Odyssey

What's it like to live in a design laboratory? Local furniture craftsman David Wiesand knows. He created one at his Mount Vernon home, spending years renovating the historic property and trying out a variety of decor and styles. The finished space — he continues to tweak — is featured in the Maryland House and Garden Pilgrimage that begins Sunday in the downtown Baltimore neighborhood. Now in its 74th year, the tour features more than 50 houses, gardens, farms, churches and historic sites throughout Maryland, with proceeds going to support a variety of preservation projects.

"Baseball Superstars 2012" Developer: Gamevil Platofrm: iOS/Android (free) Score: 7/10 There's a saying that baseball is a simple game until you try and explain it to someone who has never played it. With major league teams gearing up for the 2012 campaign, I would like to amend that statement to "baseball is a simple game until you try and explain it to someone through a Korean role-playing game. " That is was Gamevil has done with “Baseball Superstars 2012,” the latest iteration in the popular mobile series.

It's been revealed that the Obama administration named its war against Libya -- Operation Odyssey Dawn -- after a little-known album by English progressive rock band Yes.  But what hasn't been revealed are the names of other album titles seriously considered by Obama's inner circle during the build-up to the attack. Through our well-placed sources at the White House, we present to you the Top 10 Rejected "Operation Odyssey Dawn" Names.  Here we go:  10. C-Murder,  Operation The Truest S--- I Ever Said Why it was considered:  It sounded hard-core.

The West Coast racing odyssey of Maryland-bred mare Mz. Zill Bear continues this weekend when she takes on two champions, Hollywood Wildcat and Flawlessly, for the second time in three weeks at Hollywood Park in Inglewood, Calif.Mz. Zill Bear, who accompanied sixth-place Preakness finisher Blumin Affair to Hollywood Park in May and joined the stable of Hall of Fame trainer Jack Van Berg, starts Sunday in the $300,000 Beverly Hills Handicap at nine furlongs on the turf.It will be the second confrontation with Hollywood Wildcat and Flawlessly, whom she met in the Grade I Gamely Handicap on June 12.Bill Dixon of Annapolis, who along with his wife, Phyllis, owns the horse, said he is amazed that their homebred mare raced so well in that race against such top-caliber horses.

The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina began in February 1992 when the Muslim-dominated government declared independence from the former Yugoslavia and the Bosnian Serbs, supported and armed by Serbia, rebelled. The fight for territorial control has raged ever since, with the outgunned Bosnian government forces and the Muslim population suffering defeat after defeat while the world community struggled unsuccessfully to negotiate peace between the warring parties. Some 200,000 people have been killed or wounded in the conflict; more than a million have been displaced, many of them through so-called "ethnic cleansing" in which Muslim populations have been driven from their homes.

TWO PROUD Hampstead girls have returned from Boulder, Colo., ending an odyssey of invention they started in September. In Boulder, they competed at the Odyssey of the Mind international competition for young innovators. "The competition was like a United Nations with young people," said Lauren Lawson. She and her twin 13-year old sister, Heather, and their friends in seventh and eighth grade had formed a team to build a "Chameleon" vehicle that could change its appearance. The friends are Elizabeth Binette, Autumn Hynson, Sarah Miller, and Alee and Annie Pagnotti.

When I was about 5, I overheard my grandmother telling my mother that "the coloreds" were moving into Baldwin, Long Island, and that a lot of her neighbors were talking about selling their homes. She used that hushed, conspiratorial tone that naturally puts all children within earshot on aural alert. "Some of them just bought a house a block over," she reported. "But they are the loveliest people!" At the time, I was known as "Big Ears" for my ability to home in on anything even mildly controversial, and, more irritating, to repeat it to anyone who expressed the slightest interest.

JUST ABOUT EVERY two weeks for the past 10 years, Peter Fort has driven to the Mount Hope Center in Baltimore to give blood. He has donated blood and blood cells more than 280 times since 1975. Fort, an Owen Brown resident, is a man with three passions: "I am passionate about blood donation, passionate about biking and passionate about my family," he said. Next week, Fort will combine two of his passions by beginning a seven-week bike ride to raise awareness of blood, organ and bone-marrow donation.

Havre de Grace. -- McDonald's, I read recently, feeds 28 million people a day and buys about 16,000 head of cattle every week to make hamburgers. I thought of that the other day as I sent a rickety old cow down the road to the livestock auction, a single half-ton drop in an endless consumer-bound river of meat.My cow probably didn't end up in a Big Mac, but she might have. I'll never know. Like most farmers, I'm at one end of the production pipeline and the consumer is at the other. We never meet, although we both might enjoy doing so. There are just too many people in between.

In the American world of ideas, Norman Podhoretz is a monumental figure, a man known both for the originality of his mind and the prickliness of his personality. Editor of the intellectual dreadnought Commentary for 35 years until 1995, at 69 he is still a dauntless warrior. Today a major conservative force, his voice and influence have been powerful for almost 50 years, moving though a wide but never capricious spectrum that included a long period on the radical left.Now he has produced, in a very personal memoir, a sort of intellectual history of America in the second half of the 20th century.