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This feature appears each Monday on the Baltimore Sports Blitz. It's just like “What They're Saying About the Ravens,” but it includes blogger Matt Vensel saying something about what those people are saying. Got it? --- Pete Prisco of CBS Sports believes the Ravens might be better off without injured linebacker Ray Lewis . “Let me start this out by saying I think Ray Lewis is the best middle linebacker ever. But let me also say this, something nobody else will say: The Ravens might be better off without Lewis,” he wrote.

With the Baltimore Orioles in the playoffs for the first time since 1997, it's a good time to review great books on the sport, and the best I've read in years is "The Art of Fielding. " Chad Harbach's first novel is about much, much more than baseball. But the sport -- and a small college player's search for perfection -- is the driving force of the tale. Harbach has a great feel for the nuances of baseball, and even readers who aren't sports fans will come away with an understanding of the physical and psychological demands of the game.

Filmmaker John Waters brought his bad-boy twinkle to a reading from "Lady Chatterley's Lover," a performance to mark Banned Books Week in San Francisco. City Lights Bookstore convinced Waters to record his most dramatic of takes on one of the racier passages from D.H. Lawrence's novel, which was first published in 1928 and considered scandalous in some circles well into the modern era. Heck, some people probably still want to ban it. Waters, sitting sedately at a desk, reads from a part of the book that helped make the title the "Fifty Shades of Grey" of its day. The heroine melts into the arms of a lover, a vividly detailed interlude complete with silky, sloping loins, quivering, thrusting and yes, the word "penis.

Michelle Damareck's 3-year-old daughter has been singing "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider" in Hebrew, and her 5-year-old son has been learning the lessons of the Ten Commandments, thanks to a program that delivers Jewish-themed books and CDs to their home every month, free of charge. The program, called PJ Library, is run by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, based in Massachussetts. Since its creation in 2005, it has delivered more than 3 million books to tens of thousands of Jewish families in 175 communities throughout the United States and Canada, including the Lutherville home of the Damarecks.

Baltimore has been named among a recent group of cities that will receive $40,000 grants to target third-grade reading, a critical point in a child's literacy development that Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has recently partnered with the city school system to target. The grants were announced Monday by Cities of Service, a national, bi-partistan coalition of mayors, who said the funding would enable eight cities to recruit volunteers to implement what is called the Third-Grade Reads Blueprint--an initiative that will recruit well-trained tutors to help student in grades kindergarten to third grade in high-needs schools.  Education researchers have recently emphasized the importance students being able to read by the time they enter fourth grade as a leading indicator to students' academic trajectory.

More than half of the 1,900 city officials and employees required to complete ethics and financial disclosure forms fill out the forms incorrectly or not at all. Those are the findings of a report written by a mayoral fellow this year who reviewed the forms - the first time in at least eight years the forms have gotten a comprehensive examination. "The form was often submitted incomplete, with errors or missing schedules," wrote Olesya K. Vernyi, a city intern whom the ethics board asked to audit the forms.