Defined

What defines a city's musical identity is its clubs. It's not just a matter of taking a town's musical pulse; it has to do with expressing an attitude and defining a style.Maybe that's why the best-known clubs carry a cachet that goes well beyond whoever happens to be playing there at the moment. Think of CBGB's in New York, the Marquee in London, the Troubador in Los Angeles.Think of Hammerjacks.From its spot on South Howard Street beneath the Interstate 395 overpass, Hammerjacks has defined the Baltimore popular music scene for almost a dozen years.

Everything with Randy Myers is about routine.It's about an hour before game time and Myers spreads out a national newspaper before him, sits spread-eagle in front of his locker, carves up some beef stick and uses a hunting knife as fork.It's late and close and Myers is called upon to start the ninth inning. His glove in one hand, his warm-up jacket in the other, Myers comes through the bullpen door to perform a ritual jog that seems a cross between hopscotch and stomping grapes. Upon reaching the mound, he finishes each pitch by stepping toward the catcher to receive the throw back, then turns to the third base side of the mound, where he climbs to the rubber.

What defines a city's musical identity is its clubs. It's not just a matter of taking a town's musical pulse; it has to do with expressing an attitude and defining a style.Maybe that's why the best-known clubs carry a cachet that goes well beyond whoever happens to be playing there at the moment. Think of CBGB's in New York, the Marquee in London, the Troubador in Los Angeles.Think of Hammerjacks.From its spot on South Howard Street beneath the Interstate 395 overpass, Hammerjacks has defined the Baltimore popular music scene for almost a dozen years.

If the afternoon frocks, ball gowns, dinner suits and smart hats idling in forgotten closets could talk, what stories they could tell. Not just about the women who wore them, but also about the designers who tailored them for their roles in society's limelight.Sibilant echoes of gossip, wit, scandal and celebration flutter among the elegant mannequins posed for "Hattie Carnegie American Style Defined," an exhibit now at the museum of New York's Fashion Institute of Technology. It is a sampling of clothes and accessories from the salon of the woman who dressed America's socialites and stars from the '20s to the '50s.

Alexandria, Virginia. -- "What then is the American?'' asked a French-American farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, in 1782. His extremely popular book, ''Letters from an American Farmer,'' helped define the soul of a new nation. Crevecoeur's question bears repeating every July 4, as our nation annually renews its credo.To Crevecoeur, Americans were ''the poor of Europe.'' In the ''great American asylum,'' these dispossessed found land, livelihood and liberty -- regardless of previous nationality.

IT WOULD be easy "to end welfare as we know it," as President Clinton promised to. It's primarily just a matter of defining our terms."Welfare" is shorthand for the program known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).The first thing I would do if I were president is to write into the U.S. Code a non-cash definition of "Aid." Henceforth, the poor would get a credit card that entitled them to buy all the things that they needed for their "welfare," which would also be defined in the Code:"the state of faring well or doing well: thriving or successful progress in life"Thus one could buy -- or, rather, acquire -- milk, but not beer, for example.

Concerned that employers and employees don't always recognize sexual harassment when they see it, some members of the Baltimore City Council plan to introduce legislation that would define it -- and add stiff punitive penalties to city law for violators.The council members, led by Councilman Martin J. O'Malley, D-3rd, and Councilwoman Vera P. Hall, D-5th, said yesterday that by defining harassment, they hoped to curtail violations in what they described as a "muddy area of the law."The proposed bill, which is expected to be introduced Monday, also would streamline the process for enforcing prohibitions against harassment by providing a victim with relief at the local level in cases where an employer refuses to take corrective action, they said.

During the same week in February, Business Week ran a cover story on "virtual corporations," and Fortune touted "the modular corporation." The network idea is going mainstream, but we're just starting to figure out how to implement such ephemeral notions.This spring Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps will weigh in with "The Teamnet Factor," a useful primer on how to build these newfangled organizations. Teamnets are defined as employee clusters that can vary from integrated sets of small project teams within a company to "economic megagroups."

WASHINGTON -- At this point in the presidential campaign of 1980 candidate Ronald Reagan seemed to have a serious problem with his penchant for passing along as gospel wild stories and bizarre claims that could not be proven.He was the kind of free spirit who would tell you, for example, that trees were more of a pollution problem than automobile emissions. Or he would say that segregation in the armed services ended when a black cook came out of the bowels of a ship under attack at Pearl Harbor and manned a machine gun. He liked to talk about some "welfare queen" who never could be located.

