Sensation

Houston -- As they danced on the field and White Sox were piled one on top of another, as though this bowl of a baseball stadium were actually a giant laundry basket, there was one man at the heart of it all. When they surprised the baseball world back in the spring and wowed us all here in the fall, one man stood alone in the middle. And whenever the cameras rolled and the mics were hot, it was always the same man we saw at the center. The most valuable member of this team doesn't swing a bat, he doesn't throw a pitch and he doesn't turn double plays.

Marseille, France-- --Sunsets occur deliciously late at the Provencal seaside. A few weeks ago, after I had relaxed all day by the pool at Sofitel Palm Beach, a swank hotel with an excellent restaurant facing the Mediterranean Sea, the sky was still light when I finally sat down to dinner at 10 p.m. Hardly glancing at the menu, I ordered bouillabaisse, a dish indigenous to this brawny, briny city that combines seafood with onions, fennel, tomatoes, white...

WHENEVER people ask me why I don't have my own ESPN show like every other sportswriter, I tell them, first of all, that ESPN hasn't called. Then I tell them the real reason: I've spent the past five years on the baseball diamond. Instead of using my free time to work on my media exposure, I've used it to work on getting a team of Towson travel baseball players to throw strikes, hit the cutoff man and walk away rather than argue when an umpire blows a call. The time obligation was enough to discourage me from thinking about doing anything else outside of work.

You should see this," he says. "I'm looking out over the Aegean Sea. It's awesome." That's John Taylor, bassist for Duran Duran. He's calling from his hotel suite in Greece, where the band is scheduled to perform later that night. The other members -- lead singer Simon LeBon, keyboardist Nick Rhodes, guitarist Andy Taylor and drummer Roger Taylor (none of the Taylors are related, by the way) -- are unavailable. The view from his window must be captivating. "Marvelous," he whispers. In the past nine months or so, Taylor and his band mates have had little time to sit still.

HAVE YOU EVER walked past someone who had on the wrong perfume for the season? On a hot summer day you said to yourself, "It's too warm out here for her to have on such a strong scent!" Well, if you haven't, maybe that someone is you. The age-old rule, "A stronger fragrance in the winter and a lighter fragrance in the summer," still applies today. Thankfully, fragrance makers have kept the "cool rule" in mind when releasing new summertime scents. Givenchy, a fixture in the fragrance world, has just launched a new summer scent, Very Irresistible, which the company says has an icy and frosty effect, made possible by a clever combination of notes and new technology.

This time of year, it's hard to take a holiday from sugar. Out come the baking sheets, floured and buttered for rich treats in fancy shapes. Up go the candy-covered, frosted gingerbread houses. The sugar cookie is everywhere, topped with even sweeter icing. All of it adds up to a potential season-long nightmare for the millions of people watching their weight, counting carbohydrates or fighting diabetes. Enter two products this fall that mix the no-calorie sweetness of sugar substitutes with real sugar - the stuff that helps cakes rise, turns cookies and muffins golden-brown and keeps them both moist and crisp.

GEORGE SAKKAL, 62, creates an unusual form of collage. Rather than pasting photographs and other images together to form a design, Sakkal goes a step further. He cuts magazine photographs into tiny pieces, so small they are unrecognizable; then he adds the pieces to a white acrylic-coated board using a gel as an adhesive, he said. The tiny images blend together to form landscapes that range from surrealist to serene, almost as if they had been painted. Sakkal started developing the technique in 1962, when he was a student at Texas A&M University, and perfected it during the course of 42 years, he said.

Vaughn Meader, 68, who created a national sensation impersonating President John F. Kennedy on the hit 1962 comedy album The First Family but saw his career come to a virtual end when Kennedy was assassinated a year later, died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease yesterday at his home in Auburn, Maine.

True Sensation beat three other Maryland-bred fillies and mares in yesterday's $75,000 All Brandy Stakes. The race, which was originally scheduled for the turf, was contested in pouring rain and over the muddy main track at Pimlico Race Course. A Queen's Smile, the morning-line favorite, and two others were scratched after the race was switched. River Cruise spurted to the front from her outside post and opened a four-length lead down the backstretch. As GraceBay and Sweep Up slipped farther behind, only jockey Erick Rodriguez and True Sensation had a chance to deny victory from the front-runner.

To 3-year-old Grace, who woke up from a nightmare in the middle of the night recently and climbed into bed with her, Gretchen Wilson is just "Mom." To the rest of the world, though, she's "Redneck Woman," the country singer whose song of the same name shot up the charts so fast that the relative newcomer can now travel in comfort: two tour buses instead of one. It was lunchtime yesterday when Wilson talked on her cell phone from one of those buses, but...