Imagine

You might say that Joseph Cornell lived in a box within a box. From his early teens to his death in 1972 at the age of 69, the artist stayed firmly tied to a home in Queens he shared with his mother and invalid brother. When Cornell ventured out, it was chiefly to rummage for any number of objects that he would use back home to create the assemblages that made him famous — each contained in a little box with a glass front. As art critic Robert Hughes writes, "that glass, the 'fourth wall' of his miniature theater, is also the diaphragm between two contrasting worlds.

William Magruder Waters, a retired Johns Hopkins and Navy electrical engineer and inventor who built his own car and held patents related to radar imaging, died of congestive heart failure Dec. 17 at Renaissance Gardens at Oak Crest Village. He was 86. The son of Methodist missionaries, he was born in Kobe, Japan. He came to the U.S. when his father accepted a ministerial assignment in Roanoke, Va. He later lived in Gambrills, Harmans and Goldsboro, and was a 1943 graduate of Beall High School in Frostburg.

Aline Feldman's woodcut prints are given the standard eye-level installation at Howard Community College, but you'll often feel as if you're looking down from a great height owing to the high-angle perspective in an exhibit titled "The Dynamics of City and Countryside: The Synthesis of Reality and Imagination. " This lofty sensibility is especially pronounced in her urban scenes. Prints such as "City Aslant" offer schematic views of densely developed blocks in which the skyscrapers and streets are depicted with diagonal lines emphasizing the hard edges of a concrete jungle.

When you're still being dragged along in the gnarly wake of the Great Recession, bristling with the splinters of the housing bust and other flotsam of the financial meltdown, it's hard to see much of a future, much less big ships on the horizon. But they are out there, or on their way - big ships, wider than ever, carrying cargo up the coast, up the Chesapeake to the Port of Baltimore. In a couple of years, a wider Panama Canal will open for business. The wider canal will mean larger ships - new megaships - making the run from Asia to the East Coast, instead of always stopping in Pacific ports.

Luke Curlett, 6, clutched his train-theme library books and stared at the photo of a locomotive exhibited 84 years ago at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad centennial celebration in Halethorpe. The image is one of 11 in the Arbutus Historic Mural Project on display at the Arbutus Library. Any train book, photo or toy enthralls the kindergarten student at Relay Elementary, who visits the library branch at least weekly, said his mother, Kerri Curlett. "I like that they make that big whistling sound," said Luke of the trains he hears rambling through his neighborhood.

Would that Baltimore were Radiator Springs, the dilapidated, melancholy town off Route 66 revitalized almost single-handedly and instantaneously by race car Lightning McQueen in the Pixar movie "Cars. " Fate dealt Radiator Springs a bad hand when Interstate 40 bypassed the town, detouring traffic from the once thriving, neon-lit locale to new destinations. McQueen rescued it, however, repairing not only the road he destroyed but all the businesses, too. Later, he attracts a Ferrari and other luminary cars to the once-abandoned city in New Mexico.

When he was growing up in Towson, JF Thormann could not, in his wildest fantasies, have imagined a day when downtown Baltimore would be turned into a IndyCar racetrack. He did, however, frequently spend his afternoons and evenings pretending there was a Grand Prix racetrack in the parking lot of Goucher College, where his father was a professor. "I'm not sure my father knows that," Thormann said with a sheepish chuckle. "But I used to practice there a lot. I also burned up a lot of road around the Loch Raven Reservoir.

Pieter Schneider's research and planning paid off every time his boat hit the finish line. The 7-year-old had studied pictures of fast boats in magazines to design his catamaran, made of four aluminum cans and two plastic cups, with a paper plate sail. His model took first place in the Root Beer class of the Chesapeake Outdoor Group's 12 oz. Regatta Saturday. The fundraiser, held at the Port Annapolis Marina, drew more than 40 racers Saturday who had designed sailboats using 12-ounce cans — Budweiser or Bud Light for adults, and root beer for anyone below legal drinking age. The event, which has run for eight years and raised thousands of dollars for local charities, grew out of a serendipitous moment during an Outer Banks vacation.

Jeremy Adams has two parties planned for his Federal Hill comics store this month. One will celebrate this weekend's annual convergence of the comics world on Charm City. The other will anticipate a risky, game-changing strategy that could determine the shape — and vitality — of that world for years to come. On Friday, Adams' Alliance Comics will be the scene of a party in honor of the 12th Baltimore Comic Con, a two-day comics bacchanal held this weekend at the Baltimore Convention Center, where thousands of retailers, artists and fans get to immerse themselves in everything having to do with the medium they adore.

It's Baltimore Fashion Week, so this week's topic is runway-inspired. If you started your own fashion line, what would you name it? Outer Armour by SWAT. The essential clothing line for Roland Park residents when they venture Downtown.  -   Luke Broadwater, managing editor,   b Hi-Lo Couture. I love where high- and lowbrow intersect.  -   Anne Tallent, editor,   b In honor of Lauren Conrad, mine would be WC by Wesley Case. That worked for her, right?