Rare

This year's Extreme Rules pay-per-view event left us with some unanswered questions but also some new beginnings. In the main event (a rare moment in WWE history where all wrestlers in a final match on PPV weren't on a full-time WWE schedule), Brock Lesnar defeated Triple H in a cage match. Lesnar went up 2-1 on "The Game" and is likely poised for another future match in WWE (not against Triple H), perhaps at Summerslam or Wrestlemania 30. Questions coming out of this match are: will Triple H wrestle again?

It's a dream Ida Heck never really expected to come true. Her family has raised about $1 million since 2005 for research into the rare disorder that afflicts her 8-year-old daughter, Jenna, resulting in cognitive deficits, seizures, long-lasting migraines, glaucoma in one eye and a red birthmark on the right side of her face. She's been driven by a fervent hope that the money would help finance a breakthrough. Yet she had her doubts: "So often you give and give and give and never hear of any findings.

RYE, N.Y. -- A wood sandpiper in the marshes here coaxed Bill Tucker from bed at 5:30 a.m. one Saturday earlier this month to drive all the way from Washington. Keep in mind that this is someone who has already seen 2,500 birds, including the wood sandpiper."I've seen it before, but I haven't seen it this week," explained Mr. Tucker, his eyes trained on the long grasses where the sandpiper was probably hiding at high tide. "This is a very, very rare bird," he said.Rare, indeed. The wood sandpiper, which breeds in Scandinavia and northern Russia and winters in southern Africa and Australia, has not been seen in North America outside Alaska since 1907.

A freeze watch is in effect for Carroll County overnight Monday into Tuesday, something known to happen this late in May only once in more than every 10 years. Temperatures are expected to drop to the lower 30s there early Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service. That could pose a risk of killing crops or gardens. Further south and east in Baltimore, Harford and Howard counties, temperatures could reach the mid-30s overnight. Lows in Baltimore are expected in the upper 30s. According to the University of Maryland Extension, the last spring temperature of 32 degrees or below occurs on or after May 4 in 10 percent of years in Westminster.

The multiple-pitcher no-hitter certainly is a strange creature. The Orioles barely celebrated after their four-pitcher job Saturday at the Oakland Coliseum. A number of fans left before the final inning, bored. Yet what occurred was a baseball version of finding a million dollars lying in the street. A total freak.It was only the sixth time in major-league history that two or more pitchers had combined on a no-hitter. Six times in more than a century -- baseball happenstance just doesn't get much rarer than that.

IMAGINE if you had only eaten oatmeal and stumbled upon a four-star restaurant; if you thought people could only talk and then chanced to hear a great choir.Would you even be able fully to appreciate such a meal or a concert? Would you perhaps think such things abnormal, unnatural?Something like this happened last month when I found the magic forest during a kayak trip with friends along the upper, wooded reaches of an Eastern Shore river.It was purest chance we stopped for a break where we did, a tiny natural landing next to a huge bald cypress, one of many lining the stream.

Maryland's Department of Natural Resources has completed a statewide review of the state's rare species and is proposing to revise the Threatened and Endangered Species list.Several years ago, in concert with the Chesapeake Bay protection effort, DNR reviewed the rare plants, animals and habitats of Maryland's tidewater counties. As a result of that review, in 1987 the Threatened and Endangered Species list was expanded from 33 species to a total of 342 species.Now, the rare species of Central and Western Maryland have been reviewed, and the department is proposing to add an 281 species, including the northern goshawk, the barking treefrog and the early coralroot orchid, to the list.

Their words emerge as slurred whispers. They often lose their balance and fall backward, grabbing for towel fixtures and smashing into walls. Their faces freeze in anguished expressions. Their eye muscles are so weak that they can't look down. One patient, Bill Scruggs, can't even see his grandchildren playing near his feet. They, in turn, shy away from him.The collective symptoms are so distinctive that diagnosis would seem easy. But this neurodegenerative disease, progressive supranuclear palsy, or PSP, is rare.

An anxious woman was wandering near my house looking for her cat."It's a Somali cat," she said. "Very rare. Long ears."Never found the cat, but maybe I found something else: a new snobbery. Rare Somali cats.Somalia? I've been there, but don't recall ever seeing one of those fine cats. But those were difficult times, and maybe all the cats were eaten. That could be why they're so rare.Some people collect snobberies, make lists of them the way bird-watchers do with birds. Aldous Huxley, the late English writer, was one such.

Michaela Odone, 61, whose efforts to develop a treatment for her son's rare disease inspired the movie "Lorenzo's Oil," died of lung cancer Saturday at her home in Fairfax, Va. She and her husband, Augusto, had no medical training but helped develop a combination of olive and rapeseed oils that they used to treat their son Lorenzo's rare degenerative brain disease, adrenoleukodystrophy.

