University Of Baltimore

Orioles president of baseball operations Andy MacPhail wanted to make a larger point about risk and about baseball's financial imbalance Thursday during a question-and-answer session with a group of Baltimore School of Law students. So at one point, after taking questions for more than 40 minutes, MacPhail decided to throw out a query of his own. "Who is the worst free agent signing in baseball history?" MacPhail asked. "I invite all of you to think about this for two minutes. " The answers shouted back at MacPhail were varied.

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.

The University of Baltimore has announced plans by a private developer to build an 11-story, 323-bed apartment building for students on a university-owned parcel of land at the northeast corner of Maryland Avenue and West Biddle Street. The $27 million project marks the first time a developer has undertaken the new construction of student housing in midtown Baltimore, the university said in a news release. The developer, Bethesda-based Potomac Holdings, expects to break ground in April 2011 and to complete the project by summer 2012.

Arnold Blumberg plops the zombie head on a table at the front of the small theater. "I brought a friend," says the University of Baltimore professor, clad in an unbuttoned black shirt adorned with red skulls. Blumberg is meeting his class for the first time and it seems appropriate that he greet them beside "old Worm Eye," undead star of the 1979 Italian cult film "Zombi 2. " It was Worm Eye's decaying visage that called to a young Blumberg from the shelf of a Randallstown video store in the 1980s.

What if you had a choice between any institutional cafeteria you know and a cafeteria with "commitments" to organically raised produce, food-waste reduction, socially responsible sourcing and a low-carbon diet? If you pick the latter, welcome to Cafe Bon Appetit , at 621 W. Lombard St. in the center of a multitude of appetites connected in some way to the University of Maryland, Baltimore campus and tucked between the Health Sciences/Human Services library and the School of Nursing.

Politicians, donors and University of Baltimore alumni joined faculty and staff at the groundbreaking ceremony Thursday for the new John and Frances Angelos Law Center, a $107 million project on Mount Royal Avenue and North Charles Street. Construction of the 190,000-square-foot building is expected to be completed in 2012, making UB's law school the sixth-largest public law school in the country. Speakers including Gov. Martin O'Malley praised donors such as Orioles owner and UB law alumnus Peter G. Angelos, who contributed $5 million to the project in 2008 as well as an additional $5 million in June.

In June 1969, I dug deep for $5 and bought a Mechanic Theatre orchestra seat to see Baltimore's own Anita Gillette advise her audience to "Don't Tell Mama" in the hit musical "Caberet." It was her professional debut here. R.H. Gardner, The Baltimore Sun's critic, gushed in his morning-after review: "Every girl, on leaving home to seek a career in show business, dreams of returning in a blaze of glory. Last night, Anita Gillette did." Four decades later, Gillette is still on the stage, and TV too, as she was Thursday night on NBC's "30 Rock."

Albin Owings Kuhn, the son of Howard County farmers who rose to become an official of the University of Maryland, College Park, and later helped plan the university system's Baltimore County campus as a founding chancellor, died Wednesday of pneumonia at his Woodbine farm. He was 94. "Good gracious, we have so much to thank him for. He was a very special man and a giant, and we're standing on the shoulders of that giant," Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said Thursday.

The University of Maryland, Baltimore made $410,000 in "questionable compensation payments" to a senior employee between 2007 and 2009, according to a state audit released Thursday. The payments, made in addition to the employee's salary, were not disclosed in budget reports to the General Assembly. The university also failed to submit the employee's contract for approval by the attorney general's office or for review by the Board of Regents, the audit charges. During fiscal 2007, the employee received four payments totaling $350,000 for sabbatical time that was never taken.