Irresistible

Lobbyists for Maryland's real estate industry claim a broad network of political friends in the General Assembly, but to pass an important bill this year they needed a dramatic breakthrough -- a legislative champion or an irresistible argument.They got both.At issue was a major effort by the industry to reduce Maryland's notoriously high closing costs by cutting to six months from one year the amount of property taxes buyers have to pay in advance when they buy a home.The bill got its champion when the speaker of the House of Delegates, Casper R. Taylor Jr., agreed to support the measure.

If you hear there's something gross around, chances are you'll wanna see it. If it stinks, oozes or pulsates, half the neighborhood might come running. But why? What makes "gross" almost irresistible to mankind? And how do we define exactly what "gross" is?"It's hard to define gross," says William I. Miller, who wrote "The Anatomy of Disgust," "because it will often vary from one culture to the next. But what is constant is that each culture will find something disgusting."Sylvia Branzei, author of the cool "Grossology" books, says: "Anything that makes your nose turn up and your stomach clinch is gross."

Pete O'Neal had spent more than a decade chronicling the world's darker side, as a crime photographer for WMAR, Channel 2, when he became one of the people on the other side of the camera.Four years ago, in March 1993, his 74-year-old mother, Jeromia, was beaten to death by a boarder she had taken in. O'Neal, who discovered his mother's body lying on her dining room floor after he tried to phone her all day, was shattered."To say that we were close would be an understatement," he says. "I would almost say that we were one. I was an only child, and my father came and went.

DOES YOUR blood run cold, friend, when you read about the glories of "cyberspace"? Do you have to repress a shriek of protest every time you hear or read or think about "the information highway"?If so, it means you are an old stick-in-the-mud and are doomed to end up in the dustbin of history unless you surrender immediately and come along quietly into the age of electronics amok.As a devout reactionary, I naturally despise what these zealous engineers propose to do to us, but cruel experience reminds me it is foolish to oppose them when they are in the heat of re-inventing the world.

"Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King," by Jack Newfield. New York: William Morrow. 342 pages. $23 With his trademark electric hair and irresistible celebrity, the world has dismissed Don King as little more than a bright, self-promoting eccentric who dresses garishly, misquotes Shakespeare and jokes about his past as a one-time Cleveland bagman and convict.Now, thanks to four years of tenacious research and a masterful job of storytelling by Jack Newfield, a longtime boxing fan and New York Post politics columnist, we get to see another side of this remarkably resilient rascal, who has virtually dominated boxing for two decades.

Will someone explain to me why tourists love Baltimore so much?Just look at the visual evidence. Tour buses line the parking lots off Central Avenue. There are queues in front of the National Aquarium and other Inner Harbor attractions. Some days Harborplace looks as if the glass walls are going to explode from the crush of tourists.Listen to the verbal evidence, which is often more convincing than the numbers of tourists who visit here. Tourists go out of their way to say how much they enjoy Baltimore.

Although Henry Kisor's irresistible account of transcontinental travel aboard the California Zephyr has no lack of train lore, it is fundamentally a story in which 500 wildly assorted passengers spend 51 hours in proximity to one another."

There's something irresistibly festive about caviar -- it can make any occasion extraordinary. If you can't afford fine beluga, that's OK; Romanoff Caviar, from the T. Marzetti Co., costs less than $3.99 for a two-ounce jar of lumpfish caviar, and $5.99 for a two-ounce jar of whitefish caviar.Marzetti has some suggestions for serving caviar: Fill mushroom caps with onion-flavored sour cream dip and caviar, or hollow out cherry tomatoes and fill with sour cream, top with caviar and sprig of dill.

Did you hear the one in Howard County this week about the four cows that broke out of their confines? It took a police tactical response team, several animal control officers, state livestock experts and two helicopters equipped with heat-sensing devices to track down the escapees. Two of the heifers were shot dead, but two others escaped into the woods and haven't been seen since.It would all be that much more laughable it it weren't so scandalously true. Let us state unequivocally from the beginning that we are rooting 100 percent for the surviving cows in this bizarre story.

Shopping at sale time is irresistible. This year, though, with significant fashion changes in the air, it's necessary to fine tune your antenna for signals about what fashions will last.Look for long skirts. They are here for at least the foreseeable future. So are designer clothes with long, fluid lines; almost anything from Donna Karan to Karl Lagerfeld fits in this category, as do cutting-edge creations from designers like Commes des Garcons or Yohji Yamamoto.The plus ultra nightgown of satin and lace you covet, but wonder when you will ever wear, may become your '93 going out costume.

