Head

Quote: "When you lose Albert Belle and Robin Ventura, it makes it a little tough. It's a learning experience, but, hopefully, we can make some adjustments instead of just learning." -- White Sox manager Jerry Manuel, whose team has scored 13 runs in its past five games.It's a fact: Wade Boggs is 73 hits away from 3,000.Who's hot: The Red Sox's Jose Offerman is batting .469 (15-for-32) with six doubles, three triples, hitting in all seven games.Who's not: The Tigers have been blanked three times this season and have scored only 13 runs during their six-game losing streak.

NAZILI, Turkey -- Bells clang rhythmically, drawing closer as men with berets, stout guts and leathered skin lead their camels into the ring of combat. Zeybek music -- a squeaky, kazoolike sound made by a wooden flute accompanied by a drum -- carries on the wind.It's the music, they say, that makes the camels dance.Darkening clouds threaten rain. Yet thousands of villagers assemble in makeshift bleachers or lounge on truck beds surrounding the ring. They have come from throughout rural western Turkey to see this winter spectacle.

Head USA, a sporting goods company that has been based in Columbia for 20 years, said yesterday that it is relocating to Phoenix and Boston in December.The company was founded in Timonium in 1950 by the late Howard Head, who is esteemed in the sports industry for developing lightweight skis and oversized tennis rackets.Head USA has 30 employees, mainly in administrative, and senior and middle management positions, in Columbia. Fourteen will lose their jobs, said Dave Haggerty, the company's president.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Bob McCoy looks a bit silly with the white helmet-like device on his head, and he knows it."This is supposed to grow hair back," the 72-year-old director of the Museum of Questionable Devices tells a young girl who inspects him with a smile.The visitor from Canada giggles with her parents as McCoy removes the contraption and brushes his bald head. He swears to them that he has a little more hair now.Of course he doesn't, and that's why the device sits in his one-room Minneapolis museum packed with old technologies invented by medical shysters.

It's wintertime at Harman Elementary School, and the nurse knows it by the amount of nitpicking going on. Literally.In recent months, the heads of hundreds of Anne Arundel County students have been infested with six-legged lice and their rice-shaped eggs, called nits, which experts say have become harder to kill in the past year."

SAINT-DENIS, France -- When he was growing up in La Castellane, a low-income area of Marseille that is home to many immigrants, Zinedine Zidane used to help a hardware store owner with deliveries. The store owner paid Zidane in candies, and it seemed like a sweet thing to do."One day," Zidane thought, "maybe I can become a delivery truck driver."Yesterday, he delivered the goods for an entire nation.Zidane, who had been ejected earlier in the World Cup for dragging his spikes over a Saudi Arabian player, scored France's first two goals of a 3-0 victory over Brazil in the most lopsided final since 1958.

WASHINGTON -- The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration expanded head-protection standards yesterday to permit innovative air bags that some automakers have already installed.Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater said the agency had responded to the industry's voluntary improvements to vehicle safety by re-examining head-protection rules, scheduled to take effect in September, that required additional padding on the roof and roof pillars of new cars.Now the rules will include the air bags, in the hope that more carmakers will install them.

NBA games lost yesterday: 5.Total games missed: 194.Earliest estimated date that season can start: Jan. 1.Projected player salary losses (through Jan. 1): $330 million.Negotiations: Nothing scheduled.Today's best canceled game: Utah at Phoenix. Two of the best point guards in the league, John Stockton and Jason Kidd, go head-to-head.Pub Date: 12/01/98

A quiet week in the comptroller's race. So quiet, that we contemplated taking Tom Horton's column and simply replacing every reference to shad with the name of comptroller candidate William Donald Schaefer. (It worked surprisingly well.)Instead, we decided to examine the former governor's head -- not the inside, which scares us, but the outside. Here, we answer some pressing questions about Maryland's most famous pate.Q: How big is Schaefer's head?A: He wears a size 7 5/8, according to a 1992 interview with hat-maker Lou Boulmetis.

A conversation between the head and the heart about tomorrow's game between the Ravens and Colts at Camden Yards:Head: "I'm sorry. I wish I could view this as some great grudge match, but I can't. I'm just not that excited."Heart: "Are you kidding? Do you have a pulse? The Colts coming back to play in Baltimore? This is Armageddon."Head: "Aw, you're just living in the past. It's like Artie Donovan said, the Colts left town a long time ago. And besides, how can you be outraged when we've done the same thing to Cleveland && that the Colts did to us?"

