Zoom

Black & Decker Corp. shares jumped sharply yesterday after a Goldman Sachs & Co. analyst said the stock would outperform the market.Shares of the Towson maker of tools, accessories and appliances shot up $2.125 to $34.875 before settling at $34.25, up $1.50.Barbara Lucas, Black & Decker spokeswoman, said investors were reacting to a change in the rating of Stephen J. Dobi, a Goldman Sachs analyst. Dobi raised his rating of Black & Decker shares from "market perform" to "market outperform."

I am standing on the south side of Pratt Street, in the shadow of the Bromo Tower and caddy-corner to the Pratt Street Ale House, where I might have to head for a beer if my ears start bleeding. It's Friday afternoon, and 20 feet from me Indy car racers scream by at speeds of over 150 mph during practice runs for theBaltimore Grand Prix. Remember the old Mazda commercial with the tagline "zoom-zoom?" There is a whole lot of zoom-zooming going on. I keep looking around and thinking: Is this really Baltimore?

Gillian Horovitz had incentive to win Sunday's Zoo Zoom 5-miler at Druid Hill Park."My husband told me, 'Try to do your best. It'll be good for the play,' " Horovitz said about the instructions she got from her husband, Israel, whose "Park Your Car in Harvard Yard" opens tonight at the Morris A. Mechanic Theatre. "So when I was in second place with about a mile to go, I thought I better get going."That Horovitz did, taking the lead and beating second-place finisher Marge Rosasco by 59 seconds.

It's out with the old and in with the new at Six Flags America this summer. The waterpark Hurricane Harbor beckons thrill seekers with the opening of a faster, better and wetter attraction — ZoomAzon Falls, the park's first body slides for tweens, teens and adults. Meanwhile, an old favorite – Skull Mountain – this week begins its countdown to retirement. The part-water flume and part-coaster ride ends its decade-long run on July 10, when it will be dismantled to make way for a new attraction.

Excuse Patrice Malloy if she gets animated about the Zoo Zoom 5-miler and one-mile Kids Fun Run, to take place Sept. 27 at The Baltimore Zoo.Malloy is an athlete -- a member of the Baltimore Road Runners Club, the Tri-Maryland Triathlon Club and the Ancient Mariners swim team -- who, injury permitting, hopes to compete in the 14th annual run at Druid Hill Park. But she also is marketing and public relations manager for the zoo and, as such, hopes to keep the Zoo Zoom the premier local running event that it has become.

ROUXBE.COM This site offers video-based cooking classes highlighting more than 70 different dishes. Each video recipe (filmed in high definition) has "step videos" so that users can zoom in on particular tools and techniques.

HOLLYWOOD -- Call it: The Clash of theHollywood Titans as 20th Century Fox heads into court against Sony Pictures Entertainment. At stake? Whose superhero movie will rule the month of May next year, which is traditionally one of the biggest months at the box office. It all began when Fox announced plans to release X3, the third installment in its blockbuster comic-book-superheroes action series X-Men, on May 26, 2006. Sony decided to put Zoom, its own comic-book-superheroes movie, in theaters May 12. Now, Fox and Marvel Enterprises, the creator of the X-Men comic books, have filed a federal lawsuit claiming Zoom infringes on the copyrights of X-Men, a franchise that has grossed $700 million worldwide.

"All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom zoom zoom in a poom poom -- just shake your rump!"It may not look like much on paper, but when you hear it booming from a well-cranked sound system, the chorus from Wreckx-N-Effect's "Rump Shaker" comes on like a command. Some of it is in the delivery, of course, but mostly it has to do with the way those words lock into the rhythm track's frantic scratching, sax-like synth and thumping bass drum. Taken together, the chorus has a near-hypnotic effect, one which turns almost any listener into a willing rump-shaker.

Gadget allows access to e-mail away from PCIf you're looking for low-cost access to e-mail when you're away from your computer -- or maybe you don't have a computer at all -- Vtech's e-Mail Postbox ($99) is a worthwhile solution.The small, lightweight computer (under 2 1/2 pounds with batteries) has a full-sized keyboard and a small, eight-line LCD screen. Like other gadgets of this type, it makes me wonder whether seniors and others will have trouble with the dinky screen and small characters.

Kensington -- Someone could make a lot of money by producing a single map of the world. Not a printed single-page map of the National Geographic style, nor a map printed on a globe. Something far more elaborate and detailed -- and computerized.In principle, a computerized world map should be easy to make. It would allow you to pan across continents or to zoom in on, say, Paris or Bombay or Bangor, Maine, and see individual streets, with or without their names. Or you could zoom out and see all of Europe or Asia, or an entire hemisphere.