ANNAPOLIS -- With painted-on smiles and attitudes carefully checked at the door, leaders of Maryland's interior design industry toed the party line last month before a Senate committee.The statement came a day later, the House passed the bill.

Jennifer B. Bodine was in her last semester at Roland Park Country School, struggling academically as graduation loomed. She realized that she probably should have kept her mouth shut. This was the 1960s, when seniors there had a little-known tradition. Every spring, they chose a day to strip their school uniforms, set them ablaze in a trash can, and romp around, at times in their underwear, to celebrate impending freedom. "Why I mentioned this [at home], I'll never know," she said last week, shaking her head.

WASHINGTON -- More than 1 of every 3 workers at retirement age in the 2050s will have nothing saved in a 401(k)-style account, according to a government study released yesterday. On average, workers born in 1990 will save enough to replace about 22 percent of pre-retirement income, or $18,784 per year in 2007 dollars, according to the Government Accounting Office. "Today's workers will more likely struggle to make ends meet during retirement than previous generations," said Democratic Rep. George Miller of California, who had requested the report.

For some of us, Dec. 26 was the emptiest day of the year. After weeks of anticipation, Christmas had finally arrived in a blaze of tinsel and plastic and wrapping paper. It was, for a child, the closest thing to paradise. The day after dawned like an afterthought. Dec. 26 always felt like the fairground after the fair, the ballroom after the ball. Reality had reasserted itself. You awoke from your happy daze to an insistent question: Now what? Something very similar will probably happen soon to the Cuban exile community.

WASHINGTON -- The federal agency that insures private pension plans faces a shortfall of as much as $71 billion in the next decade, the top congressional budget analyst said yesterday, adding urgency to efforts by President Bush and Congress to shore up the nation's increasingly troubled pension system this year. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., under strain after taking on the pension promises of airlines, steel makers and other companies that have recently declared bankruptcy, could see its losses triple over the next 10 years unless there are major changes, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, told a House committee.

MY SON SHIPPED out for Iraq on Monday. When he told me the Army would issue him a new weapon before boarding, I told him to hijack the plane to Sweden. But you know kids. They never listen. Now our family has joined a select group that panics each time a U.S. casualty is reported. But we just go on about our lives the same way cancer patients do. You keep putting one foot in front of the other. Most Americans figure they can get someone else to shoulder this burden, that some other family will be the tragic, faceless statistic.

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As the snow came down last night, a Towson education lawyer tried to explain the law and how it defines roles and responsibilities to the Howard County Board of Education, the superintendent and his staff. "This was my idea," said Sandra H. French, the board chairman. "We come from various backgrounds with various phi- losophies, and the law does not support certain nuances of phi- losophy. I wanted us all to hear the same thing at the same time and start to be able to work together from the same base."

Like everyone else, Mike Flanagan carries a moment, a flash that offers an indelible impression of Cal Ripken, his former teammate who grew to become, as Ripken's younger brother Bill liked to say, "the biggest man in the game." The moment was Aug. 9, 51 days after Ripken had formally announced his intention on June 19 to retire and less than two months before the schedule said it was time to leave. Ripken had just suffered an 0-for-4 game against the Kansas City Royals, a faceless performance within another anonymous loss of a fourth-place season, except it had ended Ripken's hitting streak at 16 games, one shy of his career high.

"Time: Its Origin, Its Enigma, Its History," by Alexander Waugh. Carroll & Graf. 280 pages. $25. Time dominates and defines virtually every citizen of the modern industrial world. We are acutely aware of its relentless onward movement, and that awareness governs how we act and how we see ourselves. We structure our lives with clock and calendar close at hand. We try to organize work and leisure by the hour. We try to understand the rush of history and the passage of our own lives by referring to years, decades, centuries, eras.

Everything with Randy Myers is about routine.It's about an hour before game time and Myers spreads out a national newspaper before him, sits spread-eagle in front of his locker, carves up some beef stick and uses a hunting knife as fork.It's late and close and Myers is called upon to start the ninth inning. His glove in one hand, his warm-up jacket in the other, Myers comes through the bullpen door to perform a ritual jog that seems a cross between hopscotch and stomping grapes. Upon reaching the mound, he finishes each pitch by stepping toward the catcher to receive the throw back, then turns to the third base side of the mound, where he climbs to the rubber.