It has been a bad year for sports in the Washington area. It's still September and it looks like the football season is already over for the Washington Redskins, which are 1-2 and have looked bad while losing. Don't see them making the playoffs this season.

The Maryland Terapins football team is 1-3, and they have also looked bad while losing. Neither fotball team looks promising at all, and it looks like I'm in for a long season of losing by both football teams.

The Washington Nationals baseball team has lost over 100 games for the second straight season and will again finish with the worst record in baseball. Getting the top draft choice this year, Steven Strasburg, and again next year(Bryce Harper?) doesn't seem to help much now. But, unlike the football teams, the Nats seem closer to putting a very good team on the field next year. They need to add a couple more good players in the off season. We will have to wait and see.

The good news is that Hockey and Basketball are about to start and things look much better with these Washington teams. The Capitals should be good playoff team again this year and could go all the way to the Stanley Cup finals.

The Washington Wizzards should definitely be much better than last year when they were just plain bad. They have a new good coach(Al Saunders) and they should be healthy this sesason, especially Gilbert Arenas. They made a couple of good trades and I am expecting the Wizzards to make the playoffs this season. That would take a huge jump in wins, but it does seem very possible.

The Maryland Terps basketball team could be a real surprise this season and land in the Top 20 nationally. They have the veteran players, but college basketball is hard to predict and it is hard to win those ACC games on the road.

The soccer team, DC United just has not looked very good and even if they make the playoffs I don't expect them to do much. The team just has not been as good as they were winning championships earlier in the decade. 　

From: The New York Times

One of the theories espoused by Dan Brown's new book is that when many people share the same thought, that thought can have physical effects. Let’s test it on Tuesday. Watch what happens to bloggers, booksellers, nitpickers, code crackers, conspiracy theorists, fans and overheated search engines when "The Lost Symbol," Mr. Brown’s overdue follow-up to "Angels & Demons" (2000) and "The Da Vinci Code" (2003), finally sees the light of day.

Dr. Solomon accompanies Robert Langdon, the rare symbologist who warrants the word dashing as both adjective and verb, through much of this novel, his third rip-snorting adventure. As Browniacs have long predicted, the chase involves the secrets of Freemasonry and is set in Washington, where some of those secrets are built into the architecture and are thus hidden in plain sight. Browniacs also guessed right in supposing that "The Lost Symbol" at one point was called "The Solomon Key." That’s a much better title than the generic one it got.

Maria Sharapova at the 2009 U.S. Tennis Open