I got a chance to speak with Danica Patrick a few weeks ago. She was calling around to media outlets in advance of the Grand Prix and we chatted for 10 or 15 minutes about how her final season of INDYCAR was going ("It’s been an up and down year") and if she had any special items on her to-do list while in Baltimore ("I want to eat crab cakes"). But what she really wanted to talk about was her advocacy for COPD, or Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. The illness—the fourth leading cause of death in this country—includes chronic bronchitis and emphysema, the disease which claimed her grandmother's life at the age of 61.
"I remember seeing my grandma, especially at the end when she was in a wheelchair and she was on oxygen 24-hours a day, and the machine makes that sucking noise," she said via telephone. "It’s just sad to see somebody in such a fragile state, so reliant on something, so helpless. There’s no cure for the disease. That should be a wake up call. Anytime you see a loved one in a position where they’re helpless it’s really painful," she added.
Becoming an celebrity ambassador for DRIVE4COPD, was, "the perfect situation to turn a negative into a positive." She encourages everyone to go to...








While The Sun 
If ever there was a subject ripe to be documented, it's Divine, a.k.a. Baltimore native Harris Glenn Milstead, the overweight drag queen whose campy, often hilarious, sometimes bizarre turns in John Waters films like Pink Flamingos, Hairspray, Polyester, and Female Troubles always threatened to steal the show.
While I am shocked and saddened by the loss of Oriole great Mike Flanagan, I am too young to understand his full impact on the game of baseball. I got to see the end of his career as a player and always enjoyed his witty commentary during Orioles games. But, in this instance, I wanted to defer to my dad, Andrew Blumberg, a life-long Orioles fan who got the opportunity to meet Flanagan and always considered him a personal hero:
Longtime Baltimore Sun political reporter and columnist Laura Vozzella (left), who is leaving the paper to take a job at The Washington Post, had her 


