The awarding of the Nobel Peace Price to President Barack Obama landed with a shock on darkened, still-asleep Washington. He won! For what?

The public is split 40-40 on supporting or opposing the health care legislation, the AP poll found. An even split is welcome news for Democrats and a sharp improvement from September.

It’s easier to find out-of-work supermodels than athletes good enough for the NFL, which is the short answer why the Lingerie Football League will survive for another day and the Arena Football League won’t. The AFL, which had suspended the 2009 season in hopes of returning in 2010, gave up earlier this week, formally announcing it has ceased operations.

When NASCAR people talked about the need for speed, methamphetamines weren’t part of the conversation. Suddenly, they’re talking about little else. What ignited all the talk was driver Jeremy Mayfield’s come-from-behind win earlier this week in what promises to be a long and grueling legal race. Fair or not, the only way Mayfield wins - let alone makes it to the end - is if he turns out to be a better plaintiff than driver.

With his 2006 debut “Brick,“ writer-director Rian Johnson had the vision and ambition to make a film noir set at a California high school.  With his follow-up, “The Brothers Bloom,“ he has made . . .  well, he has made a Wes Anderson film, something that’s idiosyncratic enough to qualify as a genre all its own. If Johnson lacks originality here, though, he makes up for it in vibrant energy and visual flair. If he’s copying—or borrowing liberally, to be more charitable—at least he has made a better Anderson movie than Anderson himself has in about a decade.

Travis McKie, the John Marshall High School forward who led the Justices to a berth in the State Group AAA basketball semifinals, was saluted yesterday by the Associated Press as a first-team all-state performer. Two other Central Region standouts, Cadarian Raines and Chris Evans, both from Petersburg, were named to the second team. McKie, a 6-6 junior, McKie, 6-6, averaged 21 points and 10 rebounds while shooting 62 percent from the floor.

The Cosby High School girls basketball team—ranked No. 1 in the Times-Dispatch Top 10 poll—is No. 4 in a statewide Group AAA poll released today. Thomas Dale High School’s girls rank ninth in the poll, admninistered by The Associated Press. Here are the rankings for all three groups, with first-place votes in parentheses, record and total points received based on a 10-through-1 voting system: