Wire

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.

A downed electrical wire near Bowie caused delays of more than two hours yesterday in Amtrak service between Washington and Philadelphia. A contractor removing a utility pole knocked the wire down about noon, said Karen Dunn, an Amtrak spokeswoman. The incident rendered three sets of tracks unusable and halted service, Dunn said. Two were restored by 2 p.m. and the third by 3 p.m., she said. Dunn said she could not estimate how many passengers were affected by the delay. "But as of 3 [p.m.

The cast and the crew of the television series The Wire and Associated Black Charities host a concert to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina tonight. Performers include New Or leans bands the subdudes, the Rebirth Brass Band and The Iguanas. The concert will take place at Sonar, 407 E. Saratoga St. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $50. Call 410-537-6567.

SYKESVILLE -- Careless fishermen can be the death of Piney Run Lake's wild geese and ducks.Anglers are fouling the lake and shoreline with discarded gear that is lethal to the birds."

Herman Williams III, a former television talk-show producer and brother of TV talk-show star Montel Williams, is exhibiting some of the fanciful copper-wire sculptures he has made since childhood this month in Fine Lines, From the Heart at Sub-Basement Artist Studios. Many of the pieces recall the whimsical wire figures of Alexander Calder, with their cleverly crafted joinery and (mostly) monotone copper surfaces. Among them are a free-standing, near life-size figure of a crouching man, another near life-size portrait bust that projects an astounding psychological presence and a diminutive wire sculpture of a boy on a bicycle, which the artist constructed for a fifth-grade art project.

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. Baltimore actress Dravon James plays a crucial role in one of the most powerful and shocking moments likely to be seen on TV this year. But to avoid revealing too much about the third episode of HBO's The Wire, which airs tonight, I'll say only that her character, Grace Sampson, a lead teacher at the fictional Edward J. Tilghman Middle School, slaps a female pupil across the face.

A top the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the high-wire walker Philippe Petit is an epic poem in motion. In Man on Wire, the sight of his accomplishment - he walked back and forth between the towers eight times in his 1974 acrobatic feat - registers, in its own balletic way, as potently as King Kong climbing to the top of the Empire State Building. Just as Kong humanized that milestone piece of architecture, Petit did this one. Many New Yorkers thought the World Trade Center too stark, even arrogant; Petit revealed its capacity for poetry.

If someone overseas is offering to sell you a popular car for less than its Kelley Blue Book value, don't get rolled over, the Better Business Bureau of Greater Maryland warned. Advertising such cars through online classifieds and trade magazines, scam artists pose as sellers from outside the country. To give the buyer a false sense of security, the seller claims the transaction will be completed through Moneybookers.com, which is a United Kingdom-based service that is similar to PayPal.

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. Proposition Joe Stewart is one of television's most unforgettable characters, and that is, in no small measure, attributable to the Baltimore actor and teacher, Robert F. Chew, who plays him. Based in part on a local narcotics figure who was killed in an after-hours club in 1984, the slow-moving, smooth-talking Prop Joe more than lives up to his nickname in tonight's episode of The Wire.

Scientists are still a long way from figuring out what women and men really want, but they are getting a lot closer to understanding what makes their brains so different. That women and men think differently has little to do with whether they are handed dolls or trucks to play with as infants. After all, when infant monkeys are given a choice of human toys, females prefer dolls and males go after cars and trucks. The differences, researchers are beginning to discover, may have a lot more to do with how powerful hormones wire the female and male brain during early development and later in life.