Nostalgia

New sounds began airing this week at two locations on the AM radio dial.In an unusual lease arrangement, the Christian ministry voice of Towson-based WFEL-AM (1570) can now be heard mornings on WITH-AM (1230).And at WFEL, "Radio Zone . . . The Kids' Stations!" began to be heard this week in intervals of transmitter testing. The Baltimore outlet of Capital Kids Radio Company plans to begin airing its daily schedule of children's fare on Monday. The Kids' Stations carry programs of the nationally syndicated Radio Aahs 24-hour children's network out of Los Angeles, but also air a daily local morning show with host Kenny Curtis.

Look to the city of the future and you're likely to see compact, pedestrian-friendly communities of digital artisans working where they live - in a place that looks a lot more like the villages of the pre-industrial past than it does some mildly modified version of -- postwar suburban-now."

Third in a three-part series. There's no denying that soft-shell crabs are a little weird. They're slimy and slippery when raw. Cooked in a sandwich, their spindly legs and grabby claws poke out from the slices of bread and make some people wonder, "Do you seriously think I'm going to eat that?" And although even some lifelong crab-loving Marylanders believe soft-shell crabs to be a different species than the well-known blue crab, they are in fact the same creature. Soft crabs are simply blue crabs that have recently molted, shedding their hard shells to reveal a paper-thin exoskeleton that hardens within hours.

After Monday night's show, Michelle Chamuel, Sasha Allen, The Swon Brothers, Holly Tucker and Danielle Bradbery all needed your votes. Last night's eliminations were the most pivotal of the season. Why? They reveal the three contestants who will move on to next week's finals. Starting off the live elimination show was a performance by Fall Out Boy, featuring our friend and “The Voice” contestant Michelle Chamuel. The band and Michelle performed “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light Em Up)

If Lana Turner could have been a chair, she might have been the M 154 C from Heywood-Wakefield.Chic, curvaceous and kissed with a touch of Clairol blond, the M 154 C was the embodiment of sleek sophistication for the World War II generation.Born near the end of the Great Depression, hotter than hair cream in the '40s and '50s, and stone-cold dead by the late 1960s, Heywood-Wakefield was as popular in its day as country furniture has been in the last decade. Its streamlined, honey-colored looks were as optimistic as the New Deal, as egalitarian as Eisenhower and as space-age as Sputnik.

Bob Turk is a nice guy. A very nice guy. Everybody says so. "I can't even remember what he reports -- he's just part of the fiber of the city," says Maggie Miceli, 30, a native Baltimorean who currently lives in Washington. "He's been on television as long as I've been alive." Chris Godwin, a 23-year-old security guard from Baltimore, describes Turk this way: "He's just a typical person like you or I." You don't have to take their word for it. Executives at several local stations say surveys consistently show the cheerful Turk -- WJZ's weather forecaster for the past 30 years -- among the most popular people on the city's airwaves.

Cumberland--We've done this before. But the scenic train excursion from Cumberland to Frostburg offers such spectacular fall foliage (not to mention occasional breath- taking mountain vistas) that we decided we just had to do it again.Riding the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad has become an autumn ritual with my family -- just like picking up homemade apple cider and pumpkins at roadside stands, visiting small-town fall festivals and hiking in the Western Maryland woods.Come to think of it, this three-hour excursion through the Allegheny Mountains is kind of like taking a hike -- only a 1916 Baldwin steam engine known as Mountain Thunder does all the work.

B altimore's a-rabs, men who sell fruit from horse-drawn carts, are a charming tradition. But the city's health department was right that it could not ignore the poor conditions in which horses were being kept in the city's largest a-rab stable, which was infested with rats and strewn with trash. The animals, according to the Humane Society, suffered from parasite infestation, malnutrition and extremely overgrown hooves. The question is what happens next: Two years after the city promised to find a permanent home for the a-rabs, does it have any further obligation to help them?

LAUREL -- You might shed a tear or two after reading James H. Lawrence's latest book.Mr. Lawrence is publisher of CPI, a value guide to collector cars, and for most motorists, it reads like a story of missed financial opportunities.Remember that 1964 Impala convertible you let go for $1,200? It might be worth 10 times that much today.And that '65 Mustang ragtop you didn't buy from your brother-in-law because you thought $1,500 was too much money? Well, today it could bring $15,000.And your dad's '48 Buick wood-paneled station wagon?

This time of the year for some reason I get filled with nostalgia like a Jules Verne balloon.I'm like Marcel Proust who smelled a cookie and couldn't stop remembering.Wood fires are my cookie. I remember walking through an old square in my hometown in Romania, late fall 1958, kicking leaves with my feet and feeling as nostalgic as I do now for something I remembered then.I remember sitting on the step of the Santa Maria Maggiore cathedral in Rome in 1965 eating an apple while everything turned to nostalgic gold around me.I sat in a steamy cafe by the Spanish Steps later with a bitter hot espresso looking wistfully on the fashions of the year 1965, miniskirts and polka dots, and feeling so terribly young and alone.