Fine Print

C oupon masters, here's a question for you: Have you ever had to pay extra to take advantage of a "buy one, get one free" offer because the price of the "free" item exceeded the price limit stated on the coupon? BJ's Wholesale Club will pay a $40,000 penalty as part of a settlement with the state attorney general's office for giving Maryland consumers "buy one, get one free" store coupons with fine print that capped the value of the free product. In some cases, the language capped the coupons at less than the price of the product, so consumers had to pay extra for the item they thought they would receive for free, according to the attorney general's Consumer Protection Division.

There's a good chance this holiday you'll either buy a gift card or receive one. Consumers are expected to spend more than $50 billion on gift cards this year, and most are sold around the holidays. (Nothing says, "I care enough to buy you something, but I have no idea what you want and I'm running out of time" better than a gift card.) The majority of gift cards have abandoned the most egregious practices - hidden fees and early expiration dates - that outraged consumers for years.

Can you blame Wall Street for being confused? Each mortgage security polluting our economy often holds hundreds of loans from dozens of states. Loans got bundled into layers according to default rates and repayment schedules, each batch dependent on what happened in the others. In case that wasn't squirrelly enough, Wall Street bought and sold insurance contracts whose values were ultimately tied to different parts of the unfathomable mortgage pool. "I'd like to know what those damn things are worth," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said a year ago this week.

Well, now we know the whole locavore thing really has arrived. An aspiring groom opted against the old fancy-schmancy restaurant setting and popped the question a couple of Sundays ago at the Baltimore farmers' market. After blowing an air horn to get the crowd's attention, Will Hester got down on one knee at his pickle booth and offered Gwynne Harper his briny hand in marriage. "I was wearing the money belt pouch and smelling of pickles," said Hester, 31. No telling what Freud would have said about a marriage proposal at a pickle booth.

Allan Hirsch flies several times a year, sometimes for work and sometimes for fun. Almost always, he checks a bag. In the past, he has always felt relatively secure about handing his belongings over to the airlines. "I have always been under the assumption that they are responsible for the luggage once they take control of it and give you a luggage receipt," said Hirsch, a 59-year-old sales rep. "By accepting my luggage, they are taking responsibility for its care." Boy, was he ever wrong.

It's the catch, the loophole, the gotcha: It is mouseprint in advertising. Mouseprint is the fine type in print advertisements, seemingly so small only a mouse could read it. Sometimes it features an asterisk relaying details on the ifs, ands or buts surrounding the offer. On the radio it is the fast-talk provisos, conditions and requisites. In television it's the tiny disclaimer along the bottom of the picture, sometimes indecipherable to anyone without a 60-inch screen and a digital video recorder to freeze-frame the petite type.

The country's major book superstores, Borders and Barnes & Noble, are constantly competing for your business. And with good reason - in 2005, the two companies made more than $247 million in combined profits. Now it seems you can't pay for a mocha or a magazine at one of these stores without fielding an offer to join their member programs. But do they actually save you money? That depends. If you shop at Borders, do sign up for its rewards program, if only because it's free. If you want to actually reap its rewards, however, you must pay attention.

Let's get one thing clear: There's plenty of blame to go around when the question is raised about why fish poaching fines are so low. It's easy to point the finger at the Department of Natural Resources, protector of fish and critters and keeper of the law. But don't stop there. Blame state lawmakers, prosecutors, judges, conservation organizations and fishing groups. And, yes, blame outdoors writers. The charging of charter Capt. Buddy Harrison for allegedly having 31 undersized striped bass in his possession last month has been the talk of the Maryland fishing universe.

Travel inevitably involves surprises -- good and bad -- but the ones that come up at the car rental counter usually fall into the second category. Clearer pricing on the Internet has helped address surcharge sticker shock (now you are more likely to learn about these fees in advance), but there are still some surprises you might encounter if you don't scrutinize the fine print. Below are a few areas where consumers may want to be aware before they hit the road: Age restrictions: If you are between the ages of 25 and 70, you can skip ahead to the next section, since car rental companies have no problem letting you drive.

Seven-horse messed me up in the second race at Pimlico yesterday. Seven-horse hadn't hit the boards (hadn't finished in the money) in two years. Two years! In fact, Archers Bow - that's the name of this Canadian-bred - had prompted these kinds of remarks in the chart commentary of his various races: "weakened," "gave way," "no threat," "empty." He hadn't run a race of yesterday's length - a mile and a sixteenth - since November, and when he did, the horse "flattened out." So, based on this, I invested nothing in Archers Bow, despite the fact that the morning line had him at 3-to-1 and his rider was Erick Rodriguez, which is a name that always catches my eye because it is the Spanish version of the Portuguese name, Rodriques, that was my father's when he was born on Madeira Island.