others veterans. Under Baltimore's Washington Monument Thursday night, thousands gathered for carols, food truck carryout and a bit of light-hearted - if jam-packed - holiday camaraderie. At the 41st annual lighting of the monument, another winter season in Charm City was launched - kids and teens, young adults and older couples all looking skyward as the strings of lights were turned on, lasers shot patterns across Mount Vernon's trees and a finale of fireworks burst into the air, all to the accompaniment of holiday musical classics.

Some of Baltimore's most driven artists rolled into their exhibit at the Artscape festival yesterday morning in a conspicuous display of the auto-exotic. Members of a small but dedicated "artcar" subculture arrived in a caravan, 15 strong, at their reserved parking spaces in front of the Lyric Opera House, seated inside their works of art. They represent the core of a group of perhaps two dozen area artists, both amateur and professional, who have used coupes as their canvas or turned minivans into their masterpieces.

Greg LaRocque has been drawing comic books for more than 30 years, part of a love affair with the medium that dates to 1961, when Marvel's Fantastic Four first appeared on newsstands. Michael Bracco, on the other hand, didn't start appreciating comics until he was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art about a dozen years ago. This weekend, the two Baltimore-area artists will be among nearly 500 comic-book creators gathering for the annual Baltimore Comic-Con. Saturday and Sunday, they'll meet and greet, discuss their art, and maybe even sketch a character or two for fans to frame and hang on the wall.

One by one last summer, the bodies of four women were found in remote areas of Harford County, dumped in grassy fields in a largely rural county that typically registers only a handful of killings each year. Then came more shocking news: Police thought the deaths might have been the work of one person. Jury selection began yesterday in a Bel Air courtroom in the trial of a 35-year-old laborer charged with first-degree murder in the killing of the first woman found. He is also charged separately in the sexual assaults of six more women.

Travelers who pass through rail or bus terminals in major cities like New York and San Francisco cannot fail to be struck by the large number of homeless people who have taken shelter there -- a concentration of human misery that grew alarmingly during the past decade.Baltimore, luckily, may get a jump on the problem before it reaches epidemic proportions. The federal Department of Transportation recently awarded the city a $600,000 grant to help it cope with the homeless influx around the busy Lexington and Howard street subway and bus stops.

Stand for a few minutes some mild Sunday morning at a bus stopin the Mount Vernon neighborhood, and the panhandlers converge. Then you hear a whining voice: ''Excuuuuse meeeee, sorrrrrr . . .''You can ignore the beggar or give him change. A more instructive approach is to buy him a meal and hear his story.Some panhandlers come across as glib liars, spinning spurious tales of woe. I recall one ''disabled'' beggar whose alleged disability left him looking fit and well-fed, and even allowed him to flirt with waitresses.

O thou, the early author of myblood,/!Whose youthful spirit, in meregenerate.Doth with his lofty and)shrill-sounding throatAwake the snorting like a horse.--Text generated with artificial intelligence, from what computer scientists call ''the Shakespeare corpus.''San Diego.--Sometimes worlds converge, explode and create new one. Lately, I have been wondering what will happen when the worlds of high definition television (or, better yet, the three-dimensional hologram), digital sound, artificial intelligence and theories of virtual reality converge with the yearnings of the human heart.

A typical weekday begins this way for several denizens of Keswick: They get out of bed, stroll a couple of blocks away to the Evergreen, the favorite neighborhood coffee bar, trade neighborly pleasantries and then head back home. Where they begin their day's work. An unusually high number of entrepreneurs who work from their homes are clustered in this tiny neighborhood, which is tucked between Roland Park and Guilford. And that common trait among neighbors here has helped them to rely on one another for the kind of workplace networking that might otherwise come from a colleague at the next cubicle.

Photography since 1970 has been dominated by two contradictory trends: one toward the "straight" tradition of modernist realism, the other toward the subversive, debunking pastiches of postmodernism. James Welling, whose meditative photographs of commonplace objects and everyday scenes are the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, straddles the divide between these conflicting impulses with a serenity that seems completely natural and unforced. The exhibit covers Welling's work between 1974 and 1999, the equivalent of several photographic lifetimes for many fine art photographers, who usually can be expected to produce only about a decade's worth of truly original work during their careers.

Summer arrives at 7:09 p.m on Wednesday. Hilariously, 98 degree weather is due to arrive at the exact same time. June 20 is National Vanilla Milkshake Day. It just is. How about an Abbey Burger Bistro shake made with Gifford's vanilla ice cream, Berger cookies, Stoli vanilla and Godiva liqueur? Or you could take on the six-pound milkshake Chick & Ruth's Delly in Annapolis, part of the restaurants Man Vs. Food Challenge . (There's a one-pound burger, too.) Pictures: Great Maryland milkshakes Or, you could head to a participating Rita's , where regular size Rita's Italian Ices are $2 all day long on June 20. Price does not include sales tax.  

