Nightmare

LOS ANGELES -- Trembling in shock and smoking a cigarette, Robin Lee Wascher sat in a Los Angeles airport control tower office after guiding two airliners onto the same runway and seeing them collide in a ball of flame."

In a recent letter to the editor, Johns Hopkins professor Stefanie DeLuca recently suggested that many landlords refuse to rent to people with Section 8 housing vouchers because they are unfairly prejudiced against those prospective tenants ("Mossburg misrepresents research on vouchers," May 8). My guess is that Ms. DeLuca has never dealt with Section 8 as a landlord. The prejudice of landlords is directed not against the people but against the nightmare bureaucracy that Section 8 rentals entail.

NEW YORK -- When it was over, the Rangers gave a few lucky fans the shirts off their backs. What they should have done is reimburse them for their tickets. Nobody got his money's worth during the Blueshirts' $61 million nightmare season, which mercifully came to an end yesterday afternoon with a 4-1 loss to the Philadelphia Flyers at Madison Square Garden. The building was half empty for the noon start, and many who showed up were rooting for the Flyers, who edged the Devils for the Eastern Conference title with the victory.

Most likely we all agree that the Boston bombing was cowardly, senseless, dastardly. It cries out for justice. And just about every cop in the universe was on this case, big time. But what about all the drone bombings in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq? Aren't these cowardly and unconstitutional and senseless acts of injustice? Who gives those orders? Who carries them out? Innocent men, women and children are just wiped out in an instant! When will the murderers be brought to a court of law?

I TOLD A psychiatrist at a reception that I had had a nightmare, and he chuckled and wondered if it had been the "didn't-study kind." This is the kind in which a young student arrives in an unfamiliar classroom to discover that he's about to have a final exam for which he has not studied. I told the psychiatrist my nightmare had been more terrifying than that -- not the stuff of mere anxiety and panic, but the stuff of inexplicable attack on a lovely blue-sky day. I had been walking on a horse farm that seemed familiar to me. There were long lines of white four-board fence, and thick, sloping patches of emerald-green clover between the paddocks.

After reading Kevin Thomas' column in The Sun for Howard County on Sept. 25 concerning his nightmare that Ellen Sauerbrey becomes governor of Maryland, I could not sleep until I had an opportunity to respond.Let me begin by stating that an Ellen Sauerbrey administration would certainly not be a nightmare, but rather a breath of fresh air for Maryland. In Ellen Sauerbrey, we finally have a candidate who has the integrity and strength of character needed to bring accountability and responsibility back to state government.

Home security. These are two words that we all should have engraved on our brains, especially in light of the terrifying,Stephen-King-esque nightmare that was experienced recently by Judy and Tom Bondurant of Fredericksburg, Va.I learned about this nightmare via a letter I received from Sarah Moser, an alert 12-year-old neighbor of the Bondurants. Sarah put me in touch with Judy and Tom, who told me their chilling story:It was about 1:30 a.m., and the Bondurants were asleep in their second-floor bedroom.

It was every parent's worst nightmare -- the knowledge that your child has been abducted by a stranger -- but Daniel Saxon is just grateful that the story ended without tragedy.He spent some anxious hours yesterday expecting the worst after he learned his 6-year-old daughter, Lindsay, had been kidnapped from a school playground near their Glen Burnie home.But Saxon's fear turned to relief when police told him that Lindsay escaped from her abductor in Howard County and appeared to be unharmed.

With a name like Every Mother's Nightmare, image can be big problem."We're kind of viewed like some thrash heavy metal metal band -- death metal or something," said guitarist Steve Malone.It's an easy, yet false, assumption to make. The album cover is full of dark features and the band's gothic logo, featuring an angry skull, certainly don't help to sell it as anything even remotely mainstream.But all it takes is one listen to Nightmare's self-titled debut album -- just your basic Southern-influenced hard rock with a couple of power ballads thrown in -- to realize that this is one band that shouldn't be judged by its cover.

NEW YORK -- In a miraculous rescue, two sailing buddies were plucked from the frigid Atlantic Ocean after spending 12 harrowing hours amid 70-knot winds, 40-foot waves and a relentless driving rain that capsized their small sailboat, the Coast Guard says.Clinging to a rubber raft with water seeping in and air leaking out, the two were netted by a merchant ship late Saturday, hours after violent seas claimed their 30-foot vessel.What began as a holiday voyage from New York to the Caribbean turned into a nightmare for the long-time friends and sailing partners, Fareed Suraleigh, 47, of the Bronx, and Herbert Clarity, 67, of Harrison, N.J.The men, both reported in good condition, are expected to arrive in Ireland next week and will fly home with a sea story that would shiver the timbers of hardened seafarer.

