Useless

Shriver deserves praiseI had the pleasure of attending Pam Shriver's annual Tennis Challenge at the Baltimore Arena last week. Through a painful year of losing her husband, Joe Shapiro, and a faithful intern, Eleanor Brooks, just last week, Pam has remained focused on her goal of helping the Baltimore community and related children's charities.She has become a Baltimore icon and a role model for young women everywhere. With all that is wrong in sports and the world in general, one thing steadfastly remains very right: Pam Shriver.

Dear Mr. Azrael:My wife and I spent four months looking for a home. At the end of our search, we decided to build a house in a development in Harford County.When going over the options we wanted for our house, we specified that we wanted a 9-foot foundation poured. The intention was for the basement to have an 8-foot ceiling when we finished it off in the future.During our weekly inspection of the home, we noticed that the windows were not placed where we wanted and added where we did not want them.

From time to time, as today, we record on these pages responses to more or less outrageous questions somehow related to books. Next Saturday is the United States of America's 222nd birthday. (Satanists, of course, will note it is exactly one-third of 666, but let that pass.) With an eye to that occasion, though not to numerology, your faithful book editor conconcted this week's question:"A fluently English-speaking alien from outer space pleads with you to help it understand the United States as it is today, as quickly as possible.

With gossip being one of the entertainment industry's most popular byproducts, it's hard to separate what a singer does on record from what he or she does in real life. These days, most everyone assumes that singers write what they know -- literally.So when Depeche Mode fans sit down with "Ultra" (Warner Bros. 46522, arriving in stores today), the band's first studio album in four years, many will wonder how much of the album has to do with singer David Gahan's drug problems. Gahan, remember, went into cardiac arrest last spring after overdosing on heroin and cocaine, a brush with death that nearly broke up the band.

Watching rich people -- it's as much a spectator sport as anything else in this country. It's what we do. It's why people travel to San Simeon and the Vanderbilt mansion in Asheville. It's why we drive out to Worthington Valley to gawk at Cal's house. It explains all the buzz about Eddie's home run ball. None of this would happen without rich guys.So I disagree with what George Bernard Shaw once said about the rich being useless; they constitute our biggest growth industry, related as they are to Hollywood, the media, sports and corporate downsizing, which is all interconnected.

ANAHEIM, Calif. -- Orioles manager Davey Johnson was sitting on the bench yesterday morning, his demeanor somewhat mournful, when Sparky Anderson appeared in the corner of the dugout.Johnson leapt to his feet. "Sparky!" Johnson said. "Come and tell me what I'm doing wrong."So Johnson and the former Cincinnati and Detroit manager chatted for about 15 minutes, a conversation that Johnson said made him feel much better."What really enlightened me is [Anderson said] he went a week or 10 days and never gave a sign," Johnson said.

County officials have no right to give propertyI am writing to respond to your Dec. 11 editorial, "Good Use for Useless Land."First, I want to emphasize that I believe that Habitat for Humanity is a fine charity. I have donated to it myself and would encourage other private individuals and businesses to do so. However, I think it is wrong as a matter of principle to allow politicians or government bureaucrats to make donations of public money or publicly owned property to any charity.Contrary to the title of your editorial, the land given to Habitat was not useless.

Havre de Grace. -- Recently I discovered that I'm almost eligible for the senior discount at McDonald's, and in preparation for that major milestone I sent away for a baseball cap with a gray ponytail attached.It makes me look very distinguished, in a sort of '60s way, rather like a tenured professor of some useless discipline -- Semiotic deconstructionism? Gender studies? -- at an important university. I'm looking for a McGovern button to attach to it.No sooner did the cap arrive than, by a strange coincidence, I started getting torrents of mail from the old folks' lobby.

Title: "Free Stuff From the Internet: Your Guide To Getting Hundreds of Valuable Goodies"Author: Patrick VincentPublisher: Coriolis Group BooksLength, price: 459 pages, $19.95 The most expensive thing here is the book itself -- $19.95 for a book about free stuff! Still, if you're new to the Internet, it's nice to have a book that tells you where the good stuff is in the Netjungle.And even veterans of the Internet will find some goodies in here.Like the Internet, which is home to a vast range of words and ideas, "Free Stuff" points you to the high as well as the low.For example, if you couldn't make it to Rome to see Cardinal Keeler's investiture, "Free Stuff" will console you by telling you how to find "Rome Reborn," an online exhibit of manuscripts, books and images from the Vatican Library (ftp.

Don Voorhees is like a kosher butcher with a great por barbecue sauce, or a palace eunuch with Paul Newman eyes.He is the master of his domain, peerless in his specialty, but the culmination of his life's work, published this spring, brutally sums up his sad situation: "The Book of Totally Useless Information" (Carol Publishing, $7.95).Why is North Carolina the "Tar Heel" state? Don knows. In the Civil War, North Carolinians stood their ground so stubbornly it seemed they had tar on their heels.

