Hancock

HANCOCK -- The radio is tuned to a gospel station as Merle Trail fingers the antlers of the largest buck he's seen around these parts in many years.The antlers are an impressive 24 1/4 inches wide. Until about three weeks ago they graced the head of a 154-pound, white-tailed deer. A 16-year-old boy killed the deer a half mile west of this western Washington County town the first day of the hunting season.Now the antlers sit on Mr. Trail's work table, and the dead buck's hide is wrapped in plastic in Mr. Trail's freezer.

Hancock , the redemption tale of a feckless Los Angeles superhero, is named, in a roundabout way, for John Hancock, the patriot with the indelible signature. But it might as well have been named for the insurance company. The first half is diverting and inventive. But the filmmakers use the second half as a box-office insurance policy. They fill it with the conventional super-heroics and heartbreak that they spend the first 45 minutes gleefully deconstructing. Hancock swings into action in ragged street clothes: Tthe only "costume" he wears is a wool watch cap with an eagle stitched into the front of it. Mostly he sports 10 different kinds of grimaces as he demonstrates super-strength, the power of flight and an ultra-blase attitude to any piece of machinery or property that gets in his way. Happily, Will Smith is just as creative and persuasive as a homeless superman as he was playing the homeless businessman in The Pursuit of Happyness.

Edgewood's Jermaine Hancock has three posters in his bedroom. One is of a boy sleeping and dreaming about basketball. Another is of a boy holding a basketball and the words: "If you can dream it, you can achieve it." The third is of Michael Jordan. For Hancock, now averaging 35.8 points per game before last night's game against visiting Havre de Grace, his dreams have coalesced into reality and his basketball exploits, at least at the high school level, are Jordanesque. Last Wednesday, before a packed gym at Edgewood, facing Harford County rival and then No. 3-ranked defending state Class 2A champion Aberdeen, Hancock scored a career-high 49 points.

The concluding event of the Gettysburg re-enactment highlights the fateful charge led by Confederate Maj. Gen. George Edward Pickett on the third and final day of the Gettysburg campaign. After a bombardment of the Union line on Cemetery Ridge with heavy artillery fire, about 15,000 men - including Pickett's entire division and a portion of A.P. Hill's corps - charged, and briefly breached, the first Union line. While many accounts of Pickett's Charge suggest a back-and-forth battle with victories and losses on either side, the words and deeds of Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock testify to a decisive Union victory that was never really in doubt.

Everything pointed toward a game to remember before Aberdeen's 94-74 victory over Edgewood last night. No. 3 Aberdeen, the defending state champion, faced a No. 19 Edgewood team that featured Jermaine Hancock, who was averaging 35 points and needed 33 points to score his 1,000th career point. Add the fact that Aberdeen (10-1 overall and 6-1 in the league) and Edgewood (8-4, 6-1) are Harford County's fiercest basketball rivals. It was no surprise that the Edgewood gym was packed by halftime of the junior varsity game.

When Michael Oher takes the field as a Baltimore Raven this fall, a national audience of readers and moviegoers even bigger than the Ravens' fan base will be cheering for him. The amazing story behind his rise to football stardom will fill the nonfiction shelves at bookstores on Oct. 12, with a new edition of Michael Lewis' powerhouse piece of nonfiction "The Blind Side." And if all goes according to plan, it will also pack movie theaters on Nov. 20, when writer-director John Lee Hancock's movie version hits theaters, starring newcomer Quinton Aron as Oher and Sandra Bullock and Tim McGraw as Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy - the wealthy, white, conservative, evangelical couple who devoted themselves to the happiness and success of "Big Mike," a black kid from the meanest streets of Memphis, Tenn.

Anne Arundel County purchased 12.5 acres of forested land around an 18th-century homestead near Bayside Beach yesterday, providing a buffer from developers and signaling the county's commitment to turn the once-forgotten estate into a park and museum.The county will pay developers of the nearby Hickory Point subdivision, who own the land, $650,000 for two lots next to the Bayside Beach Road homestead known as Hancock's Resolution.Historians are unsure what 18th-century owner William Hancock resolved, but they can say with certainty that the home is rare, tangible evidence of the 18th-century life of Native Americans and the county's first settlers.

The bird pooped on Arthur Hancock III in the paddock at Keeneland. It was a big load, splattering on Hancock's shoulder.This was two days before the Blue Grass Stakes, the race in which Menifee, whom Hancock bred and co-owns, would prove whether he belonged in the Kentucky Derby. Hancock's aunt had always said that a bird pooping on you meant good luck."I thought, `Well, that's interesting,' " Hancock said yesterday in his Kentucky drawl. " `Maybe we'll be lucky in the Blue Grass.' "About 30 minutes later, back in his seat at Keeneland, Hancock heard a startled voice in the next box: "Oh my God, will you look at that."

CUPERTINO, Calif. -- Steven P. Jobs' remarkable return to Apple Computer, announced by the company late last week, began in a most unlikely way: with a phone conversation between two engineers at Jobs' Next Software and an Apple executive, chief technology officer Ellen Hancock, who would seem to embody everything that Jobs isn't.Hancock spent 28 years at IBM Corp., a company that Jobs often ridiculed after he co-founded Apple 20 years ago. In the mid-1980s, when Hancock was IBM's highest ranking woman executive, Jobs masterminded a commercial which portrayed IBM customers as "lemmings" marching single file off a cliff in matching blue suits.

It's quiet, rustic days are over.An 18th-century stone house on the Bodkin Peninsula in Pasadena known as Hancock's Resolution, boarded up for 30 years, has been teeming with activity in recent months -- part of an effort to restore the house and open it as a museum park.A half-dozen cars are parked where there had never been a driveway, and for the first time, the house lights up at the flick of a switch. An old well is back in use.Most importantly, archaeologists, borrowed from the historic London Town settlement site on the South River, are shoveling, poking and dusting the house's 14-acre waterfront property one foot at a time.