Federal health officials warned this week that the nation's hospitals and nursing homes are increasingly at risk from deadly new strains of drug-resistant bacteria that can't be treated with even the strongest antibiotics. So far, the infections have been confined to a small number of the sickest patients in hospital wards, but authorities at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say there is only a "limited window of opportunity" to halt the spread of these "nightmare bacteria" into the wider population.

Satirical examinations of fear, experienced by an accountant-actor and young students confronting the consequences of sin, are on stage this month at Bay Theatre in two works by playwright Christopher Durang. The fears are revealed in Durang's one-act plays, "The Actor's Nightmare" and "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You. " "Sister Mary" won the Obie award for its off-Broadway run from 1981 to 1983, and "Actor's Nightmare" is a zany exploration of growing absurdity.

Please, let me click my heals to find out I am still in Baltimore after all ("Mayor takes a risk," Feb. 12). We city residents have stuck by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake as she promised lots of magical change if we only stay. We waited patiently to see if she really would invest in our neighborhoods - those of us who don't live at the Harbor or in Canton, that is. We gulped when she closed recreation centers at a time when our crime rate is still too high, but we didn't bolt. But now the mayor has proposed a fee for picking up our trash.

There is still much we do not know about Dayvon Green, the University of Maryland, College Park student who police say fatally shot one of his roommates, Stephen Alex Rane, and seriously wounded another outside their off-campus apartment before taking his own life on Tuesday. Mr. Green, a promising graduate engineering student from the Baltimore area, reportedly was under treatment for mental illness, and though the precise nature of his condition has not been confirmed, investigators believe it may have been a factor in this horrible crime.

After hyping it up on Twitter for the past week, rising Baltimore rapper Starrz debuted his new video, as promised, late last night. The clip is for the more-serious "American Nightmare" track from last year's "Best Mixtape Ever" project. The video, which features Baltimore R&B singer Paula Campbell , was shot last week in West Baltimore at ConneXions School for the Arts (2801 N. Dukeland St.) and directed by Todd "Wiz" Dorsey . "American Nightmare," which was produced by J. Oliver , finds Starrz is in storyteller mode, making this track immediately stand out from his well-received mixtape.

AAA Mid-Atlantic says Baltimore's speed camera "nightmare" was one of the transportation lows of 2012, though the driver advocacy group credited a similar program run by the State Highway Administration with helping to improve safety in construction zones. "The troubles with Baltimore's speed camera system have raised the eyebrows of motorists, legislators and traffic safety advocates and have truly called the integrity of the City's entire program into question," AAA spokeswoman Ragina Averella said in a news release Thursday.

I KNOW a lot about bats. It's not as if I'm Merlin D. Tuttle, but I do know more than your average layman about roosting and hibernation, mating and echolocation, the Mexican free-tailed and the naked bulldog, the pipistrelles and the rousettes, the pollinators and the insectivores.Until last year I was afraid of bats, as so many people are, and I couldn't tell a flying fox from a Flying Wallenda. But that was before I was asked to read "America's Neighborhood Bats" aloud. Before Santa Claus got a request for a bat detector.

Kemba's Nightmare," they call it......Kemba is Kemba Smith, winner of the Victim Sweepstakes for 1997. Emerge magazine did a feature story on Smith in May 1996, giving details of her sordid relationship with a crack cocaine dealer. The relationship ended with Smith doing a mandatory minimum of 24 years in federal prison for her involvement in the heel's drug ring.Liberals, whiners and bleeding hearts went into collective apoplexy. Kemba's sentence, they screamed, was an injustice. Her involvement in the drug ring was minimal.

All's well at Cafe Hon , and Chef Gordon Ramsay is very pleased. That was the message of Friday night's "Kitchen Nightmares" on Fox, as Ramsay revisited the Hampden eatery where he was instrumental in tamping down a war that had erupted over owner Denise Whiting's decision to trademark the word "Hon. " After recounting Ramsay's initial visit to the restaurant, in fall 2011, the segment got down to brass tacks. First, he stopped in to see MIX 106.5's JoJo and Reagan, who assured him that, as far as they knew, things were going just fine at Cafe Hon. The food was better, they said, the staff seemed happier -- the first piece portrayed them as primed for a full-scale revolt -- and the community seemed ready to let bygones be bygones, especially once Whiting made good on her promise to let go of the trademark.

Chef Gordon Ramsay, whose visit to Hampden's Cafe Hon in the fall of 2011 helped diffuse the tension from owner Denise Whiting's attempt to trademark the word "Hon," returned to see just how much good his earlier visit accomplished. The "Kitchen Nightmares" episode featuring the return visit airs Friday.   Many area residents and one-time customers -- infuriated over Whiting's attempt to control what they viewed as a unique piece of "Bawlamerese" -- had been boycotting the business and pillorying its owner.