Every Wednesday at noon, debt collection lawyers take their seats behind a thick wooden table in a downtown Baltimore courtroom for a ritual they call the "rocket docket." It's one way officials at the city District Court try to unclog a backlog of consumer debt lawsuits, including thousands filed by hospitals over unpaid bills. Lawyers call up debtors one at a time to work out payment plans in rapid, on-the-spot settlements. Other days, lawyers haggle with debtors in the courthouse hallways.

Burt Greenwood Jr.'s business is booming - not in spite of a dismal economy but because of it. His squadron of tow truck drivers can barely keep up with the orders to repossess cars and trucks of people who have fallen behind in their payments. "Our intake of new work is increasing like crazy because of the state of affairs economically," said Greenwood, chief executive officer of Greenwood Recovery, who estimates his volume at 40 percent higher than a year ago. That mirrors what appears to be happening statewide.

ROUXBE.COM This site offers video-based cooking classes highlighting more than 70 different dishes. Each video recipe (filmed in high definition) has "step videos" so that users can zoom in on particular tools and techniques.

Under Armour Inc. reported yesterday that third-quarter profit nearly doubled and that its gross margins - a point of concern for some industry analysts - rebounded as quarterly sales surpassed $100 million for the first time. The Baltimore maker of athletic apparel raised its income forecast for the year and said that next year it expects to beat its long-term growth target of 20 percent to 25 percent. "Under Armour is a growth company," said Kevin A. Plank, chief executive officer, in opening remarks to analysts yesterday.

One of the joys of driving on the Jones Falls Expressway is having some lunatic on a sportbike go screaming past you at 110 mph, after which it generally takes several seconds for your heart to restart. Sportbikes, if you don't know, are those high-performance motorcycles tastefully nicknamed "crotch-rockets" that go very fast and are very loud. They'll also make you very dead if you're riding on one that happens to, oh, smack a Jersey wall and go flying in the general direction of the Pepsi sign.

An old friend who's buying a digital camera sent an e-mail with this question: "How much zoom do you really need in your life?" My immediate thought was, "At our age, a lot more than we used to." But what my friend really wanted to know was whether to buy one of the new "super-zoom" digital cameras or stick with a less-expensive, traditional model with more modest zoom capability. Questions like these are increasingly common as digital photography loses its mystery and buyers ask what a digital camera can do instead of how it works.

Ever wonder what it would be like to ride the doomsday asteroid as it screamed in from outer space and put a quick end to civilization as we know it? Me neither. But thanks to NASA and a gazillion of your tax dollars, you can do just that. And it's pretty cool. It's called "Great Zooms From Space," and it comes to you courtesy of the folks at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt. Using 30 years of photo imagery - most from NASA's Terra and Landsat satellites - and the commercial Ikonos satellite, all stitched together by some very powerful computers, NASA has assembled a collection of virtual thrill rides and made them available on the Web at www.gsfc.

NEW WINDSOR Middle School pupils' wetlands project is not only great for the environment, but will zoom them into the spotlight. Maryland Public Television will air a segment on the project on ZOOM, a popular children's show. "I found their wetlands project story on their Web site, and it's a perfect example of `zooming' into action," said producer Frank Batavick, who attended New Windsor Middle School in the late 1970s. "These one-minute stories on ZOOM showcase children volunteering and having a positive effect on their communities."

Motorists tired of waiting for gas prices to come down in the wake of Hurricane Katrina will be happy to know that, after years of study, economists have all but proved what most car owners have known all along: Fuel prices go up much faster than they come down. In academic circles, this is known as the "rockets and feathers" syndrome. Gasoline prices tend to "soar like a rocket" in times of turmoil, such as after a natural disaster. But they "fall like a feather" when markets return to normal, the observation goes.

WASHINGTON -- "In my head I was a wild man, but in my life I had blocks. I was living within all sorts of constraints," says Rob Cohen, 56, director of the action blockbusters The Fast and the Furious, XXX and the just-opened Stealth -- Top Gun updated by two decades. "Now I'm a 16-year-old boy in a middle-aged body." At one point, Cohen was best known as the bookish, Harvard-educated 22-year-old who fished the script to The Sting out of a slush pile. At another, it looked as if he made his mark in film history as a "baby mogul" executive at Motown, where he produced one of the top African-American films of the 1970s, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings.