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This is a place for second-guessing. Orioles general manager Roland Hemond gets second-guessed. Bud Selig and Donald Fehr get second-guessed. Managers get second-guessed.But, in fairness, much of what has been written here can and should be second-guessed. The preseason predictions, for example. For many examples, actually.It was written: Philadelphia will be terrible in '95, and in particular its defense will be terrible.With 20-20 hindsight, that was about as close to reality as that Chicago Tribune headline -- DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN -- in 1948.

Thank you for printing the column by Maria Santo. I agree with her well-written, logical piece on abortion, and I commend you for opening the door to inevitable controversy. Catherine LaFerriere Highland

ATLANTA - Fifty letters handwritten by Gen. William T. Sherman during his Civil War campaign to capture and destroy Atlanta were displayed Monday at the Atlanta History Center, which is seeking $400,000 from private donors to purchase the collection. It includes floridly written orders Sherman wrote to his generals during the 1864 campaign. In one, he threatens to shoot his men for shirking their duty: "The only proper fate of such miscreants is that they be shot as common enemies to their profession and country, and all officers and patriots sent to arrest them will shoot them without mercy on the slightest impudence or resistance."

Shirley Reingold, who managed the early R&B vocal group The Orioles and wrote their 1948 hit song "It's Too Soon to Know," died of heart disease Oct. 10 at Aventura Hospital in Aventura, Fla. The native Baltimorean was 89. She was known professionally as Deborah Chessler. In an interview with music historian Paul Horner, she said that she and her mother, Irene, were in New York when a young man proposed to her. The idea of marriage caught her off-guard, and in talking to her mother in a room at the Hotel Forrest, she said, "It's too soon, it's too soon to know.

The weekly computer column by Sun staff writer Michael J. Himowitz, which has been published in the Monday Business section, is no longer being written. A new computer column, written by Peter H. Lewis of the New York Times, begins today on Page 12C.

Lonestar Equipped with the most artistic freedom it's ever had, Lonestar hits the road again to tour in support of its current release, Let's Be Us Again. With all but one song written or co-written by band members on their 13-track disc, these crooning Southern gentlemen perform Sunday night at the Hippodrome Theatre, 12 N. Eutaw St. The show starts at 8 p.m. and tickets are $32.50 and $42.50. Call 410-547-SEAT or go to ticketmaster.com.

Ana Garcia-Moreno spent three days carefully crafting a composition about her grandparents - how much they mean to her and the activities she likes to share with them. But the exercise wasn't over when the writing stopped. There were corrections to be made - an important part of the writing process at the Calvert School. So 8-year-old Ana stood quietly in the classroom and watched her teacher, Kathy Agley, go over her 1 1/2 -page essay line by line. Agley erased the contraction haven't, and Ana replaced it with the words have not. Then Agley explained that sailboat is a compound word, not two words as Ana had written.

An interview with Carol Stretmater, member of the Highland Book Club. What book are members reading this month? They're reading The Best American Short Stories 2001 edited by Barbara Kingsolver. How did you come to choose that? A different member picks a book each month. The person who has the meeting tells you what to read the next month, and then they lead the discussion that month. Does your group read any nonfiction? Ah yes, we just read Seabiscuit. ... They all liked it. It's well written, and it's written so that it's really easy to read.

The World: Travels 1950-2000, by Jan Morris. Norton, 480 pages. $27.95. Morris was 24 in 1953 when The Times of London published the first piece in this magnificent anthology -- a first-person report from the British expedition that conquered Mount Everest. The epilogue is a paean to kindness, the consummate value that Morris finds sound and enduring at age 75 -- an essay written at the end of a final round-the-world tour that ended again at home in Wales on the day before Sept. 11, 2001.

In yesterday's Today section article about Center Stage's 1997-1998 season, the wrong name was given for the author of the play "Picnic." It was written by William Inge. The same story also misidentified an award won by playwright Lorraine Hansberry. She is the winner of a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.The Sun regrets the errors.Center Stage will announce today its 1997-1998 season, which includes a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera and three edgy, challenging works that deal with issues from racial tensions to incest and were written by women -- two of whom are Maryland natives.

