Cutters

Pitches -- His stuff is below average. He throws 86, 87 [mph]. He can hit 91, but he doesn't pitch there, more like 84 to 88. He has a good changeup and a curveball he'll throw at any time. He throws a lot of cutters, and the ball can break either way. Attitude -- He's got great [guts]. He doesn't know that [Alex Rodriguez] is out there or [Derek] Jeter. He doesn't care. He's been successful because he gets ahead of hitters and usually pitches down in the strike zone. Overall -- He's one of those borderline fifth starters.

The Coast Guard Yard is celebrating the 100th anniversary of its founding this year, starting this weekend with a reunion of the Cutters, a hockey team formed at the Curtis Bay yard during World War II that captured East Coast and national titles in 1943 and 1944.Several former members of the team, including its captain, Clifford MacLean, are expected to be at Curtis Bay and to take part in the Crab Pot Hockey Tournament at the Naval Academy.MacLean and five of his teammates will be on the ice at Dahlgren Hall at 12: 30 p.m. Saturday for pre-game ceremonies, and the Coast Guard Academy team will compete in jerseys that are replicas of the ones the original Cutters wore.

Defending champion SUNY-Buffalo returns to Navy's Dahlgren Hall today for the 22nd Crab Pot ice hockey tournament.Ranked No. 12 by the American Collegiate Hockey Association, Buffalo (12-4-1) will play No. 6 Towson (17-6-2) at 1 p.m., followed by host and 18th-ranked Navy (6-8-4) and the Coast Guard Academy (8-7-1) at 4 p.m.The winners meet 3: 30 p.m. tomorrow for the championship, won by Buffalo last year over Navy, 5-1. The consolation is at noon.A ceremony honoring the Coast Guard's centennial and its Cutters team that won the U.S. amateur title in 1944 will be held at noon today, exactly 55 years after its final game.

Glen Alvin Snyder Sr., a longtime union official who retired in 1970 as assistant vice president of the Packing House Workers of America, died Thursday of cardiac arrest at his Bayside Beach home. He was 93.Mr. Snyder became a union organizer in the 1930s while working as a butcher in Washington for the Sanitary food market, which became part of the Safeway grocery chain."They were paying him a dollar an hour for 40 hours," said his son, Glen A. Snyder Jr. of Pasadena. "But then when it became Safeway, they wanted to pay him $40 for 50 hours.

Wooden shoes were worn in many parts of Europe for hundreds of years, especially in the Netherlands, which has a lot of marshy farmland. Some people still wear them. The heavy shoes don't look like they'd be comfortable, but they are - in a strange way. And they make a funny sound like horses clomping.Wooden shoes are also called clogs. Clogs were worn mainly for work, but special shoes were made for going to church and weddings. In the Netherlands today, clogs are still worn in steel ,, factories, on fishing boats and on farms.

MARIETTA, Ga. -- Laser lights swept the room, white-hatted factory workers marched and clapped in rhythm, and Lee Greenwood himself sang "Proud to be an American" yesterday, as Lockheed Martin Corp. unveiled and defended the very first F-22 fighter plane.The 90-minute spectacle of patriotism and industrial force at the Bethesda-based company's Aeronautical Systems plant outside Atlanta was a full-throated pre-emptive strike for a defense program taking fire from budget cutters in Congress.

Young, newly married, with a baby on the way, Maria Kilduff wanted to start a Christmas tradition. She had an old family recipe that made hundreds of sugar cookies and a new, hungry husband who could eat at least that many. Though money was tight, she splurged on three cookie cutters, then invited Paul, who she called Duff, to join her in the kitchen. It was the Sunday before Christmas, 1948.And so it began, in a Baltimore apartment, the Kilduffs' Christmas cookie-baking tradition. Maria made the batter and rolled the dough, thin as paper; Duff greased the baking sheets and put them in the oven.

OTTAWA -- Canada, renowned for its willingness to place its uniformed men and women in the cross-fire of other people's wars, finds its military in a weakened state, its combat units stretched to the limits of their capabilities."

POLICE LOG* Jessup: 8000 block of U.S. 1: Two weed cutters were stolen from a shed at Zippers Cycle after someone cut through a lock Monday, police said.First block of Patuxent Range Road: A green 1994 Toyota Tercel with Maryland tags ALX-837 was stolen Monday, police said.

There's a lot of buzzing going on in Michelle Rose Warren's shop. And not just the electric clippers and razors shaving away men's hair, sideburns, beards and mustaches.Chitchat and jocularity electrify Mrs. Warren's barber shop, the Hair Cutters -- Columbia's only black-owned barber shop -- in the Snowden River Center in East Columbia. Men who walk in for haircuts or trims give their spin on the yes-it's-finally-over O. J. Simpson trial, the coming Million Man March in Washington, as well as women and sports.

