Surface

NORTH EAST -- The day is gray and the wind is cold, but horse trainer-inventor Michael Dickinson has shorts on and his shoes off as he sprints around a half-mile synthetic surface track at his 200-acre Tapeta Farm. "I have 25 years of data in my feet," Dickinson, 57 and a native of England, said at the end of his run. "I can have people come in here with all kinds of scientific instruments for measurements, but no one knows what the resulting numbers mean. I'll take my feet. "I run on the track most days and train my horses on it the next.

The Bay Bridge road surface you might be driving on next summer lies in stacks today in a weedy, open-air storage area on the sprawling Sparrows Point steel mill complex. It is there that a contractor for the Maryland Transportation Authority is fabricating the immense sections of bridge deck that will be put aboard tractor-trailers and barged down to the Bay Bridge, where they will be put together as if pieces in a giant puzzle. The transport operation is expected to begin in the middle of this month.

A WARM winter or a cold one? That's a matter of often-flawed human judgment and memory. While winter in these parts was somewhat late in arriving, it hit with a vengeance of disruptive ice and sleet. Then the thermometer shot up to springtime levels. Then it dropped and rose again.But the average temperature for December-January in Central Maryland was 10 degrees colder than in the same period a year ago, according to the latest Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. bill.The concept of global warming, fed by rising human-caused emissions of "greenhouse gases" such as carbon dioxide, is the latest explanation of weather change.

The demand for a new trial filed last week on behalf of a man wrongfully convicted of murder poses serious questions for Baltimore prosecutors and police: Who failed to disclose key evidence in the case, and how did evidence mysteriously surface four years after the homicide?Detectives blame the state's attorney's office. Prosecutors blame the police. But so far, few answers have been provided about who is responsible for keeping the evidence from Antoine Jerome Pettiford."If ever there was a case which cried out for the mercy of the court, this is the case," Pettiford's attorney, Michelle M. Martz, wrote in the motion for a new trial filed Friday.

BOSTON -- I think of it as being "mommified." After all, the word has such a nice, fusty, Egyptian-tomb sound.This is how it happens. You leave work to have a baby and come back to discover that you've been transformed from a fast-track employee to a mommy. The assumptions have changed, the boss looks at you differently, your career future is suddenly as petrified as the Pharaoh.Or maybe you're a mother being interviewed for a new job. The questions turn, discreetly of course, to child care or your willingness to travel.

IF THERE'S ONE thing this nation needs, it's bigger cars. That's why I'm excited that Ford is coming out with a new mound o' metal that will offer consumers even more total road-squatting mass than the current leader in the humongous-car category, the popular Chevrolet Suburban Subdivision -- the first passenger automobile designed to be, right off the assembly line, visible from the moon.I don't know what the new Ford will be called. Probably something like the "Ford Untamed Wilderness Adventure."

Liberty Reservoir is Maryland's premier freshwater striped bass water. In the past three years, Liberty has produced four state-record striped bass, the latest being a 41-pound, 9-ounce haul on Dec. 23 by John Reedy of Catonsville. Some of the reservoir's regular striper fans, as well as a couple of Department of Natural Resources professionals believe fish weighing more than 60 pounds are waiting to be caught.Striped bass were stocked by Maryland in Liberty and nearby Piney Run reservoirs back in the early 1980s.

Earth's average surface temperature in 1998 is the highest by far since people began to measure it with thermometers in the mid-19th century, the World Meteorological Organization reported yesterday.The United Nations agency said 1998 will be the 20th year in a row that the globe's surface has been warmer than its recent long-term average, which is the average for 1961 through 1990.Seven of the 10 warmest years on record have occurred since 1990 and the other three occurred after 1983. Most recently, new monthly high-temperature records were set in each of the 18 consecutive months ending in October 1998.

I was rumbling around inside one of my larger tackle boxes a couple of evenings back when something made me pull my head out of it's depths and take a hard look at all the lures inside. Not counting individual plastic worms and twistertail trailers, I must admit to using but a handful of bass lures each year.Inside this particular box (we're not even going to acknowledge the others stacked around my workshop area) are lures of different sizes, colors, shapes and materials that can be used on the surface, mid-depth or down deep.

HAMPTON, Ga. -- Until now, everyone knew what to expect at Atlanta Motor Speedway. But this weekend is different. Three men are vying for the Winston Cup Championship on a brand new racing surface at a totally remodeled track at incredibly high speeds in unusually cold temperatures.Yesterday, with temperatures dipping into the 40s, scattered showers forced the postponement of qualifying until this morning. But a short practice session late in the day did nothing to calm the fears about increased racing speeds here.

