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ON HIS DEATHBED, he received 100 telephone calls per hour. More operators had to be hired to handle the load. "We've never had this number of calls, even when Lucille Ball was here, Kirk Douglas or George Burns," said Paula Correia, spokeswoman for Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "Never anything like this, ever."One person who visited the dying man said: "It's a real shame. I went to the hospital and saw him, but he was unconscious. He didn't even know I was in the room. It wasn't a pretty sight, man. It was sad . . . I think it's terrible that this happened.

Caught with a couple of joints he didn't get the chance to light up, Eric Staton was ordered to appear before a Baltimore judge. Two weeks later, in a basement courtroom on North Avenue, prosecutors said they would drop the possession charge if Staton agreed to pick up trash for five hours. Staton, 42, hesitated before taking the deal. "Ten grams is nothing," he told a spectator during the hearing. "They should legalize that marijuana. " In recent years, Maryland has taken small steps to scale back laws against possession of marijuana.

They're tucked away in residential neighborhoods, alongside marinas and on the Chesapeake Bay's tributaries. But for those who don't have a navigational system in their car or boat, Anne Arundel County's picturesque waterfront restaurants can be tricky to find. A trek to Deep Creek Restaurant in Arnold, Windows on the Bay or the Cheshire Crab in Pasadena - with a left turn here and a right turn there - takes a visitor through tree-lined neighborhoods, past rows of boats suspended on lifts and ends in laid-back culinary delights.

African-American women in Baltimore and five other U.S. cities are becoming infected with HIV at a rate five times the national average for black women, and closer to the rates of some African countries, according to a new study. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University and around the country who made the findings suspected the rates were higher in these "hot spots" that have battled the epidemic for decades, but the numbers still came as a surprise in a field that tends to focus more on black and gay men. "This is why it's important to remind people that this is going on right here in our hometown," said Dr. Charles Flexner, the principal investigator for the Baltimore part of the study and a clinical pharmacologist and infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins.

Financially troubled St. Joseph Medical Center ended its search for a new owner Friday, announcing that it has entered an agreement to become part of the rapidly expanding University of Maryland Medical System. The announcement was greeted with cheers at the Towson hospital, said Dr. Paul McAfee, head of spinal surgery. "If the doctors in the operating room and emergency room had flowers, they would have thrown them," he said, adding that UMMS plans to upgrade the facilities and turn the hospital into a major surgery center.

Barney Dolt, his right arm swinging like a pendulum and a bead of sweat dangling from his nose, searched for treasure yesterday morning along the shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay. Through earmuff-sized headphones, he heard his metal detector hit a tone that tells him he's found something. The 67-year-old Eldersburg resident deftly stooped to sift through the sand, and uncovered a coin. "Too many pennies," he grumbled as he tossed it into the basket strapped to his waist. But he can't complain too much - earlier that day, Dolt helped plant the coins in a cordoned-off area of the beach as big as a football field.

FREUDIAN FRAUD: THE MALIGNANT EFFECT OF FREUD'S THEORY ON AMERICAN THOUGHT AND CULTURE.E. Fuller Torrey.HarperCollins.362 pages. $25.Theodore Dreiser, we are told, was the kind of man who would not only cheat on his mistress; he also "insisted" that she serve breakfast in bed to him and his other woman.Theodore Dreiser, E. Fuller Torrey also tells us, was the kind of man who thought Sigmund Freud was onto something.Now there's a neat little syllogism for you: Theodore Dreiser was a lout and a libertine.

Patrick "Scunny" McCusker, the 49-year-old owner of Nacho Mama's and a force in the revitalization of Canton, was remembered Saturday by friends, employees, patrons and local leaders for his outsize personality, philanthropy and pioneering contributions to the community. "The neighborhood is what it is because of him," said Gianene Musotto, 43, who gathered with other customers at Nacho Mama's, one of the neighborhood's first popular destinations. Police said McCusker died Friday after being hit by a bus as he rode his bicycle along Coastal Highway in Ocean City . The Cockeysville resident was treated at the scene by emergency personnel.

Operations are winding down at Eastern Home Products Inc. in Southwest Baltimore after the company announced that it didn't have enough money to continue in business. Eastern Home and its subsidiaries -- Eastern Manufacturing Products Inc., Home and Roam Leisure Products Inc. and Eastern Standard Corp. -- manufacture above-ground swimming pools and window blinds. Its retail stores sell pools, spas and pool tables. About 20 of the company's work force of nearly 200 are working. More than 125 workers were surprised when they were laid off abruptly in late January.

Big Huge Games in Timonium closed last May, taking nearly 100 jobs with it. Nine months later, a local studio that was launched from the ashes of the video game-maker shut down, too. And Zynga, which created FarmVille and Words with Friends, closed its Baltimore County office several weeks ago. So why aren't local game developers freaking out? They're used to volatility - not this much, but quite a bit. And even with big game-makers facing tough competition and multimillion-dollar costs, tiny independent studios are popping up locally to take advantage of new opportunities in mobile and online gaming - and new ways of raising money to get games made.