Love

We're at the finale already (didn't this season seem short?). I'll say it right here at the top of the episode - unless William falls repeatedly on his keister, requiring the judges to give him 5's across the board, there's no way he's not winning this thing. That being said, I'd be OK with any of the three finalists winning, even though I'm personally Team Driver. Tonight's show will have each couple dancing two dances:  1. Judge's pick, which are new routines danced to new music, but in a style the couple has previously danced and in which the judges would like to see them improve.  2. Freestyle Tomorrow night, the couples will be doing some sort of third scored dance, details about which we'll learn later.

Ever have one of those nagging thoughts about yourself as a parent that kind of ricochets around in your skull like a bouncy ball whenever you try to corner it and figure it out? I'd been having this strange feeling that I wasn't really willing to address until I saw this post from Gina Crosley-Corcora, aka The Feminist Breeder . In it, she wrote about whether she loved her baby girl more than her older boys, after her husband commented on their seemingly extra special connection: Not only does Jolene allow me to slobber all over her, she welcomes it with the cheesiest grin you've ever seen.

Thank God for Joan and Don. Without their lunchtime escape from the office, replete with witty, sexy banter, this episode, the worst of the season, would have been pointless. Nothing else quite worked here, in what clearly was a transitional throwaway leading up to the final few episodes this season. I, for one, do not care about Lane's financial issues (though, surely him forging Don's signature on a check to pay debts will come back to bite him). Anything involving Harry is sort of blah, even though his subplot this week brought back and old friend, Paul Kinsey, who has, ahem, gone through some changes.

Of Love & Regret - Pub & Provisions, the collaboration between Brian Strumke of Stillwater Ales and Ted Stelzenmuller of Jack's Bistro, is set to open on Wednesday. The pub's doors will open at 11 a.m. on Wednesday for lunch and a line-up of 20 "esoteric beers" on draft, more than half of them Stillwater Ales. The "provisions" part of Pub & Provisions, a second-floor shop selling gourmet products, many of them Stillwater-designed and branded, along with beer, wine and liquor, will open later this year.

I hope everyone has taken a few moments to collect themselves after that spectacular finale. Midway through, I was a bit worried as the episode was beginning to seem more like a series finale than a season finale. However, the last 15 minutes provided everything a good finale should: suspense, murder, a love triangle (quadrangle!), a drug overdose, break-ups (bonus points for calling off an engagement), a conniving friend, heart break, a parent finding their child unconscious, unplanned pregnancy, a declaration of “never speak to me again” followed by a quick hang up, an engagement, a serious accident (plane instead of car, way to go big!

Deputed Testamony is 32-years-old. His dark brown coat is shaggy, and his biggest excitement is going into his paddock at Bonita Farm for three or four hours of grazing each day. He is a pensioner, an icon. The oldest living winner of a Triple Crown race. But when Billy Boniface looks at the horse in his paddock, he sees the striking colt that was born and trained at the family farm and raced to victory in the 1983 Preakness - the last horse bred or trained in Maryland to do so. "Oh my gosh, I still get goose bumps when I look at him and remember that day," said Boniface, who was 18 then and had just taken over the breeding operation at the farm.

NBC Sports says it had 170 employees in Baltimore this week to cover the Preakness, and from the looks of the TV package it presented, all of them earned their keep. NBC's network coverage started at 4:30 p.m., and it hardly ever sagged for more than a minute or two right up until the start of the race some two hours later. And that's no mean feat given that the horse racing world is essentially on hold until the start of the race on the day of a Triple Crown event. What I am saying is that once you show the infield crowd dancing to Maroon 5, overhead shots of the Inner Harbor and Pimlico, ground level shots of the grandstand, women in hats, tables full of crab cakes, Black-eyed Susans all in a row, and the horses in their stalls, what do you do for the other hour and 50 minutes?

In a time where every artist utilizes multiple social-media outlets to make a name, it can be difficult to separate the aesthetic and the art. In the case of singer Lana Del Rey, the 25-year-old New York City singer born Lizzy Grant, she offers a couple headscratchers: a self-proclaimed groaner of a title ("gangster Nancy Sinatra") and strange genre-definers (her Facebook says her music is "Hollywood Pop and Sad Core"). On most days, this would have me running for the hills, yet here I am, listening to "Video Games" repeatedly.

I enjoy reading the various editorials and commentaries published in The Sun, but I was especially moved by Dee Wright's op-ed describing the life and death of Mary Hines ("Where was Mary Hines' 'village'?" Jan. 16). Ms. Hines, an 84-year-old retired educator who was destitute and in need, was murdered. I'm left with the same questions as Ms. Wright: What did Ms. Hines' so-called friends and family do to help in her final years of heartache and pain? Not much. Talk is cheap!