Head-on collision kills 2 in Harford County Two drivers were killed in a head-on collision Friday evening in Belcamp, Harford County, state police said. Jared Todd Church, 34, of Bel Air, was driving a 2006 Honda Civic northbound on Route 543, south of Goat Hill Road, when the vehicle crossed the center line and hit a 2004 Nissan Titan driven by Mark David Stoneberg, 39, head-on about 9:50 p.m., according to investigators. Church died at the scene; Stoneberg was taken to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center in Baltimore, where he was pronounced dead, police said.

A former prostitute, who was raped, strangled, cut and left for dead in Leakin Park, took the stand Tuesday in Baltimore Circuit Court and tearfully recounted the details of the 2003 attack by an unlicensed "hack" cabdriver whose DNA is linked to two murders. "I felt his arm go around my neck and he started choking me," the 37-year-old woman said, waving her fists behind her head to show how she tried to fight the man off. "My eyes went up in my head, then everything went black." The Baltimore Sun is withholding the woman's name because she is the victim of a sex crime.

Christopher David Jones had a penchant for making silly faces in photographs: His head cocked to the side, his green eyes turned inward, his mouth gaping. In other photos, he struck a sly smile, the typical antics of a 14-year-old boy. Christopher was endearing in other ways, too, his family and friends said, winning over his girlfriend's father with deference and a shared love of sports. Those were some of the photos and stories shared with the hundreds of people who crowded inside Riva Trace Baptist Church for Christopher's funeral Wednesday, four days after the Crofton teenager died after he was attacked while riding his bicycle home.

The death of 45-year-old Natasha Richardson last week from what had been labeled a "mild brain injury" after a skiing accident has experts in trauma warning the public to take a blow to the head seriously. An autopsy confirmed the actress, who fell on the slopes, died of an epidural hematoma, which is bleeding between the skull and the outer layer that covers the brain called the dura. But doctors not involved in her care noted reports that said she initially refused treatment. It's not possible for those who didn't examine her to say faster treatment would have saved her. And death from such a seemingly minor accident is rare.

On February 28, 2009 LAURA FAULKNER BYRD, beloved wife of James Jeffrey Head; devoted mother of Katherine Elizabeth and Caroline Grace Head; loving daughter of William Edward III and Laura Mae Byrd; dear sister of William IV, Murry, and Katherine Byrd; daughter-in-law of James S. and Frances J. Head. The family will receive friends at the family owned Ruck Towson Funeral Home, Inc., 1050 York road (beltway exit 26), on Friday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 P.M. A Memorial Service will be held at Govans Presbyterian Church, 5828 York Road, Baltimore, on Saturday, 10 A.M. Interment private.

When you think about Chris McAlister, you have to remember the good and bad. The toughness and the ability mixed in with the crucial moments when he didn't keep his head. ( For more, go to baltimoresun.com/cornersportsbar)

I'm sure we all had preconceived notions about what would happen when Mr. McMahon returned to TV, but I never expected him to get kicked in the head by Randy Orton and carted off on a stretcher. ( For more, go to baltimoresun.com/ringposts)

The Ravens had this Oct. 5 game in their grasp until referee Bill Carollo waved his yellow hanky and called Ravens defensive-end linebacker Terrell Suggs for a controversial roughing-the-passer penalty. The penalty erased a false start on the Titans and gave them a first down, keeping the game-winning drive alive. Replays showed that Suggs hit Titans quarterback Kerry Collins more on the shoulder than on the helmet and that the contact looked incidental. Carollo was undeterred in calling the penalty that led to the 13-10 win for Tennessee.

WASHINGTON - Signaling his intention to strengthen regulation of the nation's financial markets, President-elect Barack Obama announced his choice yesterday of two government veterans, including Baltimore native Gary Gensler, to lead what could be a sweeping overhaul. "If the financial crisis has taught us anything, it's that this failure of oversight and accountability doesn't just harm individuals involved. It has the potential to devastate our entire economy," Obama said in Chicago, where he unveiled his choice of Mary Schapiro as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Gensler to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

What are you madder about this morning? The injustice? Or the collapse? Are you angrier at the officials who, by all accounts except their own, handed the Tennessee Titans new life on that fourth-quarter drive yesterday? Or the Ravens' defense, which let the teetering Titans - and their easy mark of a quarterback, the punch line from the Ravens' Super Bowl win eight years ago - turn that break into the game-winning touchdown and a 13-10 win? Try both. The Ravens sure are mad at both.