Pretty In Black

"I Feel Pretty", the Nike commercial featuring Maria Sharapova has certainly come true. Wearing a glittery black outfilt that looked more like a cocktail dress rather than a tennis outfilt, the third-seeded Sharapova beat No. 2 Justine Henin-Hardenne 6-4, 6-4 in the U.S. Open final Saturday to add a follow-up championship to her breakthrough title at Wimbledon in 2004.

Sharapova began the U.S. Open with as much buzz about her sponsorships as her strokes, as much talk about her getups as her game. She's long insisted she's more about substance than style, though, and now she owns a second Grand Slam title to prove it.

After wiining the match, Maria ran into the stands to hug her father, Uri, who was wearing a a "I Feel Pretty - Relaxed" tee shirt. Maria then called her mom with a cell phone while waiting for the trophy ceremony, Sharapova leaned forward in her chair and said, "This is crazy!"

During her comments to the crowd, Sharapova thanked Billie Jean King for her work for women in tennis, including for equal prize money. Sharapova earned $1.7 million with her victory, although she makes far more from endorsement deals than prize money.

Clearly, she finds more gratification in trophies. "You can't buy a Grand Slam title, you know?" Sharapova said. "You can't buy it."

Back in Black

Maria Sharapova wearing black at the 2006 U.S. Open.

Rainy Days

Longest Commute

Residents of Washington's outer suburbs endure some of the nation's longest commutes, according to a U.S. Census survey released yesterday that also showed clogged roads and high gasoline prices are pushing a growing number of people onto mass transit.

The region's average commute is more than 33 minutes one way, ranking second to the New York area's 34 minutes among large metropolitan regions. In Calvert, Prince William and Stafford counties, however, the average journey to work takes 40 minutes or more, according to the 2005 American Community Survey of households.

These long commutes are fueled by new housing popping up rapidly in the region's outer fringes, where most residents travel to counties closer to the District to work, transportation experts say. Pushing up the numbers is the region's high employment level, which includes the parents of the vast majority of the region's preschoolers. The region also ranks high in the share of people who commute outside their home county, as more than half do.

As roads have jammed and fuel prices have soared, thousands of people have switched from cars to public transportation, the survey figures indicate.

The Washington area, where 13 percent of workers get to their jobs by bus or rail, ranks behind only New York and San Francisco in use of mass transit. The region has zoomed past Boston and Chicago since the 2000 Census. Two-thirds of workers still drive to their jobs alone, but that share appears to have leveled off since 2000. The popularity of carpools continues to fade. Read more here...

Dylan Says CDs are "Atrocious"

From Reuters:

Bob Dylan says the quality of modern recordings is "atrocious," and even the songs on his new album sounded much better in the studio than on disc. "I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really," the 65-year-old rocker said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine.

Dylan, who released eight studio albums in the past two decades, returns with his first recording in five years, "Modern Times," next Tuesday. Noting the music industry's complaints that illegal downloading means people are getting their music for free, he said, "Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway."

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them," he added. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static." Dylan said he does his best to fight technology, but it's a losing battle.

"Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it."

Tower Records In Trouble?

The 89-store Tower chain -- like nearly every other specialty music retailer -- has experienced big setbacks recently. Just two years ago, the company went through a prepackaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection filing...

Tower Records is an anomaly: In an industry almost entirely dominated by mall operations (both specialized entertainment shops and mass merchants), it's the last free-standing deep-catalog chain. Over the course of its 46-year history, it became known as the place to go for the erudite record shopper. In its heyday, it was a pure reflection of the taste and intelligence of its founder Russ Solomon...

Those indie retailers recognized that if Tower goes away -- and that is a distinct possibility -- it will be one more gloomy signal to the American consumer, who knows the Tower brand better than any competing retail logo, that the music business as we know it is over. And that's bad news for everybody... ...Read article here...

How Baseball Cards Lost Their Luster

Last month, when my parents sold the house I grew up in, my mom forced me to come home and clear out my childhood bedroom. I opened the closet and found a box the size of a Jetta. It was so heavy that at first I thought it held my Weider dumbbells from middle school. Nope, this was my old stash.

Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of baseball cards from the 1980s. Puckett, Henderson, Sandberg, Gwynn, and McGwire stared back at me with fresh faces. So long, old friends, I thought. It's time for me to cash in on these long-held investments. I started calling the lucky card dealers who would soon be bidding on my trove.

First, I got a couple of disconnected numbers for now-defunct card shops. Not a good sign. Then I finally reached a human. "Those cards aren't worth anything," he told me, declining to look at them.

"Maybe if you had, like, 20 McGwire rookie cards, that's something we might be interested in," another offered. ...Read more here