Midday

TBRQSSSB is a quiz about English idioms -- those phrases that behave like a word. A show like this is as scarce as hen's teeth. This is a whole new ballgame (though no ball is involved), and you've never seen anything like it in our neck of the woods. TBRQSSSB is no flash in the pan, either. We expect it to last until the cows come home.

Our guest this hour, Baltimore science teacher John Monahan, is a wonderfully engaging educator who claims that many of the world’s great scientists were a touch mad – or at least highly eccentric. From Archimedes to Einstein, Monahan profiles the men and women whose discoveries changed the world – while their behavior informed generations of mad scientist legend. His book:They Called Me Mad: Genius, Madness, and the Scientists who Pushed the outer Limits of Knowledge.

Who’s to blame for the financial crisis that led to the Great Recession? There were billions in losses, yet no high-profile participants in the 2007-2008 disaster have been prosecuted. But some of the companies are suing each other now. AIG sued Bank of America for $10 billion this week, claiming massive fraud when the bank sold mortgage securities that were built on toxic assets. And Goldman Sachs has been sued over its sale of mortgage-backed securities to now-failed credit unions.

The weekly Midday news review sticks to one big subject -- the financial crisis and its economic and political ramifications, in Maryland, across the country and abroad. We're joined again by Baltimore Sun business columnist and blogger Jay Hancock, and by Herb Smith, longtime political observer, professor of political science at McDaniel College and co-author of the forthcoming "Maryland Politics and Government: Democratic Dominance".

In May, international tennis star Novak Djokovic claimed his remarkable run of tournament wins had been due to his special, gluten-free diet. Djokovic changed his diet last year after his nutritionist carried out tests and established he was intolerant to gluten, the protein in cereal grains. Today, a look at the growing appeal of gluten-free, not just as a dietary regimen but as business. The Gluten Free Registry  lists more than 19,000 “gluten-free friendly” establishments throughout the world.

Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler joins Dan to talk about same-sex marriage in Maryland, a recent $500,000 penalty ordered against a Cambridge, Maryland country club for dumping raw sewage into the Choptank River, and a landowner education campaign on natural gas drilling contracts in western Maryland.

When a young lawyer named Barack Obama Jr. wrote Dreams from My Father in 1995, he relied on dim memory and family lore to describe a parent he hardly knew. But our second-hour guest, Boston Globe reporter Sally Jacobs, trekked from Boston to Hawaii to the bush country of Kenya to construct a fascinating portrait of Barack Obama, Sr.

In riot or revolution, the Tweets must flow, says the network's co-founder Biz Stone. “Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users.

Midday's collaboration with Foregn Policy magazine continues. 

This hour:  

• SYRIA CIVIL WAR with Blake Hounshell, FP managing editor
• THE LIST with Josh Keating, FP associate editor
• THE SOVIET COLLAPSE AND THE ARAB SPRING, comparative history with Susan Glasser, FP editor-in-chief

In another of our collaborations with the editors, staff writers and contributing writers of Foregn Policy magazine, Midday looks at an array of hot international stories, including the U.S. and European economic crises.

This hour: