Wire

For the second time in 40 years, a member of the "Flying Wallenda" family will wow Inner Harbor crowds Wednesday with nothing between him and the murky harbor waters but a wire cable. Self-proclaimed "King of the High Wire" Nik Wallenda will follow in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, Karl, "The Great Wallenda. " While Karl Wallenda crossed the harbor over 600 feet of wire 60 feet in the air in 1973, Nik Wallenda will ascend a wire stretched 300 feet from the Light Street pavilion to a barge in the harbor, up to a height of about 90 feet.

He didn't fall — but it looked like he came close. Daredevil Nik Wallenda made it nearly all the way across a wire over the Inner Harbor, stepping steadily and deliberately, when he stopped to kneel and pump his fist in the air. He was walking 300 feet across, up to 82 feet in the air, in a stunt to mark the imminent opening of a Ripley's Believe It or Not museum. The rapt crowd, cell phone cameras in the air, sighed with relief. But their celebration — and Wallenda's, too — was premature.

The Wire Watch, a feature in which TV critic David Zurawik highlights a must-see character or story element appearing in the current episode of HBO's The Wire, will not appear this week. The drama is on a one-week hiatus to avoid placing it in direct competition with World Series baseball, according to the network. It will air next week.

SAN DIEGO -- Things were looking bleak for Dennis Conner. He lost the first two races of the America's Cup defender finals by a combined 3 minutes 56 seconds and would have lost a third race had it not been abandoned because of a lack of wind.And things got worse. Wednesday, Conner lost to Bill Koch's America3 by 4 minutes 20 seconds to fall into an 0-3 hole in the best-of-13 series."At one point, it looked like we were going to need binoculars to see them," Conner said of America3, which led on 23 of 24 legs in the finals' first three races.

Eric Blind screamed out the names yesterday, calling for Donny and Shaver and Gary and Scott and 10 other men in mud-caked boots and tan pants and white windbreakers who scrambled in front of the horses as the big crowd poured noise into this one corner of the track.It was the 10th race. A perfect day in the starting gate at Pimlico.Blind, the head starter, a man who grew up following his father on a racing circuit from New Orleans to Chicago, was going over the program, reminding himself that Big Sur could get jittery in the start, and that Careful Gesture would just as soon kick a man as fly out of the gate.

The last episode of the last season of the HBO series The Wire airs Sunday. You can toast the occasion by having a taste at one of the bars featured in the show over the years. Here are two spots where characters from the show spend their evenings slamming back shots and beers. New Haven Lounge 1552 Havenwood Road, Northwood Shopping Center, 410-366-7416 This is the bar where Detective Lester Freamon meets state Sen. R. Clayton "Clay" Davis to threaten him with a federal indictment in the fifth season.

BOSTON -- Cardiac pacemakers save countless lives by prompting balky hearts to beat regularly. It's not a big deal to implant one: The device and its battery slide into a pocket made under the skin of the chest, and the attached electrical lead, a thin metal wire, is threaded through a blood vessel into the heart, where its tip lodges in the muscle.But when a pacemaker lead has to be removed -- because of infection, scarring, breakage or some other reason, it's a different story. After a few years in the body, the wires can become virtually glued in place as scar tissue builds up around the wire inside the artery.

David Simon, the Emmy- and Peabody-Award-winning creator of The Wire, has an unusual promise for viewers of the Baltimore-based, HBO drama that begins its fourth season tonight: He won't desert them at the end of the 13-episode cycle -- even if the series is canceled. THE WIRE / / Season 4 begins at 10 tonight on HBO

Each Sunday, throughout the HBO drama's 13-week season, TV critic David Zurawik will highlight a must-see character or story element appearing in the current episode. Leave it to HBO's The Wire to take six kids sitting in an alley talking about zombies and somehow turn it into a moment of keen insight into childhood, imagination and the power of myth. The Wire airs at 10 tonight on HBO.

I've been watching reruns of the final episode of The Wire all week. Yeah, the show is just that hard to let go. Fans of The Wire have been e-mailing me or talking to me for the past few months about the impending demise of what they consider the best television drama ever. Some have outdone themselves, watching the show a week in advance through an "on demand" service and then telling me the plot. "I don't want to spoil it for you," one of the students in my writing class at Johns Hopkins University told me the week before the character of Omar Little was killed.