Ring

If you miss Jose Canseco - and, really, who doesn't at this point? - for the small fee of $9.99 and airfare to Los Angeles, you can compete for a chance to spend a dream day with Jose and possibly win one of his prized baseball possessions. Even better, the whole thing will be captured by camera crews for a new reality show starring Jose and the handful of fans who come up with the most imaginative and outrageous ideas for their day with the Prince of Performance Enhancement. My first reaction to this was that Jose had reached a pathetic new low, which is no small task.

It was an interruption to his nap at a New York hotel that Nigerian-born boxer Emmanuel Nwodo gladly accepted. Not that he didn't need the sleep. In the past year, he had grown tired of traveling between Sudan, where he now lives, and the United States, preparing for fights that weren't in the foreseeable future. Frustration had set in because Nwodo, 33, had spent nearly a year "resting," unable to find opponents. Finally, on Wednesday afternoon in the middle of a nap, there was a chance to talk about his return to the ring tonight on national television.

Baltimore County police are searching for a man accused of stealing a diamond ring valued at $20,000 from a Parkville jewelry store, authorities said yesterday. At 6 p.m. Jan. 11, a man entered Charles Nusinov & Sons Jewelers in the 8700 block of Satyr Hill Road and asked to view the $20,000 ring, county police said. The man had entered the store the previous day, expressing interest in jewelry, a police report shows. Soon after the man was handed the ring, police said he fled the store.

When Washington National Opera decided to tackle its first-ever staging of Richard Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung, an awesome rite of passage for any opera company, it set out to give the epic fresh context. And that's what it got from director Francesca Zambello. Dubbed "the American Ring," her version substitutes this country's myths and iconography for the original Norse/German ones in this tale of gods, heroes, contracts and loyalties. If you go Die Walkure will be performed at 1 p.m. tomorrow and 6 p.m. April 5, 9, 14 and 17 at the Kennedy Center in Washington.

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. -- On April 11, 1995, little-known heavyweight Oleg Maskaev was looking woefully unimpressive in an eight-round decision.It was "the beginning," the Russian-born Maskaev said of the victory over no-name Mike Whitfield at Glen Burnie's Michael's Eighth Avenue, his third win in as many professional fights.Four years later, Maskaev is ranked No. 4 by the World Boxing Association and facing lucrative opportunities as a fighter.The latest reason for Maskaev's rise is the fall of another, Baltimore's Hasim Rahman, who thought himself "the heir apparent" to the title of boxing's best young heavyweight but learned otherwise in a bout Saturday night at Boardwalk Convention Hall at Bally's Park Place.

Emil Baku recently received certification as a masseur. He plans on giving his future clients' bodies tender love and care.But the 27-year-old native of Azerbaijan, who now makes Baltimore his home, takes a much different approach in his second vocation as a boxer. In the ring, he tries to systematically break down his opponent's body until he can no longer stand the punishment.This dichotomy is not lost on Baku, who has performed his job as a junior middleweight in a highly professional manner, winning all 14 of his fights, including 11 knockouts going into tonight's bout vs. Darryl Lattimore of Washington at Martin's West in Woodlawn.

The Senate does not care what happens to the country so long as the Senate does not seem unseemly.Poor Don is still lecturing poor Kurt on how to be mayor. It's too late.The Super Bowl pits Broncos against Falcons, which has a better ring than PSINets against MCIs.Q. What do you get by merging a Ford with a Volvo? A. A lot of boxy curves in the body.Pub Date: 1/29/99

MY FIRST VISIT to Jeepers!, a chain indoor amusement center and fast-food restaurant for kids, was brief but highly entertaining -- and not because of anything that required electricity or a microchip. It was a cunning and energetic boy of about 11, roughly the size of a junior college linebacker, who provided all the thrills.I didn't get the kid's name. For the sake of this story, I'll call him Pluto.More on Pluto in a minute. First, the scene:Sometime when we weren't looking, the old bowling alley on Perring Parkway became Jeepers!

(Editor's note: If you are a 35-year-old Baltimore woman who has been dating a guy for about three months, and you really, really like surprises, maybe you shouldn't read any further.)He's in Lakein's Jewelers on Harford Road when it opens at 9: 30 a.m. on the penultimate day of the Christmas shopping season, so he's not the last-minute, last-minute shopper, just a guy who found out the day before that he has a little more money than he expected at year's end.He had two choices: A large-screen television or a small diamond.

NEW YORK -- A few years ago, Evander Holyfield joined his brother, Bernard, in writing a book entitled, "The Humble Warrior," describing how a boy rose from the ghetto in Atlanta to become a heavyweight champion with untold wealth, but still known to the public for his true grit and grace in and out of the ring.That's why it seemed totally out of character for Holyfield to predict he would knock out Lennox Lewis in three rounds in their fight for the undisputed heavyweight title at Madison Square Garden tonight.

The first ever mixed martial arts bout in Maryland began Saturday night with a roar from the crowd and a flying kick to the chest. The kick was delivered by Steven Baker, a 145-pound fighter from Wilmington, Del., and it was witnessed by more than 5,000 people at 1st Mariner Arena. They snarled with appreciation, many of them having waited hours, and in some respects years, for this moment. And while Baker ultimately wasn't successful - he tapped out just 1 minute, 45 seconds into the bout when his opponent, Jim Hettes from Scranton, Pa., got him in a choke hold - the first MMA event in Maryland did seem like a success.

This was at training camp 2008, in the conference room at the Best Western Hotel in Westminster, the place so quiet you could hear hearts beat. O.J. Brigance stood in front of the Ravens with a body ravaged by Lou Gehrig's disease and told them in essence: Don't look at me any differently. Don't feel sorry for me. I'm still here. I'm still one of you. He told ESPN's "Outside the Lines" program that he gave the speech for one simple reason. "They were going to have one of the toughest jobs in the league," he said of the Ravens.

He was the smallest offensive tackle of his day, and maybe the smartest. It wasn't size but savvy that made Bob Vogel one of football's top linemen and a pillar of the Baltimore Colts' storied front wall. Vogel, the team's top draft choice in 1963, spent the next decade taming sack packs and clearing paths for Colts' runners despite a 240-pound frame that even then was underwhelming. "I wasn't one of those guys who could lift the stadium," said Vogel, who attended Ohio State. "I was purely a technician.

The father of a 24-year-old woman who was stabbed to death in a Catonsville liquor store nine months ago is furious that her killer has been declared not criminally responsible for his act - Maryland's equivalent of an insanity defense. Mike Ring, whose daughter, Aysha D. Ring, was killed in the attack, told a Baltimore Circuit Court judge last week that the assailant, David A. Briggs, pretended to be mentally ill after the killing, a "ruse of mental incapacitation" designed to deceive the criminal-justice system and avoid its worst penalties.

Less than a year ago, a beautiful and wonderful citizen by all accounts, Aysha Ring, was viciously murdered by David Briggs - stabbed to death while standing in line at a convenience store. The perpetrator has been found not criminally responsible and is committed to the Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center in Jessup. He will serve no jail time and will be re-evaluated in a year for possible release, although prosecutor S. Ann Brobst told this writer that her office will ensure that does not occur.

A Naval Academy midshipman was sentenced to 15 months of confinement Tuesday for theft and conduct unbecoming an officer. Julia Kaelberer, 23, a fourth-year Mid from Rialto, Calif., admitted stealing a class ring sample from a display in October 2007. Her thefts culminated in what her lawyers described as a stealing spree Dec. 6, when most of her classmates were in Philadelphia for the Army-Navy football game. The stolen items included a BlackBerry, video game consoles, a class ring and a "Go Navy, Beat Army" quilt.

Kurt Kroncke in Federal Hill has been reading about orbital collisions: "Will all the space junk orbiting planet Earth eventually form a ring around our planet?" It already has. Communications satellites and others, working and defunct, already form a ring 22,236 miles above the equator, orbiting once a day. Track them in real time at a way-cool NASA site. Google: "3D JTrack"

DAVID S. PHELPS, 79 Noted archaeologist David S. Phelps, the archaeologist who unearthed a 16th-century gold signet ring while exploring ties between native people and the doomed English colonists who first tried to settle the Outer Banks of what is now North Carolina, died Feb. 21 in Fort Pierce, Fla., the Virginian-Pilot reported. The ring proved to have no apparent link to the 1587 English colony that vanished from Roanoke Island, but it was the first evidence that Sir Walter Raleigh's explorers had contacts with the Indians.

Guys keep trying to come up with ever-more-memorable ways to propose marriage, and sometimes that becomes a problem. They pop the question in hot-air balloons at sunset or while riding giant roller coasters, which I never understood. Do you want to marry the woman or have her hurl in your lap? Or they rent highway billboards to propose, or do it via stadium Jumbotron screens or banners towed by planes at the beach. I heard of a guy who proposed to his girlfriend at a Phillips restaurant in Ocean City a few summers ago. OK, that sounds romantic enough, if a little tame.

Boy gets wedding ring. Boy loses wedding ring. Fishing buddy finds wedding ring. Happy ending. In early August, a fisherman from Bowleys Quarters we'll call "Paul Shelton" and his new bride, "Meredith," joined another couple for drinks at Red Eye's Dock Bar, the longtime Kent Island establishment and home of the never-ending bikini contest. After enduring some friendly kidding about not being allowed to watch anymore, Paul jokingly took off his ring and then put it back on. Meredith asked what was so funny, so Paul showed her. And with that, a bar patron bumped his arm and the ring rolled across the deck, between two planks and into the water below.