Fantasy

The 19-year-old man charged with fatally stabbing Dennis Lane allegedly told investigators that his girlfriend had instructed him to kill her father and his fiancee, specifying the number of times each was to be stabbed in the throat - 10 for him and 15 for her. Jason Anthony Bulmer charging documents In a conversation at school hours before the Ellicott City blogger and businessman was killed, Jason Anthony Bulmer said, 14-year-old Morgan...

Morgan Lane Arnold, an emotionally frail 14-year-old freshman, navigated the hallways of her Howard County high school each day filled with anxiety, unable because of a learning disorder to decipher the social cues, jokes and emotions of her peers. Her preferred environment, often accented by a Japanese anime soundtrack streaming through snug earplugs, featured a mix of fairies, mermaids and vampires, according to her mother. They were the protagonists of a digital realm where she said she was "practicing making friends" through role-playing games and social media.

The smash Russian fantasy Night Watch arrives here with its graphic potency intact and a rush of inventive subtitles that ramp up its comic-book-like energy - when vampires summon their latest victim, the letters run red and trail off in wispy streams of blood. The plot depicts one of those never-ending battles that start in antiquity and persist to the present day. Night Watch (Fox Searchlight) Starring Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Maria Poroshina and Galina Tunina. Directed by Timur Bekmambetov.

The Baltimore sports scene is blessed with a bunch of talented bloggers who bring their unique perspective to the conversation. Each week, I hope to chat with one of them in a regular feature called Blogger on Blogger. This week, I exchanged emails with Dan Ciarrocchi, a member of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association who writes about fantasy football for Pro Football Focus and the Redskins for Hogs Haven, an SB Nation website. MV: Which rookie backs will have the most fantasy impact in 2013?

As you surely know by now, last year's Orioles made their first playoff appearace since 1997. Before we completely close the book on that team and turn our full attention to 2013, we thought it would be fun to compare the 2012 Orioles to the 1997 version, which advanced to the ALCS. So, join in and play our “fantasy lineup game,” where you build your own team pick the player you want at each position from one of those two clubs. CLICK HERE to play.

The baseball season ended last month. Football is at midseason, hockey has returned and the basketball season just started. But mutual funds season runs all year long. And for investors trying to get a better handle on choosing and managing an investment portfolio, here's an idea that is long overdue: fantasy mutual fund leagues. Sure it's quirky, but so is the Fantasy Fashion League (fantasyfashionleague.com), where players score points based on the actions of famous designers and celebrities.

The ending was obvious from the moment the Boston Red Sox began knocking his pitches around in the Florida sunshine Monday afternoon. Jim Palmer wasn't fooling anyone. His fastball wasn't fast. His control wasn't under control. There just wasn't much there there.Actually, the ending was obvious long before that. At no point in this comeback did anyone ever say Palmer was throwing magnificently, outrageously well, which was the minimum requirement if this dream were to come true. No, everyone always nodded and said, yeah, he's throwing pretty well, you know, he looks good for 45.You aren't about to pull off a comeback from seven years in the broadcast booth if people are saying, yeah, he's throwing pretty well for 45. You might stand a chance if people are saying, wow, this is a miracle, he has sensational stuff.

"Faith Healing," the evening-length performance piece conceived and directed by Jane Comfort that appeared at the Baltimore Museum of Art on Saturday night, is both a screwball adaptation of Tennessee Williams' play "The Glass Menagerie" and an insightful psychological commentary.At one moment, the audience is laughing at the characters, who spout both Williams' and Ms. Comfort's dialogue, and in the next, the audience is quietly empathetic with them. The strength of this work is that it has its feet in both dance and drama and uses both components effectively.

There was a point last Sunday afternoon, not too long after the 1 p.m. kickoffs, when I started thinking about going outside. Taking a walk, maybe. Without my television. remote control in the other, flipping back and forth between the Redskins-Bears and the Bengals-Browns. Then wandering to MTV, the Discovery Channel and TBS. Ooooh, "Jumanji!" That's when I knew something was terribly wrong. Two NFL games to choose from, and I was watching Robin Williams run away from stampeding rhinoceroses and a crazed safari hunter with a muzzle-loader.

It's been one strange fantasy football season, hasn't it? I know I'm hardly the first one to chime in on this, but it seems that every time I talk to a friend who takes his fantasy seriously, that's the theme. In leagues around the country, owners who thought they had great drafts are staring at 1-4 records. Meanwhile, the miscreants who drafted Frank Gore in the second round and snatched Bernard Berrian off the waiver wire look like championship contenders. Weird, I tell you. Who would have thought you'd rather have Brian Westbrook as a featured back than Shaun Alexander, LaDainian Tomlinson or Tiki Barber?

As you surely know by now, last year's Orioles made their first playoff appearace since 1997. Before we completely close the book on that team and turn our full attention to 2013, we thought it would be fun to compare the 2012 Orioles to the 1997 version, which advanced to the ALCS. So, join in and play our “fantasy lineup game,” where you build your own team pick the player you want at each position from one of those two clubs. CLICK HERE to play.

The Pro Bowl, especially in recent years, has produced as much excitement and intrigue as watching somebody spackle your bathroom. But the NFL is reportedly considering shaking up the format to try to save the game. According to Ian Rapoport of NFL Network, one suggestion for tweaking the all-star game, which is held between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, ripped a page out of the NHL's playbook. The, in Rapoport's words, “intriguing option” is holding a draft when players arrive in Honolulu to determine who would play on each team.

One difficulty in talking about the Second Amendment and laws regulating firearms is the degree to which some of the parties have become captivated by fantasies.  I have seen a citizen interpret the Second Amendment to be a guarantee that when the people find their government oppressive, they are entitled to possess weaponry to rise up against it. (This is not as uncommon a belief as you might think.)  It is an interesting government that would write into its founding document a provision for armed insurrection against itself.  If you were curious about what the Founders would have thought of such a view, you might consider the Whiskey Rebellion.

Through a stroke of good luck and perfect timing, Polly and Terry Smith became residents of Federal Hill six years ago. "We were wandering around town one day and saw the 'For Sale' sign on this house," Polly Smith remembered of the spacious, end-of-group home she now shares with her husband, Terry. "I lived in other cities before, and I have always loved city life. " Just as the couple thought there was no way they could afford the three-story brick home, they were approached by an interested party prepared to buy their Dulaney Valley Colonial home on Loch Raven Reservoir should they ever wish to sell.

Kacie Bawiec has been scribbling stories in notebooks since she was in the third grade. And just two weeks ago, the 15-year-old teenager published her first novel, "Silver Dagger. " The fantasy manuscript, which Kacie wrote when she was in the eighth grade, was picked up last year by Tate Publishing, a small, family-owned Christian-based publishing house that specializes in emerging authors. In its 198 pages, "Silver Dagger" is full of evil spirits, ghostly possession and magical weapons, such as the eponymous blade with its jewel-encrusted hilt, which materializes when Bawiec's characters are enraged.

The Orioles put an interesting spin on how they decided the draft order for their annual team fantasy football draft this past weekend - with the help of some Maryland blue crabs. Reliever Darren O'Day wanted to do something more exciting than just picking names out of a hat. At first, O'Day was thinking about having a snail race, but he soon found out snails aren't that easy to purchase. “It's hard to buy them,” O'Day said of the snails. “I was looking out looking in the garden, and I looked down in the harbor because I live right down by the water and I saw crabs everywhere.

I've written football for six weeks in a row, so in the seventh, I'm resting. Besides, Week 1 of the NFL season produced not a single victory for my three teams. Eddie Kennison, Wali Lundy and Chris Cooley, you let me down. But enough on that. Let's talk some baseball, a sport that has been much kinder to my fantasy fortunes this year. One of the fun things about any season is watching spectacular talent emerge. It doesn't matter if these players are on my team or not. I just like knowing there are a few more stars who will quicken my pulse and those of my league mates when they come up in future auctions.

Imagine a slide guitar twanging in the background. My ace has appendicitis. My rookies can't hit the curve. My closer's on the DL and my speed guys seem stuck at first. I've got the blues, yes those fantasy blues. OK, so Muddy Waters I'm not. But in all seriousness, folks, a fantasy malaise has overtaken me. I suppose it's inevitable. I get so pumped in March, poring over preview guides, Web sites and preseason box scores. I develop an exact picture of each player for the approaching season and come draft day, I try to blend those pictures into a beautiful collage.

I found it highly amusing that a majority of those taking your reader poll on climate change are still in denial that the looming environmental disaster is man-made. They remind me of the Kevin Bacon character at the end of the movie "Animal House," who is frantically stamping his feet and screaming "all is well" just as an oncoming stampede of people tramples him to death. I guess if you sit in your air conditioned living room watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh, you can still pretend climate change isn't happening - as long as you avoid going outside in the real world.

Zach Teal is just 17, but his love for books led him to write one of his own and to volunteer more than 250 hours at the Finksburg branch of the Carroll County Public Library. "Two hundred and fifty hours is quite unusual for our teen volunteers," said Heather Owings, who was volunteer coordinator at the library and now works at the North Carroll branch. Zach logged those hours over the course of three years, performing such tasks as making crafts for story times, signing in reading program participants, even wearing a mouse costume for a reading of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.