Variety

Over the years, the Oscar telecast has suffered with a show that was regularly pitched more to the Hollywood crowd sitting in the hall than the viewers at home. The result: a fairly steady loss of TV audience. "As good as even last year's show was, there was a little inner circle [in the hall], and it maybe played better in the room than it played on TV," producer Bill Mechanic said, choosing his words with some diplomacy in a telephone interview Thursday. So, Mechanic, the former chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox Filmed Entertainment, and his producing partner, choreographer and feature film director Adam Shankman ("Hairspray")

There's no question that the Ravens' priority is to upgrade at wide receiver. How they will accomplish this is a more open-ended matter. The Ravens can take several different routes to improve the targets for Joe Flacco, from putting an offer sheet on a restricted free agent (perhaps Denver's Brandon Marshall), signing an unrestricted free agent (like Houston's Kevin Walter) or trading for consistent but unhappy veteran (Arizona's Anquan Boldin). "I think having a playmaker on the outside will help Joe Flacco become a better quarterback," Ravens general manager Ozzie Newsome said last month.

Question: Do I need to order both male and female blueberry plants? Someone told me you can’t have just one. Answer: Blueberry plants are self-fertile (each flower has the necessary male and female parts), however you still should buy more than one variety. That's because a blueberry plant produces more berries and bigger berries when it cross pollinates with a different blueberry variety. See HGIC's publication, "Getting Started with Small Fruit." Its chart lists blueberry varieties that flourish in Maryland and it includes bloom and ripening times.

Jessie Thomas of Ellicott City sent in a request for a recipe for an "old-fashioned" beef stew. Mildred Wise of Baltimore shared a recipe she says she has been using for more than 50 years for beef stew that sounds like what Thomas is looking for. It is a basic recipe, nothing fancy, but tried and true. Her recipe instructions have the stew cooked atop the stove in a Dutch oven. I have found that beef stew works just as well when made in a slow cooker or low oven. You can follow the same basic instructions, but if using a slow cooker, brown the meat on the stove top and then transfer it to the slow cooker with the rest of the ingredients.

The Orioles will be short one lieutenant at baseball's winter meetings next week and for the foreseeable future now that special assistant Wayne Krivsky has left for the New York Mets. Krivsky, 55, previously the Cincinnati Reds' general manager, joined the Orioles as a special assistant to president of baseball operations Andy MacPhail in November 2008. He is taking a similar position under Mets general manager Omar Minaya ; Krivsky worked for Minaya as a special assistant in 2008.

NEW PARK, Pa. -- We stood in the orchard gaping at all the apple trees like the city girls we were. They did not look like the ones in a child's coloring book -- puffy pale green clouds dotted with lipstick red circles. Instead, the branches were dark, spiked and uneven, and the apples were a rusty red and clustered in twos and fours, like giant grapes. My friend Betsy, the applesauce queen, and I had made the pilgrimage to Maple Lawn Farms, just over the Mason-Dixon line in New Park, Pa., to pick apples.

At the place where two gardening admonitions meet - "Keep off the grass" and "Stop and smell the roses"- there are plants that you can step on and find yourself rewarded with a burst of fragrance. They are "Stepables," and they are ideal for planting around pavers in a path or patio, as ground cover or even as a lawn substitute. They are the brainchild of Frances Hopkins, owner of Under A Foot Plant Co. in Salem, Ore. At 5 feet 2, she says, she was never going to grow big garden elements, so she focused on short, close-to-the-ground perennials.

John V. Lewis Jr., the former longtime proprietor of a landmark general store in Cambridge that sold everything from steaks to screwdrivers, died May 15 at Dorchester General Hospital of complications from heart disease. The Cambridge resident was 80. Mr. Lewis, the son of grocers, was born in Cambridge and raised in the city's Neck District neighborhood. In 1946, his father established the Lewis Drive Inn, and a year later, the Lewis Store on Route 343. Mr. Lewis was a graduate of Cambridge High School and served in the Army as a military policeman from 1950 to 1953.

For Marylanders angry over the significant increases in the state's electricity rates since deregulation of the state's power industry took effect last year, the answer has seemed clear - re-regulate the industry, top to bottom, and control prices to benefit consumers in the future. But total re-regulation isn't the right way to go, nor would it generate the savings customers envision. That's the assessment of a new study by the Maryland Public Service Commission, and its findings make sense.

This might well date me, but one of the few prime-time entertainment shows I have been waiting for with a real sense of anticipation is the NBC variety show premiering tonight at 8, Rosie Live, with Rosie O'Donnell. The variety show, a genre that introduced me as a kid to stars like Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra through the "magic" of television and CBS, was declared dead way too soon by the pundits. The producers of American Idol figured that out and made tens of millions of dollars by simply jiggering the formula.