Twilight Zone

The businessmen and women attending the Carroll County Chamber of Commerce luncheon on the "State of the County" last week must have thought they were serving as extras on an episode of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone." The suggestions offered by the commissioners for managing and financing the county's growth were at such variance with reality that many in the audience must have been left wondering if they had been transported to a strange world where the normal rules of logic, economics and development no longer apply.

Cleveland Melvin tells no great tales — yet. No tales of surviving the life in East Baltimore, the neighborhood near urban ground zero for such happy TV fare as "Homicide: Life on the Street," "The Wire" and "The Corner. " No stories about the glory of DePaul basketball past — long past. No self-aggrandizement acknowledging being last season's Big East Rookie of the Year, an accolade achieved innumerable xBox reloads ago by NBA stars Carmelo Anthony, Allen Iverson and Patrick Ewing.

The guys of "Twilight" are coming to Baltimore, and Vanessa Strickler is stoked. "I'm expecting total chaos," says Strickler, one of hundreds of "Twilight" fans expected to converge on the Sheraton Inner Harbor for this weekend's "Twilight" fan convention. "I want to enjoy every minute. " Before anyone jumps to conclusions, it should be made clear that Strickler is no star-struck middle-schooler with pictures of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner taped to the inside of her locker.

The guys of "Twilight" are coming to Baltimore, and Vanessa Strickler is stoked. "I'm expecting total chaos," says Strickler, one of hundreds of "Twilight" fans expected to converge on the Sheraton Inner Harbor for this weekend's "Twilight" fan convention. "I want to enjoy every minute. " Before anyone jumps to conclusions, it should be made clear that Strickler is no star-struck middle-schooler with pictures of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner taped to the inside of her locker.

A column in yesterday's Maryland section misstated Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's middle name, Lidell.The Sun regrets the error.Submitted for your approval is one Kurt Louis Schmoke, beleaguered mayor of a large East Coast city. Recently re-elected by a large majority, the mayor soon became afflicted with delusions of grandeur and competence, leading him to a bend in the road that leads to: The Twilight Zone.Rod Serling, where are you now that you're really needed? "The Twilight Zone" creator and writer might have written just such an opening -- albeit somewhat better -- for an episode about the beloved mayor of Charm City -- clearly living in a parallel universe where 90 percent of the streets were plowed after the recent blizzard.

A group of theater students at Westminster High School are taking The Twilight Zone into another dimension. Using their own keys of imagination, they have transferred that infamously eerie element of sound, sight and mind from the small screen to the stage. The Westminster students have taken on five episodes of the 1960s television series from their 21st-century perspectives, while also seeking a theatrical equivalent to the visual stunts of television. The resulting five plays, all directed by seniors, comprise this year's variation on the school's annual Odds & Evens production, which usually showcases one piece presented by freshmen and juniors, and another with sophomores and seniors.

FOR ABOUT 20 months the U.S. economy has been operating in a twilight zone: growing too fast to meet the classic definition of a recession, but too slowly to meet the usual criteria for economic recovery. There's nothing particularly mysterious about our situation. But recent news coverage and commentary -- in particular, the enthusiastic headlines that followed a modest increase in growth and a modest decline in jobless claims -- suggest that some people still don't get it. So here's a brief refresher course on twilight zone Economics 101. Since November 2001 -- which the National Bureau of Economic Research, in a controversial decision, has declared the end of the recession -- the U.S. economy has grown at an annual rate of about 2.6 percent.

The owners of an Arbutus nightclub that has been the subject of complaints about disruptive behavior pledged yesterday to fight an order from a Baltimore County judge temporarily shutting down the club until Monday.A hearing on whether to reopen the Twilight Zone will be held within 10 days, said Carol Saffran-Brinks, assistant county attorney. After that, the county plans to move to close it permanently, she said.The club -- which opens late and operates after hours -- was closed temporarily late Friday after Judge Robert E. Cadigan reviewed a motion for a two-week restraining order.

NEW YORK -- Unraveling the mystery of the crash of TWA flight 800 is as sophisticated as a high-tech underwater device being shipped to the scene to listen for the electronic beep of the missing flight data recorder.And it's as simple as investigators knocking on doors along the Long Island coastline to ask if anyone saw anything unusual in the sky.Pursuing everything from hunches to twisted hunks of airplane fuselage resting 120 feet under water, investigators have opened their inquiry on seemingly countless fronts in the 48 hours since the 747 airliner apparently exploded and crashed in the ocean nine miles from the shore on Wednesday night.

LILY DALE, N.Y. - With its antique furniture and Oriental rugs, the lobby of the Maplewood Hotel looks much like that of countless other country inns. It's the small sign on an unobtrusive column that hints at something less conventional.It asks patrons to refrain, at least in this area, from holding seances. And it gives visitors one of their first clues - but hardly their last - that to stray into Lily Dale, a small, gated community in the far west of the state, is to enter New York's own corner of the twilight zone.