Not even getting stabbed repeatedly by a needle could get Danielle Cromb to put down her smartphone Saturday afternoon. "I've been on Tumblr, Facebook, Pinterest," said Cromb, of Charleston, S.C., who clutched her iPhone as she was having ink injected into the skin on the back of her neck. "Mostly it's helpful if I'm looking up a picture in the middle of a conversation with an artist. And it can definitely be a distraction. " It is a common sight this weekend inside the Baltimore Convention Center: Semi-dressed, prostrate people playing games, texting and listening to music on their cellphones as tattoo artists work.

It's long been known that one surefire way to draw a crowd in Harford County is to hold a vintage car and hot rod rally and show. Saturday was no exception. Under bright blue skies, scores of beautiful cars and hundreds of people converged on Jarrett's Field in Jarrettsville for Romancing the Chrome, a show put together by the Harford County Public Library and the Jarrettsville Lions Club. The show was organized to help promote the exhibit "Cars: A Harford County Love Affair" that opened April 12 at the Jarrettsville library and runs through May 19. The show also provided a perfect prelude to the annual Night Out at the Jarrettsville Library that evening which featured an appearance by Earl Swift, author of "The Big Roads," a history of the interstate highway system.

Forty-four of the nation's brightest high school students are in Baltimore to test their brains about the brain — in a two-day neuroscience competition that started Sunday morning with a visit to the cadaver laboratory in the University of Maryland School of Medicine and, for many of the teenagers, their first encounter with gray matter. Some had observed sheep's brains and rabbit brains in biology class, and all had studied plastic brain models and atlases as they prepared for the fifth annual U.S. National Brain Bee, founded by a University of Maryland neuroscientist.

It took more than an hour of waiting for Jeff Skaggs to receive his limited edition Stephen Strasburg Topps Heritage rookie card at the National Sports Collectors Convention on Friday afternoon. The card is one of 999 being given out during the five-day convention and is selling for more than $100 on ebay.com. One day it could be worth far more, making the wait bearable for Skaggs, an Indiana native. "I think he's going to be a great player," he said. "They knew coming out of college he was a great player and he's really brought a lot of excitement back to the hobby.

As I glanced at the headline of last Monday's article, "When terrorist and '60s child converge" (Feb. 22) by Susan Reimer, I thought that it would be yet another aged hippie opining about why America's enemies are justified. I was not disappointed. In some ways, she was right. Shows like "The Bachelor" and "The Real Housewives of Orange County," while entertaining, portray people whose hot tubs far surpass their character in terms of depth. I am ashamed to have seen shows that match "The Bachelor" in mindless entertainment, but does this mean that I should be wiped from the face of the earth by the likes of the underwear bomber?

Three rivers run through it, and from their waters you can gauge modern Pittsburgh.Once these rivers were the polluted receptacles of millions of tons of industrial waste. Their waters carried steel and coal around the world.Now the waters sparkle. Pleasure boats slice down one river and up the next. Elaborate, old-fashioned clippers carry sightseers and party groups.The story of Pittsburgh can be told in one small room -- the visitors center at the top of the Duquesne Incline.For flatlanders to appreciate an incline, you have to know a bit about Pittsburgh's geography.

FORMER MAYOR Gerald Johnson - voted out of office this year after 12 years of growing the central Maryland town of Mount Airy - sits on the porch of his neat rancher in what once was a field, takes in the palpable hum from the Route 27 rush hour just beyond the nearby Wal-Mart, and proclaims with far more pride than irony: "Mount Airy is like that movie, Field of Dreams. ... `If you build it, they will come.'" And come they have. At the vortex of Maryland's ex-urban growth pressures - where Carroll, Frederick, Howard and Montgomery counties converge - this pastoral ridgetop has lured settlers for 170 years, by wagon, rail, Route 40 and Interstate 70. But in the last 40 years, Mount Airy more than doubled its acreage via repeated annexations, rocketing from 600 residents to more than 7,500 - with another 24,000 in developments haphazardly strewn across the rolling countryside within five miles.

An in-depth profile of underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab by National Public Radio suggests that he was a rebellious teenager offended by his parents' bourgeois lifestyle and preoccupied with thoughts of sex. Any of us who grew up in the 1960s can understand where this kid is coming from. We thought of ourselves as free spirits caged by our parents' narrow, middle-class values and, like young Umar Farouk, their excesses truly offended us. Like Umar Farouk, we thought constantly about sex -- although this determinedly chaste young man could not wait to marry, while we happily embraced the sin of love-the-one-you're-with.

Meteorite hunters are descending on Washington's Virginia suburbs this week, drawn by news of a space rock that lit up the night sky on Monday and drilled through the roof of a Lorton doctors' office. Steve Arnold, co-star of the Science Channel's TV series "Meteorite Men," grabbed an early-morning flight from Arkansas to Baltimore on Thursday to launch a search for fragments of the meteor. He was joined by Michael R. Hankey, an amateur astronomer from Freeland who was bitten by the meteorite-hunting bug last July after he snapped a photo of a fireball that fell over the Maryland-Pennsylvania state line.