Joss

We arrived early at Joss Cafe on a recent Saturday night because we'd been told that the Japanese restaurant is very small and very popular. Even at 5:30, there were quite a few tables filled in the restaurants tiny front room. But the owners have added a larger dining room in back to cut down on the lines that sometimes form outside. By the time we left, there were no lines, but the place had been doing a brisk business for hours. A line outside would be justifiable. This still-small restaurant on Annapolis Main Street serves Japanese dishes cooked and raw that are fresher, more imaginative and more complex in flavor than any others we can remember having eaten in this region.

The client's in town. The client loves sushi. I want the client to love me. I take the client to Joss Cafe. I pick up the tab. Done deal. You can replace "client" with out-of-town guest, superior officer, love interest, fellow foodie, or anyone else you want to impress, Joss promises to appeal because of two strong leading indicators: fine sushi, great space. Just don't go there expecting bargain-basement tabs. When you walk up half a flight of stairs off the sidewalk on 413 N. Charles and enter Joss, you're stepping up in more ways than one. 12:42 p.m. We enter a sparsely attended dining room and are offered our choice of unoccupied tables.

The landscape of Laura Joss' former life was a vast wilderness of volcanic plateaus, steaming geysers, dramatic gorges and forests. On any day she might come across herds of bison, bighorn sheep, even bears. For someone who loves open space like Joss does, it was close to paradise. But these days, Joss is as likely to see a unicorn as a bear, and backcountry vistas have been traded in for crowds of tourists and the sight of ships dotting an industrial harbor. It's a drastic change, but one Joss made happily, even if it meant moving across the country with her husband and young daughter.

In an article in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience, the way you choose a sushi bar - whether to stay with your old standby or to keep looking - is used as a "classic problem" of the "exploration/exploitation dilemma." It's nice to know your problems are classic. Joss Cafe & Sushi Bar, which opened a few months ago downtown, is my kind of sushi restaurant. The only thing it doesn't have is a bar for happy hour, for a night in the future when I might want to sneak in by myself for a quick bite after work.

Every day, hundreds of people walk among Steve and Kathy Joss's handiwork.The village of Long Reach couple runs the Vertical Connection in Columbia, and their interior designs can be seen throughout thecounty from Howard County General Hospital to the Bagel Shoppe, fromthe Eyre bus terminal to the Rouse Co.Since starting as a two-person home business 14 years ago, the Joss' company has grown to an 8,000-square-foot office in Columbia withseven designers.The...

AS A BOY growing up in the Dirty South (Arkansas, to be exact), I didn't hear a wide variety of music. Soul. Blues. Gospel. A little funk. That was about it. (Fusion, jazz, hip-hop, folk, alternative rock -- all that stuff came later in high school and college.) The music that enlivened the house was like the food in Mama's kitchen: greasy and flavorful, Southern style. She loved Aretha and Gladys Knight, the Temptations. And if a Johnnie Taylor cut or a Bobby Womack ballad came on, Mama would close her eyes, shake her thick curls and wave her hand in the air -- the same moves she did in church occasionally.

Dan Janes points to one photograph, then another and another on the walls of his Towson office, to black-and-white images of such pool-shooting legends as Willie Mosconi, Luther Lassiter and Eddie "The Knoxville Bear" Taylor. "I made him one," Janes says. "He had a couple. This guy gave them to governors and mayors." Janes is talking about cues. For decades, he has crafted his Joss cues for many who have made the game of pool their livelihoods, whether in smoky pool halls or glitzy television tournaments.

Like any other game, pool has its own peculiar jargon, terms like cutting the ball and banking a shot and running english and jumped ball and balance point and feather shot. But even if you've never slid a pool cue between your fingers, never leaned over an expanse of green felt and been dazzled by the glare of light coming off the nine ball, there's only one term you really need to understand.The hit.In pool, everything comes down to the hit -- not so much the sound of your stick driving into the cue ball and setting off a chain reaction across the felt, but the feel -- the little shock wave that reverberates back through the shaft and up your arm and into your heart and gut and brain all at the same moment.

THIS TIME OF the year I'd normally be seeing Ross Alexander, a friend for nearly 40 years who lived at Rehoboth Beach, Del. He died of cancer last Saturday at his home there at age 79. Ross was one of the ever-memorable characters I've known. Ceaselessly optimistic, he'd cheer me up because he never took himself too seriously. A driven, hard worker, yes; a sourpuss, no. Did he own more than one pair of the khaki pants that I saw him wear for those decades? I don't know. I also do not know where he tapped his energy.

It's about time those of you who still think Buffy the Vampire Slayer is some silly kids' show woke up and smelled the coffee (or perhaps blood would be more appropriate). And the recently released DVD collection of the show's 12 first-season episodes is a good place to start the process. The episodes on Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Complete First Season --beginning with "Welcome to the Hellmouth," in which the newly expelled Buffy moves to a new town, meets new friends and finds her slayer responsibilities never go away, and running through "Prophecy Girl," her final encounter with The Master, in which Buffy dies for the first (but not last)

After Kawasaki on Charles Street closed three years ago when its owners pleaded guilty to hiring illegal workers, the building was bought by the owner of the popular Joss Cafe & Sushi Bar in Annapolis. Renovations were clearly under way, but nothing happened until a couple of weeks ago when the Baltimore branch of Joss (413 N. Charles St., Mount Vernon, 410-244-6988) quietly opened. Heather Lee, general manager of both locations, said the Baltimore menu is a little different, with more of a focus on sushi, fewer Japanese entrees and more small plates.