After more than 100 pitches, the fastball had lost some steam and the breaking ball that baffled batters earlier in the game didn't have the same snap. South River senior pitcher Scott Mitchell, his dirty jersey showing the effects of an already demanding day, took a deep breath as pitching coach Gary Gubbings approached the mound for a second visit in the seventh inning. "Can you get this last guy out?" Gubbings asked as he looked the No. 5 Seahawks' ace in the eyes. Mitchell's response was quick and direct: "I got him. " With two runners on against No. 10 Severna Park in an Anne Arundel County matchup, Mitchell threw a high fastball that Falcons second baseman Danny Fulton swung through for the third strike to end the Seahawks' 2-1 win in early April.

When his first Kentucky Derby horse, Orb, was named the favorite Wednesday, Stuart S. Janney the III was not there to raise his hands triumphantly for the cameras. He won't be in Louisville at all in the days leading to the race. A short phone call with his trainer each day is all the northern Baltimore County resident requires. The rest, he'd rather avoid. "There's a lot of silliness that happens this week," he said Monday. "And I've got paperwork to catch up on. " Janney is instead in New York, where he spends much of his time at the 5th Avenue headquarters of the Bessemer Trust, the wealth management firm of which he is the chairman.

Joseph A. Miklasz, a trial attorney who practiced in Glen Burnie and was a wine collector, died of cancer Sunday at Stella Maris Hospice. He was 71 and lived in Crownsville. Born in Baltimore, he was raised in Severn and in East Baltimore, where he lived with an aunt on Gough Street. His father, Joseph Miklasz, owned a combined grocery store, post office and filling station in Severn. His mother, Marie "Mamie" Miklasz, ran the operation. After attending St. Michael's School in Butchers Hill, he was a 1960 graduate of Mount St. Joseph High School, where he wrestled.

When the General Assembly created a commission to study Maryland's campaign finance laws two years ago it was difficult to tell whether the effort would lead to much. Certainly, the need for reform was there, but even given how Democrats have been decrying the Supreme Court's disastrous Citizens United ruling and the lack of limits on political spending, it wasn't clear how far elected officials in Maryland would go to rein in their own fundraising. Fortunately, advocates for reform had an ace in the hole: Maryland's current limits on campaign contributions - both to individual candidates and to all campaigns during any four-year election cycle - hadn't been raised in two decades.

Leading a tour of the Soldiers Delight area of western Baltimore County on Sunday afternoon, Paula Becker, an ecologist with Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, was pleased to report the first blooming of serpentine chickweed - a plant as rare as it is splashy in spring. And while that might not constitute earth-shattering news, it is certainly reassuring to those monitoring the health of the plant. Serpentine chickweed grows in the shallow serpentine soil of the strange, hilly grasslands of the Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, at 2,000 acres the largest remaining ecosystem of its kind in the country.

How could it be that even a single U.S. senator - no matter how opposed to gun control - could vote to hold up consideration of a proposal to require background checks for gun purchases? This is an idea not only embraced by something in the order of 91 percent of the American public but 85 percent of National Rifle Association members. Yet, there it was. Thirty-one senators voted against allowing the Senate to debate the background check proposal this morning. That was a victory, of sorts, as some senators had threatened to filibuster the procedural vote.

Michael Sragow rates Michael Clayton an A, calling it a "scintillating and rare pop-culture creation, a thriller about character." What's your take on George Clooney's star turn as an attorney handling dirty work for a corporate firm? Join the discussion this weekend at baltimoresun.com/criticalmass.

Tonight at 7:30, the Maryland Film Festival offers a rare movie going experience at the Charles Theatre, 1711 N. Charles St. San Francisco's Beth Custer Ensemble performs its new score for My Grandmother, a rarely seen, an archic 65-minute Russian movie that makes fun of the Soviet bureaucracy. Tickets are $8 to $10. Call the Maryland Film Festival office at 410-752-8083 for more details.

Author George Saunders is having the kind of year that could lead the former roofer and slaughterhouse worker to imagine that someone is spritzing the air around him with a giant bottle of perfume. "The way things have been going recently, it's as if I had a personal sprayer walking behind me and making sure that the world always smells sweet," says the New York-based writer, who will visit Baltimore on April 13 to headline the 10th annual CityLit Festival. With the publication in January of his new book, "Tenth of December," Saunders, 54, a professor at Syracuse University, has been receiving the kind of attention seldom given to short-story writers - even those who, like him, received a 2006 MacArthur "genius" grant.

Baltimore County Council members took heat again last week over their use of taxpayer-funded cars, a rare perk among local councils in the Baltimore area. At a meeting in Towson, county resident Mary Locke said she was surprised to learn that Councilman Todd Huff was behind the wheel of a county-issued, "gas guzzling" Jeep Grand Cherokee last month when he was arrested on drunken-driving charges. She questioned whether the county is doing enough to ensure that the vehicles aren't misused.