THE PROBLEM -- Bus arrival times listed at a Maryland Transit Administration stop in Baltimore County do not make sense. THE BACKSTORY -- Say you want to board the M-1 MTA bus in Milford Mill and go to its last stop at the Mondawmin Metro station. The schedule posted on a pole in the 8100 block of Liberty Road gives riders a long list of options. You can grab a bus at 4:52 a.m. and 5:29 a.m., which seems reasonable enough. But the next bus comes at 5:60 a.m. Then, a little while later, another bus is scheduled at 6:61 a.m., then other at 7:60 a.m., 8:64 a.m. and 9:61 a.m. (More strange times appear on the M8 schedule.

A group of theater students at Westminster High School are taking The Twilight Zone into another dimension. Using their own keys of imagination, they have transferred that infamously eerie element of sound, sight and mind from the small screen to the stage. The Westminster students have taken on five episodes of the 1960s television series from their 21st-century perspectives, while also seeking a theatrical equivalent to the visual stunts of television. The resulting five plays, all directed by seniors, comprise this year's variation on the school's annual Odds & Evens production, which usually showcases one piece presented by freshmen and juniors, and another with sophomores and seniors.

I have a new theory about Terrell Owens. The NFL's terrible toddler not only has the ability to make an ass of himself under almost any circumstance, but he also possesses special psychic power to draw other - seemingly reasonable - people into his web of idiotic intrigue. How else do you explain respected Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter suddenly popping up Monday and threatening to look into the possibility that the Philadelphia Eagles violated federal antitrust laws when they suspended T.O. and made it clear that he would not play again this season?

MY CAB DRIVER made me an offer I had no trouble accepting. On the way into the office, he'd drive me through a neighborhood he calls the Twilight Zone, a place of drug dealers and transvestites better known as Barclay Street, south of North Avenue to Oliver Street. True, at high noon on a Thursday, there was a knot of dealers ready to supply the goods. I saw his point about this troubled address, but had a different reaction to what I viewed. Were the temperature not in the 20s, I might have been walking through this section.

Every 11 minutes, the glum saga begins anew somewhere on the streets of Baltimore. It ends, days or weeks later, inside four red walls on the eastern edge of town, a careworn building surrounded by 3,400 vehicles. This is the Pulaski Highway impound lot, a 22-acre purgatory for about 48,000 vehicles towed here each year. Some belong to speed demons and scofflaws, or to drivers who gambled with a parking meter and lost. Others were stolen, or left undriveable by accidents. Few good tempers survive the long waits, busy telephone lines, occasional property thefts and initial contact with the tow truck.

FOR ABOUT 20 months the U.S. economy has been operating in a twilight zone: growing too fast to meet the classic definition of a recession, but too slowly to meet the usual criteria for economic recovery. There's nothing particularly mysterious about our situation. But recent news coverage and commentary -- in particular, the enthusiastic headlines that followed a modest increase in growth and a modest decline in jobless claims -- suggest that some people still don't get it. So here's a brief refresher course on twilight zone Economics 101. Since November 2001 -- which the National Bureau of Economic Research, in a controversial decision, has declared the end of the recession -- the U.S. economy has grown at an annual rate of about 2.6 percent.

HOMESTEAD, Fla. -- Driving out of Miami on the Florida Turnpike, you leave the city behind and enter a kind of twilight zone.It used to be a town of 28,000 people focused on farming and a busy military base. Then Hurricane Andrew blew away most of the houses and stores and flattened Homestead Air Force Base. The population dropped by 12,000 literally overnight. And Homestead that day could have died.From the turnpike you see the giant empty spaces where buildings used to be and fields of what look to be telephone poles, which are the branch-less remains of evergreen and palm trees.

Bert Granet, 92, a television writer and producer who helped bring the Twilight Zone and The Untouchables series to the small screen, died Nov. 15 in Santa Monica, Calif., of injuries from a fall. Born in New York, Mr. Granet earned a bachelor's degree from Yale and then moved to Los Angeles, where he began to work in the entertainment industry in 1934. Over the next four decades, he produced nearly a dozen motion pictures and television shows or series, and wrote scripts for 30 others.

A Baltimore Circuit Court jury acquitted a 22-year-old Columbia man of first-degree murder last night in the shooting death of a victim who prosecutors say was killed in a case of mistaken identity. Ontay Anderson, of the 5600 block of Roundtree Lane, was found not guilty in the May 13 shooting death of Jermaine Durrell Shelton near the Twilight Zone, an after-hours club in Lansdowne. The jury deliberated eight hours before reaching a verdict, which also cleared Anderson of handgun charges.