Jonah

Jonah Hill, the chubby, urgently ebullient actor at the center of the high school comedy Superbad, has the ability to blurt out scripted profanities as if they were erupting from his own barely exposed id. Gangly Michael Cera, uncoordinated and croak-voiced, talks as if his larynx is aligned to a warped tuning fork, and walks as if his limbs are guided by a malfunctioning GPS system. Currently also appearing as an older (if no more mature) character in Knocked Up, the 23-year old Hill is sensational here as high school senior Seth, a sex-obsessed, unpredictable catalyst for good/bad news, mostly about growing up or not. Cera, 19 and an anchor of three seasons of Arrested Development, is just as good as Evan, Seth's gentle, intelligent and sometimes-craven Dartmouth-bound best pal. Superbad (Columbia Pictures)

Jonah Hill is one of Judd Apatow's boys now. In Hollywood, that's like being adopted by Jesus and given a corner office. Apatow is the anointed comedy savior who directed The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. Hill played a part in each and now Apatow has bestowed his blessing on Hill as a leading man in Superbad, a high school sex comedy opening today. Apatow produced this time. "Judd has given me every opportunity in the world to succeed," Hill says by phone recently. "The last thing I want to do is let him down."

The city that W. C. Fields would have preferred to live in if the only alternative was the grave is about to reach a milestone unprecedented in the annals of sport. Sometime in early July - or possibly even late June, if they revert to prior swooning form - the Philadelphia Phillies will lose their 44th game of the season, and the 10,000th in their history. No professional team, in any sport, has been there before. Philadelphians, a notoriously but maybe understandably vituperative bunch, are readying to mark the occasion.

Trouble Jesse Kellerman Putnam / 368 pages / $24.95 Since Edgar Allan Poe pioneered the mystery story more than 150 years ago, the genre has undergone countless innovations and permutations, from Poe's locked rooms to Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled detectives, from Ed McBain's police procedurals to Patricia Cornwell's forensics-driven novels. Collectively, they contain a modern mythology of crime while expressing, in the words of pop culture critic John G. Cawelti, "a deep uncertainty about the adequacy of traditional social institutions to meet the needs of individuals for security, for justice, or a sense of significance."

Woman pleads guilty to scalding 2-year-old A 22-year-old Brooklyn Park woman pleaded guilty yesterday to scalding a friend's 2-year-old son in a hotel bathtub, leaving the boy with permanent injuries that doctors say will prevent him from ever walking again. Entering an Alford plea on one count of first-degree child abuse, Montia G. Hughes did not admit that she abused Jonah Wali Coffey but acknowledged that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict her of doing so. As part of the plea agreement, Baltimore County Circuit Judge Robert E. Cahill Jr. agreed to sentence Hughes to no more than 10 years of prison time.

On Monday, November 13, 2006, MARJORIE GASPAROTTI. Born November 12, 1924, in Isanti, MN. Marjorie was a longtime resident of Baltimore and the wife of Paul Gasparotti, to whom she was married for 62 years. She was predeceased by her parents, Harry and Geneva Tupper, her sister, Harriet Nagy and her brother-in-law, John Gasparotti, III. Surviving, in addition to her husband, are brother, Dennis Tupper, sister-in-law, Anna Felter, brother-in-law Richard Gasparotti, daughter and son-in-law, Kathryn and Robert Mayher, son, Paul Gasparotti, II, son and daughter-in-law, Richard and Jenny Gasparotti, daughter and son-in-law, Carolyn and Dennis Robertson, grandchildren, Jonah and Zoe Gasparotti, David Robertson and Kevin Finisterre and numerous nieces and nephews.

WASHINGTON --The Rev. Andrew Foster Connors remained calm yesterday as a police officer put his hands in white plastic handcuffs and searched his pockets after he crossed a police line outside the U.S. Capitol. Less than an hour later, the Rev. Roger Scott Powers was also led away in handcuffs from the interfaith demonstration against the war in Iraq in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building. The two Presbyterian ministers from Baltimore were among 71 people who were detained yesterday as they protested the war in Iraq - and continued Baltimore's long tradition of civil disobedience against wars.

On Wednesday, June 28, 2006, CHARLOTTE CAPLAN (nee Forman), beloved wife of Charles Caplan, loving mother of Hilliary Noppinger of Reisterstown, MD and Cheryl Caplan-Zalis of Baltimore, MD., devoted mother-in-law of David Noppinger and Ken Zalis, beloved sister of Eli Forman of New Jersey, Lila Hirsch-Brody of Pittsburgh, PA. Loving grandmother of Jonah Avi Zalis Services at SOL LEVINSON & BROS INC., 8900 Reisterstown Road at Mt. Wilson Lane on Thursday, June...

A Baltimore woman pleaded guilty yesterday in Baltimore County Circuit Court to child abuse for failing to take her 2-year-old son to the hospital after he was immersed in scalding water in a hotel bathtub and severely burned from his midsection down. Regina G. Coffey, 26, of Waverly brushed away tears as she answered the judge's questions about whether she understood the rights she was giving up by entering a guilty plea. She faces up to 15 years in prison after doing nothing more than applying ointment to her son's injuries when he suffered second-degree burns across almost a third of his body - injuries that she told police caused her to cry when she first examined him. "His skin was blistered and falling off," she told detectives, according to court records.

More than two dozen activists from Baltimore and elsewhere have arrived in Cuba to protest the U.S. detention-and-interrogation operation at Guantanamo Bay. The activists, most of them Christian, have broken U.S. law by traveling to the communist nation. They were planning to set out this morning for the Navy base in southeastern Cuba where the United States is holding about 500 foreign terror suspects without prisoner-of-war status or criminal charges. They expect the 50-mile march from the city of Santiago to take four or five days.