When audiences last saw the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in May 2003, Buffy and her friends had won a nearly apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Their hometown of Sunnydale, Calif. -- also known as the Hellmouth -- was a gargantuan pit as a result. After peering into the crater, Buffy, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, walked away with a smile, and the television series came to a close after seven seasons. On March 14, Buffy the Vampire Slayer will return in comic book form. Joss Whedon, Buffy's creator, has written the first five issues and will oversee -- or "executive-produce," he says -- the whole arc as if it were a television show.

Serenity [Universal] $30 Canceled television series never really die - they find new lives in repeats on cable, syndication and DVD, and sometimes even are transformed into feature films, a la Star Trek and Police Squad! Firefly is the latest failed series to make the move from living rooms to theaters. Created by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the sci-fi adventure premiered on Fox in 2002. Although reviews were generally positive and the series quickly developed a following, ratings weren't good enough to sustain renewal.

CINNAMON KISS Walter Mosley Little, Brown / 308 pages. Reviewing books is hardly an objective pursuit, but it's made more subjective when trying to measure a writer's potential for posterity. Walter Mosley's was established almost as soon as he introduced his signature protagonist, Easy Rawlins, a decade and a half ago. Now, with Cinnamon Kiss, Easy hasmoved forward almost 20 years, surviving riots, racial tensions and thorny relationships in achieving a complex balance. When he is asked to investigate the disappearance of a prominent lawyer and his unsettlingly beautiful assistant (and possible lover)

Fall is when mainstream producers and directors, like high school and college kids, head back from the beach and prove that they can crack open the books. This is when they unleash the heavyweight projects designed to lure shell-shocked adults back to the theaters and -- who knows? -- maybe win over part of the dating crowd that might recognize an author from an English class. You can empty a small library by checking out the sources of this season's prestige releases. Just for starters there's Oliver Twist and Pride and Prejudice, David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof, Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Gerald Clarke's biography Capote, Steve Martin's Shopgirl, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated and Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. Next week's shoreline thriller, Into the Blue, starring Jessica Alba in a bikini, is the exception that proves the rule.

Dan Janes points to one photograph, then another and another on the walls of his Towson office, to black-and-white images of such pool-shooting legends as Willie Mosconi, Luther Lassiter and Eddie "The Knoxville Bear" Taylor. "I made him one," Janes says. "He had a couple. This guy gave them to governors and mayors." Janes is talking about cues. For decades, he has crafted his Joss cues for many who have made the game of pool their livelihoods, whether in smoky pool halls or glitzy television tournaments.

CINNAMON KISS Walter Mosley Little, Brown / 308 pages. Reviewing books is hardly an objective pursuit, but it's made more subjective when trying to measure a writer's potential for posterity. Walter Mosley's was established almost as soon as he introduced his signature protagonist, Easy Rawlins, a decade and a half ago. Now, with Cinnamon Kiss, Easy hasmoved forward almost 20 years, surviving riots, racial tensions and thorny relationships in achieving a complex balance. When he is asked to investigate the disappearance of a prominent lawyer and his unsettlingly beautiful assistant (and possible lover)

Serenity [Universal] $30 Canceled television series never really die - they find new lives in repeats on cable, syndication and DVD, and sometimes even are transformed into feature films, a la Star Trek and Police Squad! Firefly is the latest failed series to make the move from living rooms to theaters. Created by Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the sci-fi adventure premiered on Fox in 2002. Although reviews were generally positive and the series quickly developed a following, ratings weren't good enough to sustain renewal.

Two questions: Who is Joss Stone, and who does she think she is? The first is easier to answer. A 16-year-old ingenue from Devon, England, Stone is the latest rootsy blond songbird with a debut CD. And if The Soul Sessions is any indication, she thinks she is the voice of American soul music for a new generation. The scary thing is, she may be right. The album, which began as a side project to Stone's yet-unreleased mainstream debut, is a delicious platter of long-lost R&B cuts, fusing old-school soul sensibilities with contemporary production techniques.

AS A BOY growing up in the Dirty South (Arkansas, to be exact), I didn't hear a wide variety of music. Soul. Blues. Gospel. A little funk. That was about it. (Fusion, jazz, hip-hop, folk, alternative rock -- all that stuff came later in high school and college.) The music that enlivened the house was like the food in Mama's kitchen: greasy and flavorful, Southern style. She loved Aretha and Gladys Knight, the Temptations. And if a Johnnie Taylor cut or a Bobby Womack ballad came on, Mama would close her eyes, shake her thick curls and wave her hand in the air -- the same moves she did in church occasionally.