Visitors

Visitors to the Maryland Science Center's "SpaceLink" exhibit had an extra source to answer questions about Mars rover Curiosity on Monday -- a scientist who helped develop one of its instruments. Jennifer Stern, a space research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, was on hand with a model of Curiosity and a life-size version of one of its wheels. Stern is part of a team that has worked on the  Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, a set of three instruments that will be used to analyze rock and soil samples from the Martian surface.

For Mike Beczkowski, parking on his street near the American Can Company complex in Canton has gotten a bit better since he and others in the neighborhood persuaded the city to require residential permit parking last November. Most nights, he can now find a place to park near his rowhouse. "This permit parking has given us a hunting license to get parking in our area," Beczkowski said. But for Paul Palmieri, the CEO of Millennial Media, the parking woes in Canton have never been worse.

When Robert Marbury was 19 years old, he necked with Ricki Lake on camera. At age 29, he spent a year sailing in Indonesia, where he says his ship was attacked by pirates. Four years later, he was one of the three co-founders of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists. At age 34, one of his photographs of stuffed animals tied to car grilles was featured in The New York Times - the first of several articles in that august publication in which Marbury has been quoted. And this coming weekend, the 41-year-old Marbury will preside over an installation at Artscape that includes a 7-foot tall Bigfoot swathed in fake fur, as well as a pond from which visitors can fish for canned soda and beer.

Even with the Fourth of July holiday falling in the middle of the week, Ocean City saw a substantial bump in tourism with tens of thousands more people at the beach. Officials estimate the town's population swelled to 331,909 on July 4. The last time the holiday fell on a Wednesday was in 2007, said Donna Abbott, director of tourism for Ocean City, and the estimate then for the one-day population was 310,877. "We had a great July 4th holiday. With the holiday falling mid-week, traffic coming and going was spread out," Abbott said, explaining the challenge of gauging how successful the holiday was for the town.

My husband and I live in York County, Pa., and recently we decided to visit the Inner Harbor, which we hadn't been to in some time. We arrived around noon and walked through the first building, where we found some changes but nothing drastic. Sadly, that was not our finding on entering the second building. We used to enjoy the many vendor booths and food stands there, but this time there was very little to see. A clothing store and Bubba Gump had replaced Phillips restaurant, and on the second level all we found was a Hooters and Ripley's Believe It or Not. We were very disappointed and were on our way back on I-83 just two-and-a-half hours later, after paying $19 in parking fees.

"And all I ask for is a tall ship and a star to sail her by. " Those words are from John Masefield's "Sea-Fever," a poem that evokes strong feelings of nostalgia for the maritime life of the past and all the beauty and adventure that came with it. Baltimore had its own bout of sea fever this past week, and it was just what the doctor ordered. It will be months before Sailabration organizers have an official tally of exactly how many people came to Baltimore to see the 17 tall-masted ships and 28 military vessels that arrived last Wednesday to launch Maryland's War of 1812 bicentennial celebration, but it's safe to assume tourists numbered in the hundreds of thousands (if not 1 million or more)

You're heading out to the shore and you forgot your beach chair. No need to worry because help is already on location at your street's beach stand. These friendly folks are there to help visitors enjoy their stay by providing daily rental of beach chairs for around $6, umbrellas for around $16 and a few even offer body boards for a small fee. For some this job might be only a one-summer gig, but many guys and gals are veterans in the beach-stand game and really enjoy what they do. "It is nice to sit on the beach and enjoy yourself all day," said local Ocean City resident and long time beach stand worker Sophie Townsend.

The departing CEO and dean of the medical faculty at Johns Hopkins Medicine is being considered as interim president of the University of Virginia, whose current leader was forced to resign, stirring up controversy on campus. Hopkins CEO Edward D. Miller said he was asked about coming on in an interim basis shortly after President Teresa Sullivan resigned. The Washington Post has reported that the board of visitors was upset that she wouldn't cut weak programs quickly enough. Miller was appointed last year to U.Va.'s board of visitors in an ex-officio capacity.

Mingled throughout the thousands of visitors who flocked to the city this past weekend for the Star-Spangled Sailabration's ships, cannons and jet fly-bys was a small army of police officers and emergency responders. Other local, state and federal law enforcement officials constantly monitored the crowds from command stations downtown, via live camera feeds. Partly as a result, the event celebrating the bicentennial of the War of 1812, estimated to have attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the city, had largely come off without a hitch as of Sunday night, police said - unspoiled by the sort of violence that has marred other large events in recent years.

Cars began lining up before 7 a.m. to get into the parking lots at M&T Bank Stadium for the shuttle bus ride to Fort McHenry and the Blue Angels air show. Yellow school buses stretched from Camden Yards to beyond the football stadium to handle the crowds, which are expected to fill the fort to capacity by 11 a.m. The historic site holds about 25,000, but The Star-Spangled Sailabration is expected to draw 1 million people to Baltimore's Inner Harbor area by Tuesday. Elsewhere, several thousand people are expected to attend Gay Pride Parade activities in Mount Vernon, and the combination could mean congested traffic around downtown Saturday.