Lame

If Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat were a Broadway show, it would close out of town. Too bad it's a movie supported by obscene amounts of merchandising and a baby-boomer audience yearning to see a childhood favorite brought to the screen and updated for their kids. The title is painfully misleading. This picture isn't Dr. Seuss' slaphappy-elegant creation; it's another overstuffed monstrosity from the producer (Brian Grazer) and the uncredited rewriters (Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer)

SHHH. QUIET. The P-word ban used in 2000 might be enforced again by Ravens coach Brian Billick. But this time, it's not about playoffs. The P-word is for pass, as in forward pass, which the Ravens haven't discovered in 2003. You mention the P-word around the Ravens' complex these days, and Billick and offensive coordinator Matt Cavanaugh, of the Brian and Matt Show, get a little antsy. And the frustration is starting to show among the players. After the past two games, offensive tackle Jonathan Ogden, running back Jamal Lewis and tight end Todd Heap have publicly criticized the team's lack of a passing game.

Nine million cows keep American dairy aisles stocked, but all their laboring back and forth to the milking parlor is getting them down. One in five now has leg or foot pain - a condition called lameness that costs the agricultural industry more than a half-billion dollars annually and can leave the animals unable to produce much milk or even stand. To keep the udders, and the dairymen, in business, a team of inventors led by a University of Maryland, Baltimore County engineer has built a device that weeds out cows for early treatment.

The City Council wants Baltimore to know that it's still on the job. Honest. With three council members voted out of office in last week's primary, four others giving up their seats, and the general election to replace them more than a year away, there's a lot of talk about lame ducks. And City Council President Sheila Dixon wants it to stop. She called a news conference yesterday to trumpet something that, in a normal election cycle, is a given: The council is doing its job. "This is not a lame-duck council," Dixon said.

So much for the revolution. In the first election since a referendum passed in November forced a kicking-and-screaming City Council to shrink and reorganize, incumbents held off all underdog challengers. But it will hardly be business as usual at City Hall. The general election that follows Tuesday's primary won't occur for more than a year, leaving winners and losers alike in a long political limbo. It will be an interregnum with lame ducks and a shadow council. Two primary winners plan to set up district offices and handle constituent concerns, no matter that 15 months and a general election stand between them and swearing-in.

Martin O'Malley, the young mayor who urged Baltimore to believe in him and itself, easily defeated a high school principal in a Democratic primary yesterday that also gave a victory to City Council President Sheila Dixon and created some long- term lame ducks on a revamped council. In declaring victory, O'Malley invoked a football great and a famous abolitionist to urge Baltimoreans to have faith that the city can overcome its many problems. "We are still the hopeful people that Johnny Unitas and Frederick Douglass loved."

Martin O'Malley, the young mayor who urged Baltimore to believe in him and itself, easily defeated a high school principal in a Democratic primary yesterday that also gave a victory to City Council President Sheila Dixon and created some long- term lame ducks on a revamped council. In declaring victory, O'Malley invoked a football great and a famous abolitionist to urge Baltimoreans to have faith that the city can overcome its many problems. "We are still the hopeful people that Johnny Unitas and Frederick Douglass loved.

WASHINGTON - Now that John M. Poindexter, he of the screwy scheme for selling "war futures," has been bounced from the State Department and the idea with him, an even more bizarre notion has surfaced from the academic sector. Michael McFaul, a Stanford political science professor and Hoover Insitution research fellow, has recently written that to cope with the fiasco following the ouster of Saddam Hussein and President Bush's efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East, yet another Cabinet department is needed.

How does an embarrassment of riches turn into mere embarrassment? With Alan Quatermain (Sean Connery), the Great White Hunter of King Solomon's Mines, leading a squad of adventurers including Captain Nemo (Naseeruddin Shah), Dracula-survivor Mina Harker (Peta Wilson), the Invisible Man (Tony Curran), Dorian Gray (Stuart Townsend), Tom Sawyer (Shane West) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Jason Flemyng), The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comes on like a cornucopia of fantasy and adventure.

The Carroll commissioners decided yesterday not to reverse a series of zoning changes approved by their predecessors, saying they believed the decisions were ill-conceived but that overturning them would be unfair to property owners and possibly invite lawsuits. The vote ended a process that saw landowners wait two years to secure the zoning changes, which will open nine parcels around the county to commercial and industrial use, and then become enraged when the new board of commissioners called those changes back into question last month.