Two Sides

I am fond of rhubarb, in pies and in prose.I like dropping "a rhubarb" into a conversation as a way to describe a dispute. This usage got started in baseball, where a rhubarb is slang for a fight between two teams during a game. The image the word is supposed to evoke is of a welter of arms and legs, as tangled as the stalks in a bowl of stewed rhubarb.Red Barber, the late Brooklyn Dodgers broadcaster, generally gets credit for popularizing this use of rhubarb. But Barber said he lifted the term from a couple of Brooklyn sportswriters.

This story ran in some earlier editions of yesterday's Sun. CHICAGO - When Daniel Barenboim raised his baton on the two cataclysmic chords that began the "Eroica" Symphony this week, the performance was about more than Beethoven's music. It symbolized the cultural bonds that can unite nations separated by centuries of political hatred, intolerance and ignorance. Barenboim's Beethoven orchestra was a group of gifted Israeli, Egyptian, Jordanian, Lebanese, Palestinian and other Mideast students.

CHICAGO - Listening to liberals and conservatives bicker about Social Security is like hearing someone talk about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Their perceptions are so different that it's hard to remember they are both talking about the same thing. Liberals see it as a sacred social welfare program that shields the elderly and therefore must be protected at all costs. Conservatives see it as a grossly overstretched entitlement that punishes the young and thus needs to be fundamentally reshaped.

It's unlikely Obama will ever "sell out" Israel. However, he is doing some much-needed consciousness-raising. The American people have been brainwashed for over half a century about the facts surrounding the creation of the state of Israel and its current expansionist policies, such as the settlement push, that have infuriated the country's neighbors. Frankly, I have tired of the Middle East altogether and just wish my tax dollars could be spent elsewhere. I've watched the U.S. shell out trillions to countries halfway around the world when the entire region would have been better off without our meddling.

A murdered screenwriter who narrates from the grave. An idealistic script reader who thinks she can work her way up in a studio on smarts alone. A producer who would push a baseball project if he could turn it into a musical for a female star. Those are just the "normal" characters in "Sunset Boulevard," the anchor of the opening-day bill for "You Be Cinema," the University of Baltimore's new film series at UB's Student Center Performing Arts Theater, 21 W. Mount Royal Ave. Billy Wilder's coruscating pop tragedy, streaked with horror and black comedy, is still the ultimate Hollywood movie, 60 years after its premiere.

Eric Overmyer is a passionate playwright but a reluctant television writer. In his deepest heart, he would like to say "No, no, no," every time someone waves a proposal for a new TV show in his face. But his loudmouth bank account keeps insisting, "Yes, yes, yes." This is true even of such quality projects as "Treme," a show about New Orleans residents coping with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Overmyer created the 10-episode series with Baltimorean David Simon, and it debuts tonight on HBO. Overmyer, 58, thinks the stage is a much more creative medium than television.

— After a 21-year-old Baltimore woman testified that Tyrone Hall was neither provoked nor attacked by the two Frostburg State University basketball players he shot last April, four of Hall's friends said that Ellis Hartridge Jr. taunted Hall and lunged at him right before the 21-year-old Glen Burnie man shot Hartridge and teammate Brandon Carroll. The only part of the testimony of Patrice Britton and Hall's friends that matched up was that the former Mount St. Joseph soccer standout fired the shotgun that Britton said he had purchased weeks before at a local pawnshop.

The winter of 1946-47 was a bitter one in Europe. Three years after liberation, Paris was still the "two cities" decried by the influential communist press -- "the Paris of nauseating luxury . . . and the other Paris."Paris had rapidly regained its prewar status as the capital of culture and style. In February, while "the other Paris" was shivering in its unheated apartments -- coal barges had been icebound on frozen rivers -- Christian Dior introduced his "New Look," fashions extravagant in their use of fabrics.

UPDATES AGAIN 6:10 p.m. Wednesday with more comments from Berk on reaction to his departure. UPDATES Wednesday morning With Berk comments at end. Weatherman Justin Berk is no longer with Baltimore's WMAR-TV, according to Bill Hooper, the station's general manager. "Friday was Justin's last day," Hooper said in a telephone insterview with the Sun Tuesday. "We have been going back and forth for months on terms of a contract, and the two sides just couldn't come together.

Standing amid his $44 million refurbished textile mill, now nearing completion, developer and one-time mayoral candidate David Tufaro observed a bird wading in the Jones Falls nearby. "That's our great blue heron," Tufaro said. Water birds fly up and down the Jones Falls between the two sides of the mill, which straddles the stream. So he insisted that an image of one be included on the rooftop sign that faces Interstate 83, announcing the presence of the commercial-residential complex called Mill No. 1. When residents begin moving into the converted mill early next month, the valley between the Baltimore neighborhoods of Woodberry and Hampden will shift from being a predominantly industrial area to being an extension of the surrounding neighborhoods.