Free Tickets

Tickets to a preseason hockey opener Thursday between the WashingtonCapitals and the Philadelphia Flyers at the new Piney Orchard Ice Area in Odenton will be given away to the public tomorrow morning.The 200 tickets will be given away on a first-come, first-served basisand will be limited to either two or four per person.People interested in attending the 7 p.m. game, between rookie players from both squads, can get tickets at the arena starting 9 a.m.The arena seats about 400 people. Two hundred seats are reserved for the general public and 200 are reserved for the media and state and county officials.

A decision by Towson University officials to return the school's allotment of tickets to Saturday's football game at Maryland was done as a "service" to its fans, athletic director Mike Waddell said. Waddell said the number of tickets available on the "secondary" market had reduced the value and made better seats available at a price lower than what Maryland was offering. Waddell said it had nothing to do with the location of the seats, in the corner of the second deck at Byrd Stadium.

An Anne Arundel County permitting clerk who asked for and received 100 free tickets to a festival regulated by her department has been fired, her boss announced yesterday. Janice L. Russell was issued a termination letter effective late Tuesday, said Walter Chitwood, director of the Department of Inspections and Permits. Chitwood declined to comment further. Russell, who had worked for the county for 17 years, could not be reached. Last month, Russell was reprimanded by the county ethics commission for seeking the complimentary tickets to last year's Maryland Renaissance Festival in Crownsville.

The Dew Tour aka The Pantech Open gets underway tomorrow on the beach in Ocean City. (If you stop in at the AT&T store at Ocean Gateway today from 6 p.m.-8 p.m., you can meet Dundalk's own Bucky Lasek.) Tickets are still available. General admission is $24 on Friday and $29 on Saturday and Sunday. Action zone tickets are $100 per day. And if you purchase a Fri-Sun ticket, you get Thursday admission free. Also, Pantech is giving away free tickets here. Admission is free to the festival village, the Friday night surf contest and the Saturday Kid Cudi concert.

About 1,300 Baltimore high school students signed up yesterday to watch an exhibition game between the Orioles and a Cuban all-star team at Camden Yards May 3 after Orioles owner Peter G. Angelos offered tickets to schools.One hundred tickets were made available to each of the city's 20 high schools. School officials decided that members of athletic teams would be given the first chance to sign up for the tickets, then students with good attendance.Bernard Barnes, principal of Lake Clifton High School, said he quickly had a list of 100 students, including athletes, class officers and those with good attendance.

THIS YEAR'S passage of a new ethics law covering General Assembly members has sparked something of a philosophical question in Annapolis: Is the Preakness Stakes a "sporting" or "cultural" event?For the jockeys and trainers, the third Saturday in May is all about sports and betting. For the sunburned beer-guzzlers running amok in the infield, the Preakness is, well, a cultural experience of a sort.But for legislators, it's a tougher question and, as is so often the case, money is riding on the answer.

The question came up one day recently as the attendance at Blast soccer games at 1st Mariner Arena has risen. How many free tickets does the Blast give away? If anyone wants to irritate team owner Ed Hale, that's the only question that has to be asked. The owner, who is a businessman first and a sports fan second, was irate. "When I took over this team, the tickets had no value," said Hale, who bought the franchise for a second time in 1998. "You'd try to sell your tickets and people would say, 'Why should I buy them?

A year after passing an ethics bill banning free sports tickets from lobbyists, influential legislators have still been receiving some of the hottest tickets in the state -- to Cole Field House to watch the University of Maryland men's basketball team. The free tickets have come from the University of Maryland, College Park. Taking them is legal because the school is not considered a lobbying interest under Maryland ethics laws, though it receives hundreds of millions of dollars from the state every year.

The official in charge of enforcing workplace safety laws in Maryland accepted free tickets to a Towson contractor's luxury skybox at Camden Yards when he was negotiating a deal for more "cooperative" inspections at the company's stadium work site.Such an action is an apparent violation of Maryland's ethics laws.Craig D. Lowry, chief of compliance at the Maryland Occupational Health and Safety agency (MOSH) for 13 years, said he and his son were guests in the box owned by Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. when the Orioles played the Seattle Mariners on Aug. 22. The veteran regulator was seen at the game by an individual who recognized him and telephoned The Sun.In an interview last week, Lowry defended his actions, saying he was meeting with Whiting-Turner officials to discuss a "cooperative compliance program" for the contractor at the site of the planned Ravens football stadium.

An item in yesterday's editions about Community Day at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore failed to explain how residents of neighborhoods around the zoo can attend Saturday's event. They must obtain the free tickets in advance from their community associations.

You can now go over to Virgin Mobile Live on Facebook and try to grab tickets to this year's festival. Tickets were scheduled to be posted at exactly 10 a.m. (10:30 a.m. update: Readers are reporting free tickets are already gone) To claim yours, go to Virgin Mobile Live's Facebook page, here , and click on the FreeFest Tickets tab. There should be an option to claim tickets above Richard Branson's leathery face. Today is the first time everyone will have access to the free tickets.

Poi dancers might not be in great demand outside New Zealand, but Adrian Galvin is hoping the skill he has developed in the ancient Maori hand-strengthening routine will land him a walk-on role at the Cirque Dreams show starting next month in Baltimore. Galvin, a 22-year-old student at the University of Maryland, College Park, said the fuzzy balls at the end of the short ropes he twirled would ordinarily be on fire. But he imagined that a more authentic presentation might note have been appreciated by the management of the Hunt Valley Town Centre shopping center, where he and nine other performers tried out Saturday for a single spot in "Cirque Dreams Illumination," the new show scheduled to open Oct. 5 at the Hippodrome Theatre.

So the four of us are sitting in the ballpark the other night, with about 8,000 other Orioles fans and 8,000 Red Sox fans, when someone says, "All these empty seats, why don't they give them away to kids?" The reference is to the upper deck, massively empty on a Wednesday night, with the Bostons in town and, more importantly, the young Orioles showing late-summer promise in the franchise's 13th consecutive losing season. It's a school night, of course, but attendance was only marginally better on a recent Saturday afternoon, before the kids went back to class.

Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon received $400 worth of tennis clothes, City Council President Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake attended nearly a dozen balls and Councilman James B. Kraft has some new tools. This peek into the tastes and habits of the city's elected officials comes from the annual financial disclosure forms that they had to submit at the end of last month. Disclosure (or nondisclosure) of gifts is at the heart of the corruption cases brought this year by the state prosecutor's office against Dixon and Councilwoman Helen Holton.

Returning from Los Angeles to London with American Airlines, we took off four hours late because of some defective computerized equipment and then were diverted to New York. The new computer wasn't working, so we changed planes. We arrived in London nine hours late. American gave us each 13,000 AAdvantage miles (less than half the 40,000 minimum mileage needed for another trip), and argued that U.S. law does not require any compensation for late arrival, only for denied boarding. Would we not be covered by European Union legislation?

Mendelssohn -- Candlelight Concert Society Inc. will present a performance by the Mendelssohn String Quartet, with pianist Jonathan Bliss, at 8 p.m. Oct. 22 at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia. The quartet appears frequently at New York's Mostly Mozart Festival and other venues. A pre-concert session, "Meet the Artists & the Music," is scheduled for 6:45 p.m. Tickets are $29; $26 for those age 60 and older; and $12 for full-time students up to age 24. Middle and high school students get free tickets, if available, when accompanied by a paying adult.

You can now go over to Virgin Mobile Live on Facebook and try to grab tickets to this year's festival. Tickets were scheduled to be posted at exactly 10 a.m. (10:30 a.m. update: Readers are reporting free tickets are already gone) To claim yours, go to Virgin Mobile Live's Facebook page, here , and click on the FreeFest Tickets tab. There should be an option to claim tickets above Richard Branson's leathery face. Today is the first time everyone will have access to the free tickets.

Mendelssohn -- Candlelight Concert Society Inc. will present a performance by the Mendelssohn String Quartet, with pianist Jonathan Bliss, at 8 p.m. Oct. 22 at Howard Community College's Smith Theatre, 10901 Little Patuxent Parkway, Columbia. The quartet appears frequently at New York's Mostly Mozart Festival and other venues. A pre-concert session, "Meet the Artists & the Music," is scheduled for 6:45 p.m. Tickets are $29; $26 for those age 60 and older; and $12 for full-time students up to age 24. Middle and high school students get free tickets, if available, when accompanied by a paying adult.

An item in yesterday's editions about Community Day at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore failed to explain how residents of neighborhoods around the zoo can attend Saturday's event. They must obtain the free tickets in advance from their community associations.

DALLAS - Members of Southwest Airlines Co.'s frequent flier program will have twice as long to earn and redeem free tickets and will no longer have to worry about blackout dates, under changes announced yesterday. But those free tickets may be harder to book. Starting Feb. 10, Southwest, the dominant carrier at Baltimore-Washington International Airport, plans to limit the number of seats available for award travel on a given flight. "We want to keep the program lucrative for members, but at the same time, keep Southwest profitable," said Debra Benton, the airline's director of loyalty marketing.