If there was a shocker in the recent accounting of the spending on food at the governor's and mayor's skyboxes at M&T Bank Stadium, it wasn't that taxpayers are footing the bill for public officials to chow down on beef tenderloin and crabcakes. The surprise was just how little such gourmet grazing costs. Because the state and city governments' deals with the stadium provide them not only free skyboxes but also food at cost, both the governor and mayor fed hundreds of people for under $3,000 a season.

"Off the dome, man! We don't need phones. We don't need notepads," exclaims Los last week after ripping his Toca Tuesday freestyle live on Sirius XM's Shade 45. (Watch it in the above clip.) He had reason to be excited - the Baltimore rapper, who has been gaining traction nationally, could turn heads with performances like this. And yes, we can use the word "freestyle"* because Los is clearly going off the top of his head with these rhymes. Sure, some bars might be stored away, waiting for the right moment, but it's a true freestyle nonetheless, and it's another piece of evidence that Los might be the Great Baltimore Hope to make an impact outside of the 410. Another interesting moment from the clip: Los shouts out his long-time girlfriend and rising D.C. rapper Lola Monroe ("Shout out to my old lady / Ay, Lola, I see you / I do it and I hold it down")

Baltimore police declared a bomb scare at City Hall safe Monday morning, and reopened the surrounding streets. Police received a call around 7 a.m. about a suspicious package at City Hall, and closed the nearby streets, according to police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi. It was later revealed to be a food container wrapped in a T-shirt with the word "bomb" written on it, and streets were reopened at about 8:30 a.m. There were no suspects. Government offices were closed Monday in observance of the Christmas holiday.

Sergio Kindle's first training camp practice for the Ravens appeared to be a successful one. The outside linebacker, who missed his entire rookie season with a head injury, looked sleek and fast and impressed coach John Harbaugh at the team's facility in Owings Mills on Thursday. "I think it's great for him as a person," Harbaugh said after practice. "That's the No. 1 thing, to see what he's overcome and to be out there. He looked good. So, obviously, it's one step.

For Demetrios "Dimitri" Fotos, the challenge could not have felt more natural. An Annapolis photographer, he learned the power of reading as a child when his father took dozens of adult-education courses at St. John's College. Yet it was the visual arts Dimitri fell in love with at age 13, and that passion has never waned. So when organizers at the Mitchell Gallery at St. John's told him of their latest plan — to stage an exhibit for which artists would create works "inspired by books" — his mind went off like a strobe flash.

Horace Freeland Judson, the author of a widely praised history of molecular biology who also taught at the Johns Hopkins University, died of a stroke Friday at his Roland Park home. He was 80. For his book "The Eighth Day of Creation," he interviewed nearly 100 scientists he called "makers of the revolution in biology" and told the story of the foundations of modern genetics. "He was a gifted person with a deep understanding of science," said Dr. Paul R. McHugh, a friend who was psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975 to 2001.

Jonathan Pitts Pitts, a graduate of Haverford College and the University of Missouri School of Journalism, has been writing features for The Sun for seven years. His stories have won recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors and the Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Program. He is co-author, with Whitney Herzog, of You're Missin' a Great Game (Simon and Schuster, 1999). Pitts wrote our cover story in which he became a slave for a day in an immersion program that takes participants back to the 1850s (Article, Page 18)

For those voters who have been perplexed by the complexities of deficit spending and the slick rhetoric of budget balancing, the members of the House have offered a stunningly simple, albeit unintentional, explanation.Last week the public learned that members of the esteemed lawmaking body had left more than $300,000 in unpaid tabs at the chamber's cafeteria and had written -- and bounced -- more than 8,300 checks at the House bank.With federal legislators unable to keep their own finances in order -- writing bad checks and neglecting to pay the bills -- it's no wonder there is no fiscal discipline in Washington and that the nation is swamped in red ink.

Baltimore's public schools are being recognized as "revitalized" and on an upward trajectory in a national report released last week. As part of the March 2011 Grad Nation Summit, bringing together more than 800 education and policymaking leaders in Washington, D.C., Baltimore was among four school systems cited for significant progress over the last decade. The report, "Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic, 2010-2011 Annual Report," highlights that the high school graduation rate in Baltimore City Public Schools has increased approximately 12 percentage points since 1996 (16 percentage points if students who take five years to graduate are counted)