It looks like the "Kitchen Nightmare" might not be over for Baltimore's Cafe Hon . A producer for the show has been calling around town, looking to book people for what appears to be an episode that will check in on how the Hampden restaurant has fared since Chef Gordon Ramsay swooped in last year to help turn the place around. "Kitchen Nightmares" visited the struggling Cafe Hon last fall. The plot surrounded the restaurant's sharp drop in reputation after news broke that owner Denise Whiting had trademarked the word "hon," a beloved Baltimore term of endearment.

Wedding Day: December 1, 2012 Her story: Faith Deutschle, 28, grew up in Dublin, Ohio, and now lives in Federal Hill. Her father, Jean Deutschle, is senior sales manager at Abbott Laboratories. Her mother, Marianne Deutschle is a pre-kindergarten teacher in Dublin. Deutschle is senior marketing consultant for LivingSocial. His story: Jason Albert, 35, grew up in Manchester, Maryland, and now lives in Federal Hill. He is general manager at the Delia Foley's pub in Federal Hill.

John and Leila Juracek's British friends tell them their 1929 Tudor Revival house in Baltimore's Homeland neighborhood is more like an English cottage than the country cottages in England. The L-shaped exterior is of 18-inch-thick stone dressed in ivy and topped with a second-story, timber and stucco construction. Formal gardens grace the back of the home, while inside, leaded-glass mullioned windows with chintz and toile draperies, solid traditional furniture and needlepoint rugs impart a heady sense of living on the pages of an Agatha Christie novel.

Although a Charlottesville, Va., jury found one man - athlete George Huguely V - criminally responsible for the beating death of Yeardley Love, his former girlfriend and fellow lacrosse player at the University of Virginia, the young woman's mother wants to hold his coaches culpable, too. Sharon Love, of Cockeysville, filed a $29.5 million civil suit this month against the state of Virginia, which operates the university; the school's athletic...

Orioles fans often hear about the Oriole Way, "Orioles Magic" and the three World Series titles during the team's glory years in the '60s, '70s and '80s. Even 20-somethings who missed the last title, in 1983, have playoff appearances in 1996 and 1997 and the historic career of Cal Ripken Jr. to hold onto. But for many, being an Orioles fan has been nothing but disappointment, a streak of 14 straight losing seasons and teams that have started out hot, with plenty of players showing lots of promise, only to find new ways to crush our spirits.

Zach Teal is just 17, but his love for books led him to write one of his own and to volunteer more than 250 hours at the Finksburg branch of the Carroll County Public Library. "Two hundred and fifty hours is quite unusual for our teen volunteers," said Heather Owings, who was volunteer coordinator at the library and now works at the North Carroll branch. Zach logged those hours over the course of three years, performing such tasks as making crafts for story times, signing in reading program participants, even wearing a mouse costume for a reading of "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Alice Mercer has been a leader on Century's field hockey, basketball and lacrosse teams, which all reached the state semifinals this year. In lacrosse - the sport the senior has signed to play at Maryland next year - she has 202 career goals and 58 this spring as the No. 3 Knights head into Friday's state semifinal against No. 14 C. Milton Wright. Mercer has been selected to play in the Under Armour All-America Lacrosse Classic on June 30 at Towson University. In basketball, she led the Knights to the state final, averaging 9.7 points and 4.5 steals.

The Sun's next-day coverage of college lacrosse games held on Saturday, April 21 was the usual and typical fare. Johns Hopkins University, which lost for the third time in the past four games, got the lead story on the sports section. Loyola University, ranked second in the nation in the latest coaches poll and likely to move to Number 1 with Cornell University's defeat, won decisively but got only three sentences in the far-right column half-way down page six. J. Shawn Alcarese, Towson

Thank you, David Zurawik , for your review of VEEP ('VEEP' nails our dim-witted politics," April 22).Julia Louis-Dreyfus is certainly very good, as always, and has a wonderful #@%$ cast to @$#%^ support her. I think the #@%$y dialogue is *#$@ing wonderful. I especially like the bad language they use every &%-@^# second of the show. Well, thanks for your #@%$ time. This show is really the #@$%^ and how! Frank Fletcher, Baltimore

George Huguely V sits in the corner of a narrow, white room, at the end of a long wooden table, looking every bit the college athlete who just rolled out of bed after a normal night out — but for the bloody scratches ringing his right ankle. Hours earlier, he had used that leg to drunkenly kick in his girlfriend's bedroom door, he tells Charlottesville detectives, during a 64-minute recorded interrogation into the fatal beating of Cockeysville native Yeardley Love. The public got its first look at the video Tuesday, two years after it was made, on the morning of May 3, 2010, and nearly three months after Huguely was convicted of second-degree murder in Love's death at her University of Virginia off-campus apartment.

For the second week in a row, Baltimore got some prime-time, Sunday-night love on high-end cable TV. Two weeks ago, Lutherville got a mention on "Mad Men. " Granted, it was a throwaway line, but a mention is a mention in self-conscious Baltimore -- and its north county cousins. This Sunday, Baltimore Ravens quarterback Joe Flacco and running back Ray Rice got the shoutout on HBO's "VEEP," which is made in Maryland. The mention came when Vice President Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus)