Decades

DON HO, 76 Hawaiian singing legend Legendary crooner Don Ho, known for his raspberry-tinted sunglasses and catchy signature tune, "Tiny Bubbles," has died, his publicist said. Publicist Donna Jung said the singer died yesterday morning in Honolulu of heart failure. He had suffered from heart problems for the past several years and had a pacemaker installed last fall. Mr. Ho entertained Hollywood's biggest stars and thousands of tourists for four decades. For many, no trip to Hawaii was complete without seeing his Waikiki show - a mix of songs, jokes, double entendres, Hawaiian history and audience participation.

Remnants of the former retail glory of a section of downtown Baltimore are still visible amid the decay that has marred the area for decades. The west-side area, dubbed the "superblock" by city planners, is poised for redevelopment. Plans include apartment towers and a mix of current small retail merchants with new chain stores. The chunk of downtown real estate is bounded by West Fayette, Howard, Lexington and Liberty streets.

When does a guy get too old to enjoy new toys? Happily, I can't answer that question yet. A couple of weeks ago, I got a very cool belated birthday present from my future in-laws - an Airhawk remote-controlled minihelicopter. You've probably seen these on TV - they're a hoot. You can learn to fly one (sort of) in a few minutes. They bounce back from crashes with aplomb, and they're so light that they don't do any damage when they hit something - which happens quite often when I'm flying.

The hulking metal barns are treasured by the area's tennis community. Thousands of people have volleyed with friends on the indoor courts, including Pam Shriver, who practiced here nearly every day during the peak of her career. Now, more than three decades after it was built, the Green Spring Racquet Club has been sold to developers who are considering razing the barns and building offices. Neighbors, complaining of crowded roads, are gearing up for a fight over the site's fate. Although the new owners say play will continue for more than a year, players are scrambling to find new courts.

Lutes tinkled, knights jousted, arrows flew and bodices strained. Comely wenches giggled and rogues sang bawdy songs. Leather mugs abounded, thees and thys flowed like mead, turkey legs came in kingly sizes, and if it could be served on a stick - whether cheesecake or steak - it was. All those jesters, monks, princes, queens, soldiers, wobbly English accents and acres of heaving chests could mean only one thing. To the delight of enthusiasts who wait all year to shimmy into embroidered tunics and meet friends at the Boar's Head Tavern, the Maryland Renaissance Festival, now in its 31st year, opened over the weekend in Crownsville.

ALBANY, N.Y. -- Five decades of population decline is over.Experts say Albany's population will level off at slightly more than 100,000 in the 2000 census, narrowly averting getting shoved into the urban minor leagues.The city isn't going to experience anything like dynamic growth, but experts believe the population has stabilized. There are several reasons for the turnaround. The number of people leaving the city isn't increasing. Experts also cited growing immigrant and minority communities, as well as a steady influx of college and university students.

WASHINGTON -- The gown is Vegas-lite -- form-fitting, flesh-colored fabric with curving strands of strategically placed beads.It's barely anything, and at the same time it's too much.The onlookers at Bob Mackie's fashion show at Neiman Marcus are buzzing. There's a familiar giddiness to the whispers. Only one word is clear: "Cher."Since he first joined forces with the performer on the "Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour" in the '70s, Mackie has been designing the showstoppers that helped make her a star.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the Chicago Tribune, which was published Friday.PRESIDENT Clinton surprised the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank by proposing to forgive all of the debts owed to the United States by three dozen of the poorest nations on earth.The gesture by the most prosperous nation on earth affirms and expands a commitment made in June and, by example, encourages other well-off countries to do likewise.It increases the chances that these poorest of the poor may direct more of their limited revenues to development of their nations.

In one fell swoop, Tony Anuszewski dipped the ice cream scooper into the large stainless-steel bowl, leveled off another glob of sticky codfish cake concoction with his right hand and flung it onto an orange cafeteria tray.A crew of coddie veterans -- showing the way to a handful of novices at Canton's St. Casimir Roman Catholic Church -- scrambled to pick up the gooey piles and mold them into little discs.Each of the past six weeks, they have made up to 2,000 of the Baltimore delicacies, with 100 crab cakes and 50 pounds of potato salad, macaroni salad and coleslaw.

Dressed in boxer shorts and a Falcons T-shirt, Max Cleland rolls his wheelchair across the smooth parquet floors of his Atlanta apartment, headed for the ringing telephone. He's home on a late-summer break from the U.S. Senate, and a radio-show host is on the line. With his favorite Bible verses and cowboy posters on the walls, this place should be Cleland's refuge. But his job constantly intrudes -- and there is no refuge from the past."Now, you're a triple amputee?" the disc jockey asks.