With heavy equipment trailers, forklifts, towing cables and cranes capable of hoisting 120 tons, the U.S. Army began the largest museum move in its history this month. About 60 pieces from the U.S. Army Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen Proving Ground were loaded and shipped 200 miles south to Fort Lee, Va., where a much grander facility will soon be under construction. The move was the first of a three-phase relocation to the new facility, which will be nearly triple the size of the old. Given the massive and unwieldy nature of the collection, including dozens of tanks weighing many tons, movers tackled the outdoor exhibits first.

The Coast Guard's newest and largest vessel pulled into the Fells Point pier yesterday, part of a national tour that federal homeland security officials say marks a watershed in the service's ability to patrol the nation's waters. The Bertholf, the first of the Coast Guard's national security cutters, is longer than a football field and stands nearly five stories tall. The biggest ship ever in the Coast Guard, it's built to do it all: search and rescue, drug busts, immigration patrol and battle.

SAM BAKER, longtime resident of Middle River, died on Monday, February 25, at Franklin Square Hospital at the age of 93. Sam took over the businesses of his father, Harry Baker in 1934. The businesses included a coal yard, a feed shed for fowl including chickens, ducks and turkeys, and a grocery store that sold dry goods like workman's gloves, pants, shirts and overalls. The store was licensed to sell distilled beverages. Sam was one of the students among 32 graduates of Kenwood High School in 1932.

It's holiday crunch time. Time to dig out those last ornaments. Time to bake cookies for Santa. Why not save a little time, and make ornaments out of cookies? Baltimore International College senior associate chef instructor Faith Kling showed us how to make simple, edible ornaments from a standard sugar-cookie dough. They're baked much like regular cookies (in fact, you can bake some to eat and some to use for decoration in the same batch). Kling uses crushed Jolly Ranchers to make a stained-glass effect.

Pitches -- His stuff is below average. He throws 86, 87 [mph]. He can hit 91, but he doesn't pitch there, more like 84 to 88. He has a good changeup and a curveball he'll throw at any time. He throws a lot of cutters, and the ball can break either way. Attitude -- He's got great [guts]. He doesn't know that [Alex Rodriguez] is out there or [Derek] Jeter. He doesn't care. He's been successful because he gets ahead of hitters and usually pitches down in the strike zone. Overall -- He's one of those borderline fifth starters.

Just in time for the holidays, there is advice from Martha Stewart -- in the form of a book the size and weight of a concrete block -- on all the pitfalls of decorating and entertaining and how to remedy them. Everything from extension cords for the tree lights to candle wax on good linens. Martha Stewart's Homekeeping Handbook: The Essential Guide to Caring for Everything in Your Home (Clarkson Potter, $45) is perfect for propping the front door open for your guests, but it also contains a lot of good information.

The U.S. Coast Guard Yard in Curtis Bay has been awarded a $30 million-a-year project to repair and modernize 27 of the service's aging medium-endurance cutters. Maryland lawmakers, who jointly announced the work with the Coast Guard, said the increased work should secure the yard's jobs for years and further cement Curtis Bay's role in national service. About 690 people, mostly civilians, work at the yard, which was established more than 100 years ago to maintain and repair the service's cutters.

Robin Williams continues to shine in films that use his nervous energy best by repressing it, turning him into a character ever ready to pounce, even though the results of doing so would surely prove disastrous. In The Final Cut, Williams plays Alan Hakman, an employee of a company that implants tiny chips in selected infants' brains that record everything that happens throughout their lives. When they die, it's the job of "cutters" like Hakman to take the footage, edit out all the bad parts and make the dearly departed look like a paragon of virtue.

The college student from Maryland who tried to draw attention to flaws in airport security by smuggling box cutters, strike-anywhere matches, bleach and other banned items onto Southwest Airlines planes last year was sentenced yesterday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to two years of supervised probation. Nathaniel T. Heatwole, 21, apologized again to the Transportation Security Administration and the FBI, the agencies that investigated his case, but repeated that his intent was to help authorities improve air travel safety.

In Baltimore City Charges are reduced against student in airport security case Prosecutors have reduced the charges against a Montgomery County man accused of hiding box cutters on at least two airplanes last year in what he said was an effort to expose lapses in airport security. Nathaniel T. Heatwole, 20, of Damascus, was originally charged with taking a dangerous weapon aboard an aircraft, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. But the U.S. attorney's office in Baltimore reduced the charge last month to a misdemeanor count of bringing banned items into a passenger-screening area, according to federal court records.