With 1996's Fargo (8 p.m., AMC), Joel and Ethan Coen found mass acceptance without sacrificing a scintilla of their indie cred - no small accomplishment in an era when popular and critical tastes were becoming increasingly polarized. This, the brothers' sixth film together (they both write; Joel gets the directing credit), follows the classic Coen formula: a bunch of doofuses get together and try something either illegal or stupid (often both). They find themselves in way over their heads and don't have a clue what to do next.

Terrell Suggs couldn't have flown under the radar yesterday even if he had tried. But anyone who knows him knew he wasn't going to try. And his teammates and coaches made sure Suggs wouldn't end up there, anyway. Suggs' prints were all over the scene of the crime the Ravens committed against the Oakland Raiders, a deceptive 29-10 victory at M&T Bank Stadium. Every plot line ran through him. Even when the Ravens had the ball - especially then. It would have been plain wrong for John Harbaugh to pass up the chance to toy with the living, breathing headline machine Suggs had been all week.

Notes Liberty's blueprint: Last week, when presidential candidate Mike Huckabee suggested that the U.S. Constitution might be amended to better comport with God's law, there was widespread shocked reaction. Americans take their Constitution seriously, even as they argue endlessly about what it means and how it might be amended. Now comes Michael I. Meyerson, a University of Baltimore law professor, with a new book that promises significant help for those of us confused about the intent of the Founding Fathers when they drafted the constitution.

Many of us learn it by bitter experience. Now scientists say it's true. Some people, thanks to their genetics, behavior, diet or some poorly understood combination of factors, have body chemistry that draws mosquitoes like linebackers to a loose football. Others just seem invisible to the bugs. "I am irresistible to mosquitoes," said Michele Karanzalis, 33, a research project manager from Overlea. "I just try to stay inside a lot ... I start to get panic atacks after a while when I feel like I'm getting bit too much."

CUTEOVERLOAD.COM What's the point? -- Overdosed on bad news, sad news, boring news? Hit this site for things that'll make you go "awwwwwwwwww." Baby animals, cute products, funny reader letters, but mostly just the first -- animals looking so stinking adorable that you can barely handle it. (Or maybe that's just us.) What to look for --Click on the "Rules of Cuteness" category to find out just what makes a photo uber-irresistible. These include: multiple species of animal in one picture, animals mimicking humans and inquisitive facial expressions.

The massive, omnipresent object hanging at a diagonal across the stage in the Washington National Opera's appealing new production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut puts everything into sharp perspective. It's the flat, well-worn blade of a guillotine, a reminder of what's in store for all the preening Parisian aristocrats and their retinues -- the obscenely rich, indulgent class that Manon finds so irresistible -- come the revolution. Puccini probably never considered this 1893 opera, his first international success, to be a morality lesson about French history; he preferred to boil a story down to plain old romance and tragedy, centered around a sympathetic, if flawed, woman.

I know of no writer, living or dead, who has more profoundly explored the common enigma that might best be called the inhumanity of innocence than Michael Frayn. He is, however, far from a specialist. At 68, he is one of the masters of English letters. He has just published his 10th novel. He has written 13 plays, among them Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards in 2000. He has also written screenplays, translations and the libretto for an opera. Copenhagen is a drama about an extended conversation that took place between Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist, and Nils Bohr, his Danish mentor, early in World War II. They examine the implication of nuclear physics and of the interplay of personal moral responsibility with science, politics and atavism.

Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, by David Hockney (Viking Studio, 296 pages, $60). David Hockney's two-year purposeful pursuit of his proposition that many of the Old Master painters used lenses and / or prisms as aids to their draftsmanship has now been seminared, colloquiumed, discoursed and debated all over the world -- and remains the most intriguing arts controversy in decades. Hockney is not only a historically important and innovative painter in his own right; he is a splendid arts detective and theorist.

Odds & Ends, by Robert Crumb (Bloomsbury, 136 pages, $34.95). If you know the work and life of Robert Crumb, you need no recommendation to have a serious look at this major new collection of his work. Crumb is, of course, best known as a brilliant innovator of comic and cartooning art forms. But this gathering together of his work, going back to high school sketches from 1963, presents a dazzling array of images that range from wine labels to greeting cards to portraits of friends to record jackets to magazine and newspaper illustrations -- and beyond.

Lobbyists for Maryland's real estate industry claim a broad network of political friends in the General Assembly, but to pass an important bill this year they needed a dramatic breakthrough -- a legislative champion or an irresistible argument.They got both.At issue was a major effort by the industry to reduce Maryland's notoriously high closing costs by cutting to six months from one year the amount of property taxes buyers have to pay in advance when they buy a home.The bill got its champion when the speaker of the House of Delegates, Casper R. Taylor Jr., agreed to support the measure.