Yorker

So, two dinosaurs are merrily munching citizens of some metropolis. Gobbling people like microwave popcorn, and one dinosaur says to the other ... Well, what does it say? So, there's a business meeting being held in a New York City subway car and the one CEO says to the others ... OK, this is hard. One more. A woman meets a man on the street. He's carrying a briefcase. He's shaped like the number 6. Smiling, he says to her ... Maybe it's not so easy writing witty captions to New Yorker cartoons.

Although I've lived all my life within 30 miles of Times Square, I've never been much of a Giants or Jets fan (when people ask my favorite team, I usually say the Buffalo Bills, because unlike the players for the Jets or Giants, the Bills' high salaries help hold down my New York state income taxes). Yet, as I watched the Super Bowl , I found myself rooting for Baltimore because: •So much of Baltimore is so much like the neighborhood where I grew up in Queens. The attached brick houses with metal awnings shading what our parents called picture windows.

WHITNEY BALLIETT, 80 Magazine jazz critic Whitney Balliett, a jazz critic for The New Yorker, died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. A graduate of Cornell University, Mr. Balliett joined The New Yorker in 1951. He retired in 1998.

As a member of the arts community, I find it to be very exciting that Harford County will get a new arts center funded by a major contribution from Emily Bayless Graham ("Designs are unveiled for Harford arts center," Oct. 24). What bothers me however is the hiring of a New York firm to design it. Maryland, and particularly Baltimore and it's surrounding counties, have several extremely talented architectural firms, some of which have excellent reputations for this type of project.

PHILADELPHIA - What goes on in the minds of medical professionals who become serial killers? Forensic experts are trying to answer that question following the arrest of Charles Cullen, the New Jersey nurse who says he killed as many as 40 patients. He has been charged with murder in the death of one patient, and investigators are looking into deaths at 10 Pennsylvania and New Jersey hospitals where Cullen worked. Since 1974, nearly four dozen nurses, therapists and doctors have been prosecuted for serial killings in the United States and other countries.

"Talk Stories," by Jamaica Kincaid. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. 247 pages. $23. Jamaica Kincaid, then a staff writer for the New Yorker and assigned to its "Talk of the Town" section, attended a lunch-eon for aspiring novelists at the Overseas Press Club in February 1979. She might have been there for personal edification -- Kincaid has published five books of fiction, some of them critically acclaimed, since her New Yorker days -- but she might have seen the conference as just another source of fodder for a "Talk" story.

LAST week, a close friend phoned me late at night. He had just opened his mail."Guess what I have here!" he said mischievously. "It's a subscription offer to -- it says -- a magazine with probably the greatest editor in the world.""Who's that?" I asked, reaching for my bedside alarm clock. It was almost midnight."Tina Brown," he said firmly. "Don't you read the new New Yorker? They're offering it to me for one year -- 16 bucks.""Send me the subscription!" I pleaded. "I need it."Like many writers, I'm worried about the New Yorker.

Who wants to be a millionaire when you can have your name in the New Yorker? Vince Banes, a 49-year-old Silver Spring rocket scientist, seemed perfectly happy Wednesday to snare first prize in the magazine's caption contest -- even if it came with a gag gift, not cash and a handshake with Regis. When the annual Cartoon Issue of the New Yorker arrived in November, Banes flipped through, avidly scanning the captions, until he came to the Back Page, where one final cartoon begged for a caption.

REMEMBER LAUGHTER: A LIFE OF JAMES THURBER. By Neil A. Grauer. University of Nebraska Press. Illustrated. Index. 204 pages. $20.SOME OF the very best American prose is the work of humorists who began as their careers as journalists -- the best, of course, is Mark Twain. Second or third on the list would have to be James Thurber, the subject of this exemplary little biography by Baltimore writer, Neil Grauer.Even devoted Thurber lovers who have read other biographies of him (the last one was published nearly 20 years ago)

A RECENT biography of Harold Ross, the eccentric founder and first editor of the New Yorker, prompted us to cull these passages from James Thurber's 1959 memoir, "The Years with Ross":Of their first meeting in 1927, two years after the launching of the magazine, Thurber wrote, "I told [Ross] I wanted to write, and he snarled, 'Writers are a dime a dozen, Thurber. What I want is an editor. I can't find editors. Nobody grows up. Do you know English?' I said I thought I knew English, and this started him off on a subject with which I was to become intensely familiar.

