Earthworms

The Knights of Columbus Holy Trinity Council No. 3413 will hold a shrimp feast from 7 p.m. to midnight Aug. 4 at the Columbian Center, 335 N. Ritchie Highway, Severna Park. The event will feature a buffet of shrimp creole, barbecue pork and chicken, hot dogs, baked beans, beer, soda and a cash bar. Entertainment will be provided by Glen Burnie disc jockey Grey Fox. There also will be prize wheels and video horse races. Proceeds will go toward repairs of the Columbian Center. Tickets are $25 per person in advance and $27 at the door.

The 16th annual Annapolis Striders' "Dog Days of Summer" 8K Cross-Country Run will be held at 8 a.m. Aug. 5 at Anne Arundel Community College. The 4.97-mile course will meander through the Earl Scott Trail, named after the former AACC groundkeeper and longtime member of the Annapolis Striders. The moderately hilly route will have some pavement. Water will be available on the course, and refreshments will be served at the finish line. No headphones, pets or baby-joggers are allowed. Awards will be presented at 9:30 a.m. to the overall male and female runners and to the finalists in each age group.

Last year, Sandbox.com Inc. offered $10 million to any basketball fan who could correctly pick all 63 games in the NCAA men's tournament. No one made it out of the first round. This year, instead of offering gobs of cash, Sandbox, which produces Internet sports games, is offering the perfect bracketeer an opportunity to turn company president Larry Cotter's life into pure misery. "We're so sure you're not a hoops guru," a posting on the Web site reads, "that the Sandbox team will fly you and a friend to our corporate offices in sunny Virginia and let you do any one of the following to mentally and physically scar us for the rest of our lives -- but ONLY IF you can pick the PERFECT BRACKET: "1. Push us off the roof of our three-story building.

Cymphoni Hall has a thing for creepy crawlers. When spider expert Dave Myers showed off a pink-toed tarantula at Seneca Elementary School in Bowleys Quarters yesterday, 7-year-old Cymphoni eyeballed the creature's hairy body and legs, enthralled by its alien look. As part of Seneca teachers Rob Bartosch and Sean Hoffmaster's summer science program called "Creepy Crawlers," Cymphoni and 19 other youngsters got a chance to read up on insects and to touch, measure and feed them.

Who needs chemical warfare? Many garden centers carry or will order these beneficial bugs, which will fight your gardening battles for you:* Ladybugs: Ladybugs love to dine on aphids and other little bugs such as thrips, mealybugs and spider mites. Aphids are those tiny insects that suck the juices out of the tender new leaves on roses, photinias, crape myrtles and other shrubs. Ladybugs come packaged in a mesh bag or a screen-top carton, for approximately $6 to $10 for 1,500 to 2,300 bugs.

A QUICK WORD of congratulations to the faithful few whose patience outlasted the curve that nature threw at us this year, those true believers who knew that spring would indeed come.Spring can no longer be put back in its bottle, and we're all renewed, along with the cherry trees and the earthworms and the strange weed that purples my yard.Volunteers honoredCongratulations, too, to Gundel Bowen of Annapolis, who was honored Wednesday with the Junior League of Annapolis' Excellence in Voluntarism Merit Award.

Underground ChicagoIt's a dirty world at Chicago's Field Museum. The natural science museum's newest permanent exhibit, "Underground Adventure," delves beneath the surface to explore the many different critters that help make the ecosystem go 'round.The $10 million installation covers 15,000 square feet and consists of six sections. In Base Camp, visitors learn about the variety of things dependent on soil; in the Shrink Chamber and the Micro Soil Lab, guests are "reduced" to 1/100th of their normal size and transported underground to visit giant crawfish, earthworms, wolf spiders, microscopic mites, plants and fungi.

RAIN FELL IN the fifth-grade classroom at Hampstead Elementary on Monday.The simulation was created by Lisa Spence, home horticulture assistant of the Carroll County Cooperative Extension. She used a watering can in an exercise to demonstrate the ability of roots to net the soil and prevent erosion.Spence, assisted by five county master gardeners, showed fifth-graders why soil conservation is important.The program, Up From the Soil, began with a video, moved into touching earthworms and ended with a marigold for each child to plant after Mother's Day.Pupils from the classrooms of fifth-grade teachers Jo Clark, Regina Richardson, Meg Cheyne and Miriam Krumrine watched a video of the weathering of rock into soil, newsreels of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and measures that have restored prime prairie farmland over the past 60 years.

Southern California has long been the end of the road, as well as the end of the rainbow.It is notorious for being the last stop for drifters, misfits, malcontents, wing nuts and Looney Tunes. On the far edge of the continent, thousands of miles from the East's hidebound centers of convention, Southern California's endless summer and boundless optimism have made it an eternal magnet for dreamers and speculators.A fair sampling of the breed is on display in "In Cahoots," a fanciful yarn about a gaggle of Orange County pals who, in 1953, try to figure out where Walt Disney is going to build his amusement park so they can buy a piece of the real estate first.

Crafts store named desireRosanna Williams is a welder by trade, but a couple of months ago she decided to take on another career: She opened a crafts gallery in Little Italy called Water From the Moon. Here you can get ceramics and pewter pieces, mirrors and wood carvings, silk wall hangings, glassware, clocks and vases -- many of them by well-known American artists. Prices range from $16 for a pair of earrings to $1,300 for a wood vase.The offbeat name is taken from the film "The Year of Living Dangerously" and means, says Williams, something you desire strongly that's hard to get.Water From the Moon is located at 913 Fawn St. Hours are Tuesdays to Fridays, 11: 30 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Saturdays, noon to 8 p.m.; Sundays, noon to 6 p.m. Does your child think bugs are yucky?