Alan Ball

Two-time champion Tony Stewart likened NASCAR to professional wrestling and accused it of using bogus caution flags to shape races in biting comments made on his weekly radio show in Charlotte, N.C. Stewart's appearance on his Tuesday night show was his first since skipping a post-race news conference in Phoenix. He dominated Saturday night's race but lost after a late exchange of leads with winner Jeff Gordon.

FOR decades, Nancy Oliver wrote plays that her old Florida State University pal, screenwriter Alan Ball ("American Beauty"), occasionally produced on small stages. Oliver put obscurity behind her with a critically acclaimed television series and an Oscar buzzworthy screenplay in "Lars and the Real Girl." And it all came not a moment too soon.

The mourning has finally broken. Alan Ball is contemplating life after death -- five seasons' worth. Ball is coping with the final throes of HBO's "Six Feet Under," his black-humor-laced drama about a family-run funeral home that will end its run Sunday. "Six Feet Under" is one of the flagship components, along with "The Sopranos," "Sex and the City" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm," that have made the pay-cable network a critical favorite and powerhouse.

Bravo to Paul Brownfield for putting into words those feelings that kept me tossing and turning all night long after watching the final episode of "Six Feet Under," especially the moving coda that detailed the outcome of the main characters' lives ["A Fitting Epitaph for 'Six Feet Under,' " Aug. 22]. With moments that echoed the equally mysterious and glorious end of Kubrick's "2001," I was left wondering about my own mortality, who would be with me when I died, where I would go and who would be there to greet me. When the show made its final trademark fade to white, writer Alan Ball gave new meaning to the term "going into the light."

After a mysterious two-week disappearance, the body of Lisa (Lili Taylor), Nate Fisher's (Peter Krause) sweet, gentle, murderously passive-aggressive wife, washed ashore somewhere near Santa Barbara. The news, which came at the end of the final episode of "Six Feet Under" last June, broke the fever that had raged throughout much the third season. Thanks in part to Taylor's moony presence, the congenitally repressed Fisher family had plunged headlong into lunacy.