It was planned to be the perfect day trip for a guess-I'm-retired New Yorker who thought he loved baseball and Italian food equally: take the bargain bus down to Baltimore, get the free birthday-month ticket in the upper deck, watch a meaningful game between two teams in playoff contention for two-and-a-half hours, and then take the free bus over to Little Italy where I would be confronted by the same daunting challenge I have every time I've been...

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, enjoying the freedom that only a final term in office can bring, has proposed banning the sale of soda and other sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces at restaurants, sports venues, delis and food carts, effective next March. If you want your drink super-sized, you will have to buy two - or go back for a refill. And New Yorkers, who never harbor an unexpressed thought for very long, are outraged. Some see this as the nanny state gone wild, and another liberty, like the right to consume trans fats in restaurants, trampled by the health-nut mayor (who has built an edifice to his passion here in Baltimore)

Frances Schoonmaker lived in New York's Upper West Side working as a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College. She took subways and buses, and knew enough to stay alert on the streets of the big city. In nearly 30 years, she never once got mugged. She retired last year, moved to Rodgers Forge and let her guard down. Instead of crossing the street when she saw a suspicious woman on Stevenson Lane this past weekend, she walked by on her way to teach a Sunday school class at her church.

Sheppard Pratt seems to have found its target market: readers of The New Yorker. The Towson psychiatric hospital ran not one but two ads in the Nov. 3 issue. There's yet another in the Nov. 24 edition. Perhaps anyone who understands those one-panel cartoons should have his head examined. But is there something else that makes New Yorker readers likely consumers of psychiatric services? No one in the hospital's public affairs office responded to my calls, so no insight there. Jim Bready, the retired Evening Sun editorial writer who spotted the ads, thinks Sheppard Pratt might be fishing for newly despondent Wall Street types or the age-old reckless rich.

WASHINGTON - "Damn you and the likes of you to the bowels of hell, you ignorant racist bastard!" So wrote an outraged Muslim to political cartoonist Doug Marlette a few years ago after he drew a cartoon featuring the prophet Muhammad. Tens of thousands of Muslims bellowed, blogged and clogged until servers collapsed with hate mail and death threats. No cartoon - or cartoonist - would go unpunished. Here we go again. Similar passions are being expressed this week in response to another cartoon, this time on the cover of the liberal-leaning New Yorker magazine.

A satirical New Yorker cover cartoon picturing Barack Obama in the Oval Office dressed as a Muslim, his wife as a terrorist, and a portrait of Osama bin Laden hanging over a fireplace with a burning American flag elicited angry responses yesterday from the Democrat's presidential campaign and his supporters. But The New Yorker defended the artist and its cover, which illustrates an article titled "The Politics of Fear," as a satirical look at the scare tactics and misinformation being used to derail Obama's campaign.

Garry Wills is the Nixon aficionado's Nixon aficionado: the man who charted that 5 o'clock shadow down to its nubbiest bristle. A quarter of a century after its initial publication, Mr. Wills' "Nixon Agonistes" remains the best book written on the 37th president. Anyone wondering about Mr. Wills' hold on the franchise now that the Trickster has joined the Great Silent Majority in the sky need only turn to the July Esquire for reassurance."He contrived to die in the odor of statesmanship," Mr. Wills begins his assessment of the reaction to Nixon's passing.

Tepper Isn't Going Out, by Calvin Trillin. Random House. 215 pages. $22.95. If you live in Manhattan and park your car on the streets -- as opposed to paying usurious fees to a garage -- this curious comic novel by Calvin Trillin may be right up your alley. If you're not (and this effectively eliminates some 260 million Americans), it may be considerably less appealing. Murray Tepper is a mild-mannered senior citizen with a strange fixation for parking. He knows all the parking regulations -- Lower East Side, one-hour parking, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. including Sunday; East 78th Street, no parking 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday and Friday, etc. Once he finds a prime spot, he sits there for hours in his car, reading the newspaper and making annoying little hand gestures that signify "I'm not going out" to motorists who covet his parking space.

With injured local favorite Ah Day on the sidelines, a flock of New Yorkers will be at Laurel Park today to seek the winner's share of the purse in the Grade II, $300,000 General George Handicap. The field of eight has only one home entry, John Alecci-trained Ryan's for Real, and one other not stabled in New York, Marvel Wood, who campaigns primarily at Philadelphia Park and Delaware Park. And both are decided long shots in the morning line. They face a daunting task in trying to get on the board against shippers from New York who stand in the barns of Todd Pletcher, Kiaran McLaughlin, Rick and Tony Dutrow and Bruce Levine.