Queen

The Ravens' giant offensive left tackle Bryant McKinnie proved Tuesday that he is the biggest drama queen in the country. Team officials and McKinnie finally agreed on restructuring a new one-year deal still worth about about $3.2 million, but with more incentives. The Ravens were smart in making the move, but they shouldn't have waited until the week before the regular season began to start negotiating. It didn't make much sense, and I hope they don't continue the practice.

Sometimes the Amazon robots get a little wacky with their book recommendations for readers. The bots must get rusty from all of the rain out in Seattle. Read Street reader Eileen O'Brien recently got some weird suggestions for mysteries and thrillers, when the bots listed several books by Baltimore novelist Anne Tyler. Among them: "Breathing Lessons" and "Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. " Maybe the bots confused Tyler's "The Beginner's Goodbye" with Raymond Chandler's "The Long Goodbye," but I'm flummoxed about the others.

Darnestown native Caroline Queen didn't advance beyond the qualifying round in whitewater slalom racing earlier today, knocking out the only American in the field of 21 women kayakers. The 20-year old Queen finished 18.30 seconds off the top mark in her initial run of 117.05. Her second run was significantly slower, as she finished at 136.23 and suffered a pair of two-second penalties for gate touches. She was forced to take the first run as her best time. Fifteen boats advanced onto the next round, leaving Queen, who finished 17th, on the outside looking in from London. 

From her push-up bra to her square-cut bangs, the woman in the photograph is somehow both squeaky-clean and, in a sexual sense, a little bit dirty. Her undergarments are crafted from black lace. She's wearing 7-inch platform heels and an utterly unforced smile. She's bending forward, but not too far. Her arms are held behind her at an awkward angle as if her wrists are bound. When Claire Sharp of Severna Park fished the slide from the pocket of an old suitcase last year, she immediately recognized the subject as Bettie Page, the 1950s pinup queen.

Caroline Queen remembers the feeling she had when she didn't make the U.S. Olympic kayaking team going to Beijing in 2008. She finished behind Heather Corrie, who had grown up in England. "I was pretty [engrossed] in the process," Queen recalled recently. "There was an emotional explosion when it didn't work out. " Queen could be forgiven for such an outburst. She was 16 years old at the time and the youngest woman in the history of the U.S. national team, which she made at age 15 in 2007.

A Westminster man was killed Saturday by a light pole that fell on him on the side of Route 50 in Queen Anne's County after he lost control of his motorcycle on the roadway and it struck the pole, Maryland State Police said. Police believe Philip Jeffrey Merson, 59, was traveling in the left lane of the eastbound roadway shortly after 2:30 p.m. when he lost control of his red and black 2009 Honda motorcycle and swerved to the right, across three lanes and onto the exit ramp for Nesbit Road.

Monsignor James Vincent Hobbs, former rector of the Basilica of the Assumption who during his tenure oversaw a two-year, $32 million restoration of the 200-year-old structure, died Monday of cardiac arrest at his Thurmont home. He was 81. James Vincent Hobbs was born and raised in Thurmont, where his father owned a grocery store and his mother was proprietor of a hardware store. He attended Frederick County public schools as an elementary school student before entering St. Anthony's parochial school in Emmitsburg.

Kayaking Marylanders Parsons, Queen make Olympics Bethesda's Scott Parsons secured a third straight U.S. Olympic team berth in men's kayaking with a dominant victory Saturday at a world cup event in Cardiff, Wales, and Darnestown's Caroline Queen narrowly secured her first Olympic team slot in the women's event, edging longtime friend Ashley Nee , also of Darnestown. Wrapping up a three-step Olympic trials selection process, Parsons topped two other Americans in Wales with his 11th-place finish in 97.62 seconds.

Suddenly, in Britain, of attenuated interest, the Queen's English Society. The organization of crotchet collectors was forty. After the failure of the society's much-ridiculed project for an Academy of English , will waned quickly. The Independent reports that at the society's annual meeting, with an attendance of twenty-two, its chairman, Rhea Williams, announced, "Despite the sending out of a request for nominations for chairman, vice-chairman, administrator, web master, and membership secretary no one came forward to fill any role.

Draw possession and their own patient offense proved equally effective as No. 8 Severna Park held No. 11 Catonsville to its lowest offensive output of the season en route to a 15-10 victory at Franklin in the Class 4A-3A state semifinals. The defending champion Falcons (17-2) advance to the state final for the 13th time and will go after their 11th title Tuesday or Wednesday night at UMBC against the winner of Saturday's semifinal between Westminster and Churchill. The Falcons defeated Westminster, 14-7, in last year's championship.