New Orleans

PASADENA, Calif. -- The last time I saw Larry Hagman was at his Malibu beach house, and he was just about to pass out drunk.He was at the height of his fame as J.R. Ewing on "Dallas," and he was sitting there with a big white Stetson on his head and a drink in his hand, staring out at the Pacific Ocean as a band played Bob Wills' "Faded Love.""Another ------ day in ------ paradise," Hagman said to me.When I turned to answer, he was out cold. A woman wearing a flag-of-Texas bikini bottom assured me that Hagman was OK and asked me to help her make him comfortable by putting some pillows under him on the couch.

Gleaming white with twin black smokestacks and a 23-ton red paddle wheel at its stern, the Queen of the Mississippi is an apparition rising more than five stories above the Wicomico River. Before the month is out, the lines holding it dockside at Chesapeake Shipbuilding Corp. will be cast off and the Queen will churn down the coast on its way to New Orleans, a life on America's most famous river and a showdown with a bigger-name rival. American Cruise Lines, the Connecticut-based owner of the vessel, is betting that the 280-foot riverboat is exactly what the cruising public wants.

New Orleans -- I talked to a woman in Santa Fe who was kidnapped by aliens who performed a long medical procedure on her. She now wakes quite often in the middle of the night and sees ''many beings standing in her bedroom.'' She was most earnest about her experience, looking at me with sincere though flat eyes that exuded objectivity and resignation. She reminded me most forcefully of Anita Hill testifying solemnly about her defilement by sexual innuendo.Judging by the current hysteria about sex raging through the country today, I think that all of us have been kidnapped by aliens who have taken the sex out of us and are now standing in all our bedrooms babbling about it through the mouths of TV, radio and other unidentified sources.

The NFL has dropped the hammer on the New Orleans Saints. And believe me, it was a heavy hammer. The league on Wednesday afternoon announced the punishment for the Saints in their bounty scandal. (And moments later, the New York Jets announced that they had traded for Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow, a sequence of events that surely put Twitter's servers to the test.) With its ruling on the Saints, the NFL made it clear that bounty systems must go the way of leather helmets.

Chris Paul has requested to be traded and the Hornets have scheduled a meeting with the star guard on Monday, according to a person familiar with the situation. Paul will sit down with new head coach Monty Williams , new general manager Dell Demps and team President Hugh Weber in New Orleans, the person told the Associated Press on Thursday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the team had not made plans to meet with Paul public, and because Paul has not publicly demanded a trade.

I n 30 years of writing about television, I have never heard music used as organically, wisely and powerfully as it is in the new HBO drama, "Treme," from Baltimore writer David Simon and playwright Eric Overmyer. The 80-minute pilot episode opens on a street parade and closes on a funeral procession. The former, with its screaming brass, syncopated bass drum and snake-hipped dancers, lifted me out of my seat and instantly transported me into the bombed-out landscape of post-Katrina New Orleans, where the series is set. The latter, with its dirgelike, slower-than-the-slowest-rhythm-you-can-imagine version of "A Closer Walk with Thee," touched me in a psychic place that has nothing to do with rational thought, criticism or even words.

He played a hardnosed detective on HBO's The Wire, a trombonist on Treme and soon Wendell Pierce will be a grocery store owner. The actor who has a made a career starring in David Simon's popular television series plans to open Sterling Farms grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans, where there a shortage of good supermarkets. He talked about the plans recently with The New York Times. He and a business partner have already opened Sterling Express in the city where Treme is taped.

Harry Shearer says his "head exploded" 20 months ago. That's when he heard President Barack Obama, during a town hall meeting in New Orleans, refer to the flooding of the city after Hurricane Katrina as "a natural disaster. " The comedian, actor, radio host and writer, widely known as a co-creator of the mock-documentary "This is Spinal Tap" and a voice actor for "The Simpsons," channeled his outrage into his first real documentary, "The Big Uneasy. " This lucid, civilized but merciless expose debunks every myth surrounding the near-ruination of New Orleans in 2005.

