Witch

"Sorry. " -- Eric Northman I think it's important to list the most frightening things about this crazy, muddled installment of "True Blood. " Ready? In descending order: 5. A child-like Eric killing Sookie's fairy godmother (apparently when this happens to fairies they turn into melting Nazi soldiers a la "Raiders of the Lost Ark"). Although it was hilarious when Sookie told him to stop and all he did was grin and say "Sorry. " 4. Marnie going all crazy cult-leader and pleading ("Pleeease")

Today's news that a pro-Sarah Palin documentary will debut in June has the political world buzzing about a potential presidential run for the former governor of Alaska. The $1 million film, titled "The Undefeated," paints Palin as an "inspirational maverick,"  and will premiere just in time to influence the first votes in Iowa, according to CBS News.    The Twitter world, by contrast, wasn't so concerned about whether she's running. Twitter users were too busy making up funny names for her movie.  Under the tag #namepalinsfilm, Twitter users wrote jokes all day long (doesn't anybody have to work?

Sarasota, Fla.--A few days after she was born, Kimberly Mays was switched with another baby in the hospital nursery. Two sets of parents went home with the wrong infant.One of the many unfortunate results of that 14-year-old incident is that everyone involved has received multimillion-dollar settlements from the hospital.They therefore can afford to keep suing each other till the cows come home.''This case has been in court for five long years!'' cried one of Kimberly's three attorneys Monday.

Tip No. 1 for a trip to Green Bank, W.Va.: Pack lots of CDs. If you hit the "scan" button on your car radio, all you will get is an endless display of numbers as the radio searches vainly for a station. There aren't any. There isn't much else out here in east-central West Virginia, either -- just an occasional farm, a logging truck or, scampering back into the Monongahela National Forest, a deer. The trip here, via routes 55 and 28, winds up into the clouds where snakes of mist curl around the road.

"The Witch of Exmoor," by Margaret Drabble. Harcourt. 288 pages. $23.England, George Orwell once observed, is more a family than a nation -- a wrangling, peevish family with crazy uncles locked in attics, poor cousins scrubbing floors and the worst siblings left in charge of the silver, but possessing nonetheless a family's shared feeling about right and wrong.It shouldn't be much surprise, then, that Margaret Drabble casts as a family drama her latest novel, "The Witch of Exmoor," a fable about what the Victorians called the "Condition of England."

Chicago. -- In the 1950s, Joseph McCarthy's followers resented having his attack on elusive Communists in government called a witch hunt. When Arthur Miller wrote his play ''The Crucible,'' equating Eisenhower's America and 17th-century Salem, McCarthyites felt wronged. They were not conducting a witch hunt, they claimed.But when modern evangelicals attack feminists, they are not anxious to dispel the witch-hunt claim. That, in literal fact, is what they are pursuing. Most of them are not ashamed to say so.Even the vice president's wife told us, in her Houston speech, that feminists are trying to deny ''the essential nature of women.

She may not twitch her nose, but there's a new witch in town beginning tonight on ABC."Family Matters" (8 p.m.-8: 30 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2) -- Urkel and the gang end their trip to Paris. Parisians rejoice. ABC."Unsolved Mysteries" (8 p.m.-10 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11) -- Tonight's mysteries include the July suicide of Margaux Hemingway (Mariel's sister and Ernest's granddaughter). NBC."Sabrina, the Teen-Age Witch" (8: 30 p.m.-9 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2) -- Think of it as a kid's version of "Bewitched."

Smog is not simply a result of human air pollution. It's highly dependent on natural weather conditions, as this summer's heat wave demonstrates.The blanket of sweltering, stagnant air has trapped harmful ground-level ozone in the Baltimore-Washington basin, causing decidedly unhealthy air quality for more than a dozen days so far. That's more than in all of 1994, according to government air monitoring stations.It's a reminder that sunlight is a key ingredient in production of ozone, or smog; it's needed to cook the nitrogen oxide and hydrocarbon pollutants of vehicles, factories and furnaces to create ozone.

When the clock struck 9 p.m. on Tuesday, political office-seekers in Maryland had reached their witching hour -- the moment of truth when it was put up or shut up: either put your money up as a filing fee, or sit out this year's election. A record number of candidates filed with the state elections board, ensuring major changes in the composition of the state legislature and a number of county councils.Confusion reigned in the race for governor, though. Lt. Gov. Melvin Steinberg's campaign continued to perform as though under a magic spell.

LOS ANGELES -- For Samantha Stevens, the perky housewife-witch on TV's "Bewitched," coming out of the closet would have been a one-second affair. With a twitch of her nose, she would have been home free.For actor Dick Sargent, who played Samantha's husband, Darren, from 1969-72, it has taken four decades."I wish I had come out sooner," says Sargent, 61, who publicly declared himself gay on National Coming Out Day two weeks ago. "I've been hiding my whole life, and I realized, dammit, it was just time to stop."