Bee Bee

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.-- --This is what we -- the collective media -- have been reduced to during the first week of Barrymania 2006. In the absence of any real Barry Bonds news, an ESPN camera crew was busy filming Bad News Barry's personal photographer, who was busy taking dozens of pictures of Bonds sitting on the bench in the Scottsdale Stadium home dugout doing absolutely nothing. I don't know if life was imitating art or art was intimating that some of us have no life, but just to make sure there's no misunderstanding -- and to preserve the remaining shreds of my journalistic integrity -- I'm going to disclose right now that there was no one named Art anywhere around.

Filth PigMinistry (Warner Bros. 45838)Although Ministry built its reputation on the industrial music circuit, there's more metal than machinery in the sound of "Filth Pig." Between the shuddering crunch of guitars in "Reload" and "Game Show," and the tortured vocals that flesh out "Crumbs" and "Lava," the music certainly sounds like modern metal, but it's the lumbering, animal menace of the rhythm section that confirms the resemblance. For the most part, Ministry's metal groove avoids the thrash-and-burn of speed-obsessed bands like Slayer, opting instead for the slow-churning grind of Type-O Negative and its ilk. That brings added intensity to the buzzing guitars and heavy bass of "Useless" and lends an almost hypnotic intensity to the title tune's central riff.

Sanna Neilson coaxed an Irish-bred gelding named Tom Bob to run the race of his life and won the 95th running of the Maryland Hunt Cup yesterday in her first try over the difficult course in Glyndon.Neilson ruined the chances of her best friend, Blythe Miller, t become the first woman to sweep Maryland's "Big 3" timber races.Miller, riding the favored Cabral, nearly fell at the 17th fence afte setting the pace and ended up fifth in the 13-horse field.At the wire, Neilson was a 10-length winner over a fast-closin Ned Halle on Gesticulate.

Would someone please tell Helen Delich Bentley, longtime Republican and former congresswoman, that the tenets of her party include an insistence on self-reliance, strong morals and personal responsibility? She must need remedial studies in GOP principles, given her reference to the late Spiro T. Agnew's wrongdoings as "the misfortunes that came his way.""Misfortunes"?Small fortunes in kickbacks is more like it."Came his way?"Mrs. Bentley, who served in the Nixon administration, makes it sound as though the former vice president was merely standing there with his palms out when a strong wind came up and left cash in his hands.

NEWPORT NEWS, Va. - The motion alarms on Newport News Shipbuilding's huge gantry crane began blaring their familiar "BEE-OOOH, BEE-OOOH" warning as it set about another chore. Dangling from the crane's tentacles of thick steel cables was another piece of the shipyard's 29th aircraft carrier, the Ronald Reagan, named for the former president. It was a preassembled rectangular section of the flight deck, with a V-shaped channel called a "cat trough." The German-made gantry, fittingly called Goliath and one of the world's largest, gingerly carried the section to another part where helmeted workers waited to apply finishing touches before it was to be added to the ship.

HOLLANDALE, Miss. -- As a teenager in this Mississippi Delta town, she sat defiantly at all-white lunch spots and marched downtown with her classmates to take movie theater seats reserved for whites. As a college student at Jackson State, she listened in disbelief as police fired hundreds of bullets on campus - shots that thrust that historically black college into the epicenter of the civil rights movement. And as a newly minted lawyer, she forced Grenada, Miss., to remake its government, giving black residents a greater voice in running the city and prompting threats to her life.

Letters are the building blocks of language, and among the 26 in the English language a seemingly inexhaustible combination can be assembled to form words. Those words must seem larger than life to the 248 contestants who competed in this week's 73rd annual Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. For Myla Goldberg, this contest is an epiphany, but not because she's a competitor. The 28-year-old Laurel native lived, ate and breathed spelling bees for almost two years while writing "Bee Season."

Teeth baring. Territory marking. Chain yanking. In the dog-eat-dog world of American politics, these are all required job skills for our nation's elected officials. Yet, lately, there's more fur flying than usual in Washington. At the official White House Web site (www. whitehouse.gov), Spotty, Laura Bush's springer spaniel, gives a pun-filled tour of where he lives. And when Legally Blonde 2 opens at movie theaters July 2, what's the top priority for congressional aide Elle Woods (Reese Witherspoon)

Today, The Sun begins a story unusual in content and in form. In 16 concise chapters, "God's Other Plan" will relate the events of Marci Crosby's life much as they unfolded for her. It is a story of love, loss and the bonds of family .July 1995Dear Jessica,"My whole life I wanted to be a mommy to a precious little girl and have a great husband. Boy, did I hit the lotto ..."From the bed in the guest room of her parents' house, Marci Crosby watched her daughter push a toy shopping cart down the hallway.