Abyssinia

BaseballThe newly formed Howard County Babe Ruth League will begin its first season this spring -- not in future years as reported in last week's column.This countywide league will be open to youngsters ages 11-18.Bob Russell, a member of the league's founding Board of Directors, said that registration will begin with nightly sessions at Centennial High School on Jan. 18 and 25, at which time the league will also conduct community organizational meetings.Open registration will continue in front of Woodies at the Mall in Columbia on Jan. 28.Indoor soccer* 15-and-under boys -- The Blue team from First Baptist Church of Guilford opened its Christian Fellowship Basketball League schedule with a 45-17 win over Wayland Baptist last weekend at Calverton Middle School.

A struggle goes on here, although it's hard to tell by looking around. The Bean Hollow Roastery and Espresso on Main Street in Old Ellicott City drips charm on the worst day, and on the best day owner Gretchen Shuey should charge you for sticking your nose in the door and intoxicating yourself with the aroma of roasting coffee. That's her behind the counter, tending to the brewers or serving another customer or standing in the back at the small roaster, cooking another batch of Guatemalan, Ethiopian, something.

"Korea," by Simon Winchester, 240 pages, Prentice Hall Press, New York, N.Y., $10.95.Books like Simon Winchester's "Korea" belong to a lineage that goes back to the beginning of time, or at least to that time when some blue-painted Anglo-Saxon cave dweller ambled off to the next moor then came back to tell his cavemates about it."Korea" is one of those British travel books in which a British writer describes the peculiarities of a people who are not British.These books are endlessly popular, especially here in the United States, which itself has been described in many, many British travel books over the last couple of centuries, often unfavorably.

Imagine that you're a movie director preparing to make a bio-pic. The story has box office potential, with an exotic desert locale, epic sword battles and a compelling hero known to billions. But there's one hitch: The title character can't actually appear in the movie. You can't even use his voice. That's the conundrum the makers of Mohammed: The Last Prophet faced in bringing the story of Islam's prophet to the big screen in an animated film that opens next month around the country.

The British explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, who died Aug. 24 in England at the age of 93, was a lover of unforgiving landscapes and peoples largely cut off from modernity. Little known in the United States, his name was a touchstone for armchair travelers fascinated by the Arabian Peninsula and, especially, by southern Iraq. For people who actually traveled there, he served as an intimidating inspiration. He made difficult travels his life, becoming a chronicler of the remote, the difficult, the primordial.

USUALLY, BLACK History Month focuses on the accomplishments of African-Americans or the past glories of African civilizations. When the issue of slavery is explored, the focus is almost always on slavery in the United States. Seldom, if ever, do we ponder the history of slavery in Africa or the Arab slave traders who exploited Africa long before the 15th century when the Portuguese became the first Europeans to buy and sell Africans. What happened to the millions of Africans who did not make the voyage west across the Atlantic but wound up in bondage in the Middle East?

It seems that I always need something on Grand Street. The lure on New York's Lower East Side might be yeasty bialys, a concert or bargains in panty hose, linens or toys.In Little Italy, I shop for scamorza, the dried mozzarella properly used in lasagna, or a pasta cutter or a CD of Neapolitan folk songs.Where Chinatown edges into Little Italy, I buy a bamboo steamer, a fresh-killed guinea hen from a live-poultry market or a palate-tingling Malaysian chili crab. Or I find a glass shade for an antique brass lamp.