Loyola University Maryland men's basketball team celebrates Monday night victory over Fairfield to win first MAAC championship since 1994.

GREYHOUNDS DEFEAT FAIRFIELD STAGS,
CLINCH  BERTH  TOWARD  ‘FINAL FOUR’

Last men’s basketball title was in 1994

Loyola University Maryland clinched its first men’s basketball title in 18 years Monday, defeating Connecticut’s Fairfield University Stags by a score of 48-44.

The victory, in Springfield Mass., was not assured until game’s end, as the second-seeded Greyhounds defeated the number-four Stags to win the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) championship and an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament scheduled to begin in Dayton Ohio March 13.

Both Loyola and Fairfield are Jesuit universities.

Popularly known as “March Madness” a/k/a the “Big Dance,” the annual National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament was organized in 1939 and now features 68 college basketball teams. It is a single-elimination tournament.
 
— VoB Staff report
 
Read more »

BIG’s improvisational play ‘Unscripted’ is playing weekends at Hampden’s Mobtown Theater through Saturday March 17th.

CREATIVE PRODUCTION
WILL RUN IN HAMPDEN
THROUGH MARCH 17th
 
By Tim Young
 
“Unscripted,” the Balti- more Improv Group (BIG)’s initial attempt at a full-length play, began its run this weekend and did not disappoint.

The concept seems simple: take nine improvisational actors, put them on a stage with props, and let them perform for a long enough time to create a play. But what actually occurs is much more coordinated and complicated than that.

The production began with director Prescott Gaylord’s invitation to the audience to assist the cast: “Write the beginning of this together,” he proposed. Then from the few minor suggestions and props brought by the audience for the actors to use, the play began.

At the onset, it feels a bit rough, the actors clearly feeling each other out and developing a plot line that audience members may doubt will last; but near the end of Act 2, you realize that you’ve just seen something unique, approaching genius, constructed right in front of you.

Each full play is completely different. This night there was a salacious tale of a broken home in the Poconos (location chosen by an audience member).

Read more »

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leads the field of Republican presidential candidates heading into Super Tuesday lineup of 10 primaries next week, most of them in New England & the South.

HOME STATES OF ROMNEY &
GINGRICH VOTE THIS WEEK

1,144 delegates needed to win
Republican  Party  nomination
 
With only 13 percent of the delegates to the Republican National Convention chosen thus far, the four GOP presidential candidates are gearing up for the biggest primary election day to date — so-called Super Tuesday, which focuses on New England and the South.

The home states of two of the candidates — Georgia and Massachusetts — will select more than a quarter of the 437 delegates to be chosen on Tuesday, when voters are scheduled to go to the polls in 10 states.

A total of 1,144 delegates are needed to win the nomination.

To date, only 299 have been selected, with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading the field with 163, followed by ex-Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum with 83.

Rounding out the quartet of candidates are former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who has 32 delegates, and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, who has 19.

The largest delegation up for grabs this week, 76, is in Georgia, followed by Ohio, which has 66, and Tennessee, with 58.

The one additional southern state that will be voting is Virginia, along with the New England states of Massachusetts and Vermont and the southwestern state of Oklahoma.

Read more »

Trademark pink flamingo adorns façade of Hampden's Cafe Hon. The restaurant and its owner were featured Friday on WBFF-Fox45-TV's ‘Kitchen Nightmares.’

TV HOST, CHEF GORDON RAMSAY,
ON 3-DAY VISIT  TO BALTIMORE,
REDESIGNS  HAMPDEN EATERY

Restaurant  owner Denise Whiting
trademarked Balto. word ‘Hon,’
incurring wrath of entire city

BY SHOW’S END, ALL IS LOVEY-DOVEY
 
By Alan Z. Forman
 
Anyone who watched the first 45 minutes Friday night of the hour-long reality-TV show “Kitchen Nightmares” would have thought Hampden’s Cafe Hon was about to be dead-and-buried.

But wonder upon wonders, in the show’s final segment, Television Chef Gordon Ramsay and his “team” of culinary experts literally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, transforming the iconic 36th St. restaurant and “persuading” its insufferable proprietor Denise Whiting to give up her claim to ownership of the trademark “Hon.”

Asked if he “twisted her arm” to get Whiting to accede and relinquish her claim to the word, Ramsay said “No”; however he had all but told her in so many words throughout the first three-quarters of the show that if she didn’t agree to it, the restaurant she had put 20 years of her life into was doomed.

Then today, Whiting went on WBAL-1090-AM-Radio and virtually admitted that the only reason she gave up the trademark was because Ramsay had insisted on it, thus also calling into question the sincerity of her mea culpa.

In the TV program’s final minutes a tearful Whiting acknowledged publicly — via a press conference filmed with Ramsay and reported by local media in November — that she was reluctantly relinquishing the trademark which has nearly bankrupted her once-thriving business and made her arguably the most hated woman in Baltimore.

Read more »

Wife of USAID contractor jailed in Cuba speaks at Stevenson synagogue Sunday. (VoB Photo/Alan Z. Forman)

USAID CONTRACTOR’S SPOUSE
ADDRESSES SMALL AUDIENCE
AT STEVENSON SYNAGOGUE

Pope Benedict is asked to intercede;
innocence of Alan Gross in question

ACCUSED GREW UP IN BALTIMORE
 
By Alan Z. Forman
 
The wife of a Baltimore native incarcerated for more than two years in Cuba on charges of attempting to overthrow the Castro Government came to Stevenson (Md.) early Sunday to drum up support for getting her husband released from a Havana prison.

Judy Gross, wife of computer technician Alan Phillip Gross, 61, who went to Cuba to provide Internet service to Havana’s Jewish community one too many times, is serving a 15-year sentence for espionage for what his family insists are trumped-up charges.

Having been denied an appeal last August by Cuba’s highest court, Gross’s family hopes to influence President Raúl Castro to release him from the maximum-security military hospital in Havana on “humanitarian grounds” based on illness and family hardship.

Gross’s 89-year-old mother is in her last days, his older daughter just underwent a double-mastectomy, and he, according to telephone conversations with his wife, has lost more than 100 pounds off his six-foot 250-lb. frame while in prison.

Castro has said the Baltimore native and recent resident of Potomac Md. is an American spy.

Read more »