The radical reshuffling of America's military priorities proposed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates this week makes an important turn away from the wasteful spending on the kinds of wars we used to fight to better prepare for the nontraditional conflicts we are likely to face. Maryland would gain because billions in Pentagon spending would be shifted toward intelligence, surveillance and research programs headquartered here, most importantly, at the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, which intercepts and decrypts secret communications around the world.

I might have to consider staying longer on the continent, especially after the discovery that they serve beer at McDonald's restaurants in some foreign countries. In particular, this revelation has given me a new appreciation for the French culture. If that isn't enough, I boarded an AirBerlin flight on Thursday and the flight attendants were handing out free copies of Playboy, which caused me to spontaneously blurt out, "What a country!" Unfortunately, it was the German language version of Playboy, so it was useless to me. ( For more, go to baltimoresun.

It's chilly by the pool in Dundalk. "Is it my imagination or has it been unseasonably low this August?" asks Lauren Zielski Paneto. "We loved swimming in July. ... But this whole month of August ... our pool sits useless 'cause the water is too cold!!'" My, you're a delicate thing. It's been cool - about a degree below the long-term August average, with 13 days so far below the norm. Radiational cooling on clear, dry nights might also be draining your pool's heat. So swim faster.

Brand loyalty aside, the "can you hear me now" guy would be thrilled with Motorola's new T9500 Talkabout radios. Back in the old days (say five years ago), there were people who could yell farther than the range of the small two-way units. Anything -- a hill, a tree, a map -- could interrupt the signal, making the radios useless in the backcountry. The T9500s are advertised as delivering up to 25 miles if you're standing on a summit and calling base camp to get the margaritas chilled.

If children could watch the tests conducted here, inside this bland, boxy building in Columbia surrounded by an unattractive chain-link fence, they would think the place was haunted. An engineer clicks on a small lamp and the picture on the nearby television set immediately contorts into abstract art. Another engineer flips on military radar, and the video being played on a nearby laptop freezes. The magic wands in both cases are invisible signals that travel through the air and make BlackBerrys, radios, satellite TV, pagers, walkie-talkies, garage-door openers and a lot of other gadgets work.

WE LOST so much more than Johnny Carson when he died Sunday. The man who hosted The Tonight Show for 30 years was 79 when he passed. He was born in 1925 and grew up during the Depression and World War II. The country always loses when someone from that generation dies. When what has been called America's "greatest generation" vanishes, we will not see its like again. Carson took over as host of The Tonight Show in 1962, in an America quite unlike the one we have today. For five nights a week, Carson would treat viewers to comedy that came within inches of crossing the line that separates the acceptable from the risque.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss. Gotham, 240 pages. $17.50. From time to joyful time, up pops a fad of such enchanting improbability as to endorse the dubious proposition that spontaneous wit is immortal. Such was, of course, the Pet Rock, an utterly useless outrage that made millions and delighted more. Winnie the Pooh in Latin, a generation ago or more, was snapped up by tens of thousands of readers who remembered barely a word of the dead tongue, if ever indeed they had known one. Now comes this delicious, unpretentious, thoroughly serious and consistently delightful manual on punctuation.

Believe it or not, the infomercial is 20 years old. And how it has grown. Today, the often mocked format is as much a part of the TV landscape as sitcoms and reality shows. And bigger business than ever. The diet aid Herbalife was among the first infomercials to break big during the mid-1980s. Since then, infomercials have created some of the best-known faces in America. Self-help guru Tony Robbins has sold more than $300 million of his products through infomercials. Ali MacGraw and Lisa Hartman opened the way for actors to appear in infomercials when they turned up in a 1989 makeover spot for Victoria Jackson Cosmetics.

It hasn't always been this easy to be a Tolkien fan. There was a time in the not-too-distant past that Tolkienites occupied the vaguely sinister and decidedly weird regions shared by Dungeons & Dragons players, members of creative anachronistic societies and women who collected flower fairies and unicorn figurines. This was, of course, before director Peter Jackon's Lord of the Rings trilogy made it cool to once again speak in Elvish. Science fiction has always been regarded as a more acceptable obsession: It was masculine, based on science and reason.

REACTION TIME at the Bush White House is clearly speeding up. A gay-basher headed for appointment to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV and AIDS was gone within hours of the choice becoming public. It took days before Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld apologized for dismissing Vietnam War draftees as of "no value" to the war effort. More than a week went by before the White House started pushing Trent Lott out of the Senate majority leader's job for waxing nostalgic about the segregationist campaign of one-time Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond.