Partners

Thank God for Joan and Don. Without their lunchtime escape from the office, replete with witty, sexy banter, this episode, the worst of the season, would have been pointless. Nothing else quite worked here, in what clearly was a transitional throwaway leading up to the final few episodes this season. I, for one, do not care about Lane's financial issues (though, surely him forging Don's signature on a check to pay debts will come back to bite him). Anything involving Harry is sort of blah, even though his subplot this week brought back and old friend, Paul Kinsey, who has, ahem, gone through some changes.

Baltimore city students will have a plethora of options for education and recreation this summer, under a new partnership between city agencies and school system that will expand the scope and length of programming for city youth. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blakeand City schools CEO Andres Alonso announced Wednesday that with the help of non-profit and philanthropic communities, the city's recreation efforts will converge with the system's summer learning initiatives to create a unique structure of a full-day of summer programming.

When Jim Biggs returns the title of president to Wayne Biasetti next year, there will be no ceremony or handing over of the company car keys at Enforcer Products Inc."There is no Mercedes," laughs Biggs, who also serves as vice president of sales and marketing for the Cartersville, Ga., firm. "Wayne and I drive identical Chevy trucks. He's got a white one and I've got a gray one."Biasetti, who founded the growing pesticide and home products company in 1977, decided that sharing power as well as stock with his partners was the best way to keep them happy and productive.

Online education is a hot trend at the moment. But within that trend, there's an increasingly hotter sub-trend: online music education. Baltimore's Connections Academy , one of the bigger players in online K-12 education in the country, today announced that it's partnering with the Juilliard School in New York City to deliver online music education to pre-college students beginning this fall. The program is called Juilliard E-Learning. [My observation: This is a heckuva smart move by Juilliard, to extend its brand online to youngsters in K-12.

Colliers International, a commercial real estate firm headquartered in Columbia, named partners Matthew Haas, SIOR, and Kevin Haus managing directors and principals. Haas and Haus specialize in leasing and selling office and flex real estate throughout the Baltimore region. Haas, of Stevenson, previously was vice president of Manekin LLC after serving as president of Haas Tailoring Company, his family business. CoStar recognized Haas as Power Broker of the Year for four straight years, and the Baltimore Business Journal recognized him among the Top 25 Real Estate Brokers in Baltimore for seven years.

Since at least August, some concertgoers have been traveling to Merriweather Post Pavilion by way of the party bus company Rock & Bus. Today the concert venue formally announced a partnership. Rock & Bus, which also offers "luxury tailgate travel" to Madison Square Garden in New York and M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore, will be the venue's official shuttle service. Tickets for an upcoming round trip, say, to see Incubus, cost $40. The buses have pick-up stops in Maryland, Virginia and the District.

After a brief hiatus, the Hollywood Diner is back in business — but the city has other plans for the downtown eatery. Baltimore City, which owns the property, has terminated its lease with the Chesapeake Center for Youth Development, the nonprofit organization that has run the diner since 1991. In April, the comptroller's office will issue a request for proposals for a new operator of the property, made famous as a filming location for the Barry Levinson film "Diner. " "It is our goal to obtain an experienced restaurant operator that will provide quality, reasonably priced hot and cold food to the downtown patron," city Comptroller Joan M. Pratt said.

A partnership hoping to buy the bingo license held by a businessman with reputed ties to organized crime figures pledged yesterday to make an honest business out of his Brooklyn Park bingo hall."

Salesmen, a pair of brothers, an unresolved relationship with a father. These may sound like the makings of an Arthur Miller play. But in this case, the play is Paul Bogas' Partners, the final entry in this summer's Baltimore Playwrights Festival. Miller is a tough precedent to follow, but a solid one, and Bogas is definitely on terra firma with this account of Harry and Sammy Waldman, two discontented, middle-aged brothers. For more than a quarter century, Harry has been running his late father's hat store in Brooklyn.

The Baltimore law firm of Weinberg and Green suffered a major defection yesterday as three partners announced they would leave the firm, including the head of Weinberg's banking and commercial law group and the head of its bankruptcy practice.Stanford D. Hess, Deborah Devan and Stanley Neuhauser will join Neuberger, Quinn, Gielen, Rubin & Gibber, a 15-lawyer firm founded in 1989 and populated by lawyers who also left larger firms.Mr. Hess is the second present or former member of Weinberg's five-person executive committee to leave the firm this fall.

The Bryn Mawr School and Gilman School have each agreed to pay $350,000 to Baltimore City to fund traffic-calming and streetscape improvements along Northern Parkway and Roland Avenue, which intersect near the two schools in the Roland Park area. Under the agreement, announced Wednesday, the schools will maintain the improvements that fall in the public right-of-ways on Northern Parkway between Roland Avenue and Boxhill Lane, and on Roland Avenue between Northern Parkway and Cold Spring Lane.

Soccer United to partner with Bohemians; friendly slated for June 5 D.C. United announced a development partnership with the Baltimore Bohemians of the United Soccer Leagues' Premier Development League. A friendly between United's under-23 squad and the Bohemians has been scheduled for June 5 at Bel Air's Cedar Lane Park, the Bohemians' home field. As part of the agreement, the Bohemians will provide United with prospective players who might have the potential to play in Major League Soccer.

Catherine Mahan founded a landscape architecture firm in 1983 on the first floor of a Mount Vernon rowhouse. She had four employees and scraped by at first doing jobs for local architects and designing backyards for homeowners. When she retired from Mahan Rykiel Associates this year, the Baltimore-based firm had 42 employees, an office in Hong Kong and a long list of completed projects in the United States, Portugal, Japan and Mexico. Under Mahan's guidance, the firm has handled many local projects as well: It designed rooftop gardens for Harbor East's high-rise residences and for Mercy Medical Center, created a backdrop for the infinity pool deck at the new Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore, redesigned Center Plaza in downtown's office district, landscaped the light rail line and created the plazas at Oriole Park at Camden Yards . The firm has worked out of the former Stieff Silver building in Hampden since 2001.

Loyola University Maryland is expected to announce Tuesday a partnership with a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm for a startup accelerator that will help students quickly form new companies — one of a handful of such programs recently launched in the Baltimore area. Wasabi Ventures will work with the university to attract and mentor students into the accelerator program. The venture firm will provide professional staff to manage the program, oversee funding for new companies, and offer internships.

The founder of a payment processing firm in Rockville has filed a $300 million lawsuit against Baltimore-based private equity firm Sterling Partners, alleging that he was fraudulently induced into selling SecureNet Payment Systems. The lawsuit, filed last week in Baltimore City Circuit Court, alleges that SecureNet's founder and chief executive, Marc Potash, was duped into selling a 52 percent interest of his company to Sterling Partners for $56 million in September 2010. The lawsuit says the deal stipulated that Potash was to remain CEO and have day-to-day control but was wrongly fired a year later and was unable to collect millions in installment payments.

Students and staff at Prince George's County Public Schools are celebrating National School Breakfast Week March 5 to 9 in partnership with Kellogg's cereal company, to increase nutrition awareness and help a local Feeding America food bank. For each school breakfast purchased by students during the week, Kellogg's will donate a bowl of cereal to a local food bank through its "Eat, Share, Prosper" program. According to school officials, Prince George's County public school serve an average of 170,000 breakfasts each week.

The Baltimore law firm of Piper & Marbury said yesterday that it had hired three partners from Venable, Baetjer & Howard, including the head of that firm's taxation practice.The move represents a minor coup for Piper, which has boasted a strong corporate law section that has not been matched by its tax practice. At the same time, Venable's taxation section, once nationally known, is a fraction of the size it reached in its heyday in the mid-1980s.Venable partner Stephen L. Owen, 40, who chaired Venable's tax practice for several years, joined Piper Wednesday as a partner in that firm's tax section, which is headed by Larry Katz.

In a novel mix of entertainment and law, five partners in a Towson law firm have purchased an AM radio station that will air an eclectic mix of "nostalgia" music and legal and financial advice.The partners, who practice at the firm of Hodes, Ulman, Pessin & Katz, completed on Thursday evening the $675,000 purchase of 1360-AM, whose soon-to-be-changed call letters are now WHLP, according to attorney Michael Hodes."We're probably the first law firm in the country to go out and buy a media source," Mr. Hodes said.

Tryko Partners LLC, a Brick, N.J.-based private equity real estate group, said Tuesday it purchased the 253-unit Park Raven apartments in Baltimore from Continental Realty Corp. The purchase price was not immediately available. With the acquisition, Tryko owns and operates 1,137 apartment units within a three-mile radius. Park Raven, with 55 brick buildings on nearly 20 acres on Ramblewood Road, was built in 1949 and is about 95 percent occupied. The property, near Good Samaritan Hospital and two miles from Belvedere Square, underwent a major renovation in 2006, including updated kitchens and baths.

Patricia T. "Patty" Rouse, who with her late husband, Columbia developer James W. Rouse, co-founded Enterprise Community Partners Inc. and who devoted her life to making sure that decent and affordable housing was accessible to all Americans, died Monday afternoon from complications of Alzheimer's disease and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at Vantage House in Columbia. The Wilde Lake resident was 85. "Patty Rouse was a visionary, who, along with her husband, saw a time when all Americans would have a home they could call their own," Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, a Baltimore Democrat, said in a statement released Tuesday.