Squeeze

Kyle Durrie had established a decent living, handcrafting and printing wedding invitations, but truth be told, she was at the end of her creative rope. As in the cowboy songs she loves, the open road called to the resident of Portland, Ore. The life of a vagabond, however, didn't seem to jibe with that of a craft printer, whose equipment doesn't fit into a knapsack. Flying by the seat of her pants, Durrie dreamed up a way to squeeze her studio into the back of a 29-year-old van. Instead of feeding the wedding industry, she decided, she'd drive the country, spreading the gospel of letterpress printing at art shops, schools and flea markets.

On a night when the league's most dominant hurler was trying to put an exclamation point on the best season for a pitcher in two decades and on a night when a likely Hall of Famer made international baseball history, the Orioles' 6-5 victory over the Detroit Tigers came down to two unheralded rookies who combine to weigh about as much as one NFL lineman. Matt Angle and Kyle Hudson couldn't have come up much bigger, however, Saturday night before a sellout crowd at Comerica Park that was hoping to witness Justin Verlander become the first pitcher since the Oakland Athletics' Bob Welch in 1990 to win 25 or more games.

The Greek parliament approved a $113 billion austerity package that had been demanded by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund as a condition for receiving a $17 billion installment of the $160 billion "bailout" package negotiated last year. This cash infusion will allow Greece to avoid defaulting on debt obligations due in July and August. This is a precursor to negotiations on a new "bailout" package that must be created to prevent Greece from defaulting on its debt over the next five years.

Gas prices have subsided a bit, but fuel can still eat up a big part of your budget. Jack Gillis, author of The Car Book, offers some ways to trim gas bills. Among them: —    Use a gentle foot on the gas pedal. By not accelerating and decelerating like a jack rabbit, you can save 68 cents per gallon. Similarly, for every 5 miles per hour your reduce your highway speed, you reduce fuel consumption by 7 percent. Dropping from 70 mph to 65 mph will save 27 cents a gallon.

Over the last few months, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has exempted a long list of unions and employers from an Affordable Care Act provision that would have made it too costly for them to continue some of their health care insurance plans. But, in sharp contrast, HHS apparently doesn't intend to do anything at all about a new health reform mandate that could eventually force hundreds of badly needed U.S. hospitals to shut their doors. Many of these hospitals are already struggling to make ends meet because Medicare only reimburses them for 90 percent of what it costs them to take care of Medicare patients.

NASCAR continues to feel the economic pinch, not only because of a significant dip in television ratings. ESPN reported this week that NASCAR Hall of Fame officials are looking to cut between $2.5 million and $3 million in annual expenses to balance the budget. The budget problems are based on a large overestimation of attendance during the bidding process and a shortfall of sponsors. The original first-year attendance estimate was 800,000 for the NASCAR Hall in Charlotte.

The Federal Trade Commission's complaint against the maker of Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice was certainly worth headlines. The regulators have accused Pom Wonderful LLC of making unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of its beverage, which it advertised as a panacea for heart disease, prostate cancer and erectile dysfunction, among other ailments. According to the FTC, most of the research the company cited did not follow standard scientific method or back up the advertised health claims.

Adam Jones had seen and sweated enough. The Orioles had stranded 12 base runners and managed just one run over the previous eight innings, and that was on a bases-loaded walk, and Jones decided to do something about it. So he ... bunted. Jones' two-out bunt base hit in the bottom of the 11th inning scored Nick Markakis from third and sent the Orioles to a 5-4 victory over the Seattle Mariners in front of an announced 12,375 at sultry Camden Yards. "Yeah, we've been working on that," Orioles manager Buck Showalter joked.

Mass transit systems need to be as cost-effective as possible; there's never been much doubt about that. But to make cost-effectiveness the primary criterion by which any proposed new bus and rail systems are judged is a short-sighted and perhaps even costly mistake. That error - committed by the transit-averse administration of President George W. Bush - was rectified last week. U.S. Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood announced that the federal government is going back to a policy of looking at a broad range of factors, including a start-up project's impact on economic development, the environment and land use, when deciding whether it should be funded.