Saga

CARLISLE, Pa. -- The Tony Casillas saga is getting stranger and stranger.One day after the former Dallas Cowboys defensive lineman returned a $1.2 million signing bonus and was released by the Kansas City Chiefs for refusing to report to training camp, Casillas said he'll play football this fall and would be "stupid" not to want to play football for the Cowboys."

PHILADELPHIA - The year 2003 reminds me of the movie serials I used to watch as a kid at Saturday matinees, where you waited eagerly for the final installment that would tell you how it all came out. In the last 12 months, we've viewed several episodes of Iraq: The U.S. War to Remake the World. But the serial is far from over. The heart of the story - why the lead character, George W. Bush, chose to go to war - remains unclear, since subsequent installments keep revising the reasons. As for how the saga ends, you won't find out until later this year, or way beyond that.

There's something uniquely appealing about the ongoing O. J. Simpson saga, and if you don't believe that, simply check your local newsstand.The proof is stronger than a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and it's pasted across the covers and all over the pages of Newsweek, Time, U.S. News & World Report, People, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, Globe, Star and the National Enquirer.It's an unprecedented story, football great/media personality Simpson charged with murdering his ex-wife and her friend, then fleeing before surrendering to police.

To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, the Howard County Council's long-running redistricting saga should end tonight not with a bang, but a whimper.The last gasp should come in the form of an amendment from Councilman Darrel Drown, R-2nd, who wants the Timberview neighborhood included in his district."

THE uncovering of the world's most famous anonymous source, Deep Throat, sends me into old files I haven't looked at in 30 years. There's Frank Pelz and there's Paul Chester, and there's Turk Scott, too. They were not Richard Nixon, and I would not pretend to be Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. But the files, on old copy paper now frayed around the edges, reminds me how far we have come in newspapers, and how much of it seems frightening. Deep Throat, aka the ex-FBI man W. Mark Felt, transports all of us of a certain age back to Watergate, when the Nixon White House tried to sneak a fast one past Justice while she had her blindfold on. It's probably too much to say that Felt saved the country while hiding in the shadows.

ABOARD THE ISLENDINGUR - The year is 1008. Now that you've braved the Atlantic Ocean to reach a new continent and fathered the first European child on those shores, what are you going to do? I'm going to Gowanus! That scenario does not quite represent the standard history of the Vikings in North America. But the idea of their heading south to Gowanus Bay in Brooklyn seemed quite plausible to Gunnar Marel Eggertsson as he steered a replica of a millennium-old Viking ship into New York City waters recently.

ADVICE TO THOSE who viewed the recent tobacco deal as a settlement in the making and are waiting for the signing ceremony: Consider asbestos and exhale.In 1973, a federal court in Texas held that workers who had been injured by exposure to asbestos could sue asbestos manufacturers to collect compensation for their losses. So began a saga of almost a quarter-century of workers' attempts to recover damages for medical care, disability and other less easily quantifiable losses.Hundreds of thousands of claims would be filed against scores of companies in industries ranging from shipbuilding to oil refining to auto brake manufacturing.

Efforts by lawmakers in Washington to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo failed in the courts and tanked in opinion polls, but intense interest in the Florida woman's saga is expected to force a broader debate in Congress and state legislatures about government's role in sensitive end-of-life issues. As Schiavo entered her 11th day yesterday without the feeding tube that has sustained her for 15 years, a small group of protesters stood in a driving rain outside the White House and prayed for lawmakers to do more now to help prevent her death.

NOW WE know "NCPAC". But who is "MD4BUSH"? That's a remaining mystery in the continuing saga of the rumors about Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley's marriage and the role of a former Ehrlich administration staffer in spreading them. A week ago, Washington Post political reporter Matthew Mosk confronted Joseph F. Steffen Jr., a longtime congressional office worker for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., asking him if he used the name NCPAC - an acronym for National Conservative Political Action Committee - in postings about the rumors on the conservative Web message board www.FreeRepublic.

The worst spill at a Maryland racetrack this year occurred yesterday at the five-eighths pole at Laurel Park.For several minutes, three horses and two jockeys were strewn on the dirt racing strip, resulting in the death of two of the thoroughbreds and a serious injury to jockey Alcibiades Cortez, who was in shock and suffering from a compound fracture to his right leg.Cortez, 34, was airlifted to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where the...