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The Oscar-winning filmmaker discusses baseball, unimportant dialogue, Americana, and French fries.

Well known for his comedies and period films, including many set in his native Baltimore (Diner, Tin Men, Avalon, and Liberty Heights), Barry Levinson also gave us such diverse hits as Bugsy, Rain Man, and Good Morning, Vietnam. In 1984, he scored a home run with The Natural, starring Robert Redford, which many people consider to be the best baseball movie of all time. It's now a new special-edition DVD, The Natural Director's Cut, from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Several new technologies are poised to break the ties that bind.

Imagine being able to place that brand-new flat-panel HDTV anywhere in your living room without having to figure out how to hide the video cable that tethers it to your A/V receiver, DVD player, or set-top box. You won't have to imagine it much longer as wireless HD transmission moves from the drawing board to the retail shelves. As always seems to be the case in this industry, we'll go from having virtually no options to having multiple technologies competing for the attention of manufacturers and consumers alike.

An affordable speaker system you just might take a shine to.

My daughter has been coming home recently with holes in her slacks—and, no, they aren't the holes she puts her legs through, as she wryly pointed out the other day. (That's what I get for raising a family full of wiseacres.) The cause of these holes is a bit of a mystery, seeing as how they appear and reappear at the same spots on each leg at random times. I've toyed with the idea of treating them as the fashion equivalent of crop circles or the result of an obsessive-compulsive moth, but these are, as you might conclude, unfulfilling answers. None of her peers have similar apparel problems, so it appears to be an extremely localized phenomenon. It remains an enigma.

Webcasters and the music industry worked out a deal on Thursday of last week that will temporarily delay draconian new royalties that many predict would kill many net radio broadcasters.