The Little Elm softball team can't catch a break.The Lady Lobos entered the 2007-08 campaign with plenty of questions. Courtesy of the best season in program history, most have been answered. But one important query still remains: What does it take to pull away from the pack?Riding a four-game win streak, the team is still entrenched in a skin-tight battle for the third and final playoff spot in District 9-4A. Head coach David Garza expected to wake up Wednesday to find his team with some breathing room in the standings. Not so after a whacky turn of events Tuesday that saw Frisco upend cross-town rival Centennial and McKinney Boyd pull the year's biggest upset by handing McKinney North its first district loss."Things thickened up quite a bit," Garza said.North will lock up the district title Friday with a win over Lake Dallas, leaving Little Elm, Centennial, Boyd and Frisco to fight for the final two postseason berths.

CD reviews: German sessions offer innovative sounds

If it is the ultimate compliment to suggest an improvising pianist is playing in a Keith Jarrett manner, then Kristjan Randalu can begin celebrating. "Live" is a recording that calls to mind Jarrett's solo performances, with one big difference: percussionist Bodek Janke. In these sessions recorded in Germany, the pair perform greatly inventive material that includes originals, standards and a version of the largo from Antonin Dvorak's "New World" symphony. The pianist hums and adds other vocal touches at times while playing jazz or in a 21st-century-classical manner. His 12-minute look at "Igauhel oma pill," which has a folk-sounding melody, is something from a new-music concert. He lays back into a nice groove on "All the Things You Are" and "If I Were a Bell," but perhaps the best moments come on the Dvorak piece.

Briefs: Pair of sandals looks beautiful to some, ugly to others

They're so weird, so bizarre, so utterly ugly that they qualify as spring's must-have pair of shoes.

They are Prada's flower-heeled Mary Jane sandals from the Milan, Italy-based fashion company's spring '08 runway collection. The leather sandal, with its seductive tone-on-tone piping, the sculptural rise of its 3 1/2-inch heel and its lemony-sweet "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?" bow tie, is certainly an acquired taste. And with the $750 price tag, not many people will be able to breathe in its rarefied scent, much less slip a pair onto their well-manicured tootsies.

But the straight-from-the-catwalk shoe, with its oblique references to abstract expressionism and the Spanish modernist architect Antoni Gaudi, has elicited vigorous love-it-or-hate-it debate on Internet blog sites.