Obvious

I always thought it would be fun to live in one of those cities where new products are tested. It must be neat to offer opinions about a thing still in development, knowing that someday you might look on, say, an automatic fabric softener dispenser with personal pride - "that fill line, my idea." And whenever I go to a movie preview, I dutifully fill out a little survey card. (I always write, "More dancing!") Anyway, sitting in judgment of someone else's concept is a large part of the fun of going to Punk's Backyard Grill, the lone locally owned restaurant among a dozen or so national chains that ring the Westfield Annapolis Mall.

It was the first thing analysts asked Black & Decker boss Nolan D. Archibald about the Maryland company's sale to The Stanley Works. "Why now?" James C. Lucas of Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia queried during a Tuesday conference call. "What drove this transaction today as opposed to any time in years past?" Archibald had an answer, which I'll get to. But the real answers seem obvious. After one of the longest reigns in history for a Fortune 500 CEO, Archibald is old enough to retire and ready to relinquish power.

Michael Phelps said yesterday that the decision by USA Swimming to suspend him for three months is "fair" and that he'll continue training for future events, even though he remains uncommitted about participating in the 2012 Olympic Games. "It's not my decision. It's theirs," Phelps told the Associated Press about the suspension, the result of a photo in a British tabloid showing him inhaling from a marijuana pipe. The ban will keep him out of several smaller meets but still allow him to compete at U.S. Nationals and the FINA World Championships, both in July.

Super Bowl. Arizona Cardinals. Do those two phrases go together? Yeah, like Paris Hilton and sensible shoes. Hey, people, the owner of this outfit is still Bill Bidwill, the reverse alchemist who can turn gold into lead. Bidwill showed up in one of the largest markets in the country, one hungry for NFL football, and almost immediately his teams were playing to an empty stadium. OK, it's understandable that in 2008 the Cardinals made the postseason and earned their first home playoff game since the Truman administration.

Eden's Lounge is much better known as a nightclub, lounge and all-around posh gathering spot than as a restaurant. In a city where sexy, upscale clubs seem to come and go, Eden's Lounge has maintained. It's an especially beautiful club, too, making wonderful use of an old building's good bones (the Eager House used to be here) with an interlocking series of sumptuously exotic rooms, each offering different levels of cushiness and comfort. It's a club worth dressing up for, and on its Web site, Eden's Lounge tells its customers they had better do just that - "sophisticated and stylish dress a must."

It has been three days now, and the ground hasn't opened under the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., and swallowed up the building. So the selection of Dick Vitale didn't turn out as apocalyptic as one would have thought. Still, Vitale is in the most prestigious of basketball shrines and Jim Phelan is not. Not even Vitale, in his moment of glory on Monday, could understand that. But he believes he can explain it. So can one of his new fellow enshrinees, John Thompson, a coach who, like Vitale, thinks Springfield has an obvious void.

West Chester, Pa. -- One thing certain about Tim Donaghy, the former NBA referee who is at the center of a federal sports gambling investigation, is that he left an impression. Longtime friend Frank Capece, a New Jersey attorney, described Donaghy as a "good, decent guy who, if he had a weakness, it's that he wanted to give his family everything." A neighbor of Donaghy's here, where the referee lived until 2005, developed a far different opinion. "Tim could change in a minute," said Pete Mansueto, who filed a lawsuit against his onetime friend of 15 years in which Donaghy was accused of stalking and harassing Mansueto's family.

Recently, you responded to a writer who had problems with no sound on the computer. Having experienced the same issue, I think you should remind readers that there is also the old-fashioned dial on some computers that can be accidentally turned and will mute the sound. After I'd gone through a series of steps, this was finally pointed out to me, and I felt rather foolish having missed the obvious. But it was a lesson learned. - Ray Silverman I winced when I read your note, because I had quoted the splendid tech support advice of Sherlock Holmes, which was to look for things so obvious that they get overlooked when one has a problem that defies solution.

Tucker Carlson was an obvious out the first week on Dancing With the Stars 3. But Shanna Moakler? It's pretty clear that, at least for now, the voting is all about fan base and not so much the dancing. How else to explain that Jerry Springer's still in it? I think he'll be around for a while, much to the consternation of some of the better competitors.

CHICAGO -- If you take a look at mass media aimed at teenagers, you start to see a pattern. What topic suffuses teenage prime-time dramas? Sex. Movies aimed at high school boys? Violence. Music popular among the SAT-taking crowd? Sex and violence. You've noticed, and the scholars at the medical journal Pediatrics have noticed. They have unveiled two new studies that confirm what we all know: The kids most exposed to sex and violence are the ones most likely to participate in sex and violence.