Downstairs

Off to the side of the main entrance of the Hunters' Lodge, one of Howard County's premier fine dining establishments, is a door that leads downstairs to a live music venue. Called the Stone Cellar, the 2,500-square-foot room rocks three nights a week to the sounds of local bands that play blues, funk, rock, ska and reggae. The room is making a name for itself as an East Coast stopover on the live-music circuit among national acts such as Jimmie's Chicken Shack, a popular band scheduled to headline a show in the coming months.

"I am an entertainer," proclaimed the matinee idol, playwright and composer Ivor Novello, the real-life historical figure at the center of Robert Altman's new movie Gosford Park. "Empty seats and good opinions mean nothing to me." Altman at age 76 might well say the same thing. Although his only break-out hits have been M*A*S*H and The Player, he's been following his muse for more than four decades to challenge and amuse himself, and as big an audience as he can find -- not to court critics or to push a social or artistic agenda.

Ellie Litman is exhausted, but she's game. She walks down the stairs to her newly decorated basement and says -- once more, with feeling -- "Annlynn, I love what you've done with this area down here. It is really nice." She said the same thing three hours ago when the Home and Garden Television crew first starting shooting the final segment of the Designers' Challenge that will air here on Wednesday at 8 p.m. It's beginning to sound pretty natural. The designer, Annlynn Best of Dramatic Comfort Interiors in Baltimore, looks just as modestly pleased as she probably did the first time her client said it. Designers' Challenge is one of HGTV's most popular series.

In his spiffy and engrossing Gosford Park, director Robert Altman gathers a group of aristocrats and servants whose lives are made up of trivial pursuits and puts together a game of Cultural Pursuit. He makes it one contest that everyone can learn and win. All you have to do is see and hear. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears open as the guests arrive at the home of Sir William McCordle (Michael Gam- bon) and Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas). You'll learn along with the visitors how life is lived at Gosford Park - an estate that cleaves to old-fashioned discipline to avoid confused behavior.

Cyritta Goode loved her mother as much as she feared becoming her, which appeared likelier than ever when her dress size topped 18. Eating a whole tin of taffy on vacation, snatching food from the catered trays she carried at parties, she knew her eating habits were out of control. A TV commercial urging African American women to join a benefit walk in Druid Hill Park and save their hearts triggered memories of her mother's obesity. Cyritta was among the first to arrive. She had to change.

Everyone loves the smell of piping-hot pizza. But no one loves the smell of a burning pizza box. Turns out, this is a difficult scent to eradicate from the home, and I've tried — even frying tilapia for dinner one evening. But the scent of flaming cardboard somehow persists. Almost all of my friends use the oven, set very low, to keep their pizzas warm in the box while they wait for their guests to arrive, for the evening news to be over or for the salad to be made. No one I know has encountered a problem with this.

The 21-year-old college student allegedly told detectives that he hadn't just killed the man who'd lived with his family for months, but had eaten his heart and portions of his brain. The victim's severed head and hands were found in the men's Harford County home; more remains were left in a trash container outside a church. Authorities outlined the macabre circumstances Thursday in charges against Alexander Kinyua, an electrical engineering major at Morgan State University and member of his school's ROTC program, of first-degree murder in the death of 37-year-old Kujoe Bonsafo Agyei-Kodie, a Ghanaian national and a former master's degree student.

The old low-income Hilltop Housing project in Ellicott City has given way to another world: new apartments with facades of soft-colored siding and stone, and a recreation center with the latest in exercise gear, including a retractable-roof indoor swimming pool. Gone are the brick low-rise buildings put up around 1970 that were not aging gracefully, along with the public housing policy that made them possible. The county is moving away from the practice of building apartment complexes strictly for low-income people, in part because of the lack of government money to support projects that cannot be sustained by people paying below market-rate rents.

It's Thursday night on the seventh floor of Hagerstown Hall dorm, and there's a party going on.Well, sort of a party.In the lounge, there are three giant bags of potato chips, two huge platters of chocolate chip cookies and a couple of cases of soft drinks. There are also 15 or so University of Maryland, College Park students in cutoffs, sweats, jeans and gym shorts eating, drinking and waiting for the start of "Seinfeld."Other dormies wander in and out. One woman dries her hair in preparation for a date that she says "will probably be totally Elainesque"; one guy slides in the door like Cosmo Kramer.

Lawrence J. Swartz, who gained national notoriety as a teenager in the killings in 1984 of his adoptive parents at their Cape St. Claire home, died of an apparent heart attack Wednesday in Florida, where he had lived the past several years, his lawyers said. He was 38. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and served nine years in Maryland penal institutions. The killings occurred Jan. 16, 1984, and became the subject of a national best-selling book, Sudden Fury, and a 1993 NBC movie, A Family Torn Apart.