Paradise

An East Baltimore church was destroyed in an early morning blaze Sunday after a burglar stole sound equipment from the building, according to police. No injuries were reported in the fire and burglary, which occurred shortly after 4 a.m. at the Paradise Christian Center, located in the 3000 block of E. Oliver Street, according to police spokesman Kevin Brown. Brown said the fire started when a burglar attempted to steal the sound equipment, and eventually consumed the entire building.

• PHILLIES: Second baseman Chase Utley (patellar tendinitis) missed another spring training game after getting a cortisone shot in his right knee. The 32-year-old Utley got the shot Friday. He has not appeared in any of the Phillies' eight exhibition games. … Possible starting right fielder Domonic Brown suffered a fractured right hand Saturday and will be out three to six weeks. • MARINERS: Catcher Miguel Olivo strained his groin while running home in an exhibition game.

The aiding and abetting of the pedophile priest and fugitive, Laurence Brett, continued long after his days at Calvert Hall College in Towson, and it wasn't monsignors and bishops who gave him cover. Even in exile in the Caribbean, this old abuser — described by the newspaper that hunted him down as "a predator blessed with charm" — got some help from friends, including at least two other priests, as well as a Maryland businessman and a Baltimore psychologist. Father Larry, as he was known, seduced teenage boys, but he apparently could get grown men to do things for him, too. Mr. Brett, who reportedly died on the island of Martinique on Christmas Eve, merits Top 10 standing among the most notorious American figures in the Catholic Church's gone-global priest-abuse scandal.

The volunteers who run next weekend's annual Smith College Book Sale are determined, patient and love the volumes they offer. They spend a year soliciting, then organizing, the donated books and entire libraries, then stage an annual springtime sales event that serious readers consider their own secret. "We're praying for cold and rain," said Mary Anderson, president of the Smith College Club of Baltimore. "Bad weather brings us our best crowds." For 52 years, Baltimore Smith College Club volunteers have been gathering and selling a yearly haul of about 50,000 used books.

News reports of the horrific flooding on the Portuguese island of Madeira refer to it as a popular tourist destination, and it is -- if you happen to be British or German. It is not so well known here, even among Americans affluent enough to take vacations abroad. In fact, before the scary videos of the mudslides hit television over the weekend, I would bet most Americans had never heard of Madeira, one of the most beautiful places on earth. And I don't make such an assertion because my father was born there, or because my visit to Madeira rekindled some strange, almost haunting bond with the place, as if I'd been there before.

It is possible in this day and age to fly south in December and three hours later land in a city where you can sit comfortably in your T-shirt and linen jacket and eat your dinner at a cafe under palm trees and still enjoy the protections of the U.S. Constitution, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Paradise, in fact. The problem with paradise is that it's temporary: You don't belong here, and the neighbors are nobody you care to know, so it's only blissful for a week or so.

Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 "Trouble in Paradise" series soars on gossamer wings, thanks to the dashing words of screenwriter Samson Raphaelson. The star, Herbert Marshall, asks a waiter, "If Casanova suddenly ... turned out to be Romeo ... having supper with Juliet - who might become Cleopatra. ... How would you start?" The waiter replies, "I would start with cocktails." Marshall, playing a suave con artist, is about to fall in love with an impudent thief, played by Miriam Hopkins.

Middle-class marital strain makes women svelte and focused, men doughy and awkward, and everybody stupid. That's the inadvertent message of "Couples Retreat," which finds it as impossible to locate a laugh in glittering Bora Bora as it was for Operation Enduring Freedom to nail Osama bin Laden in gritty Tora Bora. Some of the finest comic actors of their generation, including Jason Bateman (as a character named Jason), Jon Favreau (Joey) and Vince Vaughn (Dave), go up in tropical-restaurant flames as husbands who vacation with their wives at the Eden resort in French Polynesia, run by Jean Reno's "couple whisperer" Marcel.