Mayor Sheila Dixon and Baltimore County Executive James T. Smith Jr. plan to announce tomorrow that they support construction of an east-west light rail line that involves a mix of surface and underground tracks - an alternative that has won the support of Baltimore business leaders. The heads of the two metropolitan governments will urge the Maryland Transit Administration to choose what is known as Alternative 4C as its preferred design for the proposed Red Line from Woodlawn to Bayview.

Though Microsoft has been uncharacteristically tight-lipped about the next version of Windows, tentatively code-named Windows 7, the company recently gave the world a peek at one of its key new features - multitouch technology. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same concept used in Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. Oh, and let's not forget the trackpad gestures featured on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro models. But before rushing to accuse Microsoft of ripping off another Apple idea, I must point out that Microsoft demonstrated multitouch technology last year with its tabletop "Surface" product.

LOUISVILLE, Ky.-- --The pre-race buzz all seems to surround the aptly named Big Brown. The hype has infected everyone, even Churchill Downs' oddsmaker, Mike Battaglia, who essentially admitted that despite the horse's lousy post position, the confidence and bluster from his camp boosted the morning-line odds. Here's what I keep thinking about, though: The brash entourage that surrounds Big Brown's barn didn't know what they had. It wasn't until relatively recently they realized a winning lottery ticket might've blown into their stable.

The Pittsburgh Steelers gave in to their players' wishes and will keep the grass at Heinz Field, though it might not necessarily be the field that is currently in place. While the Heinz Field surface is regularly rated by NFL players as one of the league's worst, a large number of Steelers players lobbied the team to keep the grass because they are convinced it reduces injuries. "The majority of our players have told us that they prefer natural grass to any artificial surface," Steelers president Art Rooney II said in a statement yesterday.

On the surface, a show now playing at the Theatre Project on Preston Street ostensibly shows Baltimore as Baltimoreans see it, and describe it. But the surface is deceiving, because if this were actually a hometown look at the hometown, it would be jokey or earnest or a mixture of both, and it's not - quite. Baltimore: The Opera, which runs through this weekend, really offers a glimpse of Baltimore as outsiders see Baltimoreans seeing it. It's a little bit of a revelation. A theater company called the Squonk Opera came here from Pittsburgh, as it has gone to other cities around the Northeast, and videotaped a few dozen interviews with a variety of people.

NORTH EAST -- The day is gray and the wind is cold, but horse trainer-inventor Michael Dickinson has shorts on and his shoes off as he sprints around a half-mile synthetic surface track at his 200-acre Tapeta Farm. "I have 25 years of data in my feet," Dickinson, 57 and a native of England, said at the end of his run. "I can have people come in here with all kinds of scientific instruments for measurements, but no one knows what the resulting numbers mean. I'll take my feet. "I run on the track most days and train my horses on it the next.

St. Mary's running back Dontra Peters doesn't take as much of a beating as he used to. Now, when he gets tackled, he's not getting slammed into rock-hard dirt; he's getting slammed into cushy artificial turf. The Saints' old home, Weems Whalen Field in Annapolis, was primarily dirt by this time of the season, but their new field, not far away at St. John Neumann Church, is a featherbed by comparison. "At Weems, when you get tackled, it hurts," Peters said. "You've got rocks on the ground, and when you get up, you could be cut up and bleeding because you fell on something -- and the ground is hard itself.

The Bay Bridge road surface you might be driving on next summer lies in stacks today in a weedy, open-air storage area on the sprawling Sparrows Point steel mill complex. It is there that a contractor for the Maryland Transportation Authority is fabricating the immense sections of bridge deck that will be put aboard tractor-trailers and barged down to the Bay Bridge, where they will be put together as if pieces in a giant puzzle. The transport operation is expected to begin in the middle of this month.

It's nice when a gear maker takes the time to make a good product better. Last year, I praised Wenger's Swiss Army knife with "EvoGrip" that fit the hand like a glove and had plenty of useful blades and tools. The one drawback was the shiny red surface that slipped easily from wet hands. No more. This year's version has black rubber patches on the handle so that the knife is not only comfortable to hold, it's safer, too. The knife still has the two-stage closing system that stops the blade at 75 degrees to allow the user to clear his or her fingers before snapping it shut.

MARYLAND Squad may pursue race crimes Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler is exploring the creation of a cold-case squad to investigate unsolved homicides, with an emphasis on racial crimes dating back to the civil rights era. pg 1b School at risk, critics say At the final public hearing on a proposal to close or relocate 10 city schools, community leaders, parents and teachers testified yesterday that a plan to move another school to the...