For something that has been steadily dying for decades, the Chesapeake Bay promises to be a lovely corpse. Most of us who are fortunate to look out onto the broad estuary at sunset or witness the morning sky unveil the remaining pristine tracts of tributary and marsh are blinded by beauty. Yet we know the bay is sick, because we are constantly reminded. For a decade, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the region's dominant enviro-educational organization, has issued annual report cards with disappointing grades.

Many an opera plot is set in motion by a wicked curse that generates terrible heartache and loss. These days, it looks as if the real world of opera has been hit with a curse every bit as pernicious. Although orchestras, art museums, theater troupes and dance companies have certainly been buffeted by the economy's precipitous decline that started last fall, opera is being hard-hit. The Baltimore Opera Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December, shortly after presenting a vividly sung production of Bellini's Norma that made it to the stage only after a longtime donor guaranteed the salaries for the cast.

He thought it might take one, maybe two months to land a new job. When Guy Salomon was laid off in February from a Hewlett Packard job paying more than $70,000, he had more than two decades of experience in technical support and instruction at major computer companies. At HP in Greenbelt, he handled technical support for Veterans Affairs hospitals, often fielding emergency calls in the middle of the night. He had worked before that for Wang Laboratories and Sysorex Corp. He was stunned to find his job gone, one of a number of positions eliminated under changes to a long-running contract with the VA. Even with 10 years, Salomon, 55, simply had less seniority than others.

For two decades, Milton N. Tillman Jr. has sold himself as a successful Baltimore businessman wrongly and repeatedly targeted by the law. "Can't get no justice in this city," he told a judge who ordered his nightclub called Odells to remain shut in October 1992. Four months later, Tillman pleaded guilty to trying to bribe a city zoning board member with $30,000 to keep the North Avenue club open. In April 1993, he cried as a federal judge sent him away to prison for 27 months, a jail term longer than the U.S. attorney's office had sought.

Doug Collins is reportedly close to getting a second go-round in Chicago as coach of the Bulls, just about two decades after he was fired there after the 1988-89 season on the eve of the blossoming of a dynasty. If he is hired, it would be Collins' fourth head coaching job after a roller-coaster tour of duty in Detroit in the 1990s and an awkward stint baby-sitting Michael Jordan's Washington Wizards earlier this decade. Three decades. Three teams. Three strikes. But in the NBA, apparently you're (almost)

Arthur G. Turner Jr., a former newspaper reporter and life insurance salesman, died Feb. 11 at the Broadmead retirement community in Cockeysville. He was 86. His son, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles A.P. Turner, said his father's health had been weakened by a stroke a few years ago. A recent bout of influenza, he said, proved fatal. Mr. Turner was born in Baltimore, the son of Arthur Gordon Turner Sr. and Florence Brainerd Turner. He graduated from West Nottingham Academy in Colora in 1938 and attended Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia before joining the Army Air Corps in the early 1940s.

This is what the New York Yankees' Jason Giambi said in a USA Today article last summer: "I was wrong for doing that stuff. What we should have done a long time ago was stand up - players, ownership, everybody - and said: 'We made a mistake.' " Giambi's candor drew the ire of Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, who said, in part: "There's an implication that there was a lot of people that were involved that would know that, what was going on, and I can tell you that's false. ... Whatever goes on individually with these guys is really on them."

For an afternoon, it was the summer of '77. Jimmy Carter was president. Gas was 62 cents a gallon. "You Light Up My Life" topped the pop charts and Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel and five co-defendants were on trial for an elaborate bribery scheme. Memories of the Mandel trial may have faded in the public consciousness, but yesterday in a packed moot courtroom in downtown Baltimore, they were crystal clear again - thanks to members of Baltimore's Federal Bar Association and the University of Maryland School of Law who assembled many of the still-prominent (and alive)

Lutes tinkled, knights jousted, arrows flew and bodices strained. Comely wenches giggled and rogues sang bawdy songs. Leather mugs abounded, thees and thys flowed like mead, turkey legs came in kingly sizes, and if it could be served on a stick - whether cheesecake or steak - it was. All those jesters, monks, princes, queens, soldiers, wobbly English accents and acres of heaving chests could mean only one thing. To the delight of enthusiasts who wait all year to shimmy into embroidered tunics and meet friends at the Boar's Head Tavern, the Maryland Renaissance Festival, now in its 31st year, opened over the weekend in Crownsville.

It is almost impossible, when reading this guide, not to slap oneself on the forehead in despair that the Army knew so much of the Arabic culture and customs, and of the importance of that knowledge for achieving military success in Iraq, six decades ago - and forgot almost all of those lessons in the intervening years."