Villain

With the cancellation of ABC's Life on Mars last week, it's official: The cop drama as we've known it since Hill Street Blues in 1981 is dead. Twenty-eight years is an impressive run, but as a culture, we have moved well past thinking of urban America as a dark and threatening frontier that needs to be tamed by hard-edged, big-city detectives like Mick Belker of Hill Street Blues and Andy Sipowicz of NYPD Blue. As a nation, we have new fears, frustrations and nightmares, and so, Hollywood is trying to give us new prime-time heroes that speak to our anxieties and send us off to bed feeling a little better about the world in which we live.

Which company has committed the greater evil? Yahoo Inc. helped send a reporter to prison by revealing his identity to the Chinese government. Cisco Systems Inc. helps send thousands of Chinese dissidents to prison by selling sophisticated Internet surveillance technology to China. If bad press is to be the judge, the "stool pigeon" Yahoo is clearly the bigger villain. In 2004, after the Chinese government ordered the country's media not to report on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, journalist Shi Tao used his Yahoo e-mail account to forward a government memo to a pro-democracy group.

The men who've made the movie version of Susan Cooper's fantasy novel about Light vs. Dark, The Dark is Rising, have tinkered with everything in the book, altering the nationality, age and family of the young immortal hero, as well as adding a potential Judas character and gaudy magical transformations. So why didn't the makers of The Seeker: The Dark is Rising go all the way and change the villain - the Dark's main man - from a fearsome horseman known as the Rider to something we haven't seen before?

In the original Halloween, Donald Pleasence played the antihero Dr. Loomis as an eccentric, but one who ultimately proves himself good, rescuing hunted baby sitter Laurie Strode from a psychopathic Michael Myers. Leave it to bloodthirsty director Rob Zombie and actor Malcolm McDowell who specializes in villainous characters to craft the ambitious doctor as much less of a white knight in the "reimagined" Halloween, opening today. "It's a very different storyline. We are reinventing the characters," says McDowell, who appeared this month at Horrorfind Weekend at the Hunt Valley Marriott.

NEW YORK -- When actor Edgar Ramirez had a break from shooting The Bourne Ultimatum in London last spring, he didn't hit the English nightclubs or take a long weekend to unwind in the Cotswolds. Instead, he hopped over to Paris to observe the first round of the French national elections. "I still have credentials to observe elections," Ramirez recounted recently over a slab of steak at an Argentine restaurant in New York. "I went to the banlieue, the very faraway voting centers, and it was really amazing the amount of people who were intending to vote."

You have to be of a certain age to remember Georgetown as the team in the black hats. Hardly any Georgetown student was born when America was rejoicing over the results of the Hoyas' last trip to the Final Four before this one, when Villanova played David to Georgetown's Goliath in 1985. It wasn't just because the Hoyas were defending champions and ranked No. 1 all season, either. Just barely, and with a perfect game, Villanova took down the most intimidating program in recent memory, and those who had been intimidated - pretty much everybody and everybody who didn't swear allegiance to Georgetown - soaked up every bit of it. Duke thinks it attracts a lot of animosity today.

Jack Palance, the leather-faced, gravelly voiced actor who earned Academy Award nominations for Sudden Fear and Shane before capturing an Oscar for his role as the crusty trail boss in the 1991 comedy western, City Slickers, has died. He was 87. Mr. Palance, who had been in failing health, died yesterday of natural causes in Montecito, Calif., at the home of his daughter Holly, family members said. He was one of the best-loved bad guys in motion picture and television history - the murderous husband in Sudden Fear (1952)

WASHINGTON -- Prime-time television is largely run by self-hating businesspeople. That's the implication of a recent study by the Business and Media Institute, a conservative watchdog group that finds America's most popular evening entertainment shows portray businesspeople as "a greater threat than the mob." Titled "Bad Company," the study looked at the dozen top-rated TV dramas during last year's May and November ratings periods and found almost all of the businesspeople were doing something unethical, cruel or criminal.

Rita Chelton of Elkridge knows a thing or two about garlic mustard. She won the cooking contest at the Garlic Mustard Challenge in Patapsco State Park two years in a row - in 2004 for her garlic mustard bread, and this year for her garlic mustard herb chicken. "I consider it not a very strong herb," she said of the edible weed - a plant so invasive that nature lovers mount a push each spring to yank as much of it from the invaded park as possible. "It has an interesting odor, but I don't think it has a strong taste."

Hammond High School senior Chris Heady wrote, produced, directed and stars in The Secret of Monkey Island, which will be performed at 6:30 p.m. today at Hammond High School. The swashbuckling, colorful production is based on a popular video game series bearing the same name by LucasArts Entertainment Co. The play includes pirates, a damsel in distress and a villain. It is tongue-in-cheek and pokes fun at the likes of Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean and Star Wars, Heady said. Mission accepted The plot - written in the same vein as the video games - follows hero Guybrush Threepwood, played by Hammond junior Matt Lehtonen, as he completes three missions to become a pirate.