Hank

"It's an honor that should be celebrated, not taken away from. I'm not sure people will appreciate what just happened." Ben Sheets Milwaukee Brewers pitcher, on Barry Bonds' potentially breaking Hank Aaron's home run record

YOU GO TO WORK every day and do what you're supposed to do," thinking it will pay off some day, Baltimore County assistant state's attorney Frank Meyer Jr. was saying, "and then this fluke comes along."

If there is anything more futile than coveting a man's soul, it is pretending to be that man.I wanted to be the poet Charles "Hank" Bukowski.I tried to be Bukowski.Now Hank is dead, and I've stopped trying.This month, leukemia took Hank away at 73. His family came to America from Germany when he was 3, landing first in Baltimore. They settled in Los Angeles. It was here that Hank suffered his father's stern discipline, without escape, until finding solace in a bottle at age 13. Like Los Angeles, booze would both corrupt and create his writing all his life.

Art asks, `What is the world like, and is the world fixed, or is there more than one way to see it?' And he [Salvador Dali] demonstrates, with his incredible technical skill, that the world is mutable. It's up to our imaginations to make the world what it is." - HANK HINE, director of the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla., explaining the enduring appeal of Mr. Dali's art.

It's a little early for the Reign of Terror to begin up in the Bronx, but I'll take my chuckles where I can find them. Steinbrenner the Lesser, the chip off the old block known as Hank, is in full-throttle Robespierre mode now that the Yankees are just 10-10 and 3 1/2 games out of first in the American League East (we can all hope that losing two of three to the Orioles also helped). Team co-chairman Hank is especially upset that Joba Chamberlain is still working out of the Yankees' bullpen rather than starting.

YOU WANT to know about baseball, I'll tell you about baseball. Hank and me, father and son. It's baseball that brings us together.Thirteen times a year we drive 160 miles for baseball. That's 80 miles to Baltimore, 80 miles back. Thirteen times 160 miles makes 2,080 miles we drive every summer. Just for baseball. Father and son. Driving to and from Baltimore. Together.Thirteen times we park the car at $5 per park. Makes $65. Thirteen times we sit in our $14 seats way out in right field. That's $364 for seats, plus $65 to park, makes $429.

REALITY BITESOriginal Motion Picture Soundtrack (RCA 66364)What would a slacker comedy be without hip, alterna-rock tunes beneath the laugh lines? So it's no surprise that the soundtrack album to "Reality Bites" is chock full of music by modern rock hit-makers like U2, Lenny Kravitz and Crowded House. Granted, the offerings aren't too hip -- movie producers see no point in having the music go over the audience's head -- but that doesn't mean it's entirely predictable. After all, who'd have imagined that the Posies' "Going, Going, Gone" would so completely upstage World Party's "Young Americans"-derived "When You Come Back to Me"?

The Major Soccer League's new roster limit and salary cap claimed another victim yesterday as the Blast cut backup goalkeeper Hank Henry."I saw it coming," Henry said yesterday, one day before the opening of training camp. "I knew it was a possibility. I wish it hadn't happened, but it has. Obviously, goalkeepers in Baltimore are expendable," he said, referring to former starting goalie Scott Manning, who was not re-signed by the Blast.Henry was one of the first players re-signed for this season, before the players association and the MSL agreed to reduce rosters from 18 to 16 players and to cut the salary cap by $100,000 to $550,000.

The high cost of racism and intolerance, especially when weighed against the human need for understanding and companionship, is at the heart of Monster's Ball, a brave, emotions-on-its-sleeve character drama featuring some of the year's strongest performances. Hank Gutowski (Billy Bob Thornton) is a second-generation prison guard who seems to have room for only two feelings: a keen sense of tradition and an overwhelming, blinding hatred of people whose skin is darker than his. Both of those traits he seems to have inherited from his father, Buck (Peter Boyle)

Everyone's heard of the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail. But what about the famous Buzzard Trail? And who knew that two important figures of the Gold Rush were Steve the talking mule and Cletus -- who had an opossum living on his head? OK. The Buzzard Trail isn't that famous and Cletus and Steve aren't really important. To tell the truth, none of that is even true. But if it helps elementary school pupils be more enthusiastic about learning history, then fifth-grade teachers Kevin Mulroe and John Krownapple are glad to tell such tall tales.