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? Everyone, it seems, has fond memories of visiting this delightful city, now so sadly ravaged by Katrina. Share your New Orleans experiences with us for a coming story: Did you catch beads at Mardi Gras? Dance to the Neville Brothers at Tipitina's? Follow a night of Bourbon Street revelry with warm beignets at Cafe du Monde? Send your memories by Tuesday to sun.features @baltsun.com, with "New Orleans" in the subject line. Please include a daytime phone number where you can be reached.

THE PHYSICAL devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina has painfully revealed the moral devastation of our times that has led to mass looting in New Orleans, assaults on people in shelters, the raping of girls and shots being fired at helicopters that are trying to rescue people. Fear, grief, desperation or despair would be understandable in people whose lives have been devastated by events beyond their control. Regret might be understandable among those who were warned to evacuate before the hurricane hit but who chose to stay.

The Very Rev. Matthew J. O'Rourke, a Josephite priest and former superior general of his Roman Catholic religious order, died of congestive heart failure March 9 at St. Joseph Manor in North Baltimore. He was 93. Born in the Bronx, N.Y., he earned a bachelor's degree at Manhattan College and a master's degree from Loyola University in New Orleans. He was ordained a priest in 1947. In 1951, he helped found New Orleans' St. Augustine High School, a predominantly African-American institution.

A month from now, editors will be converging on New Orleans for the sixteenth national conference of the American Copy Editors Society . If you have been before, you know what to expect. But if this conference is your first, let me offer some advice. As alluring as the fleshpots of New Orleans may be, you can expect that most of your colleagues will conform to the dorkish stereotype of our craft and actually attend the sessions . This doesn't mean that you should forgo cafe au lait and beignets at the Cafe du Monde, but you should study the schedule carefully to see what sessions most interest you, and check out the buzz when you arrive.

He played a hardnosed detective on HBO's The Wire, a trombonist on Treme and soon Wendell Pierce will be a grocery store owner. The actor who has a made a career starring in David Simon's popular television series plans to open Sterling Farms grocery stores in low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans, where there a shortage of good supermarkets. He talked about the plans recently with The New York Times. He and a business partner have already opened Sterling Express in the city where Treme is taped.

The Associated Press NFL All-Pro teams were announced Friday, and three Ravens players were named to the first team: outside linebacker Terrell Suggs, defensive tackle Haloti Ngata and fullback Vonta Leach. Suggs led the Ravens with 14 sacks in 2011, and his seven forced fumbles are a Ravens single-season record. Ngata had a career-high 64 tackles, recorded five sacks and forced two fumbles during the regular season. Leach paved the way for Ray Rice, who set career highs in rushing yards (1,364)

Fatherhood had kept Dana Sohr from service work. It also brought him back to it. Sohr's youngest son had come home from his first religious education class at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Columbia in September 2006 and told his father about a service project the students wanted to do in New Orleans. “It just kind of struck me,” Sohr recalled more than five years later. “I said, 'I'd like to help you do that.' ” Sohr was among nearly 30 parents and high school students who went to a city still ravaged and reeling from Hurricane Katrina.

The dish: New Orleans-style Muffuletta ($9.25) You can satisfy a hankering for a muffuletta sandwich at Larry's 1332, a small, recently opened shop on Sulphur Spring Road in Arbutus, but not if the hankering demands the sandwich be made with a muffuletta round. Larry's uses Italian bread. It's fresh and spongy with a yeasty bite: A fine loaf in keeping with muffuletta origins — but it might not be the sandwich you had in mind. If you can make it over the bread hump, you're in for a nice ride.

Stuart L. Buchwald, a former Baltimore professional prestidigitator who performed under the name of "Stuartini the Magnificent," died Oct. 21 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cancer at his home in Hollywood, Fla. He was 67. Mr. Buchwald was born in Baltimore and raised in Forest Park. After graduating in 1962 from City College, he earned a degree in psychology in 1966 from the University of Baltimore. "Stuart and I have been friends since we were 9 years old. He lived at 4021 Cold Spring Lane, and when my family moved into a home around the corner on Garrison Boulevard, he was the first friend I made, and we've stayed friends for 57 years," said Stuart J. Snyder, a Baltimore lawyer.