I Swear

Marietta Cellars Old Vine Red, Lot 32 ($13). The Sun's electronic archives show that I've been recommending this perennial favorite since Lot 8 back in 1990, but I'd swear my love affair with Old Vines red goes back even further. I have never had a bad bottle of this wonderful blend of red varietals. This version may be a little less concentrated than others, but it more than compensates with intense, gripping flavors of wild berries, chocolate and coffee. It's drinking well now, but these wines have a track record of lasting up to five years.

Sushi Sakura occupies the Pikesville location where Fortune House Chinese restaurant was for a short time. Before that, it was a forward-looking and ambitious Chinese restaurant named Try's Asian Fusion that I admired but never went back to after I reviewed it. I had, in fact, come to review Fortune House a few months ago, but it was "closed for painting." Fortune House, it turned out, was being converted into Sushi Sakura, a perfectly nice Japanese restaurant that I didn't take to at all, in spite of the fact that the food it serves is comparable to what I've enjoyed in similar restaurants for years.

One of the sadder aspects of this job is having to review the work of once-great writer-producers who are over the hill and merely recycling their old and tired tricks. That's the case with Steven Bochco's new series, Raising the Bar, premiering tonight on TNT. The man who helped change the face of network drama from soft-focus escapist fare to the hard-edged grit of Hill Street Blues in 1984 debuts a big-city legal drama that follows the same conventions of such series as his NYPD Blue and Brooklyn South.

NOVELIST LARRY DOYLE Larry Doyle won two Emmys as a writer for The Simpsons TV show. He wrote episodes for Beavis and Butt-head and several movie screenplays. He has written for magazines and Web sites. Now the writer has just recently published his first novel, I Love You Beth Cooper, the story of a high school geek in love with the head cheerleader. Doyle and other first-time novelists shared their experiences as part of a panel at the Baltimore Book Festival. The event, held in Mount Vernon, ends today.

BERLIN -- Angela Merkel, a pastor's daughter known for her ambition, capped a remarkable rise through German politics yesterday by becoming the nation's first female chancellor and the first to have grown up in what was then communist East Germany. The 51-year-old conservative, the youngest person to reach the chancellor's office, will lead Europe's largest economy as head of a fragile coalition that faces high unemployment, low growth and problems with the welfare state. Less a charismatic campaigner than a sober tactician, Merkel is expected to rely on her gift of persuasion to keep the government from splintering along party lines.

Welcome to Project Fresh, a blog about cooking, style, home design, and living the do-it-yourself lifestyle. Who am I?  I’m a simple girl, originally from Arizona, who somehow made it all the way to Baltimore (after many days of hitchhiking and only a sack of potatoes to sustain myself). Before I got here, I went to school at Northwestern for journalism, creative writing, with some art in there too. I’m a designer by day at b, and I’m crazy about style and design in all areas of my life.

It doesn't look as if Alicia, 30, and Chris, 46, will celebrate their first anniversary next month: Their marriage, the second for both, is being torn apart, says Alicia, and the blame lies with Chris' "hateful" older sons -- Greg, 24, and Andy, 22 -- from his first marriage."

Edith Gentry insists she changes nothing for the sake of change.That's for sure.Freshly graduated from college in 1947, she started the Cedarcroft School in North Baltimore with money borrowed from her accountant father. A half-century later at 72, she's still the headmistress, and little has changed at the preschool for children 3 to 6.The 70 youngsters and their nine teachers still gather at 9: 15 a.m. for opening exercises heavily flavored with patriotism. Gentry sits at the piano, accompanying the children in "America" and "Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue" as a color guard of tots circles the room bearing American, Maryland and school flags.

New Orleans.--The other day, a friend of mine was explaining how she had to move these pixels around her computer and had to add 20 megabytes of memory to handle the operation. I had the disquieting thought that all this memory she was adding had to come from somewhere. Maybe it was coming from me, because I couldn't remember a thing that day.And then it became blindingly obvious: All the memory that everybody keeps adding to their computers comes from people. Nobody can remember a damn thing.

All through the long week, you heard the talk everywhere: The Eric Tirado jury went soft. When the convicted killer of state trooper Ted Wolf got life in prison instead of death in the gas chamber, a message seemed to be dispatched to all who slay at random: Nobody in Maryland pays the ultimate price for murder.You heard it on the radio talk shows, and people sent angry letters to the editor. Around police stations and courthouses, a sense of veiled rage hung in the air.And on Interstate 95 near Jessup, by the patch of highway where Wolf was shot in the head while writing Tirado a speeding ticket, someone left a hand-lettered sign that seemed a bitter howl of protest: "An Eye for An Eye."